The Knights of Columbus presents

The Luke E. Hart Series

Basic Elements of the Catholic Faith

T HE E IGHTH
C OMMANDMENT: T RUTH
PART THREE• SECTION TEN OF
CATHOLIC CHRISTIANITY

What does a Catholic believe?

How does a Catholic worship?
How does a Catholic live?
Based on the
Catechism of the Catholic Church

by
Peter Kreeft
General Editor
Father John A. Farren, O.P.
Director of the Catholic Information Service
Knights of Columbus Supreme Council 130
 Nihil obstat:
Reverend Alfred McBride, O.Praem.
Imprimatur:
Bernard Cardinal Law
December 19, 2000
The Nihil Obstat and Imprimatur are official declarations that a book or pamphlet is
free of doctrinal or moral error. No implication is contained therein that those who
have granted the Nihil Obstat and Imprimatur agree with the contents, opinions or
statements expressed.
Copyright © 2001 by Knights of Columbus Supreme Council
All rights reserved.
English translation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church for the United States of
America copyright ©1994, United States Catholic Conference, Inc. – Libreria Editrice
Vaticana. English translation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church: Modifications
from the Editio Typica copyright © 1997, United States Catholic Conference, Inc. –
Libreria Editrice Vaticana.
Scripture quotations contained herein are adapted from the Revised Standard Version
of the Bible, copyright © 1946, 1952, 1971, and the New Revised Standard Version of
the Bible, copyright © 1989, by the Division of Christian Education of the National
Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America, and are used by per-
mission.All rights reserved.
Excerpts from the Code of Canon Law, Latin/English edition, are used with permission,
copyright © 1983 Canon Law Society of America,Washington, D.C.
Citations of official Church documents from Neuner, Josef, SJ, and Dupuis, Jacques, SJ,
eds.,The Christian Faith: Doctrinal Documents of the Catholic Church, 5th ed. (New
York:Alba House, 1992). Used with permission.
Excerpts from Vatican Council II:The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents, New
Revised Edition edited by Austin Flannery, OP, copyright © 1992, Costello Publishing
Company, Inc., Northport, NY, are used by permission of the publisher, all rights
reserved. No part of these excerpts may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
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 A WORD ABOUT THIS SERIES
This booklet is one of a series of 30 that offer a collo-
quial expression of major elements of the Catechism of the
Catholic Church. Pope John Paul II, under whose authori-
ty the Catechism was first released in 1992, urged such ver-
sions so that each people and each culture can appropri-
ate its content as its own.
The booklets are not a substitute for the Catechism,
but are offered only to make its contents more accessible.
The series is at times poetic, colloquial, playful, and imagi-
native; at all times it strives to be faithful to the Faith.
Following are the titles in our series.

Part I:What Catholics Believe (Theology)

Section 1: Faith
Section 2: God
Section 3: Creation
Section 4: The Human Person
Section 5: Jesus Christ
Section 6: The Holy Spirit
Section 7: The Holy Catholic Church
Section 8: The Forgiveness of Sins
Section 9: The Resurrection of the Body
Section 10: The Life Everlasting

Part II: How Catholics Pray (Worship)

Section 1: Introduction to Catholic Liturgy
Section 2: Introduction to the Sacraments
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 Section 3: Baptism and Confirmation
Section 4: The Eucharist
Section 5: Penance
Section 6: Matrimony
Section 7: Holy Orders and the Anointing of the
Sick
Section 8: Prayer
Section 9: The Lord’s Prayer
Section 10: Mary

Part III: How Catholics Live (Morality)

Section 1: The Essence of Catholic Morality
Section 2: Human Nature as the Basis for
Morality
Section 3: Some Fundamental Principles of
Catholic Morality
Section 4: Virtues and Vices
Section 5: The First Three Commandments:
Duties to God
Section 6: The Fourth Commandment: Family
and Social Morality
Section 7: The Fifth Commandment: Moral
Issues of Life and Death
Section 8: The Sixth and Ninth Commandments:
Sexual Morality
Section 9: The Seventh and Tenth Command-
ments: Economic and Political
Morality
Section 10: The Eighth Commandment:Truth
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 PART III: HOW CATHOLICS LIVE
(MORALITY)

S ECTION 10: T RUTH

1. The importance of the eighth Commandment
The eighth Commandment is really much more far-
reaching than it seems. It forbids not only perjury, false
oaths, calumny, and slander, but all kinds of falsehood, and
commands total truthfulness.
This Commandment is one of the most neglected and
most disobeyed of all the Commandments. For like the first
Commandment, it is disobeyed whenever any
Commandment is disobeyed. Just as all sin is some kind of
idolatry (choosing some false god), so all sin is some kind
of falsehood, some kind of choice of darkness over light.
The eighth Commandment does not merely tell us to
speak the truth to others but also to love and live the truth
in ourselves, to commit our whole hearts to truth and to
live that commitment. It forbids not only false witness
against our neighbor, but also against ourselves, since we
are to love our neighbor “as ourselves.”

