Called to Communion - 08/27/20 - with Dr. David Anders

all to communion with dr david anders starts now what's stopping you from becoming a catholic why can't women become priests 1-833-288 ewtn i don't understand why i have to earn salvation david 1-833-288-3986 on the ewtn global catholic radio network [Music] well happy thursday to all of you welcome to a thursday edition of ewtn's call to communion where we ask the question what's stopping you from becoming a catholic we would love to hear from our non-catholic brothers and sisters or perhaps you are catholic but you're in conversation with one of our separated brethren or maybe someone who lives a life of no faith at all we'd love to hear your questions today the number to be on the program is eight three three two eight eight e w t n that's eight three three two eight eight three nine eight six if you're outside the united states and canada your number is one two zero five two seven one two nine eight five and we will put you straight to the front of the line at one two zero five two seven one two nine eight five you can always send us an email ctc at ewtn.com or you can text your question to dr anders text the letters ewtn to 5500 wait for a response text your first name and your question message and data rates may apply i'm jack williams charles bury producing the program your call screener is ryan penny and jeff burson handling our social media efforts so if you are watching us on youtube and facebook live you can type a question into the chat window and it may find its way to us by the end of the program our host as he is every day on this program dr david anders how are you jack i'm fine thanks how about you you know what i'm doing terrific i wanted to start the show out today uh i think it would be fair uh i don't know that i don't want to overstep reality here but i think it would be fair to say that in your evangelical days especially those days leading up to you really starting to take a serious look at the catholic church you may have on occasion in conversations with the catholic been less than charitable is that fair that would be absolutely fair yeah i want you to speak yeah i want you to speak a little bit uh to our non-catholic brothers and sisters who may ha exude similar behavior towards catholics not only from uh you know from a christian charity point of view but also from a point of view of creating an impediment for themselves to be able to receive the truth yeah thanks i appreciate that so first of all i related to catholics when i was a non-catholic through a stereotype through a caricature of catholicism that i had learned from my own tradition and uh that's really critical because you know there's a there's a there's a form of the lack of charity that we call prejudice right which is i don't attend to the actual living breathing agent some you know subject in front of me who has his own or her own personal thoughts feelings history challenges difficulties and whatnot i don't really attend to them and what they're telling me and who they are but i attend to the stereotype or the conviction that i have in my mind about who i think they ought to be based on my own tradition or my prejudices or whatever so right there there's a lack of charity and many times my interest in talking to a catholic would be to proselytize them to attempt to get them to leave their tradition and to accept christ as i had understood him in my tradition and my motives for this were not charitable they weren't that i knew this individual and cared deeply about them as a person but generally were motivated by my desire to get a feather in my own cap and be able to say well i'd you know want someone for jesus especially from that nasty catholic church and to go home and feel good about myself because i've been an effective evangelist or an apologist or whatever and so it's profoundly dehumanizing and uh and that that of course created an enormous barrier not only for me to receive the truth of the catholic faith but even to go to heaven right because i was i was committing the sin of pride and hubris and egotism and was was heedless of the ways in which i was shutting off the flow of grace into my own soul not so much because i wasn't catholic but because i was attached to my own um to my own uh insecurity and my own egotism and pride in the way i related to other human beings and it was a great a gift to me um to uh to kind of get slapped upside the head a few times by people for the way i was treating others uh to see to begin to see myself as a sort of culture arrogant so and so that i really was and that it was i i was the one who needed the deep interior renovation of grace and the change of perspective and the infusion of the life of virtue uh so that i could so that i could come to know god and that i could be changed and i could be saved because i spent my time you know running around talking about how i was going to save others when in fact i was myself the one with the giant log sticking out of both eyes three three two eight eight e wtn is our toll-free number eight three three two eight eight three nine eight six uh sunny john is watching on youtube and uh says i know canonizations are infallible however what are we to make of pre-congregation saints i'm mainly focusing on the lesser-known saints such as saint ursula i read the devotion to some of these saints may have emerged from popular devotion by the laity without any declaration from any particular holy father yeah i think so so the church has actually removed uh saints from the church calendar and revoked their feast days in the past uh precisely under this consideration right that uh before the process of canonizations was taken over by the vatican it basically emerged from popular piety at the local level and and some of them were quite fanciful