Apologetics in the Letters of St Ignatius of Antioch

Today is the Feast of St Ignatius of Antioch, a very important figure in the early Church. He was the third bishop of Antioch (Peter being the first, before Peter went to Rome), and also a disciple of the Apostle John. He was martyred in the Roman Coliseum circa 107 AD, having been thrown to wild beasts.

On the way to his martyrdom, Ignatius was chained to Roman soldiers who treated him quite brutally. Ignatius called them the “ten leopards”. He also wrote seven famous letters to key outposts of the nascent Church. These missives are rife with evidence that the Early Church was, in fact, the Catholic Church.

Let’s take a look at just two important apologetic facets of just one of these letters, the one written to Smyrna, a city mentioned as an early Church hub in the Book of Revelation.

Ignatius is the first person to use the term “Catholic Church” in an extant writing. The fact that he doesn’t explain the term in any way is likely a sign that he expected his readers to know what he meant by it, and that the term predates his use of it in 107 AD. The word “catholic” comes from the Greek term kata holos, which means “universal” and also “according to the whole”. This perfectly describes the Church founded by Christ, for it is “universal” (for people of all times and places), and also keeps the “whole” of Christ’s teaching intact. Splinter groups who have departed the Church over the centuries usually reject one or more doctrines of the universal Church.

See that you all follow the bishop, even as Jesus Christ does the Father, and the presbytery as you would the apostles; and reverence the deacons, as being the institution of God. Let no man do anything connected with the Church without the bishop. Let that be deemed a proper Eucharist, which is administered either by the bishop, or by one to whom he has entrusted it. Wherever the bishop shall appear, there let the multitude of the people also be; even as wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church.

—Letter to the Smyrnaeans, Chapter 8

We may note also in this quote the hierarchical offices of bishop, priest (“priest” is the English translation of “presbyter”), and deacon as being essential features of the Church. Ignatius also speaks here of a “proper Eucharist” as one either a) celebrated by a bishop himself, or b) by his designates (the priests, or “presbyters”), with whom the bishop shares some of his prerogatives, such as the ability to confect the Eucharist. But did the early Christians believe in Eucharistic realism? The Smyrnaean letter once again comes through:

Take note of those who hold heterodox opinions on the grace of Jesus Christ which has come to us, and see how contrary their opinions are to the mind of God… They abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer, because they do not confess that the Eucharist is the Flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ, Flesh which suffered for our sins and which the Father, in his goodness, raised up again. They who deny the gift of God are perishing in their disputes.

— Letter to the Smyrnaeans, Chapter 6

Ignatius explicits says that the Eucharist is the Flesh of the same Jesus who died on the cross and was resurrected on the third day. This coheres very nicely with the words of Jesus himself in John 6:51: “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh”.

There is, in my view, a very good argument for John the apostle as the source of the material found in John 6. We also know that Ignatius of Antioch was a disciple of John himself. So, I think Ignatius had a pretty good idea of what John — and, by extension, Jesus, meant in John 6:51. Ignatius confirms that the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist is an essential feature of the apostolic Church founded by Jesus himself.

St Ignatius of Antioch, pray for us.

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At the Mount of Olives, Jerusalem: Jesus as Messiah-King (Video)

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Ever wonder exactly why Jesus chose to ride into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday on a donkey? It was no accident. In this video, filmed on location at the Church of All Nations in Jerusalem, Cale explains how Jesus fulfills Old Testament prophecies as a new and greater Solomon, the “Son of David”, not only as Israel’s King, but also as Messiah.

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Memento Mori: Remembering Your Death with Sister Theresa Aletheia Noble

Sister Theresa Aletheia Noble, the nun behind the ever-growing memento mori phenomenon, interviewed for the Verbum blog:

Sister, you came back to the Church after becoming an atheist as a teenager. What led you back to the Church and to your vocation with the Daughters of Saint Paul?

I first doubted whether God really existed at the age of five. My natural skepticism, coupled with the problem of suffering, led me to turn to atheism at the age of fourteen. I was a materialist atheist for over a decade. Eventually, I began to realize that my worldview had unsatisfying answers to some of life’s most important questions. So, I began to explore different religions and worldviews. I still didn’t believe in God, but I was investigating, searching for truth. Then, in one Damascus-like moment in Costa Rica, I had what Jacques Maritain would call “a metaphysical experience” in which God made clear to me that he existed, that he was a person, that he loved me, and that he had a plan for my life. I would have never imagined it as an atheist, but my experience of God in that moment eventually led me back to the Church and later into the convent.

