Archives for January 2015

Elsewhere: teaching the faith

Elsewhere

Being Catholic: to know, love and serve the Lord. I like to add “in that order.” You can not love what you do not know, you will not truly serve what you do not love. If you are loving and serving only what you think (or hope or prefer) the Lord to be, then chances are you are missing the mark…   possibly by a wide margin (our separated liberal Protestant brethren come to mind).

We are called to serve in many ways, but at least in witness to the Lord (evangelization) as we are able. The Church, the bride of Christ in her earthly mission, suffers with poor catechesis. Those who leave typically do so without actually knowing what they have left. Others remain luke-warm. Many are not “ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope” (1 Peter 3:15).

Part of the New Evangelization is utilizing all the modern tools that are available to communicate the Good News in its fullest. Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen did this on television. Mother Angelica founded EWTN. Today countless folks work for the Kingdom in “new media” in all its diverse forms. This is a wonderful development!

One interesting Internet meme, the “sketching video,” can communicate quite a bit of information in an interesting and engaging manner. A recent example of this comes from the Sophia Institute for Teachers:

 

Houston, we have a problem. “God became man and took the punishment we deserve.” Nope.

This video is really good and I would recommend it to folks, but it has two problems (at least that I noticed). The most important one is presenting the Atonement as penal substitution. That is (essentially) Jesus bearing the wrath of God for our sins. Some Protestant denominations have this view (e.g. Calvinists) but it is not what we believe and is highly problematic.

One of my favorite apologists and expert on Calvin is Dr. David Anders (a convert). He describes Christ’s sacrifice this way:

Play Penal Substitution vs. Sacrifice

Bryan Cross at Called to Communion has a related piece Catholic and Reformed Conceptions of the Atonement which includes this succinct graphic:

Reformed Catholic

Two other excellent pieces on this topic are Does the Catholic view of Christ’s Atonement permit the Reformed view of “Penal Substitution”? and Why Do So Many Catholics Believe in Penal Substitution?.

The video’s second (but lesser) problem is describing the grace we receive from the Eucharist. It is presented as actual grace (calling it just “grace”) whereas it is primarily sanctifying grace. (See Catholic Answer’s Grace: What It Is and What It Does for a description. Other good descriptions are here and here.)

There is much good in the video, so (these problems not withstanding) I still like and recommend it…

The Potter and the Vase

The Potter And The Vase

Guest contributor:   Ed Trego

“As clay in the hand of the potter – for all his ways are as he pleases – so men are in the hand of him who made them, to give them as he decides.” (Sirach 33:13)

Can a vase crafted by a accomplished potter say to his maker, “Why did you shape me such? I would have preferred a longer neck. I don’t like the colors you used either. I would have chosen greens and shades of yellow rather than the blues you selected. Perhaps you should remake me.” A guitar can’t tell the guitarist, “I really think the G-chord would have been better there. Oh, by the way, your fret work is really pretty poor.” Can the sculpture criticize the artist? “You should have made my hands bigger, you know. I think I should have been taller as well.”

Sounds pretty silly, right? But isn’t that what we humans do on virtually a daily basis? We had no hand in our making, yet we feel free to complain to our maker that we don’t like what He has made. Our legs are too short, our waist too big. I wish I had auburn hair rather than this dishwater blond. I wish I still had hair. What was God thinking? How dare He not ask us how we wished to be made? Shouldn’t we have had say in how were made? After all, we’re the ones who have to live with what He gave us.

Therein lies the clue most people miss; we are to live with what God gave us Shouldn’t we have had say in how were made? Apparently not. Listen to the Psalmist: “For you formed my inward parts, you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.” (Psalms 138:13). God formed us with a purpose, not by accident.

Our longing to change ourselves physically has resulted in the development of several industries to respond to our desires. If you nose is too big for your liking, they’ll make it smaller. Need fuller lips, just inject some collagen. If we don’t like how we look as we age, we can fix that too. Face lifts, tummy tucks, Botox to eliminate wrinkles all play into our self-absorbed obsession with our appearance. Virtually every part of your body can be altered in today’s world.

I suspect that very few people would consider Mother Teresa to be beautiful in a physical sense, but her sole and her spirit were beautiful beyond compare. The love she shared with the poorest of the poor, those suffering horrible disease and affliction was the beauty that God had given her. She shared that beauty wherever she went. Each of us has the opportunity to share God’s love with others, just as Mother Teresa did. Unfortunately we tend to look at the poorest of the poor as people we avoid rather than welcoming them and caring for them in Christian love. We forget that they are the children of God as well. Without benefit of two thousand years of Christian history and teaching, how would we have looked upon Jesus carrying His cross through the streets of Jerusalem? Would we have seen a savior, or an outcast on His way to death. We must look for Jesus in every face we see, for we are all wonderfully made by God.

The truth is we sometimes forget is that God isn’t interested in a beauty contest. He isn’t looking for physical beauty. Rather, He is interested in spiritual beauty. We fail to seek our purpose in God’s plan, focusing instead on what seems to be important to us and the world. We forget that the world will pass away, but God’s plan for us is eternal.

We must also keep in mind that God does not make mistakes. That can be a very difficult concept to accept and live with. Particularly if we, or someone we love, suffers from a painful or even life-threatening disease. How can someone who has watched their child waste away with cancer still accept that God’s plan is perfect. We can’t know the reason for such an occurrence and it can be extremely hard to simply accept as part of the bigger plan of God. We want to know why. We can see no reason for such suffering. How could such a thing be of God? How many times have you heard someone say, “How could a loving God let this happen?”. We don’t have an answer for that question. We know that God is a loving God but we can’t know why such a thing happened. To simply say that it is God’s plan does little to alleviate the pain and suffering of someone who has lost a loved one or someone who suffering themselves. I am confident that at some point we will understand God’s purpose, but not in this world.