and some of them obviously now in hindsight are even one could say even absurd i mean i remember reading an anecdote one time about a bishop in the middle ages who did a visitation of his own diocese and found a very lively local cult in a in a small village to some revered person and he investigated about the origin of this cult and he found out that it was actually a dog who had like rescued his owner or something and needless to say the people had a lot of enthusiasm but very little understanding about the proper objects of christian devotion so that one did not make it into the canon of course but we can find less less absurd but similarly fanciful legends that have popped up in the history of the christian people sometimes they catch on to get popular and they get circulated widely as legends will tend to do doesn't mean that they're factual or vertical and and they don't have about them the marks of of infallibility right they haven't been ruled on in that way uh by the universal church um in the magisterium and so you know that doesn't trouble our faith in the slightest that these things have happened eight three three two eight eight e wtn that's our toll-free number it's a free phone call anywhere in the united states in canada eight three three two eight eight three nine eight six it's called the communion with dr david anders [Music] hello family our world has been turned upside down by the coronavirus pandemic concern for our loved ones economic uncertainty and of course social distance it's easy to understand why there's such great anxiety and fear in the world i'm convinced that god is using this moment to bring us closer to him and to strip away the distractions of our normal daily lives and that he is calling us to place our trust in him in this difficult moment ewtn is a great spiritual resource that can help you your family and friends make sense of the chaos of course ewtn is where you can turn for mass every day in addition to our television and radio channels you can also find the mass live eucharistic adoration the rosary and other devotions on our web and video on demand platforms and of course ewtn news will continue to provide you with the latest updates on the pandemic as well as other current events around the world from a catholic perspective please know that we're praying for you and let's also join together in prayer for our ewtn family around the world thank you and may god bless you hi i'm doug keck inviting you to join me next time for a special remote interview with dr peter craft about his book ask peter craig the 100 most interesting questions he's ever been asked the most important thing in ethics is what's the meaning and the value and the point and the purpose and the good of doing anything that and much more on our next bookmark ewtn bookmark with doug keck brings you the best catholic authors saturdays at 4 30 pm eastern sunday's at 9 30 a.m eastern on ewtn [Music] it's thursday that means the world over with raymond arroyo tonight raymond challenges viewers with important political and cultural reporting and analysis of a wide variety of topics of interest to catholics and people of faith and i know raymond has been out uh covering uh one of the conventions this week so i'm sure he'll have some very timely things might even touch a little bit on the hurricane and please keep all those folks that were affected by hurricane lara let's be sure we keep them in our prayers as well uh that's tonight 8 pm eastern time right here on ewtn radio and television a couple lines open for you at 833 288 ewtn that's 833-288-3986 first up today is sarah in st louis missouri a first-time caller listening on sirius xm channel 130. sarah thanks so much for holding welcome to the program thank you what can we do for you today well um i was raised in the catholic faith and married in the catholic church raised four children and then divorced and started exploring god in other churches and i learned a lot i i learned about him in a new way and my spiritual growth was amazing and it's been several years now i'm remarried and um not in the catholic church uh by the way my first marriage was annulled and so with my second marriage i'm not married in the catholic church but my husband is and i are very very um close to the lord and um we live a life that i believe is pleasing to the lord he has blessed us in so many ways so i'm considering the catholic faith again and i want to understand why uh why the catholic church doesn't see um being saved as simple as john 3 16 you know if you believe then you will not suffer eternal hell you'll be living with him after this world is over um eternally with him yeah thanks i'm really happy to answer that question and i really appreciate your call a lot and i i resonate with your story and i appreciate the positive things that you have found in your journey both in and out of the catholic church and i'm i i i just celebrate them and i'm glad that you have an interest in learning more and considering possibly coming back so i'm just really appreciative of everything that you've told me thank you so much for calling and uh and how exciting it's right to learn that you've grown in your understanding of god and your sense of yourself in relationship with him and that that's an encouragement to you and makes you want to learn more i i have nothing but but but praise and admiration and thanksgiving for that so thank you so much um so the heart of the catholic teaching which course is drawn from the bible drawn from jesus and the apostles is that the the bond of our union to god is charity it's love and saint paul talks in the book of romans about the love of god being poured into our hearts by the holy spirit and that's really that's kind of the whole shooting match and and a sort of a picture of that love poured into our