I Say a Little Prayer for You

The last part of the Liturgy of the Word is called the Prayer of the Faithful.  Some individual church parishes may refer to it as the “General Intercessions,” but it’s the same thing.  As much as I’d like to paraphrase it and pass it off as my own thinking, I’ll just go ahead and quote the General Instruction of the Roman Missal on this one, because they sum it up pretty well:

In the Prayer of the Faithful, the people respond in a certain way to the word of God which they have welcomed in faith and, exercising the office of their baptismal priesthood, offer prayers to God for the salvation of all. It is fitting that such a prayer be included, as a rule, in Masses celebrated with a congregation, so that petitions will be offered for the holy Church, for civil authorities, for those weighed down by various needs, for all men and women, and for the salvation of the whole world. (GIRM 69)

Pretty cool, right?  This paragraph shows how the Mass is not just a series of random prayerful events, but rather builds upon itself.  Once we hear the Word of God and learn how it applies to us in today’s world, we profess our Faith in God who gives us the guidance of the scriptures we just heard.  Then we offer prayers for others so that we can fulfill our calling of our baptismal priesthood (which we’ll get to in our Sacrament series after we finish with the Mass). 

The celebrant (priest) of the Mass is the one who directs this prayer from his chair; however, he is not the ordinary announcer of the prayers.  After the priest gives a short introduction, inviting the congregation to pray, a deacon, lector, cantor, or some member of the lay congregation goes to the Ambo (or another suitable place—generally meaning a lectern/pulpit or some similar location).  The congregation, already standing since before the Profession of Faith, responds to each intercessory prayer with a short affirmation of the prayer, such as: “Lord, hear our prayer,” or “Hear us, O Lord.”  /Some church parishes go a little further and have the people respond with something created to be relevant to the theme for that day’s Mass such as: “Hear us, Spirit of the Living God,” or “Lord of healing and forgiveness, hear us.”  There is nothing wrong with a parish making up their own response, but this avenue should be taken with care not to have something too long or distracting like, “God, creator of Heaven and of Earth, hear our prayer and answer us according to your will.”  Remember that the congregation is supposed to be praying this together/collectively.  If we make it harder for us to pray together we’ll end up distracting ourselves, making the oh, so creative response more distracting than prayer-encouraging.

Now, let’s talk about the prayers, themselves for a second.  The types of prayers that are to be prayed at this point in the Mass are clearly…CLEARLY…outlined in the GIRM.  They are:

1.      For the needs of the Church

2.      For public authorities and the salvation of the whole world

3.      For those burdened by any kind of difficulty

4.      For the local community

Now, the GIRM also says that for individual occasions such as Confirmation, Marriage, funerals, etc., the intentions can better reflect the significance of that particular occasion.  Please note, however, that we DO NOT pray for the dead here.  I have been to MANY parishes that have prayed for the dead here.  This is NOT the place.  As you’ll see a few posts from now, the Eucharistic Prayer includes a prayer for those who have died, and even includes an option to include specific names of people who have recently died in the community. 

Some take the 4 prayers literally, taking them to mean that there should only be FOUR prayers.  Others take a little more liberty to say that there are four TYPES of prayers that can be made, and make up as many prayers as they want to as long as they feel the prayers fall into one of these four categories.  The GIRM, unfortunately, has not yet clarified this dilemma.  HOWEVER, care should be taken (again, this isn’t from the GIRM, but from extensive negative personal experience) to limit the number of intentions so that people don’t get distracted by a “laundry list” of intercessions.  Think about the last time you went to a Mass where they had TEN or so intercessions.  Can you tell me what ANY of them were?  Probably not.  By about the time intention number 6 rolls around, the average person stops paying attention to what is actually being said (assuming they were paying attention in the first place, of course), and just starts waiting for their cue to respond.  So to all the priests out there who may be reading this, take it from members (or at least one member) of the congregation: Keep them concise to help us and our incredibly short 21^st century attention spans stay focused on the importance of each particular prayer.

While I’ve still got your ear…or eyes, I guess…there’s also this little pet peeve of mine that I’ll bring up because, well, it’s MY blog.  Many parishes try to take the “guess work” out of what the people should say in response by having the person reading the intentions preface them by saying, for example, “Please respond: Lord, Hear our Prayer.”  Let’s be clear: this is not supposed to be a “practice round.”  Saying “Lord, Hear our Prayer” is your response to the PRAYER.  We’ve been going to Mass enough that I think we don’t need to “rev ourselves up” to be ready to say the right response after the reader tells us what it will be. 

So now that I’ve gotten off THAT soapbox, that’s the end of the Prayer of the Faithful, and also the Liturgy of the Word.  In our next post, we’ll start unpacking the second half of the Mass called the Liturgy of the Eucharist.  Until then, keep on praying!

'Cause I Gotta Have Faith - Part XIII

Last one!

Article 12 (no change come Advent 2011):

…and the life of the world to come

Here’s where things get kinda messy between Christian faiths.  We all believe in Heaven and Hell, but we have VERY different ideas of who goes where and how they get there.  Then there’s the whole Purgatory issue—look out!  No matter what aspect you’re speaking of, the “life of the world to come” refers to where we go after we die and how we spend that phase of our existence (notice I didn’t say “how we spend that time” because it won’t be time in the way we know it after we die).  So here’s my best attempt at explaining what CATHOLICS believe (or should believe) about what happens once we kick the bucket.

1 – Heaven

Ah, Heaven.  Contrary to what the lyrical stylings of Belinda Carlisle may suggest, Heaven is NOT a place on Earth.  I say that because, if nothing else, Heaven is not a place.  Remember, God is limitless and infinite, so to imply that there is a physical limit on Heaven seems pretty contrary to our understanding (or best attempt at an understanding) of how the Spiritual Realm of God works.  Heaven, like Hell and that “Purgatory” thing we’ll talk about in a minute, can probably be better understood to be a “state of being” rather than a place.  If we go with that explanation, it would mean that we would be in a constant state of realizing that God loves us, and we could simply bask in the awesomeness of God for all eternity.  Don’t worry, it won’t get old, because since God is infinite, it follows that God’s love is infinite, so it’s not like we can ever run out of ways to feel God’s love.  I like to think that Heaven will be one of two things: either (1) we’ll be able to understand the answer to every question we ever had about God and our Faith, or (2) we’ll be so pre-occupied with the glory of God that we won’t care about things as trivial as where Cain’s wife came from (sorry to hurt your brain if you’ve never thought of that before).  We believe that souls that are clean and free from sin are able to enter Heaven after they die.  Notice, though, that this is contrary to what most Protestant faiths believe.  Their belief is that when Jesus died for us on the cross, that he didn’t CONQUER our sins, but rather covered them.  So it seems to me (and any Protestants out there, please correct me if I’m wrong) that when we die, it doesn’t matter how much or how little you’ve sinned, you’re still getting in as long as you “confess with your lips” that Jesus Christ is your Lord and Savior.  Now I don’t know how many parents are out there reading this right now, but it seems a little hard to believe that there would be absolutely NO atonement we’d need to make for our sins at all.  We have an instinctive sense as parents to want to have our children not only realize, but UNDERSTAND why what they do is wrong.  That’s why we have systems of rewards and punishments when dealing with our children.  If we see the benefit of commending our children when they do well and discouraging negative behavior when they do something bad, how much more does God see that benefit, and how much better would he execute that system?  The answer is infinitely.  We need to recognize and understand that our actions in this life DO play a part, however large or small, on our situation after this life.  Remember the last verse of Chapter 21 of the Book of Revelation?  “But nothing unclean will enter it, nor any (one) who does abominable things or tells lies….” (Revelation 21:27a)  So how do we get into heaven if we’re not absolutely perfect when we die?  We’ll get there in a second.

