Called to Communion with Dr. David Anders: Pro-life Church (February 26, 2022)

what's stopping you from becoming a catholic why can't women become priests why do catholics worship mary why do i need to confess my sins to a priest where is purgatory in the bible i think the pope has too much authority what's stopping you you are called to communion with dr david anders on the ewtn global catholic radio network hey everybody welcome again to call the communion here on ewtn this is the program for our non-catholic brothers and sisters sisters and and if that is you if you are a non-catholic maybe you were an active catholic years ago maybe you've never been a catholic but in any event you've got a question or two about the catholic faith you're looking to get an answer for those questions do give us a call 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 those of you watching us on tv today you can participate as well our email address ctc at ewtn.com ctc at ewtn.com charles berry is our producer matt kabinski phone screener jeff burson handles social media for us and uh i am tom price along with dr david anderson thompson good to see you good to see you my friend how was your weekend that was very nice thank you how was yours couldn't be better well actually i was working on tax i was working on taxes could have been better we're going to lead off with a very interesting objection that we received from kelly watching us on youtube kelly had this to say on a recent show you spoke of narcissism wouldn't you say that the church's political positions such as opposition to abortion are narcissistic yeah thank you i'm not sure i even understand the question i mean i understand the words in the question but i don't see how you could construe uh a position in moral theology that calls on people to respect the inherent dignity of every other human life as narcissistic i'm i'm failing to see the connection here it is a little baffling maybe they're maybe rather than narcissistic maybe they're saying uh you know kind of a kind of an arrogance so who knows what's wrong i could i could imagine someone taking this position saying like if you have a moral or theological conviction uh you should keep that to yourself and you shouldn't seek to legislate that universally on society right i i could i could see someone taking that point of view okay the problem is is that like to take that stance is to violate your own principle because you just did it well yeah right i mean we we can't avoid making moral choices uh and and if we're going to live well together as people we have to have principles that we can all agree to and that we may instantiate in the form of legislation right now you depending on how much pluralism there is in a society and how much uh diversity the common ground that we have might shrink to virtually nothing we might we might only be able to agree on the contours of a political process right but then that leaves you with no basis for actually legislating right any any kind of legislation proceeds from some conception of the human good now the catholic position begins with the assumption not the assumption begins with the conviction of human dignity that whatever we do in society it ought to benefit everyone and we should privilege in fact we should have a sort of preferential option for those who cannot help themselves now if you you may not agree with that you may think you know might makes right and i'm for the ubermensch and let's stomp on other people i mean that might be your political philosophy that's not the political philosophy that the catholic church begins from but with this preferential option for the weakest among us now if you look at society and well who are the weakest among us clearly the unborn of course got to be all right and uh kelly thank you so much for your question here's one now from ludiana who's checking in on youtube from kingston jamaica uh ludiana says my question is how do i explain to my protestant friends our belief in perusia and not the rapture sure easily so the the the parisian parasia uh greek word just refers to the second coming of jesus well the biblical teaching is that christ will in fact come again and that's the catholic confession we believe that christ will come again at the end of time and that will include saint paul's thessalonian correspondents makes clear our being caught up into the air with the lord when he returns and having our bodies translated from these bodies of flesh and to the spiritual bodies that will not be subject to death and will be with the lord and like him forever so that's the catholic belief that's not what protestants mean when they talk about the rapture they have many other beliefs beyond that that get tied in for example most people who believe in the rapture also believe that that at the end of time or towards the end of time that the nation-state of israel will will actually rebuild a jewish temple in jerusalem and reinstitute temple sacrifices that's part and parcel of the whole worldview of the rapture dispensationalism believes in a restored jewish temple and jewish sacrifices the catholic church does not believe that that is in any way necessary for the un for the fulfillment of god's purposes i mean it's not intrinsic to the nature of redemption i should put it that way that uh that jews offer sacrifice in a temple in jerusalem and when christ comes back it will certainly not be to reinstitute temple sacrifices but that is exactly what what dispensationalists believe they think that jesus will rule for a thousand years on a physical throne in jerusalem and they'll sacrifice goats and bulls as they did under the old covenant so that's we don't think that don't think the new testament teaches that another thing that dispensationalists rapture people believe is that jesus will come