Matthew Leonard's Catholic Conversion Story: How the Son of a Protestant Pastor found the faith

anyone has anything to add to the sharing okay otherwise we would go right into the today's talk um just before we um i'll just introduce our guest basically just before he comes on um i'll just quickly read out his profile so our guest for today is a matthew leonard and he is an international speaker also podcast and founder of next level catholic and his website is clearly stated here um next level catholic academy.com an online membership community focused on teaching catholic spirituality he is an accomplished filmmaker he has written produced directed and hosted multiple best-selling catholic video series such as the bible and the virgin mary and genesis to jesus which have been translated into almost a dozen languages a convert to catholicism and former missionary to latin america sorry can everyone hear me can anyone hear me all right can you hear me yes we can also muted yeah please go ahead okay thank you okay so others continue um he's an accomplished filmmaker he has written produced directed and hosted multiple best-selling catholic video series such as the bible and the virgin mary and genesis to jesus which have been translated into almost a dozen languages he's a convert to catholicism and former missionary to latin america on television programs across the chapters in theology from franciscan university of steubenville and is the author of two books louder than words the art of living as a catholic and prayer works getting agreed on catholic spirituality he lives in ohio with his wife veronica and their six children so join me and let's welcome our guests for today matthew leonard how you guys doing i know you can you guys are all muted but uh i just want to thank you for having me queen mary thank you so much for the invitation and i don't know if you would kind of want me to jump in or if there's anything else you want to do first just let me know you can have the flow please just go right away well first of all let me say this it is really cool for me to be sitting on this side of the ocean and engaging with catholics uh across the world especially young catholics and i i greatly uh the fact that this church that we call home is universal and it just it really warms my heart to be able to interact with you guys and to uh to share in the joy of the fact that we are catholic that we are truly brothers and sisters in a real way uh you know as a protestant growing up we would use the term brothers and sisters in the faith but there wasn't a reality there in the same way that there is in the catholic church because of the sacrament so we are literally joined together as brothers and sisters in the lord and i just it's wonderful to connect with you guys so i appreciate you having me and i have the pleasure of being able to share with you guys this evening my conversion story and this is something i i haven't i've never published it or anything i think it's kind of uh some of my friends when i first became catholic they said oh matt you should you should publish your conversion story i just never really have gotten to it i love to share it though and and partly because um i'm a pastor's kid and so i'm kind of an anomaly uh even amongst uh a lot of the convert friends that i know and a lot of my friends and family come to me and say you know why do you believe what you believe now as a catholic you know why do you teach what you teach at next level catholic academy and traveling around and such like how in the world did this happen uh because again compared to a lot of people who are converts my background is a little unique my father was a methodist pastor and then he became a pentecostal pastor if you know anything about catholicism excuse me protestantism you know those are kind of polar opposites and we went after a church split we ended up going to a bible church and then a non-denominational charismatic church and then i went to a calvinist high school which i'll tell you about i graduated from oral roberts university which is a big televangelist university in oklahoma i went to mega churches outside of chicago uh i joined the conservative episcopalian movement i was a missionary to mexico uh with a kind of a high church anglican type organization and i've been in bible chapels and evangelical free chapels and assemblies of god churches i mean you name it i have been there and so you can kind of call me a protestant mutt and a lot of people ask you know well how in the world did a guy with that pedigree or lack of one how in the world did he end up catholic and you have to understand that really it was this diversity of background that i had is that's what kind of propelled me into the arms of holy mother church and before i realized that before i ever made a move toward catholicism that i was a very zealous protestant i was formed relatively anti-catholic and i was not afraid to take you people on now that said i didn't run into catholics very often i just didn't mine was a very protestant world growing up and it was a very good world i'm very grateful for how it is that i was raised i mean i met jesus as a protestant i learned sacred scripture as a protestant i was surrounded by a lot of good and loving people and my whole family more or less is still protestant so i'm not up here to you know kind of wag any fingers at anyone uh if you don't happen to be catholic and you're watching this i'm not here to wag my finger i am i am here to tell you about how it is i came into the fullness of the catholic faith and i talk about my conversion to catholicism not out of an i'm right and their wrong mentality but because i want everyone to experience the truth the beauty and the goodness of this catholic church that our lord has given to us and to be honest sometimes i kind of have to pinch myself uh that i become [Music] like the loch ness monster i don't know some of you guys i mean this is the young catholic professionals i know so you guys might be too young to even remember all the hysteria and stuff around the loch ness monster but that's what it was like for me in catholics uh you know every now and then someone would claim to have seen a catholic but all they could produce is kind of a dark and grainy photograph you're like are you sure that's a catholic well look you know they're smoking a cigarette so they must be catholic and like oh yeah he's gonna go to hell you know and that was kind of my interaction with catholics for a long time growing up and i didn't really i didn't really encounter catholics on a daily basis until i got into junior high school and frankly those are the kids i stayed away from they were more rough and tumble so to speak than the the kids i hung out with in my protestant youth groups and they had a way of talking that they kind of shocked and enthralled me at the same time a lot of these products or excuse me catholic kids could make swearing sound like poetry and you always knew his catholic kid because they're always wearing a blue polo because they do half a day in their catholic school then come down to my public school and these these kids scared me and to try and get away from the worldly influence of those catholics by the time junior high was over i begged my parents to put me in a private christian school and so they did and off i went to this calvinist high school in the suburbs of chicago and it was there really that i kind of fully developed my anti-catholicism but it's also there that i met the one catholic family that radically transformed my life the vogels and the vogels are kind of your stereotypical irish catholic american family uh they have redheads and and uh and brunettes in the family they all have hot tempers and whatnot and for some reason all of these uh redheaded catholic irish boys uh came to my calvinist high school which is still a bit of a mystery to me why it is that they were there and in the early years um you know even after becoming really close friends with them my buddies they kind of further solidified uh my impressions shall we say of catholics and they were pretty rough and rowdy um but we were great friends uh and we got to we got really close but they were catholics which you know meant they were probably going to go to hell and uh and because i knew this to be the case uh i would try and evangelize them i i wanted them to change their mind about the faith i wanted them to become protestant and and so they could be saved like they needed to go on an altar call you know and accept jesus as their personal savior uh i don't know if the the churches the protestant churches in africa do altar calls uh but basically an altar call for those of you don't know is at the end of uh you know a uh like summer camp conference or at the end of a sermon or whatever the pastor whoever speaking will say you know if you'd like to make a decision to serve jesus as your lord and accept them into your heart then please uh come forward and you would process forward and they pray over you and so you're getting saved and i've probably done this like 150 some odd times sometimes it was just to follow a girl up there or you know one of my buddies or whatever but i've been through a million of these altar calls it's funny because looking back on it now we called it altar calls but the funny thing is there's no altars it's a total catholic leftover in the protestant vocabulary there literally are no altars in most uh protestant churches we should have called it like the orange shag carpet call or something like that because that's what was up on the platform now be that as it may um these boys these catholic boys were growing in their faith and they were just as strong in their their catholic faith as i was in mine they have really holy parents who formed them really really well and they went off to school at a place called franciscan university of steubenville once we graduated from high school and i remember when these guys came back from their very first semester of of college and we went out and did what it is we always did in the summer times we we went out and uh played beach volleyball on the the shores of lake michigan and i'll never forget we showed up at the beach and we ought to taking our shirts off and i look at these guys and they're wearing these like scapulars and nettles and stuff and i was like what in the world you know it was like this catholic mr t starter kit if you guys even know mr t is uh it's kind of an 80s reference maybe like a cast like a rapper or something i mean all these medals and stuff i'm looking at i'm like that's enough to like weigh you down to hell what are you doing wearing that kind of stuff right especially since a lot of it has to do with mary and we'll get to her in a few minutes but uh these guys were they were gaining a fair bit of knowledge about their faith at franciscan university and as a result we had a lot of great theological discussions and even arguments and i really enjoyed it um [Music] and it's interesting because you know a lot of what i mistakenly believed about catholicism was kind of drilled into me by this calvinist high school that i went to and this is one of the big points i think when we're talking about conversion and evangelization we have to realize that a lot of the people that we talk to probably don't even really understand the catholic faith when i'm speaking out on the road i oftentimes will compare and contrast protestantism and catholicism because i think that for us as catholics we need to know what the protestants believe first of all so that we can it helps our interaction with them but you will find out pretty quickly that there's a lot of mistaken beliefs by protestants about catholics and that's where a lot of the divide is now certainly we have some very different beliefs on certain things but lots of times they think that we believe things we just don't believe okay so i just kind of tossed that out there with regard to evangelization but at the calvinist high school that i went to it was kind of interesting because they were populated a lot of the teachers anyway were were former classmates of a famous protestant excuse me catholic evangelist named scott hahn and for those of you who've ever watched ewtn uh i don't know if you if you guys watch that over there or not but um he's on tv all the time and he's just he's a pretty famous convert in the united states and his conversion to catholicism really sent some shock waves through my calvinist community because they'd all gone to college with this guy and so uh no one could believe that scott hahn had become a papist it really it kind of shook them he'd been their bible study leader they've been kind of a pretty tight group and i remember going back and visiting my high school that uh oh good i'm seeing some comments here good you guys know mr tias that's good and you've heard of scott hahn all right so that's good when i went back to my my protestant high school after i started college um a teacher grabbed me one day and he said matt i have some terrible terrible news i said oh no like what is it and he said scott hahn has become catholic and i said ah that's awful who's scott hahn and so yeah they explained to me who scott han was and they said you got to warn all those vogel boys that scott han has gone to teach uh theology at franciscan university of steubenville and and i'm kind of doing the math and i'm like uh well the vogel kids are catholic franciscan university's catholic the scot han character whoever he is is catholic too i'm not sure what i'm supposed to warn him about but what happened was even though i never met him because of the way they spoke about him i became in view imbued with this kind of animosity towards scott hahn that went hand in glove with my anti-catholicism and it's funny several years later i had my my opportunity to kind of display my disdain for dr han and his catholic faith i told you my dad was a pastor right well my mom uh had a master's in theology and she was an author and she wrote a book on the covenant and if you know anything i know you guys do know about scott hahn but you know that just like every other word out of his mouth is covenant he probably named one of his kids covenant if he could but he found my mom's book and he was using it to teach one of his graduate school courses and through a series of events my parents and i were passing through steubenville and the hans found out and they invited us over to their house now i would be lying if i didn't tell you that i was a little worried about the fact that my parents were were gonna go to scott and kimberly hahn's house because my mom was developing a kind of a closet catholicism at this point i mean she made a she made a pilgrimage to lizzu she wrote a children's book about the little flower we were going to kind of a high anglican almost catholic like church at the time we had a statue of saint therese in our backyard and i realized my dad is a protestant pastor it is really difficult to explain to your calvinist buddies why there's a catholic statue in your backyard you're like oh yeah these catholic church came over and like vandalized our yard last night look they even left the statue i have no idea why it's still there but you know so i was really worried that you know they might kind of sway my parents a little bit more toward catholicism and so i figured i needed to make a statement and what i did to demonstrate my contempt for catholicism and the hans was i just refused to go in their house i sat in a car for