And:

Sister, you’ve written two books on the theme of Memento Mori. Can you tell us how these projects came about?

I was inspired by the founder of my religious order, Blessed James Alberione— who kept a skull on his desk to remember his inevitable death—to begin meditating every day on my death. Over two years ago, I also got a skull for my desk and started to meditate on death every day. I shared my journey on Twitter, and before I knew it, thousands of other people were getting excited about memento mori and meditating on their death. People were buying skulls for their desks and reading my tweets, but I wanted to help people really integrate this practice into their lives. So that’s where the idea for my memento mori projects came from. I worked with my sisters at the Daughters of Saint Paul to create a memento mori journal, a Lenten devotional, and an upcoming prayer book, Memento Mori: Prayers on the Last Things. It’s been exciting to see peoples’ responses to these projects because I know that the Holy Spirit is using them to help people to grow in the spiritual life. The practice of remembering death and living for heaven is so vitally important in the Christian life.

Good interview. Sister Noble’s work really speaks to people steeped in the current atheistic and aggressively secular cultural zeitgeist because, quite simply, she embraced it herself growing up, as she explains.

“Beginning with the end in mind”, as Stephen Covey so famously championed in his book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, is a great strategy not just for work, but for all of life, especially one’s spiritual life. Meditating on one’s death, far from being a distasteful exercise, is actually a great, practical starting point for gaining wisdom on how to live well in the present. “So teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom” (Ps. 90:12, RSV).

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What’s in a Name (Like Bartholomew)?

(My latest for Catholic Answers Magazine.)

These days I take a lot of heat for my name.

When I introduce myself as “Cale”, I quickly have to add, “not spelled like the vegetable.” This often leads to a bit of repartee, in which I explain that my father was a big fan of the famed race-car driver Cale Yarborough. Eating Kale wasn’t really a thing when I was born, but now that it is, perhaps I should change my name to “Arugula.”

This sometimes gets me thinking about some of the more unique names in the Gospels, like that of St. Bartholomew, whose feast we celebrate on August 24th. Often it is alleged—in both scholarly and popular circles—that the Gospels are late, legendary documents written many decades after Jesus died, or that they are not based on eyewitness testimony, and, as such, are not to be trusted.

Recent studies on names in Jewish antiquity, however, give us new reasons to challenge such assumptions.

Building upon the work of the Israeli historian Tal Ilan, Richard Bauckham has compiled lists of the most popular Jewish names at the time of Jesus. In his magnificent tome, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, the famed Cambridge New Testament scholar shows that there were clear regional preferences for certain names, even within the same ethno-religious group. In Egypt, for example, the most popular Jewish names would have been different from those in Roman-occupied Palestine, where Jesus lived, even though the regions were adjacent to one another.

Greg Monette, in his book The Wrong Jesus, takes Bauckham’s list of the most popular Jewish names in Roman Palestine and applies it to the list of Jesus’ apostles in Matthew (with their respective rank in parentheses):

The names of the twelve apostles are these: first, Simon (1), who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother; James (11) the son of Zebedee, and John (5) his brother; Philip (61) and Bartholomew (50); Thomas and Matthew (9) the tax collector; James (11) the son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus (39); Simon (1) the Cananaean, and Judas (4) Iscariot, who betrayed him” (Matt. 10:2-4).

Andrew is a Greek name, and therefore unranked, although he may have had another, more common Semitic name. Thomas’ name is Aramaic for “twin” and is likely his nickname, and therefore also was not ranked.

This explains why there are always “qualifiers” applied to figures in the Gospels who have extremely common names. “Simon”, as the list above shows, was the most popular Palestinian Jewish male name in Jesus’ day—hence the need to differentiate “Simon, who is called Peter (the name bestowed on him by Jesus, meaning “Rock”)” from “Simon the Cananaean”. Bartholomew owned only the fiftieth most popular name, and Philip had the sixty-first, so there was no danger, really, of confusing them with anyone else in the apostolic band. Hence, they could be identified by only one name.

