Catholic Agnosticism

Our Catholic Faith teaches: (Choose the correct answer.)

1. Babies who die without baptism (including abortions and miscarriages):
a) Go automatically/directly to heaven due to their innocence and God’s love.
b) Go to hell because of original sin and separation from God.
c) Go to limbo.
d) We really don’t know, but we trust, pray and hope (which is to say that we don’t know.)

2. Evolution of species as the mechanism that originated the human race is:
a) An indisputable, absolute fact.
b) Impossible because it contradicts the clear testimony of Genesis.
c) The marvelous, complicated way God created humans.
d) We really don’t know from our faith about evolution.

3. Christ’s second coming:
a) Will not be a historic reality since it is a biblical myth.
b) Imminent because of current events prophesized in scripture.
c) Will probably occur in a few million years.
d) We have no idea of its timing although we know it is coming.

4. The population of hell is:
a) Few or none because the love of God forgives all sins.
b) Immense because the vast majority remain in sin and disbelief.
c) Probably about a 50/50 split with heaven.
d) We really have no clear idea from revelation, scripture and tradition; we only know there is a hell, not how many are there.

5. The ideal political/economic society:
a) Abolishes the injustice of great wealth alongside of horrendous poverty.
b) Secures freedoms associated with democracy and market economies.
c) Directly obeys the Church in the manner of medieval Christendom.
d) We have no such template. Rather, we have principles (solidarity with the poor, subsidiarity, freedoms including that of religion) that can be applied to critique and improve all imperfect societies.

6. The State of Israel is:
a) A divinely intended compensation for the guilt of the Holocaust.
b) Clearly God’s proximate preparation for the imminent Parousia.
c) A cruel injustice against the disenfranchised Palestinian Arabs.
d) A complex, multifaceted secular fact without any clear, univocal religious content.

7. Judas, Hitler, Stalin and Mao are now:
a) In purgatory or heaven because God wants no one to go to hell.
b) Without any doubt in hell.
c) No longer exist.
d) We don’t know where.

8. The details of the Genesis story (temptation with fruit, serpent, etc.) are:
a) Purely fictional (like myths from other ancient religions) and entirely void of actual, historical content.
b) Literally true in all details because they are divinely revealed.
c) Blend of fact and fiction which scripture scholars can unravel.
d) Aspects we do not clearly know about the actual, real event of the fall.

9. Jesus’ descent into hell between his death and resurrection is:
a) Not factual but a poetic/mythical way of saying he frees us from evil.
b) A precise, accurate, historic description of his temporal stay, from Good Friday afternoon to Easter Sunday morning, in hell where the souls of the just had been waiting through the centuries (linear time line) to enter heaven.
c) A metaphoric way of saying that he emptied himself and entered the very deepest realities of despair and abandonment.
d) A revealed reality about which we know very little.

10. The homosexual condition is:
a) Something one is born with and therefore morally neutral or good.
b) A self-chosen moral depravity.
c) A dysfunction treatable by therapy.
d) We do not know, from our faith, its origins.

The correct answer to all these questions is d: we don’t know. Catholicism, agnostic about these realities, maintains an epistemological humility before the Mystery of these mysteries. Most of them we will probably never know this side of heaven and the eschaton: population of hell, destiny of the nonbaptized, and detailed knowledge of the fall. Some may yield greater theological light with the passage of time (descent into hell.) Others will be clarified by developments in science (evolution, origins of homosexuality) but always with the partiality, tentativeness, provisionality, and correctibility that characterizes scientific hypotheses.

Liberal sentimentality renounces such humility in favor of a rigid dogmatic system that teaches: the mercy of God without his justice and wrath; presumption about heaven; avoidance of the reality of original sin; evolution as a dogma; homosexuality as inborn; foundational scriptural realities as mythical; a softened version of class warfare and leftist utopianism. All of the a answers above express this subjectively infallible mythology/ideology. These beliefs are not rooted in revelation or science; rather, they are personal sentiments, feelings, and presumptions. Imbibed from and reinforced by a secular ambiance, they are asserted all the more aggressively and defensively because they lack scientific and revelatory authority as mere assertions of emotive, psychological certitude.

The b answers above all express a Protestant fundamentalism that, deprived of an apostolic magisterium and tradition, interprets particular biblical passages in a literal and selective manner. It also sanctifies secular realities (Israel, democracy, capitalism) thereby immanentizing heaven and the eschaton as an inverse image of leftist utopianism.

In contrast with these competing closed/rigid systems, the genuinely “catholic” (universal) position welcomes a diversity of opinions to the Big Table: Intelligent Designers and evolutionists; Christian Zionists and pro-Arabs; utopian optimists and apocalyptic pessimists; socialists, anarchists, libertarians and capitalists; clinicians who identify homosexuality with psychological harm and scientists searching for biological predispositions. There is, then, a liberty within the Church in regard to a large range of philosophical issues; a liberty that does not characterize the opposing, polarized ideologies of our society. Paradoxically, it is the magisterium that preserves and protects this liberty by preventing the sacralization of any particular school of thought.

The Catholic deposit of faith is as clear about what we don’t know as it is about what we do know, with certainty, from Divine Revelation. It deconstructs mythologies and ideologies of the right and the left, even as it tolerates both. With the wise man, the Catholic can say about these many realities: “I know that I do not know.”