three hours in front of their house while my parents had lunch with scott and kimberly haunt i could see him right through the bay window i just refused to go inside i wasn't going to sully my sandals on the floorboards of a of a romanist and what's you know that that kind of basically sums up my attitude toward you guys toward catholics for the better part of the first 30 years of my life uh i was just anti-catholic i wasn't going around hammering on catholics but i just i mean i knew you guys were wrong and i was pretty sure you're gonna go to hell uh and what's hilarious is if you fast forward a few years in my story to the point where i was actually taking a really hard look uh at catholicism it was suggested to me by the mother of the vogels this irish catholic family that i should travel to steubenville and i should go through the rcia program there because i was living in chicago at the time it really wasn't a good rcia scene and i had just come off the mission field in mexico i've been there for 14 months and i had tried to put my questions that had started up about catholicism on hold when i went to the mission field because i was supposed to be i was supposed to be evangelizing people for the protestant church i was with instead what happened was more questions came about because like in mexico and in latin america in general every street corner it seems like has a catholic church or a shrine on it to some saint you know and not to mention like tattoos of our lady of guadalupe on the biceps of like 70 of the mexican males and those are just like the children so i had all kinds of questions by the time that i got back uh from mexico and so mrs vogel said matt listen instead of just kind of going through an rcia which is basically catholic membership classes here i don't know if you call it the same thing in africa but she said why don't you go somewhere where you can actually live and learn the faith at the same time and she wanted me to to kind of breathe the scented air of catholicism so to speak and i was skeptical for all kinds of reasons um but she finally said you know it'll be worth it let's just do this you know and she's like i'll even i'll give you a ride i'll even find you a place to stay now if anyone ever says to you that god doesn't have a sense of humor i have no idea what they're talking about because my eight-hour trek from chicago to steubenville ohio ended at the front doorsteps of the same house i had sat in front of several years earlier it was scott and kimberly han's house that's where i was staying for the weekend and trust me they had not forgotten and there were several laughs held at my expense during the weekend and uh you know at the end of the weekend they they invited me to come live with them they had students that would live at their house and they they had an extra room and so they invited me to live with them i was certainly not ready to make that kind of a decision and plus i'm fast forwarding in the story a little bit so let me let me back up a little because i often get asked like what was the impetus like what was that that one thing that even made you start to consider the catholic church and as i kind of think back to the story of my life really after meeting the vogels i mean first of all i'll just throw that out there relationship is so key when it comes to evangelization uh you have to get to know people you got to walk in their shoes a little bit it's through relationship that you establish to trust then that can you can then talk about christ with other people so that's foundational right and i met the vogels and i i'd seen their their family and i'd gotten to know them and and i saw the faith lived in their lives and mrs vogel had started to uh to start to give me a couple of books here and there and so i was starting to get more and more questions and one night i was out to uh to coffee with some friends of mine and in wheaton illinois of all places and wheaton illinois is kind of like to to the evangelical world wheaton is what steubenville is to uh the the the united the world of the united states the the american church it's kind of the bastion of evangelical protestantism so i'm in this little cafe in wheat and i'm drinking some overpriced cup of coffee and memory gets a little fuzzy as you get older but we were talking about baptism at one point and this is not what we normally talked about we normally talked about girls in sports right but that night we i brought up baptism and because i've been reading some things about the church and i'd had interactions with the vocals and discussions and stuff and so the questions we were discussing were like is baptism necessary for salvation uh is it for infant or adults is it sprinkling or is it immersion and after a few minutes it struck me that even amongst so few of us there was no agreement we couldn't agree on these things and we'd all been taught different things growing up we could all whip a bible verse or two out of our back pocket to back up the position that we've been taught growing up for example in john 3 5 when jesus says that you must be born of the water and the spirit in order to uh to enter the kingdom of god and so you know baptism must be necessary because you've got to be born on the water and someone else would say well if that's the case then how come saint paul said well we didn't call him saint paul how come paul says in romans 10 9 that all you have to do is confess with your lips that jesus is lord and believe in your heart that god raised him from the dead and you will be saved so maybe baptism isn't necessary and after engaging in this kind of theological merry-go-round for several minutes i finally asked the obvious question like how are we supposed to know who's right because god is who he is it doesn't matter what i believe about him right this sweater i'm wearing is blue it doesn't matter if i believe that it's yellow it is what it is all right i think thomas aquinas says truth is conforming one's mind to reality this is huge i mean that's a fundamental thing so there have to be reasons for the faith there have to be right answers to the faith and the question is like how would we know what do we know is right and someone in the group said well we have the holy spirit to guide us and i said yeah well you got him and you got him and you got him you got him and i got him and we all disagree so how are we supposed to know and as i've recounted this story to some of my protestant friends over the years i will sometimes get this little kind of phrase that we would uh we would throw out there whenever there were disagreements in the body like this and the phrase is this we major in the majors and we minor in the minors and really what that means is as long as we all agree that jesus christ is lord it doesn't matter about all the rest of this stuff who cares you know baptism or not all the rest these kinds of things it doesn't matter jesus is lord the only problem with this as i as i kind of pointed out to these guys is well jesus says in john 16 that the holy spirit's going to come and guide us to all truth not just some of the truth but to all the truth so there have to be right answers how is it then that we all disagree and at this point in my life it really began to bother me that even among so few of us we couldn't agree even on something as important as salvation right was baptism necessary that's pretty kind of a big deal like salvation that's not secondary or tertiary that's what it's all about right and i thought back to all the different denominations uh that i had been a part of growing up and while some of them certainly believed very similar things some of them were diametrically opposed to one another the the charismatic church i grew up in taught salvation by faith and and you had free will to choose or not to choose right the calvinist high school i was going to had a doctrine of double predestination uh which said uh that you it's already determined whether or not you're going to go to heaven you're either death you're predestined to heaven or you're predestined to hell doesn't matter what you do so those things are polar opposites right and so these kinds of things begin to bother me and the issue that i just couldn't escape as time went by was authority it's authority now you guys probably know that they're basically two fundamental um founding principles of protestantism right sola fide so faith alone and sola scriptura the bible alone uh faith alone is what martin luther introduced uh and the catholic uh theological doctrine is that we are saved by grace alone and luther said it's by faith alone so literally the act of faith saves you and the problem for luther is that the phrase faith alone only appears one place in sacred scripture it's in james 2 24 where james says you are not you are not saved by faith alone but by works and this is one of the reasons why martin luther took the book of james and he put it in the appendix of his bible when he translated it from latin into german he wanted to get rid of the book of james he called it the book of straw he also wanted to get rid of hebrews jude and revelation as well so not only did he get rid of seven books out of the old testament successfully he tried to get rid of four books of the new testament when i found that out that that really kind of freaked me out just a little bit you don't mess around with the bible and and that points to the second one i mean solas scriptura the reason you don't mess with the bible is because the bible alone is our only authority that was the one thing that was like pounded into my head growing up we can only trust sacred scripture because only it is the inspired inerrant word of god something i still believe to this day the problem is like so many other protestants i never stepped back and asked like where does the bible even come from right this is where does it come from i didn't know that the canon of scripture didn't take shape until the catholic synods of carthage and hippo in the 4th century it never occurred to me the reason why i even called the bible the word of god is because the catholic church said it was the word of god more than a thousand years before anyone ever heard of anybody you know called a protestant i just kind of assumed he went you know dropped down out of the sky into the pew in front of me had a nice leather cover and said matthew leonard in the bottom right hand corner that was my view of the bible i never thought about the catholic church and it well it bothered me but to make a long story short when i left that that night in the coffee shop the first thing i did is i when i started asking my dad questions now my dad isn't just a pastor he has a phd he's a doctorate in the canon of scripture and so i started asking questions like well why are there seven less books in the protestant bible why and you know he didn't have good answers i think if i would have gotten good answers i would have stopped my questioning at that point in time i wasn't really interested in becoming catholic but there aren't good answers and that's why he couldn't give me good answers and so after talking to my dad i decided i was going to go start reading the reformers themselves and i read some of it i knew some of it on some level already but it really shocked me when i dug into martin luther and john calvin that hey they didn't agree with each other and b uh there are lots of different lutherans who believe all kinds of different things uh amongst even the lutheran denomination a lot of calvinists disagree with john calvin on certain things and of course there are more than 40 000 different protestant denominations across the world and after looking at the reformers i made a big mistake i kept going and i eventually found myself in the arms of uh the early church fathers and you know what i discovered like so many other people who come into the catholic church what i discovered in the early church fathers really rocked my world it rocked the foundations of my belief system in a lot of different ways and i was stunned for example to read the writings of of saint ignatius of antioch who said you have to obey your bishop to be outside of your bishop is to be outside of christ i was like man we don't even have a bishop you know and then he's talking about the eucharist you're talking about the second century here he's talking about the eucharist like this is catholic stuff like why are these guys talking about the eucharist we had the lord's supper we would do like once a quarter and it was like a little thing of grape juice and bread and there was no meaning to it right but the way that these guys were talking about it it was a whole different ballgame and as blessed now saint john henry newman once said to be deep in history is to cease to be protestant and that's really kind of what happened to me uh i went so far back then i discovered the catholic church has always been the one true church now sometimes like lots of times reading isn't enough and i was reading i started reading quite a bit actually mrs vogel was kind of feeding me catholic books like uh like they were scooby snacks or something and so i started reading these things quite a bit but she then hooked me up with a priest one time and said matt you need to go out to dinner with this guy i know you've got more questions you haven't gotten answered yet this guy's brilliant i want you to take him out and talk to him i said okay and i was living in chicago downtown at the time i was i was you guys this is like 30 years ago or some crazy number 27 years ago i don't know what it was but i was a young american professional protestant living downtown chicago right and so i go i drive over to to loyola university in chicago and i picked this priest up and we got to vietnamese town for dinner and this guy was amazing he was obviously brilliant he answered all of my questions with intelligence and wit it was hilarious so we just kind of laughed and we ate three it was a point in my journey to the church for sure and when it was all over i drove him back to the university i thanked him and uh we uh we parted ways and a couple days later i was at my friend's house and i'm kind of going through the channels like a rabbit on speed you know and all of a sudden i stopped because i see that same priest that i just had dinner with on tv and i yell at my friend who's in the next room like hey dude i just had dinner with this guy and he's i'm looking to tv and praying a rosary in israel and then his name flashed up on the screen it was father mitch paqua and for those of you you know who don't watch ewtn uh these days father mitch pack was really um he's he's kind of the figurehead now he's a pretty famous priest here in the united states and i had no idea you know who this guy was uh but it's interesting because even with all these kinds of graces right uh patient care from my catholic friends and lengthy dinners with with catholic luminaries and such conversion typically is not something that happens overnight i mean sometimes you hear about these kinds of people uh that you know boom they just know the catholic faith is true and also they become catholic and i hate those people right that is certainly not the way it was with me and that's frankly not the way it is with most people because a lot of us have baggage that has to be unpacked but i remember there was a period of about nine months where i just i felt completely and utterly adrift i don't know how else to put it um i knew i was no longer a protestant but i wasn't yet