Very, very good homily Fr.John! Will be interesting to see what the follow up might be. What will it take to keep people coming to the universal church, and participating in this wonderful faith, and serving others!
I love how you led off there. I think more Catholics need to realize that. As a former Protestant, kind of the consensus amongst us was that Catholics just had more empty ritual, with mediators between them and God, but that we had a relationship with Jesus. A lot of this is probably availability heuristics, because unfortunately the nominal Catholics that we knew did not exude the aura of a relationship with Christ. When I first read St. Therese's Story of a Soul, I was just blown away by how personal her relationship with Christ was; the Church was not a hindrance to that relationship, but rather it was through the Sacraments of the Church that the relationship was able to blossom. While there are many Protestants who are holier than I am, I think that they're still like people who are hobbling around on the one leg of their baptism, then they could so easily attach themselves to the Church and procure the other graces available in the sacraments of Penance, Eucharist, and so on.
Very, very good homily Fr.John! Will be interesting to see what the follow up might be. What will it take to keep people coming to the universal church, and participating in this wonderful faith, and serving others!
ReplyDeleteMike Doades
St. Malachy
I love how you led off there. I think more Catholics need to realize that. As a former Protestant, kind of the consensus amongst us was that Catholics just had more empty ritual, with mediators between them and God, but that we had a relationship with Jesus. A lot of this is probably availability heuristics, because unfortunately the nominal Catholics that we knew did not exude the aura of a relationship with Christ. When I first read St. Therese's Story of a Soul, I was just blown away by how personal her relationship with Christ was; the Church was not a hindrance to that relationship, but rather it was through the Sacraments of the Church that the relationship was able to blossom. While there are many Protestants who are holier than I am, I think that they're still like people who are hobbling around on the one leg of their baptism, then they could so easily attach themselves to the Church and procure the other graces available in the sacraments of Penance, Eucharist, and so on.
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