Other common qualifiers included one’s father’s name, known as a patronymic, such as “Simon Bar-Jonah” (Matt. 16:17). The Aramaic “Bar,” of course, means “son of”. Place of origin was another differentiator; hence “Jesus of Nazareth.” By the way, in case you were wondering, “Jesus,” which is the same name as “Joshua” (or “Yehoshua” in Hebrew, meaning “God saves”), was the sixth most popular name at the time.

Why does all of this matter? Because it shows once again that the Gospels cohere with the way things really were at the time, making their historical accuracy much more likely.

If the Gospels, as critics allege, were really written many decades after the events in question and made up out of whole cloth, what would be the likelihood they would have picked the right names for their “characters”?  This idea is akin to someone today penning a fictional story set a century ago in another country—one might have a hard time coming up with historically accurate names for that place, at that time. Of course, Google could help with this, but imagine trying to do that almost 2,000 years ago on your own! It would be technically possible, but highly unlikely.

The fact that the Gospels do display accurate first century Palestinian Jewish names is a mark of authenticity, making it extremely likely that they were indeed written very close in time to the historical events they narrate, and that they reflect eyewitness testimony.

One might argue, “Perhaps the names and accounts were still fabricated—but by contemporaries, not someone coming along several decades later.” One major problem with that objection is that  and could have set the record straight as the Gospels began to circulate. In this scenario, they might have gotten the names right, but the events of Jesus’ career couldn’t have been fudged, with so many eyewitnesses who could have easily refuted such reports, were they not factual.

Before we go, I want to talk about Bartholomew in particular (it is his feast day, after all). Who was he, really?

This has proved to be a somewhat difficult question to answer. He’s a bit of a man of mystery, so he isn’t necessarily the most popular of Jesus’ disciples today. His first post-New Testament mention isn’t until the fourth-century Ecclesiastical History by Eusebius, which states that he, at some point, may have been evangelizing in India. Various accounts of his martyrdom have also been proffered.

To further complicate things, we’re not absolutely sure what his real name was. Many scholars have historically claimed that Bartholomew was the same person as Nathanael, who famously scoffed at the idea that the Messiah could hail from Nazareth (John 1:43-51). One reason that scholars believed this is that Nathanael, who is never mentioned in the Synoptics (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), appears in John’s Gospel, while Bartholomew, present in the Synoptics, is never mentioned in John. In the lists of the apostles in the Synoptics, Bartholomew’s name follows Philip’s, implying a connection between them—and it is Philip, in John’s Gospel, who introduces his friend Nathanael to Jesus.

But Bauckham cautions us about being too dogmatic about this. As we saw earlier, name differentiators were often used when a person’s given name was very common. Bartholomew’s name means “Bar-Tolmei”, or “son of Tolmei,” and the name Tolmei/Bartholomew was only the fiftieth most common name. So, Bauckham reasons, if one was going to use such a unique name as a replacement, that would indicate he had a common given name. But that would seem to rule out Nathanael as a name, since it was already an uncommon name in Israel. In fact, tied with Bartholomew for fiftieth place. In other words, there shouldn’t have been a need for Nathanael to call himself Bartholomew at all to differentiate himself from anyone else among Jesus’ apostles.

Perhaps ol’ “Bart” and “Nate” aren’t the same person after all—or maybe they are! We may not have absolute certainty about that issue this side of heaven, but we can take heart in the fact that the Jewish names in the Gospels are marks of authenticity for these books. And we can still celebrate the feast of St. Bartholomew with a great meal, perhaps even serving up some kale—or maybe arugula, instead.

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Christopher Check on The True Roots of Mass Violence

Christopher Check, President of Catholic Answers, writing for Catholic Answers Magazine:

A good bit of the political rhetoric that followed the El Paso and Dayton massacres argued that we can arrest or reverse immoral behavior with legislative, therapeutic, or technological solutions. We have heard calls for more federal money to address mental illness, more legal restrictions on the ownership of firearms, and better software for sifting through billions and billions of social media posts. Some of these measures may well prevent some future brutality, but their effect will be marginal.

I propose something more fundamental: Christians who feel a sense of helplessness or even despair after each mass shooting should start being honest about evil, with themselves and with those that God puts in their lives. If you are reluctant to talk about evil and need a pep talk, I recommend the stirring final chapter of St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians:
For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.


