IS CHRISTIAN AUTHORITY REALLY BASED ON ANY SOLA?

Catholic: Is the Word of the Father authoritative to the Christian?

Protestant: Of course.

Catholic:  Is the Word of the Jesus authoritative to the Christian?

Protestant: Yes. Both the Father and the Son are God. They are both authoritative.

Catholic: Is the Word of the Holy Spirit authoritative to the Christian?

Protestant: Yes, Christians believe in the Trinity, three persons in one God. They are all authoritative.

Catholic: What if I were to say to you, “My authority is Pater Solus or a Father alone. I don’t go to Jesus or the Spirit. I go straight to the Father. He is my final authority and I check out all that Jesus says or the Spirit says through the Father.” What would you say?

Protestant: I don’t understand the point. Jesus and the Father are one so they are not going to disagree. 

Catholic: But if they do disagree. I’m not going to Jesus, I am going to the Father. 

Protestant: What are you saying? That the Father and Son might disagree?

Catholic: No.The Trinity is our authority. There is no conflicts between them. Even though there are three final authorities, no Christian would see a problem with this.

Protestant: So?

Catholic: So, like the Trinity itself being our final authority, Christians also have three voices or sources of the Word of God that are authoritative: The Bible, Tradition and the Magisterium. All three of these are the Word of God revealed to us. The Bible is the written word, the Tradition is the oral word and the Magisterium is the living word. So, the earthly authority reflects the heavenly authority. It is three working in unison rather than any one or “sola” authority. 

The Dark Ages? Hardly-- They were the LIGHT Ages

CATHOLICS! BE ANNOYING!

Preach it MICHAEL!!

EWTN Question to Father Pacwa by Yours Truly....

My husband and I just took a pilgrimage to EWTN and were in the audience for the live television shows:

ETWN LIVE with Father Mitch Pacwa




AND Threshold of Hope also with Father Pacwa:



The reason for this blog is to give my perspective on the question I asked Father Mitch and his guest in the first video. I asked the second question (and the close up wasn't flattering.... I don't look like that in real life....smile....); my question is around the forty minute mark, but the full video is so good I hate for you to fast forward.

The question I asked was for my friend Ricky (currently in RCIA), "If Christ is truly present in the Eucharist why aren't Catholics more Christ-like?"

Since they didn't have time to ponder their answers, I think they answered it well enough, but I have been thinking about this since I was considering Catholicism way back in 2006 or 2007 and I want to give my personal answer to it. However, how truly Catholic my answer is, I just don't know.

Why Does the Eucharist Seem to be Impotent in Changing Catholics Lives?

I would answer this with other questions. Why could not Jesus Christ, Immanuel (God with us) perform miracles in some towns? 

And He could do no miracle there except that He laid His hands on a few sick people and healed them. And He wondered at their unbelief. Mark 6: 5, 6

Why were not the Jews, even the Apostles themselves, instantly changed by being with Christ day by day? After all, the "real presence" of Christ was there in the flesh, in the form of a human man, daily and few were miraculously changed into saints. In fact, I don't know of any who left Christ's presence on earth who were perfected by it. Zacchaeus promised to be better, and Jesus told the harlot to go and sin no more, and perhaps they were instantaneously changed by God, but we have no record of it.  

People walked amongst Christ day by day, heard His teachings and the miracle of His real presence changed only a few, gradually.

The Real Presence Then and Now

Just as the Jews were repulsed by the idea of God giving the world His true flesh and becoming one with us as a man, so are many Christians repulsed by the idea of God giving the world His true flesh and becoming one with us in bread and wine. Both are testing miracles. 

I am not saying that one cannot be saved outside of the Catholic Church. But just as the Jews were tested by the miracle of the human Christ, Immanuel, God with us; so too are we, His followers today, tested by the miracle of the Eucharist. 