ready to accept everything that the catholic church taught and i can't begin to describe to you how difficult uh this period in my life was because i was i was basically totally unmoored like everything that i had been taught from birth basically was falling apart and uh it's not it's not that i questioned jesus christ i always knew that that he was god i never thought about leaving christianity either um but i was faced with a question of who god was you know you know i love you lord but but who are you because this rock that i thought to be unmovable this this like belief system that i thought to be unchangeable was kind of changing and moving right in front of my very eyes the deeper i went and of course it wasn't god who was changing it was me who was changing my world view was basically crumbling and it was terrifying it was really scary and really it was through god's grace and mercy and nothing less than that that i was able to kind of make it through uh that period as he was you know kind of solely drawing me to his loving arms and there were many nights of confusion and tears and and questions and long conversations and all kinds of things and but eventually the lord brought surety of faith uh to me but before i ever achieved any level of surety i got to tell you about mary because most converts to catholicism have you know a particular issue that for some reason presents more difficulty than others and i'm no different my issue was our lady uh everything else the typical issues you know that protestants typically deal with as they're coming into the church i'd dealt with them like jesus founded the pet trine church check uh he was really present in the eucharist shack magisterium has apostolic authority check sacraments check saints check tradition check i mean i checked off all the boxes right uh but but not mary not not our lady uh she she was still so foreign to me you know the little statue with her head bowed and her arms open wide and she was kind of beckoning me and welcoming me but really she was just terrifying me and it really it was interesting thinking about it because it wasn't until i was around good catholics for several years that i finally began to wonder why is it that mary was not more a part of my experience even as a protestant right why didn't we honor her why didn't we respect our lady because you're talking about the one woman that god chose amongst the billions of women ever born to bear his only son so for that reason alone she should have some level of status right and finally i mean i don't know if you guys have fluorescent lights like we do here in the states but like in the gymnasiums when i was a kid growing up they would turn the lights on you have to wait 20 minutes for these giant fluorescent bulbs to kind of like slowly light up that's what it was kind of like for me with our lady at some point the switch was flipped as to how special she was but i wasn't fully illuminated i guess i was kind of a low wattage bulb if you want to put it that way but even in the last stages of my decision to become a catholic mary remained a struggle for me and because you got to understand guys mary really only comes up in in two kinds of contexts there are only two conversations about mary that you have when you're a protestant the first one is if you are condemning catholics to hell for worshiping our lady and of course we know that's not the case right we have different different even distinctions inside of of catholicism for the kind of veneration the hyperdulia that we give to our lady but i didn't know that right so your number one is if you're condemning catholics to to hell for worshiping her and number two christmas that's it that was the only two times when mary ever comes up in conversation and it's funny because you know we statues are verboten right you didn't have statues as a protestant but we actually had these like statues of our lady uh looking back on it and that's of course using the word statue loosely i mean i'm talking about like these hollowed-out plastic figurines that are about this tall they have a nice frosted 60 watt bulb inside to give it a nice new mom glow you know but when christmas is over we just kicked mary back into the closet i that was it uh unless you were talking to catholics or you were looking at a creche mary just was not part of my vocabulary growing up just not a part of it and as a result i developed a kind of a a latent hostility uh toward our lady that i'm very ashamed of now i love our lady uh but i remember this kind of hostility that i had toward mary raising its its ugly head one night um i was out with some friends two of those vogel boys they happen to be red-headed twins and another protestant friend of mine and i told you that we often uh would have these theological debates about catholicism versus protestantism and sometimes these debates that we had would morph into kind of odd competitions and one night we decided that we were going to settle the whole protestant catholic question the manly way uh we're going to bowl uh to to victory it was going to be like a 10 frame duel to the theological death i know it sounds ridiculous but we were you know young men in our early 20s what do you want but i was going to strike a blow for the reformation i was going to put these catholics in their place and show them what the true church was now i was super comfortable with this challenge because not only had i seen these kids bowl and they were terrible bowlers but i i've been in like a sixth grade bowling league which in my mind made me practically a professional so i was secure in the knowledge that i was going to beat these guys and that's why i was stunned when the whole thing turned into a complete seesaw battle it actually came down to the last frame of the last game if my redheaded catholic buddy could bowl a strike they would win and we would be shamed and you have to understand how ridiculous this was they were awful bowlers we should have never even been in this position to begin with but this kid gets up and he goes and he like puts his hand over the blower to dry his hand like he had any idea what he was doing he picks up his ball and over the the din of the loud 80s and early 90s music that was playing in the bowling alley and the crashing of the pins and all the rest of it this kid looks over me and he gives me this big cheshire cat grin and i'm thinking no way pressure's gonna sink him so fast but instead over this cacophony he looks at me and he says this one's for mary i was like oh brother this kid pulled the ball right down the middle of the lane now i mean dead center in any other universe this would have been what's known as a 710 split of biblical proportions right but instead 15 pounds of marian blessed plastic and urethane destroyed every pin in sight i mean it was a strike and they're like ah they're cheering like yeah this is awesome right and i couldn't believe it and i was stunned in fact i was a little angry i'm like god how in the world could you even allow this to happen this is ridiculous right and i was i was just flabbergasted at the entire thing and it's really been my experience that for the most part the reason why so many potential converts to catholicism really have problems with mary doesn't have anything to do with mary herself what's not to love about mary i mean really uh she's so gentle and humble she's the only woman in the world who can wear blue like every day of the year and no one ever says anything mary's beautiful right she's lovely the problem for for potential converts and for co for protestants is that protestants have a very healthy fear of offending god okay so anything that diverts attention from our lord is wrong is to be avoided at all costs it would be idolatry plain and simple okay so you're breaking the commandments now this fear of idolatry that we had didn't stop us from talking about all the other great biblical figures from salvation history you know we would we would talk about abraham and moses and david and peter and jacob and isaac we'd have like an eight-week sermon series on ihood the left-handed judge for crying out loud but we never talked about mary she just wasn't part of the process right he never focused on her and really again this is more of a reaction i think against catholicism than a reflection of our own doctrine and so while i didn't consciously dislike her i shunder because catholics worshiped her right even in bowling alleys for crying out loud so needless to say i had a lot of baggage about mary that needed to be unpacked and uh god knew that right and and just like everything our loving father knew the right time for me to come to grips with our mother and i told you before that the hans had invited me to uh to move in with him and so several months later i ended up doing that now at this point in the process i had been reading lots and lots of books i had just come off the mission field to mexico right and uh i had lots of questions about the faith and so i really moved to steubenville uh to do what mrs vogel wanted me to do to breathe the scented air of catholicism and i moved in with the hans and i took a job on campus and one day my boss came up to me and my boss said hey matt would you cover my holy hour and i said sure uh you know what's a holy hour and so he explained it to me and i'm like well that sounds biblical you know i can do that and what time it's 2 a.m like 2 a.m like who in the world prays at 2 o'clock in the morning well i found out catholics do right and i already said yes so i had to do it so at 2 00 in the morning that night i go trudging into this downstairs chapel in the middle of winter this old church and uh there's nobody else there because no one else is crazy enough to be praying at two o'clock in the morning apparently and i kneel down there and i'm kind of looking around this chapel thinking you know what am i going to pray about you know for an hour and and the whole catholic thing is still kind of new to me so i'm just kind of looking around and i'm looking at jesus in the monstrance and as i kind of glance around a little bit more my eyes fall on this big statue of mary who was three feet away from me and i quickly vert my gaze and i look in front of me and there's a big pile of rosaries sitting there in the kneeler in front of me including a glow-in-the-dark one right catholics always have glow-in-the-dark rosaries i don't know why i even have one i think i prayed one this morning but anyway this big pile of rosaries and i was like man this woman is like she's like stalking me um and and she's like hunting me down what am i gonna do about this because i got to deal with the issue of mary and at this point i had really kind of gotten to the place where i could accept the church's teaching with our lady intellectually right but i just needed assurance on a deeper level i i needed grace to help me embrace her and get over the hump of a lifetime of avoidance and and false teaching so i did what anyone who lacks faith does i i asked for a sign i was thinking look if gideon can do it so can i right and so i thought about at that moment the one thing that i found more impossible than anything else in my life you know the thing that was causing me the most angst and i said okay mary like here is your shot if you really are my mother i want something from you i want reconciliation with my father um he's he's not talking to me um you know coming from a from a really protestant background my conversion to catholicism was difficult for everybody in my family like they're really worried about me but no one was as worried about me as my dad and i think that uh that he took it personally uh he really felt like i was betraying my family betraying my tradition betraying my faith and the result was this um kind of strained relationship that uh is kind of deteriorated as lent began and it just went downhill and we basically hadn't spoken for weeks at this point and my situation was made even more difficult by the fact that um my mother at this point in time was bedridden in a hospital and she was finally succumbing to a cancer that she'd been battling for five years and as i told you she kind of had become a closet catholic she was going to this anglo catholic church whose liturgy looked just like a mass it just wasn't valid and she was the only one who expressed any kind of understanding of what it is that i was doing as i was moving toward the church and she had even urged me to go to steubenville uh and and even so i i struggled immensely wondering you know am i am in the right place doing the right thing while my mom is home dying and i was wondering if my dad was wondering the same thing and so i picked up one of those rosaries that was sitting in front of me in that kneeler and i said uh all right mary okay here's your shot i want reconciliation with my father then i prayed the one prayer that a lot of catholic converts have prayed at one point or another which is please god don't strike me dead for praying this rosary i made the sign of the cross and i launched in now that was two o'clock in the morning right after my holy hour was done i went back i crashed uh and at 2 p.m that same day the mail arrived and in it was a letter from my father asking for reconciliation and i said okay mary you win right and so not only had i got my father back but now i had a spiritual mother and that was awesome i mean i love our lady our lady if you don't have a devotion to our lady you have to develop one right now uh saint max man colby says that that all of our devotions lead back to one place they're like links in a chain that lead back to one place right jesus christ but he said don't even think about trying to get to our lord without going through our lady because she's the one who gave him to us and so we get back to him the same way through mary so develop a deep devotion to our lady and she will change your spiritual life this becomes more and more true in my life as i continue to go deeper and deeper into the spiritual life mary will take you to jesus period right there's no reason to fear her all she wants to do is to see you in heaven with the rest of the family of god now as all this is you know kind of happening i'm going through our cia and it was a difficult time spiritually for sure right but it was a difficult time materially as well coming off the mission field in mexico i had zero cash i had no job i had i'd sold my car before i'd gone into into mexico and just two years earlier i'd been living the high life i was really well paid i lived downtown chicago i had you know cool apartment and great friends and now here i was you know 25 years old or not 29 years old 25 000 in debt from school loans i was living in a third floor like room in the han house that didn't even have heat and it was january in in ohio and i was glad to have a place to stay but this is not exactly how it expected my life to go you know and i i wasn't even a real student here i was at a university and all i was really doing was going to rcia classes and i was sitting in some classes here and there but i was really just going through rcia and trying to experience the catholic life and and lots of times i thought like what in the world have i done with my life this is just not what i saw happening and of course there was always the constant pressure of am i gonna be like like pull the trigger and become a catholic you know and it was really difficult and and just being eight hours away from my mom as she was dying of cancer was really enough to make me