hearts christ gives to us in the sermon on the mountain in particular the beatitudes so the kind of person we become when god's love is manifest in us as one who's poor in spirit and meek and merciful and hungering for righteousness and pure in heart and a peacemaker and all those things that jesus tells us that we ought to do saint paul describes it also in first corinthians 13 when he says that love is patient and love is kind and keeps no record of wrongs and bears faults patiently and so forth endures all things and hopes all things love never fails that's really the sort of the main business of the christian life is to be united to god in love because god is love saint john tells us in his epistle of course god is love when jesus talks about that bond of union with god in charity a great place to go for that is john chapter 14. i mentioned john in particular because i know we're trying to make sense of john chapter 3. in john chapter 14 jesus says whoever loves me whoever loves me whoever loves me and keeps my commandments my father and i will come to him and make our dwelling within him so it's the promise of a very intimate relationship with god the blessed trinity dwelling in our hearts and it is the reward of those who love god and keep his commandments that's what christ has said and saint thomas aquinas explicates that indwelling and he says that god can dwell in our hearts in the way that the known is in the knower and the way the beloved is in the lover and the the the mirror of that the analogy for that that the bible most often uses is the relationship of spouses we are espoused to god we are the bride of christ and and so i'll go to that analogy to to delve into this reality a little bit more deeply you know my wife dwells in my heart i mean not as intimately as god does but my wife dwells in my heart insofar as i know her as a person i know what she wants i know i can anticipate her needs her desires and if you ask me right now you know would jill like that for lunch i would be like oh heck no you know she's totally not into that what she'd really like is this you know if i want to know how to please her i know in advance like i don't have to go ask her i already know the kinds of things she's going to want to do and and and i care about those things because i love her you know aristotle once said a friend is like a second self you know my wife is like a second self and so her interests her cares her desires i take them upon myself as my own and i feel them through and in her such that when something that she values is lost or destroyed i i have a sympathetic pain because i have this care for her and she feels the same way towards me right we know one another we love one another we share in one another's griefs and sorrows that's the nature of the indwelling that can be ours uh in relationship to god now it it stands to reason right that that faith is of the essence of that relationship what on earth could it possibly mean for me to know and love and be indwelt by my wife if i didn't trust anything that she had to say if i didn't rely upon her promises if i didn't believe that she was trustworthy or faithful i could have no exchange of love with her and yet and yet a trust of faith a reliance that did not care was not sympathetic to or empathetic with the things that she loved and valued would would be unintelligible well you know i believe what you have to say but i'm really uninterested in what you want well that's just not the kind of bond that god offers us in himself and here's the difficulty that we have we do not by nature desire the good that god wills that's our problem i mean what is god well he wills that we be pure in heart and love righteousness and be meek and merciful and a peacemaker he wants these things in us and we do not naturally will them right the flesh and the spirit contend and saint paul says i you know i see another law at work in my members right the law of sin and death wages war against the desires of the spirit of god and and so it's difficult for us to to to come to that point of really loving what god loves in the same way that you know we might love what our spouse loves and we need to be changed interiorly we need a renovation on the inside we need to be renewed made new and and that comes to us as a gift you know in the same way that spousal love comes as a gift you know we offer ourselves to one another and when you are in relationship with someone right this this awakening to your own personhood happens in that in that free trusting unself-conscious relationship of self-giving and it changes you makes you a new kind of person it expands your horizons and your possibilities god comes to us in this interior renovation principally in response to faith you know when i when i when i believe and trust his representations about me in him when i rely on that in faith that says ball is what brings that interior renovation the holy spirit comes and makes me a new person enables me to love him back it begins and is it is premised on the response of faith but what faith brings is precisely that saving loving relationship to god and and to separate the two and to say well it's just faith alone and i can just keep going about my own business and do what i want to do and i don't actually have to love god or love what he wills well then you just don't know what it means to be in relationship with god right it'd be kind of like i'm gonna have a great marriage but i'm not gonna do anything my wife wants i'm just gonna believe what she says but then do whatever the heck i want it's not a good marriage it's a good relationship when we really do genuinely love one another trust one another believe one another and allow that loving relationship to renovate us on the inside so that we come to enjoy the very thing that god is namely