We have no reason to doubt that we are perfectly made and that each occurrence in our life is a part of God’s perfect plan. God’s creation is always perfect, whether it be us, the weather, the earth, the galaxy or the entire universe. But it is perfect to His plan, not ours. The problem begins when we try to add or subtract to God’s plan. We don’t know the entirety of his plan, so who are we to believe we should meddle in it? As God told Job when he questioned God’s plan, “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements – surely you know!” (Job 37:2-5). Job didn’t know and neither do we.

In fact, we insult God if we deny that He made us perfectly. Not, perhaps, to our idea of perfect, but to His. “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground without your Father’s will. But even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows.” (Matthew 10:29). Jesus wanted His disciples, and us, to know of their worth to the Father. The knowledge or our worth to God should relieve our concern over our well-being. After all, God considered us worth the death of his son to provide a path for us to share eternity in His presence.

We can’t place the responsibility for our faults and sins on the way God made us. We can’t use “that’s just the way God made me” as an excuse for sinfulness. God did not make us to commit adultery, fornication, murder, theft, envy or any other sin. We choose what actions we take. It’s called free will. We have the freedom to accept or reject God’s plan. When someone tells you they aren’t responsible for their failings, it’s just the way they were made, they are choosing to reject God. Not only are they rejecting God, they are attempting to hold Him accountable for the evil that they do. God is never the agent of evil. All evil is the result of turning from Him in one way or another.

If we want to question God about how He made us, shouldn’t we owe it to Him to find out the purpose for which for which He made us? We want to say that we are a self-made person. Our place in life is the result of our efforts. We’ve been taught from childhood that independence and self-reliance is a good trait. However, we are all God-made. God designed us as He desired and we are to use the gifts He gave us to the best of our ability. He knows His plans for us and it is our responsibility to make the effort to understand His plan for us. In order for this to happen we must have a relationship with God based on absolute trust. Trust that God wants only what is best for us and will provide it if we allow Him.

He is the potter, we are the vase. We need to accept the fact that some vases are larger and more ornate that others. Perhaps we are a simple vase in order to allow us to ignore ourselves and serve others, as Mother Teresa did. If we are a larger, beautifully accented vase, perhaps our beauty is intended to bring joy to others in some way. It certainly isn’t for us to take pride in and keep to ourselves, for our benefit only. Whether small or large, simple or ornate, we are made by God with a specific purpose in mind. It is our duty to discover that purpose and fulfill it as God desires. This is the path to true happiness.

“I praise you, for I am wondrously made. Wonderful are your works!” (Psalms 139:14)


The above meditation is a chapter from Ed’s new eBook “The Narrow Gate”.

Available now for only $1.99 on Amazon,

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New Evangelists Monthly – January 2015, Issue #25

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Elsewhere: filtering Francis

Elsewhere

Recently, I gave you my take on Pope Francis (Francis: style, substance, execution). Not that my opinion matters all that much, but I gave high marks on style and substance — not so much on execution. In that section I expressed my concern on how the pope’s message gets twisted by the media (and apparent lack of correction from the Vatican).

In the substance section however, I noted:

Pope Francis describes himself as a “loyal son of the Church.” Put another way, the pope is a faithful Catholic. Duh.

What I did not expound upon is what will happen when the media finally figures-out that he is not what they want him to be: a hard-left liberal reformer who will discard and/or disregard previous Church teaching. One popular theory is that they will viciously turn on him, probably attributing his “change of heart” to “Vatican hard-liners” prevailing (or some other such politically inspired nonsense). Such is the lens they see everything through.

George Weigel offers another possibility. He argues that the media has settled on their narrative and will not leave it. The pope will continue to teach faithfully, frequently, but the media will simply “filter” it. A sort of “if you don’t report it then it never happened and is therefore not real” approach.

At the end of last month, he gave these examples in a piece for the National Catholic Register:

Well, things like the Pope’s passionate defense of marriage as the stable union of a man and a woman, which he underscored in an address to the Schoenstatt movement right after the Extraordinary Synod of Bishops on the Family 2014 and in his keynote address to a November interreligious conference at the Vatican on the crisis of marriage in the 21st century.

And things like the Pope’s defense of the gospel of life, a persistent theme in Francis’ November address to the European Parliament. The press reports I read focused on Francis’ concerns for immigrants and the unemployed. Fair enough; that was certainly in the text. But what about the Holy Father’s defense of those whom indifference condemns to loneliness or death, “as in the case of the terminally ill, the elderly who are abandoned or uncared for and children who are killed in the womb?”

What about his insistence that Europe, past, present and future, makes no sense without Christianity? What about his condemnation of those who subject Christians “to barbaric acts of violence” and his plea for support for those Christians who are “evicted from their homes and native lands, sold as slaves, killed, beheaded, crucified or burned alive, under the shameful and complicit silence of so many”? You didn’t read much about that did you?

Nor did you read (unless you read the Pope’s text himself) that Francis, having made a plea for environmental stewardship, went on to “emphasize” (his word) that, “along with an environmental ecology, there is also need of a human ecology, which consists in respect for the person.”

Another aspect of Pope Francis’ preaching that has been too often filtered out of the coverage of his pontificate involves (if you’ll pardon the term) demonology. Before Pope Francis, no pope in decades so regularly referred to Satan.

Read the Weigel’s entire piece: Pope Francis, Filtered.

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