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Church Seasons and Feasts

Two things to know about Christ’s ascension into heaven

Sister Anna Marie McGuan

February 23, 2022 7:47 am February 23, 2022

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The ascension of the Lord Jesus into heaven is a mystery rooted in history and spoken of in Scripture, like the Resurrection. It is presented both at the end of…

The ascension of the Lord Jesus into heaven is a mystery rooted in history and spoken of in Scripture, like the Resurrection. It is presented both at the end of Matthew’s Gospel and at the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles. It is also alluded to in John’s Gospel, when the risen Jesus encounters Mary Magdalene and says, “Stop holding on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am going to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God’” (Jn 20:17).

The Ascension is the completion of the Easter mysteries of Jesus’ life, passion, death and resurrection, and it is the final step before the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church states: “Jesus’ final apparition ends with the irreversible entry of his humanity into divine glory, symbolized by the cloud and by heaven, where he is seated from that time forward at God’s right hand” (No. 659).

Yet perhaps we feel somewhat like the Apostles who witnessed the Ascension, standing there, looking up, wondering what just happened. Why did Jesus go? Where did he go? The angels’ response to them is apropos for us, too: “Men of Galilee, why are you standing there looking at the sky? This Jesus who has been taken up from you into heaven will return in the same way as you have seen him going into heaven” (Acts 1:11).

There are two things to remember about this mystery. First, in a very real way, Jesus’ ascension into heaven is the goal for each one of us. He goes before us, and we are to follow Him there. In the Ascension, the domain of God’s glory is opened to us, and Jesus, in His glorified humanity, takes His rightful place at God’s right hand. It is a privilege for all of us that one of our own, a man like us in all things but sin, has been so glorified. Not only that, he is calling us and interceding for us always so that we will one day join him. As the Catechism states: “Left to its own natural powers humanity does not have access to the ‘Father’s house,’ to God’s life and happiness. Only Christ can open to man such access that we, his members, might have confidence that we too shall go where he, our Head and our Source, has preceded us” (No. 661).

The second thing to remember about this mystery is that Jesus will come back. When that day comes, we should be ready. He has asked us to be his faithful disciples, living in a vital friendship with him. This is not magic, however. It takes the power of the Holy Spirit, whom each of us receives in baptism and confirmation. It also takes a lived relationship with God in prayer. Finally, Jesus expects us to be open, available and ready to cooperate with him in the mission he calls us to.

The last thing Jesus said to the Apostles was, “But you will receive power when the holy Spirit comes upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, throughout Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). In Matthew’s Gospel, the last injunction is similar: “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age” (28:19-20). If we live out that mission from Christ, and truly make disciples of all nations, then his presence is with us despite his bodily absence. First and foremost, Jesus is with us in the Eucharist and in the liturgy of the Church. Jesusalso is present spiritually when we pray in his name, as he said: “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them” (Mt 18:20).

Jesus’ work on earth is now complete, but the task of bearing witness to Him and making disciples is never done, not until he returns at the end of time. That is the task the Apostles began to do, starting with prayer in the upper room as they awaited the promised Holy Spirit. Mary, the Mother of Jesus, was there with them. Clothed with the power of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, the Apostles and disciples of Jesus began to preach and teach about him to Jews and to Gentiles. They began to do what the Lord Jesus asked them to do: bear witness and make disciples. That task is not just theirs; it belongs to all of us.

Sister Anna Marie McGuan, R.S.M., is Director of Christian Formation in the Diocese of Knoxville.

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6 min read

Culture

Called to Community

Sister Anna Marie McGuan

February 17, 2022 8:00 am February 17, 2022

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Men and women are by nature social animals. We usually grow up in a familial setting and attend school with other boys and girls. We learn, through these relationships, what…

Men and women are by nature social animals. We usually grow up in a familial setting and attend school with other boys and girls. We learn, through these relationships, what appropriate social behavior is and what is not. We also learn that friendship can be a rich source of personal and communal growth. Society also tends to organize itself into groups of people, such as an extended family, a church, a business, a service organization, etc.

We now have the capacity to be in contact with friends and family (and strangers) all over the world at the touch of a screen. What is it that people are looking for in social interaction? How does one’s social nature help to deal with loneliness that everyone sometimes feels? How do people foster goodness as social beings? The first thing that people seek through social interaction is identity. Who am I? Who are you? How do we fit together?