three times not just twice the catholic church along with sacred scripture teaches that christ comes first in the incarnation and then a second time at the end of time the dispensationalists add another coming they add a secret coming someplace towards the end where christ yanks all the quote unquote true believers out of space and time he sort of pulls them out of the picture and and then unleashes a whole series of tribulations at the end of which time jesus comes back with his raptured church and they set up this hebraic kingdom in jerusalem so there's a whole apparatus there that's really derived ultimately from a kind of wooden fundamentalist reading of the old testament that assumes that every word in the old testament has to be literally fulfilled not just spiritually fulfilled in the church and this is a fairly recent phenomenon 19th century yeah dispensationalism is a 19th century invention so even even early protestants didn't know anything about this rapture business okay well there you go and uh lou diana we hope that is helpful for you thanks for watching us uh today on youtube in kingston jamaica got to visit kingston jamaica to do a little missionary work a few years ago visiting working with the missions of the poor missionaries of the poor you remember that i i know that y'all been down there father richard holland fantastic yes oh wonderful beautiful country too in a moment we're going to get to the phones at 833 288 ewtn that's 833-288-3986 it is called a communion here on ewtn do stay with us [Music] it's called a communion here on ewtn our phone number 833 288 ewtn that's 833-288-3986 if you're watching us on ewtn television today you can participate by shooting us an email ctc at ewtn.com ctc at ewtn.com i want to get to a question here from carissi watching us on facebook karisi says why do seventh-day adventists say that catholics worship idols and attack catholics for worshiping idols yeah thank you so this criticism is not unique to seventh-day adventists uh it's uh it's actually very ancient in the church they've always been detractors against the church's practice of venerating icons and images and of course in uh within protestantism this this critique was found in the very beginning not not among all protestants but among a very large portion of them especially uh the reformed tradition that emerged out of switzerland zurich and geneva in particular and then the protestantism as it's practiced in the anglo-american context is very heavily influenced by calvinism so that that antipathy towards catholic veneration of saints and of icons and images is deeply woven into the whole fabric of protestantism so the origins of this are interesting um you know the the ten commandments say that you should not make graven images and bow down to them and worship them and is catholics number the commandments that is that is adjoined to the first commandment don't have other gods before yahweh and don't make images of those gods and don't bow down and worship them so the whole thing is the condemnation of idolatry and of course catholics abhor idolatry and we would we would avoid idolatry at all costs and many catholics have gone to their death by martyrdom rather than engage in idolatry but it cannot mean what the calvinists think it means they'll see what the calvinists did and and the zwinglians as well as they they considered the prohibition against images to be a sort of stand-alone commandment they will number it as the second commandment and calyx don't number the commandments that way and say well this is just a prohibition just a plain prohibition against any use of sacred art or imagery and worship and so ulrich zwingli the the zurich reformer whitewashed the church in zurich took all artwork out of the church even took organs out of the church in church music and so it kind of became a staple of calvinist or reformed worship to worship in a bare white-washed room with no ornamentation at all and sometimes even no instrumentation and they wouldn't even allow uh for the the composing of hymns uh the only singing that was allowed were uh metrical settings of the psalms so biblical texts and there was a principle that emerged in the reformed church called the regulative principle of worship which said that you can't do anything in sacred worship that you can't warrant directly from the pages of the bible that was the position right and they took that to mean that you couldn't have any graven images well you could have any images of any kind in sacred worship now it always struck me as odd because if you will read uh god's commandments to moses about the construction of the tabernacle and later the temple you'll find that he commanded the production of images and lots of them many of them israelite worship was not devoid of images so in fact uh the ark of the covenant the holiest item the holiest artifact in hebrew religion had had angels uh on the lid on the cover and and you had images of angels and of pomegranates and all kinds of beasts of the earth and so forth adorning uh the space of sacred worship in israel so the bible not only fails to condemn in fact commands the use of sacred artwork in in worship so where did zwingli get this idea from how did he arrive at this interpretation of the bible so personal opinion and well and not just mind it's also a scholarly opinion who have from people who studied zwingli uh many people think that zwingli was heavily influenced by a particular school of renaissance platonism a philosophical school that was had a deep antipathy towards the body and things physical and that his conception of religious life was overly intellectualized and that his philosophical predilections bled into his biblical interpretation and colored it so that he found in sacred scripture things that other people in the catholic church