Category: Apologetics

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Jesus is Real to Me

I wonder if you have the heart of an Evangelizer? We Catholics haven’t been too good with evangelization and to some extent many of us have never been evangelized. One diagnosis common today is that many Catholics are “sacramentalized but unevangelized.” What this means is that many Catholics have received sacraments and many even go to Church regularly but they have never really met Jesus Christ. They have heard about him, read about him, be told of him, but never really met him. Many in fact do not expect to meet him but are content to live their faith by inference. In other words they are content to have their faith based merely on the fact that someone they trust has told them. “Jesus is Lord because my pastor told me or my mother told me…” and so forth. Now this is a very good start, faith DOES come by hearing. But at some point we have to personally know for ourselves that Jesus is Lord and that he is risen and is at the Father right hand and is ministering to me. At some point the Good News has to become powerfully personal and evident to us. At some point he have to meet Jesus Christ.

Have you? Once we have really met Jesus it is pretty hard to stay quiet about him. Have you ever experienced really good news?  You couldn’t wait to tell some one could you? Well, have you ever felt this way about the Lord Jesus? Have you ever expected to feel this way about the Lord? If not why not?

And that brings us back to evangelization. Once you’ve been evangelized (i.e. met Christ) you’re ready to be an evangelizer because now you can say,

Let me tell you what the Lord has done for me! I’ve met the Lord and he’s changing my life. There are sins I used to commit that I don’t commit any more. I used to be so much more resentful, angry, lustful, greedy, self-centered and unloving. But little by little I’m more serene, joyful, able to love, more generous and so on. If you’ve met Christ you’ve got a testimony.

As a Catholic you also ought to be able to testify how the Lord has ministered to you in the liturgy and the Sacraments:

I just don’t know where I’d be today if the Lord hadn’t fed me on his Body and Blood, taught me through his scriptures, and healed me in confession. The Lord is the physician of my soul and He’s healed me through the medicine of his Word and the Sacraments.

Can you testify like this? You don’t have to be a finished product. You still have your sins and shortcomings. Just say “I’m not what I want to be but I’m not what I used to be.”

But be an evangelizer. In four steps:

  1.  Get to know Jesus Christ. Get to know that he’s real! How? Ask him!
  2. Reflect on your life story; your testimony. Think back on all the ways the Lord has blessed you and ministered to you in his word and in the sacraments, in your prayer and your your daily life. This is Good News.
  3. Tell someone your good news. Be personal but authentic to Church teaching and scripture.
  4. Invite someone: “Come and go with me to my Father’s house.

Don’t be satisfied with anything less than a Christianity that is real. Merely intellectual won’t do. The intellect is important but at some point you have to personally know and experience that Jesus and all he has taught is real. And you have to be able to testify to what you know as a first hand witness. We Catholics have to rediscover that to know Jesus and experience the Good News of a life that is changing is the heart of evangelization. We cannot merely know at an intellectual level. He have to know in the biblical sense of the word. In the Bible the verb “know” always means more that intellectual knowing. It means to have deep intimate, personal experience of the thing or person known. To know biblically is about experience more than what’s in a book. Do you know Jesus?

Here is a music video I put together. The Soloist is Gwen Miles, the Accompanist is Kenneth Louis. Both are from my parish of Holy Comforter-St.Cyprian here in Washington. They sing a song that reminds us that Jesus is real and that the normal Christian Life is to know, to experience just how real is is.

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A Holy Father Teaches His Children

The video below is a beautiful depiction of Pope Benedict answering the question of a seven year old child. The child ponders how Jesus can really be present in Holy Communion when we cannot see him.

This is a perfect question for all of us to ponder as we are reading the great treatise on Holy Communion from John 6 these past Sundays at Mass.

The Pope’s answer is both charming and understandable even for a child. It is also a profound reminder that knowing is more than seeing. We know and experience many things that we cannot see.

This brief video presents much for us to ponder and is so simple a child can understand it. Enjoy the Holy Father, as a father, teaching his children.

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Benedict XVI: Pope and Apostle

The word “Apostle” means one who is sent. Clearly, Jesus sent the Apostles forth with the great commission that they make disciples of all the nations. Most of our Bishops who have succeeded the apostles have a specific territory (or diocese) for which they are responsible. But the Pope is Apostle and bishop to all the world, pretty big territory…hugh? In recent decades both Pope John Paul II and Benedict the XVI have truly manifested that they are sent. They have gone forth to the ends of the earth, they have been sent by God to make disciples of all nations.

