Called to Communion with Doctor David Anders - July 13, 2021

hurts 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 1833 [Music] global catholic radio network hey everybody welcome again to call to communion here on ewtn it's the program for our non-catholic brothers and sisters if that's you if you're a non-catholic perhaps a a catholic as a child and then stepped away from the faith for whatever reason maybe you've never been a catholic but you've got questions about the catholic faith and you would love to get those questions answered well this is the place for you here's our phone number 833 288 ewtn that's 833-288-3986 if you're listening to us outside of north america please dial the u.s country code and then 205-271-2985 you can also text the letters ewtn to 5500 wait for our response and then text us your first name and your brief question message and data rates may apply and of course you can always send us an email ctc at ewtn.com we'll get to one of those in just a moment here ctc at ewtn.com charles berry is our producer we also have michael birchfield on the job he is our phone screener for this program and jeff person is on social media so if you want to ask a question via youtube or facebook we're streaming there right now just put that question of yours in the subject line in the comments section and then jeff will shoot that to us here in the studio i'm tom price along with dr david tom how are you today well i'm great i think i still remember how to do this [Laughter] we've been off for a couple of days you were traveling i i took a family vacation to boston mass did the revolutionary war tour saw the sights you know climbed around in old ironsides went to mass at the cathedral all that good stuff and got very wet because we arrived during a tropical storm that dumped millions of tons of rain i think that was elsa i think that was the last remnants of elsa i believe so so you know they have these these trolley tours of the city of boston and i discovered that you cannot see out of them when all the windows are fogged up because of the rain ouch um but you can't however get off the the bus and go crawl around in the rain on old iron sides and all the navy personnel were out there with you know dry vacs like keeping the whole yeah yeah keeping the interior dry so what fun well i'm so glad uh first of all i'm glad you had a great time and number two i'm very glad that you're back with us today i'm i'm also glad to be back i think all the good italian food i ate in the italian district will take me about you know three weeks to to work off yeah so it's good to be back and probably settle down again so we're going to lead off here with an email from sean who uh is you know it's funny you would say old iron size because sean begins his letter by taking a shot across the bow he says dear dr vegan anders isn't that nice he says dr anders i am a non-denominational christian since my childhood now in my 40s but in the past few years i've become interested in following the catholic tradition however i find that my biggest challenge is that my faith is regularly shaken one hour i have faith that god loves me and i love god the next hour my faith gets shaken because i see human suffering i sin without putting up a fight or a challenging question is presented to me that i just can't answer what can i do what simple thing can i hold on to that will help me keep my faith in a more steady manner now with all of your knowledge and experience do you feel your faith has ever shaken and if so how do you get it back great show sean thanks sean i really appreciate the question so uh pope benedict uh before he was pope benedict back when he was uh joseph ratzinger a theologian and later a bishop and then finally the prefect for the congregation of the doctrine of the faith wrote a book called the introduction of christianity back in the late 1960s and he really wanted to address the the the intelligibility of the faith the credibility of the faith in the in the modern world in light of modern challenges and he recognized that faith many people in the modern world can seem very uh unstable right because we're confronted with a lot of existential challenges that that threaten the security of faith and he takes an interesting approach to that question he he deals with the ambiguities and the conflicts and the difficulties and the darkness right up front doesn't dismiss them at all and concludes with this admonition he says there's no escape from the dilemma of being a man or being a person we might say yeah and uh and so the the question of how to make the faith coherent or relevant or livable i mean it is a it is a modern problem it's actually a human problem it's been a long around as long as there have been believers i find for me personally the greatest comfort not in always having an answer to every challenge even though that's kind of my objective in this show i try to be the guy who can answer questions but in my own life i recognize that there are questions that i will never answer and that that's okay and in fact the scriptures canonize that sense of anguish that we experience in the face of horror and confusion and darkness and i think really honestly and people may be surprised to hear this psalm 88 which a lot of times folks will say well you know read all the psalms but don't read psalm 88 like me that leave that one off the menu you know no for me it is it may be my favorite psalm really because the theme of the psalm is lord everything is terrible your terror washes over me you've taken away all my friends and my one companion is darkness amen wow there's no note of hope there's no expectation of redemption it is simply a lament at the sacred writer's profound sense of anguish loss and confusion and yet it's in sacred scripture it's been canonized and what that tells me is the expression of those sentiments to god is a worthwhile endeavor and christ himself does not usually answer direct questions with a direct answer he invites a kind of a shift in perspective and a participation in a new mode of being he tells people come follow me rich young ruler goes to christ he says what should i do to be safe good teacher