lose my mind and so i was i was on the edge and you know just a couple of or three weeks or so after arriving in steubenville i uh i jumped on a bus with a bunch of other students and we drove to washington dc for our national march for life and it was awesome right and when it was all finished after we're marching for for life and please please please pray for the elections the united states i mean the issue of life is is for is front and center and and like so many lives are state guys the scourge of abortion is so real and it has wiped out your generation right there's so many more people that you would have known that i would have known in my generation as well that are just gone right they're gone and they're never going to see the light of day in this beautiful world that god created we have to fight for life okay sorry for that aside it just this is just front and center right now but i went to the march for life and it was over we got back on on the bus and and generally speaking you know after you march for eight hours or whatever it is we did in the frigid cold and you were up all night trying to get there you go to sleep college kids are not most people right they wanted to talk they wanted to sing they wanted a jabber and everything else and one of them looked at me on the way back and said hey i heard you're not catholic like what are you doing here so i was like oh man and i started to tell a little bit my story of how it is that i got there by the time i was finished all these kids like half the bus was crowded around me and they were so nice they prayed for me and that kind of stuff and it was really kind of a beautiful moment but at the end of the day i was still just this broke scared protestant guy in a place that he really didn't fit in and i'd met a lot of wonderful people i had new friends um but i was still very alone in a very foreign place trying to figure out this very foreign faith was actually the truth and it was incredible incredibly difficult in so many levels on so many levels and in so many ways and and to kind of top it all off i started getting reports from my dad and my brothers and sisters that my mom was going downhill pretty quickly the cancer had reached her brain and things were not good so i reached a breaking point um i was ready to call it quits and and go back home and that's what i told god i'm like look either you have to make this crystal clear that i'm in the right place doing the right thing or i am out of here i have to know right and the very next day dr han walked up to me and said hey come with me i think the school's going to do something for you so he took me over to the administration building and dropped me off and they started handing me forms and in an hour and a half and i had no transcripts they didn't know me really from adam but in an hour and a half i had applied been accepted and scholarshiped into the masters of theology program at franciscan they gave me something called the newman uh grant and the newman grant was for people who had been full-time in the ministry as protestants who'd become catholic now i hadn't even become catholic yet they had to contact some bishop in a different state who oversaw the grant foundation to get an approval and he said yeah go ahead and give it to him and i was the second person to get it the first person to get it was jeff cavins and i was i'm standing there overwhelmed like oh my goodness i just became a student right and and i said god this is all great and everything but i'm so broke right now i can't even buy pencils like literally two minutes later a guy walked around the counter handed me a 500 check for the school uh bookstore and said go get whatever you need i didn't go to the bookstore i went to the adoration chapel and i knelt down and i thanked god for showing me that i was in the right place at the right time so here i was a couple of weeks into the semester i'd now become a student and and god had spoken very loudly now all i had to do is decide if i was actually going to become a catholic or not right that's all and it's really kind of hard to explain i think to cradle catholics how difficult it is uh for a very strong protestant to become catholic and i don't want to overstate this i think all too often we put converts on too much of a pedestal you know because cradle catholics frankly are the most blessed people on the face of the earth i wish i was a cradle catholic because you guys have had the eucharist from the get-go i didn't get my first eucharist plus 29 years old right so cradle catholics are the most blessed but when you're really strong protestant and you're trying to become catholic it's hard and the best way i can describe it is it's kind of like um it's kind of like an american in the 1980s moving to the soviet union you know i know you guys have most of you are probably too young to remember the fall of the of the berlin wall in 1989 but when i was growing up we were always under we're in the cold war right and and soviet union was the enemy all the sylvester stallone movies and schwarzenegger and chuck norris all these guys we're always fighting the commies right the communists and so that's what it would be like for an american to move the soviet union to defect that way that's what it was like that's the best way i can describe it except your eternity is at stake which kind of ups the ante just a little bit but rcia i'm going through it and it was a whirlwind and easter vigil finally arrived and i was packed into the front row of franciscan university field uh steubenville's field house with a couple of thousand other people and there were at least four other people there besides the rcia group i was with that were protestants my sister and brother-in-law and my best friend and his fiancee had driven from chicago and indianapolis just to come to the liturgy to support me that was it they did not agree with what i was doing at all just like two hours previous my sister had taken me behind a bob evans restaurant and begged me not to become catholic but they came out of love for me and i'm forever grateful for them uh doing that i might i think my parents would have come to frankly but my mom obviously she was so far gone with cancer that just wasn't tenable but the hardest part about the mass and going through it was that the the further the liturgy went the more i could feel this gulf develop between me and my family members and if there are any conversation watching this i i'm assuming you you have some sense of what it is that i'm talking about it's really really difficult and when i was finally confirmed i turned around and i'm on a college campus you know and these these are serious catholic kids and they're all excited they're new catholics and they're jumping up and down and cheering you know and and i look at my family and they're stone-faced they were so upset in fact when the liturgy was over they immediately left they went and got their unopened suitcases they'd arrived that day after an eight hour drive they got their unopened suitcases they put them back in the car and they took off for chicago at midnight and i remember seeing those taillights go off into the darkness and it was a pretty lonely feeling but the lord is always faithful his grace is always sufficient the next day was easter sunday in fact it was the five year anniversary of when i found out that my mom was dying of cancer but i called home to my brother's house in chicago and i wanted to wish them all a happy easter they all congregated there in wheaton of all places the same place that i kind of had that first domino fall for catholicism and after greeting everybody else they handed the phone to my mother now my mother was essentially in hospice at this time she was bedridden and most of the time essentially catatonic because again the cancer had reached her brain so she was there but she wasn't really there you know and i'm sure that uh some of you have maybe seen this happen with your own loved ones and it's it's very difficult to see someone who is as vivacious as my mother reduced to this kind of a condition so they had her at the house but she was just kind of parked there okay but when they handed my mom the phone suddenly something clicked and my mom was there she was completely and utterly lucid it had been a long time since i'd had a lucid conversation with my mom like months and my last conversation with my mother was her telling me that she completely understood my conversion to catholicism she completely understood why i made the decision it was the greatest grace i could have received because two months later she passed away and here i am 22 years later and uh my life is a lot different than it used to be i've got six kids of my own now i'm married to a beautiful catholic cradle catholic lady and uh i'm still the only catholic in my family except for my mom who lord william is hanging out with saint therese in heaven right now but i never planned on being one of you people i'll tell you that much uh but i am sure glad uh that i am because there is nothing greater than this church that is given to us by jesus christ does it have its problems of course it has its problems right god is chairman of the board but he's not a micromanager this thing is being run by a bunch of fallen humans just like us right don't focus on the issues and the problems and if you're listening to anybody or whether it's youtube personalities or whomever else in the fights about this that or the other and if you find yourself getting angry at the church and and you want to lash out at this person or that person prelits or whomever if you find yourself in that position you need to back off you need to stop listening to those people right division is something from the evil one and he's gonna sow it all day long we are the church right in fact to put it more clearly jesus christ is the church you and i are a part of it to the to the point where we are conformed to his body the church isn't it's not priests it's not nuns it's not bishops it's not even the holy father right it's not you and me technically speaking it's jesus christ we are as bride right and again we are members of that church to the degree that we conform ourselves to jesus christ we have to remember that that's the way we have to live our lives we have to conform ourself not just to the image of christ but to the likeness of jesus christ and the best way to do that is through the catholic church you want to be radical in your faith be radically obedient that's the way to be most radical even when it's something you disagree with look there are things inside the church that sometimes i'm like what i scratch my head it doesn't matter right be obedient because the church is god's gift to us there is grace present in the hierarchy there is grace that is present in the sacraments you know the division all the rest that kind of stuff that i sometimes see in the church i've been there and done that it's called protestantism when you put yourself outside of the bishops you put yourself outside of the hierarchy you put yourself out of the church and you're like no this is catholicism my version of catholicism is the only version of catholicism that's wrong that's not the church the church is this the church is jesus we have to obey we need to be obedient be radical in your obedience and the lord will bless that and there is a safety and obedience i finally realized i could not be the final authority right that's why i became catholic it's beyond me so much bigger than me i don't trust myself to be the final authority i need the grace and truth of jesus christ and his church you cling to the church of jesus christ that is your safety it is the pearl of great price and sometimes we sully it with our sin sometimes others sully it with their sin for sure but it always remains the pearl of great price and by the virtues that we develop we're polishing that pearl we're getting rid of that pitch that we cover the the presence of god with get rid of the sin in your life become a saint you want to evangelize you want the church to change become a saint saint paul saint john paul ii said today we must beg god to sidiously beg god to raise up saints why because saints are game changers that's how the church is going to be healed of the current divisions that's how the world is going to be transformed that's how we're going to get to heaven it's through becoming saints and the best way the most powerful way is through the roman catholic church and that's why 22 years later here i am i am so proud to stand before you to sit before you and say my name is matthew leonard and i'm a roman catholic god bless all of you i guess that kind of wraps up my story um i don't know how you want to handle this queen mayor if you want me to to take questions now uh or where how this does it but why don't you if you jump on and let me know yeah thank you so much matthew well you you're really amazing i must say um it's so many nuggets i mean i just can't list them all but it was truly amazing thank you thank you so much thank you okay i'll just open up yeah i'll just open up the floor right now um if we've got questions feel free to by show of hands or you can put them in the chat box please um let's get your questions or comments i can see a hand up um i'm thinking that's diddy yeah so um just a second sorry just a second okay diddy can you mute yourself please all right we're cool yeah okay matthew hey great um great jerry thank you for that i'd like to um ask a question on the issue of what you said the last thing you said right i am matthew and i'm proud to be a roman catholic so i've recently found out about um the eastern rites of the catholic church what do you think should be done about um this whole division thing right i know you said the vision is from the devil right but you know the eastern catholics and their western catholics and then there's all this controversy about pope benedict trying to have a new world order with them making like a one-world religion what are your viewpoints on this well i would say that when we're talking about division in the church we're not talking about the the eastern and western segments of the church because eastern catholics are fully in union with the holy father the eastern liturgies are gorgeous they celebrate the many of them celebrate the liturgy of saint john chrysostom and we have one across the river here and uh occasionally we will we will go to mass there that's not what i'm referencing when i'm talking about the spirit of division i think that there are a lot of people these days um who have taken shots at the hierarchy and again i don't know what it's like uh where you are uh there's a spirit of very strong individualism i'll put it that way in the united states and i think that we are susceptible to this in a lot of ways more than other people um just because of it's kind of in our blood but there are a lot of people who take shots at the holy father uh at bishops uh at different forms of liturgies uh that are totally valid uh you have the the people on the very far far right you have the people on the far far left and [Music] they're just they're fighting tooth and nail now obviously if you were holding a position that is outside the teaching of the church then you're not even really catholic okay and there are a lot of people who are in that space who call themselves catholic and they're just not living according to the teaching of the church that's a different problem really what i'm talking about with regards to division