La Croix: Several of your TikTok videos have generated reactions, including complaints to Rome and your bishop. In a video from June 2022 in particular, you seem to say that the devil does not exist as an entity outside of man, where The Catechism speaks of him as a creature…
Father Matthieu Jasseron: Contrary to the remarks that La Croix attributed to me recently, I want to affirm that, of course, the devil exists. It is a reality that I am confronted with every month; I try to help people defend themselves against it, whether by going to bless their house when they have the impression of seeing supernatural phenomena there, by trying to accompany those who are in a spiritual battle or others, more fragile, who feel victims of a bad spell, possessed or not masters of themselves…
Now, the devil is not necessarily what people imagine: an entity that would come around a bend in a dark street, or in the circumstances of a horror movie, jump on us to deprive us of our free will. The devil, as his name suggests, is the divider. Satan means accuser. It is therefore this force – which we have all carried since the beginning – which pushes us to act badly, but which does not act in our place, which suggests, which tempts, and which makes us perform acts that are bad for us and those that surround us. This is what our contemporaries need to be wary of, more than a malevolent spirit in the spirit of Hollywood movies.
The cross : By speaking in your video of the “potentiality” of division in usvou seem all the same to erase the idea of an entity external to the man that one however finds in the Christian tradition…
Father MJ: It is more than a potentiality: it is a force external to us, which suggests us. Simply, where I wanted to be clear is that the devil is not part of the Creed, of our faith. It is the same thing for the apparitions of Lourdes which some may doubt without being bad Christians. My question is not so much to brandish dogmas as to accompany people towards God and towards what is promised to us all, holiness. I don’t believe that repeating theology with the words of theology to people who have no or very little notion of it can help them.
In 2000 years, tradition has spoken with a language that no longer necessarily has the same meaning today. Theology would need to return to this Divider, this Accuser in order to explain to us clearly what it is. Evil does not come from outside the body of man but “from what comes out of his heart”, said Jesus… It seems to me that to imply that the devil is only something outside of us, which would come to annihilate our freedom would not be to honor the Creation that God has made in man. We all have this freedom which is surely one of the best aspects of our likeness to God. If God had also created an entity that could restrain it in this way in us, it would be surprising because it would deny our most intrinsic dignity.
La Croix: In another video, released in 2021 and about homosexuality, you claim that the Bible and The Catechism of the Catholic Church nowhere say that being homosexual or practicing homosexuality is a sin. Don’t you sometimes go beyond the magisterium with the concern of showing the general public a more welcoming, more open Church?
Father MJ:The Catechism of the Church says in black and white that we must welcome and offer a way to God to everyone, including homosexual people. I therefore sought to follow him by trying to show that one should not judge because each conscience is the temple of the Holy Spirit. I may have seemed hasty in my formulation and I would like to apologize to those who may have been surprised by my remarks, but nowhere in the Bible does it say that homosexuality or its practice is a sin, and no either in the chapter dealing with homosexuality in The Catechism of the Catholic Church.
La Croix: But then, what about paragraph 2396 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church: “Among the sins seriously contrary to chastity, mention should be made of masturbation, fornication, pornography and homosexual practices”?
Father MJ: This paragraph is a summary of the chapter on affective and sexual life, but in this synthesis appears a new thesis which did not appear in the pages it aims to summarize. We learn that homosexuality would be classified among the “sins against chastity”. And what is even more surprising is that, when you read the entire Catechism of the Catholic Church, nowhere does this notion of “sin against chastity” exist. So here again something new appears, in a summary, something that has not been developed anywhere before, and a new element not explained beforehand…
Summaries are not the theological development of the Catechism. It is the chapters that make up the content of the subject. How can we accept in a synthesis new notions external to the thesis?
La Croix: A little higher up, it is also a question of “serious depravity”, of “intrinsically disordered” acts: aren’t these precisely the passages that certain associations of homosexual people are asking for to be rewritten?
Father MJ: Yes, and because The Catechism, which dates from 1992, is no longer up to date, as evidenced by the passage on the death penalty. Our contemporaries, often distant from the Church, wonder if such and such an action, such or such a dimension of their being, is of the order of sin. Sin frightens them – surely with good reason – but they have a fantasized image of it. However, there are many Christians on social networks, evangelicals, Catholics or others, who present homosexuality as a very serious sin by implying that people will burn for eternity. I do not believe this is the reality or what is written in The Catechism: nowhere in the tradition of the Catholic Church does it say that it is a sin that would lead us to the fire for eternity.
After, the texts describe this reality with words which it is necessary to know how to receive, to interpret. The words “depravity” or “inherently disordered acts” are unclear to people, and surely very hurtful. They would benefit from being clarified and even more pastoral. People who live with people of the same sex and try to love them in the momentum of what Jesus presented to us are more visible than a hundred years ago. It is a subject of society, and the Church must have an honest discourse, in line with what she has understood of Jesus, but also understandable by our contemporaries.
The Catechism would benefit from being updated from the beauty of the theology which thinks afresh of the reality of our today. It is a question of always better refining the reality of what God has transmitted to us in order to allow our contemporaries a path which helps them to go towards God.
La Croix: How do you work on the texts of your videos?
Father MJ: It is above all life on the ground that helps us always find the words to reach people in front of a screen or in a group. I am also fortunate to have kept very good ties with theology professors at the seminary and to have a recognized theologian as my spiritual guide who helps me. In addition, the team of volunteers who accompany me proofread my scripts regularly. Thanks to all these accompaniments, I dare to believe that my videos have a real flavor of the Church and also a certain theological credit.
:quality(85)//cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/infobae/R7X7MJZRZJG5ZKH3UOXJL77MSQ.jpg)
:quality(85)//cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/infobae/LN5V2WGHSFE2NNYVI6I7XLIL7I.jpg)
