Patrick Madrid - Why Be Catholic? - 2015 Steubenville DFC

you good morning yes Nancy and I have 11 children and we have never been invited to teach NFP classes ever at our parish thank you for the introduction Mike I'll be speaking about the theme of my book this morning why be Catholic the subtitle is ten answers to a very important question and the question why are you Catholic is not only a personal one for me as a cradle Catholic I am NOT a convert and I know that many people for many years have assumed that I'm a convert first of all I wear the uniform of everybody here the blue blazer the khaki slacks but I think many people assume that if you're involved in apologetics or defending the faith it's a law that you have to be a convert to the Catholic Church I am a token cradle Catholic in the movement of apologetics in this and you know what's funny about the fact that you're clapping is I can take no credit for that whatsoever this is something my parents did for me they gave me this great gift and I think it's true that many of us cradle Catholics have been greatly amazed and greatly edified and have learned a great deal from our brothers and sisters who have converted I can speak personally that am I right on that yes Scott and Kimberly hon Marcus Grodi so many of the other well-known converts wolfenberg eita who have just come into the church so many edifying examples of people who had to give up a lot to receive something that I in my case did nothing to get I it was given to me and this is one of the dangers I'll just touch on this briefly that one of the dangers of being a lifelong Catholic is if we're not careful we can become complacent don't you think we can we can just take it for granted or as Scott Hahn once said so famously we live like beggars on top of Fort Knox we have all of the the riches of our faith at our fingertips and it is an occupational hazard of being a cradle Catholic to take it for granted if we're not careful so it's it's a great joy for me for the last 27 years or so to have been able to get to know some of the people who did suffer and who did give up a lot and who had to study and even in some cases claw their way to that pearl of great price the Catholic faith so I'd like to begin by acknowledging that and also I'd like to give you a little bit of background about my own experience since I'm not a convert you may be saying well what happened to him how did he get this way in my case I was born in Southern California I'm the oldest of eight children my mom and dad also cradle Catholics from families who are Catholics for generations generations on my father's side I'm a hundred percent Hispanic Mexican and Spanish all the way back as far as we can tell on my mother's side Swedish and Irish which I was very happy to report to Wolff and his wife and so we grew up in a home that was decidedly Catholic but not weirdly Catholic our home did not smell of incense we did have images of the Lord in Our Lady and the Saints in our home it was it was customary that we would have family rosary most evenings and for some stretches of time we did it faithfully every evening I admit that when I was a kid and even as a young man I thought it was rather boring to kneel down and pray the rosary but it really helped me when I got later into life and I looked back and realized how deeply in how closely the Blessed Virgin Mary was helping me in my life it led to what amounted to a deep reconversion experience that I had in my mid-20s after having never left the church I never was tempted to leave the Catholic Church there was nothing about the Catholic Church that caused me any doubts or difficulties it was the age old problem st. Agustin writes about it in his confessions it is the war between the world and the flesh on one side and the spirit and truth on the other it was the tension between wanting to be in the world and kind of of the world rather than in the world but not of the world so all of those things that most of us have experienced in one way or another where part of my growing up had a very normal upbringing but the one thing that for me as I look back is very interesting is how my mom and dad managed to instill in us kids a sense of our Catholic faith as our identity it's not something we do for a week on Sunday for an hour or do for an hour once a week on Sunday our Catholic faith was not supposed to be something that we you know put our Catholic hat on now and again and we did some Catholic things but the rest of the week we just did whatever we pleased and my parents didn't so much say that but they lived it and they showed it to us in the way they lived and even just in little things there are things that I didn't understand it at the time but I look back and I'm grateful for the teaching that my parents gave us for example my father very upright man I never in my life have heard him utter a curse word ever not even one of the mild ones that you would think well that's okay to say that even when he hit his thumb with the hammer when he was working in the garage and and although at the time it never made much of an impression upon me later on I realized he was teaching me a kind of way of living that was very helpful to me when I became more aware of the truth so one other thing I'll mention about my mom and dad is that they raised eight children and every single one of us is still Catholic to this day no one has left the Catholic Church I I wish my mom and dad could be here to hear those applause they're they're alive and doing very well they live in Cincinnati now I grew up in Southern California as I mentioned but just reflecting back on my experience growing up as a Catholic has helped inform my mind and help me to talk more effectively I think when I meet somebody who asks me the question well why are you Catholic and I recall the first time I discovered I was about five years old when I discovered that not everybody in the world was Catholic it just seems so strange to me do you ever have that experience some of you cradle Catholics it was very shocking because I I just assumed that this well this is all true obviously my mom and dad taught me that Jesus is on the altar in the Blessed Sacrament and marrying the Saints are in heaven praying for me and all the things that I was taught as