goodness and love itself is that helpful to you sarah oh yes it does i appreciate you appreciating shedding light on that thank you very good god bless you we'll keep you in our prayers that's one great thing you've done by making this phone call today is you'll have a whole lot of folks praying for you and your husband and uh we'd love to hear from you down the road as things progress 833 288 ewtn is our toll-free number 833-288-3986 next up is tom in hazelton north dakota listening to ewtn on real presence radio tom you're on with dr anders outstanding dr anders my question is probably pretty simple for you but i'm curious about christ's crucifixion compared to a typical roman crucifixion was christ treated particularly badly did other people have to carry their own cross up cavalry or up a hill did others get scourged before they were crucified and and that's my question okay thanks so i am not an expert on on all of the techniques that went into roman crucifixion uh i know something about it um one of the things i know is that we don't have a lot of archaeological remains we don't have many and one of the reasons why is that that roman citizens were not crucified slaves and barbarians were crucified and they were crucified because they were people of no account they were non-people all right and so the romans didn't have an interest in in documenting this stuff with great with great depth because like you know it's like giving an intimate description of stepping on a bug they just didn't care that's precisely why you know they uh they didn't leave all these great records for us um but we have been able to discern that they weren't all the same like there were different modes of crucifixion some with nails some with ropes you know the main cause of death was asphyxiation and uh and different postures could be used as well different types of crosses could be used and of course some of the some of the crucifixions were mass executions of slave rebellions and that sort of thing it's hard for me to imagine that that you know if you've got a you know a couple thousand slaves to work through in an afternoon i mean you know you want to make it to the lunch break and then go home right you're not you're probably not gonna have time to sit there and scourge everybody the important thing is to get the guy up on the cross and walk away and so i don't imagine this is just my speculation historical speculation it seems unlikely uh very unlikely that every crucifixion would have followed the exact same form of christ's um and particularly some of the indignities and the mockery and so forth that were exhibited on christ were unique to his case i mean hail king of the jews and dressing him in a robe and putting a crown of thorns on that sort of business obviously was unique to his to his case in terms of carrying the cross again you know i i i could imagine just that this is something this kind of indignity probably was not unique uh but i can think of many instances in which it would not have been very useful for the romans themselves particularly when they had a lot of people to work through um you know that would just seem like to take a bunch of extra time when you've got five thousand slaves to crucify in a day eight three three two eight eight e wtn that's our toll-free number 833-288-3986 next up is julianne in fort worth texas listening on the ewtn app julianne you're on with dr david anders hello hello well i am catholic and i was trying to explain purgatory and um you know the fact when we go to confession our sins are forgiven and and god remembers them no more but the question is why why do we have why do we have purgatory and if the sins have been forgiven and i get that you you um you know you break a window you pay for it but if the sins are forgiven and remembered no more what what i was trying to explain it yeah sure a couple things i'd like to say about this and i appreciate the question so so first of all you you have to distinguish two things all right you have to distinguish uh the fact of forgiveness which restores a broken relationship right forgiveness restores a broken relationship you have to distinguish that from from acts of justice and and reparation which can follow from such rep from such forgiveness so you you've already given a good illustration with fixing the broken window but you know consider something a little bit more intimate my my wife is uh probably not going to be able to hear it in this question because here comes the music so i might have to hold that fault and come to the other side of the break i was going to use an illustration with my wife and you will don't go anywhere julianne 833 288 e wtn is our toll-free number 833 833-288-3986 it's ewtn's call to communion with dr david anders the venerable fulton john sheen if we wish to keep our rights and liberties we must also keep our god piety and patriotism go together that's the first glory of being in america the leading catholic voices are on ewtn radio the ewtn home video highlight for august is lourdes with the franciscan missionaries of the eternal word go on pilgrimage with father joseph mary wolf and father john paul mary zeller to the healing waters of lourdes where saint bernadette first encountered our lady and where all are now called to conversion order your dvd set at ewtnrc.com 24 hours a day seven days a week or call 1-800-854-6316 and now the ewtn family prayer with father joseph family a prayer that we pray together is a powerful prayer so please pray together with me our ewtn family prayer today we pray for women considering abortion heavenly father we worship you you love the thought of each one of us and wanted us to exist and so you knit us together in our mother's wombs share your love with those mothers who are considering aborting their unborn children dispel their