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As wife joins the Catholic Church, Jordan Peterson says Easter is ‘the core story of humanity’

April 1, 2024 Catholic News Agency 2
Psychologist and author Dr. Jordan Peterson speaks to EWTN News In Depth’s Colm Flynn as Peterson’s wife, Tammy, joins the Catholic Church. / Credit: Screenshot/EWTN News in Depth

CNA Staff, Apr 1, 2024 / 15:00 pm (CNA).

Psychologist and author Jordan Peterson spoke about Easter as the “core story of humanity” in an interview with “EWTN News In Depth” hours before his wife, Tammy, joined the Catholic Church this Easter at Holy Rosary Church in Toronto.

Tammy Peterson’s faith was formed through praying the rosary while she struggled against a rare form of cancer. Peterson is known for his biblical lectures on Genesis and Exodus in particular, which often appeal to both Christian and secular listeners. 

When asked by EWTN News correspondent Colm Flynn about what he thought about the Christian Easter message, Peterson said that it’s “the core story of humanity.” 

“I’ll speak psychologically about it and speak in terms of its literary echoes,” he said. “It’s a variant of the dragon and treasure story, which is the oldest story we have. It’s the core story of humanity in some fundamental sense — that in the darkest places, what’s of most value can be found.” 

Peterson noted that he was “not going to delve into theological matters” but that “speaking strictly psychologically,” the Easter story describes “the worst that life and death can throw at us,” but then offers a “promise.” 

“The promise in the story is that, if that’s undertaken wholeheartedly, the consequence is redemptive, transformative and redemptive,” he said. “A resurrection of the spirit, a resurrection of the spirit eternally — that’s the promise.”

When asked what the cross meant to him, Peterson said “it’s the point where everything comes together.”

“It’s the agony of life,” he continued. “With God’s grace, you might say that the triumph of life, in the face of agony, in the face of malevolence, that’s what it is.”

“We’re very confused about what faith is in the modern world. We think that faith is your verbal assent to a collection of descriptive statements,” he noted. “That’s perhaps an element of faith. …But the faith itself is, what would you say? It’s the willingness to presume that being and becoming is good despite tragedy and malevolence.” 

In the interview, Peterson reflected on the idea of a “calling.” 

“You’re called upon to climb Jacob’s Ladder, and it spirals infinitely upward — well, to where?” Peterson asked. “Infinitely upward isn’t a place — It’s a direction. Heaven is a place that’s perfect, that’s getting better at the same time.”

“Anything that attracts your attention is a portal to the divine,” he added. “You’ll pursue that thing that attracts your attention, that’s your calling, and then it’ll transmute, and you’ll find yourself oriented in another direction. The spirit that remains constant through all the transformations of your calling — that’s the divine.” 

“That’s what the divine is; it’s ineffable because it can’t be fully revealed. It’s unlikely to be fully revealed in the course of your existence, but it calls you forward continually,” he continued. “That’s what the burning bush is in the story of Moses. It shows itself in different places for different people.”

When asked what it was like to see his wife join the Catholic Church, Peterson said it’s a “miraculous thing to see.” 

“I loved my wife from the moment I laid eyes on her when I was a kid,” he said. “If you love someone, it hurts you when you see them deviate from the thing that draws you to them. And since she’s pursued her efforts at enlightening herself more thoroughly — and this investigation of Catholicism has been key to that — she’s much more who she is.”  

Though his wife became Catholic, Peterson said he remains “unlikely” to join the Church. When Flynn asked what was holding Peterson back from becoming Catholic himself, he responded: “I don’t think anything’s holding me back. Everybody’s got their own destiny.”

Peterson said that whether this was part of his own “destiny” was “unlikely” because he, as he put it, “exist[s] on the borders of things.” 

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Bishop Barron: Assisted suicide can never be morally sanctioned

January 8, 2024 Catholic News Agency 0
Bishop Robert Barron speaks to EWTN’s Colm Flynn about evangelizing the culture today in October 2023. / Credit: Word on Fire

CNA Staff, Jan 8, 2024 / 15:00 pm (CNA).

Winona-Rochester Bishop Robert Barron is urging Catholics to oppose an effort to make assisted suicide legal in Minnesota — one of an increasing number of states seeking to legalize the practice, which goes against the Catholic Church’s teaching on the sanctity of all human life. 