and christ could have answered the question formulaically but instead he says why are you calling me good you already know what to do and he goads the young man and finally and being prompted for something more he says well you know you really want to know the truth give to the poor and come follow me come engage a new way of being right and i think ultimately if i reduce my practice of the faith simply to a series of propositions which which may or may not be defensible philosophically and that's what the theme of this show is then i'm going to have an anemic faith i have to have a broader understanding of the life of faith as an engaged participation in in the life of god that transcends just my intellection god says bring it all to us all right thank you so much for that and in a moment we'll be talking with kevin in toronto there's a line open for you right now at 833 288 ewtn for call to communion [Music] when i was outside of the church there was always an unsettled feeling there was always a feeling of something missing and something not complete the deal clinchers we found our way to our our parish and we met just an incredible pastor we learned things that we'd never been taught wouldn't be the person that i am without the church and without the sacraments particularly the eucharist i can't live without it if you've been away from the catholic church visit catholicscomehome.org christ is the answer with father john ricardo here's the new challenge at least one hour a week in front of the blessed sacrament with the goal of an hour a day in front of the blessed sacrament i had a guy come up to me and he says father you know i'm doing a lot of things i'm i'm in a men's fellowship i pray with my wife every day i go to mass every sunday and and usually a couple times during the week i read scripture he goes i want more i said do you pray in front of the blessed sacrament he said outside of mass no i said i think that's the more see all these saints these are the ones who surround us these are the ones who ran before us these are the ones who fought well who kept the faith they would tell you as would every single saint in heaven right now you cannot run this race if you don't spend time with the master whatever else we're doing it's second third and fourth first things need to be first the first thing is to be with the master and the master is jesus it's called a communion here on ewtn if you have a question for dr david anders or if you just like to tell us what is stopping you from becoming a catholic do give us a call at 833 288 ewtn that's 833-288-3986 tom price here with a reminder don't miss the latest political and cultural reporting and analysis on topics of interest to catholics and all people of faith on the world over with raymond arroyo this thursday at 8 pm eastern and now you can get news from the world over in your inbox every week so sign up today by visiting ewtn.com click on the word subscribe it'll take you to a little menu of things that you can subscribe to you click the world over give us your email address and you will start getting those notices right away if you're ready now let's go to the phones at 833 288 ewtn here is kevin to lead us off a first-time caller from toronto listening on siriusxm channel 130. hey there kevin what's on your mind today hi dr david thank you for taking my call i'm a lifelong catholic and i've always defended mother church i mean even against the scandals with the priests always that's individuals who have problems and not to blame you know you think of judas fell and by but peter didn't but what's happening in canada now i don't know if you're aware there's up to 30 churches been burnt to the ground and for your american listeners you don't know indigenous communities across canada are demanding the pulp apologize for its role in the residential schools and what they were was the forcible removal of children from their homes yeah they stripped them of their culture language and identity and their stories of kids who their mother might have made them beads like you know like like a sweater and the priest or the nuns would rip them off you can't have or get slapped in the face for speaking ojibwe because yes they're trying and they had a canadian priest who in the homily said a lot of good came from the school the intention wasn't to uh it was to try and give these people some kind of uh modernization but the india just in no way with it was genocide they're now finding thousands and thousands i i do know the story so how can i help you well it's a crisis of faith for me because i don't understand all the holy spirit because this isn't just a labored priest this was systematic and i'm sure the americans might have done similar yes but it hasn't hit the news yet yes and and i'll take my comments but i i get so there's a lot of catholic friends who are refusing to go to mass now it's really the reputation of our church yes okay yes i can address this i really appreciate it thank you so much as a wonderful question and i'm deeply sympathetic to your concerns so let's let me just lay out a couple of facts about the case and then also talk about the theology of the thing the questions that you're raising so my understanding is that these residential schools were actually mandated by the canadian government they were not initially the creation of the catholic church they were mandated by the government to pursue a policy of colonialization and assimilation that was not at all respectful of native american culture and identity so this is part of the larger sort of western european colonial project of assimilating native cultures around the world to a to a european way of life and thinking now in creating these institutions the government had the problem of staffing them and there weren't a lot of people around that had much interest in participating in the project and so they turned to catholic religious orders that had a history of ministry to native american cultures american peoples as a logical uh uh employment force really for these government mandated schools and and they did and many times the abuses that you've articulated in fact occurred that that uh catholic priests