fears free them from pressuring boyfriends or parents and give them joy in their motherhood spare them lord from a life of regret so that they may enjoy the satisfaction of a motherhood lived in love amen [Music] hi this is janet williams you don't have to be a woman to enjoy women of grace tomorrow at 11 a.m eastern here on ewtn radio now back to call to communion with dr david andrew [Music] 833 288 e wtn is our toll-free number 833 288 we're talking to julianne in fort worth texas and david she wants to know if her sins are forgiven and forgotten in reconciliation what in the world do we need purgatory for yeah i think so i started to give an illustration before the break where i said you know my my wife has a number of things she likes for me to do as sort of tokens of my love and affection for her many of them have to do with the way we keep our house and you know she's forever asking me you know please don't leave that there and clean that up when you do x y z and uh you know i can imagine if i'm in the kitchen one day and you know she doesn't like me to put the coffee spoon back in the drawer without brushing off the coffee grounds she hates to get coffee grounds in the in the silverware drawer that's just an example and i i confess frequently violating that norm out of thoughtlessness you know and uh and i could uh i could imagine you know like i'm i'm heading for the for the coffee drawer with the grounds all over the spoon and and jill says hey wait a minute wait a minute what did i say about the spoon oh i am so sorry honey i i just wasn't even thinking i apologize and then just putting the coffee grounds right back in the drawer you know like like not actually like i'm sorry oh it's okay i forgive you it's not a big deal and then like not cleaning up my mess i mean it's just unthinkable you i mean you're like it's the small thing it's just unthinkable when we when we do something that offends another person and we're sorry like they forgive us or we forgive them in turn but but the charity that is re-established by the forgiveness expresses itself in an act of reparation to make up for the thing you did wrong that's that's just what love means and in our relationship with god when we go to confession when we confess our sins when he forgives us what he has done is he has restored us to the life of charity he which means that the grace of god now flows again within our hearts and we are in intimate relationship with him why then would we not want to out of love make reparation reparation for the disorder that we brought into that relationship and that's what acts of penance are they also have they also have a curative effect on us right number one they do make reparation for the injustice against god or against our neighbor but we also retain within ourselves the wounds of original sin concupiscence and and pride and egotism and these kinds of things and when we perform acts that directly contradict the passions of soul that led us to the sin in the first place then we begin to habituate ourselves to virtuous acts and it makes it more difficult for us to sin again in the future and and the unpleasantness the sort of the penal aspect of the thing also stands as a motive to us not to not to violate those norms again so in a number of ways acts of penitence are curative and healing and charitable in the life of the soul they make reparation for the injustice that we that we have perpetrated against against god or against our neighbor they they contradict the the immoderate passions of soul and enable us to to establish virtuous uh habits and uh and and so in these ways they're beneficial to us now purgatory is just an extension of that same dynamic of penance that we experience in this life and it's necessary to sort of clean up the soul from these immoderate attachments so that we can be fit for the life of heaven uh saint john henry carl newman wrote a poem one time called the dream of jurancius about a soul that goes to heaven and perceives that it's not quite ready for that much beatitude you know and and uh and sort of voluntarily dives off a cliff you know to go get cleaned up and uh and and and wants to be wants to become like showing up at a party and recognizing that you know everybody else's got on a sports jacket and you came wearing a t-shirt you know like i really want to be at the party um i'm gonna feel pretty awkward let me run home and and put on the sports jacket and i'll be right back is that helpful to you uh julianne okay yeah so it's less it's less about just god needing justice and more about repairing reparation for for what we have done uh that's what what purgatory is it's about both i guess well you know i i like the fact that you talk about god's needs god has no needs god has absolutely no needs whatsoever at all nothing that we do changes god in any way ever ever god is changeless timeless outside of time and utterly perfect and entirely blissful within himself right everything that we do in the spiritual life is ordered toward to to properly arranging our interior life to be able to receive the good that god is okay you're going you're going through your spoons right now in your drawer aren't you julianne [Laughter] thanks so much and listen to this again thank you thank you we appreciate that you can do that at the podcast at ewtn.com radio 833 288 ewtn is our toll-free number 833-288-3986 next up is aaron in new douglas illinois he's uh listening on covenant radio today aaron you're on with dr anders hi thanks for taking my call dr anders can you hear me yeah what can i do for you uh thank you for taking my call dr anderson um i was wanting to know if uh i was a heretic um because i believe that like in the arc of can you hear me okay we hear you great okay cool so like in the old testament there was a high priest and the