a child and it was shocking to imagine that not everybody in the world believed what I had been taught it just seems so self-evidently true so it was perplexing to me when I discovered that there were kids in my kindergarten class who didn't come from homes where they believed in Jesus and as I got older I began to run into some of the challenges that are typical when you're a kid and one that really sticks out of my mind was from the fourth grade I was on a field trip and I was sitting next to this girl in my class and on the bus ride home after a long fun day of this field trip and we were having a great time talking and somehow or another on the on the bus trip back she decided to ask me what church I went to which had nothing to do with anything we were talking about and I said oh well I'd go to the Catholic Church I named my parish and she looked at me with a look of disgust in horror I think on her face and she said you're Catholic I'm just like I let her down you know letting her know that I was Catholic I said yeah why she said well Catholics are idolaters and I said we are not what's an I never heard the word before and she said see here's a beautiful image of our lady she said well Catholics worship idols and I didn't know what an idol was either and I said what do you mean she said you have statues and you worship those those are idols and the Bible says you shouldn't bow down before statues you shouldn't worship idols and the Catholic Church teaches idolatry and I knew she was wrong I knew I had never worshiped a statue I had never seen my parents worship a statue I'd never even heard of worshipping a statute was so foreign to my mind that I couldn't quite connect what she was saying and it was only years later that I discovered in my research and study of the Bible that indeed in Exodus chapter 20 God commands Moses not to carve any graven images of anything in the sky above or on the earth below or on the waters beneath the earth and he says do not bow down to them do not worship them so I was starting to put two and two together later in life and I realized oh that's what she was talking about she and her church whatever church that was she was being told that because we have religious images that equals idolatry and perhaps you know people who hold that very view I've run into them countless times in my life but in the fourth grade I didn't know what to tell her all I could say was that's not true we don't worship statues but I didn't know what else to say but I've never forgotten that day it was my first opportunity to practice apologetics and I failed miserably because I had I had no knowledge interesting on that particular point if you look five chapters later in Exodus 25 you'll see where God actually commands the carving of religious images that's one of several places in the in the Old Testament where God either approves of or commands the carving the fashioning of religious images in Exodus 20:5 it happened to be the two cherubim angels that would sit on top of the Ark of the Covenant now I didn't know that in the fourth grade but as I learn that later I began to realize it's not graven images that the Lord was prohibiting but it is idolatry in our own day perhaps few people are prone to worshiping a statue although props somewhere you might find somebody who might commit that sin but we have a lot of other idols that occupy by our time and attention in the modern world money pleasure power that kind of thing I didn't know that in the fourth grade now I was speaking at a parish in Chicago years ago and I I showed up in front of the rectory where I would be speaking that evening in the church and Karl Keating my friend at Catholic Answers was with me we pulled up in front of the church and there on the front lawn of the rectory was a life-size statue of Our Lady of Fatima you know about as large as I am and then there were three statues kneeling in front of that statue praying with hands folded and I turned to Carl and I said what a great religion not only can we worship statues but our statues in worship statues and and we both chuckled and we thought that's pretty clever you know so when I got up that evening to say hello to the audience I used that story that had just happened an hour earlier and like yourselves all the Catholics in the audience chuckled at the absurdity of it but there were some people in the audience who didn't chuckle and one of them happened to be a local Baptist minister who during the question and answer period he said why were you laughing because you do worship statues so by then I was prepared to answer the question and I was very happy to disabuse him of that notion that Catholics worship statues we have statues for the same reason that you carry pictures of your loved ones in your wallet or your purse right you can't see them with your physical eyes the picture represents people who really are alive and so with the Saints and Our Lady for example it's like a picture and we love the person the picture represents if you saw me kids to pick a picture of my wife and children you wouldn't be shocked and think what's wrong with him he loves Kodak paper you'd say you'd say well he loves his wife and he loves his family when I got into high school that's when things really began to heat up in terms of the opposition to my Catholic faith and the most iconic experience for me was the summer between my junior and senior year of high school I call it my golden summer and perhaps some of you may have heard talk or two I've given where I've referenced this golden summer briefly what happened was first of all I had my driver's license which was awesome I was living in Southern California which was awesome because they had the beach and Disney and all of that I had some jingle in my pocket because I was working a job so I had some spending money and amazingly my parents allowed me the use of one of their cars now and then to get around but the best and most interesting part about that golden summer was that I was going out with this girl named Kristy very nice girl very pretty girl she was she came from a very ardent Protestant family and the one thing I remember I remember very little about Kristy to be honest with you I remember a lot about her dad because I mean she was nice and her