are people who are inside the church but have a very narrow view of what catholicism is and if your version of catholicism doesn't fit their version of catholicism then you're not really catholic and again this is just it's frankly it's just protestantism all over again and i see these people blocking each other on social media or calling each other names and you know all the rest when the reality of who we are in jesus christ is so mind-blowing uh that if people would step back a second and focus on that i think that we would get rid of a lot of the vitriol that's in some of the dialogue with regard to the church um i can't speak to what people have said about pope francis about what he's gonna do with one world governments or you know any of that kind of stuff i don't know i'm too ignorant of the of the particulars to even comment on that kind of stuff now it doesn't stop a lot of other people from commenting on it um i i pray am i confused by some of the things that i hear from various bishops priests or the holy father whatever at various times yeah i am and sometimes i'm like okay i got to figure this out but what i've learned is um whether or not let's talk about pope francis for a second we'll we'll zone in on him because he's a favorite punching bag for a lot of people here in the states and he's my holy father i would never talk about my father my real father my birth father in public the way that a lot of people talk about our holy father and it's not just with pope francis people would talk about pope benedict this way people talked about pope john's paul ii uh this way and john the 23rd and paul vi et cetera et cetera et cetera people talk about saint peter this way for crying out loud i'm sure right why because humans are humans but it doesn't change the fact that they have a god-given position of authority over the top of us right now it doesn't mean everything that comes out of every pope's mouth is ex-cathode run we have to believe it and whatever i mean there are barriers there there are there are parameters under which the popes are acting and teaching us and all the rest of it right and and we have to be cognizant of that uh but the kind of disrespect and lack of charity that is so prevalent out there right now i just frankly think it's from the devil it really is and when i find myself getting really frustrated with this or that person what i try and make an effort to do is a i make an act of the will to forgive them if i think that they have wronged me in some way and then i continue to pray for them and what i discover is when i pray for even people whose positions i think are completely out there whoever that might be my heart softens towards them as human beings and i think that we've forgotten this and and you have to understand i am not a wishy-washy catholic in any sense of the word i have given my life for this faith and when people fight against it it wounds me deeply and i have a deep desire to evangelize the world to the catholic faith because i think it is the one true church that said we have to show love even to people who are outside the balance of the faith even those who are attacking the church why because that's what jesus did he showed them love and it didn't stop him from using the whip but i will tell you right now that the parameters for righteous anger are pretty tight i mean if you think that you're you're angry for a good reason you better take a hard look and make sure that uh your anger is justified because a lack of peace and division and lots of times anger comes from the evil one but that's what i'm talking about with regard to division the church is the bride of christ and we can sully her as much from the things that we do inside the church as those who are outside the church do to it and we have to realize too that because we are joined together as brothers and sisters in the faith there is an ontological reality to us being joined together and what i mean by that is you know when we sin we damage not just ourselves we damage the rest of the body of christ if i sin i damage you if you sin you damage me this is one of the reasons why we go to a priest to to hear our confessions because the priest acts in persona christi capitas in the person of christ the head and he's there as the head of what the body the body of what the body of christ right so he is jesus to me in that confessional and when i confess my sins it brings healing not just to me but to the rest of the body of christ as well and and there is a real grace and power there that is given by god and the pope has primacy over all of that i mean he is the head of the body of christ on earth and we have to respect that and we have to love that right i don't i mean i i could keep talking on this topic for for quite a while because i feel very strongly about it um i want things to be theological theologically and liturgically correct as much as anybody else but how many times has god shown you and me divine condescension like how many times has he come down to our level so as to raise us up to his right this is what he's doing throughout all of salvation history this is what you and i need to do as well when we are dealing with other catholics or even non-catholics and i don't mean come down to their level and act the way they do or believe the way they do i mean show them true catholic charity so even if we disagree with them on this that or the other we're not pointing fingers and fighting them by the way we are living our lives we are becoming blinking signs that say jesus right the catholic faith lived in its fullness and its reality and its authenticity and they're gonna want what it is that we have got bring them into the church that way right their ship that way show them the love of cross the live of christ lived in an authentically catholic way that's where conversion comes from that's how guys like me become catholic that's how catholics who are strained come back to the faith now i guess i hope i answered your question at least to some degree i'll i'll pause there because i don't want to keep talking because i probably could well this is what makes you very endearing um thank you you could have said it any better that division is straight up from the devil so thank you for reiterating as well that we are truly the body of christ so i would call on um um could you please unmute and ask your question hello yes we can hear you go ahead hello everybody okay so i actually wrote down my question in the chat so i'm just gonna read it out can everyone hear me yes okay so my question is this so i'm also a catholic convert but i had a background more similar to catholicism which is anglicanism one challenge that i had was confession and um of course this is a topic that protestants love to rip us out on so what was your journey to acceptance of confession in your conversions experience um you know to be honest i didn't have a ton of of problems uh with confession you have to understand something with regard to protestantism in general and maybe you do i'm speaking to everyone here but um if you were going to kind of boil protestantism down to one thing it would be that they got rid of the priesthood and when you get rid of the priesthood you no longer have sacraments okay so getting rid of the priesthood also levels the playing field so to speak so we had a kind of a colloquialism inside of my protestant churches you know it's the priesthood of all believers and really what that meant was we don't need catholic priests we don't need someone else to do for us what we can do for ourselves i can just pray write to god ask him for forgiveness for my sins and that's that now there is a reality there to some degree like if if i sin i will immediately pray and ask god for forgiveness i ask god for forgiveness for my sins every night when i do an examination of conscience before i go to bed but it doesn't take away from the reality of the sacramental grace that's present in the confessional and i think that one of the things that helped me was recognizing that confession is something that's extremely biblical not only do we know the passages where jesus gives peter the ability to bind and to loose but when you go back into the biblical history you find that this whole binding and leucine is something you see in rabbinic literature as well in the old testament you see that the israelites would go to the temple or the tabernacle to confess their sins and they would offer up sacrifice at the same time so it's something that's very very biblical but it's it's kind of uh an underlying um foundation that there just aren't sacraments so to speak and so if you don't need priests then i'm the priest and i can just go right to god that's the mentality that that i was raised with but i'll tell you my experience of it uh when i walked into the confessional for the first time and actually i didn't walk into a confessional mine was face to face with this old italian priest i was terrified i'm 29 years old it was my first confession i had a list like this long i was in there for half an hour and i will tell you when i came out of it i was floating on air it was the greatest thing ever and part of that is because as a protestant even though i believed i could just go right to jesus and ask him for forgiveness and i didn't have to do anything else i wrestled with guilt right i never knew how long i was supposed to feel guilty for the things that i had done and just kind of hang around there and hang around there and i believe that jesus forgave me of my sins but there's a humanity that we forget uh and and like i i felt it i had the guilt this is one of the most beautiful things about the catholic faith it takes our humanity into account it's not just a spiritual reality i am going in on verbally confessing my sins to a priest who's acting as jesus christ and then he says i absolve you of your sins and it's the greatest relief in the world catholicism is such a nitty gritty faith it's one of the most beautiful things about it and it's something that most protestants just don't have now your experience was an anglican uh was far more like catholicism than what mine was growing up like my church was a gymnasium with felt banners over the basketball hoops for crying out loud we didn't have confessionals we didn't have anything like it right so to experience a palpable forgiveness that's verbally uttered to me by a man who's acting in the person of jesus christ when it's scripturally based it's such a powerful experience it's humbling as all get out it's just as humbling now as it was back then but when you bring the dark recesses of this the dark corners of your life into the light of jesus christ that's when the healing begins that's when the the peace comes back and you're like thank you lord and one of the greatest things about about confession i think a lot of catholics don't realize you get special graces for the sins that you confess not just to forgive what you did in the past but to help keep you from it in the future that's what i love about confession so i i go regularly i go as often as i possibly can and uh i think confession is one of the greatest gifts of the church thank you thank you for that thanks matthew okay i have another hand oh um it's iffy as azingy could you mute yourself please if you go ahead hello iffy are you there can you hear me yes yes i can hear you now good evening ah yes thank you ah great so um thank you matthew for this beautiful talk i've been i mean one of your biggest fans here in nigeria you know from all the videos and things so this is a little fan moment here all right so my question yeah my question so i have this is just my own experience i have many friends here in nigeria who are pentecostal now i don't know if it's a combination of maybe their brand of the christian faith and also something that's a bit common amongst young people now i suppose all over the world you know not reading a lot you know always being being a bit you know a bit too distracted people don't do a lot of reading you know there's lots of series and things and we read a lot of stories you know about people like scott han for example who converted you know after they read he did a lot of reading then found the church fathers and things i there are very few people i know who want to read at all you know i mean they don't want to just to find out about the truth about you know what even their own churches say if they have any writing so generally when it comes to the faith they say things like when it comes to christian faith they say things like i want to be in a church where the spirit is moving i need to feel these things in the catholic church the spirit doesn't move it's a lot of emotions and feelings and when you talk about truth and you know this is what historically this is what happened etc they're not really interested they can't relate they don't want to do the search you know they don't want to search for themselves because they feel it's not relevant it's important it's a waste of time so um what's your advice about you know trying to evangelize and convert people like this thank you yeah it thank you for the question this is it's hard i'll i'll tell you this until someone can get to the point where they recognize that truth matters it's hard and one of the things that that these people will discover at some point as most do is that you simply cannot sustain the emotionalism that pentecostalism lives on uh it's impossible you're going to have up days and down days and and all the rest in fact if you dig into the spiritual life and this is what i focus on in next level catholic academy you are going to come to points in your spiritual life relatively early on if you get serious about prayer where the lord draws back from you on purpose and you're not going to have any sense of his presence whatsoever how can you get emotional about that how can you get happy and feel the spirit move when the lord intentionally pulls back from you and he doesn't just do it if you're a catholic he does it for anyone who's seeking heart after him in prayer it's just the catholicism and the tradition that we have handed down to us by two thousand years of saints writings lay out for us what it is it's supposed to look like teresa of avila and john the cross and others right so we know what what is happening but for a protestant who's going through that all sudden they're just not experiencing the lord anymore and what does that mean that god doesn't exist so what about those times when you don't feel the presence of god and this is an overemphasis first of all it's an anti-intellectualism like you touched on you're absolutely right uh in fact there was a book written by a guy who used to teach at wheaton college called the scandal of the evangelical mind and in the very first paragraph of the book he says and he is evangelical and he says the scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is none and and he's right they are not doing the kind of scholarship for the most part that other sections of the church does like catholicism and that's because it is based on an emotional experience i want to feel jesus you can't fight against that on a well you can come and feel the presence of god move in the catholic church in the same way our liturgies are just not designed and not set up in the same way that a protestant church service is even the most vibrant of catholic masses because it's ordered to something else it's ordered to an actual physical participation and frankly that's probably the way that i would go