fail to find there if you want a good book that explores that thesis that's by carlos iyer e i r e the title of the book is the war against idols and it's about the the uh this political position on the destruction of images in reformed worship now i think the seventh-day adventist impulse is just born out of that same that same historical stream okay very good karisi thank you so much for checking us out on facebook it's called communion here on ewtn with dr david anders if you're ready now let's go to the phones at 833 288 ewtn we begin here with steve in gettysburg pennsylvania listening on his alexa device hey there steve what's on your mind today hey good afternoon hey thanks for i really appreciate your show guys thank you um so i had a question for dr david anders um he had mentioned i think it was last week that he was very skeptical of claims of you know finding uh saint relics in the middle ages and i know dr david anders is a great admirer of st augustine and i was curious um because i think the bones of saint stephen or the grave was of saint stephen was found when 4 15 or sometime around that time danny gustin had a lot of right had a lot to write about that i think in it was the city of god or something i don't know all the details but i was curious to get dr david anders thoughts on that and and of course you know saint augustine really isn't anyone's fool so i'm sure i mean he i think he was convinced those relics were were genuine so i was just curious to get dr david anderson's thoughts yeah sure absolutely i really appreciate the question so to be clear i'm a huge fan of relics and of course i affirm the catholic dogma on the suitability of venerating the relics of the saints and in fact um i i have saints relics in my home that i venerate and occasionally i'm i'm blessed to visit a fellow catholic who's sort of replete with relics you know in their house or we have a monastery in our diocese that's a very old monastery it has a very nice reliquary that's open to the public and i i really really really like i appreciate very much to be able to venerate the relics of so many different saints and i will take for granted i will presume uh the legitimacy of any relic that has you know a stamp of approval from the church and is in a reliquary and has been blessed and so forth and uh and i'll i'll go from that and so if somebody some comes to me this app you know i have a relic of mary magdalene or whatever i'm not going to fail to venerate it right i'm going to venerate the relic now that being said i'm keenly aware that there was a traffic in relics in the middle ages that became quite uh excessive and it's something that catholic commentators from the era remark on people like erasmus of rotterdam who was a great satirist a devout catholic but he he had an eye for the satirical and he could he knew how to make fun of foolishness when he saw it uh got endless fun out of sort of ribbing people for their credulity and you've probably heard me tell the story about the medieval relic salesman who shows up in town and offers to hawk the head of john the baptist and the townspeople are not such fools they say we've already got the head of john the baptist and his response is no no this is the head of john the baptist as a child and the fact of the matter is is there were multiple multiple competing uh claims to possessing the very same relic by different parties so they're clearly clearly spurious relics in circulation in the middle ages and probably today as well my skepticism is simply that the the older the claim and the more noble and august the saint being claimed uh the the higher the likelihood that it's probably spurious right not genuine you get into modern saints uh well if you have a if you have a a call to shrine to a saint that's well attested from antiquity and has sort of been a sort of uninterrupted tradition of veneration of say a particular uh cemetery for example where that saint was known to have been born have been buried that seems a little bit more credible to me and also the modern saints the church takes great care now with the care of bodies of of the dead and someone is in the beatification process they'll exhume the body and this sort of thing so much more certainty about that now how to handle saint augustine's taking at face value a claim of having discovered the relics of some say in his own date well of course i wasn't there and i don't have the tools to discern and i i'm not going to be able to do a dna test against the original because we don't have the original so there's no way for me to assess of lydia of the claim um augustine was nobody's fool as you as you rightly uh uh hold and i believe that he also lived long before the era the fully developed tradition of sort of critical historical consciousness that we have today now he was no mean historian i mean he city of god is a deep philosophical engagement with history and the philosophy of history but i you know he he probably was more prone than i would be to naively accept the judgment of a local catholic community does that in any way impugn augustine as a source of wisdom uh for catholic living and catholic thinking catholic theology and philosophy by no means you know philosophy proceeds from generalities not from specifics it looks at what are those elements of human experience that are universal and tries to derive universal principles with universal import that's the way philosophy works and augustine had a philosophical mind second to none but he's also a man of his times but if you present me with a relic of saint augustine i'm venerating all day long there you go steve thanks so much for your call that opens up a line for you right now at 833 288 ewtn that's 833 288 3986 or if you're watching us today on tv shoot us an email ctc at ewtn.com it is called to