and religious were complicit in that policy of of sort of imposed uh uh you know cultural uh change and colonialization that denied native peoples their their own traditions and their own dignity and that's tragic and that's terrible and there were children that died while they were in the institutions um usually of infectious diseases like tuberculosis and they were just buried on the site rather than being returned to their to their native villages or to their homes or families and so i think we can all recognize this is a horrible abuse it's a terrible injustice but those are the facts of the case as i understand it now how do we as catholics view it when we see uh you know the church on a large scale complicit in some some gross injustice like this so first of all um as a i'm a catholic myself and a devout and practicing catholic i i am profoundly wounded by this sort of thing and i'm deeply upset by it it doesn't challenge my faith as such like i'm not tempted to think that the church and its divine mission is somehow rendered less credible because i know what i have to know what the church claims for itself to know whether or not this actually stands as a kind of defeater to those claims and the church has never presented itself doesn't pretend to be wouldn't try to be a kind of necessarily a kind of exemplar that that all catholics or all catholic institutions or all catholic hierarchs even on a large scale necessarily embody um the virtues of prudence and justice habitually right that's never been the church's claim about itself and i think if if anything is evident from history it's often not the case that that catholic leaders or institutions um are are collectively or individually any more just or wise or prudent than than than culture at large right and in this instance there was a systematic injustice built into the colonialist mindset that disregarded the value of native peoples that was widespread culturally for centuries in the west and it's one in which catholics as members of those cultures were were also complicit okay so so if that's not how the church represents itself the church has has not said you know we're gonna fundamentally rise above culture at every instance so that we're always a kind of shining beacon on the hill if that's not the church's job it's not a self-description what what is the church offering right so uh the church teaches us that it is going to articulate the truth about christ which includes moral truths about the dignity of the human person all right and and that having those things jesus talks about a mustard seed or a treasure buried in the field having those things articulated embedded in the church's liturgy and worship and prayer the hope and expectation is is that as individuals and as a society that that we can be transformed by those luminescent truths that's what's that's what's being offered that's what's being articulated now the extent to which those truths about the dignity of the human person and the universal call to holiness which means nothing other nor nothing more or less than love right right the extent to which those truths and those graces in fact affect us either individually or culturally is always a work in progress and always imperfect and sometimes grotesquely so so i think it's it's useful to back up a second and ask how is it that we recognize something like colonialism to be wrong how do we now stand in judgment of this kind of abuse because tragic though it is it's certainly not unique in world history no it's certainly not unique to catholicism or to the west colonialism imperialism genocide these are these are both symptoms and and systematic within the entire history of culture it's true of native american cultures against other native american cultures it's true of asian cultures and african cultures in conflict with one another warfare and assimilation and genocide are characteristic of the entire history of human culture now it's very salient in our consciousness now because in the hands of europeans because of the technological prowess the scale of the abuses in the modern world is so much greater right and so it's it's also more recent history but you find this kind of thing i mean to be sure the aztecs were all about destroying other cultures and in fact eating them quite physically cannibalizing them and offering them in sacrifices to their gods this kind of thing has been going on what's unique in christian history is that we articulated as a church and an alternate principle and said in principle everybody is equal before god and created in his likeness and image and possessed of an inherent dignity i mean that's a christian contribution to the world story yes aristotle didn't say that plato who i just love didn't say that right you don't find that in other cultures to the extent that you find it in the christian church and as an idea it it began to as a seed work its effect on the history of culture such that the the invention the articulation of adoption like universal human rights by which we rightly criticize these abuses is in fact the fruit of catholic intellectual reflection on the dignity of the person and so you know i'm i'm not catholic because i think that the catholic church or catholics as individuals always necessarily or even habitually exemplify the virtues to which the catholic church calls us i'm catholic because these virtues and these truths and the graces to live them are made available to me and i'm called to cooperate in the hopes that i might attain to holiness kevin we hope that is helpful for you and uh thank you for bringing this uh to the program today here on ewtn's call to communion that brings up a line for you right now it opens it up at 833 288 ewtn that's 833-288-3986 here is dave now in strongsville ohio listening on sirius xm 130 a first-time caller hey there dave what's on your mind today hi good afternoon i'm driving i'm going to be pulling over here just momentarily okay i recently i recently joined a parish and i joined a a group it's called men of state and i've been attending these meetings and uh the last meeting i attended the person that is normally uh there running the program was not