Ordinary Time 23
September 6, 2026
Helping Others To Salvation
When I
was a teen, some friends and I were watching a local soccer game together. The
game started getting a little chippy, as tempers were beginning to flare,
before an all-out brawl began on the field. Of course as teen boys we were
excited and began to cheer, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” One of our teachers came up
to us and said, “Guys, what are you doing? Why are you encouraging others to
sin?” It really made me think – oh wow, he was right. Why am I rooting people
on when they’re doing something evil?
The truth
is, as our Scriptures make clear, we are our brothers’ and sisters’
keepers. We can’t be hands-off when it comes to another person’s spiritual
well-being. In fact, if it’s true as St. Paul says that “love is the
fulfillment of the law” and love is defined as willing the good of the other,
then the greatest act of love is to will someone’s greatest good: their eternal
salvation and sanctification. So let’s talk about how to avoid participating in
another’s evil and how to assist others in their path to Heaven.
Our
Catechism gives us some clear ways in which we sometimes participate in another
person’s evil: if we praise an evil act, if we encourage or command it, if we
keep someone’s evil deeds a secret when we have a duty to reveal it, if we
enable it in some way, or if we don’t speak up when we ought to.
This has
real-world consequences. Sometimes people will joke around about bad things
they’ve done – we cannot join in that laughter. Sometimes people don’t want to
snitch on a friend’s evil, but remaining silent means we wordlessly approve.
One that has hit most of us hard is when a child or grandchild gets married
outside of the Church. As tough as it is, we can’t congratulate them or give a
gift, lest we approve of a life-choice that is objectively sinful. In that
case, we ought to have a kind conversation with our loved one, explaining why
our conscience will not allow us to celebrate an invalid and sinful marriage –
it’s tough, but this is one of the ways in which Our Lord tells us we must
choose Him even over our closest family.
Moral
theology gives us three different types of cooperation in evil. First, there is
formal cooperation which means that we intend the evil that is done. For
example, someone who drives the getaway car for the bank robbery is still
guilty of theft, even if they didn’t actually steal the money, since they had
the same intention as the robbers.
Secondly,
there is proximate material cooperation in evil, where someone may not
intend the evil deed, but enables it anyway. So a liquor store clerk who sees
the same alcoholic drunk man coming in every day to get his bottle of whiskey
cooperates in evil since he knows he is enabling the man to get drunk, even if
the clerk doesn’t intend the drunkenness himself. This is sinful, less so than intending
the evil, but the person is still knowingly enabling the evil.
Finally,
there is remote material cooperation in evil which means that we are so
far removed from the evil that it is morally neutral. A good example is paying
our taxes, some of which are used for immoral government programs – but we
cannot control that, and our refusal to pay taxes wouldn’t change the immoral
allocation of money. Growing up, my parents would never buy General Mills
Cereal because that company donated to Planned Parenthood, an abortion provider
– but there are dozens, even hundreds, of companies that donate to immoral
causes, so to boycott them all would literally mean we can’t buy anything. (I
did go a little crazy on the Golden Grahams when I went off to college and
could actually eat them!). Remote cooperation, where we are so far removed from
the evil done that it’s not possible for us to seriously impact it, is morally
acceptable.
But
enough about how to cooperate in someone’s evil – how can we also cooperate in
their holiness? There are several ways: prayer, evangelization, and fraternal
correction.
Of
course prayer comes first, because it is ultimately God alone who causes any
virtue or holiness to grow in a soul. Listen to what St. Ignatius of Antioch
says: “When God wants to have mercy on someone, He inspires someone else to
pray for him, and He helps in this prayer. Pray without ceasing on behalf of
other men… For cannot he that falls rise again?” Who is God inspiring you to
pray for, that He may shower His mercy upon them?
Once
prayer has prepared the soil, we evangelize – live as authentic Christians, and
invite others to do the same. In the second century after Christ, a young Greek
man named Justin was a perennial seeker of truth – he studied every philosopher
up to his day, and found them incomplete. Yes, the philosophers could tell him
that God existed, but not who He was or what God wanted for his life. He had
heard about the Christians, mostly because they were persecuted and often died
for their faith – he admired their courage, but didn’t know what they believed.
One day he was pondering these things on the seashore when an old man walked up
to him and asked what was troubling him. Justin started pouring out his heart –
he had dabbled in every Greek philosopher but couldn’t find the answers to his
questions. The elderly man said, “Yes, we cannot know God by human reason
alone. But He has revealed Himself, first to the Jews in the Old Covenant, and
finally through Jesus Christ.” Justin was intrigued and asked the man to hear
more about this Jesus. He introduced him to the Christian community who began
showing him the Scriptures, which converted his heart completely – he finally
found what he had been looking for! St. Justin became a martyr himself, and the
first great teacher of the Faith – but he was converted through both the
witness of the martyrs, and the invitation of a friendly man.
Finally,
as Jesus bears witness, a word of correction, given in love, can be enough to
change a soul’s direction. We know St. Monica as the mother of St. Augustine
and a holy mother and wife, but in her teen years, Monica used to sneak into
her parents’ basement to sneak some wine – to the point that she was on her way
to becoming an alcoholic. One day, one of her family’s servants caught her, and
reproached her for being a drunkard. The word of correction struck its target –
Monica realized that she needed to give up the habit! It was only that
servant’s loving, but difficult, word that put her on the path to holiness.
Giving a
word of fraternal correction is difficult, but Jesus gives us the play-by-play:
Go to your brother (meaning that we should already have a close relationship
with the person), and go privately. If he doesn’t listen, we recruit others who
perhaps have greater influence. I know, for example, that my non-Catholic
brother will not listen to me about Christ – we don’t have the greatest
relationship. So I am constantly praying that God raises up the right person
whom he will listen to. I know many parents want to preach the Lord to
their grown kids who have abandoned the Faith, but perhaps they are not the
ones to speak to their hearts, so pray that others may be raised up to speak
about Christ to them.
Although
each person is free to make their own choices, we do have an influence
on others’ souls. Let us make the resolution to assist one another to Heaven,
for to love our neighbor truly is to desire their eternal salvation!