father was nice to her father was a very friendly guy very very hospitable man but he was deeply deeply anti-catholic and he told me very quickly when I started showing up a Christie's house to pick her up to go get pizza or something like that he let me know right away he said you can come here you can go out with Christie but we need to talk about Jesus and the Bible and you getting saved and I said well I'm already saved I'm Catholic he says you're not you're not only not saved you're not Christian you believe a different gospel you worship a different Jesus and you are not saved and if you're willing I'd like to explain to you why so I was a bit miffed by that but I thought okay give it your best shot let me see what you let's see what you got okay tell me your reasons why I'm not a Christian and that was rather brash on my part because I was utterly ignorant of why I believed what I believed I knew what I believed that much I knew I knew I believe in the Eucharist I believed in the communion of saints I believed in purgatory I believed in the masses of sacrifice and all the other peculiarly Catholic aspects of the gospel but I didn't know why I believed them really I didn't have any evidence to support what I believed as I quickly found out so for the balance of that summer that you know two and a half three month period I was going over to Christie's house all the time part of it was I wanted to hang out with her but I also wanted to continue this conversation with Christie's father so he would break out the big King James Bible and he would grill me mercilessly it seemed to me like it was hours and hours probably was only 10 or 15 minutes but it was interminable and he would open his bow and he would say for example now Pat in your church what do you call your priests and I said we call him father and he would open to Matthew chapter 23 verse 9 and quote where Jesus says call no one on earth father for you how but one father who is in heaven and I would sit back perplexed I didn't know how to answer that and then he would say things like well do you believe that Mary was sinless and I said yes we do he says you mean you believe that Mary never committed a sin yeah that's right and then he would open to the luke's gospel and he would quote from the Magnificat portion our ladies saying my soul rejoices in God my Savior and then he'd sit back with a grin and he'd say now how could Mary need a Savior if she didn't commit a sin and furthermore if she never committed a sin what was she saved from and the Bible says Mary needed a savior Mary herself says she needed a Savior and your church says Mary never committed any sins which by the way the Bible doesn't say so which is right the Bible or your church with all its man-made traditions now for those of you who are familiar with how to respond to these arguments using the Holy Bible this is no problem for you no sweat because you know how to answer these questions for those of you who have not yet learned how to respond to these questions I hope in a certain sort of way that you feel a little uncomfortable right now because you're seeing what what at first glance is an apparent contradiction it's not a real contradiction but it's an apparent contradiction between a teaching of the Catholic faith and if you read the Bible a certain way how you might interpret it and I went through a whole summer of that it was a very uncomfortable summer for me but something interesting happened her father would do things like he would give me a chick comic book tract perhaps you've seen these little fundamentalist comic books Illustrated anti-catholic screeds he gave me one one day I'll never forget this it was called the death cookie and this was against the Holy Eucharist and it's laughable now but at the time I was like really irked by it but also kind of afraid of it because I didn't know if it would demolish my Catholic beliefs so he gave me the death cookie said you read this it'll show you why the Eucharist is not true he called it the cookie or the wafer or something like that and on the cover of this little comic book was a host as we would use at mass superimposed over the host was a skull and crossbones that's how you know how lowbrow this this little comic book was so I'd go home time after time I'd go to my dad I'd say okay dad here's the latest thing I got the death cookie here now what do I do this now god bless my parents and this is one reason why I hope all of you will go home today load it down with books and DVDs and CDs and I'll explain to you in a moment why because my dad every single time I would come home and I would give him the latest argument from Christie's dad that had shaken me he said no problem and he reached up to the bookshelf we had a large Catholic library in our home and he would pull down a book of say radio replies which is an awesome three-volume work of apologetics if you don't have radio replies I do recommend it and he said that that's covered in this book here and he'd pull it down and give it to him he wouldn't show me where it was in the book I had to find it myself but in so doing what happened was I found Wow this death cookie thing this is ridiculous it's not historical the biblical arguments don't really work and I began to realize that the Catholic teaching on whatever the given subject was that I was being challenged on actually was very biblical and it really was historically verifiable and so little by little in spite of the efforts that Christie's father went through to try to bring me out of the Catholic Church and into the pure light of the gospel as he referred to it so often I found that he actually was having it was having a boomerang effect on him because it was making me more convinced that I was in the right church and so by the end of the summer I had found in many of these issues I had found the reasons why I believed them so it wasn't merely knowing what I believed it was why I believed them this is one of the mantras that I'm constantly talking about on my radio program I do a little radio program it's a three hour morning show Monday through Friday oh what a coincidence there's that's the name of the program by the way quick aside if you don't live in an area where my show plays on your local am/fm station just if you'll keep the