available and someone else was there and started we would watch the video on the alpha program and i wasn't aware such a program existed but after watching this video it was like an hour you know my question uh they're saying no reason to go to confession you know jesus is the one to go to confession to it was all soul of scriptura uh my concern is that you know we're they're being uh we're being positive and how do i what do i do about it okay okay yeah i i understand the question and i really appreciate your concerns i share them i think your concerns are valid and uh you know there are there there are catholic parishes that make use of the alpha program and there is a version of alpha that's been toned down a little bit for catholics but it is not in its genesis a catholic program and the objective of alpha is not primarily to teach the elements of the catholic faith and so uh as a standalone catechetical resource i think it's woefully deficient it's not at all sufficient to help people live a robust full relationship with jesus and the irony is that i think that the people who've designed alpha and many of those who are enthusiastic about it that's exactly what they intend they put it forth as well this is about having a relationship with christ and but the problem and this is what you've laid your finger on is and therefore we don't need all that other stuff we don't need all this catholic stuff it's all about having a personal relationship with jesus and here's the problem right we need to stop with the first premise what does it mean to have a relationship with jesus i mean that's the most fundamental question and and we can't leave that question unaddressed well jesus himself tells us what it means to have a relationship with himself when he gave the commission to the apostles in matthew 28 he said go into all the world make disciples baptize them in the name of the father son holy spirit so he begins with a sacrament and teach them to obey everything that i have commanded you and chief among the things that christ commanded was the liturgy do this in memory of me whoever sends you forgive are forgiven whoever sins you retain are retained if we wish to have a relationship with christ we have to have in the way that he prescribed which means obedience to his teaching the the following of his example recapitulating his divine personality we have to take up our cross and follow him right dwell with him be like him and uh and and and to celebrate and exemplify these realities in the liturgy that he established the mass confession baptism and the other sacraments this is how we have a complete relationship with christ relationship with jesus cannot be reduced to a kind of sentiment or a private religious experience christ himself never talks about it that way sacred scripture doesn't present it to us that way it is in fact through the church that we have a relationship with christ whoever hears you hears me jesus said to the apostles if we want to know christ we know him in and through the church that he founded and so the alpha is not the only one there are other evangelistic programs out there some of them by in use by catholics that uh that that diminish the truth about christ and what relationship with him means and we should be on our guard about that now in terms of what do you do uh i think if if you heard in this class that you should dispense with the sacraments in confession i think that would be a reason to to contact your priest your parish priest and say i'm concerned about a catechetical program that tells me to avoid mass in the sacraments i don't think that that without qualification that does not have a place in my in my catholic parish we need to we need to address that question then of course it'll be up to the pastor to deal with it as he sees foot there you go dave thank you so much for your call and uh sounds like a valid concern to me as well it's called the communion here on ewtn let me give you our phone number we do have a couple of lines open for you right now 833 288 ewtn that's 833 288 3986 in a moment we're going to answer a question from matthew who chimed in on youtube a few minutes ago we'll also get to more calls at 833 288 3986 that's 833 288 ewtn on the tuesday welcome back program here on call to communion on ewtn stay with us in any language it means the same live truth live catholic ewtn [Music] this is a messy family minute with mike and alicia hernan when it comes to prudential matters like rules or discipline you and your spouse need to act as a team when it comes to discipline it's better to be wrong together than write alone you might think you have the perfect discipline plan but wait there is no perfect discipline plan but the most essential part of any plan is that you and your spouse agree on it sure it's simpler to parent alone but as a long-term strategy it's a disaster the key is communication you and your spouse need to talk decide and act together maybe it's the wrong decision but it's incredibly crucial that you agree to be wrong together spend more time talking with your spouse than listening to experts because being in unity with your spouse unlocks the grace that comes from the sacrament of marriage remember it's better to be wrong together than write alone for more on this topic listen to our podcast on parenting as a team at messyfamilyminute.org the ewtn home video highlight for july is a church in crisis the church is under attack from within and from without through the chaos dr ralph martin illuminates the path forward for a church in crisis order your dvd set at ewtnrc.com 24 hours a day seven days a week or call 1-800-854-6316 matt swaim here join us tomorrow on the sunrise morning show as we celebrate the feast of saint kateri techa with known as the lily of the mohawks and learn more about her story now back to call to communion with dr david anders [Music] what's keeping you from becoming a catholic let's talk about it here on ewtn's call to communion our phone number eight three three two eight eight ewtn that's 833-288-3986 as promised a question here from matthew watching us on youtube this afternoon matthew says hey dr anders can you help me understand