Let’s set aside talk of the culture war and talk instead about spiritual combat. Paul’s meaning is clear: evil is personal. There are demons at work in the world, and these demons are persons—not just vague forces or bad feelings. If you have ever been tempted by the deliberate efforts of another human person, you can at least have a guess at how vastly more skilled demons are. They need not bother with your senses. They can go straight to your imagination.


For very good reason the Church exhorts us to make it a fair fight by seeking the help of St. Michael and his angels to defend us in spiritual combat. For very good reason the Church warns us to avoid the occult. I discourage you from looking at all into the obsessions of the Dayton killer, but his enthusiasm for the demonic cannot be separated from the evil acts he committed. Was he possessed by a demon? The Church is careful not to make such determinations without close examination and cannot do so in this case. But it would be naïve to dismiss the massacres that are now so much a part of our news cycle as merely the actions of racists or the mentally afflicted.

Amidst all the attempts to politicize — and to politically profit from — these tragedies, I haven’t heard too many takes like this, taking into account the metaphysical (yet very real) dimensions of these evils.

As a former Marine, Check knows, as did G.I. Joe, that “knowing is half the battle”. But only half. To win, one must not only understand the enemy one is up against; a practical battle plan is needed. Check offers one strategem in particular:

Closer to the truth, of course, is the causal relationship between the disintegration of marriage and family and the abundant social pathologies that afflict the children of broken homes. My friends Allan Carlson and Jennifer Roback Morse, and many other historians of the family, have amassed data enough to choke an elephant showing that social chaos fills the vacuum left by the retreat from marriage. If the government wanted to promote the one institution whose failure leads more than any other to the violence plaguing our country, it would encourage marriage and the traditional family. An easy way to do this would be tax incentives that favor intact families with children.

Catholics who want to do something about mass shootings should live fully and publicly the teachings of the Church concerning the sacrament of matrimony. Here are two: don’t divorce and stop contracepting. That sounds glib, I know, but matrimony is a sacrament, so with it comes all the graces needed to live it to the fullest.

Direct and to the point. Many of today’s lost boys and girls are the casualties of the War on Marriage and the Family being waged in our culture today. Intact families don’t always produce law-abiding citizens, of course (original sin and its aftermath, at work in the existence of free persons who can choose against the good, are always in play), but there is no question that healthy “cells” (families) are the key to the health of the “body” (societies, be they nations or the Church).

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J.D. VANCE BECOMES CATHOLIC

Rod Dreher, interviewing J.D. Vance for The American Conservative regarding Vance’s reception into the Catholic Church:

Dreher: Why Catholicism? Why now?

Vance: I became persuaded over time that Catholicism was true. I was raised Christian, but never had a super-strong attachment to any denomination, and was never baptized. When I became more interested in faith, I started out with a clean slate, and looked at the church that appealed most to me intellectually.

But it’s too easy to intellectualize this. When I looked at the people who meant the most to me, they were Catholic. My uncle by marriage is a Catholic. Rene Girard is someone I only know by reading him, and he was Catholic. I’ve been reading and studying about it for three years, or even longer. It was time.

It probably would have happened sooner if the sex abuse crisis, or the newest version of it, hadn’t made a lot of headlines. It forced me to process the church as a divine and a human institution, and what it would mean for my two year old son. But I never really questioned over the past few years that I would become Catholic.

Dreher: You chose St. Augustine as your patron saint. Why?

Vance: A couple of reasons. One, I was pretty moved by the Confessions. I’ve probably read it in bits and pieces twice over the past 15 or so years. There’s a chapter from The City of God that’s incredibly relevant now that I’m thinking about policy. There’s just a way that Augustine is an incredibly powerful advocate for the things that the Church believes.

And one of the subtexts about my return to Christianity is that I had come from a world that wasn’t super-intellectual about the Christian faith. I spend a lot of my time these days among a lot of intellectual people who aren’t Christian. Augustine gave me a way to understand Christian faith in a strongly intellectual way. I also went through an angry atheist phase. As someone who spent a lot of his life buying into the lie that you had to be stupid to be a Christian, Augustine really demonstrated in a moving way that that’s not true.

Vance is the author of the book Hillbilly Elegy, which is currently being made into a movie by Ron Howard. Dreher had been tweeting a lot this past weekend about the fact he was in Cincinnati. When asked if he was there to give a talk, he didn’t really answer — then he drops this bomb! Wow, what a great surprise! Deo Gratias! Congratulations to you, J.D., and welcome home!