2 – Hell

Ooooooh…he said “H-E-double hockey sticks”!  Hell seems to be a fascination of humanity.  I mean, seriously: stop and think for a minute of how many movie’s you’ve seen where Hell was involved in some way, whether someone was taken there, or came out of there, or was threatened with it, or something of that nature.  I’d be willing to say that there are far more (mainstream) movies that have some connection with Hell, or demons, or Satan, himself, than there are those that have some connection with Heaven.  The funniest thing about this (entirely made up) statistic is that most of these movies are probably incredibly off-base with their depiction of Hell.  First of all, like Heaven, Hell is not a place, but rather a different state of being for your soul.  Remember our discussion on the Penitential Rite?  God always loves us, no matter how horrible of a thing we might do.  When we do something against the will of God, the only thing that changes about our relationship with God is OUR part.  We break our relationship.  When we accept God’s love and forgiveness, whether that be through the Penitential Rite & the Eucharist (for venial sins) or through the Sacrament of Reconciliation (for mortal sins), we restore that relationship to its rightful set-up of us being loved by God infinitely and unconditionally and us reciprocating that love as best we can.  We essentially keep ourselves in a state of hell when we refuse to accept the forgiveness of God.  Remember, God loves all his creation…even the souls of Hell.  That’s why they still exist.  Our existence comes from God, in the form that we can best describe as “love.”  So if God would stop “loving” something, it would cease to exist.

3 – Purgatory

Here’s the biggie.  People have debated the validity of Purgatory for centuries.  The reason is that Purgatory is not mentioned by name in the Bible.  But just because something is not explicitly named in the Bible doesn’t mean that the underlying concept isn’t there.  In the end it doesn’t matter what we CALL it, because we just gave the concept a name so that it would be easier for us to discuss it.  So let’s be clear: Purgatory IS in the Bible…just not under that name.  So where is it?  Let’s just go ahead and take a look see, shall we?  Let’s go first to 2 Maccabees 12:43-46:

And making a gathering, he sent twelve thousand drachms of silver to Jerusalem for sacrifice to be offered for the sins of the dead, thinking well and religiously concerning the resurrection. (For if he had not hoped that they that were slain should rise again, it would have seemed superfluous and vain to pray for the dead), and because he considered that they who had fallen asleep with godliness, had great grace laid up for them. It is therefore a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead, that they may be loosed from sins.

So we clearly see here in the scriptures that the idea exists that it is a good practice to pray for the dead so that they may be forgiven for their sins.  If someone has died with sin, they are unclean and unable to enter Heaven (Revelation 21:27).  However, this passage shows that it is possible for people who have died to be forgiven of their sins after death.  So there has to be another option besides just Heaven (where perfectly clean, sinless souls are) and Hell (where unclean souls unwilling to accept God’s forgiveness are) where a person can be cleansed of their sins so they might be fit to enter Heaven.  This is what we call Purgatory.  Want a better, more directly-related-to-Jesus-type of passage?  Well, here you go: 

And whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but he that shall speak against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be forgiven him neither in this world, nor in the world to come. (Matthew 12:32)

NOW we’re getting somewhere.  See, the Books of Maccabees are not included in most Protestant versions of the Bible.  From the very beginning of Christianity, certain books were kept and others omitted as we learned more about their background.  The Catholic Faith has kept the 2 Books of Maccabees, while Martin Luther omitted them from his version of the Bible during the Protestant Reformation because he didn’t like the whole “praying for the dead” concept (yeah, that wasn’t arrogant of him at ALL…).  Anyway, it’s kind of hard to argue with what Jesus is getting at here, isn’t it—no matter WHAT religion you connect yourself with?  Again, Jesus doesn’t use the word Purgatory—this is just a word we coined along the way to identify the concept.  Notice the root word of Purgatory?  --purge—Which the Merriam Webster Dictionary defines as “to clear of guilt.”  In the passage from Matthew’s Gospel above, Jesus is saying that sins against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven neither in this world, nor in the world to come.  Anyone with half a brain can figure out that that implies that there ARE some sins that can be forgiven in the world to come—or Jesus wouldn’t have made the (then) unnecessary distinction.  But he did, so there is a distinction.  We call this distinction Purgatory.  So even if your Bible doesn’t contain the 2^nd Book of Maccabees, it most likely DOES contain the Gospel of Matthew.

So now that we’ve given fairly good evidence as to the existence of Purgatory, what is it, exactly?  Just like Heaven and Hell, it probably isn’t a place, but more of a state of being.  It is a cleansing stage that we have to go through before we can enter Heaven.  Again, it’s not like there is some timeline of how long we stay, because there is no time after we die…and I seriously hope you’re not still trying to grasp the concept of being outside of time, because it’s probably humanly impossible.  It’s just a phase we have to go through if we want to be in Heaven.  It might just be until we are able to accept God’s love and forgiveness, and THAT’s why the souls that have died with sin need our prayers—to help them realize that they CAN be forgiven so that they’ll accept the forgiveness.  That’s just MY thought, though.

So there you have the Profession of Faith/Nicene Creed/Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed…whatever you want to call it.  We say it at Mass regularly on Sundays and on Holy Days of Obligation (which we’ll get to in time).  Leave your comments and questions about the Creed below.  If you have none, we’ll move right along in the Mass in our next post.