Made for Community

First, we are born into relationships. The family is considered the fundamental cell of human society. In the family comes our first identity: as treasured son or daughter. In the family, our intrinsic value can be affirmed and, at the same time, the members can be encouraged to live up to their value. No one comes from a perfect family, but everyone comes from a family that can be better. The family becomes better when its individual members become better, more virtuous people. They do that by forming one another through truthful dialogue and corresponding action.

Second, people look for the ability to decide — and live with the decision of — “Who am I?” This is different from the identity of belonging to a certain family, or being a certain child within that family. This second answer to “Who am I?” builds on the first, stepping into the realm of freedom and holding counsel with oneself. Here human persons use their free will, in control of their own actions, to form themselves further. A person is known and revealed by his acts. It is through free-will action that people establish themselves as individuals in the world. Granted, they are already individuals, but they make up their minds themselves about who this individual is and what this individual is about. This requires making choices in society, both within the family and without. At this point, however, a person seeks personal integrity through free choice and communion with others.

Third, part of being social opens people up to areas of potential growth. Through interactions with others, for example, a young person may begin to experience in which he or she can make a positive difference in the life of another. On the other hand, he may also see how negative consequences of his choices adversely affect others (individually and as a group). Both are useful for a deeper self-knowledge and a greater humility. People can always improve, meaning that they can always make more and better choices that correspond to their own dignity and, at the same time, uphold the dignity of others.

Better for Ourselves and Others

The desire to be better, to be more real — to be one’s best self even — dwells within the human heart. To deny this is to shut down or handicap our rational nature. Human freedom is not meant to atrophy, it is meant to become strong and robust. Inertia of the will leads to personal atrophy — becoming a weaker or worse version of who you could be. Good choices, communion and strong relationships stop that from happening. In fact, the reverse happens. Freedom allows one to become freer, able to choose better for the sake of one’s own good and the good of others.

When members of a community are not focused on fostering the individual’s potential for good, however, people drift toward inertia or, worse, poorer choices. They can suffer from loneliness and even despair due to a lack of meaning and purpose in their lives. This does not mean that every conversation people have must be about purpose and meaning. It does mean that encouragement, help and kindness could be extremely formative for people in a healthy and positive way. It also means that negativity and discouragement (not the same as truthful criticism) should be avoided. When facing loneliness, the best thing to do is to go outside of oneself, to counteract the loneliness in some way. This is most effective when that going out of oneself contributes in some way, however small, to the well-being of another.

Living for Others

Going back to the choices the individual makes about personal integrity, the choices that each one makes about identity, meaning and purpose — while having a huge impact on the individual — have an enormous impact on others. Integral, virtuous people become the “salt of the earth” and the “city set on a hill.” We can become like lights in the darkness for those who are lost. For those suffering from loneliness and a lack of communion, the help of a few good people can make a life-changing difference.

How does someone make choices toward personal transformation and friendship? Remember always to seek what is good, the true good, for oneself and for others. To desire good to someone for his or her own sake, not one’s own, is the definition of love. This means that the other is never a means to an end. One does not use another for the sake of obtaining some other good — not in small ways, not in big ways. Instead, love and friendship are focused on the virtuous development of both people. This may mean that fewer people are real friends, but so be it. We should not waste time being a user or being used.

Perhaps a little remedial work is needed before a person is capable of being able to will another’s good — because to do so requires a certain understanding of one’s self as good — and then extending that benevolence to others. Perhaps a person is not good — where should she start? Identify one area to improve, and start there. Break it down into smaller and smaller pieces if necessary. Let yourself be different, which means, if you do improve, embrace it and love yourself for doing so! All of this is the grace of God transforming and shaping the human heart. Let us be grateful for his calling forth the best part of ourselves, for our own fulfillment and the communion he creates among us.

Sister Anna Marie McGuan, R.S.M., is Director of Christian Formation in the Diocese of Knoxville.

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5 min read

Easter

The Formation of the Gospels and Good Shepherd Sunday

Sister Anna Marie McGuan

February 16, 2022 8:23 am February 16, 2022

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The Good Shepherd Gospel reading on the Fourth Sunday of Easter seems out of place because it takes us back in time before the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus….