how protestant thinking came to sinner yet saved thinking the journey of sanctification is a very hard sell to my non-catholic christian family okay thanks yeah sure i can so um martin luther is the is the progenitor of this idea and luther was an augustinian monk in 15th century germany saxony and he was possessed of a very scrupulous conscience my personal judgment my personal opinion is that luther probably suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder and maybe from a bipolar condition because he often describes his emotional state as a passage from from deep depression to ecstatic manic highs and he he had that tendency his entire life and that's sort of characteristic of someone who's bipolar but also fixated on the minutia of his moral life such that he would go to confession and he would confess things that really weren't sins right he just he was constantly trying to sort of pick at his conscience until he could gain some sort of assurance or peace of mind now if you've ever dealt with somebody who had obsessive compulsive disorder you know that you can't satisfy them no like the the only way through the problem is exposure right you've got to actually go stick your hands in the garbage and rub them all over your face right that's what you have to do to get over this these compulsions you have to confront the thing and and not run away from it right and uh uh but luther was you know trying to deal with it by endlessly washing his hands so to speak he couldn't get any peace yeah and it was driving him crazy he was just driving him crazy and uh it it bled him away from a kind of socially engaged practice of the faith towards a very very introspective um almost uh kind of solipsistic practice of the faith he wrote one times before he became a protestant he wrote that uh that anyone who wanted to be saved should act as if no one else on in on earth existed which is i think just profoundly wrong very contrary to the teaching of jesus but it shows you how subjectively focused he was that kind of make anybody go nuts a little bit but he was a brilliant man luther was a very very intelligent person he was highly educated and um and he was he was brought up in a couple different philosophical uh traditions within the scholastic training of 15th century germany one of them is a tradition called uh nominalism the via moderna the new way uh in philosophy associated with a fellow by the name of william of occum and luther credits occam specifically as having a profound influence on the way he understood the faith and religion and the relationship of faith to reason and what characterized occam was the belief that we can't really know the essences of things right that all we can know are names that we assign to entities and uh i'm not going to go into the philosophy of that but the long and the short of it it was the idea of sort of ascribing a name or an identity to something by fiat just i'm just going to declare that's what this is i'm going to call this rather than trying to discern the real inner nature of a thing that's characteristic of occam's mode of doing philosophy okay um uh luther was deeply influenced by uh by german mysticism the rhineland mystics who who had developed a form of mysticism that sought to kind of negate the individual and the and the will and and regard themselves as sort of no account and subsume themselves under this uh this sort of magnificent unknowable god and and then luther of course discovered the writings of saint augustine of hippo and augustine was no protestant he was no lutheran but augustine did put a heavy emphasis on on grace as opposed to works in the life of faith that catholics do that but you know he from luther it was all new and so with this uh kind of his uh neurotic scrupulous conscience reflecting on the works of augustine um trained in rhineland mysticism and in thinking alchemist nominalist thoughts about philosophy luther was reading sacred scripture he tells us it was in the cloaca maybe in the bathroom actually and and he had what he considered to be a kind of breakthrough with his understanding of saint paul and uh i don't regard it as a breakthrough i regarded as a kind of collapse in his understanding of saint paul but uh but he had this sort of moment of what he thought of as inside and believed that this is what paul was saying that in fact when saint paul teaches in the book of romans and galatians that we are justified by faith and not by works of the law luther thought he says oh that means that no works at all there's no moral quality to my life that has anything to do with my justification before god it's just by divine fiat right just god's declaration here comes that alchemist influence again that god is just declaring me to be righteous apart from any intrinsic change in my essential being right and uh and so that's where the doctrine comes from luther invents it and he he's very very explicit about these very articulate about it luther would write a sermon in 1519 called two kinds of righteousness and he would say there is there is a kind of objective moral righteousness the sort that would be recognized in civil society characterized by one's behavior right uh but that's not christian righteousness he says the christian righteousness is this imputed righteousness that is in the inner man that god assigns to you apart from your moral behavior and he goes on to explicate this distinction at great length and it enters into the protestant various protestant systems becomes characteristic of protestant belief and like i talked about that pessimism he had about moral activity well that also came to characterize his his thinking that moral progress was uh was difficult if not impossible to achieve and in in the calvinist rendition of that it gets articulated as a doctrine of total depravity that no matter how much moral progress you would seem to make in life so the calvinists would hold whatever you do is so vitiated by self-love and by sin that it's intrinsically hateful to god and so even the best moral behavior they would hold uh would seem to be offensive to god now i'll give you a caricature of that belief when i west off was growing up as a