JOHN 6: 31-71

"Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, 'He gave them bread out of heaven to eat.' " Jesus then said to them, "Truly, truly, I say to you, it is not Moses who has given you the bread out of heaven, but it is My Father who gives you the true bread out of heaven. For the bread of God is that which comes down out of heaven, and gives life to the world. Then they said to Him, "Lord, always give us this bread." Jesus said to them, "I am the bread of life ..." Therefore the Jews were grumbling about Him, because He said, "I am the bread that came down out of heaven." ... "I am the bread of life. Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread which comes down out of heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down out of heaven; if anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever; and the bread also which I will give for the life of the world is My flesh." Then the Jews began to argue with one another, saying, "How can this man give us His flesh to eat ?" So Jesus said to them, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in yourselves. He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For My flesh is true food, and My blood istrue drink. He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me, and I in him. As the living Father sent Me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats Me, he also will live because of Me. This is the bread which came down out of heaven; not as the fathers ate and died; he who eats this bread will live forever."

" ...many of His disciples, when they heard this said, "This is a difficult statement; who can listen to it?"... As a result of this many of His disciples withdrew and were not walking with Him anymore. So Jesus said to the twelve, "You do not want to go away also, do you?"

Today, we as Catholics have the presence of Christ with us in the Eucharist. We can stand before God as the Apostles did. And we too can reject the living bread and withdraw from Christ and walk with Him no more, even as mass-attending Catholics. 

Christ called His disciples to "do this in remembrance of me." That means we, as we partake in the sacrament, are to bring to our hearts this precious gift and allow it to change us. We are to actively invite Christ who knocks on our door, to enter and cleanse us of all sins. Jesus says to the lukewarm Christians:

"...you do not know that you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, I advise you to buy from Me gold refined by fire so that you may become rich, and white garments so that you may clothe yourself, and that the shame of your nakedness will not be revealed; and eye salve to anoint your eyes so that you may see. Those whom I love, I reprove and discipline; therefore be zealous and repent. Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and will dine with him." Revelation 3:17-20

When it comes right down to it, repenting is the biggest problem. We want faith only to believe, not faith enough to let Him in that He may rid us of our sins. We don't want to dine with Him for we are afraid of letting go of our sins. We tend to love them or at least depend on them. We cling to them and often it is very, very painful to let them go. 

The power of the Eucharist is not to magically make us hate sin, as if God is a type of Bewitched and all He does is twitch His nose and our sins are all gone. The Eucharist is a softening of our stubborn hearts, it is a gentle wooing us to love Him and let go of all things that harm us and others. This takes time, most of us, our entire lives.  So we cannot judge other Christians when they partake of the Eucharist. For receiving the True Presence is either making us more stubborn in our sins, or less. You are either drinking life or you are drinking wrath, God's immortality or God's damnation. It is either making you more clouded or Christ-like. And it is not automatic that you receive the life and immortality. That is your active choice.

This is the power of the Real Presence in the Eucharist. And always keep in mind that Protestants are watching you.....

ON BEING CATHOLIC: The Family Feud

Random thoughts about being Catholic.

I've been Catholic since Easter of 2008 and it feels like I am just Catholic and at the same time as if I've been forever Catholic. The Catholic faith is so rich that no matter how deeply you study it, there is a surprise, a wonderful joyous surprise around every corner. Which keeps the faith alive and new. And at the same time....because my husband and I study it, ponder it, daily we also feel like we know the faith better than most Catholics. When you become Catholic and submerge yourself in it, you no longer live as you did before. Your mind itself changes. Protestantism seems a distant, a very very distant memory after only five years.

It is hard being Catholic. Most Americans assume you have been deceived into a false gospel. It's hard because, in America, if you decide to kneel and take the Eucharist on the tongue or if, as a woman, I wear my head covered, then all the liberal Catholics judge us with some unchristian severity. We didn't intentionally walk into this family battle, but by choosing to kneel we unknowingly took sides and so we have had constant fire our direction. Liberal Catholics made automatic assumptions about us because we must, naturally, be SSPX-sympathizing, holocaust-denying, Latin mass pushers. No on all three. I do love Palestrina and the Litany of the Saints, but I also love all the sweet little songs we sing at the Eucharist about the bread being the body. (See I don't even know the names of them.)

