Tomorrow my parish is going door-to-door in a local neighborhood to invite people to become a member of our parish. This is the fifth time we’ve done this and so far we’ve visited about 2,000 homes. It is a great activity, as it allows us to reach out to those who might never hear the Gospel otherwise. I have also found that it is very uplifting to those who do the evangelizing, as they receive great graces from the Lord through their work.

My wife invited a number of friends this time and I thought her invitation was beautiful so I’m going to copy it here:

“Let’s go love some people”

Some of you have participated in SJN’s door-to-door evangelization projects in the past. If you have, you know what a blessing the experience is to those you meet and for yourself. If you have not, I am writing to encourage you to participate this time. Maybe it’s a little nerve-wracking to think about knocking on a stranger’s door to invite him to come to church. I hear ya. But, for one thing, we’ve pretty much never had an angry response. More importantly, we’ve been given the opportunity to pray for some very needy people. I’ve had people share with me about deaths in their families, divorces that have pained them,
and their desire for their children to be catechized. It has been a privilege to be invited into the most important part of the life of someone I’d never even met. I’ve also had people close the door with a “whatever, whacko lady” look on their face, but that’s OK, too. In both cases you give Jesus a big thank you.

A few times I’ve taken two of the kids with me. It was an eye-opening experience for them, too, and I hope that by doing this sort of thing now evangelization will be for them in the future not something to be nervous about!

Please pray for us and all we will meet!

Maria del Pilar “Pilina” Cimadevilla Lopez-Doriga was born in Madrid fifty years ago and died at the age of 10. Her life revolved around her home and she was in just about every way an ordinary kid.

She is also currently on track to be canonized a saint by the Catholic Church.

From an early age she was know for her docility, intelligence and piety. Her First Communion was a major milestone in her life, and she prayed with an attentiveness uncommon for her age. She often visited churches to pray.

At the age of nine she contracted Hodgkin’s disease, an irreversible and painful disease that she accepted with serenity. At the hospital where she was cared for by the Daughters of Charity, she was asked about joining the Union of the Missionary Infirm. Pilina welcomed the idea and began offering her sufferings for the missions, for the conversion and salvation of souls.

A few days after turning 10, on March 6, 1962, Pilina died in the arms of her mother.

Pilina’s soul matured through her illness and those who knew her were amazed at her heroism in suffering and joy in sacrifice.

There is something scandalous about child saints. They upset our ordinary ideas of what it means to be a committed follower of Christ. Especially here in America, we equate success – even in holiness – with doing something. If someone doesn’t found an order or convert many souls or help the poor, then they are not really a saint. Yet the Church reminds us through children saints that discipleship starts with a pure heart and love for Christ. Young “Pilina” drew very close to our crucified Lord during her short time on earth; I’m sure she is a powerful intercessor for us in heaven.

Pilina, pray for us!

Today is the pope’s 82nd birthday, and he is spending it quietly with his brother. Last year, he spent it (a little less quietly) with me and a few friends:

(Picture taken in front of Vatican Embassy on April 16th, 2008).

The Resurrection of Jesus we celebrate this week is our own guarantee of access to eternal life. Christ is the “firstfruits” of our future resurrection and life with God. The question now becomes: how do we receive this eternal life which Christ has made available?

A common belief among non-Catholic Christians is that one must simply “believe in Jesus” to obtain eternal life. The quote used most often is John 3:16:

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

The problem is that this is only one instance of Jesus speaking about “eternal life” and how to obtain it. On my count, there are 17 instances (including synoptic parallels) of Jesus talking of eternal life and its possession. I looked at each of these and broke them down into four general categories: Faith, Good Works, Self-Denial, and Sacraments. Here is a basic outline of each instance:

Faith
John 3:15; John 3:16; John 3:36; John 5:24; John 6:40

Good Works
Matthew 19:16; Mark 10:17; Luke 18:18; John 12:50; Matthew 25:46

Self-Denial
Matthew 19:29; Mark 10:30; Luke 18:30; John 12:25

Sacraments
John 4:14 (Baptism); John 6:54 (Eucharist)

Then there is one more instance of Jesus speaking of eternal life:

And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the law? How do you read?” And he answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have answered right; do this, and you will live.”
(Luke 10:25-27)

This final passage, I think, sums up all the various statements of Jesus on how to obtain eternal life: if you love God with all your heart, soul, and strength, and if you love your neighbor as yourself, then you will surely have faith in Christ, perform good works, deny your passions, and receive Christ’s sacraments. And in doing so, you will obtain the object of your love: eternal life with God.

If this is the result, I for one am praying for a depression…

Yesterday I posted about the “oddness” of Easter, linking to an excerpt from an N.T. Wright book. The final example given by Wright of the oddness of the Gospel accounts of the resurrection might be a bit hard to understand at first:

The fourth and final strange feature of the Resurrection narratives, which may call into question many of the Easter sermons that I and others regularly preach, is the absence of any mention of the future Christian hope.

Almost everywhere else in the New Testament, where you find people talking about Jesus’ resurrection, you find them also talking about our own future resurrection, the final hope that one day we will be raised as Jesus has been raised.

