I don't know. Maybe there ought to be something in canon law that prohibits priests my children like from dabbling in speculative theology. Agitating laymen seem to do enough damage by themselves, though the cause behind it can usually be traced to clerical instigation, to some guy with "theologian" after his name. The reader should keep in mind that I am not a theologian, just another layman trying to extrapolate from a set of premises, those basic catechetical postulates, held in common by us all. So here's the letter I spoke of, circa 1991 or 92. As I said, there was no response or acknowledgement of any kind. I thought he might invite me to dinner, but…

Dear Father K.,

When most priests, religious, and laymen of my acquaintance are so comfortable in their ignorance, it is good to find one who so loves the faith that he continually studies and teaches it for the sake of many souls, as well as his own, and for the love of God. I think you would agree that, just as you are a priest forever, when it comes to the study of God we are all students forever. I trust, therefore, you will have patience with a few remarks from a fellow student concerning your sermon of last Sunday, in which you claimed that Christ could have sinned but chose not to.
Your premise for this assertion seems to lie in your conviction that His free will would be impaired if He could not have made such a choice. And, indeed, this has proven to be a problem of no small magnitude for theologians from Patristic times to our own. But it is a problem of explanation, not of doctrine. The Fathers and early councils unanimously uphold the impeccability of Christ, and the dogmatic essentials have all been with us since the end of the fifth century and the close of the Council of Chalcedon. Those essentials are:

- that Christ, born of a woman, assumed a truly human nature, body and soul, intellect and will;
- that He therefore possessed a human and divine intellect, a human and divine will;
- that the two natures remain unimpaired, neither confused (as though one subsumed the other) nor divided (as though merely co-existing side by side), and yet,
- that the two natures are united to form one individual, one person, the second person of the Holy Trinity, and that consequently
- He not only did not sin but could not sin because He was God.

You are, I take it, in contention only with this last item, the part about "could not sin." I quote from Father John Hardon's Catholic Catechism: "Only in the spurious supposition that Christ has two persons is sin conceivable, since the human person might then commit sin, while the divine person would be perfectly holy."

Now the will is the agent of a personality, and in Christ that personality is divine. His divine and human wills were united in and by that person. For a divine person to choose evil, he would have to contradict His very essence, which is goodness, holiness, and all perfection. If Christ, through His human will, could have chosen to sin, then that will would have to separate, disunite, itself from the divine person, and another person would be required to make the choice for evil. But there is no other person.

Out of curiosity I have asked many Christians, Catholic or otherwise, "Did Jesus have a human personality?" Almost all, after a moment's hesitation and fearful of denying His humanity, respond, "Yes." And so I conclude that this sense of the human and divine in Jesus sort of casually hanging out together – joining hands but not hearts, involved in a courtship but not a marriage – comes easily to many of us.

As to your central premise: Do we impair Christ's free will if we say that He could not sin? The answer lies submerged in the mystery of the hypostatic union (and part of it always will because it is a mystery). In His divinity such a choice clearly could not be made; but what about His humanity? Is His humanity denied if we deny Him this choice, or rather this capacity to choose? Again, His humanity had no decision-making power apart from His divinity. That power resided in the divine person, to whom the humanity belonged, with whom it was in union, not at war. We might as well ask if God's freedom is constrained because He cannot choose to be other than what He is. Are the blessed in heaven somehow deprived because they no longer suffer temptation, no longer see, as we do, evil as an option? I realize they got where they are by making choices, the right ones, while on earth, but their goal was to become like the One who need never make such a choice. The lives of the saints provide ample evidence that virtue can become as much a habit as sin, that the good can be recognized and adhered to without entertaining an evil alternative. It is said of St. Thomas Aquinas that at some point he no longer suffered temptations of the flesh. Was he less free because God's grace allowed him to bring an unruly passion under control?