'Cause I Gotta Have Faith - Part XII

Only two more to go!  Here’s one of them:

Article 11:

Current Text:

We look for the resurrection of the dead

Beginning Advent 2011:

And I look forward to the resurrection of the dead

Ok, let’s just be clear: in the current text, we’re not looking for the resurrection of the dead because we lost it.  This is one of those really great changes that’s coming in Advent, because it makes our beliefs much easier to understand.  Now that that’s been said, let’s move on…

So how do the dead resurrect?  If you’ve ever seen a movie where someone digs up a grave, or opens up an old coffin, the person who was buried within that hold was probably depicted in the form of a skeleton.  After we die, our organs deteriorate, and the only things that are left of us are our bones and our teeth.  That raises the question of what will happen with what we call the “Resurrection of the Dead.”  Will our skeletons grow our organs back and our hearts start beating again?  Will our skeletons start walking around on their own?  As Catholics, we feel it’s probably not exactly either of those—although the former is closer to what will probably happen.  Theologically speaking, when we die our bodies and souls separate.  Our bodies are left on earth to do what they do, and our souls go on to (hopefully) meet God.  In the Resurrection (of the Dead) God will give incorruptible (not able to die and decay) life to our “bodies”, which will be reunited with our souls.  This idea comes to us pretty much straight from St. Paul’s 1^st Letter to the Corinthians, Chapter 15, Verses 42-44: “So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown corruptible; it is raised incorruptible.  It is sown dishonorable; it is raised glorious. It is sown weak; it is raised powerful.  It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual one.”  This incorruptible body is the one that will be given to us by God at the end of this worldly age, and is the “body” we will experience eternity in.  I’m using quotation marks because we need to remember that the “body” we will have then is not like the body we have now.  Our body now is able to be hurt, get sick, and be killed.  The “body” God will give us at the end of this time, and the beginning of eternity is unlike that.  We really don’t have any way of knowing (and we DEFINITELY don’t have any way of fully understanding) what this body will look like or how it will operate.  We just have to have faith that God knows what he’s doing and that when the time comes, we’ll know what we need to know.

I was going to try to put the last article in this post as well, but although it’s only 8 monosyllabic (I love that word) words long, it’s pretty huge, so I’ll save it for its own post.

'Cause I Gotta Have Faith - Part XI

Ok, guys. We’re in the home stretch now.  Only 3 articles to go.

Article 10:

Current Text:

We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.

Beginning Advent 2011:

I confess one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.

Apart from reading the Bible and, of course, believing in the Trinity, one of the main things that ties most Christian denominations together in common is Baptism.  Baptism comes from the Greek word baptizein, meaning “plunge” or “immerse.” Being plunged or immersed in water symbolizes our burial into Christ’s death.  This is indicated by St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans, Chapter 6, Verse 3, which says, “Or are you unaware that we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?”  Once we have “died” to our former selves, we can “rise” through Baptism to new life in Christ as his follower.  From the flood to cleanse the earth of evil—the flood that prompted Noah’s ark building, to the flowing back of the Red Sea over the army of Pharaoh after Moses had parted it, water was used throughout the Bible as (surprise, surprise) a symbol of being washed clean, typically of sin and evil.  Jesus, himself, was baptized in the Jordan River by his cousin John the Baptist (not a very creative title, I know).  Jesus put stock in the idea of being spiritually washed clean, not only for himself, but also for his followers, so much so that baptism is referenced in the last two verses of Matthew’s Gospel: “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age."

Now, depending on which denomination you talk to, Baptism has slightly different traits and requirements attached to it from faith to faith.  In many (if not most) Protestant (non-Catholic Christian) faiths, for instance, when you become a part of their congregation, no matter how many times you may have been baptized before in no matter how many different churches, you must be baptized AGAIN to become a part of their church.  Not only must you be re-baptized, but you must be an adult.  In the Catholic Faith, we view things a little differently.

First of all, you have to realize that most Protestant faiths do not baptize infants like we do in the Catholic Faith.  They hold to this belief because they feel that in order to be baptized into a life in Christ, you should be able to understand what you’re getting into and profess your own faith.  Seems like a logical enough theory, but these Christians forget about (or simply don’t believe in) the concept of Original Sin.  Original Sin is the idea that before the sin of Adam and Eve, humanity had the opportunity to live sin-free and guiltless for all time, but because they chose to disobey God, we as humans are born with tainted souls—souls stained by the original sin that all humanity shares in.  Because of this tarnished soul, we Catholics believe that children deserve the cleansing and forgiveness of sin that comes along with baptism without having to wait until they are adults.  This has a good bit to do with receiving the Eucharist.  See, if you remember from our posts about the Penitential Rite, we touched a bit on the fact that our souls should be cleansed and our hearts should be right in order to receive the Eucharist.  A person who has not been baptized is not FULLY clean, because they have original sin on their souls.  Since in the Catholic Church, we have children begin to receive the Eucharist at the “age of reason” (the age at which a child should understand right from wrong), we have our children baptized before this point.  When Catholics become adults (different dioceses put this at different points, usually in high school), they receive the Sacrament of Confirmation, which is our opportunity for a Catholic adult to make an independent choice to become a member of the Church. 

When you think about it (soapbox alert!), the Protestant faiths that have an issue with us baptizing infants don’t really have MUCH of an argument against it, because they say that a person should have the choice as to whether they want to be baptized or not.  However, their belief is (generally) that baptisms in other churches have no importance, but that a person needs to be baptized into THEIR church to belong to the body of believers.  This is contrary to the Catholic belief of ONE baptism: once you’ve been baptized, you’ve been baptized, whether you were baptized in the Catholic Church, or in the Baptist church, Episcopal church, or in some random non-denominational church, as long as you were baptized with water in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit (we call this the “formula” for baptism).  So in the end, if someone who has been baptized (at ANY age) wants to leave a church, they can just leave.  If they go to another Protestant church, that church will tell them that they have to be baptized again in THEIR church, so in the end, whatever previous baptism they had was meaningless (to them) anyway, no matter WHEN in their life they received that previous baptism.  Also, if an adult decides that they want to leave religion altogether and become an atheist, then to them all that happened in the baptism was that they got a little wet.  No harm done.  So I still have yet to hear a good reason as to why we SHOULDN’T baptize infants.  If you have one, I’d love to hear it in the comment section below.

Anyway, you’re probably wondering about that word “confess” that replaced the word “acknowledge” in this line, right?  Well, maybe not, but you’re probably wondering about it now…you’re welcome.  The word used in the Latin text is confiteor.  Look familiar?  The Confiteor is the “I confess to Almighty God, and to you my brothers and sisters…” prayer from the Penitential Rite earlier on in the Mass.  Here, though, it has a slightly different connotation (connotation is the suggested meaning of a word as opposed to the denotation, which is the literal meaning of the word).  Here the word means more of “profess” than the typical sense of “confess” that we are used to, as in “confessing your sins.”  Both meanings are definitions of the word confess, but the one we’re using here is “profess.”  