young protestant a calvinist i attended a protestant school wheaton college in illinois and and i remember a public debate of some seriousness about whether or not we should regard mother teresa mother teresa mother teresa as a christian all right because and this was the position that i heard articulate no matter how good she seems to be no matter how good she seems to be uh it's of no account before god and luther himself had said in his commentary on the galatians that god never smiled on a man for his charity or virtues it was luther's position luther said god never smiled on a man for his charity or virtues so you take that to its logical extreme even the virtue or the sanctity of someone like a mother teresa so my interlocutor is held would be of no account before god now that's not the catholic point of view right the catholic point of view is god cares very much about our charity and virtues so much so that he infuses them into us that salvation is by grace it is by faith but it's but it's a grace that changes us inwardly transforms us inwardly such that the life of love faith hope and charity flow from within us and enable us to to you know if it's your vocation in life even to become someone like a mother teresa and that god absolutely smiles on what he himself has created within us so that's that's the origin of the of the position now in terms of selling this to someone who's not catholic well you know people don't like to be sold on things no and when folks have their heels dug in and they're ideologically committed to a point of view they are typically and i'm guilty of this myself they're typically um resistant to any sort of challenge or defeater and whatever you offer them no matter how sound will that will actually build up resistance in them to the truth that you're trying to offer them and in my own case what persuaded me of the truth of the catholic faith on this point was several things one was decades of study i mean not just not just a week-long seminar but but you know 10 years at least a full-time theological study of the fathers of the church and medieval theology and sacred scripture and so forth and and so the cognitive dissonance that my protestant belief left me with when i began to really confront the scripture and the writings of the fathers and recognize how out of step my protestant upbringing had been with the truth of the catholic faith in scripture that was a very very hard pill to swallow but on top of that i had the cognitive dissonance of my own life you know augustine in uh thinks book eight of the confessions when he talks about his own conversion uh speaks about his own self disgust in his own self-loathing but he experienced before his conversion after his conversion he got rid of all that but his own moral weakness began to really really afflict him and he was he was sort of nauseated at his uh at his moral condition i relate to this intimate right the coming into early adulthood and realizing that i was utterly bereft of the kind of virtues that i needed to live as a husband and a father and a responsible person that hadn't hadn't been infused into me by my faith and i was kind of a moral mess and that i needed something more than faith alone to meet the existential challenges of life but of course that is born out of suffering that's borne out of the actual existential challenges of life and you could that can go one of two ways right you can confront these moral challenges and then you can avoid them you can get into avoidant behaviors and self-destructive behaviors and you can become hardened and you can become a mean person right or if god's grace helps you to do so you might actually be prompted to change and so i think it's a you know it's a it's a complex and question how do you actually change another human being and their point of view in their worldview well god ultimately has to do it there are arguments you can use from scripture and from tradition but they all have to have a motive to change and that usually sort of running up against the dilemma of their own moral weakness realizing i'd really like god's grace to help me change i'm not content with great with faith alone yeah hey thank you so much for your call matthew glad you're watching us today on youtube call to communion here on ewtn be sure to join us tomorrow for more to life tomorrow morning 10 a.m eastern here on ewtn radio are you feeling like your relationships are too much like work well dr greg and lisa pop check will help you reboot those relationships and cultivate stronger bonds that's tomorrow morning 10 a.m eastern right here on ewtn radio let's go now to paul in portland oregon listening on the great modern day radio hey there paul what's on your mind today uh good morning thank you for taking the call just as background uh when i was my mother's an eastern mystic grandparents were catholic uh father's a religious started a study when i was about 24 started with the academic texts niebuhr you know people like that um you know came to conclude that uh i'm catholic you know by opinion but i was going to ask the guest i can't remember his name please forgive me as you say you've been struggling with this for decades and had you know uh decades of training is there a resource or some kind of uh well a resource for you know what i would characterize as fairly advanced questions oh yes i think oh yes plenty of resources all right yeah thank you so a lot of places i would start number one the the the general patrimony of the catholic intellectual tradition is an inexhaustible resource that everyone should avail themselves of and i'm really talking about the full body of reflection of catholic truth in the light of reason carried on by men and women down through the centuries that have emerged as luminaries right and and some of them they feel like the fathers of the church for example or the doctors of the church the church actually publishes a list of who are the sort of luminescent authorities on catholic life and its relationship to reason and and culture and the spiritual life that we should look to as examples and you can go look up the doctors of the church now chief among them would be would be