I thought of this recently when I was listening to a Johnny Cash song: “I’ve Been Everywhere” and it occurred to me to reduce my thoughts to a video. Enjoy this video and the song too!

It also occurs to me to link you to this video refelcting on the life of the Pope. It is long but you might wish to play it if you have the time. It is quite good.

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“Year for Priests”Indulgences

Today we have a post from a guest blogger: Anthony Lickteig is one of our seminarians from the Archdiocese of Washington. He is entering his fourth year of Theology and will be ordained a transitional deacon in the Fall.

Today is the 150 Anniversary of the death of St. John Vianney, patron saint of parish priests. Since this is the year the Pope has dedicated for Priests, the Holy Father has offered Catholics the opportunity to earn a Plenary Indulgence on this feast day. In fact, during this whole “Year for Priests”, the Pope has declared that any lay Catholic may earn a Plenary Indulgence every first Thursday of the month from now until the close of the Year on June 19, 2010, as well as on the close of the Year itself. See the following link (especially Section B) for more information:  Enchiridion of Indulgences

So what does this mean? Well, it means that contrary to popular belief, the Church still believes in indulgences. The practice of selling indulgences during part of the Church’s history was wrong, not the belief in indulgences. The Church’s understanding of indulgences is tied to the understanding of sin and the authority of the Church as the Body of Christ to forgive sin. If one doesn’t believe in either of these, then of course one will not believe in indulgences. Now God is all-Holy and through the gift of Jesus Christ, he has called us to that same Holiness, and has even given us the ability to reach that same Holiness. Sin is choosing to reject this gift and not respond to that call. This free choice has consequences. If this choice destroys our communion with God, it causes death to the soul (mortal sin). However, all sin, even venial sin, has consequences. “It disrupts our communion with God and the Church, weakens our ability to resist temptation, and hurts others. The necessity of healing these consequences, once the sin itself has been forgiven, is called temporal punishment. Prayer, fasting, almsgiving, and other works of charity can take away entirely or diminish this temporal punishment.” (U.S. Catechism for Adults, p.244). God desires our ultimate perfection, but he wants us to cooperate with him to remove these imperfections of temporal punishment. It is still his grace in Christ working, but we are freely responding to it.

The bottom line is that prayer and works of charity really do change things; they help the one praying and the one for whom the prayers are offered. See Tobit 12:9 – “almsgiving saves one from death and expiates every sin” and James 5:16 – “pray for one another, that you may be healed. The fervent prayer of a righteous person is very powerful.” And Jesus himself said, But as to what is within [i.e. unrighteousness] give alms, and behold, everything will be clean for you.” (Luke 11:41)

If these temporal punishments are not removed before death, a final purification or Purgatory is needed. So in addition to prayer, fasting, almsgiving and other works of charity, the Church also “attaches to certain prayers and actions an indulgence or pardon, that is, the full or partial remission of temporal punishment due to sin.” (p. 244). A Plenary Indulgence is the full remission of temporal punishment due to sin. These indulgences can be applied to ourselves or to a deceased person.

So go out today (and every first Thursday until June 19th) and cooperate with this great gift that God wants to give us and our deceased relatives and friends! However, certain conditions must be met to receive this indulgence today (and in the future). See the following link to know how you can meet them: Conditions for Plenary Indulgence

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Commentary on Caritas in Vertitate by Fr. Barron

I’ve read a lot of commentary on the Pope’s latest encyclical Cartitas in Vertitate. Much of the commentary admits that this is a “hard” Encyclical. It is hard for two reasons. First, its style is dense, very theological, very nuanced, quite technical in places. It requires something of an expansive background and history of  the social teachings of the Church. It is also hard for many because it runs against the grains of the political views of many. To be sure, there are things hard to swallow for both the politically conservative as well as the politically liberal. When we confront the often intractable social problems and issues of our day politics is very much in the mix. How best to solve them, big government solutions, marketplace and private sector initiatives? There is strident social  and political disagreement among reasonable people.

All this makes Veritate in Caritate a “hard” encyclical. Fr. Robert Barron has a video commentary on the letter below. As always he is a master and taking complicated teaching and distilling from it lots of good “take away” stuff. This video is longer than his average, it is close to 9 minutes. If you don’t have time to see it all I direct you especially to the last three minutes wherein he deals with the “hard” aspects of this encyclical. What about the “World Government” notions in the letter and why does this letter seem so oddly “non-Ratzinger” in its style?