I have to admit that there is a much cooler explanation that I’ve heard recently about the word “confess” used here, but I cannot for the LIFE of me think of what that explanation is.  I’ll do a little research and post it in the comment section later.

'Cause I Gotta Have Faith - Part X

Since last post was such a brain-strainer, we’ll keep it short and simple tonight…or as simple as we can when talking about the Catholic Faith, as I’m sure you realize by now that there’s a lot more to this Church than most people realize.

Article 9:

Current Text:

We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.

Beginning Advent 2011:

…And one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.

This line gives us what we call the “Four Marks of the Church.”  They are that the Church is (1) one, that the Church is (2) holy, that the Church is (3) catholic, and that the Church is (4) apostolic.  I think it’ll be simplest to take these individually.

ONE:  One of the coolest things about being Catholic is that we have Matthew 16:18 on our side: “And so I say to you, you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it.”  Hard to argue with the words of Jesus there.  He was establishing his Church with St. Peter as its leader.  And since this is the ONLY time in the Bible Jesus established a church, I’m not sure how Protestants are ok with reading this line of the Bible and realizing that they don’t belong to the Church Jesus, Himself, founded.  I mean, maybe it’s just me, but if I’m going to follow the teachings of someone, I’d probably want to learn them from the organization that THAT person created, right?  Some people say that all we need to know is in the Bible, and we don’t need an “establishment” to tell us anything further.  Well, I’d say that there might be some merit in that, except (contrary to popular belief) Catholics ACTUALLY read the Bible…including John 16:12-13 where Jesus says, “I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now. But when he comes, the Spirit of truth, he will guide you to all truth. He will not speak on his own, but he will speak what he hears, and will declare to you the things that are coming.”  So there’s obviously more for us to learn about our Faith other than what is explicitly laid out for us in the Bible, and if we DON’T have the Church that Jesus founded to lead us, I’m not really sure how we, as the entirety of humanity, are to learn that message.  Again…it might just be me…but who knows?  That’s just my soapbox for the day.  Anyway, the Catechism of the Catholic Church sums up the “one” concept pretty well: “The Church is one: she acknowledges one Lord, confesses one faith, is born of one Baptism, forms only one Body, is given life by the one Spirit, for the sake of one hope, at whose fulfillment all divisions will be overcome.” (CCC 866).

HOLY:  This one’s pretty tough to figure out, right?  The word holy comes to us from Old English, but its general idea comes from the Latin word sanctus.  For a good definition, let’s look to my trusty friend, the Merriam Webster Online Dictionary, which defines the word holy as: “exalted or worthy of complete devotion as one perfect in goodness and righteousness.”  Sounds less like the people of the Church, since we are all sinners, and more like the God we worship, right?  Well, when Jesus (who is holy) sacrificed himself for us on the cross, he sanctified us by making atonement for our sins and made us, His Church, a holy people.  Remember, we would have nothing if it had not been given to us by God…even holiness.

CATHOLIC:  Let’s first be clear on one thing.  Go back up to what I’ve copied verbatim, word for word, and letter for letter from the Nicene Creed above.  You might be surprised to know that I did NOT make a mistake by not using a capital C on the word catholic.  The word catholic comes from the Greek kaqolikos, meaning “universal.”  So who belongs to the universal church?  After all, if you happen to find yourself in any number of protestant churches, you might open up one of their hymnals and find the Nicene Creed written right there in a Protestant book, and it won’t be a misprint!  Many Protestant churches use the EXACT same creed that we do in the Catholic (big C) Church.  Well, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church says: “All men are called to this catholic unity of the People of God….And to it, in different ways, belong or are ordered: the Catholic faithful, others who believe in Christ, and finally all mankind, called by God’s grace to salvation.”  So although people might not call themselves Catholic in the sense that they believe in the faith of the Roman Catholic Church that comes to us from Jesus through the lineage of the Apostles (modern-day bishops), every human on this planet, whether they believe it or not (or like it or not, for that matter) is a part of the universal church—the catholic (little c) church—the Body of Christ.  As far as our PARTICULAR faith—that of the Roman Catholic Church—there is a whole deeper level of universality here, as we realize that our faith is practiced exactly the same all over the world—with the occasional difference based on different cultures.  We are universal in the sense that we are the same wherever you are.

APOSTOLIC:  The fourth mark of the Church goes back to the Gospel passages where Jesus founded his Church on St. Peter and gave his apostles the mission to “Go into the whole world and proclaim the gospel to every creature.” (Mark 16:15)  The word apostle comes from the Greek apostellein, meaning “to send out.”  We as an apostolic Church are sent out by Jesus with the charge of spreading the Gospel in our daily lives.  We can do this in many ways.  We don’t have to go on mission trips to third-world countries to achieve this (although, if you feel called to, go right ahead).  We can spread the Gospel message in little ways every day by holding doors open for someone carrying a load of groceries, or by helping someone pick up a load of books they dropped, or by sitting…. patiently…. at… the… D… M… V…. without… gritting…. your…. teeth…. too…. much.  Anyway, we’re an apostolic church that is called to not keep our faith to ourselves.  We need to bring it out to the world.  Now I’m not talking about standing on the sidewalk of Bourbon Street (sorry if you don’t get that reference, non-Louisiana readers) with a sandwich sign that says, “Repent for the end is near!”  I mean, who really pays any attention to those guys?  No one…that’s who!  One of my favorite things Jesus ever said is found in Matthew 10:16, where he says, “Behold, I am sending you like sheep in the midst of wolves; so be shrewd as serpents and simple as doves.”  If you’re in people’s faces about your faith and how they’re wrong for not having faith of their own, you’re probably not going to get very far.  There’s a pretty substantial truth to the saying “You get more bees with honey.”  (Not that bees are attracted to honey…they make honey…just for the record…so that saying is pretty stupid, if you really dissect it.)  Anyway, Jesus is calling us to be strategic about how we spread the Gospel. The Gospel message is strong enough on its own, yes, but people have free will, and they can sometimes choose to close their hearts to the Word of God.  We need to sometimes soften them up first in order that they may be able to accept the Truth into their lives.

Ok, so I guess I lied at the beginning when I said that this would be short, but this is Catholicism!  It’s exciting!  WOOH!  The real problem is that I just said I lied, even though since I’m typing I could just as easily have gone back to the top of this post and erased the part where I said it was going to be short and simple.  What’s even worse is that instead of doing that, I typed this lengthy explanation of how I didn’t do it instead of just doing it in the first place.  But I do know that this has gone on much longer than necessary, so I’ll just say, “Adieu! Adieu! To yeu and yeu and yeu!”  (Thanks for getting that, Sound of Music fans!)

'Cause I Gotta Have Faith - Part IX

Ok, sit back, ‘cause this one’s a biggie!