those like saint augustine of hippo all the writings of augustine saint thomas aquinas the cappadocian fathers like gregory nazianzus greg of nessa basil of caesarea uh john chrysostom saint jerome um you know i'd say in the modern world we've had we've been blessed with some tremendous catholic intellects who thought these big thoughts before us uh chief among them would be joseph ratzinger who became pope benedict xvi uh his body of work is an absolutely just just bottomless depth of of of resource wisdom and inside the writings of carol watila pope john paul ii um other great theologians um like auri de lubbach theologian from the early 20th century i would also say if you're looking for specific answers to specific questions you might check the catechism of the catholic church which is you know you just go to the table of contents or the index you know find out what you're looking for now that's true now uh a popular resource uh produced by someone who is very qualified highly qualified seeking to condense this catholic intellectual tradition and to bite-size pieces and use it to actually engage the questions of culture in the modern world is is bishop robert barron oh yeah and his ministry word on fire is uh is designed to do precisely that he baron himself is someone who's deeply schooled in the catholic intellectual tradition um and uh but he's taken that wisdom and insight and he's turned it to things like how does this apply to my analysis of the most recent spider-man movie and uh and sometimes quite brilliantly yeah and it has produced a countless a series of videos on youtube and places like that to bring that kind of reflection to bear on on the questions of culture that are confronting all of us today so there's some great resources for you paul thank you so much for your call let's go now to scott in gilbert arizona listening on sirius xm 130 scott what's on your mind today hello gentlemen yes i had listened to a program the other night jimmy akins was on there and and he had was responding to a caller and he had said we were talking about the real presence of christ in the eucharist and he had said that there are other denominations that do recognize the real presence of christ in the eucharist and i know you know we talked about you know martin luther and those are you know founding fathers of that denomination and they recognized the real presence i think he actually believed in it at one point but my my question is is are these other denominations that recognize the real presence or is the catholic church the only church that reveres and adores and then true agape format the presence of christ and the others have a watered-down version i'm just kind of struggling with what their real yeah thanks i really appreciate the question so let's make a couple of distinctions if we can first of all um when christ founded the church he sent the apostles out to the four corners of the world and as they did so they obviously went to different cultures and language groups and they founded churches and they appointed successors bishops and priests after them and as they celebrated the liturgy and consecrated the eucharist forms cultural forms grew up around the celebration of the eucharist as adornments embellishments that were unique to the cultures in which the apostles planted the gospel and many of those communities continue to exist to this very day and their roots may have been latin they may have been syriac they may have been greek uh they may have even been south indian or or um or east african but they continue in continuity down to the present day having been founded by the first apostles now these some of these churches are in communion with the bishop of rome some of them are not some of them over the centuries have have fallen out of communion with rome but in the thinking of the catholic church they still have the real presence of christ in the eucharist and and uh and their liturgies are valid now um and so you know your orthodox churches for example uh your your greek orthodox greek orthodox churches as well as uh as the you know the coptic church in egypt which is a sort of another animal another another another uh species another category but they they have the real presence of christ and they have they have a valid liturgy all right now something different happened in the reformation of the 16th century um it was more radical it was more radical than simply than simply falling out of obedience to the pope and that's what happened with the orthodox churches in the reformation churches martin luther offered a sort of fundamental rethinking of what it meant to be a christian and came up with a radically new doctrine that was in great discontinuity with the ancient church unlike the orthodox that maintain a very close continuity with the ancient church the protestants proposed a very radical discontinuity in a theory of discontinuity they actually argued for a break in the continuity of christianity down through the centuries that's how they justified this move and they claim to be recovering something pristine but what they were really doing is offering a novel innovative presentation of the christian faith now the question of the real presence was important but far more important was the question of the sacrifice of the mass and you see for catholic the real presence is is not there for no reason the real presence is there first and foremost because the victim who died on calvary is made present to us in the mass and we offer him to god in reparation for the sins of the world this offering of christ this oblation of christ present in the sacred elements we call the sacrifice of the mass now sacrifices when you offer something god offer to god something of value we are offering god the body blood soul and divinity of his own dearly beloved son right and that the doctrine the doctrine that the the liturgy that the mass is in fact a sacrifice or an oblation offered to god that doctrine was completely rejected by martin luther the founder of protestantism he regarded that as an atrocious action and in rejecting the sacrifice of the mass he rejected the doctrine of the catholic priesthood because you see the