about it now that i think about it you know we have scripture we have the liturgy of the word it's ordered to something very physical it's ordered to the physical reception of our lord and savior jesus christ what we have to do as catholics if we're going to evangelize these kinds of people is to give rise to the emotional experience that they should have in the face of the reality of the fact that our end goal is to be deified that is to be divinized and to become part of the family of god it in other words recapturing what saint john paul ii calls the eucharistic amazement we have to wet their appetite for something that goes beyond what they can feel in their 45 minute long music service they can actually partake of the body blood soul and divinity of our lord and savior jesus christ so i guess in thinking about and talking out loud with you my my advice would be to focus in on the on the reality of the experience of the eucharist not the partaking of the eucharist is going to suddenly make you levitate or something but that you are physically ingesting god and this is kind of the thing that's just missing for protestants the the end goal is that you're saved from something you are saved from hell right you want to stay out of hell but for catholicism it's we're not just saved from something we're saved for something which is divine life it's deification and frankly we need to teach this to catholics first because most of them are unaware that this is our reality i think that if more catholics really understood that our end goal is to literally be deified i mean this is what we do at mass we receive the body blood soul and what divinity of jesus christ so we're being divinized in reality so that we can join the divine life divine family of god in heaven if more catholics really grasp that again i don't know what's going on in africa i'm not tapped into the church in nigeria but in the united states they're closing churches in the northeast and the east coast and all that why because people don't know the catholic faith they don't really know what it's all ordered to if we knew that as catholics and we grasped it and we lived it our protestant brothers and sisters even those who based their their lives on kind of an emotional experience would see the transformative joy that's emanating from us constantly not just in church services not just in liturgies but all the time the deeper we go into the catholic life the more that joy of the lord is going to explode out of every pore of our being they're going to see that and be attracted to it guys we've got the market cornered and we don't even realize it right there's you know augustine says our our hearts are only fine it's rest when they find us rest in thee right i'm gonna i'll dumb that down to a catholic version there's a catholic shaped hole inside of every person they just don't know it yet we have to show them that what we have will fill that up so they stop seeking it in those emotional experiences at church uh with the pentecostals and such that's the only way you're going to fight that especially in this age of anti-intellectualism you've got to show them by the way you live your life and speak it right you have to teach the faith you have to preach the faith but you have to show them that you have the joy of the lord inside of you right and they're gonna want like how come that guy how come that girl is always so joyful in the lord even when things go bad right because they don't have a theology of redemptive suffering they it's that's not existent in the protestant world we can have calamities happen to us and we're still joyful they're going to look at that and go i want a piece of that action right that's the only way that i know to combat those things you have to and again this goes back to something i said i think when i was talking about a conversion experience it happens through relationship you can't expect people just to see you as a stranger they might have some attraction to you that way but it happens in relationship and thanks because it's a great question thank you matthew okay we have another hand up it's francisca um just a second francisca okay could you please unmute yourself and i ask you a question matthew thank you for the talk and so in the past week on lockdown and lot of people have not been able to attend physical mass and also attend confession so have you had times a moment where you've been a confession back to communion like no conversation with my partner around why are you going for confession when you've okay i'm only hearing part of it can someone maybe type the question out for me because i'm only getting bits and pieces of this i'm not exactly sure what was asked yeah sorry about that i guess it's her network um i'll just i'll just quickly call on someone else and i'll ask her to put the question in the chat next sure um so all right have you had this time right sorry francis that you were breaking at some point if you could quickly just you know put the question together so you can take that again please because he didn't he didn't get all you said so i'm saying that we know that has happened with a pandemic and we were unable to attend mass for months and a lot of people have been away from confession and then now we are we're back to attending mass and still some parishes i've not been able to have okay i lost her again so sorry okay i'll i'll just um i'll just call on um chibunzo please i think you have a question without going for confession okay um i guess francisco can you type type your question in so that um we can ask my team so matthew thank you so much i'm a big fan again um i watch ewtn especially from genesis to jesus as one of my favorite programs thank you for that yeah and thanks for the time um yeah um i want to ask two quick questions one is i mean you dropped a lot of nuggets um especially the thing about um when you leave the bishop and if the authority magisterium of the church is chaos because everybody ultimately becomes their own interpreters their masters and that explains why there are all sorts of disunity in the protestantism so that's my my question is um one how what advice would you give to someone in terms of steps um someone has friends who are non catholics and you want to bring to the you know to share in the joy of the faith how does one start like how do you break the eyes do you have any quick i'm speaking for someone who has been through that experience what do you start with do you refer them to a book do you start over the topic so that's one second my other question is is does faith reside in the will in terms of how much of it is the decision of the individual so no matter what you give them to read no matter what you tell them how much of it is their own realization or decision to say yes i choose to um absorb and follow the truth or accept the truth or out of pride thank you okay uh boy you ask a doozy i'll start with the first one um my advice when you were trying to evangelize non-catholics and again uh it depends on where this person is in their own personal walk right but let's just assume that these are protestant christians okay so at least they believe in god and what not the problem that a lot of catholics run into especially those who are really into apologetics is you kind of get into um proof texting battles where you're like well the bible says here this and then they're like well over here it says this and you're just basically talking past each other right and even if you win those kinds of arguments nobody ever becomes catholic because they got humiliated in an argument uh that's just it's not gonna be attractive to them so whenever you're doing those kinds of things it has to start with love and always end in love but um my advice is that instead of trying to to show them from sacred scripture which is their natural ground and we have a tendency to go that direction because that's what they believe right that's what their their authority is step back first and pose the authority question like this was the domino that fell for me i've met so many other catholics converts who is the same thing uh in their life so you start with authority uh i back out and i start to ask them the question of look you you're quoting scripture to me you believe in jesus christ why why do you even believe that the bible is the word of god because at the end of the day just by even calling the the bible the word of god you're giving tacit approval to the catholic church period right no church no bible that's where i start that starts to open the eyes of authority the only argument that they can muster to combat that is that oh well constantine went off as rocker and uh when the church became the the public the official religion of the empire then you know things went downhill and it got corrupted and martin luther just restored it that's horse hockey and we all know that that's a completely invalid argument it's not something that they can even possibly back up but if you will get them thinking along the lines of why it is they believe that the bible is the word of god that is the best place to start because it makes sense at the same church that god gave the authority to tell us what the canon of scripture is is the same church that he gives the authority to interpret what it means it's logic that's irrefutable okay so that's my piece of advice with that uh with regard to how much of it is the act of the person the uh when when god is acting upon them to believe and to either believe in god himself or to believe the catholic church is the one true church or whatever how much of it's them uh how much of it is god uh which i think is part of anyway what you're asking that is a question that theologians debate ad nauseam i will say this um there are two kinds of grace that are operative for us there's actual grace and there's sanctifying grace sanctifying grace is the kind of grace that comes through the sacraments and that's what saves us actual grace are those little nudges that we get from god constantly to move us in the right direction now uh we can slap his hand away at any point in time we want right we can reject we have the ability to reject those actual graces so god does not force anyone to become catholic or to to hold on to the truth he doesn't keep anyone out either uh so there is a kind of a version of the doctrine of predestination that the catholic church would hold to but not to some kind of the same kind of double predestination that was taught by john calvin where it's already decided before you even born that it doesn't matter what you do you're either going to heaven or you're damned to hell okay that is not catholic teaching at all we have free will but it's free will that's aided by the grace that god is constantly giving us and he will give it to us all the way up until the very end and we can reject it all the way up until the very end so it is an act of free will and when you think about it it's pretty unbelievable that god gives us the ability through grace to even reject his will like we wouldn't exist without the grace of god right the same grace that's acting upon us to accept the truth is the same grace that we use to reject him because we can't exist without god's grace i can't blink my eyes without god's grace so he empowers us sorry my lights are going out uh he empowers us uh to to accept him or reject him and when you think about the humility that that entails from almighty god that's pretty crazy so the bottom line is yeah you can reject it you can accept it it's your choice but god's gonna help us all the way as much as you can you okay thank you matthew we have a couple of questions but i don't know how much how much more you could take i hope you mean time wise oh yeah oh yeah yeah no i can i can take a couple more questions that's fine oh thank you all right there's one from isiama um she's asking for people who are interested in becoming apologetics and pursuing the evangelization agenda what tips do you have for personal formation and how to utilize social media as a source of evangelization can i take that again it's um i would say before you ever decide and make your way into the apologetics arena which is a great thing not only do you have to be well formed so you gotta know what you're talking about and every catholic should have a you know we gotta understand what we're talking about more than that you had better have the deepest of deep spiritual lives and the reason why is as soon as you step into that arena you're going to have a big x on your back because the devil's going to come after you one way or the other but if you're attempting to bring other people into the catholic faith he's going to come after you even harder and what that means is not that you just have to have the protection of our lady and you know grace surrounding all the rest you have to have a deep relationship with our lord and not only does it serve to kind of inoculate you against the the wiles of the evil one but there's also a reality reality that the deeper that you go into uh the life of prayer for example uh this is what i'm focusing right now in the academy i'm doing the nine grades of uh of prayer and teresa of avila and what you discover as you begin to move into mystical prayer is that god is actually infusing himself into you now god when god infuses himself into you it doesn't mean you're just like i'm just closer to god right what it means is he's imparting himself to you you are being unified with him and so you are going to acquire a greater understanding of who he is in himself which is only going to help empower you to evangelize and catechize that doesn't get rid of the need to go and read the catechism front to back and if you've never gotten into the catechism of the catholic church i always say go to section four first which is the section on prayer to me it's the most beautiful section uh read that absorb it and then pray your way through the catechism again and of course there are an obscene number of resources that are available to us as as catholic apologists and evangelists but you can know all that stuff all day long that knowledge will not save you that knowledge will not save another person you have to have a deep and abiding relationship with the lord uh and this is something that it's not just a personal relationship it's a familial relationship because we're catholics but at the same time when you go and stand in front of the pearly gates st peter isn't going to care whether or not someone else in your family had a relationship with the lord he's going to care whether or not you did but in evangelization you have to have a spiritual life period and if you don't you're never going to develop the virtues you need to evangelize other people in fact saint teresa of avila says humility humility humility without humility all will be lost you cannot become humble and become a good and holy evangelist without the humility of jesus christ who though he was in the form of god did not consider equality with god something to be grasped but humbled himself and and became not just our kingdom on our level he became lower than us so that we might be raised up that's the way that we have to approach our spiritual life so that we can raise other people up into the catholic faith okay hope that helps thank you all right we have another hand up um that's one knee um could you please unmute yourself and ask your question okay uh thank you matthew and thank you to ycp for this wonderful opportunity uh my question revolves around the unity of