Bearing Fruit for the Kingdom

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.

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On the Nativity of Our Lady

Today the Church celebrates the feast of the birth of Mary of Nazareth. Saint Peter Damian captured the elation Christians should feel on this day: “Just as Solomon and the chosen people celebrated the dedication of the Temple with great and solemn sacrifice, so should we be filled with joy at the birth of Mary. Her womb was a most holy temple. There, God received his human nature and thus entered visibly into the world” (Sermon 45).

The Old Covenant temple was constructed of the finest materials, by the most superlative craftsmen in the world. No expense was spared. In like manner, God himself was the architect of the one whom he knew from all eternity would be the Mother of his Son, and he ensured that Jesus would have an Immaculate “house of gold”, as the Litany of Loretto calls Mary, in which to dwell. No person was ever closer to Christ. Since Mary knows him best, so let us fly to her patronage and intercession as we seek to worship the divine Messiah.

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Queen Mother

“And a great portent appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars” (Revelation 12:1).

Today’s feast of the Queenship of Mary celebrates the coronation of Mary as Queen of the universe. This is another Marian teaching of the Church that non-Catholics have trouble with, because it’s scriptural roots aren’t as obvious as they often are for other doctrines. A proper understanding of typology, however, makes the Queenship of Mary stand out in sharp relief as one reads the sacred page.

What is typology? As one writer put it, “God writes the world the way humans write with words.” Human writers can use literary devices like foreshadowing to tip the reader off to what’s coming in the future. When God acts in the history of salvation, he works in a similar fashion. He uses not words, but events, places, and people during Old Covenant times to foreshadow even greater realities – events, places, and people – of the New Covenant.

One of those realities is the position of Queen. In the Old Covenant Kingdom of David, the Queen was not the wife of the King, but his mother – the Queen Mother. This position began under King Solomon, the son of David. Solomon had, of course, many wives, so rather than have them slug it out in some sort of mud wrestling match for the title, the crown went to Bathsheba, the king’s mother, who sat at his right hand.

In a similar way, the one the New Testament hails as “the Son of David” rules a Kingdom. Jesus calls it “the Kingdom of God – exactly what David’s kingdom was called in the OT. That kingdom has a Prime Minister, which we saw in this past Sunday’s readings is Peter, who holds the “keys of the kingdom”, like Eliakim did in Isaiah 22.

This Kingdom also has a Queen – a Queen Mother, Mary. This is why foreign dignitaries pay homage to Jesus as to a king, alongside his mother after his birth (Matthew 2:11), just as other rulers would have done in earlier times for Solomon in the presence of his mother.

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Catholic Tech Talk Reviews The New Mass App!

Brad West from Catholic Tech Talk.com has put The New Mass app through its paces, and his full review is now online! You can check it out by clicking here. Brad has really captured the essence of why we created the app.

As well, please don’t forget to click on the “Recommend” button at the top of the The New Mass page, to tell all your Facebook friends about it! We would also greatly appreciate it if anyone who has downloaded the app would give it a rating, via the App Store on your mobile device, or through iTunes on your computer. Thank you so much!

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The Assumption of Mary

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.”

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Book a Faith Explained Seminar with Cale Clarke!

I’m now booking more seminars for the U.S., Canada, and overseas explaining the new Mass translation. Or, you can choose one of the many other topics available. Simply use the “Contact” page here to send us a message and get the process started. Our calendar is filling up quickly, so book now to avoid disappointment. End of infomercial!

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My Journey Home Episode on YouTube!

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EWTN Week Starts Tonight!

Tonight I’ll be appearing on “The Journey Home” program on EWTN with Marcus Grodi. Marcus interviewed me recently about my journey from nominal Catholicism to agnosticism, to Protestant ministry, and eventually home to the Catholic Church. You can watch it at 8 PM, or catch it in live streaming format on EWTN’s website. It will re-air on Tuesday, July 19, at 1 AM & 9 AM,   Thursday, July 21 at 2 PM, and Saturday, July 23, at 11 PM (all times Eastern). The entire weekly EWTN schedule can be found here.