sacrifice and you know and a lamb and the ark of the covenant and the mercy seat i believe that that um like that that sheds light on the sacrifice of christ where jesus christ is the lamb and jesus christ is the high priest and his and his sacrifice and his uh blood and everything fell onto the mercy seat at his at his uh at his feet that that little notch that was a mercy called the murphy seat yeah and on to the ark of the nuke and onto the ark of the new covenant uh mary and i believe that without mary there being co-redemptrix um she if she was not present the ark of the covenant would not be present and then our salvation will not be complete um am i heretic for believing that okay thanks i appreciate the question well you're not a heretic because a heresy a heretic is someone who obstinately denies a dogma of the catholic faith and you have not denied a dogma of the catholic faith and certainly haven't done one haven't done so obstinately and so therefore you're not a heretic that doesn't mean that you're not in error i'm not asserting that you are an error i'm just saying like there are a lot of things other than a heretic that we can be right and still be in error um and uh i would say that the position you've taken is a is a highly speculative position um and it it presses a metaphor very very literally uh and i i i really don't think there's any necessity to do so in other words you know and it would certainly be wrong of you to insist that others hold that as the orthodox point of view there are there are different mariological positions in the catholic church that are allowable um and and to insist on one as the correct way when it itself is not dogmatic would be would be taking that way way way too far but no it doesn't it does not obstinately contradict some dogma of the faith although it may be maybe pressing a metaphor a bit hard 833 well go ahead i'm sorry aaron go ahead thank you um where can i find out more information about mary being co-redemptrix um so so i'm trying to think if i have a good i don't have a book off the top of my head that i would recommend to you specifically on that topic i will say that the magisterium of the church has considered that title and and and absolutely decided not to define it as a dogma of the faith because it is so uh is so easily misunderstood right and uh it's not like the church doesn't know about this title and and a special mary in congress called by pope john paul ii specifically for the purpose of examining it advised against making this a dogma of the faith eight three three two eight eight e w t n is our toll-free number eight three three two eight eight three nine eight six simon is in amarillo texas listening to us on st valentine radio simon you are on with dr david anders simon are you there is your phone on mute by chance simon i see that you're talking we'll come back to simon let's try john in rochester new york who is uh listening on roku john you're on with dr david anders hi dr anders thank you for listening to me i i have a question regarding these outreach letters i've been receiving from jehovah witnesses they offered a dialogue with me but of course i offered a dialogue back with them but they never do and they they usually give me a couple bible verses to check out and i and i do and i kind of see you know where they're where they're going with them but i wonder if you have any suggestions on bible verses that might be helpful in my return letters to them uh that might kind of draw them into dialogue or help them get them just get them thinking yeah i appreciate i appreciate the question um i i i would advise against that as a as a method of approach to jehovah's witnesses and and and the reason why is i think that once you you begin a sort of tit-for-tat exegetical exchange you've already conceded too much of the argument to their premises because the premise of their argument is that that's how you do theology right you you start with the text of the bible and you do exegesis in particular guided by the watchtower society rather than the catholic magisterium and i don't want to i don't want to engage in that conversation at all i i'd rather go underneath that conversation to first principles and talk to them really about the question how do we know the mind of god how do we know the revealed will of god what did jesus himself tell us about this and and then and raise questions about so you know when did christ ever indicate that the watchtower society was a reliable guide to the interpretation of of of the mind of god um when did christ ever establish that the jehovah's witnesses list of canonical books was in fact the rule of faith and they will have no answers to those questions because there the answer is is never and nowhere right and their entire system is built on a mirage right namely that the bible is the sole rule of faith as interpreted by the watchtower society that's precisely the thesis that you need to call into question not their interpretation of this or that book and then you should there's plenty of evidence to uh to discredit the watchtower society as an interpreter of sacred scripture in particular the very many false prophecies they have given naming in dates and times the end of the world that has failed to come to pass as they predicted so you know if they if they if they make go on record with a day and a time for the end of the world and it doesn't happen then that's that's proof positive that you should never listen to a word they say eight three three two eight eight e wtn is our toll-free number eight three three two eight eight three nine eight six let's try simon again in amarillo texas uh simon are you there hey you guys can hear me yeah there you are what's your question yeah what's your question today yes sir um so i was talking to some friends yesterday they