logo up for a moment just go to your App Store on your phone and get the Immaculate Heart Radio app and then you can listen to the program it airs live Monday through Friday from 9 to noon Eastern it's on morning drive 6 to 9 Pacific but if you get the app on your smart phone just look up Immaculate Heart Radio and you'll find the app and then you can just press a button and it turns on it's a free app by the way the reason I mentioned the radio program is that I'm a heart on this theme endlessly hopefully not in a grading way but I'm constantly reminding listeners it's not enough to just know what you believe anymore maybe in days gone by and our parents and grandparents generation that might have been sufficient but our parents and grandparents never had to deal with things like the Supreme Court changing the definition of marriage we never had to deal with fetal stem cell research our parents and grandparents never had to deal with any of the things that you and I are bombarded with on a daily basis today am i right about that yeah so we are we live in a generation the the unique first generation of its kind of Christians that now have to deal not simply with being hassled or being persecuted to whatever extent persecution may arrive but we're dealing with different arguments now look at the rise of atheism atheism is getting increasingly militant increasingly muscular they're no longer content anymore to just simply laugh at Christians now you've got the billboard campaigns and the bus placards and the YouTube videos and the books and TV shows and they're really making a play for the belief of Christians especially to switch from believing in God to believing that there is no God now counter-intuitively perhaps I'm really excited by this the fact that atheism is actually ramping up to my mind can be a good thing if more of us as Catholics see it for what it really is and see it as an opportunity for evangelism and to show why we believe that God exists the rational proofs for God's existence that don't rely upon quoting a Bible verse you might as well quote the Yellow Pages to an atheist for all the good it will do in quoting the Holy Bible so I pause there only to emphasize once again what a beautiful thing a conference like this can be for all of us and that is to help us even more so solidify in our own minds and hearts not only the knowledge of what we believe but why we believe it and what are the systematic ways that we can explain that so for example when somebody says to me why be Catholic I have now kind of a system in place that I can go through and talk about I remember one plane flight I was taking from Southern California back home to where I live now in Columbus and I fly a lot as you might imagine doing conferences and things like that so I have a lot of frequent flyer miles I think on American Airlines alone I'm like almost three million miles flown with them so which is insane so I get on this airplane the reason I mentioned is because you get all these upgrades into first-class so I walk into the planes early flight leaving about 6:30 7:00 in the morning I get on I walk into first-class and it's practically empty except for one guy sitting in the window seat in this row over here and maybe one or two other people the rest of first-class is empty so I'm thinking this is great I'll have a row to myself but I looked at my boarding pass and I was seated in the aisle seat right next to this one guy so I thought I'll just sit down and when the plane gets going I'll get up and move so I sat down said hello he was a very middle-eastern looking guy when he said hello back it was clear that he was an Arab and I said you know there's nobody else here in first-class so once we get going just to give us some more elbow room I'm going to get up and move to another another seat and he looked at me very sternly and he said why is that because I'm a Muslim and you don't want to sit next to a Muslim and I said no sir that's not the reason why I want to move I just thought it'd be nice to move to a different seat and he says well I thought it was because you don't want to sit next to a Muslim then I'm thinking to myself I'm definitely sitting in this seat for the rest of the flight I want this seat none of the other seats and I said absolutely not I'm actually quite interested now tell me you're a Muslim tell me more and and so he did he proceeded to tell me all the reasons why I should be a Muslim and I said you know we've got a three-hour flight ahead of us how about this I would love it if you would just explain it all to me give me give me a day to dump tell me everything of what you believe and why I think how many chances do I get to sit down next to a believing evangelical if we can use the term Muslim so I wanted to soak up every moment of the experience so I said how about this I will be happy I'll keep my mouth closed I won't say anything I just want to learn from you and if you would tell me everything you want to talk then battery I don't know if we need a new battery for this mic but we'll see how it goes I said all I ask is that you would be willing to let me explain to you what I believe and why I'm a Catholic and what I believe about Jesus he said okay fine so we had this ongoing conversation lasted the entire flight and when we were finished it didn't seem to me that he was at all swayed by anything I said and I definitely just so you know I was not swayed by anything he said in case anyone's wondering and he gave me his business card in his email and all that he wanted me to look at some YouTube videos and I said sure and I'll send you some stuff so I sent him a copy of dr. Peter crêpes the philosophy of Jesus which is an awesome book if you don't have it get it and I sent him some I forget what else I sent him as some links to some videos so we did stay in touch once after the flight he wrote back to me and he says did you see the videos that I wanted you to see and I said yes I saw this one I saw this one and here was my question about this one in that one and I and then I said did you read the book I sent you and I never heard back from him so all I know is in a case like that you you explain like the sower of the seed you explain what you believe you do your best to explain why you believe it in your