communion with dr david anders here on ewtn let's go now to kathy in south bend indiana listening on the great redeemer radio hello kathy what's on your mind today hi thank you for taking my call sure just want to say well i'm a creative catholic we've raised our three children catholics my son is a young adult he's 22. questioning things uh here's something interesting he said the other day i'd never heard of this author before benny shannon so my son said and i'm kind of embarrassed to ask this or i just kind of want your opinion and maybe what i can say to my son but um he said i think he'd read a read a book and also saw a podcast by benny shannon so he claims that the ancient israelites and moses were on hallucinogens when moses went up mount sinai and that's why moses thought he saw god and the ten commandments and the whole thing um i guess because the acacia tree the bark of the acacia tree has a dimethyltryptamine in it and that he this author benny shannon feels like the ancient israelites were consuming the bark and they were all on hallucinogens when this whole episode of moses happened so um i do believe my son is bordering on being an agnostic so uh if there's maybe another book or resource maybe i could suggest for him besides this person benny shannon and his outlandish claims um but i wasn't sure what to say to him i was like i'm sorry i've never heard of him sure i think i can help i think i can help appreciate the question so there is no doubt that people take mind-altering drugs and have overwhelming and overpowering experiences to which they assign a spiritual significance i mean is that we had a hippie movement in the 60s and 70s that was largely fueled by just this kind of thinking and you know many of those people permanently damaged their their rationality and iqs in in consequence which is a great shame but they were seeking transcendent experience and they settled you know for garden variety intoxication really is what it boils down to in many cases now that being said lots of things can create mind-altering situations for people you can get a runner's high you know you can you can you can become deeply engrossed in your work or in music and you can have a feeling of sort of losing touch with yourself and being uh sort of immersed in some activity that you find overwhelmingly meaningful or pleasurable or significant and make you sort of forget your nattering self-conscious narcissism for a little while and that can appear to give you a sense of liberation and you can want more of that sense that we recognize that now i think it's one of the reasons and this is a benevolent form you know music can do that for people with less harm than psychedelics why is music so often associated with religious practice i think that's why i mean and this is even within a christian context people can engage in the practice of music and they have a sense of being drawn out of themselves into something beautiful and maybe not transcendent in a metaphysical sense but it transcends them and it binds them to the people around them in a way where they're all sort of sharing a common experience uh you know that's that's that's beyond words and that's what music does and it's quite beautiful and it's it's from a catholic point of view it's right and appropriate that anything that's harmless you know in itself it's not malevolent or dangerous and drugs of course are tremendously dangerous but something like music or or sort of losing myself in my work or or our collective activities of one kind or another that can give me that sense of belonging to to a greater whole into meaning these things should be incorporated in our religious lives because we are embodied creatures you know we're not gnostics that think the religious life is merely at the level of the imagined uh or the conceptual but it involves our total person and all our affectivity and our will and our emotions and all of those capacities of the human person to self-transcend we ought to bring all that to the service of the love of god and neighbor now the catholic insight i think that's quite profound and quite important is that the true spiritual uh experience the the true kind of self-transcendence to which we ought to aim is an ethical self-transcendence where those things are put in the service of the greater or the common good you know in my younger days i used to visit rock concerts and sometimes there were people who considered themselves quite spiritually enlightened you know if you follow my thinking oh yeah and i found them more or less generally to be tremendously selfish and sensual people who used the language of spirituality to justify a lot of self-indulgence and they really wouldn't wouldn't be able to rationally pursue the common good so i think one of the ultimate signs of self-transcendence in a genuinely spiritual way would be an activity like forgiveness or or when when a person moves from being an arrogant so-and-so to a humble man now we're talking about self-transcendence that really really matters and so there's a tremendous literature on this in the catholic tradition the the catholic spiritual tradition the likes of teresa of avila john of the cross saint augustine who were discussing earlier his confessions all tremendous books about transcendence and spiritual experience which has zero to do with psychedelic drug use now the claim that moses was tripping on top of mount sinai is just simply not verifiable yeah it's not verifiable at all i mean this is just this is just speculation by someone who wants to make hay all right kathy thanks so much for your call in a moment we're going to go to a max in houston also john in florida there's a line with your name on it right now at 833 288 ewtn for call to communion with dr david andrews do stay with us [Music] hey what's stopping you from