function of the priest is to offer is to affect the sacrifice and so luther and the protestants that followed him when they rejected the doctrine of the catholic priesthood they actually lost the ability to consecrate the eucharist because they vitiated the the sacrament of ordination the way you make a priest is you ordain him well they eliminated the catholic sacrament of ordination and inserted a new sacrament a new rite of ordination that did not account for the sacrificial nature of the priesthood and as such they lost the sacrifice of the mass they lost the priesthood therefore they lost the real presence too and so there's something very very different about their celebration of christian worship now they all had different accounts of the real presence they had different theories of the real presence luther believed in the real presence but he thought that christ was present without the disappearance of bread and wine see catholics believe bread and wine become the body and blood of christ luther says well bread and wine stick around and christ comes along to join the party right that's his view of the real presence the calvinists had a really strange doctrine of real presence their view was that bread and wine stay around that jesus stays in heaven that the body and blood of christ stay in heaven but the holy spirit unites what's distant in space namely the body and blood of christ with the worshipper on earth through faith in a mysterious or mystical manner that's only knowable by faith and so there's no actual local presence even though there really is a substantial partaking of christ's body and blood now that's so confusing yeah that most people who followed calvin just threw that out and just said ash just a symbol yeah okay there you go scott appreciate that thanks uh for your question it's a good one call to communion here on ewtn let's go to karen in cincinnati right now a first-time caller listening on the great sacred heart radio hey there karen what's on your mind today oh hello my question is um think about the coming catholic because i do believe it is the true church founded by christ my concern is for my fellow protestant relatives or myself still what happens if so if there's only in the catholic church does teach there's only one way to salvation it's through the sacrament through the catholic church so what happens to all these protestants who i believe or many of them who do love jesus are never going to become catholic because they've never been introduced to it for whatever reason location their town they live in it or better so so are these individuals given a choice to um declare the true faith at the moment of death because i understand the question okay yes thank you so much so so uh uh the way the catholic church understands this is that it is not necessary for a person to have a conscious and explicit knowledge of the catholic faith in order to be saved by the catholic church and so the the premise of your question well do they have an opportunity to explicitly acknowledge the catholic faith before they die is unnecessary it's not necessary to have an explicit affirmation of the catholic faith in order to be saved now christ established the catholic church as the instrument and sign of his grace in the world and so that's the most efficacious means for us to come to sanctity and holiness but it's not the only means for us to come to sanctity and holiness if anyone is saved they're ultimately saved through the mediation of the church all right because maybe they've laid hold of just some element of catholic faith and protestants have many elements of catholic faith they don't have the whole show they don't have the whole package but they've got elements and those elements can be for them a means of redemption and sanctification and salvation and so if a protestant threw no fault of their own they've never heard the catholic faith it's never been made intelligible to them but they love god and they love christ they love their neighbor and they have the grace of god in their heart you know because let's say they've got 66 books of the bible in baptism right and they and they squeeze a lot of good out of those 66 books in baptism well sure they can be saved they can be saved heck if all you had was the gospel of matthew in baptism you could be saved if you just had baptism in the natural law you could be saved and believe it or not if all you had was the natural law and you cooperated with the grace that god made available to you you know according as you were able as your as you had light then you also could be saved so why then become catholic that's the question if potentially anybody could be saved then why become catholic because within the catholic church we have the fullness of the truth the fullness of the means of grace the fullness of that visible unity that christ intends for the world so you're better off being catholic but being outside the visible structure of the catholic church does not condemn you to a damnation far from it okay karen we hope that is uh helpful for you and uh thank you so much for your call we'll be praying for you on your way into the catholic faith uh please please lord that would be fantastic dr david andrews uh very glad to welcome you back to these microphones so glad to be back tom yeah yeah and i'm glad you had a good time in boston rain notwithstanding that's right thank you don't forget we do this program live monday through friday 2 p.m eastern here on ewtn with an encore at 11 pm eastern we also bring you a podcast anytime you wish by going to ewtnradio.net ewtnradio.net you can subscribe to it get it every day there in your inbox just for you it's a wonderful thing we'll usually have that posted for you within an hour or two of the end of the broadcast on behalf of our fantastic team i'm tom price along with dr david anders thanks for joining us see you tomorrow right here on ewtn's call to communion god bless war of words conservative senator

Channel: EWTN

Views: 3,203

Rating: 4.8762889 out of 5

Keywords: Catholic, EWTN, Christian, television

Id: 9IO4sQu9pGc

Length: 54min 5sec (3245 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 13 2021