own words and it doesn't have to be fancy I'll tell you a store about that in a few minutes and when you do that you never know how God might make use of that chance meeting that you might have with somebody even if it's somebody who's very hostile to the faith apologetics is a very I would say a very mysterious process and as I look back on my own experiences over the years of doing apologetics and I consider how many things I've I've bungled and how many mistakes I've made and missed opportunities and imperfect ways of explaining things and yet time after time I notice how people they gravitate to Catholic truths have you have you seen that because it has its own gravitational pull the Catholic faith the truths of the Catholic faith they're beautiful in themselves even if the person trying to make the case for them bungles it they're beautiful in themselves and there's a certain attractive power that draws people much like when you men when you met you're the woman who would be your wife eventually like when I met Nancy it's always at first the external qualities isn't it the beautiful hair the beautiful smile winsome personality and once you're drawn in by that outward beauty and you begin to get to know her then you realize there's an inward beauty that I never would have known about if I had not first been attracted by the outer beauty one of the reasons I talked about this in the book why be Catholic is because for many people they're unwilling to consider anything about the Catholic Church because they're looking at it first from a dogmatic standpoint or they're looking at it first from how they see Catholics act and sometimes it's helpful for people to step back and just consider the church in her own self and what what she isn't what she does as opposed to the Catholics that they might see or work with in the office I use an analogy early in the book about how the Catholic Church is like Noah's Ark and that's not a unique analogy to me others have used it before but the way I approach it as I say I want to talk to you about the Catholic Church in light of Noah's Ark now think about Noah's Ark Noah's Ark was the Ark of salvation someone asked me in fact Mike had posted on Facebook something I had forgotten I had written and and when I saw it I thought that is actually pretty good I forgot I had written that thank you Mike for putting it on Facebook to remind me and again nothing unique to me but what I said was I love the Catholic Church I love being in the Catholic Church the way Noah loved being on the ark during the flood now think about what the ark would have been like can you imagine what it smelled like in the Ark after 40 days especially could you imagine trying to get a good night's sleep on the ark and isn't it true that on the ark not only was it messy and a lot of commotion and a lot of noise but there were also a lot of unruly passengers on the ark as well there were a lot of the animals on the ark who if they could have gotten out of their pens or cages or whatever they were in they would have loved to devour other animals on the ark and so when I say that I love being in the Catholic Church the way no Noah loved being on the ark this is not in any way disrespectful to the church or self but it's not a clean and tidy and odor-free place in the Catholic Church is it it is always rough-and-tumble it has always been rough-and-tumble it has always been in a kind of a state of uproar and commotion there have been some epochs thankfully where God granted his people a relative calm and relative peace but for the most part as I've studied church history I realize the Catholic Church is this is a place that makes Saints because remember when you were kids did you ever have a rock tumbler you ever have one of those little gizmos you would put any old Rock from the backyard into this thing and there was some sort of a paste or powder that you would put in it and this thing would just turn and turn and turn for weeks and weeks and eventually what was inside the rock had been coated smooth with this kind of glassy substance and it was interesting how that happened it's kind of like that in my experience is that in the Catholic Church all those rough edges and all the sharp edges those are the things that a lot of people they see that and they say I want no part of the Catholic Church but they don't see the beauty that's where it comes for us to explain the beauty to them when I when they say why are you Catholic I talk about things such as the mass the Holy Eucharist an analogy that might be useful to you imagine a conductor who gathers all the members of this new Symphony Orchestra that he wants to send out for concerts and he says all right all of you members know Symphony Orchestra is what it's an ensemble of highly trained musicians right so what if what would you think of of this conductor if he said okay I want you to go out and I want you to tell people what music would sound like if only they could hear it I'd like you to describe music to them that would be pointless wouldn't it but you would expect the conductor to say alright here are the instruments now go make music now the analogy as I see it works like this if the Catholic Church did not have the mass it would be akin to the orchestra not having the instruments because with the mass we can actually make the music which is the Holy Eucharist it is good to speak about Jesus to describe Jesus it's good to sing about Jesus it's good to remember Jesus everything about that is good and we should all do it and we should in no way look down upon our non Catholic friends who do those things but I have found personally that that's a great incentive to me to want to share with them the Holy Eucharist Jesus truly present body blood soul and divinity because as I was thinking back to my golden summer Christie's dad was telling me that is idolatry you're worshiping a piece of bread and it eventually clicked in my mind either the Catholic Church is right about this and it really is Jesus Christ truly they are body blood soul and divinity or it is idolatry Christie's dad is right so if the Catholic Church is wrong about this issue and I'm utterly convinced that it's not based upon all the evidence not only from Scripture but the early church and the continuous examples