2. How all sin is a form of lying

Bearing false witness against our neighbor means
lying to our neighbor, deceiving our neighbor. But lying to
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our neighbor always begins with lying to ourselves.All sin
does. The pattern for all sin is shown in the first sin, in
Genesis 3, the eating of the forbidden fruit.This sin began
by listening to the Devil’s lie, sin’s false advertisement, the
lie that this sin would bring joy and delight while obedi-
ence to God’s command would bring misery or boredom.
The first step in barring the door to sin is refusing to
listen to any false witness that contradicts God’s revealed
truth. Faith is this bar against sin.Therefore Scripture says
“whatever does not proceed from faith is sin”(Rom 14:29).
St. Paul contrasts sin with faith, not just with virtue, and
contrasts faith with sin, not just with doubt. Believing the
darkness of Satan’s lie rather than the light of God’s com-
mandment was the beginning of the Fall, and continues to
be the beginning of every fall.We eat the forbidden fruit of
falsehood with our minds before we eat any other forbid-
den fruit with our bodies and our deeds.

3. The importance of truth for morality

Man, having both body and soul, lives in two worlds, a
material world and a moral and spiritual world. The Ten
Commandments (Ex 20) are to the moral world what the
Six Days of Creation (Gn 1) are to the physical world. God
ordered man’s physical world by the Days of creation; then
he ordered man’s moral and spiritual world by the Ten
Commandments.The source of both orders is Truth.
In all cultures, light is the natural symbol and expres-
sion of truth. No good work can be done without light.The
world’s best doctor in the world’s best hospital with the
world’s best technology cannot perform the simplest oper-
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ation without light. God himself did not order the universe
without light; he created light first.
Created light was the first reflection of uncreated
light. Light came first for God, and it must come first for us
too, if we are to echo God’s will and God’s priorities. Our
very first choice must be:“Let there be light!”We must love
and seek and live and speak the truth. For if we do not love
the truth, we will not know it. If we do not first seek it with
our will, we will not find it with our mind.
The crucial importance of truth for morality is not
generally understood today. People are rarely taught that
morality is more than kindness and compassion, more than
good intentions, even more than love. For love without
truth is not true love.
Love and truth are equally absolute, for both are
divine attributes, infinite and eternal. Truth and love are
“what God is made of.”These two are one in God, and the
more godly we are, the more they are one in us.

4. The theological basis for the eighth Commandment

“The eighth commandment forbids misrepresenting
the truth . . . . This moral prescription flows from… God
who is the truth and wills the truth” (C 2464).
As with all the Commandments, this one is based on
reality; what ought to be follows from what is.The reality
here is the ultimate reality, God – his essential nature.
Repeatedly, Scripture describes God as “true.”The Hebrew
word used, emeth, means not just “objectively accurate
thinking and speaking” but “personal reliability, trustability,
integrity, fidelity.”
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 We are to be people of truth because our God is truth.
In him, truth is perfectly personified; truth is a Person! –
the One who proclaimed,“I AM the truth” (Jn 6:14).“Since
God is ‘true,’ the members of his people are called to live
in the truth255” (C 2465).

5. “What is truth?”
What truth means in God, its origin, determines what
it means for man, God’s image. And the Catechism men-
tions three aspects of truth in God:“God is the source of all
truth.
[a] “His Word is truth.
[b] “His Law is truth.
[c] “His ‘faithfulness endures to all generations’255”(Ps
119:90; C 2465).
What do these three things mean for us?
a) The truth of God’s Word is the revelation of his
mind.
b) The truth of God’s Law is the revelation of his
will.
c) The truth of God’s promises is the revelation
of his heart.
These three aspects of truth fulfill the needs of the
three parts of the human soul.
a) God’s Word fulfills the mind’s search for true
thought.
b) God’s Law fulfills the will’s search for a true
life.
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 c) God’s promises fulfill the heart’s search for
true joy.
They also correspond to the three “theological
virtues.”
a) God’s Word (revelation) specifies what faith
believes (“Thy Word is truth” – Jn 17:17).
b) God’s Law specifies what charity chooses (“If
you love me, keep my commandments” – Jn
14:15).
c) God’s promises specify what hope trusts
(“This is what he has promised us: eternal life”
– 1 Jn 2:25)
The three lasting cultures of ancient times – Greek,
Roman, and Hebrew – especially emphasized these three
aspects of truth, as enshrined in their very words for
“truth.”
a) Aletheia, the Greek word for truth, means the
“unhiddenness” or revelation of a mystery to a
mind.
b) Veritas, the Latin word for truth, means right-
ness or righteousness of thought or deed.
c) Emeth, the Hebrew word for truth, means
faithfulness in the heart and character.
All three are fulfilled in Christ, the “Light of the world.”
a) Christ is the ultimate revelation of the mystery
of God to us.
b) Christ is our ultimate righteousness, or holi-
ness.
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 c) Christ is the fulfillment of all God’s promises
to us.