I would therefore like to offer a tentative solution – tentative because I appeal to no authority on its behalf, and will surrender it if shown to be in conflict with the Church's understanding of human psychology. It is this: the defining mark of freedom of the will is not the necessity of making endless choices between good and evil, which is a faculty peculiar to our fallen humanity. (Christ's humanity was, of course, unfallen.) The defining mark is the ability to see the good and to follow it, period; that if an alternative exists, it may as well involve a choice between two goods as between a good and an evil; and that the soul has greater freedom of movement in the former case than in the latter. No temptation, no agony of decision, is necessary, as was the case when Christ in the desert betrayed no internal delight in Satan's suggestions, nor a moment's hesitation in rejecting them. As further example, I would venture that Adam and Eve were fully human and fully free in their innocence. It was only after yielding to the serpent's wile that they became enslaved to the necessity of choosing between good and evil. This necessity is a kind of prison in which we now labor, where the war in our souls is an endless distraction from the boundless good and abundance of grace into which Adam and Eve were born, when they were most fully human and truly free. Why they had to confront the serpent is as mysterious to me as most anything. We can only say that God allowed it, but did not provoke it. Christ's coming seems to have been contingent upon, and necessitated by, a misuse of the will by both angels and men. We cannot impute to Jesus even the possibility of a misuse of His will, as though He might have participated in the very sinfulness He came to atone for, locked Himself in the very prison from which He came to free us.

A complementary difficulty in this area arises, I think, from another too casual supposition about the nature of evil: that our choices for evil are real and substantial in the same way as our choices for good. They are real, all right, and so are their consequences; if only we could plainly see how awful they are. Satan is also real but, as evil personified, what kind of reality has he next to God? His (and our) evil is measured by our distance from God. Understood in this way, evil is less a presence than an absence – the absence of good. (I like C.S. Lewis' formulation, that what goes to hell is not a man, but the remains of one.) There is no greater freedom than to choose what is right, and Christ's freedom is perfect. The possibility of choosing evil would not be an expansion, but an adumbration of that freedom.

Finally, the doctrinal implications of your position are astounding. If Christ could have sinned on one occasion, might He not have done so on others? Could He have been in error on one thing, but not on anything else? (As I mentioned before, and as you know from your place in the confessional, sin is habit-forming.) Could a fallible Christ found an infallible Church? Could a morally deficient Savior offer the perfect sacrifice to the Father to take away the sins of the world? Could such a doctrine as the Immaculate Conception survive? Would there be any point in having, if it were possible, a sinless Mother give birth to a sinful Savior? She would then be truly in danger of receiving what Catholics are often falsely accused of giving her: the adoration due only her Son. Could there have been a resurrection from the dead, the crown of incorruptibility, of a God-man who had corrupted his own soul? How would the example of His life make saints through the ages? Perhaps He would have been reduced to proclaiming weakly: Do as I say, not as I do. It seems clear to me that the possibility of sin is the devastation of His mission. Christianity (and preeminently, Catholicism) as we now know it and have known it through history, would simply not exist. The Father sends His Son into a fallen world to save it, on the off-chance that He might actually succeed.

I offer these thoughts out of love for the Church and the priests who must guide it. We fall so easily into error it can pass unnoticed. Unfortunately, the standards for priests are higher. They must notice because they are commissioned to preach and teach. Likewise, if I am in error, show me. But I can find no endorsement for your position in the decrees of councils and popes, the writings of the Fathers, nor in Scripture. Lots of debate, but no endorsement.

Also, my kids like you. You said the first mass our family attended at St. Charles, and before leaving the church, while still facing the altar and standing before the sanctuary, you genuflected toward the tabernacle. The kids thought this the best thing they'd seen in a while. "He's very reverent," whispered the eight year old. She and her younger sister attend St. Charles school. They have heard the other priests and still like you best. I have not tried to disabuse them of this affection, nor will I. But I will teach them the Truth as it has been handed down.

Sincerely (in Christ)....