But the Gospels never say anything like, “Jesus is raised, therefore there is a life after death” (not that many first-century Jews doubted that there was); or, “Jesus is raised, therefore we shall go to heaven when we die” (most people believed something like that anyway); or better, “Jesus is raised, therefore we shall be raised at the last.”

No: insofar as the event is interpreted in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, it has a very “this-worldly” meaning, relating to what is happening here and now. “Jesus is raised,” they say, “therefore he is the Messiah; he is the true Lord of the whole world; therefore we, his followers, have a job to do: we must act as his heralds, announcing his lordship to the entire world.”

It is not, “Jesus is raised, therefore look up into the sky and keep looking because one day you will be going there with him.” Many hymns, prayers, and Christian sermons have tried to pull the Easter story in that direction, but the line of thought within the Gospels themselves is, “Jesus is raised, therefore God’s new world has begun, and therefore we, you, and everybody else are invited to be not only beneficiaries of that new world but participants in making it happen.”

Wright is addressing the common charge that the Gospels were written well after the events they recount and therefore contain added theological reflections and downright inventions that the later Church created. For example, many who deny the resurrection claim that the apostles had a purely spiritual encounter with Christ after the crucifixion and then invented these stories to justify them.

Yet the actual stories contained in the Gospels reflect a very early tradition, dating back to the time of Christ himself. Paul, for example, writing 20-30 years later, has contemplated the implications of the resurrection and applies it to the Christian life (see 1 Corinthians 15). This is an understandable development within the Church. Yet the Gospels offer no such reflection. If you notice, the story of the crucifixion takes up a lot of the text, yet the resurrection does not – it is almost an afterward to each Gospel. This is because the crucifixion was something they could quickly understand; there is much Scriptural support for it (such as Isaiah’s suffering servant). Yet the resurrection is a completely new event – there is no precedent for it in the history of Israel. So the initial reaction to it was simply to proclaim it (see the first sermons in Acts), not necessarily understand it or interpret it.

So the fact that the Gospels do not apply any eschatological sense to Christ’s resurrection is actually a good sign of the earliness of the tradition being used: nothing is added on to the story, it is just recounted as it actually happened.

Last week Larry Hurtado, the author of Lord Jesus Christ (one of my all-time favorite books), wrote an article for Slate entitled “Why Was Jesus Crucified?” (h/t Mike Aquilina). Hurtado writes,

Indeed, one criterion that ought to be applied more rigorously in modern scholarly proposals about the “historical Jesus” is what we might call the condition of “crucifiability”: You ought to produce a picture of Jesus that accounts for him being crucified. Urging people to be kind to one another, or advocating a more flexible interpretation of Jewish law, or even condemning the Temple and its leadership—none of these crimes is likely to have led to crucifixion. For example, first-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus tells of a man who prophesied against the Temple. Instead of condemning him, the governor decided that he was harmless, although somewhat deranged and annoying to the Temple priests. So, after being flogged, he was released.

This is an important point: if your “Jesus” is not one that so upset the Roman authorities that they kill him in humiliating fashion, then it is not the true historical Jesus.

This is huge news: A.N. Wilson has returned to the practice of the Christian faith. For those not familiar with Wilson, he has been a prominent English skeptic who wrote critical biographies of both Jesus and C.S. Lewis. However, he is now a practicing Christian:

For ten or 15 of my middle years, I, too, was one of the mockers. But, as time passed, I found myself going back to church, although at first only as a fellow traveller with the believers, not as one who shared the faith that Jesus had truly risen from the grave. Some time over the past five or six years – I could not tell you exactly when – I found that I had changed.

When I took part in the procession last Sunday and heard the Gospel being chanted, I assented to it with complete simplicity.

I love the fact that he can’t even say when he had “changed.” Too often we think that God only works as He did with St. Paul: with a flash of illumination which leads to immediate and total conversion. However, I think it is true that more often He works as He did with Wilson: slowly over time. Sometimes we don’t even realize that we are changing, but when we look back over a period of years, we recognize that we are no longer the same person we used to be. God will never stop working on us and will continue to pour His grace on us until we reach our earthly end. I don’t know about you, but that gives me a great deal of hope.

It appears that American Christians have a hard time with the personhood of both Satan and the Holy Spirit:

The majority of American Christians do not believe that Satan is a real being or that the Holy Spirit is a living entity, the latest Barna survey found.

There are probably a myriad of reasons for this, including Scriptural ignorance, New Age influences, and a denial of the supernatural.

One of the challenges of the New Evangelization is that we must evangelize people who already identify themselves as Christian. Note I did not say that we must catechize them, but evangelize them. Catechesis is very important, but it builds on the foundation of evangelization. Until someone recognizes his personal need for a redeemer, he is not going to listen to explanations of the personhood of the Holy Spirit or Satan. But if someone already considers himself Christian yet has not really come into a deep relationship with Christ, it will be quite difficult to lead him “back,” so to speak, to the basics of evangelization. We have our work cut out for us.

St. Paul, pray for us!

