Category: Evangelization

Ephesians 4:29-32

Never let evil talk pass your lips; say only the good things men need to hear, things that will really help them. Do nothing that will sadden the Holy Spirit with whom you were sealed against the day of redemption. Get rid of all bitterness, all passion and anger, harsh words, slander, and malice of every kind. In place of these, be kind to one another, compassionate, and mutually forgiving, just as God has forgiven you in Christ.

Romans 13:11-12

It is now the hour for you to wake from sleep, for our salvation is closer than when we first accepted the faith. The night is far spent; the day is near. Let us cast off the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light.

Cardinal Francis George to JPII on the Catholic Church in America. Looks like we’re hung up on step 5 of 12: “Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.”

Writer/editor Fr. Peter Stravinskas is probably best known for his apologetics work, but he’s announcing a new general-interest Catholic magazine he plans to launch in July. I look forward to it. Here’s his announcement.
(Thanks for the bandwidth, eje.)

This is in response to Catholic Light’s favorite Protestant, Ken Shepherd, who commented on a previous post about praying to the saints.
Ken, I have to take issue with your assertion that “asleep” in the NT is anything other than a euphemism for bodily death. Is our God the God of the living, or the dead? In Revelation, are the saints who cast their crowns before the Lamb “asleep”? No: “…they are before the throne of God and serve him day and night in his temple; and he who sits on the throne will spread his tent over them” (Rev. 7:15)
Or Revelation 4, which describes the worship of the Lamb that goes on “day and night”?
Are the saints indifferent about what happens on Earth? “…I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain because of the word of God and the testimony they had maintained. They called out in a loud voice, ‘How long, Sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood?'” (Rev. 6:9-10) That sounds like they’re tremendously concerned with enacting justice on earth.
You don’t cease to be a member of the Church merely by dying. There is one body in the Lord, not separate bodies for the physically living and the dead. “From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.” (Eph. 4:16) Some do the work in heaven, others do it on earth. There’s nothing we can do for the saints in heaven; they have attained perfection. However, since they have been transformed into “little Christs,” they have the ability to pray to the Father and intercede on our behalf, just as Revelation says they do.
I think it’s best to leave the question of imputed righteousness for another day. (For now, I’ll point out that Christ himself commanded us to “be perfect, even as my Father in Heaven is perfect,” and I think he meant it!) What I’d like to do is ask, if you don’t mind, when and where you think prayer to the saints originated? Because I can show you references to that practice that are contemporary with Scripture, and in the decades following. To my knowledge, that wasn’t even a significant point of controversy within Christendom until Martin Luther reacted against the real, scandalous, and devil-inspired abuse of relics and other saint-related devotional practices.
If the practice is wrong, it was wrong almost from the very beginning, since as I mentioned before there are ancient accounts of the earliest Christians venerating the graves of the saints and building altars over their bodies. And why didn’t Jesus step in to stop it? What was the Holy Spirit doing for 1,500 years, if it wasn’t guiding the Church? Why would he allow his children to persist in such gross errors for so long?

(In response to Ken Shepherd’s comments below about the “Messiah” being fine for Christmas.)
Ken, we’re running into one of the big differences between the liturgical and non-liturgical Christian traditions (and no matter how much Evangelicals like to deny it, Evangelicalism is as much a tradition as Roman Catholicism.)
You say, “…Christianity is not about cycles, it’s about the linear unfolding through time of God’s eternal plan towards the end of this age and the inauguration of a new heaven and a new earth.” In the Catholic view, the Christian life has a very strong cyclical component. We celebrate the birth of hope in winter, as the days begin to lengthen; we do penance before Spring so we can celebrate the resurrection of Christ.
To the Catholic, there is nothing wrong with following the cues of nature as we live out our baptismal vocation. Nature was created good by God, and we must adapt our lives to it even in the modern world. Those two facts urge us not to keep a constant focus on one aspect of the Christian mission — spreading the word of God — to the exclusion of others. Sometimes we should preach Jesus Christ, and sometimes we should merely adore and worship Him. The remembrance of his birth is an occasion for the latter.
Evangelicalism, as the name implies, has an omnipresent emphasis on conversion and downgrades adoration to a lower priority. What about the prophetess Anna, who “never left the temple but worshiped night and day, fasting and praying” (Lk 2:37)? Does the Evangelist imply that she should have been out proclaiming the Word, a la John the Baptist? No. She was living out her vocation: to pray for her fellow men and to adore God in the one place in the world where he dwelled in a special way. Clearly her example is one way to live out the Christian life.
To everything there is a season. There is a time for the Cross; but for now, it’s still off in the distance. This is the season to kneel at the Christ child and be astonished once again that God wanted to become one of us.