6. The Christocentrism of the eighth Commandment

“In Jesus Christ, the whole of God’s truth has been
made manifest. ‘Full of grace and truth,’ he came as the
‘light of the world,’ he is the Truth257” (C 2466). Before
Pilate, Christ proclaims that he “has come into the world to
bear witness to the truth” (Jn 18:37), and Judge Pilate
scornfully asks,“What is Truth?” when the most complete
answer any man ever got to that question is standing right
in front of him. Pilate let Christ be crucified in his court
because he first let truth be crucified in his soul.

7. Lying is wrong because it is contrary to human

nature
“Man tends by nature toward the truth” (C 2467).This
is not a naive optimism that ignores Original Sin, which
draws us toward falsehood, or the struggle between truth
and falsehood. It means that man’s essence, man’s God-cre-
ated nature, has truth as its natural end, its spiritual food.
Man is meant for truth.
That is why lying is wrong.“By its very nature, lying is
to be condemned. It is a profanation of speech, whereas
the purpose of speech is to communicate known truth to
others” (C 2485).
(Once again the categories of “human nature” and
“natural purpose” come up as central and indispensable to
Catholic morality. They are simple, common-sense con-
cepts, but modern skeptical philosophers have made them
unpopular in modern times for the first time in history.)
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8. The social necessity for truth-telling
“‘Men could not live with one another if there were
not mutual confidence that they were being truthful to
one another’263” (C 2469).Thus the eighth Commandment
is an essential part of Catholic social ethics as well as indi-
vidual ethics.

9. Truth as a form of justice

“The virtue of truth[fulness] gives another his just
due” (C 2469).
The demand to be truthful and to love truth is
absolute and unqualified, but the demand to communicate
it is subject to justice, which must take account of the cir-
cumstances and the other person’s right to know. We are
not morally obligated to “tell the truth” by revealing secrets
we promised to keep, or to reveal all our thoughts – for
instance, to say to a person we think ugly, “I think you’re
ugly!”“Truthfulness keeps to the just mean between what
ought to be expressed and what ought to be kept secret; it
entails [both] honesty and discretion” (C 2469).
Honesty does not mean saying everything you feel.
(That’s either candor, when good, or shamelessness, when
bad.) Nor is honesty opposed to keeping just secrets or
withholding truth from those who have no right to know
it – for instance, those who intend harm.

10. “Witnessing”
“The Christian is not to ‘be ashamed then of testifying
to our Lord’267” (C 2471).
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 “In situations that require witness to the faith, the
Christian must profess it without equivocation . . .” (C
2471).
“The duty of Christians to take part in the life of the
Church impels them to act as witnesses of the Gospel . . .”
(C 2472). For that is “the life of the Church.” Christ’s com-
mand to “go therefore and make disciples of all nations”
(Mt 28:19) did not come with a “clergy only” tag.
Witnessing, however, should be done with prudence,
grace, and sensitivity, rather than in a boorish or pushy way,
or in any way that harms the Gospel more than helping it.
On the other hand, we must also avoid timidity (a far
greater danger for most) and not tailor Christ’s Gospel to
man’s desires, omitting its unfashionable and offensive
teachings. Christ warned us: “woe to you when all men
speak well of you, for so their fathers did to the false
prophets” (Lk 6:26).

11. Martyrdom
“Martyrdom is the supreme witness given to the
truth of the faith: it means bearing witness even unto
death” (C 2473). The Christian tradition has always put a
high value on martyrdom, since this was the most impor-
tant thing Christ himself did, the reason he came into the
world. The word “martyr” means “witness” in New
Testament Greek; a martyr is not merely one who endures
wrongful death, but one who does so for truth, as a “wit-
ness” to truth.
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 Few things are worth more than life itself. Only what
is eternal is worth more than all of time, worth more than
a lifetime. But Truth is eternal.
Jim Eliot, twentieth-century missionary martyr in
Ecuador, explained the wisdom of martyrdom succinctly:
“He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep to win
what he cannot lose.”
Martyrdom is not something from some bygone era.
There were more Christian martyrs in the twentieth cen-
tury than in all nineteen previous centuries combined. As
history moves closer to its end and to Christ’s promised
Second Coming (however near or far away that may be),
martyrdom will not cease, but will continue to be a “sign of
contradiction,” a cross. It is a sign of the spiritual warfare
between Christ and Antichrist, light and darkness, truth and
falsehood – which is Scripture’s persistent theme from
Genesis to Revelation, because it is the central drama of
human history and of each individual life.