Article 8:

Current Text:

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son.  With the Father and the Son he is worshipped and glorified. He has spoken through the Prophets.

Beginning Advent 2011:

And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified, who has spoken through the prophets.

So here we go with the third person of the Holy Trinity, the Holy Spirit.  We call the Holy Spirit “the Lord” because the Holy Spirit is just as much “the Lord” as God the Father and God the Son (Jesus), the other two persons of the Holy Trinity.  We call the Holy Spirit “the giver of life” because throughout the Bible, the life-giving actions of the Lord are attributed to the “spirit” of God, i.e. the Holy Spirit.  Take Genesis 2:7, for example: “the LORD God formed man out of the clay of the ground and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and so man became a living being.”  The word being here is literally translated “soul.”  So God breathes the “breath of life” into man, which is essentially his spirit (the Holy Spirit), and so we are given life by God.  St. Paul also directly mentions that the Spirit gives life in verses 5-6 of his 2^nd Letter to the Corinthians:  “Not that of ourselves we are qualified to take credit for anything as coming from us; rather, our qualification comes from God, who has indeed qualified us as ministers of a new covenant, not of letter but of spirit; for the letter brings death, but the Spirit gives life.”

So we know that the Bible teaches that the Holy Spirit gives life.  Now we get into the more philosophical concept of the Holy Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son.  This is the very thing that causes migraines all over the globe on Trinity Sunday:  how do you explain the unexplainable mystery of the Holy Trinity to the general congregation?  I’ve come to the realization over the years that I’ll never fully understand the Holy Trinity, just like I’ll never understand the concept of God not being bound by time.  I might be able to explain it to a certain point, but in the end, that explanation will be lacking some crucial, fundamental point, because God is just too big for the human mind to comprehend, and while some people say, “That’s dumb!  Why would God create us and have our minds fall short of understanding him?”, I say, “That’s exactly right.  God is infinite, and our finite minds, just can NOT comprehend something infinite.”  All the same, I’d like to share with you the most sensible explanation I’ve learned about how the Holy Trinity exists in one being.  First, we’ll have to have a little philosophy lesson:

Let’s take you, the person lucky enough to be reading this blog (yes, I AM quite full of myself most of the time).  I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that you have friends, or at least have interacted with at least one individual at some point in your life.  Might be a pretty big assumption, but I’m just going with it for now.  So take this other person you know.  How do you know they exist?  If we look back at the French philosopher Rene Descartes, we see that first thing we have to be sure of when contemplating existence is our own existence.  You have thoughts, and those thoughts have to come from SOMEWHERE, so you decide that they are coming from yourself, some kind of being.  So if you’re real enough to create thoughts, we can safely say that you exist.  This is where the phrase “I think, therefore I am” comes from.  So now that we’ve established that you exist, how do you know that other things that you encounter exist—whether those things be friends, bar stools, three-toed sloths, or even blog authors?  Well, you first have to figure out where all these things come from.  Well, let’s figure out where YOU came from, first.  We know that you exist, but WHY do you exist?  How did you get here?  Who created you? 

If you choose (and forgive me philosophy students, but I AM moving incredibly quickly through these concepts) to believe in a supreme being, we can, for argument’s sake, call this supreme being “God” and say that God is the one who has created you.  But how do we know that God did not create ONLY you, and that everything you THINK you are experiencing every day is not just a figment of your imagination?  How do we know that God is not an “evil genius” (as Descartes speculates) who is determined to fool you into thinking that the world you experience is real?  Pretty Matrix-y, don’t you think? 

Well, Descartes tackles the idea of God this way (sorry if this gets too philosophical, but it IS, philosophy, after all):

First of all, we have to understand that something cannot come from nothing.  Everything in this world was created by something that was created by something that was created by something, and so on.  Next, we see that the cause (or creator) of some “thing” must have at least as much formal reality as that “thing” has objective reality.  So Descartes realizes that he has in himself an idea of God.  Since we view God as creator as being infinite, Descartes says that the idea of God has infinite objective reality.  We also see that man cannot be the cause of the idea of God, since man is not an infinite and perfect being.  We, being imperfect, cannot create the concept of perfection and infinity…we don’t enough formal reality to be that cause.  Only an infinite being, or a perfect being could cause an infinite or perfect idea such as an infinite and perfect God.  Therefore an infinite and perfect God MUST exist.

Now that we know God exists, we go back to the question of whether God created you, then made you believe that you were part of this big world, when really it’s all just a figment of your imagination.  Well, Descartes says that if God is a perfect being, he would have to be a good and benevolent being.  Since we’ve already seen that God is a perfect being, we conclude that he IS a good and benevolent being.  Since a good and benevolent being would not deceive a person in that way, we conclude that the things we experience are NOT figments of our imaginations. 

So now that we KNOW that the things around us are real, we can get back to talking about how we experience them.  This brings us to the subject of relationships.  Now I’m not talking about relationships in the sense of not knowing who’s “hooking up” with who on Jersey Shore.  I’m talking about how we interact with other things in the world.  For the sake of forcing you to separate the idea of “relationship” from the way you’re USED to using it—in the sense of a “romantic” relationship—I’ll continue my explanation using you and a table.  How do you know that the table exists?  You can’t talk to it.  It can’t talk back to you.  So you can’t make that kind of connection.  You can, however, try to walk through it, but in the end, you’ll probably end up with a sharp pain in your thigh, depending on how tall you are in relation to the table—it could be a pain in your  rib cage, or in your shin if it’s one of those little Japanese tables.  So we can interact with the table in such a way that we can “experience” it and the fact that it’s there.  For the sake of our discussion, we’ll call that interaction your “relationship” with the table.  Now don’t run off and start making out with random tables…remember, we’re not talking about relationships in the commonly-used “romantic” sense, but in the philosophical sense.  So you have a relationship with the table.  Let’s dissect that relationship, shall we?  There are three components to that relationship: (1) you, (2) the table, (3) the relationship that exists between you.  Let’s shift this over to personal interaction.  Let’s say you’re married, the relationship that exists between you and your spouse has three components, as well: (1) you, (2) your spouse, (3) the relationship that exists between you.  Now, at its most basic form, the relationship between you and the table is essentially the same as the relationship between you and your spouse.  Realistically, however, we see an obvious distinction between those two relationships.  Again, I hope you don’t play spin the bottle with your coffee table on lonely Saturday nights.  If so, seek help immediately.