brought up uh that priest who found out he wasn't validly baptized and so they were just asking questions about it i was explaining to them the difference between sacraments invalid versus lists and all that kind of stuff and pretty much they kind of ascended and their their protestants pretty much they sent us the fact that it makes sense of why we would have um kind of so much structure around sacraments because they're so important um but they were one of them said i know but i still feel the catholic church is too legalistic and and uh so i wanted to ask you your opinion um you know where do you where would you go with that because maybe they sent it intellectually to a point but they still don't they saw these feelings about it and so they kind of felt like it was maybe fair like like pharisees in the old testament like that so how would you approach that as a catholic talking to non-catholics yeah absolutely so so uh here's a really important distinction between catholicism and many forms of protestantism all right in a lot of protestant churches it is very important to identify the presence of grace in the soul so you know john calvin for instance taught that it was possible for a person to know with certainty that he was elect he could know with certainty that he was going to go to heaven and that that sense of you know i can draw a line in the sand and and delineate who has grace and who doesn't remains a really key issue in a lot of protestant denominations i remember uh teaching at a bible college in upstate new york when i was in my 20s fundamentalist bible camp and this the kids were taught this song the song went one door and only one and yet it's sides are two i'm on the inside of which side are you you know the sense that i know that i'm i'm good with god how about you you know we're going to draw this line in the sand and uh and the catholic church does not do it that way right something cardinal newman noticed even in the 19th century if you read his apologia praveeda sue he came out of evangelicalism became catholic one of the things that that sort of prompted that was this uh was this evangelical need to draw a line in the sand and say i know who has grace and and i know who doesn't and uh and that's really not the way the catholic church does it at all what the catholic church does is say we know not with certainty about who has grace that we don't know we don't know who has grace what we know is where grace is objectively an offer that's a very different way of looking at the business okay so the it's it's really important to celebrate the sacraments as objective means of grace objective they're out there in front of me they're tangible signs that i can lay hands on and you know if i want to get my sins forgiven i don't have any doubt about where to get that done i know i go to the confessional and i know that grace is objectively an offer in the confessional if i want to have original sin washed away be born again in christ and made a member of his body the church i don't have any questions about whether that's taken place or not it's objectively signaled to me in baptism in which saint paul says i die with christ and rise again with him to new life you know the protestant has to introspect he draws these lines that the catholic draws objectively in the sacramental order the protestant draws them interiorly in his own experience and he marks out elements of his own emotional and intellectual life and tries to discern within those the marks of grace that he claims to know infallibly you know westminster confession of faith presbyterian confession of faith says that the elect can have infallible assurance of their salvation infallible that's the language that it uses a protestant document how they don't claim to know with infallible certainty whether or not grace was an offer in the sacraments in fact that's a key issue in calvinism calvin taught that the sacraments always work in the elect and never in the reprobate so for john calvin you never know whether a sacrament has worked you never know if you have a valid sacrament never know if you're john calvin you might you might not you don't know all you can know you can know if you're elect that's where calvin thinks and he's just as legalistic as you could ever want to be about that he has a set of criteria and of course all puritanism follows him they have a they have set criteria by which they discern or claim to discern the presence of grace in the soul right catholics don't do that we don't do that and so how is that how is it advantageous for a catholic well first of all i don't i don't get involved in judging my neighbor this frees me up so i don't have to judge my neighbor i don't have to be like the fundamentalist bible camp anymore i don't sing you know i'm on the inside on which side are you i don't do that anymore what i do is i say christ is on the inside christ is inside the sacraments christ is inside the eucharist christ is inside the church he's also inside reality and he invites all of us to come know him and there are objective tangible signs in which we can encounter him let's make those manifest and then lets all of us come to him and let him be the judge and so the disposition of a catholic about his own interior life about his own relationship with christ about his neighbor's relationship with christ is not at all legalistic it's the opposite of legalism right because i'm not drawing a barrier a line in the sand and saying you have to be on this side of the barrier to be saved i'm not doing that that's what the protestant does what i'm doing is i'm saying there's an objective offer of grace that is the certainty let's all go to it but i'm not going to judge who has grace 833 288 ewtn is our toll-free number 833-288-3986 mary's in west palm beach florida she is a first-time