12. Some specific sins against truth

1) “False witness and perjury.When it is made pub-
licly, a statement contrary to the truth takes on a
particular gravity. In court, it becomes false wit-
ness.276 When it is under oath, it is perjury. Acts
such as these contribute to condemnation of the
innocent, exoneration of the guilty, or the
increased punishment of the accused.277 They
gravely compromise the exercise of justice . . .” (C
2476).
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 2) “He becomes guilty: of rash judgment who . . .
assumes as true, without sufficient foundation, the
moral fault of a neighbor;
3) “of detraction who, without objectively valid rea-
son, discloses another’s faults . . .279
4) “of calumny who, by remarks contrary to the
truth, harms the reputation of others and gives
occasion for false judgments concerning them” (C
2477).

13. Lying
“‘A lie consists in speaking a falsehood with the inten-
tion of deceiving’281” (C 2482).
“Lying is the most direct offense against the truth.To
lie is [1] to speak or act against the truth [2] in order to
lead someone into error” (C 2483). Both of these elements
must be present for a lie. 1) Unintentional falsehood is not
a lie. 2) Nor is play-acting or fiction. However,“[t]he right
to the communication of truth is not unconditional. . . .
[F]raternal love . . . requires us in concrete situations to
judge whether or not it is [morally] appropriate to reveal
the truth to someone who asks for it” (C 2488).

14. Different degrees of lying

“The gravity of a lie is measured against the nature of
the truth it deforms, the circumstances, the intentions of
the one who lies, and the harm suffered by its victims” (C
2484).
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15. The secret of the confessional
“The secret of the sacrament of reconciliation is
sacred, and cannot be violated under any pretext” (C
2490).A priest cannot and will not reveal to anyone for any
reason any thing he hears in sacramental confession.

16. Privacy
“Everyone should observe an appropriate reserve
concerning persons’ private lives.Those in charge of com-
munications should maintain a fair balance between the
requirements of the common good [this does not include
the right to hear gossip!] and respect for individual rights”
(C 2492).

17. Censorship and propaganda

At the opposite extreme from Western societies, in
which the communications media are very free and sub-
ject to little or no moral authority or censorship, totalitari-
an societies sin against the truth in the opposite way, by
censoring truth and broadcasting false propaganda for
political purposes. “Moral judgment must condemn the
plague of totalitarian states which systematically falsify the
truth, [and] exercise political control of opinion through
the media . . .” (C 2499), whether this is done under
Communism, right-wing dictatorships, Muslim fundamen-
talism, or even democracy. (Is it only “totalitarian states”
that “systematically falsify the truth [and] exercise political
control of opinion through the media”?)
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18. The media
“Within modern society the communications media
play a major role in information, cultural promotion, and
formation [of opinion, mind, and character]. This role is
increasing, as a result of technological progress . . .” (C
2493). As their power to mold minds increases, so does
their moral responsibility. The danger is that the media
become increasingly secularist and morally irresponsible.
As a consequence, modern man can easily become more
docile to secularist media and less docile to God’s revela-
tion; often the “gospel” of the world draws more faith than
the Gospel of Jesus Christ.The communications and enter-
tainment media are one of the major battlefields in the war
between truth and falsehood today, and one of the most
important opportunities for Christians to bear witness to
the truth and influence their society for the good.
Christians should be encouraged to be active in this field,
whether professionally or privately, and hold the media to
higher moral standards.
In addition to immoral content, there is a concern for
the psychological effect of the very form and structure of
modern media: the mass media “can give rise to a certain
passivity among users, making them less than vigilant con-
sumers of what is said or shown” (C 2496).
This is due mainly to the fact that images cannot be
argued with as clearly as ideas can. This is true of all
images, good or bad, naturally or supernaturally planned.
According to the Saints and Doctors of the Church, evil
spirits cannot directly influence our minds or wills but
they can tempt us by influencing our imagination, by
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bringing up deceptively attractive, erotic, or confusing
images that are already in our memories, many of which
come from the media. Thus good images – good movies
and stories, lives of the saints, sacred art – have much more
power and importance than we suspect in the spiritual
warfare between truth and darkness.