Let’s just go for it now and apply this to God.  If you haven’t picked up on it already, the Holy Trinity is (are?) the three parts of a relationship.  (DISCLAIMER:  Again, this is my attempt at explaining something that my incredibly limited mind probably has NO business trying to comprehend.)  As we’ve just seen, the three parts of a relationship are:  (1) the first entity in the relationship, (2) the second entity in the relationship, and (3) the relationship that exists between them.  Applying that to the Holy Trinity, we’ll say that the first entity in the relationship is God the Father.  We’ll say that the second entity in the relationship is God the Son.  Now for the mind-blower…the THIRD part of the relationship, which is the relationship that exists between the two entities, in the case of the Holy Trinity is (drum roll………..) THE HOLY SPIRIT.  Yep, the infinitely perfect bond that exists between God the Father and God the Son is such a powerful relationship that it is, itself, an entirely other “person” of the Holy Trinity.  This relationship, which is a relationship of perfect love, is the way we experience God.  As the title of Pope Benedict XVI’s first encyclical as pope clearly spells out, “God is love.”  We experience God, because we experience his infinite, perfect love.  This is where we get our existence.  This is where we get our forgiveness.  This is where we get our grace. 

Getting back to the Creed, we say, “who proceeds from the Father and the Son.”  It’s important to remember that God had no beginning, and will have no end.  So it’s not like God the Father was existing, and God the Son was existing, and one day they met each other at work and God the Father was like, “Hi, I’m God the Father,” and God the Son was like, “Hey God the Father, I’m God the Son…want to establish an eternal relationship of infinitely perfect love from which we can pour that relationship of love onto a universe of our own creative design?”  The relationship of the Holy Trinity has always existed.  It never BEGAN…it just always is.  So it’s important to understand that the word proceeds is not used here to mean that the Holy Spirit comes AFTER the Father and the Son, but rather that the Holy Spirit exists because the Father and the Son exist.  However, it’s important to realize that without the relationship between them, the Father and the Son wouldn’t exist, so it’s not like the Father and Son are more important than the Spirit and that the Spirit is just a by-product of the Father and the Son.  They are all equally important components of a bond of existence that we’ll never understand (until possibly after we die).  This is why we say that the Spirit “…with the Father and Son is adored and glorified.”  The Holy Spirit is just as much “GOD” as the Father and the Son.

Finally (thank the Lord), we believe that the Spirit “has spoken through the prophets.”  If you remember, this line was not in the original 325 AD version of the Nicene Creed.  It was added later, as we came to a fuller understanding of the importance of the Holy Spirit in the workings of the world.  Since my brain nearly exploded earlier in this post, I’m going to be lazy here and defer to the 2^nd Letter of Peter, Chapter 1, Verses 20-21:  “Know this first of all, that there is no prophecy of scripture that is a matter of personal interpretation, for no prophecy ever came through human will; but rather human beings moved by the holy Spirit spoke under the influence of God.”  Right there in plain black & white in the Bible.  The Holy Spirit is believed to be the guiding force behind the prophetic works in the Bible.  The writers of the books of the Bible wrote the words with their own hands, but we believe that the thoughts and prophecies they wrote were not of their own minds, but rather it was the Holy Spirit of God that touched the hearts and minds of those writers to have God’s message sent though them to the people of the world.  A message we are still unpacking today.

'Cause I Gotta Have Faith - Part VIII

Article 7 (will not change in Advent 2011):

He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end

If you haven’t already, you should really take some time to read the Bible…but for our purposes in this post, you should at least read the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 24.  There’s some pretty amazing stuff in there.  Here are verses 29-31:

“Immediately after the tribulation of those days, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from the sky, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken.  And then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in heaven, and all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming upon the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And he will send out his angels with a trumpet blast, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the other.”

Jesus is talking in this passage, and he’s referencing the concept illustrated in this 7^th Article from the Nicene Creed.  We’ve all heard of “Judgment Day,” right?  1991 movie starring The Governator?  Second Terminator movie??  No?  Not following?  It’s ok, my wife studied Psychology in college and still can’t figure out what’s wrong with me.  No, I’m not REALLY talking about Terminator 2: Judgment Day.  I’m talking about “Judgment Day” in the sense of the end of time.  The Book of Revelation tells the story of what will happen when the world comes to an end.  Whether the words of the Book of Revelation are literal or figurative/symbolic is up for debate.  But the basic idea behind the words is solid truth.

When the physical world as we know it comes to an end, God will call all souls, living and dead, to himself to live in Heaven.  Those who choose to completely reject God’s love and mercy at that point will spend all of eternity rejecting the love of God in a state of what we refer to as hell.  Those who DO accept God’s love and mercy will be called home to be one with God in heaven.  This separation of good people and evil people is known as Judgment Day, and will be carried out by the Messiah, Jesus Christ, which is what the first part of the 7^th Article says.

Now, you may be familiar with the recent news story about the preacher who predicted that “the rapture” would happen May 21, 2011.  The problem for us in the Catholic Faith is that “the rapture” is NOT a Catholic teaching.  The idea of the rapture seems to have been invented by a protestant some time in the early 1800s, so the idea is less than 200 years old.  Best we (Catholics) can tell, is that this idea comes from a misinterpretation of Revelation 20:6 which says, “Blessed and holy is the one who shares in the first resurrection. The second death has no power over these; they will be priests of God and of Christ, and they will reign with him for (the) thousand years.”  Protestants who believe in the rapture believe that at the end of the world, believers who have died will be raised up to heaven, then the believers who are alive will also be raised up to heaven.  The raising up of the believers who are alive is what is referred to as “the rapture.”  However, we need to remember that God exists outside of time.  Remember the Book of Genesis, and the story of creation?  Did God create the world in 7 days?  If so, how do you explain dinosaurs?  As comedian Lewis Black says, “Whenever anyone tries to tell me that the world was created in 7 days, I immediately reach for a fossil, and say, ‘Fossil.’” 

Time for us is simply the measure of the sequence of events.  The most significant event we point to is the rotation of the earth around the sun.  We break up rotations of the earth around the sun into days—365.25 days to be exact.  These days are broken up into 24 hour periods.  Hours are broken up into 60 minutes, which are further broken into 60-second periods, and you get the idea.  But those measurements are for OUR purposes.  God just IS.  He has no need for measuring time, because he simply IS.  Time lets us measure change.  God does not change.  Therefore he has no need to measure change for himself.  Catching on yet?  The 1,000 year thing is (probably) not meant to signify a LITERAL thousand years as we know it, just like 7 days of creation (probably) didn’t mean a LITERAL seven days.  So now that this nut of a preacher guy has revised his original prediction, and made a (failed) attempt to “save face,” by saying that May 21, 2011 was a “spiritual judgment day,” and that October 21, 2011 will be the date of the physical rapture, you can probably be that much more certain that you’ll wake up bright and early on the morning of October 22, 2011.  …just sayin’.