The Good Shepherd Gospel reading on the Fourth Sunday of Easter seems out of place because it takes us back in time before the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus. On the preceding Sundays of Easter, the focus has been on the Resurrection appearances — beautiful moments of joy, trepidation, surprise and hope. The Good Shepherd passage, however, has something important to teach us about the formation of the New Testament.

In recalling that all of the Gospels were written after Jesus’ resurrection and ascension, we have to conclude that everything contained within them was written in the light of the Resurrection, that is, with the end in mind: the victory of Jesus over sin and death. The Gospels, in other words, record the life and teaching, the death and resurrection of Jesus, as told to us through the faith of the Apostles who knew him and loved him. The Apostles are telling the story of Jesus in faith and for faith — to inspire us to believe in Jesus.

Not everything that Jesus said and did was understood at the time, certainly not before the Resurrection and the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. John himself tells us as much in his Gospel. For example, after the cleansing of the temple, John wrote, giving us just one example of how a word spoken by Jesus could only be understood in the light of later events: “Jesus answered and said to them,^‘Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.’ The Jews said, ‘This temple has been under construction for forty-six years,^* and you will raise it up in three days?’ But he was speaking about the temple of his body. Therefore, when he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this, and they came to believe the scripture and the word Jesus had spoken” (Jn 2: 19-22).

Another such example is when Jesus spoke about himself as the Good Shepherd: “Although Jesus used this figure of speech,^* they did not realize what he was trying to tell them” (Jn 10:6). After Jesus’ death and resurrection, however, Peter and the others came to understand these words, especially where Jesus explicitly says of himself: “I am the good shepherd. A good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep” (Jn 10:11). We know this because Peter refers to Jesus as the shepherd in his first letter: “He himself bore our sins in his body upon the cross, so that, free from sin, we might live for righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed. For you had gone astray like sheep, but you have now returned to the shepherd and guardian of your souls” (2:24-25).

Passages like Jesus’ description of the Good Shepherd illustrate how the evangelists often show how the Apostles were mystified by things that Jesus said and did. Certainly, the Apostles did not hide that fact in their preaching. The Gospel writers told the story of Jesus to the best of their ability, inspired by the Holy Spirit. The process of transmitting Divine Revelation in the form of the Gospels happened rapidly, over the course of about 50 years. But a key to their writing was how they came to understand Jesus’ words in light of his death and Resurrection.

How did the Gospel writers compose their Gospels? The Church teaches about three stages of the formation regarding the canonical (meaning accepted as inspired by God and read in the liturgy) Gospels in the Catechism (CCC, No. 126). The first stage simply relates to the life and teaching of Jesus. Depending on the witness of the Apostles — who were with Jesus, called by Jesus to form his intimate circle of companions and to be the foundation of his Church — who passed on what Jesus said and did. The second stage came when, after Jesus’ Ascension, once they were enlightened by the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, the Apostles preached boldly, not in weakness. They knew and loved Jesus, and they wanted everyone to know who he was. They wanted everyone to have access to the mystery of God’s life through faith in Jesus and through baptism. In the third stage, the Gospel writers selected both oral and written materials to prepare their texts. They organized what they heard and read in order to write most effectively to the diverse audiences of their time.

According to a long-standing tradition in the Church, some of the Gospel writers were Apostles and others were not, but they preserved and wrote down the apostolic preaching: what the Apostles learned from Jesus himself, and what they themselves saw. St. Justin Martyr, who died around 165 AD, identifies the Gospels more than once as the memoirs of the Apostles. The Gospels continue to teach us about the life and teaching of Jesus. They are God’s gift to His Church, and their apostolic origin is undeniable.

Sister Anna Marie McGuan, RSM, is director of Christian formation in the Diocese of Knoxville.

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7 min read

Evil

Can the Existence of Evil Disprove God’s existence?

Sister Anna Marie McGuan

February 16, 2022 7:08 am February 16, 2022

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7 min read

The existence of evil is a common objection to the existence of God, or at least to a personal God who is all-knowing and all-good. How is it possible to…

The existence of evil is a common objection to the existence of God, or at least to a personal God who is all-knowing and all-good. How is it possible to reconcile belief in God with the clear evidence of evil and its manifold manifestations? This is a good question, and one that people have been asking for thousands of years (just read through the book of Job in the Old Testament). To answer the question, two related, yet distinct ideas must be examined.