caller watching us on facebook live mary you're on with dr anders thank you dr anders for taking my question my question is the apostle paul uh met jesus and um how did what made him an apostle was it because he saw christ or was or did they name apostles after christ had died and risen i know they did name apostles after that but how many early apostles were not among the original 12. yeah i think so the the uh we distinguish apostle as someone who received a commission directly from christ to preach the gospel and establish the church that's what apostle means from the original twelve now the original twelve were all apostles but not all apostles were members of the original twelve and the paradigm case of course is saint paul right we and and paul paul had to actually contend for his apostleship his apostleship was called into question by many people precisely because he wasn't one of the twelve christ appeared to him on the road to damascus now there are there are other people in scripture who are referred to as apostles some whose um let's say like silas and timothy are sometimes mentioned along with saint paul as the co-senders of first thessalonians and there's other instances i i honestly i can't enumerate all of them right and so and the way the word is used is sometimes a little ambiguous because the word apostle lost in greek just means sent and so sometimes it's ambiguous if we're talking about this special commission that came by divine revelation immediately from christ versus someone who just sort of had a mission from the church to go out and represent christ and maybe a little bit ambiguous in the text but the paradigm case of the apostle who's not a member of the 12 is certainly saint paul quickly we'll head to vincent in houston texas a first-time caller listening on guadalupe radio vincent what is your question today hi dr anders mike so my question was why did dinosaurs exist before humans yeah thanks i really appreciate the question i'd like to ask you vincent um i i know it sounds like you're a bit younger fellow i used to be your age when i was young i thought dinosaurs were the coolest things in the world do you think dinosaurs are pretty cool yes sir man i love dinosaurs and i loyal back i was up in south dakota they got a bunch of dinosaur skeletons up there i went to uh a natural history museum saw these dinosaur skeletons i could have stayed all day one of my favorite books as a kid was danny and the dinosaur man i just think they're awesome i mentioned that because god also thinks they're awesome and that's why god makes stuff he makes it because it's cool honestly and that's what the scriptures say says the heavens declare the glory of god every particle of creation just emanates rings out echoes with the glory and beauty and majesty of god and uh and god god uh because he's goodness itself just goodness and good things and cool stuff just flow out of his creative activity because that's the kind of being that god is and even before mankind the angels the angels uh rejoiced in in the created order they just loved and thought it was fantastic and awesome cool you know the present universe that we inhabit has all kinds of stuff in it that you and i will never see wild creatures living at the bottom of the ocean you know far-flung galaxies zillions of light years away will never experience god knows these things he knows every particle of these things and he makes them because they're cool yeah yes sir awesome very quickly we'll head to paul in albany new york listening on pox at bonum radio paulie just about a minute and a half left with dr anders what's your question hi thanks for talking my question i need to i want to know when the catholics were requested to be one issue voters thanks catholics have never been requested by the church in any sort of categorical way to be uh one issue voters there have been many occasions in catholic history when one particular political issue is of such great moment that it captures the entire imagination of the catholic people i'm i'm thinking for example of uh of the war in vonday france in the early days of the french revolution when the french catholics had to confront the question will we let our sons be conscripted into the atheistic revolutionary army to force the french revolution on on on peoples outside of france in an imperialistic onslaught and the people of the vonde said no we don't think so we we're not we're not behind this atheistic revolution that's destroying killing priests and torturing people so we're going to draw the line at letting our sons be conscripted into the military and they paid for that decision with their lives when the french revolutionary army went in and wiped out the von dais killing hundreds of thousands of people in one of the first genocides in uh in modern western history because of one issue right we're not going to stand for this imperialism by the french revolutionaries at other times maybe some issue like that doesn't capture the imagination in such a comprehensive way but sometimes injustice just cries out to heaven and we have to draw online and say no thanks david anders for being so gracious as you always are with your time thanks thanks jack all right we'll do it again tomorrow on behalf of our host dr david anders our producer charles berry call screener ryan penny and our social media maven mr jeff person i'm jack williams thanks so much for another great day of ewtn's call to communion back at it tomorrow with dr david anders coming up next on many of these ewtn stations open line uh stay tuned and uh until we get together tomorrow god bless

Channel: EWTN

Views: 2,540

Rating: 4.8904109 out of 5

Keywords: Catholic, EWTN, Christian, television

Id: SN29hY4bd6U

Length: 53min 56sec (3236 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 27 2020