19. Truth, goodness, and beauty

These three ideals of the human spirit, based on attrib-
utes of God, are by nature one.“The practice of goodness
is accompanied by spontaneous spiritual joy and moral
beauty. Likewise, truth carries with it the joy and splendor
of spiritual beauty” (C 2500).Truth and goodness are beau-
tiful. Pope John Paul II entitled his encyclical about the
foundations of moral goodness “The Splendor [beauty] of
Truth,” thus showing the unity of these three things.

20. The truth of natural beauty

“Truth in words, the rational expression of the knowl-
edge of created and uncreated reality, is necessary to man,
who is endowed with intellect. But truth can also find
other complementary forms of human expression, above
all when it is a matter of evoking what is beyond words:
the depths of the human heart, the exaltations of the soul,
the mystery of God. Even before revealing himself to man
in words of truth, God reveals himself to him through the
universal language of creation, the work of his Word, of his
wisdom: the order and harmony of the cosmos – which
both the child and the scientist discover – ‘from the great-
ness and beauty of created things comes a corresponding
perception of their Creator’ . . .290” (C 2500).
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21. The truth of art
“Created ‘in the image of God,’294 man also expresses
the truth of his relationship with God the Creator by the
beauty of his artistic works. Indeed, art is a distinctively
human form of expression; beyond the search for the
necessities of life which is common to all living creatures,
art is a freely given superabundance of the human being’s
inner riches. Arising from talent given by the Creator and
from man’s own effort, art is a form of practical wisdom,
uniting knowledge and skill,295 to give form to the truth of
reality in a language accessible to sight or hearing. To the
extent that it is inspired by truth and love of beings, art
bears a certain likeness to God’s activity in what he has
created. . . .296” (C 2501).

22. The truth of sacred art

“Sacred art is true and beautiful when its form corre-
sponds to its particular vocation: evoking and glorifying, in
faith and adoration, the transcendent mystery of God . . .”
(C 2502).We can judge sacred art by its effects, according
to the principle “you will know them by their fruits” (Mt
7:16). “Genuine sacred art draws man to adoration, to
prayer, and to the love of God . . .” (C 2502).
If sacred art (especially sacred liturgical celebration)
fails in this, its primary purpose, it is deformed, no matter
how relevant, popular, or attractive it may be. Liturgical
abuses are not just aesthetic lapses but offenses against
truth. For the liturgy is not a display of human taste but of
truth, even of divine truth.
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 The greatest works of architecture were built to glori-
fy the Architect of the universe.These were the cathedrals,
miraculous “sermons in stone” that made rock and glass
seem to take wing and fly like angels. Many of the world’s
greatest paintings and statues were made for churches, and
much of the greatest music was composed for Masses. For
what happens within that sacred time and place is the
most beautiful work of art ever conceived: God’s work of
redeeming man from eternal darkness into Heavenly light
by himself enduring that Hellish darkness in man’s place
on the Cross. The most beautiful thing man’s eyes have
ever seen in this world is the bloody martyrdom of God
himself.There, in every Mass, where Christ becomes truly
present again in an unbloody manner but in the same act
of love, offering himself for our salvation, we find truth
incarnate, goodness incarnate, and beauty incarnate, and
their perfect union.

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 CONCLUSION
This is the Catholic Faith. It is the “greatest story ever
told” – either the greatest lie or the greatest truth. It is the
incredible story of the Creator’s proposal of spiritual mar-
riage to the creature.You can accept or reject this propos-
al. You can believe it or not, as you choose. But if you do
believe it, you should be prepared, you should know that
this is no ordinary thing.You are embarking on life’s great-
est adventure, and you will never be the same again for all
eternity.

________________________
Notes from the Catechism in Order of Their Appearance in
Quotations Used in this Section
256
Rom 3:4; cf. Ps 119:30.
255
Ps 119:90; cf. Prov 8:7; 2 Sam 7:28; Ps 119:42; Lk 1:50.
257
Jn 1:14; 8:12; cf. 14:6.
263
St.Thomas Aquinas, STh II-II, 109, 3 ad 1.
267
2 Tim 1:8.
276
Cf. Prov 19:9.
277
Cf. Prov 18:5.
279
Cf. Sir 21:28.
281
St.Augustine, De mendacio 4, 5: PL 40:491.
290
Wis 13:3, 5.
294
Gen 1:26.
295
Cf. Wis 7:16-17.
296
Cf. Pius XII, Musicae sacrae disciplina; Discourses of September 3
and December 25, 1950.
130 11/00
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