I feel like wearing a t-shirt to mass that says, "Hey, I'm just happy to be here!" All this girl altar boys and when we kneel or stand....  or if we say "and with your spirit" rather than the old "and also with you" I don't get. I haven't been Catholic long enough to have an opinion. All I know is that someone told me sometime while learning Catholicism that you can stand or kneel, so I thought, "How sweet, I'd like to kneel." I didn't know I was going to be ticking off so many people each mass. (At least some people--including a priest-- have told me that I am displaying my pride and making everyone judge me.)

I also really like Michael Voris. His programming on church militant tv is outstanding. I've also learned not to say that out loud because for some reason a lot of Catholics don't like him.

And we love EWTN and when Father Pacwa said something or other about not holding hands during the "Our Father" I didn't. Again, making mass quite uncomfortable for the man next to me who kept trying to grab my hand. I'm tired of the family feud and I just and finally got to the party. And even with it all I am incredibly glad to be here. I love being Catholic. I mean.... I LOVE being Catholic.

What I realized is that when all this stuff happens in other churches and people start taking sides, the Protestant churches have an easy out. They split apart and everyone goes to church with everyone else who agrees with them. Catholics can't do that. You are made to stay and learn how to get along. And that means obedience. AND humility often accompanying some true humiliation depending about how loud you were on insisting you were right. God set up the Catholic Church to be one. Unity is hard. So, therefore being Catholic is harder than being Protestant.

So here in Catholic land, Dave Armstrong (a Catholic convert) is going to have to get along with Michael Voris (a Catholic revert). And I get to love them BOTH!! (hee hee!) There are so many wonderful people to love within Catholicism on  all sides. If I could have one wish granted. (Other than everyone being saved and peace on earth) I would wish for all people to see Catholicism through my eyes and heart.

I'm now being hit from within Catholicism and from without, from Protestants. It's worth it. Really. I've never been so targeted with people wanting to "correct" me and yet even when I am sobbing with hurt I feel a joy, a joy expanding within my soul that I cannot explain. In Catholicism there is a suffering in each joy and a joy that pervades and infuses every suffering.

As a Protestant, I knew and felt Jesus. In Catholicism He and I are becoming one. As wonderful as both are, the struggle of being Catholic makes my life an epic story. And that story looks very much like Christ's.

The Meaning of the Bible

I remember Ginger's room. She was much older than I and her room was a mysterious place of grown-up girls and make-up and women's dresses. Her room was a world of wonder for me, a four or five-year-old. I wasn't supposed to go into her room. I don't remember being told not to, I just remember feeling guilty when I once went in and she wasn't in her room. There, on a table or chair or something, was her purse and a writing pad and a pen. She had something written in cursive on a piece of paper. I was absolutely intrigued. 

I stared at those rounded scribblings and contemplated what they meant. I knew that all those black ink symbols held some very important information and I wanted to know what. It seemed a great mystery to me, a great challenge to figure it out. 

Then, I took a pen and next to her writing, I strained to copy it. I mimicked the little loops and the short straight lines. Somewhere in my child's mind I felt certain I had written something and that no one would ever know these weren't real words. 

And that is the end of my memory. 

*******

"Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path."

 Psalms 119: 105

Most Protestants believe that anyone can read the Bible and know the definition of many of the words. Okay, I would say to that, yes, most people can read the words, but that is not the problem. Reading words doesn't mean we understand them. The promises of God about His word, such as the text above, is not for those seeing the black symbols on paper. The writing itself contains no blessing, no insight. Many people will read and understand all the definitions of each word, but they will not be able to grasp what the text means. Jesus didn't promise us understanding of His words: 

"When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what has been sown in his heart." (Matt. 13:19)

The light we receive from God's word is when we understand what the author meant. We must know the intent of the words and that entails interpretation. What did God mean when He wrote (insert text here)?