the church which i think is the subject of christ's last prayer before ascension but if you really look back since ascension to date it's like everything is fleeting splitting speed i don't know how many numbers do you think matthew that a catholic church or rather what is the catholic church doing to achieve this unity because it seems like rather than focusing unity without splitting so you're asking what do i think that we should do in order to achieve this unity is that was that your question yes yes yes yes yeah and that's a it's a great question because there's a there's just a lot of division going on as we we chatted about earlier i i'm going to step out on a limb here and i'm going to say that when you see people who are swinging the axe at the foundations of the church that are going after other catholics that are condemning other catholics uh and i'm not talking about calling out obvious sin again there are some people who are just simply not living the catholic life right we know that but when you're talking about catholics dealing with other real catholics and there's an attacking and there's name calling and all the rest that kind of stuff i would bet my bottom dollar that those who are doing the name calling and all the rest do not have what it is that we just talked about and that is a deep spiritual life i'm not saying that they are not saying their prayers they could be saying their daily rosary they might even be going to daily mass but something isn't right and the reason i say that is because the deeper you go into the spiritual life which mostly revolves around prayer and the sacraments and you know the sacraments you can go to daily mass guys um and still end up in hell you can right the grace is there there's enough grace in one consecrated host to save the entire world the only thing stopping it is us prayer is what gets the us out of the way right so you have to have a deep life of prayer and the more your life of prayer develops the more you are going to be conformed to jesus christ and the more you are conformed to christ you're conformed to a sacred heart you're penetrating the sacred heart you you're experiencing the wounds of his love and you are focused as much on the mercy that the lord provides as the jesus with the whip in the temple getting rid of the money changers this is what's lacking a lot of the saints will talk about like alfonsus lagori and others will talk about the fact that you know you can go to you can go receive communion uh every day in a state of mortal sin but you cannot be practicing regular meditative prayer and remain in mortal sin the two things just simply are not compatible you can't put yourself in the presence of the lord and literally commune with him in prayer because that's what it is and be in a state of deep sin but beyond that the deeper you move into prayer and the levels of the spiritual life the more you understand um that the the love of christ covers a whole lot more people than what our love does and we will lose that spirit of division and we'll start trying to become bridge builders and peacemakers not that we're pansies in the faith at all uh i don't mean wishy-washy catholicism cow towing to this that and the other that's not what i mean at all the truth is the truth and we always live by it but we have to develop this deep life of charity and until more catholics are deepening their spiritual lives and growing in faith hope and charity the highest of the theological virtues you're going to continue to see this division and the devil knows us better than we know ourselves right he is way smarter than all of us put together and he knows our weaknesses better than we do and he knows how to put his finger in there and push our buttons and so we have to develop the virtues and get rid of the vices that he can utilize against us that's the way the division is going to get rid of that there's no other way to to defuse it we have to get holy we have to become saints because it's then that we could we are all conforming our lives to christ and we're not just seeing people the other way we're starting to treat people the way that christ would would treat them calling out sin when he sees it but doing so in a loving way that's inviting them back into the fullness of the faith that's the only way period that's my best dance thank you thank you okay thank you matthew okay the other lady francisca who was actually asking the question at some point she was breaking up um she spilled her question in the chat box and i'll just read it out she says a question is about many people being away from the sacrament during the lockdown and with restrictions on confession is it okay to go to communion if you are not able to go to confession as a result from the pandemic um man what a great question and i am not a i'm not a moral theologian but i would say this if you are in a if you know that you were in a state of mortal sin then i would not go back to communi um if it is venial sin and you believe it's just venial sin then yes i mean the church the requirement of the church is we go to confession once a year right that's the low bar but that's also assuming you're staying out of mortal sin during that entire time which let's be honest uh for most people a lot of people anyway a lot of catholics that's just not possible they need the grace of the sacraments to stay out of mortal sin right so if you're in a state of mortal sin don't go back to communion that's my advice if it's just venial yes i'll go back but you have to get the confession at the earliest possible moment now if you're in a state of mortal sin i would still go to mass and i would make a spiritual communion instead of receiving our lord and the lord knows that you have the intent then to receive confession when you possibly can and there are real graces attached to that don't think you're not getting anything out of the mass just because you can't receive our lord there is power in the spiritual communion this is what many of us did for months uh you know as we're watching masses on tv and all the rest and we can't get to the sacraments so there's power there but in order to to get as much out of that spiritual communion and get as much out of all those other things that we're that are being held back from us so that we can only park to partake in partly right now i'll go back to what it is i said before i want to sound like a broken record but develop your life of prayer that will change everything you cannot grow in the spiritual life without a life of prayer they are part and parcel of the same thing like saint teresa of avila says about people without a deep life of prayer they're they're tragically like like paralegic so you don't have arms and legs but you can't move them you can't move in the spiritual life without a deep life of prayer and if you have that you can fall back on it it will at least assuage some of the angst that you have over not being able to receive certain sacraments and as soon as they're open to you again boom you go back and get them and you're firing on all cylinders again okay thank you okay i have a question from miguel and he's putting in the chat box and it says i really don't understand why the catholics pray to the holy cross as in in quote the imitation of the holy cross prayer i'm yet to understand this concept could you explain i'm not sure i know the prayer that he's referencing oh i'm gonna look it up um oh the holy cross prayer the secret to happiness um i'd have to do some research on this one because i'm just really not familiar uh with the prayer this is one of the this is one of the things that uh always kind of cracks me up about the catholic church we have so many devotions uh that there's no way i'm ever gonna stay on top of them it's one of the beautiful things about the church but it's also sometimes frustrating when i get a question like this and i'm not sure i i really know what it's all about so i'm not really qualified to uh to answer it okay thank you i'll just ask em gonna could you mute yourself please and ask a question hello everyone hello matthew hello thank you very much for the time i've really benefited from your talk this evening and we're here in nigeria it's evening in nigeria my question is i personally am very much involved in world politics especially that of the united states and where things are concerning the environment and and social issues have been have been politicized and so i sometimes struggle with it when the mother church gets involved in things concerning the immigration across the world feminism and climate change and i keep struggling with these things i mean so i asked myself the question do i stop watching things do i stop reading about things do i stop caring how how do i handle these things how do i manage it in order not to yes in order to lose faith really because this is something that i struggle with every day every time how how do i go about this place thank you it's a great question and this kind of piggyback piggybacks on some of the stuff we've been talking about um look there are times when i share your your uh concerns um personally uh i mean i i have a different opinion than a lot of other people on you know environmental concerns and things like that uh my brother worked in the recycling world for a number of years and opened my eyes to a lot of the nonsense of it but setting all that kind of stuff aside the the way i approach it is this and i'll put it back in terms of the fact of uh or the analogy of my own human father there are a lot of things i disagree on with my dad right um whether it's politics or whatever else there are just things that i disagree with now that doesn't mean i stop listening to him it doesn't mean i stopped caring about his opinion it doesn't mean that he is not still my dad right and he still even although i'm 51 years old he still exercises a kind of authority over me in the sense that he is my father right now this is a different uh but similar in the catholic faith catholics are bound to obey the pope uh in and believe what they are teaching with regard to faith and morals right that is when they are speaking in such a manner that we have to believe so there's doctrine there's dogma and there's teaching about faith and morals and there's some gray matter here with regard to what fits underneath faith and morals but when hey everyone that's my wife [Laughter] i think you just scared her but um when when we are in a situation where um we don't disagree we disagree with what the church might be teaching the holy father says about this or a bishop says about that or even our priest in the pulpit at mass it's not that i don't care it's not that i won't listen but there are certain things that i just don't have to agree with right becoming catholic doesn't mean you have blind obedience right um but it's recognizing the the power and the authority of the position that's uh given to that person right so um my brother once asked me not long after i converted you know matt if you could believe whatever it is you wanted to believe what would you actually think and it's just the kind of the wrong way to approach it again we don't have a blind obedience and so we can certainly use our reason i mean john paul ii wrote it in the cyclical on this faith and reason the the faith is reasonable and we can use the intellect that god gave us to discern and sift through and make up our minds about various things right and sometimes these things are going our decisions are going to be in contradiction to things that are taught by authority figures inside the church now just because they're an authority figure inside the church does not mean that they exercise authority with regard to this or that particular issue right the pope or the bishops or whatever don't reign over every aspect of life they don't uh they are in a certain sphere of faith and morals now there's a ripple effect certainly of catholic teaching that that falls over into the secular world and i use that in the in very i don't really like to make distinctions between church and state so to speak with regard to the grace of the faith obviously grace is just as operative in in the secular world as it is in the church world right uh but at the same time there are certain things that um like the president of the united states will make a decision that's his purview to make there are things that the president does i don't agree with uh there are things that congress does i can't stand right but they exercise a certain authority and they can activate that authority and do what they want with the authority that is given to them by god um so the long and the short of it is it's okay to disagree uh with things that are outside of faith and morals while still respecting the office that the person holds and recognizing that when they do speak in terms of faith and morals that we are bound to believe the teaching the discernment comes in in recognizing what falls within the faith and morals and sometimes it's crystal clear and sometimes it's not and that's really the best answer i can give you and but i would say this again not to sound like a broken record but the more you have a life of prayer the more you're going to be able to discern these things because you're growing closer and closer to the heart of christ who's not necessarily going to give you infused knowledge about the environment but you're going to understand things a little bit more through the eyes of christ and it can't help but affect your decision-making progress our process hope that makes sense thank you matthew okay um i'd ask john go ahead please don't mute yourself okay hi good evening matthew hi john yeah thank you for your talk i really enjoyed a lot of it and learnt a lot of it a lot a lot from it as well so my question well i'm concerned what you just talked about like um to descend what was going on you know the situation now sometimes when i like i'm reading the old testament i just likened the situation in the church now to when it was saul and david you know the spirit of god left saul you know then david was anointed but so was he the king you know saul was trying to kill him and all that so i just liking the situation then and when the israelites were juvenile everybody was just doing the things that they like and all that but this is my question my question just goes to um i don't i guess you'd have read the council of trains because it really talks about the percentage reform like to guide um against um what do you call it against um all the heresy that we're coming through after with the protest in the 15th century you know so like there's a lot of anathemas like some anathemas will be if you don't believe maybe if you don't believe in like you hold a certain belief in the church that is not according to the church you know you are anatomized yeah it's communicated so how does like i see like listen i have some friends you know when they say some things and they're catholics and you know that this thing in the church you know that these things you have to believe the whole thing you know mary was mother of god you know christ you know some people don't know and they're catholics and then you know under the council of trinity to say this person is excommunicated so how does um how does one approach like to you know to guide a friend who is falling into such situation and then how does that anatomy works i don't know because he's really guys about protestant and then so you have a lot of converts coming in so how do i talk to one in line with the