becoming a catholic let's talk about that here on ewtn's call to communion with dr david anders our phone number 833-288 ewtn that's 833-288-3986 or if you're watching today on tv shoot us an email ctc at ewtn.com we'd love to hear from you let's go to max now in houston listening on the ewtn app a free download hey there max what's on your mind today sir uh yes sir i had a question here um the way i understand it mary is full of grey and could have been but her grace failed will didn't let her why then did adam and eve if they were made perfect then were they not full of grace or did mary have some kind of and bad advantage yeah thank you i appreciate the question mary had a tremendous advantage over adam and eve and it is definitely not the catholic opinion that she was capable of sen that's that's not that that is not the catholic opinion at all there's no there's no certainty that she was capable of sin and in fact a a very strongly held opinion among theologians is that she was impeccable that it was not possible for her to sin um and in view of precisely this dignity of being granted the immaculate conception and the fullness she had grace the plenitude of grace as much grace as a human being could ever attain uh and more so right i mean it just an un imaginable quantity of grace well it's not something you really quantify but but um in view of this tremendous dignity of having been chosen by god to be the mother of god which is not something that pertains to eve at all eve was chosen to be the mother of the human race and she was given sufficient grace to fulfill that task worthily sufficient grace not not an efficacious grace to preserve her necessarily from every sin but sufficient grace to be preserved from sin had she chosen to cooperate and to worthily become the mother of the progenitor of of the human race well adam's the progenitor and but mary was given uh sufficient grace to be the mother of god worthily [Music] now think about the respective positions you know between being a good human mom of a human person and being a mom who can worthily bear and parent god no comparison no comparison okay appreciate that max thank you so much uh for your call today let's go now to john on uh palm coast florida on the coast right there he's watching us on ewtn television john what's on your mind today sir yes hi david hi how are you today i'm fine thanks how about you okay great uh listen i'm a lifelong catholic and i'm a senior citizen so i've always wondered where and how when where and how did our mass originate what a wonderful question yes i really appreciate the question so we can read about the origin of the mass in a number of places probably my favorite account of the origin of the mass comes from this 22nd chapter of the gospel of luke on holy thursday in the upper room when jesus christ took bread and said this is my body given for you do this and memory of me and then after the supper he took the cup and said this is the new covenant in my blood which is poured out for you christ instituted the holy sacrifice of the mass and ordained the apostles as priests in the upper room on holy thursday and saint paul who is the earliest new testament writer he's writing before the gospel of luke was written in his first letter to the corinthians gives a very similar account of the origin of the mass and he specifically notes that he had this by way of sacred tradition that it was handed on to him as it had been received from others and so he was conscious of receiving a tradition that went back to the earliest days of well christ's institution even though you know paul lived just a few decades later and yet the celebration of the mass as a ritual was already being handed down by way of sacred and apostolic oral tradition now over time as christianity spread throughout the world embellishments grew up around the mass and those embellishments differed depending on the culture where christianity was translated and as christianity became embedded in a latin-speaking culture those embellishments grew into what we now call the latin rite and so most catholics in the western world belong to the latin rite of the catholic church and our liturgy derives out of that particular cultural heritage there are other rites in the catholic church some of them greek for example some syriac some coptic some assyrian or chaldean and in many respects they're similar some respects they are different the assyrians are particularly different from the rest of the catholic world in the formulation of their right but they all have this one core thing in common the use of bread and wine consecrated by a priest to become the body and blood of christ given for us and offered to god in sacrifice all right and john thank you so much for your call hope that's helpful for you there on palm coast florida call to communion with dr david andrews here on ewtn our phone number is 833 288 ewtn that's eight 833 three nine eight six if you call right now we can probably get you on today's program let's go now to michael in washington and uh michael's got a great question what would that be michael the question is what is the catholic response to a protestant who makes the inquiry have you been saved yes thank you i really appreciate the question uh i love to be asked this question by protestants and i answer different ways depending on my mood okay okay but i think the best thing to do would be to say what do you mean by the word what do you mean by the word because if i say yes he will misunderstand me and if i say no he will misunderstand me because we don't mean the same thing by the word what many protestants mean is they imagine that there is a specific moment in time in a person's life when they can be certain of having passed from a tradition of from not a tradition excuse me having passed from a