This question must be asked with every single line of God's word. The blessing we receive from God's word doesn't come off the paper just by looking at it. We receive the Word of the Lord when the meaning of the words is understood. If someone gets the wrong meaning, the Bible then was of little value. In fact a wrong understanding of scripture can create a lot of theological angst in our lives. That promise above of a lighted path? Well, the path will remain dark if the meaning of the word is unclear. It all depends, not upon the reading, but upon the correct understanding of scripture. 

It takes more than reading scripture. God must open your mind to understand the scripture as Jesus said to His Apostles in Luke 24: 45 (See also I Cor. 2:12, 14). 

As the Ethiopian was returning from a trip to Jerusalem, he found out that he was unable to comprehend a passage in Isaiah. Christ's disciple Philip asked him, "Do you understand what you are reading?" and the man responded, "How can I, unless someone guides me?" (Acts 8:29-31) Why wouldn't God have just sent the Spirit to guide the Ethiopian in his studies? Why send Philip? Evidently God didn't have in mind that the scriptures were always simple and direct. The passage in Isaiah that the Ethiopian was reading was confusing not because the man didn't know how to read, it was because he could not grasp the meaning. 

As obvious as this seems, many people have never really contemplated it. Just like my story above, being able to see the words doesn't covey what the writer is communicating. And when I was a year older and able to read the words, I supposed I still would not be able to understand a lot of what Ginger had written on the paper. Until I knew Ginger, until she explained to me what she meant, I wouldn't have understood her and been able to relate to her writings. And that is more than being able to read. 

The Bible contains things hard to understand. (Matt. 13: 13-15; Mark 4: 13; 6:52; 8:17, Luke 2: 50; John 8:43; 10:6; John 12:16) and the gift of the written word is lost when it is not understood. It must be "rightly divided" (2 Tim. 2:15) Peter writes of Paul's letters, "There are some things in them hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do other scriptures." (2 Peter 3:16; See also Ephesians 6: 13-17)

So it all comes down to the correct meaning. Reading scripture wrongly can cause your destruction warns Peter. Rather than assume we know what God means in scripture, the critical question we need to ask is, "What did God mean to say in this story or passage?" We are to go and discover it. Seek and ye shall find. For unless we understand what God meant, we are no more than I was as a four-year-old just scrutinizing little loops and lines in black ink. 

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The True Story

This is a true story:

There was a Christian man who had several children. He loved his wife and he loved his children.

The man and his wife got a divorce. The woman told her children dreadful things about their father and why the divorce happened. The man remained quiet and would not defend himself. The children grew up believing what their mother said about their dad.

Grandchildren were born and told the same story. All blame for the terrible divorce was placed on the grandfather.

One day, the grandfather died. And years went by and great-grandchildren were born and told the same story as they were told. 

A half century went by since the divorce.

Until, now old, one of the children of the Christian man admitted to the family her father had come privately to her and pledged to her that he had not done what her mother had claimed he had done.  

The Christian man had admitted the divorce was partly his fault but that nothing, nothing of immorality was done, but it had been because of irreconcilable differences, no act of dishonor on either side.


The child had kept that part of the story hidden for fear her mother would find out she knew and it would upset her.

The child assumed the mother, the wife of the Christian man, had lied because she wanted her children not to blame her but be on her side against their father. 

The truth was out and everyone was shocked.

The great-grandchildren had seen the devastation of the lies the wife told. For two generations lies had been spread unknowingly. The Christian man had been shunned by the entire family because of the lies. Cousins had not seen cousins because the family had broken up. 

One day the Christian man’s grandchild sat down and took an overview of the fifty years of damage the divorce and subsequent lies had wreaked upon the family. And the grandchild cried, for there would be few who would really think about the effects of the lie. No one would really care about all the years the Christian man had suffered in silence while his family rejected him. Perhaps he didn’t know why. Perhaps no one had even cared to ask him if he had done the things he was accused of.

