Archive for category: Blog

In today’s Gospel reading for Mass, Jesus reminds us, “A good tree does not bear rotten fruit, nor does a rotten tree bear good fruit. For every tree is known by its own fruit. For people do not pick figs from thornbushes, nor do they gather grapes from brambles. A good person out of the store of goodness in his heart produces good,but an evil person out of a store of evil produces evil; for from the fullness of the heart the mouth speaks” (Luke 6:43-45). When I was still on the journey home to the Catholic Church, but was still in Protestant ministry, I had an interesting encounter with a Catholic priest. At the time I was exploring Catholic doctrines, things I should have learned well while growing up Catholic, but didn’t. I was enthralled by what I was discovering, even becoming convinced of the truth of the Catholic position, but at the time I didn’t think it was necessary for me to revert. I thought I could remain in a Protestant context, and teach those who listened to my preaching about Catholicism, sharing its riches, without having to necessarily be visibly, corporately united to the Catholic Church. My conversation with this priest (whose name, sadly, I don’t recall) was one of the things that convinced me otherwise.

I had explained to the priest all of the things I just mentioned above, and he had patiently listened. In response he simply said, “You can’t give what you don’t have”.

I eventually realized he was right. I couldn’t share the wealth of the doctrines of Catholicsim, “the unsearchable riches of Christ”, as St Paul puts it, if I didn’t posess them myself. I had to try and live them, not just talk about them. And this is another reason why Jesus’ words in today’s Gospel matter so much.

If we hope to share our faith with others (and all of us are called to holiness and apostolate via our baptism), we can’t be operating out of our spiritual reserves. Our spiritual tanks must be full. We have to give out of our abundance, not our lack. The caregiver must be cared for as well. This is why we must allow Christ to minister to us, by spending time with him at Holy Mass and in personal prayer, allowing him to speak to us in our scriptural and spiritual reading, and letting him feed us with his very Body and Blood in the Eucharist. We must let him cleanse us regularly in the confessional, washing away the grime of life’s journey that can stick to our souls. Then, God can produce the produce of the Kingdom in our lives, luscious fruit that our companions on the journey can draw from, many of whom are spiritually starving.

And we can look to Mary, exemplar of the fruitful Christian life, to help us. No life bore more for Kingdom purposes, for “the fruit of her womb” (Luke 1:42) is none other than the King of that Kingdom, Christ himself.

The scene was a McDonald’s in the aptly named town of Normal, Illinois. I was a 21-year-old business student who was doing an internship at Illinois State University. I was having a chat with Jerry McCorkle, a young adult pastor from a local Baptist Church. And I was in the process of leaving the Catholic Church to become an Evangelical. Over Big Macs, Jerry seemed to give me another big theological reason to make the move. “The Catholic Church invented the Assumption of Mary in the year 1950″, Jerry said. “1950! That’s almost two thousand years after the time of Christ! I mean, where are they coming up with this stuff?” Sadly, I didn’t even know what the Assumption was – such was the state of my Catholic formation at the time. I just nodded my head in silence. Jerry and I had two things in common that day: we were both sincere seekers of God, and neither one of us had any clue what Catholics really believed about the Assumption of Mary. Since today, August 15, is that great solemnity, it’s a good chance to run over some facets of this dogma.

The Assumption of Mary is the belief that, at the end of her earthly journey, God took Mary, body and soul, into the glories of heaven. Critics of the Assumption point out that the New Testament never mentions such an event. But not all of the truths of the faith that we need to believe are explicitly recorded in Sacred Scripture – in the Catholic Church we also have the Word of God delivered to us by means of Sacred Tradition – and even Sacred Scripture itself was Sacred Tradition before it was written down. It is also highly likely that Mary was still alive on earth when many, if not all, of the books of the New Testament were being written. Luke, for example, seems to have interviewed Mary himself in writing his gospel, in order to ascertain certain details about the events surrounding the Nativity of Christ.

It is also worth pointing out that all Christians – Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant – believe that Assumptions not only can happen, but have happened! Scripture records for us the case of Enoch, who “was taken up so that he did not see death, and he was not to be found because God took him up. For before his removal he had been commended as having pleased God” (Hebrews 11:5). The prophet Elijah was also taken, or assumed, into heaven – body and soul – by a chariot of fire and a windstorm ( Kings 2).

As Scott Hahn points out in his excellent book, Hail, Holy Queen, no city ever claimed to have the relics of Mary – an absolutely astonishing fact, because the early Christians took great pride in venerating the relics of saints and martyrs, building their altars, and, indeed, their churches upon them. The example of Saint Peter’s Basilica, with its high altar directly over the underground crypt of Peter, is a prime example. The fact that no one ever claimed Mary’s relics, which would have been the ultimate prize, is good corroborating evidence that no one had them, because they didn’t exist. She had already been bodily Assumed into heaven. Two cities (Ephesus and Jerusalem) did claimto be the locale of her tomb, found to be empty, but none claimed the relics.

The liturgy is the place where Sacred Tradition is taught most clearly; the ancient maxim “Lex credendi, Lex orandi” – “the law of belief is the law of prayer”, or “the Church believes as she prays” holds true. If you want to know what Christians really believe, observe how they worship. Just because Pope Pius XII formally defined the dogma of the Assumption in 1950 doesn’t mean that he invented it, as Jerry supposed, or that Catholics didn’t believe it beforehand. A defined dogma of the Church has always been contained in the original deposit of faith, but dogmas can be defined much later, when the need (eg. a heresy challenging the belief) arises. For example, God was always a Trinity of Persons, long before the Council of Nicea affirmed it in the 4th century AD – in fact, this truth goes back to all eternity! But it was never formally defined until it was challenged by the arch-heritic Arius and his followers. The Church clebrated the Assumption in its liturgy – the highest form of prayer, and thus belief – going back to at least the 4th and 5th centuries.

Much more could be said, but it’s fitting that we finish with an argument from what is called “fittingness”. The preface to the Eucharistic prayer for the solemnity reminds us that the Assumption simply makes good common as well as supernatural sense, with this prayer to God: “You would not allow decay to touch her body, for she had given birth to your Son, the Lord of all life, in the glory of the incarnation.”

Video streaming by Ustream