condition of being alienated from god to a position of being reconciled to god in such a way that they now know with certainty and with no exception that they will go to heaven when they die and so when they ask you the question are you saved what they mean is did you have this moment in time when you passed from alienation or disinterest or rebellion against god to reconciliation with god such that you now know with certainty that you will go to heaven when you die that's what they mean when they ask the question are you saved now i think it is a false question because i do not think that there is any such legitimate experience i know that there are people who claim to have had such an experience i say that they are deceiving themselves because sacred scripture and sacred tradition and reason all tell us that it is impossible for an individual to know right now in historical time with certainty that they will necessarily be reconciled to god for all eternity now the entirety of the biblical tradition stands against that conviction all of the new testament is filled with admonitions to stay the course to persevere to the end and indicates numerous opportunities real certainties in fact that people who begin the life of grace in christ can and do depart from it never to return so ii peter for example the epistle of ii peter says explicitly it is better never to have entered the way of righteousness than to set foot on it and then turn back the book of hebrews says precisely the same thing saint paul when he wrote the letter to the galatians addressed people who he said you have been born again you have the spirit you have been clothed with christ and you are in danger of going to hell because you're stepping away from your first love you're turning off on another path you started right now you're wrong all right so the the new testament position does not allow for this language of have you been definitively determinedly permanently saved doesn't permit for that and even reason apart from revelation reveals to us many people who begin religious life with fervor and all the signs internal and external of of genuineness and of growth and virtue and then who fall away and wreck their lives and die without faith and it takes only a very obstinate and ideological i think and very narrow perspective to try to make of such people uh well you know they weren't really safe to begin with or or you know some kind of justification like that yeah and what boils down to is if that's you the position you take well all those who fall away weren't weren't really safe to begin with then it just goes to my point that you can't have certainty right because those people had every internal external subjective objective indication they were doing what the other people who claim to be saved were doing and yet they still fell away it leaves to the paradox that a former presbyterian acquaintance of mine articulated he says well you know the saved know for sure they're going to heaven and i might be one of them well the problem is they don't know for sure they're going to heaven right jesus's admonition in matthew 24 was whoever perseveres to the end will be saved so my here's my position here's my position when someone asks me this question what how do i understand subjectively my religious life i have encountered jesus christ in the bible and in the catholic church and in sacred tradition and in the persons of his saints and in holy men and women that i have known that's how i have encountered him i am captivated by the person of christ and i would like my life to be lived in imitation of jesus's life and i'm doing a fairly poor job of it now thank you very much but i do have confession and i have the sacraments to keep me on track so i will make every effort to persevere to the end to grow in virtue and holiness and to conform myself to jesus because that's the path of life that he has set out for me and it is a good path of life it's a path that leads to rationality to self-control to resilience to virtue and to simple human goodness and so i'm going to walk that path uh as hard as i can as long as i can but i trust not in my own strength because i know that i could get off that path at any minute i could stumble in grievous ways many people have done so and may god preserve me until the end absolutely all right michael thank you and that really was a great question appreciate hearing from you today in washington call to communion with dr david andrews here on ewtn our phone number 833 288 ewtn that's 833-288-3986 i want to remind you to join us for a stalwart of catholic radio and that would be catholic answers live now on the air for almost golly i think 25 years or so check it out on ewtn radio 6 pm eastern monday through friday and of course ewtn radio is the exclusive radio home for catholic answers live it's a wonderful wonderful program answers an awful lot of questions just like we try to do here monday through friday on call to communion let's go right now to uh mary mary is listening in michigan on sirius xm channel 130. mary what's on your mind today hi thank you so much for taking my call uh i have a question about valid baptism my children were affected by the technicality of the priest saying we baptize you instead of i baptize you and so the baptism and all subsequent um sacraments were not valid and it really put a strain but anyway i i've grown in my faith and i've grown from being a kid thinking jesus is doing a check mark that you went to mass and all that kind of thing and i know it's more about a relationship so i just want to understand why the church would take this position that seems like a technicality like a check mark yeah thanks i really appreciate the question so let me let me draw a distinction that might help you and i was having a conversation once with a canonist