This morning as I was performing my morning ritual of seeing what has been posted on the Wayward Catholic Facebook page I had a post from “The Drew Mariani show” stating today is “National Honesty Day”. He then asked the question “Is it ever okay to be dishonest?”Needless to say I have been thinking about this all day. He mentioned several examples, I’ll just state two:

• If your kids ask you if you ever did anything wrong when you were their age (drink, drugs, pre-marital sex) do you tell the truth?
• Is it okay for someone like Lila Rose over at Live Action to use subterfuge to expose the practices used by Planned Parenthood, such as providing abortions to minors without parental consent, etc.?

Let me start by saying, if you are looking to the Wayward Catholic for an answer, I am not sure I have one, hence the name “The Wayward Catholic”. How can we say one lie is okay while another isn’t?

In my opinion, a big part of the problem in this country today is we can no longer make a distinction between right and wrong, we tend to make everything into a grey area. As Mariani said in his post regarding the first example, if you tell the truth, then your kids can turn it around and say “Well if you did it and you turned out alright, why can’t we?’ If you lie to them, well you lied to them.

In the second example, we can easily justify it becasue we are trying to get something good from it, stopping abortions. But it is still dishonest. Two wrongs don’t make a right. Should the good we do by exposing Planned parenthood outweigh the fact we are using dishonest means to get to the end?

Here is what the “Catechism of the Catholic Church” says:

“A lie consists in speaking a falsehood with the intention of deceiving. The Lord denounces lying as the work of the devil.” CCC 2482

“Human acts, that is, acts that are freely chosen in consequence of a judgment of conscience, can be morally evaluated, They are either good or evil”. CCC 1749

“The end does not justify the means.” CCC 1753

So the Church teaches us it is wrong to lie, even when there are good intentions but…

This is why there are so many Wayward Catholics out here, we don’t know what to do. Well that isn’t exactly true, we know we should do what is right in the eyes of God.

To be continued…