Big Questions

Sometimes a question is so big that, for many well-meaning people, it is too big to see. Two examples.

(1) There is much compassionate concern for people who have got themselves trapped in structures of Adultery.

BIG QUESTION: Is this the first human age in which people have felt sexual temptation, and have sometimes fallen victim to it?

If not, why does this age demand novel ways of circumventing the objective sinfulness of adultery?

(2) There is much talk about Discernment, Accompaniment, Gradualism, and Conscience, as applied to those in objectively adulterous relationships.

BIG QUESTION: Does all this stuff apply only to adulterers, or does it also apply to all sinners, including embezzlers, paedophiles, murderers, wife-beaters, human traffickers, torturers, rapists, economic exploiters of the poor, blackmailers, racists, exploiters of prostitutes, perpetrators of genocide, drug-traffickers, etc. etc..

If not, why not?

There is a phrase "Not seeing the Wood for the Trees".

Some people at the moment examine in minute and immensely sophisticated detail the finer points of Discernment, Accompaniment, Gradualism, and Conscience. They seem always to have in mind the more comfortably 'vanilla' sexual sins: Adultery dressed up to look like Marriage; genitally expressed Homosexuality dressed up as Marriage.

In so doing, are they not making the mistake of examining every leaf of one particular tree under a microscope with such single-minded concentration that they fail to notice the Forest?

At least prima facie, such people look to me like folk who have a desperate compulsion to find, by hook or by crook, a by-pass which will enable them to drive right round "Thou shalt not commit Adultery".

Why can't we drive round the other nine Commandments too?

Why is it necessary to talk about Sin at all?

Why don't we just murmur, with the Zeitgeist, "Stuff happens"?

Why should anybody ever go to Confession ... or be baptised?

Why did Christ die?