I also had a chance to guest on the “Deep in Scripture” radio program, also hosted by Marcus, which will air this Wednesday at 2 PM on EWTN radio, and at this link: We had a great time exploring John 21 and the implications of that text for the Papacy.

This week, I guess it’s all EWTN, all the time!

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Authenticating the Resurrection of Jesus: The Appearance to Paul

An empty tomb alone does not a resurrection make, and that’s why the appearances of the risen Jesus are so important. With Christ’s resurrection, as with the truth of Catholicism in general, what we have is a series of converging and convincing arguments that are the most plausible explanation of the facts that we have. So, let’s take a deeper look at the evidence that Jesus appeared alive in bodily form to many after his death and burial.

My former professor and resurrection expert, Dr. Gary Habermas, lists ten considerations in favor of Jesus’ resurrection appearances. These ten points have two things in common: they are attested by scholars, both Christian and skeptic alike; and natural phenomenon alone fail to explain all of the data. Today, let’s look at those facts that have to do with the appearance to St. Paul. It’s good to start with him, because Paul’s conversion was a key event in the spread of the early Church. The question is, what caused Paul to convert, and what caused his preaching to be so successful? The best explanation is the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Here’s why:

1. No scholar seriously doubts the historical fact of St. Paul’s conversion. The facts are: that he was a Pharisee who violently opposed the nascent Church, and that he subsequently became not only a believer in Jesus, but the greatest missionary of all time – and these facts are not in doubt. Paul himself stated that the reason he became a Christian was because the risen and glorified Christ appeared to him (1 Cor. 9:1, 15:8; Gal. 1:16). The man’s own opinion of the matter counts! Just about every New Testament scholar maintains that Paul wrote most, if not all of the NT letters attributed to him, so the biographical details he provided are firsthand testimony that Paul believed he encountered the risen Lord. At any rate, something has to explain Paul’s radical change from persecutor to propagator of the new faith -and the best explanation is the resurrection.

2. In 1 Corinthians 15:3 and following, Paul quotes what is universally acknowledged as an early Church “creed” – a formula that predates Paul’s letter, likely by two decades. The composition of this creed that focuses on Christ’s death, burial and resurrection appearances thus dates to within mere months of the event of the Jesus’ resurrection. This makes it extremely unlikely that it is a legendary account, embellished over time. The presence of living witnesses to the events themselves also mitigates against that thesis. Paul himself notes (1 Cor. 15:6) that on one occasion, Jesus appeared to more than 500 people at once, most of whom were still alive and ostensibly willing to be interviewed about the facts. Habermas notes that most scholars believe that Paul received this creed abut AD 35, from the apostles Peter and James (see Gal. 1:18-19). Habermas also confirms that Paul’s choice of words in this passage, such as the Greek word historeo, indicates that he systematically interviewed, if you will, the apostles about the events behind this creed.

3. Paul was so concerned that he was preaching an historically accurate message that he returned to Jerusalem 14 years later –  to once again submit his message to the other apostles for examination (Gal. 2:1-10)! He was extremely concerned about the accuracy of his statements. This time, Paul specifically mentions John’s presence – thus confirming that all three apostles who were part of Jesus’ “inner circle”, the men who knew our Lord best while he was on earth, ratified Paul’s message once again.

4. Not only did the other apostles confirm Paul’s take on the gospel, Paul in turn confirms theirs: he verifies that he knew what the other apostles were preaching (1 Cor. 15:11), and that all of them were preaching the same message of Jesus’ resurrection with one voice. In light of all this, the oft-repeated idea that some revisionist scholars have that Paul, not Jesus, was the “inventor” of Christianity is obviously untenable.

Paul’s testimony to the appearances of the risen Christ are crucial to the overall argument. But there’s far more to be explored. In the next installment of this series, we’ll consider six more facts that Habermas puts forth to buttress the case for the resurrection appearances of Jesus Christ.

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