council and then the anatomist that's it yeah this is a great question and it's a it's a tricky one to deal with uh to be perfectly honest the the way that i approach it is and you touched on it already you have to put the councils of the church and the things that are said inside these councils in the context in their historical context right so the church had just experienced an unbelievable rupture with the protestant reformation and there was a direct assault upon the teachings of the church and so the church was basically laying down the law and saying this is the catholic faith this is what you need to believe there's a lot of confusion at the time and there were people abandoning the faith left and right for all kinds of different reasons and so the church was kind of like battening down the hatches and it was saying no this is the way and you have to believe this because the the catholic church is the one true church so you have to put it in that kind of historical context we don't go around hurling anathemas at people today i would say however there's no such thing as a cafeteria catholic either uh this is the major problem of the church today you have a lot of people who don't fully believe what the church teaches and so you have council of trent using the language of anathema's and saying well you're excommunicating yourself there's a reality there in the sense that let's say somebody denies the church is teaching on contraception let's say the church or someone denies the church is teaching on abortion they deny it on on whatever right um once you deny the authority of the church you're outside the church de facto okay you've kind of excommunicated yourself so to speak uh especially if you start practicing against that faith and or against those those teachings uh because it's going to lead to mortal sin if it isn't that outright so there's a reality there with regard to the anatomist it's not taking the realities out but we don't go around hurling them today because the historical context is very different and this opens up a whole different ball of wax when you start talking about more modern councils particularly vatican 2 and the language that was used in vatican tune you don't see anathemas just because there aren't anathemas and vatican do doesn't mean that it's not a legitimate council it's an ecumenical council of the catholic church if you don't abide by the teachings of vatican 2 um you know what you're de facto outside the church because the same church that taught and promulgated vatican ii is the same church that promulgated the council of trent is the same church the promulgated the council of nicaea and florence and every other council of the church period right so there's a flow of history and the what the church teaches and how it teaches it what the church teaches doesn't change doctrinally right we know that prudentially decisions can change based on the historical context that we find ourselves in doctrinally it does not so does a person put themselves outside the confines of the catholic church when they're acting and living contrary to the faith with the full knowledge of the faith yes they do you know what they shouldn't be going to communion they shouldn't be defacing or or desacramentalizing uh jesus they shouldn't be it's sacrilege i'll put it that way it's sacrilege you're desecrating the lord when you're going forward and you're saying amen yes lord i believe i fully accept everything the church teaches i'm receiving you body blood soul and divinity but the way i live my life i'm not i'm not buying it right that's sacrilege and and so that's a serious serious sin and elsewhere in scripture you see people died for that right uh so it's a great question with regard to david and saul this goes back to something that we we touched on earlier that there is a power and respect that we have to give to people who are in office i did a podcast on this a couple of podcasts ago it's about obedience and i use david and saul uh particularly to prove this out saul's trying to kill david and david still will not touch him when he has the opportunity to kill him why because he is the lord's anointed and david says who am i to touch the lord's anointed and he even mourns when saul dies saul was demon possessed trying to kill david and david still respects the office because he was the lord's anointed we need to remember that with regard to our church the hierarchy the pope and everybody else but again i know i'm getting a little bit off track there's a lot to this question but with regard to how we deal with anathemas and such it all holds true it the way we talk about it changes and you always have to remember there's a level of culpability with people i would say that the the culpability level of a lot of catholics today is not the same maybe as it was at the council of trent i don't know i'm get i'm guessing right because we've had a lot of bad catechesis for the last 40 years and catholics don't know their faith okay so there's a lower level of culpability there that doesn't get them off the hook but i'll tell you what it does do it puts the onus on you and me to be harbingers of truth so that those people don't suffer the consequences of the anathemas that were proclaimed back at trent so they don't suffer the consequences of a life outside of christ in mortal sin and they're knocked on the door trying to get in and they're just not going to thank you so much matthew i mean i don't know i think we're really taking your time i don't know if you could take one more just the last one what time i have 4 23 my time yes i can take one more all right and i'll ask um the glory um please don't mute yourself and ask a question okay thank you very much for taking my question matthew um my name is glory i'm a catholic convert and i admire people like yourself and like spartan who speak very openly about their conversion story so uh i was born on the feast of matthew and like him at the lord at work while i was working through a colleague who shared the faith with me and i became catholic but i mean in my ideal and my excitement you know they said my went and called all his friends and threw apart for them when i tell when i tried to tell my colleagues about my conversion i didn't quite get the same i didn't quite get the same reaction it's a very fast-paced sophisticated fortune 500 company and so responses ranging from it's approval to shop you know they just felt if you're so focused on the on it was it was the question okay you were getting ulna crashed on company time you know that kind of thing because religious discussions are seen as unprofessional in the workplace in your opinion i mean very few people that genuinely were interested but largely you know it generated a lot of gossip and and um uh speculation so in your opinion is it confident to share a conversion story in a secular workplace environment or is it better to leave it for smaller more intimate gatherings like this it's a great question here's what i think um the holy spirit's gonna give you opportunities to share it uh and you need to be tuned in enough to when the opportunities arise to take the opportunity so you know lots of times um i made this mistake uh like right after i became cast like i was so fired up about it i would tell anyone and everyone and if they wanted to fight i'm like bring it on i was like yosemite sam from those old like bugs bunny cartoons you know we'd fight about everything because i was so zealous about the faith well you soon learn that there are a lot of people just aren't in the place to hear what it is that you want to say and so i do not hide my faith at all i wear my faith on my sleeve all the time and when i say that i mean just even in things like when i'm in a restaurant or whatever i i will pray i will if i hear the name of the lord taken in vain when i'm watching a movie with my kids doesn't matter who's over i pause that movie and we say a hail mary in reparation for the holy name of god i will do these kinds of things because i'm catholic right but when i get active about sharing my faith in secular environments is when the holy spirit presents me with the opportunity so this kind of goes back to what we were talking about before if you live your faith the way that you should always moving deeper into the spiritual life and utilizing the sacraments of the best of your your ability to their of their availability to you then you are going to be in a place where you are really tuned in to the holy spirit it's kind of like a a spider that's on a web you know it's just got its legs out there and it's feeling for those little things of a bug that comes in and then it goes over to it that's kind of like us with evangelization um you get tuned in to the little pings and nudges of the holy spirit when it's time for you to actively share your faith but all the while i'm attempting to live the catholic faith not to make a spectacle of myself it's not about making spectacles it's about living the catholic life so that people can't help but see christ in you when that happens the opportunities are going to come to you more instead of you going after them i can't tell you how many times when i travel all over the place speaking uh my wife just laughs because i will sit on a plane and inevitably the person who's going to sit next to me is a fallen away catholic or a strong protestant and they want somehow the conversation gets to the catholic faith and why are you catholic it always happens and not just on plains in other places as well but what you'll find is if you're living the catholic life the holy spirit is going to bring opportunities to you because he wants them to be catholic even more than you do right and so he's going to present you with those opportunities your job is to prepare yourself interiorly for that encounter know your faith be joyful in your faith knowing who jesus is in his reality so that you can share it in a way that is loving and welcoming to that person uh so that they're going to see what you've got again we've got the market cornered they will come to you if they see christ living in you they just can't help it because don't forget everyone's created with a catholic shaped hole they just don't know it yet all right thank you that's very very helpful thank you okay thank you very much matthew it's my pleasure all right i think i think we're done but we'll quickly just take the vote of thanks and just appreciate you i will then quickly call on for me for me could you please unmute yourself and just take the vote of thanks hello for me okay sorry about that um okay i'll just quickly just do that and matthew i really want to appreciate you your time and all that you've said i mean trust me we are a big fan of yours when we see you on journey through through scriptures and i mean that was what actually endeared me to you you know to having you talk to us and it was really worth the time i really appreciate you and only god can bless you and reward you for the time you spent with us i mean i mean if we live if we live it we you probably go on and on and we will just be enjoying your talk because um it's it's worth appreciating it's something we can we just cannot explain but i know um god will really reward you for this time spent with us because i mean your style of teaching trying to pass the message across is just amazing so that's why i said you're simply amazing so thank you very much and our regards to your family and berenica and the kids i got to see some videos of you on your kids and just the fatherly rule i really you know admire that it's so much admirable and we really really appreciate you thank you so much matthew god bless you thank you and just let me say that again reiterate what i said at the very beginning it's a joy for me to to join with you guys you know on the other side of the world and yet we are one in jesus christ and um i would covet your prayers and i will pray for all of you because we are trying to be saints in this crazy world and uh there's reality to sin but there's a greater reality to the grace of jesus christ yeah thank you so much so um i don't know if you want to stay on with us for a few minutes or sure go ahead okay thank you so much all right i'll just quickly call on anyone who is joining us for the first time um if you could just signify by show of hands um just um let us know if you're joining us for the first time and if you have a particular request or any word or two you want to say to us just let me know and i'll meet you right away anyone okay i see ami i'm easy yeah please go ahead any word or two i mean can you mute yourself emmy can you mute yourself okay hello good evening everyone good evening thank you so so much this is my first time actually and i enjoyed every bit of it very if quite insightful i'm really very grateful to isabella who invited me and um i hope to always be part of this thank you so much thank you we're glad to have you here okay um someone would reach out to you right away so you can just you know pass on your details and we'll get back to you okay okay that's fine all right thank you thank you yeah i see you some of your hands though yeah please go ahead hi isam are you there hello everyone hiya okay um i just want to say i was really blessed there are so many questions i wanted to ask and i was um excited to see people asking questions that i really wanted to ask so i got answers to most of my questions that i didn't even ask so i was really blessed today thank you so much to people for being part of this okay thank you two for joining us we have to eat okay um one day time is up can you yeah please go ahead hello oney sorry okay um this is my first time i'm a catholic i'm a professional but i'm not so young and i was invited by otherwise and i'm really really very impressed and i'm encouraged at the efforts of the young people and it makes me happy because then there is future for the church in nigeria yes so i just wish to say thank you and i would like to join you as often as that is possible thank you and thank you michael for i can't find the right word to describe you know your talk but it's very very exciting and educative and keep it up thanks be to god thank you okay i don't think there's any other person so once again um we want to thank everyone for being on this call and just before we go we'll obviously say our closing prayer and i would humbly ask matthew to take that for us so if you just say a closing prayer for us please oh be my pleasure um in the name of the father and the son and the holy spirit lord jesus um you're so good to us always and you give us so much help us to live up to the family name uh that we have been called to join and help us to draw as many other people into this beautiful divine family as well in our workplace uh in our hearts in the entire world i pray for healing in this world i pray for healing and in our own interior lives and in our church and i pray for an explosion of grace and love all across the world so that other people can realize and live the beauty of what it is you offer us just give us the grace to love you more and to spread that love with abandon in your precious and holy name amen

Channel: Young Catholic Professionals CCDM

Views: 4,608

Rating: 4.9812207 out of 5

Keywords: Catholic, Catholic Faith, Conversion, COnversion Story, Rome Sweet Home, Evangelism, Catholic Evangelism, Faith, Young Catholics, Young Catholic Professionals

Id: l266S7rW9VY

Length: 144min 20sec (8660 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 08 2020