friend of mine about impediments for validity in marriage so it's not the sacrament of baptism it's a different sacrament right but this is an era where where what might appear to some people to be technicalities occupy the vast majority of of judicial rulings in the day-to-day life of the church courts it is regulation of marriage is is kind of the that's the bread and butter of your typical canonist right that's where they spend all their time and and i was a little bit worried you know an analogous question namely um a lot of people running around in invalid marriages or what would probably be found to be invalid marriages if they were subjected to scrutiny and they don't know about it and it i had i was expressing some concern for perhaps the spiritual state of these individuals and and what the church had a sort of a duty of obligation to be more diligent about getting the word out or whatnot and the candidates made an interesting and i think pertinent observation she said to me well remember that the job of a candidate has determined validity but we leave grace up to god right and and we always recognize that god himself is not bound by the sacramental form that's true god and and clearly in sacred history there are bountiful examples of god extending grace to people through some medium other than the sacraments basically everybody before the coming of christ who was a saint who was a holy person experienced god's grace participated in god's grace in some extra sacramental form and some of them even outside the household of israel all the characters in genesis 1 to 11 that were identified as men and women of god who walked with god some of them even translated to heaven like enoch did so without the benefit of the christian sacraments righteous job a man in whom there was no fault somebody else it wasn't even an israelite so we recognize that god can extend grace to people in ways known only to himself and god is certainly not going to penalize an individual oh well you know i wanted to let you in heaven but gosh that priest said we you know god's not going to do that and we know that that's not how god functions okay but does it matter that we have principles to define a valid sacrament well of course it does and here's why the sacraments are for our benefit all right they're not they're they're not for god's benefit he doesn't need them we do and christ instituted them and they have a determinate form and content because well two reasons what is a sacrament well it's an efficacious sign a sign that actually accomplishes what is signified it's an efficacious sign instituted by christ by which divine life is transmitted given to us that's the church's definition now look at both sides of that definition it's it's efficacious it intrinsically con contains the grace that's signified and it signifies now the catechism also teaches because they signify because they are signs the sacraments also teach so what are you teaching the whole counsel of god i hope and uh there are times when people want to monkey with the words of the sacraments because they have some say ideological motive for example let me take another sacrament let's take uh well it's the same sacrament different problem uh when people want to baptize in the name of the creator in the redeemer and the sanctifier rather than the father son and holy spirit now why why do people why are people motivated to do this generally these days is because of a sort of misplaced concern for gender equity they don't like to use gendered terms like father and son in reference to god and so they they'll improve on the baptismal formula so you know so to speak so to speak okay does that do any harm to anybody well clearly at first of all at the level of teaching certainly it does all right because father and son as applied to the godhead are not terms about sexual uh differentiation and and the person who takes them that way misunderstands the nature of trinitarian language father and son don't describe biological relations within the trinity but but relations of persons to whom son and father are the best human analogs right namely begetting and affiliation right is the is the way the distinction works and that tells me something about the inner life of god the inner communion of persons in the godhead that to which my life should become conformed now if i use instead the language of creator redeemer and sanctifier it makes it sound like god is just differentiating roles yes and there's an ancient heresy called sibelianism or modalism that teaches that three persons of the trinity really aren't three persons at all they're just different functions you know like god's a postman on mondays and he's a fireman on tuesdays and you know he's a he's a pop star on thursdays you know and one day he's a creator one day he's a redeemer and that tells you nothing however that sort of imagery tells you nothing about the inner life of trinitarian communion and so out of a misplaced desire for say gender equity they actually mangle the catholic doctrine on god so it fails to teach what we need to know to really develop our inner lives so that's one reason why the proper formula is important it's also important for the efficacious part for the inner life of the sanctuary for the power of the sacrament because we need to have certainty about if a sacrament has been validly performed so that we can have certainty about the offer of grace so take a sacrament-like confession one of the great things about confession is that when i go to confession i don't have to guess i know that god has offered me the grace of forgiveness now the form of the sacrament reflects the reality the words i absolve you in the name of the father son and holy spirit reflect the reality that absolution genuinely is offered to me by god the sign conforms to the reality