Minnesota is considering a bill (SF 1813/HF 1930) to legalize the practice of assisted suicide. In an article on the website of Word on Fire, Barron — who founded that ministry in 2000 and who previously ministered as an auxiliary bishop in California — noted that Minnesota is his home state. The bishop said the proposed law caused him to reflect on a billboard he saw in California when that state was considering legalizing assisted suicide in the mid-2010s: “My life, my death, my choice.”

The bishop wrote the billboard caused him to think of St. Paul’s exhortation to the Romans in which the saint writes: “We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.”

“Did the billboard get it right, or did St. Paul? Does my life belong to me, or is it a gift from God? Is my death a matter of my personal choice, or is it under God’s providence and at his disposal?” Barron asked. 

Barron wrote that the premium placed on bodily autonomy in modern society misses the point that the intentional taking of an innocent life is always wrong, no matter what the perceived benefits may be. 

Instead of assisted suicide or euthanasia, the Catholic Church has long supported palliative care, which means accompanying patients toward the end of their lives with methods such as pain management and not accelerating the process of death. 

“Some advocates of physician-assisted suicide will argue that autonomy over one’s body is of utmost importance for those who face the prospect of a dreadfully painful demise,” Barron wrote. “But this consideration is largely beside the point, for palliative care is so advanced that in practically all cases, pain can be successfully managed.”

“The deeper point is this: Even if a dying person found himself in great pain, actively killing himself would not be morally justifiable. The reason is that the direct killing of the innocent is, in the language of the Church, ‘intrinsically evil’ — which is to say, incapable of being morally sanctioned, no matter how extenuating the circumstances or how beneficial the consequences.”

“Though we place a huge premium on it in our culture, I don’t consider autonomy the supreme value. Authentic freedom is not radical self-determination; rather, it is ordered to certain goods that the mind has discerned,” he continued. 

“If I speak obsessively of ‘choice’ but never even raise a question regarding the good or evil being chosen, I find myself in a moral and intellectual wasteland. True freedom is ordered toward moral value and ultimately to the supreme value who is God.”

The current version of Minnesota’s bill contains several “safeguards” designed to ensure that only autonomous adults with a terminal illness will be able to die by assisted suicide. Barron wrote that he is “skeptical” that such safeguards will remain in place, given the erosion of similar measures in recent years in several European countries and in Canada. 

“In many of those places, the elderly, those with dementia, those experiencing depression or severe anxiety can all be candidates for this form of ‘treatment.’ Though the advocates of medically assisted suicide will deny it until the cows come home, this law places the entire state directly on the slipperiest of slopes,” Barron said.

Minnesota is one of at least a dozen states currently considering a liberalization of its assisted suicide laws. As of last year, almost a quarter (21.6%) of the U.S. population lived in a state that has legalized physician-assisted suicide.

Barron in his article urged Catholics to speak out against the bill, which is being sponsored by 24 Democratic Minnesota lawmakers and is currently in committee. 

“[C]all your representative or senator, write to the governor, talk to your friends and neighbors, circulate a petition. And to those in other parts of the country, I would urge vigilance. If this legislation hasn’t come to your state yet, it probably will soon enough. If you stand for the culture of life, fight it!” Barron concluded. 

Euthanasia and assisted suicide are not the same, although the two terms are often used interchangeably. Assisted suicide is the act of making the means of suicide — such as a lethal dose of medication — available to the patient, who subsequently acts on his or her own. 

Euthanasia, in contrast, refers to the practice of a medical professional or other person directly acting to end the life of a patient, a practice that remains illegal across the entire U.S.

According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “intentional euthanasia, whatever its forms or motives, is murder” and “gravely contrary to the dignity of the human person and the respect due to the living God, his Creator” (No. 2324). This teaching was reaffirmed in the 2020 Vatican document Samaritanus Bonus. Pope Francis has spoken frequently against euthanasia and assisted suicide and in favor of palliative care. 

Catholic teaching states that patients and doctors are not required to do everything possible to avoid death, but if a life has reached its natural conclusion and medical intervention would not be beneficial, the decision to “forego extraordinary or disproportionate means” to keep a dying person alive is not euthanasia, as St. John Paul II noted in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae.

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