of Eucharistic miracles that are inexplicable that have come down through the centuries I realized that yeah it either is true or it's not true but it is true and it's been proven to being true so in my view everybody should be Catholic and it would actually be wrong of me and of you to either out of willfulness or out of neglect to not share that truth with other people the bread of life Jesus truly present with us when people say to me why are you Catholic I say well because I've become convinced that the Catholic Church is the church that Jesus Christ established well isn't that rather arrogant well you know I guess you have to talk to Jesus about that but the evidence that I have seen has convinced me beyond dispute that the Catholic Church is the church and by the way I do include our Eastern Orthodox brothers and sisters in this claim because prior to the 11th century they were in the Catholic Church with us United together they have valid sacraments Valley Holy Orders so when I make the claim the Catholic Church please understand I'm including our Eastern Orthodox brothers and sisters but history demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Catholic Church can trace its lineage from the present day all the way back to the time of the Apostles all the way back to Jesus in fact when I encountered for example great Saints like Saint Ignatius of Antioch saying to people in the letters that he was writing on his way to be martyred in Rome around the Year 107 and he wrote a number of things I'll conflate a couple of them into a single kind of paraphrase here he said for example he says if you meet somebody who does not profess what we believe namely that the Eucharist is the flesh of Jesus the flesh that suffered for our salvation on the cross then stay away from that person because in essence he's teaching something that did not come from the apostles now how would he know that well because he was a disciple of st. John the Apostle st. John was in the Upper Room when Jesus performed the miracle of transubstantiation not for the first time by the way the first time was at the wedding at Cana when he transubstantiated water into wine but Saint John was there Saint Ignatius of Antioch also it seems knew Saint Peter who is also in the Upper Room so he was receiving the teaching on something as central as the Holy Eucharist directly from the man who were in the room when it happened and they told him this is what Jesus meant so st. Ignatius who got it literally from the source he was able to say if you meet somebody who doesn't believe this they're not getting that from the Apostles the real presence you can go back through the centuries from the present day and see the Catholic Church in every generation almost always in an uproar almost always with all kinds of difficulties and problems great Saints terrible sinners you can see how the Catholic Church is a saint making Factory ask yourself this question just food for thought that's all and you might ask this of the non Catholic folk that you meet where are the miracle-working raising from the dead healing by locating soul reading miraculous people outside of the Catholic Church where are they where have they been where where is the evidence of these things throughout history again no disrespect intended to any non Catholic person please understand the meaning of what I'm saying here I'm focusing on the fact that for 2,000 years now the Catholic Church has produced this endless stream of men and women boys and girls who are Saints who are heroically virtuous and in the case of some of them who perform miracles that are inexplicable there's something to be said the Catholic Church has something it has the right soil in which the roots of great Saints can sink down deep and turn out a Saint John Paul the second or a mother Teresa or Saint Padre Pio etc when somebody says to me why are you Catholic when you could be anything else I talk about the Blessed Virgin Mary and I talked about how her role in the life of the church is part of the full gospel this is one of the things I had to overcome when I was growing up as a Catholic perhaps some of you may still struggle with this and that is a feeling of being kind of squeamish about Our Lady's role in the Catholic Church like worrying that you know I don't really want to emphasize because maybe people will think that we're over emphasizing Mary or something like that I discovered to my happy surprise how many times people who seem very distant from the Catholic Church very very even very opposed to this aspect of the Catholic Church the Church's teachings on Mary and how with enough exposure to what those teachings really are the person falls in love with the Catholic Church by understanding the role of the Blessed Virgin Mary as intercessor one such person by the way whom I encountered and spoke about this subject with many many years ago is in this room right now her name is Kimberly Hahn and before Kimberly was Catholic I don't know if you remember this conversation Kimberly but we had a long conversation Scott had become Catholic a few years earlier you are still on the journey and I remember if you don't mind if I can share this story I hope you don't mind I remember how struck I was as a cradle Catholic growing up always hearing these things to be true and hearing from Kimberly something that it just it just resonated with me in the sense that I understood how somebody could have a difficulty Kimberly at the time still have angelical but sympathetic to what Scott was doing but she had of the difficulty with Mary and I remember Kimberly you described how you and Scott had gone with the kids to a cemetery I don't know if it was to visit a relative's grave or something and when she saw the kids kiss a statue of Mary she was very unhappy with that and I remember you were describing the conversation you had with Scott after you got back in the car or something you know why are you teaching the kids to kiss a statue of Mary because it was very hard for her to imagine that that would be something good and now over the years since then don't you know Kimberly has been one of the most articulate and persuasive and effective expositors of the Church's teachings on the Blessed Virgin Mary the point I'm making here is that don't