The meaning of evil

Firstly, it is necessary to establish what exactly is meant by “evil.” When speaking of evil, it is easy to see it as a force that drives nature or people toward destruction. However, evil does not exist per se, meaning in and of itself. It only exists in things as a lack of something that should be present. St. Thomas Aquinas wrote: “…every being, as such, is good; …evil can exist only in good as in its subject” (STh., Q. 49, a. 3). For example, blindness is not something added to the eye; it is the lack of a power that should be there. The eye suffers the deprivation of the good of sight, which is an evil. Sickness is not the addition of a new perfection; it is the lack of health in a body. Hence, a physician works precisely to restore someone to health, the good state the body should be in.

This understanding of evil is important because it immediately rules out the idea that the material world is evil and must be overcome in order for human persons to be happy. That dualistic perception of the world and its origins is at the heart of the Manichean heresy, which lies within the Gnostic tradition. Essentially, the two eternal principles of “good” and “evil” are at war, and all matter is seen as evil. This, of course, is in direct opposition to the biblical tradition which precedes it, in which all creation is declared “good,” even “very good,” in Genesis 1. Matter is definitely not evil in the biblical vision.

What about when bad things happen? Physical or natural evil that people experience is the playing out of the laws of the universe, like the earthquake that causes the tsunami that causes the destruction of an island and all the plants and creatures living on it. One the one hand, it is seen as a tragedy. On the other hand, however, how it happened is perfectly logical and can be traced back through the laws of nature. This type of evil can also be quite relative. For example, the lion eats the antelope. Good for the lion, evil for the antelope. As St. Thomas Aquinas wrote, “Now, the order of the universe requires…that there should be some things that can, and do sometimes, fail” (STh., Q. 49, a. 2).

The existence of evil

Secondly, once evil is understood as the privation of a good and not a principle of existence, the idea free will in rational creatures must be addressed. Moral evil is more nuanced than physical evil, and it is really at the heart of the above-stated question about God. Moral evil refers to the choice by a rational creature to do what he knows is not good, either for himself or for others. In this case, the privation of the good that ought to be there is caused by the choice of the creature. For example, the thief lacks the virtue of justice. The good that ought to be present, namely, the ready disposition to give to each what is due, is lacking. Instead, the thief has an inordinate desire to possessions and violates justice in order to satisfy that desire. A famous line from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn summarizes this perfectly: “Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes … right through every human heart — and through all human hearts.” Man, each and every man, chooses to commit moral evil or not. God is not the cause of this type of evil, but he does allow it to exist.

If God is all good — why doesn’t He stop people from doing bad things? This is the conundrum, right? The answer lies in the great value and the goodness of freedom, even when it has gone wrong. Make no mistake — God has explained what freedom is for: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might” (Dt 6:5). Or, as St. Paul wrote: “The commandments, ‘You shall not commit adultery, You shall not kill, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,’ and any other commandment, are summed up in this sentence, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law” (Rm 3:9-10).

Each person has an innate understanding that what St. Paul says is true, and freedom’s true purpose is clear. Yet, if someone makes a bad or a vicious choice, God still permits the choice. The power of goodness and love, latent within the human will, is so great and good, that God will not thwart man’s use of it. He wants humans to choose to love freely — to love him freely, to love the self freely, and to love others freely. He could have created puppets who automatically loved him and could not do otherwise. He did not. As such, there are adverse consequences to human freedom: sin and the effects of sin.

Sin and evil

That is really the crux of the problem. It can be explained metaphysically and in a satisfactory way that evil exists, but God’s seeming absence from the scene right when we need him fails to satisfy. But, is he absent? St. Augustine said: “For the Almighty God, who, as even the heathen acknowledge, has supreme power over all things, being Himself supremely good, would never permit the existence of anything evil among His works, if He were not so omnipotent and good that He can bring good even out of evil.”

St. Augustine’s argument here is actually the only solution. The existence of evil cannot disprove the existence of God, because evil exists only in something good as in a subject (blindness in the eye, illness in the body) or as part of the lawful order of the universe. Yet, God’s allowance of evil, especially evil freely chosen on the part of human persons, cannot but bring us to the question of why? To begin to understand this, the nature of human freedom must be appreciated and understood. Freedom is a power for good, not for evil, but it can be misused. God allows this because this is how he created rational human beings — for the good, capable of evil. He will not go back on his creation. At the same time, the evil that God permits, will, in his time and purposes, be an avenue from which he brings good.

