{"id":1254,"date":"2015-03-31T17:26:35","date_gmt":"2015-03-31T21:26:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/66.147.242.160\/~stumbli4\/?p=1254"},"modified":"2015-03-31T17:26:35","modified_gmt":"2015-03-31T21:26:35","slug":"new-church-of-suicidal-loopholes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/?p=1254","title":{"rendered":"New Church of Suicidal Loopholes"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Escaping<\/a>

Escaping Pain<\/p><\/div>\n

Aleteia is running a priestly advice piece on suicide, and predictably it does everything humanly possible to make killing oneself seem anything but damnable.\u00a0 It even presents a picture of a woman who seems to be submerged, as if drowning.\u00a0 If only suicide were drowning!<\/p>\n

A writer asks Fr. Mike Schmitz if those who commit suicide ‘automatically’ go to Hell.\u00a0 Who asks questions like this?\u00a0 Does anyone believe that Hell is automatic?\u00a0 Isn’t Christ our judge? Mercy is always possible for those who can truly repent but reiterating that incessantly undermines Church teaching. We have our Church to show us what we should expect, and what not<\/em> to presume.<\/p>\n

Catholics must take an absolute stand against every form of suicide. Suicide is \u201ccontrary to the love of God.\u201d It is truly evil. Now, please understand me here. In saying that suicide is evil, I am not saying that the person who commits suicide is necessarily evil. But anyone can choose to do evil actions. There are some actions which are evil in and of themselves, regardless of motivation or circumstance. Of these, suicide is one.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Suicide is always bad, but people…people are not bad, OK.\u00a0 This confusing modern mantra makes Catholics think they’re all going to Heaven.\u00a0 People can be called bad when they are vicious, meaning they have acquired many vices.\u00a0 That’s what a bad person is.\u00a0 Everyone is redeemable, but some can truly be called bad until the point when they are not.<\/p>\n

And for these people who are never really bad and who commit suicide, there are all kinds of extenuating circumstances.<\/p>\n

If a person freely chose to kill himself, fully knowing that he was saying \u201cno\u201d to God, and he died unrepentant, all signs point to eternal separation from God. But here\u2019s the deal: we don\u2019t know a lot of that information. I don\u2019t know if his will was truly free (the person may have suffered from \u201cgrave psychological disturbances, anguish, or grave fear of hardship, suffering, or torture\u201d\u2026these can lessen their responsibility (cf. CCC 2282). I also don\u2019t know the person’s degree of knowledge; did he know that he was not simply \u201cescaping pain,\u201d but was in fact choosing something contrary to God\u2019s love? And lastly, none of us have any way of knowing if the person repented before death. There is an ancient saying in the Church, \u201cWe don\u2019t know what happened between the bridge and the water.\u201d This indicates that you and I have no clue if the person we love regretted the decision and turned back to God at the last minute. There are stories of many people who survived attempted suicides, who found themselves praying that God didn\u2019t let them die even after they jumped, or swallowed the pills, or used other means.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Why is the bar so, so low today?\u00a0 Committing suicide is absolutely one of the worst things a person can do and honestly, when did psychology ever begin to be a factor in someone’s culpability?\u00a0 Didn’t they just invent it?<\/p>\n

Another mitigation is this lack of knowledge.\u00a0 People who kill themselves don’t really know it’s bad today, and people don’t know what marriage is either, and they don’t know all the sexual sins are wrong any more, and on and on.\u00a0 Why do we even teach anyone the Faith?\u00a0 If we left them all blissfully ignorant they could sin miserably their whole lives and then sail into Heaven!\u00a0 You don’t even have to be part of the Church so long as you’re nice.<\/p>\n

It’s like we’ve developed a new doctrine of excuses.\u00a0 Can we really expect to get to Heaven with a pocketful of explanations? No. but we can surely go to Hell preaching laxity, presumption, and hyper-mercy.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Aleteia is running a priestly advice piece on suicide, and predictably it does everything humanly possible to make killing oneself seem anything but damnable.\u00a0 It even presents a picture of a woman who seems to be submerged, as if drowning.\u00a0 If only suicide were drowning! A writer asks Fr. Mike Schmitz if those who commit …<\/span> Read More →<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1254","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1254"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1254\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1266,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1254\/revisions\/1266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}