Now for that last part of this 7^th Article: “…and his kingdom will have no end.”  We’ve pretty much summed this up already here, but God exists outside of time.  While it’s difficult, if not entirely impossible for us to grasp the concept of eternity, it’s entirely natural for God, because he DOES live in eternity.  There is no past, present, or future for God, only the ever-present now.  Chew on that for a while.  Seriously, it’ll probably give you a headache after you try thinking about it for a while.  Eventually, you’ll probably be like me, and just let it be one of those “faith things.” 

'Cause I Gotta Have Faith - Part VII

Continuing with the Nicene Creed and the 12 Articles of Faith,

Article 6:

Current Text:

…he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father

Beginning Advent 2011:

He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.

Ok, so there’s really no change in the wording here…just a change in the sentence structure before this article.  But that being said, remember that these “changes” to the wording of things in Mass that we’ve been talking about are not “changes” in the sense that we’re changing what’s happening, or even changing our beliefs.  We’re simply correcting our translation of the Latin into English.  This article simply was easier to translate from the start, so the words that we say here won’t change.

Now, the concept illustrated here is another one that we were able to take straight out of the Bible with absolutely no interpretation or revelation necessary.  Mark 16:19 says, “So then the Lord Jesus, after he spoke to them, was taken up into heaven and took his seat at the right hand of God.”  This also points to Psalm 110, Verse 1, which says, “The Lord says to you, my lord, ‘Take your throne at my right hand, while I make your enemies your footstool.”  The footnotes of the New American Bible on this verse say that this verse points to another passage, that being Matthew 22:41-46, which is a pretty clever one:

While the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus questioned them, saying, “What is our opinion about the Messiah?  Whose son is he?”  They replied, “David’s.”  He said to them, “How, then, does David, inspired by the Spirit, call him “lord,” saying: ‘The Lord said to my lord, “Sit at my right hand until I place your enemies under your feet’?”  If David calls him “lord,” how can he be his son?”  No one was able to answer him a word, nor from that day on did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.

This is another verse illustrating the idea of the Messiah, because Jesus was trying to point out that King David (the author of the Psalms) would be saying that there would be someone more important than himself (which was a really big deal at the time, seeing as how David was KING, and all), but separate in theory from God the Father.  King David says that the LORD (God the Father) says to “my lord”, meaning David’s lord/master, who, with David speaking as King, could only be speaking of God the Father or the Messiah, and since he has already said that THE Lord is speaking to David’s lord, unless God is talking to himself—which, I guess, in a way he was—he must be talking to someone else, and if there is someone else David is referring to as being higher in rank than himself, and other than THE LORD, it must be the Messiah.  This is pointing out how the Messiah must not be David’s literal son, but must come from some higher source…Jesus as the “Son of God.”  The original verse of Psalm 110 which led us on this re-directed path points to Mark 16:19 which blatantly states what we are saying here in the 6^th Article of Faith:  that Jesus, after his death and resurrection, ascended into heaven to sit at the right hand of the Father.

So by “seated at the right hand of the Father, we must mean that after we die, we’ll be able to go to a room where God the Father is sitting in a big chair, with his long, white beard and his flowing robes with Jesus sitting in another big chair on God the Father’s right side with his own beard and robes, right?  Well, it probably won’t exactly be like that.  Again, no one on this earth can say for SURE what will LITERALLY be going on in heaven—we’ll just have to wait and see if the Bible’s descriptions of heaven are literal or figurative and symbolic.  Our best understanding at this time, however, is that since God is infinite and is not bound by a body (and as such, probably does not have a long white beard), Mark 16:19 is probably symbolic.  So the question becomes, “What is the significance of Jesus sitting at the right hand of God.”  In the Jewish tradition, the place of importance at the table was the place to the immediate right of the host, or head of the table.  This was generally the place where the oldest son would sit, next to his father, to show his importance and his place as the head after his father.  So it seems very fitting that Jesus would be given the highest level of importance in Heaven, being the Son of God the Father. 

“What about the Holy Spirit?” you ask?  Why wouldn’t he ALSO be seated at the right hand of God the Father?  Just be patient…we’ll get there all in good time.  I’m trying to make this as easy on everyone as possible.  So until then, keep the faith!  (well, you should probably keep the faith, even AFTER that, but you know what I mean…….)

'Cause I Gotta Have Faith - Part VI

Trucking right along through the Nicene Creed, we come to the 5^th Article of Faith.

Article 5:

Current Text:

On the third day he rose again in fulfillment of the Scriptures

Beginning Advent 2011:

…and rose again on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.

If Jesus had not risen from the dead, there would probably be no such thing as Christianity today.  See, at the time, the Jewish people were waiting for someone to be sent by God to deliver them.  They got this notion straight from the Scriptures.  In the Book of the Prophet Isaiah, Chapter 9, verses 6-7, we read:  “For a child is born to us, a son is given us; upon his shoulder dominion rests. They name him Wonder-Counselor, God-Hero, Father-Forever, Prince of Peace. His dominion is vast and forever peaceful, From David's throne, and over his kingdom, which he confirms and sustains by judgment and justice, both now and forever. The zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this!”  These verses, along with others such as Deuteronomy 18:15-16, which says: 

”A prophet like me will the LORD, your God, raise up for you from among your own kinsmen; to him you shall listen. This is exactly what you requested of the LORD, your God, at Horeb on the day of the assembly, when you said, 'Let us not again hear the voice of the LORD, our God, nor see this great fire any more, lest we die’”

point to the Jewish concept of the Messiah, or literally translated: “anointed.”

Jesus was believed by his followers to be the Messiah.  This was probably aided by such verses as John 4:25-26, which says: “The woman said to him, ‘I know that the Messiah is coming, the one called the Anointed; when he comes, he will tell us everything.’ Jesus said to her, ‘I am he, the one who is speaking with you.’”  At the time of Jesus, though, the Messiah, though, the Jewish leaders believed that the Messiah spoken of in the Scriptures would come as a political leader who would raise the Jews above the rule of Rome that controlled their existence at the time.  When the son of a poor carpenter from Nazareth came along and people started spreading word that HE was the Messiah, you can imagine that the Jewish leaders had a pretty difficult time believing it.  They felt Jesus was preaching against their authority and that he sought to destroy their hierarchy.  So they decided that he needed to die, and they had him killed…kinda like an ancient mafia, I guess.

Had Jesus died and stayed that way, that probably would’ve been the end of Jesus’ story.  He may have been remembered as a really great dude who did a whole bunch of great things for people who were in need, and who had great insight to the scriptures and moral behavior, but that would’ve been about it.  HOWEVER, he DID rise from the dead after being publicly crucified (nailed to a wooden cross) and buried in a stone tomb.  Hosea 6:2, Joel 2:32 and other Old Testament passages point to the idea that Jesus was meant to die and then rise again.  And so he did.