be afraid to share the Full Gospel which includes the Blessed Virgin Mary it includes purgatory it includes all the sacraments everything that you and I know as Catholics that some people look at as peculiar or off-putting it's amazing to me how often people will wind up gravitating to these truths once they've met a Catholic who's willing and who's not afraid to talk about these things it does not make excuses for them but simply explains them as they really are one thing that in my workshop I'm going to show you how to do I'll be in the tent today by the way for the workshop I'm going to show you how in your conversations with people especially if you're talking about why you're Catholic I'm going to show you in in the area of dealing with those who go by the Bible alone typically evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants how you can share your faith with them as a Catholic on all these issues that are not directly spoken about in the Bible and you can do it in a way that will show them that it is compatible with Scripture and is even biblical in a broader sense of the word I'll save that one thing I should mention too is I have a new book out for those of you are interested in knowing about this it's called scripture and tradition in the church and it will explain to you how you can make the case for your non Catholic Bible believing friends who won't listen to the Catholic Church but they will listen to the Bible you can show them after seeing in this book how to do this how the Bible and tradition and the church's Authority all go together one more time just for the title so you know what it is scripture and tradition in the church in my remaining time I'd like to just emphasize that every single encounter that I've had with people on this topic of why be Catholic is different and it will always be different for all of us we're all person specific and the Lord of course knows what needs to be said in that moment the Lord knew for example when I was talking to the Muslim man on the plane that it would be good for me to have that conversation with him and vice versa I remember I was signing books at a conference in Albuquerque once and a lady came up to the book table and she pointed at I think it was surprised by truth to the yellow covered book which is the surprised by truth books our conversion testimony anthologies and they're just people telling why they became Catholic so she came up she pointed to the book she said that book brought me back to the Catholic Church I said really what happened cuz I love these stories she said well I graduated from high school and I was raised Catholic but when I graduated from high school and left home I left God altogether I checked out of religion and I was leading a very wild life and she said for the next 20 years or so I had nothing to do with God or my faith at all my parents were beside themselves but I was having the time of my life and I never looked back and she said one day I went I was backpacking or hiking or something in some remote place in Minnesota she says I went into a one-room post office to buy stamps so I could mail some postcards and she said I was talking to the clerk and somehow him probably it came out of the conversation that she was an ex-catholic and the clerk said oh you're next Catholic he reached under the counter he said you need to read this book and he pulled that book out and she said no I can't take your book please thank you but no and he says no I have a whole stack of em here I keep him here for people just like you and sure enough he did now there are two two things I want you to think about here first what happened was she took the book she was kind of dazed by the whole thing she took the book later that day or the next day she started thumbing through it she started reading it she read it all the way through and the way she described it was she said when I was done I put the book down I got in my car I drove into the nearest town I could find found a Catholic Church went to confession for the first time in 20 years she came back to the faith now here are the two things that I'd like to emphasize from that I learned from that number one is the the amazing little seemingly insignificant details that can lead to a profound conversion experience it could be something as simple as you hand somebody a book or a CD or let them know about the catholic radio station in your town they can be as simple as that the second thing to keep in mind is that the power of testimony is huge what got her to start thinking where the story is told by the people in these conversion stories the people in the book and each one in their own way just shared from the heart this is what I believe this is how I came to believe this and there's a powerful attractive drawing force in that testimony that's part of what I think we all need to take away from our thinking about why be Catholic and that is say to yourself why am i Catholic not just why are people Catholic but why am i Catholic and how would I explain that in my own words to somebody if somebody asked me about that I only have a few minutes left so let me share with you two final thoughts the first one very dear to my heart is this is a lesson I learned from a woman who's very dear to my heart my lovely wife Nancy who's here with me today some of you have met her I've learned many things in my life from Nancy and I'm grateful to God for Nancy in so many ways but one story that I'd like to share with you has to do with when our Levitt was a newborn and Nancy and I needed a break from all the noise at home so this this kid now is a horse he wears a size 13 shoe and he's going to be six foot five I'm sure by the time he's done he's 14 years old but when he was a newborn baby Nancy and I his name Steven we took him to we took him with us we went to the local Olive Garden and the waitress gave us our menus and then sat us down and started talking with Nancy about the baby boy or girl how old Tippecanoe then she asked Nancy the question that neither she nor I wanted her to ask which was is here first and Nancy looked at me and raised her eyebrows as if to say do you want to tell her and I shook my head no you can tell her so she said he's our eleventh now this poor woman she was just she couldn't