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Finding God at the Sears Tower! (or) The Existence of God and the Second Law of Thermodynamics

The History Channel has been running a series called Life After People It depicts what would happen to our cities and landmarks if all humans suddenly disappeared. As you might imagine, things tend to fall apart pretty quickly. What the series depicts rather graphically is the Second Law of Thermodynamics which is:

The entropy of an isolated system not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium.

What? You might say! Well, consider a cup of hot coffee that is placed on the counter. Over time the coffee will lose its heat (this is entropy) until it returns to room temperature (equilibrium). It is not in the nature of a cup of coffee to keep its heat or to get even warmer unless acted upon but some outside factor such as man or strong sunlight etc. This is the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the cup of coffee must follow it. Stated in a broader way, the Second Law of Thermodynamics and in particular entropy means that complex things tend to fall apart and go back to their basic elements without  something outside them to maintain them. Lets illustrate this using an example you might see on the series “Life After People.”

We’re at the Sears tower in Chicago, one of  the tallest buildings in the world. The massive building is like a small city with lots of  complex systems that maintain it. It is January 1, 2010 and suddenly all humans disappear from the planet. In the first moments there is little difference to the building except an eerie quiet. Music still plays in the elevators and the escalators in the lobby  move along. At 2:30 pm a small alarm goes off in the basement indicating to the boiler mechanic that the boiler needs a minor adjustment. But the boiler mechanic is not there. Heat slowly builds in the boilers and other alarms go off. But no one is there to hear or respond. The heat reaches a critical point by 3:30 pm and two major pipes burst spewing steam and boiling water. By 4:30 pm the boiler room has flooded to the point that several electrical panels short out causing a major portion of the building to lose power. In the building above the temperature begins dropping. Outside it is a frigid January day. As the sun sets mid afternoon, the once well lit and warm building descends into darkness and increasing chill. By 5:00pm the next day portions of the building near the external walls have begun to drop below freezing. Outside the temperature is hovering in the lower teens. Overnight the water in some of the pipes near the external walls begins to freeze. By noon the next day there is some thawing and then refreezing as the night temperatures drop. After several days of this pattern, several large pipes begin to break and water begins to flow freely in the upper floors and starts to leak out some of the window casements. The freezing and thawing begins to loosen some of the windows and, several months after man the glass starts falling to the streets far below. The building is now increasingly open to the weather and more and more the building suffers deterioration.

Well you get the point: Entropy is at work. This are falling apart and returning to their basic elements. In the months and years ahead rust and other corrosion will take a toll and the building will deteriorate to the point that it will begin to collapse. Finally, in the decades ahead complete collapse will have occurred and steel and rubble will be strewn all over State Street. In the centuries to come even the steel and rubble will return to dust and be overgrown by trees and forest. Without an indwelling intelligence and energy to maintain equilibrium, the Sears tower cannot stand. It looses its complexity and returns to the dust from which it came. This is the Second Law of Thermodynamics and particularly the principle of entropy illustrated.

But don’t you see, as the Sears Tower in Chicago needs  Man, so the created universe needs  God. Without  God’s indwelling intelligence and maintenance, entropy would cause all kinds of disorder in the universe and ultimately failure. The complex systems of this world would fail and return to their basic elements without some outside force acting upon them. Even the atheists who so love to talk about evolution have to see that evolution, in a way, is the  opposite, of entropy. The evolution of simple things into complex things cannot take place without an outside energy (and intelligence) causing it. Otherwise the Second Law of Thermodynamics is violated. A cup of coffee does not heat up on its own. The Sears Tower would not suddenly or even gradually appear out the earth as a fully functioning little city without a lot of outside energy and intelligence. It does not pertain to sand and rocks to evolve  into steel and then take shape as a fully functioning building with plumbing, electricity and computers. For this to evolve takes energy and intelligence, some force from the outside to act upon it.  The Sears Tower or a hot cup of coffee cannot explain themselves. Something outside of them must explain them.  The atheists want you to think that all this order came it to existence by itself and organizes itself. Well if you can tell me how the Sears Tower could suddenly or even gradually come into existence all by itself as a fully functional building, I might start to believe the atheist and secularists arguments. But as it is I think it takes a lot more “faith” to believe the atheist arguments than simply to admit the obvious, that this world has order that resists entropy because it is designed and indwelt by God who sustains it. A cup of hot cannot explain itself or maintain itself something or someone from the outside does this. Our bodies are far more complex that even the Sears Tower. What caused entropy to reverse and for the complexity to evolve? It had to be something outside of and this world bound by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Maybe it’s God!