by having rules about validity if i go to confession i am not left in doubt i the recipient know with certainty that i have been absolved now do priests ever mangle the words of the absolution it has happened it has happened some priests again out of a kind of misplaced concern for equity and sort of democracy uh will will present from saying i absolve you and they'll say well god forgives you not the same thing not the same thing well i know god forgives me in a general way what i want is certainty that he has extended forgiveness to me not in some general way but right here and now through the medium of the sacrament and the language the specification of the word not only conforms to the reality but also gives me a objective basis to know with certainty that i have been absolved and so it is an act of mercy on the church's part not to let any priest do willy-nilly whatever he wants but to specify you must say these words now uh what do we do when somebody has messed it up and we're the church or you're a bishop yeah and you find out you've had a priest who's been out in left field for you know 30 years and has mishandled people has been passed sort of pastoral uh ineptitude or maybe malice i don't know what the motive is right what do you do in that circumstance you proceed with kid gloves in my judgment you treat those people with such kindness and sensitivity you do not send them a bureaucratic letter in the mail ordering them to show up you know next thursday at 11 59 a.m for their baptism no no no you go to them and you accompany them and you apologize and you make it good to them sure but you still insist on the form okay mary is that helpful for you i appreciate that so much thank you and i i guess that's part of what i'm struggling with too because one of the ones that just got a letter and said you need to fix it and it's just alienating as a lifelong catholic very like you're walking sure very alienating i'm right there with you and if this happened to me i'd be mad as a snake yeah i'd be like you don't deserve this you don't you deserve the sacraments validly performed and charitably performed i like your your phrase of kid gloves yep just give them that respect appreciate your call thank you so much mary here's a quick one now from bradley watching on facebook what should we believe about the writings of anne catherine emmerich what level of trust should we give them i've ran into some folks who put more faith in writing such as these and study them more often than they do the bible or the catechism all right and catherine emmerich what do we what do we believe there yes so um and catholic emeric and other people who claim the status of visionary right when someone in the church says that some sacred person a saint or jesus of the blessed virgin mary has appeared to them and revealed some information to them uh how seriously should we take those those claims we should certainly not take any such claim with the level of seriousness or devotion that is due to sacred scripture or sacred tradition certainly not because these fall under the category of what the church calls private revelation private revelation now when christ commanded the apostles to go into all nations make disciples and teach everything he had commanded them that is the church's public revelation those things that were taught by christ or that are immediately entailed by them developments from them as human reason and the tradition of the church has explored and tried to penetrate the depths of christ's teaching and make it applicable in a kind of universal way right all of that is the public teaching of the church that's what we are to hand on when we make disciples that's what we need for salvation saint peter says that in the promises of christ we have all we need emphasis all we need for life and godliness that's what saint peter says all we need for life and godliness from the public teaching of the church because it's about such things as the life of virtue and growing in grace and repentance from sin and holiness and asceticism and renouncing evil and that kind of business it's the general contours of the spiritual life you can apply it in your own concrete circumstance in your own way but that's the general teaching of the church now what these uh provisionaries claim is to have had specific information that may or may not be applicable to a specific individual or to a specific set of individuals yes if somebody comes to you and says you know well god has told me that you're supposed to marry my niece right that's a that would be a classic example of someone claiming private revelation for a specific purpose and uh and you know your answer to that question would be well he hasn't told me yet [Laughter] right um can god speak to people through private revelation of course he can he's gotta do whatever he wants sure are there many spurious claims to private revelation all day long and twice on sundays right um every once in a while and just because somebody's a saint doesn't mean their private revelations are heretical or true either right every once in a while the church will sort of nod the head to a visionary and say this is maybe a little bit more worthy of consideration but never at the level of public revelation very good bradley thanks for your question via facebook and dr david anders thank you sir thank you tom remember that we do this program on ewtn radio monday through friday 2 p.m eastern with an encore at 11 pm eastern on behalf of our fantastic team i'm tom price along with dr david anders thanks for joining us we'll see you next time right here on ewtn's call to communion with dr david andrews god bless

Channel: EWTN

Views: 867

Keywords: clc, clc16239, ytsync-en

Id: KYvTFBEd2aQ

Length: 50min 29sec (3029 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 28 2022