take it she ran off and got three or four other waitresses brought them to our table and they're standing there looking at us and it was clear from the expressions on their faces it was if like the freakshow had just shown up at Olive Garden so they're looking at this they're saying eleven kids and you know isn't that expensive and why would you do that you know all the negativity and I could see on their faces they're looking at her saying you poor thing and they're looking at me and thinking you monster what is wrong with you and then they started talking about their own personal contraceptive habits so one of them said well I have two kids and I'm on the pill and the other one laughed and said yeah well I got my tubes tied and the other one kake'land said yeah well I made my husband have a vasectomy and I'm sitting there thinking I just want to have a plate of lasagna I I don't want to know and I don't want to know any of this stuff especially not right now um so it was weird and very negative and all that so in the midst of all this my lovely wife she I'll never forget her she just smiled at them and she said in a very calm voice she's just said well my husband and I believe that children are a blessing from God and we believe in being open to life so that God would bless our marriage and that's all she said just like that in that tone of voice simple and it was enough to kind of quell all the controversies so the waitresses they went back to work and we ate our I mean we kind of laughed it was not ridiculous we ate our food and 45 minutes or so later I paid the bill got the baby we went out to the minivan and as we're getting into the minivan I heard footsteps running up behind us and I turned around to see who it was and it was our waitress and she had run the length of the parking lot down to where we were parked at the end and under the streetlight above I could see tears in her eyes and she said I'm so glad I caught you I didn't want you to leave without saying thank you and I knew she wasn't talking to me because the tip was not that big so I she's I just wanted to say thank you and I said or she was talking to Nancy Ann and she said what you said in there she said about children being a blessing from God she said my husband and I have two kids I'm on the pill and I've never heard anything like that before she said but when you said that I realized it's true and she said they really stirred my heart and I can't explain it but I've decided I'm getting off the pill when I go home tonight after my shift I'm telling my husband because I want God to bless my marriage and I didn't want you to leave without saying thank you she gave Nancy a hug she went back inside we've never seen her again thank you lord Thank You Nancy so little things I have one final thought and then I'm done little things are perhaps the most important of all yes sometimes you need to quote Bible verses yes sometimes you need to give a more detailed explanation of a given doctrine but keep in mind apologetics is about the heart more than it is about the mind it is about the mind but if it doesn't have the heart it's not going to go anywhere so I learned that lesson from Nancy and I share it with you in hopes that perhaps the simplicity of her answer will be an encouragement to you let me share with you one final thing it'll only take me a moment it's a true story it comes from a book called small miracle it's kind of like Chicken Soup for the Soul it's going to take me about a minute to read this but to listen to this and here's the reason why I'm reading this - because it's time to act all of us we have to act we have to step in we have to take some risks we have to know not only what we believe but why we believe it and we have to be willing to talk about it listen to this I was walking down a dimly lit Street late one evening when I heard muffled screams coming from behind a clump of bushes alarmed I slowed down to listen and panicked when I realized that what I was hearing were the unmistakable sounds of a struggle heaving grunting frantic scuffling the tearing of fabric only yards from where I stood a woman was being attacked should I get involved I was frightened for my own safety and cursed myself for having suddenly decided to take a new route home that night what if I became a victim shouldn't I just run away - and call the police and let them handle it although it seemed like an eternity the deliberations in my head had taken only seconds but already the girl's cries were growing weaker I knew I had to act fast how could I walk away from this no I finally resolved I could not turn my back on the fate of this unknown woman even if it meant risking my life I'm not a brave man nor my athletic but once I had finally resolved to help the girl I became strangely transformed I ran behind the bushes and pulled the assailant off the woman grappling we fell to the ground and were and struggled for a few moments punching until the assailant jumped up and ran away panting hard I scrambled up right and approached the girl who was crouched behind a tree sobbing in the darkness I could barely see her outline but I could certainly sense her trembling shock not wanting to frighten her any further I had first spoke to her from a distance and said it's okay the man ran away you're safe now there was a long pause and then I heard her words uttered in wonder and amazement dad he's at you and then for behind the tree step my youngest daughter Katherine that's Greg O'Leary true story from small miracles I'll leave you with that thought just imagine what would have happened if that father had taken the easy way out had not taken the risk had not been willing to put his own life on the line just imagine if he had found out later that it was his own daughter to my mind that's the story that reminds us very poignant Lee about our own need to step forward and not just know what we believe and not just know why we believe it but be willing to share it thank you all god bless you

Channel: Steubenville Conferences

Views: 42,218

Rating: 4.8571429 out of 5

Keywords: Steubenville Conferences, Catholic, Franciscan University, Catholic Ministry, New Evangelization, Youth

Id: Ik6iWEth6oU

Length: 51min 30sec (3090 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 01 2016