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THE BASKETBALL SUPERNOVA WHO BECAME A NUN

Elizabeth Merrill, writing for ESPN about the journey of Villanova basketball legend Shelly Pennefather:

Twenty-five years old and not far removed from her All-America days at Villanova, Pennefather was in her prime. She had legions of friends and a contract offer for $200,000 to play basketball in Japan that would have made her one of the richest players in women’s basketball.

And children — she was so good with children. She had talked about having lots of them with John Heisler, a friend she’d known most of her life. Heisler nearly proposed to her twice, but something inside stopped him, and he never bought a ring.

“When she walked into the room,” Heisler said, “the whole room came alive.

“She had a cheerfulness and a confidence that everything was going to be OK. That there was nothing to fear.”

That Saturday morning in 1991, Pennefather drove her Mazda 323 to the Monastery of the Poor Clares in Alexandria, Virginia. She loved to drive. Fifteen cloistered nuns waited for her in two lines, their smiles radiant.

She turned to her family.

“I love you all,” she said.

The door closed, and Shelly Pennefather was gone.

Incredibly poignant. The accompanying video short, featuring Sister Rose Marie’s family, especially her aged mother, hugging her for the first time in 25 years — and likely for the last time — is powerful stuff.

When secular publications write on religious issues, accuracy and basic fairness to the subject matter is often lacking. However, Merrill handled this story with respect and real sensitivity, especially given that the vocation of a cloistered nun — with the unique sacrifices it entails — is even harder to understand for non-Catholics (and, let’s face it, for many Catholics, too) than the vocation of those who live out their vocations within visible society. Go read it.

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George Weigel: The Vandals Sack Rome…Again

George Weigel, writing in Catholic World Report on what amounts to a total demolition of the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and the Family in Rome:

There is a history here, and it’s worth revisiting in order to get the destruction underway into clearer focus.

Despite the global media addiction to the “liberal/conservative” trope for analyzing the Second Vatican Council and the debates following it, the really consequential division after the Council (which, as several conciliar theologians’ diaries attest, began to open up during the Council’s third and fourth periods) was between two groups of previously-allied reformist theologians, one group of which seemed determined to embrace intellectual modernity and its sundry skepticisms in full, while the other was committed to ballasting authentic Catholic reform by grounding theological development in the Church’s living tradition. This “War of the Conciliar Succession” (as I call it in my forthcoming book, The Irony of Modern Catholic History) was no mere donnybrook among intellectuals; it had real consequences in the life of the Catholic Church.

And:

Resistance to the magisterium of John Paul II (a magisterium that was influenced, of course, by then-Cardinal Ratzinger) was deep-seated and bitter among those self-styled progressives who imagined that they had won the War of the Conciliar Succession and yet suddenly found themselves, after the second conclave of 1978, on the outs in the great game of ecclesiastical politics – even though they continued to maintain an iron grip on most theological faculty appointments and on a lot of theological publishing. John Paul II’s response to this recalcitrance and intellectual pride was not to attack it head-on, purging progressivist faculty from the Roman universities. Rather, his strategy was to encourage newer and dynamically orthodox foundations like the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross (now, arguably, the most intellectually interesting of the Roman schools), and to create new institutes of higher learning in existing universities.

In both cases, the goal was to foster the genuine renewal of Catholic theology according to the mind of Vatican II – and not according to the minds of Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Karl Marx. Reversing Gresham, John Paul II was quietly confident that good coinage – good theology – would eventually drive out bad ethical coinage, for the latter was bankrupting human lives and leading people into confusion and misery.

The John Paul II Institute for Marriage and the Family was the linchpin in this effort to create vibrant alternatives to Catholic Lite scholarship, which had become increasingly bizarre when John Paul II came to the Chair of Peter. (In the United States, for example, the prestigious Catholic Theological Society of America commissioned a mid-1970s study of human sexuality that could not quite bring itself to condemn bestiality as intrinsically evil.) And over its first decades of work, the John Paul II Institute did exactly what its papal founder wanted it to do: it helped foster a renaissance in Catholic moral theology, recovering and developing the tradition of virtue ethics, exploring with care and compassion the often-tangled issues of living chaste love in various vocations, and creating a cadre of moral theologians around the world who wanted their intellectual work to help convert the late-modern and post-modern worlds, rather than pandering to late-modernity and post-modernity as they careened into decadence and incoherence.

