What is the difference between faith and superstition? Question asked by Kate.

Faith is a movement of the heart towards God.  It is brought about by God’s presence in us and is a gift that fulfils our nature.  There are ways in which this capacity in us to trust in goodness can be distorted: we can believe lying politicians and place our hopes in what they offer, even to the point of not seeing the moral evil that impels them.  (Hitler and Stalin would be prime examples.)  The result is a kind of parody of religion that people sometimes call ‘political religion’, which mimics good religion by triggering the same kinds of movements within the person that grace does. 

‘Sin came into the world by Man - which leaves Man in need of redemption.  Yet, long before man arrived, the world was (and remains) a violent place to live.  Big fish eat little fish.  Lions feast on weaker animals,  Crocodiles eat anything that comes along.  In the dinosaur age, violence was a way of life among reptiles. Why did God expect man to be any different?  Why did God create such a violent world?  Why is the Old Testament so filled with violence?’ Question posed by Gerry.

First of all, clarify the nature of the language that you’re using.  Is it ‘violent’ for a sheep to eat grass?  I think not.  For a lion to eat a sheep?  More tricky.  You might not like the physical tearing of limb from limb, but in principle, what the lion does is nourish itself from other items in the world, and this is no different from what the sheep does in relation to grass.  Animals differ and what animals have evolved to need differs.  If you have a world in which there is diversity, and Aquinas thinks that this diversity of created things is needed in order to give expression to divine goodness (‘there must be a lot of different things because no one created thing can be expressive of goodness’), then there will be a diversity of dependence built into the way things are.  A lion needs a certain diet, etc, and would not have the features of its nature without certain ways of sustaining itself.  I would worry about a vegetarian lion: it’s probably spent too much time reading The Guardian. So in itself, that animals feed off one another doesn’t seem to me to be problematic, and it is probably misleading to use the word ‘violent’ to describe this because this word has connotations relating to human malice not prompted by need, but by badness.

You might not realise it, but our very own Fr John McDade is one of the most eminent theologians in the country. And he has agreed to answer any theological questions you might have and, what's more, to keep the reply short. Anyone familiar with the usual theological tendency to provide multi-volume answers to simple questions will regard this as little short of miraculous. So, to ask a question, please go to Fr John's entry in the 'Directory' and submit your query via email. He has a hundred word limit to his answers. Let's see if he can keep to it.

Question: where does the extra information about Mary that is not contained in the Gospels (such as that her mother was Anne and her father Joachim) come from?

Answer: the Protoevangelium of James and traditions of the Jerusalem Church (more to come).

Word count: 13.