Yesterday I posted about Bart Ehrman, who has made it his business to find all the “problems” with the Bible. For Ehrman, if two tellings of the same story are not completely identical, then someone is lying.

On the other hand, N.T. Wright has a new book coming out which discusses the Passion and Resurrection, explaining what the Gospel writers intended by their respective perspectives. Christianity Today excerpts a portion in which Wright explores the “oddness” of the resurrection accounts, and how this oddness gives them more credence, not less. He mentions four particular aspects of these stories:

1) The strange absence of Scripture in the Resurrection accounts.
2) The presence of women as the primary witnesses.
3) The portrait of Jesus himself.
4) The absence of any mention of the future Christian hope.

The second and third points are pretty well-known, but I have to admit that I have never considered the other two points. Be sure to read the whole article.

Over the past few years, I have slowly weaned myself from “mainstream” news. I no longer have a TV, so I don’t watch CNN, MSNBC, FOXNews or the major network news. I no longer subscribe to the Washington Post. I have cut down how often I visit websites like cnn.com or foxnews.com. One of the primary reasons I stopped consuming such outlets was that I became sick of the tripe that they considered news: What did Bradgelina do this week? How did some pop tart disgrace herself today? What movie star or sports figure was arrested recently? And this focus on the inane crosses ideological and political boundaries as both liberal outlets like CNN and conservative ones like FOXNews engaged in it. The reason being is that it brings in viewers, and money is the almighty focus for all the networks, regardless of their political beliefs.

I was reminded of this recently when I glanced at the CNN website (shame on me!), and saw that the most popular story was entitled:

Woody Harrelson claims he mistook photographer for zombie

News for zombies, by zombies, and now about zombies. If this is not a sign that our culture has rotted to the core, I don’t know what is.

My friend Angelo Matera, a successful businessman and founder of Godspy, wrote a very insightful article a few years back on the Catholic faith and the free market. National Catholic Register wisely decided to rerun it in light of our current economic difficulties. An excerpt:

What can orthodox Catholics do? They can protest against these economic “structures of sin” that harm families and communities, and victimize the poor and the vulnerable. Just as we protest against laws and conditions that threaten the sanctity of life and family values, we must advocate for reasonable regulation of the marketplace to ensure a just economy (as the Catechism says in No. 2425).

Historically, the Church has always taken a middle path between collectivism (socialism) and individualism (capitalism). It favors private property and the common good, strong government and economic freedom. As Catholics, our criterion for judging economic policy should be: “Will this make life in our nation more human … more Christian?”

This might not go over well on conservative talk radio. But we are called to proclaim the Gospel, not a party platform. We must go beyond liberal and conservative.

Reducing our economy’s obsession with cutthroat competition, unrealistic growth, short-term profit and higher stock prices, by whatever reasonable means, will help create more breathing space for charitable and spiritual pursuits, and strengthen families and communities. Most management experts agree such measures would probably improve long-term business performance as well.

And that’s the rub.

An economy motivated mostly by the lust for money will, paradoxically, end up less wealthy. Even more damaging than business sins of commissionare sins of omission —the creative acts of investment and service that don’t happen when a business or economy is motivated solely by greed and selfishness rather than the sort of self-giving commitment to customers, employees, neighbors and investors that comes from the Gospel.

Bart Ehrman has gotten a lot of press in recent years over his supposed debunking of the Bible. A former Evangelical, Ehrman has left the Christian faith over the supposed contradictions he has found in the Bible.

Last week, he was on The Cobert Report and frankly, Cobert took him to school:

I have to admit, I’ve never read any of Ehrman’s books. After seeing him on Cobert, I’m not inclined to – his arguments are laughably weak. For example, in the clip above he claims that Jesus is not presented as divine in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark or Luke. This is an old argument that has been debunked on both the popular and scholarly level. The truth is that Ehrman doesn’t understand how 1st century writers like Matthew would express Christ’s divinity. (I’ll give you a hint: it’s not by writing “Jesus is God!”) Pope Benedict shows the fallacy in Ehrman’s claim in Jesus of Nazareth and a fuller treatment can be found in Larry Hurtado’s Lord Jesus Christ. Scholarship has shown decisively that the early Christians considered Jesus divine from the first days of the Church. Moderns may reject his divinity, but it is dishonest to claim that the early Christians and writers of the New Testament did.

Update: Dean gives some informative details in the comments regarding Ehrman’s previous life as a Christian as well as why he left the faith.

Hallelujah! He is risen!

Lo! I tell you a mystery.
We shall not all sleep,
but we shall all be changed, in a moment,
in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet.
For the trumpet will sound,
and the dead will be raised imperishable,
and we shall be changed.
For this perishable nature must put on the imperishable,
and this mortal nature must put on immortality.
When the perishable puts on the imperishable,
and the mortal puts on immortality,
then shall come to pass the saying that is written:
“Death is swallowed up in victory.”
“O death, where is thy victory?
O death, where is thy sting?”
The sting of death is sin,
and the power of sin is the law.
But thanks be to God,
who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.
1 Corinthians 15:51-57

Click here for my Sunday scriptural reflection.

St. Thomas Aquinas on Christ’s descent into Hell.