The whole piece is well worth your time. Disturbing developments, to say the least. The speed at which all of this has taken place — especially the immediate dismissal of all senior faculty and cancellation of fundamental moral theology courses — is frightening, and must be a great shock to Weigel personally, who of course served as the main biographer of St John Paul II (Witness to Hope, The End and the Beginning). The establishment of the Institute, along with its satellite locations abroad, was one of the great accomplishments of the John Paul II papacy. I’m sure Weigel never imagined that, only 15 years after the Pope’s death, it would effectively cease to exist. Make no mistake: this isn’t a mere tweaking — it’s a teardown.

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On the Feast of Saints Joachim and Anne, Grandparents of Jesus

We live in an age that is somewhat obsessed with genealogies. Various companies like Ancestry.com and 23andMe offer you the chance to mail in a sample of your DNA for an opportunity to discover more about your family tree, or where your ancestors came from (although giving one’s genetic info to a private firm amy not be the greatest of ideas). Hey, inquiring minds wanna know.

All of this is is really an attempt to answer fundamental questions of the human experience: Who am I? Where do I come from? No matter what the answers to those questions are from a physical/historical point of view, ultimately we all came from God (who created all things and gave us all an immortal soul at the moment of conception), and are going to God (provided we pass from this world in a state of Grace — that is, in God’s friendship).

And that’s where the modern ancestry craze meets the Bible, which is filled with genealogies. When reading them, like the genealogy of Jesus contained in Matthew 1, for example, one can at times feel like one is reading a phone book (remember those?). But biblical family trees are important, especially when it comes to that of Jesus. They remind us that God works through very imperfect people (just like you and me), living in a very imperfect world, to bring about his designs.

Today is the Feast day of Ss. Joachim and Anne, the parents of the Blessed Virgin Mary. As such they are important members of Jesus’ family tree, according to the flesh. We know their names only through extrabiblical traditions and documents such as the noncanonical Protoevangelium of James, which may — or may not — give us any real, historical information about Mary’s early life. That’s another post for another day. Such traditions say that they resided in Sepphoris, which was near Nazareth.

I think one of the main takeaways of today’s feast is that Joachim and Anne belong to the so-called “hidden life” of Jesus. Jesus lived an ordinary life for the vast majority of his life on Earth prior to his public ministry, and there’s certainly a message there for us. Jesus sanctified his everyday work, worship, and family activities, and that included his relationship with his grandparents. As Fr. Steve Grunow writes in the Word on Fire blog:

Their role in Christ’s life? We can only guess. What we do know is that Christ must have had grandparents, and if the role that most grandparents play in our lives is any indication, their impact on him was likely quite profound.

Perhaps they were part of a nexus of relatives that nurtured him and helped him to negotiate and understand the world. Did he help his grandfather up from his bed and lead him to sit in the cool shade of a tree? Did he soothe his grandmother’s gnarled and calloused hands? Did he beg from them stories about the old days or for tales about his mother when she was just a little girl? Maybe their deaths were the first deaths that touched him deeply. Was it in their aged faces that he saw how brief, fragile, and wonderful life in this world really is? Did he ask of them their thoughts about God? Did they know his secret?

I am often taken by how quickly the mystery of the Incarnation can be emptied of its true content and dulled in its impact. As children, the tale of Christ’s Holy Birth can hold us enrapt at attention. But since it is a story that we identify as familiar, it can wrongly be thought of as just one more of many seasonal tales. This perception on our part is a grave mistake because the Incarnation is not just a story, it is the story — a story that describes the most surprising and uncanny event that has ever or will ever happen. God accepted for himself a human nature and lived a real human life. This means that he accepted, not just a human nature in the abstract, but as it is embedded in the real circumstances of this world. God chose a family for himself. He submitted himself to having to learn about life in the context of a particular culture at a particular time and place. Because the human nature he chose was real, God in Christ called two people his grandmother and grandfather…

This is a great day to pray for our own grandparents, and for their repose if they have passed into eternity. I’m always amazed by how many people I meet who say that it was a grandmother or grandfather who introduced them to a living relationship with Jesus Christ. And if you’re a grandparent yourself, don’t underestimate the spiritual impact you can have on those around you.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

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