Sister Anna Marie McGuan is with the Religious Sisters of Mercy in Alma, Michigan.

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5 min read

Easter

Easter Evidence: At the Heart of the Church’s Mission

Sister Anna Marie McGuan

February 11, 2022 6:11 am February 11, 2022

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5 min read

Easter Sunday is the Church’s greatest feast day — a day in which we celebrate Jesus Christ’s Resurrection from the dead. It is the “Feast of feasts” and the “Solemnity…

Easter Sunday is the Church’s greatest feast day — a day in which we celebrate Jesus Christ’s Resurrection from the dead. It is the “Feast of feasts” and the “Solemnity of solemnities.” The Catechism of the Catholic Church states: “Beginning with the Easter Triduum as its source of light, the new age of the Resurrection fills the whole liturgical year with its brilliance” (No. 1168). Christians believe that Jesus “crushed death,” and the “mystery of the Resurrection … permeates with its powerful energy our old time, until all is subjected to him (CCC, No. 1169).

Jesus Christ truly died on Good Friday. There was no mistaken prognosis that Jesus did not really expire on the cross; there was no accidentally identifying Jesus as someone else. There was no theft of Jesus’ body from the tomb; no swallowing up of the body in an earthquake. From the beginning, Christians proclaimed not only the resurrection of Jesus, but also his very real death. His human soul separated from his human body. All of the gospels testify to this. Without that death, his appearances to the women and to his apostles on Easter morning would have been humdrum. Instead, people were terrified, overjoyed and astonished.

There are factors that confirm the Church in her faith in the resurrection of Jesus. First is the empty tomb. The apostles saw the empty tomb and heard the testimony of the women who went there on the first Easter morning: “…[T]he empty tomb was…an essential sign for all. Its discovery by the disciples was the first step toward recognizing the very fact of the Resurrection.” (CCC, No. 640).

Second, the apostles saw Jesus with their own eyes. They disbelieved at first — and who wouldn’t? — but were convinced by the fact that they could touch him, speak to him and eat with him. Jesus’ body was clearly different than it was before, and almost always the women, the apostles and the disciples do not recognize him at first. Each time, however, Jesus reveals himself to them, and they are able to make the connection that this one standing before them was the same one who died by crucifixion on Good Friday. In the encounter with the apostle Thomas, Jesus actually points to his wounds as the way for Thomas to make the connection that the man standing before him, talking and breathing, is the same man who was crucified. Jesus had to lead Thomas and the others to that understanding, because his glorified and risen body was no longer subject to the limitations of space and time. He could appear as he wished, when he wished. He could be in their presence and not reveal himself, and then allow them to recognize him in an instant. All of this has to do with his glorified, risen humanity and its new properties. “At Jesus’ Resurrection his body is filled with the power of the Holy Spirit: he shares the divine life in his glorious state, so that St. Paul can say that Christ is ‘the man of heaven’” (CCC, No. 646).

The Resurrection also brought St. Paul, who hated Christians, to believe in Christ and to be baptized in Damascus, after having encountered him on the road there. He saw him with his own eyes. He heard his voice. He spoke to him. Later, in his letter to the Galatians, Paul had to compare his authority to preach the gospel as being on par with that of the first apostles, and so he based his valid apostleship on his encounter with the risen Jesus. He himself saw the Lord Jesus risen from the dead, and from that encounter, Paul’s life was transformed, and he became God’s apostle.

It was the fact of the resurrection that compelled the apostles to preach that Jesus was and always will be the true messiah and the savior of the world. It is still the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus that compels Christians to share his life and message and to dedicate their lives to him. Without the resurrection, Paul says, Christianity is useless: “For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins” (1 Cor 15: 16-17). He continues: “But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive” (v. 20-22).

Because of the evidence of the empty tomb and the encounters of the risen Jesus with the women, the apostles and disciples, and St. Paul, the Church has always believed and preached the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. It is the moment that definitively changed human history forever. Jesus’ rising from the dead was the catalyst for all evangelization, meaning the fact of Jesus’ resurrection impelled the apostles to go and tell people what had happened. That is still what the Church proclaims today, and she always will.

Sister Anna Marie McGuan, RSM, is director of Christian formation in the Diocese of Knoxville.