So here is my Argument for the Existence of God Based on the Second Law of Thermodynamics:

  1. The entropy of an isolated system not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time until it returns to equilibrium. (i.e. things tend to fall apart and return to their basic elements without someone or something to cause their evolution into more complex things or to halt their tendency to entropy)
  2. But this world does manifest substantial complexity that manifests an evolution from the simple to the complex, a kind of reverse entropy.
  3. Therefore this world must be acted upon by someone or something outside itself that orders it and pushes back entropy.
  4. This someone or something we call God.
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Double Standards Continue as Anti-Catholicsm Remains and”Acceptable”Prejudice

The New Yorker Magazine recently published a hateful essay by playwright Paul Rudnick. I will not reproduce the venom here. However I would like to post excerpts from the Untied States Conference of Bishops Website. You can view the whole article Here: USCCB Full Article

Here are excerpts of that article followed  by a few of my own comments:

The New Yorker, the magazine of urbane Americans, proves once again that anti-Catholicism still lurks in U.S. society. This time it’s in an article by the playwright Paul Rudnick, who seems to get his kicks by bashing religion. It is bizarre that someone who uses his literary skills to decry prejudice and stereotyping of gays opts to indulge his own prejudice against another group, Catholics….Rudnick’s recent rap on Catholics comes in snide remarks about religious sisters in “Fun With Nuns,” in the July 20 issue of the New Yorker. …Apparently the editors, who even are heralding the essay on the New Yorker Web site, don’t find any problem with Rudnick’s gratuitous slam: “Nuns can be dictatorial, sexually repressed, and scary—and therefore entertaining.” Nor did they bother to edit out a remark about which nuns should be “f…able.” ….

Historian Arthur Schlesinger Sr. once noted that anti-Catholicism is  “the deepest-held bias in the history of the American people.” Anti-Catholicism also has been called the “anti-Semitism of the liberal.” It seems on the rise now….
Last week, the USA Today Faith & Reason blog was rampant with anti-Catholic comments in response to Pope Benedict XVI’s ground-breaking encyclical on the economy “Caritas in Veritate” (“Charity in truth”). Because the blog has a “Report Abuse” button…. some of the initial offensive remarks are gone. Yet more than a week later, [comments] can still be read asking if you spell pope with “one or two ‘o’s,” advising the pope to do something that’s unprintable here and ought to be unprintable in a family newspaper’s blog, remarking that “someone needs to give the pope his meds” and opining that “the pope is disgusting and sickening,” adding for good measure, “Catholic is DISGUSTING.” Even more slurs and canards to be found on the Website, including “I guess the Vatican is finally going public with its plot to control the world.”At least USA Today can be blamed only for not keeping up with its obligation to watch what bloggers post. The New Yorker, on the other hand, despite its history of fine literary criticism, intentionally runs Rudnick’s comments and even boasts of them on its Web site.


So there it is, the ugly face of bigotry. But I ask you, would anyone dare to speak this way about a Jews, Muslims, African Americans, Latinos, et. al.? Do you see the double standard?  Most of this ugly and hateful speech gets a pass in the media and entertainment world. Part of it is that we Catholics aren’t the type to take to the streets in protest.
But in an odd sort of way I want to say that I am glad to belong to a Church that is so hated by the world. It means we stand for something and are not simply going to compromise and be silent as the world chooses to go morally insane. And the world hates us for this. Did not Jesus promise hatred and persecution: If the world hates you know that it hated me before you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own, but I have called you out of the world and so the world hates you.   No pupil is greater than his teacher, If they have hated me they will hate you too. (John 15:18-20) And Jesus also warns us, “Woe to you if all people speak well of you, for it was in this way that they treated the false prophets. (Luke 6:26).  So in a way I am glad to be in good company, with Jesus. If we were a compromising, equivocating Church the world would welcome us. As it is they hate us and I suspect they are so angry because deep down inside they know we are right.

Despite my paradoxical peace in the face this hatred I DO want to finish by what I consider to be a necessary rebuke: Shame on you Paul Rudnick for speaking  of our religious sisters as you did. Shame on you for your scurrilous and hypocritical attack.  And shame on all those who wrote hate-filled things about our Holy Father and our Holy Faith at USA Today Blog. Shame on all of you and remember, God is watching.

Here is a video that gives the full context of John 15 and the Scripture quotes I listed above.