As you read the New Testament, the idea of dying and resurrecting is EVERYWHERE.  The disciples who were fortunate enough to see Jesus after his resurrection were the ones who were charged with carrying the message of Jesus’ triumph over death to the rest of the world.  Throughout the history of Christianity, people have asked why Jesus didn’t show himself to more people so that those people would also KNOW that he had risen.  The reason is quite simple.  Jesus wanted us to have FAITH.  Beginning with Abraham in the Book of Genesis, Chapter 22, the Bible is chock full of stories illustrating the importance of faith and God’s desire for us to have it.  There’s an old saying that goes, “Seeing is believing.”  Well, when you really think about it, that statement’s not literally true.  Seeing is knowing.  NOT seeing is REALLY believing.  If you see something, you KNOW it’s there, and you have absolutely no need for faith.  God could’ve revealed himself to the world any number of times…he STILL can any time he wants to.  But for the most part, he’s decided to ask us to just have faith and believe.  The Catechism of the Catholic Church distinguishes faith from believing in the following two passages:

CCC 179:  Faith is a supernatural gift from God.  In order to believe, man needs the interior helps of the Holy Spirit.

CCC 180:  “Believing is a human act, conscious and free, corresponding to the dignity of the human person.

See, when God decided to give us free will (meaning that we have the ability to freely make our own choices in life without God FORCING us to choose right or wrong), he gave us the ability to choose whether or not we will believe in him.  Faith is a gift from God.  When we accept that gift and consciously choose to put it to use, we are able to believe.

I know we ended up a little off-topic, but it just wouldn’t be MY blog if I didn’t get off-topic every once in a while.  Plus it was relevant, so I’m not going to lose any sleep over it.  Till next time, peace!

'Cause I Gotta Have Faith - Part V

For those of you keeping close watch, yes, I DO know that according to some scholars the 12 Articles of Faith refer to the breakdown of the Apostles Creed, while I’ve been addressing the Nicene-Constantinopolitan (or simply, Nicene) Creed.  However, that’s only SOME scholars.  OTHER scholars (and probably even some of those same scholars from the first point) have applied the same 12-part breakdown to the Nicene Creed.  And since we’re talking about the Mass right now, I felt it fitting to go the 12-Article Nicene route.  Speaking of which,

Article 4:

Current Text:

For us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven: by the power of the Holy Spirit he was born of the Virgin Mary, and became man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered, died, and was buried.

Beginning Advent 2011:

For us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven, and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became man.  For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate, he suffered death and was buried…

This Article clearly demonstrates that according to the Catholic Faith, women have absolutely no importance and should not be counted anywhere near the equality of men.  Right?  Ok, that’s not entirely accurate…actually, it’s not at all even close to being able to be misunderstood as remotely accurate.  See, when this was all written, men were still considered to be the “important” ones in society, so it was fitting that at the time it would say “men,” although it was implied that women would be counted in the purpose of Jesus’ coming down from heaven.  It’s not one of those situations like in the Declaration of Independence where they said “all men are created equal,” but by “all men” they really meant “all free, white landowners.”  Here “man” refers to the universal “man” as in “mankind.”  So why didn’t they just say “For mankind and for our salvation”?  Well, according to the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, the earliest known use of the term mankind is in the 13^th Century.  Before that, when someone used the term man or men in the context as it’s used here in the Creed, there was no question about what was meant by the use of the term.  It’s an unnecessary change to have to make, so we keep with tradition still today.

So for all mankind and for our salvation, Jesus came down from heaven.  I’ll skip over the “by the power of the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became man” part for now, and include in this little segment the “For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate, he suffered death and was buried” part.  Ever wonder why Jesus is sometimes referred to as the “Lamb of God”?  Or why people say that “Jesus died for your sins”?  Me too.  To understand this, we need to go back to the beginning of the Bible.  In Genesis, Chapter 22, we read the story of Abraham and his son Isaac.  This is the one where God tells Abraham to take his son Isaac to a mountain and sacrifice him.  As they were on their way, Isaac, who knows that they’re going to worship the Lord, but doesn’t realize that he’s meant to be sacrificed, asks Abraham, “where is the sheep for the holocaust?” (Genesis 22:7b)  The thing to realize from this is that Isaac knew that worshipping the Lord included some sort of sacrifice.  This implies that even before this event took place, the “norm” for worshipping God included sacrificing an animal.  Later, in the first few verses of Chapter 1 of the Book of Leviticus, we see details spelled out by God, Himself, about how to perform sacrifices of animal offerings.  Leviticus 1:10 says, “If his holocaust offering is from the flock, that is, a sheep or a goat, he must bring a male without blemish.”  In Leviticus 4:35 and Leviticus 5:10, God illustrates how making such sacrifices are done to make atonement for sins.  More interestingly, both verses say, “the priest shall make atonement for the sin the man committed, and it will be forgiven,” but we’ll come back to that later in the Mass. 

When Jesus comes down from heaven, He ultimately is crucified, or sacrificed.  This is done to mimic what was written in the Old Testament as guidance for the Jewish community to make atonement for their sins.  An innocent lamb, who is without blemish (Jesus committed no sins in His life), is offered as a sacrifice in atonement for the sins of the world.  Now, Jesus isn’t just a little furry, four-legged animal…He’s God.  So if sacrificing a lamb can make atonement for a man’s sins, how much more perfectly can God sacrificing His son, and in essence, Himself, make atonement for the sins of the whole world, both those that had already been committed, and those that had not yet (and still have not yet) been committed?  So that’s why Jesus had to be sacrificed and had to die for our sins and that’s how our salvation was made possible—a fact that we’ll touch on more in the next Article of Faith.

Now back to the “by the power of the Holy Spirit he was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became man” part.  We’ve touched a little on the relationship of the persons of the Holy Trinity, and we’ll get even further into it when we talk about the 8^th Article of Faith, but for now, just know that the Holy Spirit is the person of the Trinity that is associated with most interactions between God and the world.  The word incarnate is defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “invested with bodily, and especially human nature and form.”  Chapter 1, Verse 35 of the Gospel of Luke says, “And the angel said to her in reply, ‘The holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God.’”  So this part of the 4^th Article of Faith is STRAIGHT from the Bible, with absolutely no interpretation necessary.  Mary and Joseph, the man she was engaged to at the time, had not had sexual relations prior to the angel letting Mary in on God’s plan for her (and Jesus), so for her to be pregnant, was, in fact, a literal miracle.  Just one of many in the Bible.

4 down, 8 to go.  Next post we’ll continue on with the 12 Articles of Faith in the Nicene Creed.  Don’t forget to post any questions and/or comments in the comment section below.