These things really happen all the time to many, many families and they did happen to my family.

As a Protestant, when I studied Catholicism, I couldn’t help but wonder if Protestants were not like me. We were taught to distrust and suffer over a story told in our family about a Christian man who had gone very bad and had done very terrible things. Because our parents had passed down a sincerely held lie, we were cut off from the fullness of the truth. We were cut off from a Christian man, imperfect but not at all what we had been taught.

Because of my family, I knew it could happen. And so I looked into Catholicism and I looked for the true story.

MORE THAN YOU THINK IS POSSIBLE....

Want to be humbled? 

Think about these questions:

How much knowledge is out there? Of the billions of light years wide and billions of years old this universe is, of all the dimensions that we are not even aware of, additional universes and different ways of perceiving things we are not even aware of, from the galaxies to the eleven dimensions of particles smaller than the string theory... Of all that is there and of all that is possible to be there --- how much is perceivable and knowable? (Assuming you are an entity that is as big as the universe and old as the universe and can know all.) How much of the all is there?

It is infinite. The possibilities of what is knowable to an infinite entity is infinite. So basically, a lot of knowledge is out there.

Let’s bring it down:
Think about this, humankind is limited in time and space and perception, so human ability is wildly constrained compared to the things that might be out there in different dimensions and perceived with different senses. If all humankind of all ages could catalog everything humanly knowable, of the things knowable within our senses and timeframes and spacial dimensions--every book ever written, every history ever lived, every thought ever thought, every feeling ever felt, every experience ever experienced in every place at every time in humankind history what percentage of all knowledge would it be? Compared with the knowledge of an infinite entity?

All human knowledge is infinitesimal.

Let’s bring it down further:
How much do you know? Of all that is humanly possible to know about everything, how much do you personally know? What percentage of all books and manuscripts and letters and emails have you read? What part of every conversation and experience were you part of? What percentage of ALL things humanly possible to know, do you know? 


An infinitesimal amount.

So you personally know an infinitesimal amount of what is humanly knowable which is an infinitesimal amount of all that is knowable. So if what is knowable is infinite, compared to that, what we know is a quark size... probably a whole lot less... we don’t know...

Let’s bring it down again even further:
So of the things that you do know, that totality of what you have learned and know, how much of it are you certain is right? What percentage have you gotten wrong?
Can you please list the things you think you know but in actuality are wrong?

You can’t... We have a blind spot inside us that hides from us where we are wrong about what we know. We are, by ourselves, incapable of seeing clearly where our seeing is distorted.

So actually we know less than an infinitesimal amount of the infinitesimal. And of the things you do think you know, some of it is wrong. And of the things you are wrong about, you are not certain what they are and cannot discover where you are wrong without using something outside ourselves.

Kinda humbling.

Why shatter someone’s confidence in what he knows? What’s the point in that? Why create such an eternally deep space between our perceptions and what is knowable?

Because we live in a culture that demands that we judge everything by our own perceptions. And our perceptions cannot be trusted to make big decisions. We have been given the gift of enough perception capability to make immediate decisions and assessments such as, “Have I gotten enough exercise today? Do I need to check on my elderly neighbor who told me she was sick? Where are my car keys?

Those are things we can judge. We have that capability.

We can of course ponder universal thoughts that are vast, but we cannot judge them. We should indeed ponder things bigger than we can think and know... like the string or M theory, how quantum physics has created a dilemma that something is and isn’t all at the same time, or what is infinite or if language is proof of God. Ponder and study and grow in knowledge and wisdom. But be careful to judge the things we cannot know. Like God.

When we hardly can judge our own spectrum of knowledge, how can we possibly think we can judge God? How can anyone possibly think that with their perceptions they can decide whether or not there is a God? We cannot know what goes on in that vast cosmology of unknowns. To try and judge what goes on in unknown dimensions and with unknown senses is like sending a blind astronaut into space.  

More than you think is possible.