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5 min read

Culture

Truth and Truthfulness

Sister Anna Marie McGuan

February 5, 2022 10:17 pm February 5, 2022

5 min read

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5 min read

“For this I was born and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” Pilate said…

“For this I was born and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” Pilate said to him, “What is truth?” (Jn. 18:37-38)

This snippet of dialogue comes from part of a conversation between Pontius Pilate and Jesus on Good Friday. After asking Jesus “What is truth?” Pilate walked away from him. He didn’t wait to hear the answer. Was he not interested in an answer? Or, cynically, did he believe there wasn’t one? Perhaps Pilate didn’t think that truth exists at all.

What he didn’t say is “There is not truth.” That would, of course, be false. And yet many people make that claim today. That very statement is self-contradictory and self-refuting. The reason? If it is correct, then it would be true. But, then, nothing can be true, and therefore, “There is no truth” cannot be true. The reasonable and logical outcome, then, is that “There is truth” must be correct.

Context

Since truth exists, then, what is it? There are multiple ways of explaining it, all of which are related to one another. Additionally, what one means by “truth” has to be properly understood. Since the meaning of truth can be a bit complicated, it is worth looking at how we should understand it in a normal, everyday context, and then how a person’s relationship to truth plays out in his life and actions.

Perhaps the best way to start is to focus on the truth as it is normally understood in conversation and interaction: that is, the truth about the things around us. When an object is perceived, if it is perceived correctly, then it is said to be known “truly.” For example, if a woman sees a dog but calls it a banana, another person will correct her and say,“No, that is a dog, not a banana.” Her initial assignment of the category “banana” to that particular canine was erroneous and, therefore, she did not identify the truth about what it was.

Notice that this fundamental way of perceiving and naming nature presupposes that nature is something that can be known and understood. It also presupposes the normal, innate human capacity to perceive and rightly judge what things are in the world. Both of these are reasonable starting positions. This means that, unless a person is somehow impaired, that person can know the truth about things. As a starting definition, then, one could say with Thomas Aquinas that truth is “the equation of the thought and the thing.” In that statement, the word “equation” means that the perception of the object matches up to what the object is in itself.

Drawing conclusions

From this very basic ability to perceive reality for what it is, all sorts of other truths come to light. People begin to reason about reality. That means that they are able to draw conclusions about more and more of what can be known. This is where areas of learning, like philosophy, art, science, literature, math, grammar, etc. begin to develop. Over the centuries and millennia of human existence, this body of knowledge has grown as the human race has grown. Truth, then, has to do with the intelligibility of the world and human capacity to know it. The adjective “true” describes the accurate perception of reality and also the logical reasoning based upon that perception.

Yet, there is even more to truth than this objective and rather dry description. Truth is also something that people desire and expect from one another. How does one person give truth to another? The Catechism of the Catholic Church reads: “Truth as uprightness in human action and speech is called truthfulness, sincerity, or candor. Truth or truthfulness is the virtue which consists in showing oneself true in deeds and truthful in words, and in guarding against duplicity, dissimulation, and hypocrisy” (No. 2468).

Another way of saying this is that the truth living in a person is the virtue of truthfulness. Truth becomes a part of one’s identity and of one’s way of interacting with other people in the world. Without the virtue of truthfulness, individuals fracture interiorly (that is the meaning of the “duplicity, dissimulation, and hypocrisy” in the quote above) and society consequently degenerates. Thomas Aquinas said it this way: “Men could not live with one another if there were not mutual confidence that they were being truthful to one another.” Living in falsehood and then perpetuating those lies does have serious consequences — at the very least, there will be a lack of personal integrity and a negative impact upon community and society as a whole.

Witness

There is an alternative to that rather dismal picture. No one person alone can make a society truthful. Each person can only decide how he or she will bear witness to truth personally. The mechanism that was mentioned above, namely, accurate perception and then proper naming of that perception, can be applied to human speech, action and interaction.

Through choices to speak and act in truth, a person becomes truthful and virtuous. That, in turn, has an effect on society. The transformation of the community, however, only happens through the transformation of its members. The building up one one’s personal integrity through truthfulness happens one choice at a time. The solidifying and reintegration of society occurs through the same process happening in multiple persons over generations. The ability to identify and speak truth, and be truthful, is a chief characteristic of a society wanting unity and peace.

Sister Anna Mare McGuan is a Religious Sister of Mercy of Alma, Michigan. She serves the Diocese of Knoxville, Tennessee, as the director of the Office of Christian Formation.

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