Just a bunch of random thoughts I’ve had in the last few days. Each not big enough for a blog post in itself, but maybe still worth putting out there.
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A. is growing in his faith each day, and it’s a joy to witness. We have long conversations over Sunday brunch and weekday dinners. There are still things he’s had problems wrapping his mind around, like the Church’s “no” to contraception, co-habitation/sex before marriage, masturbation, and Jesus’s real presence in the Eucharist.
The first three were solved elegantly when I found a wonderful video by Matt Fradd on those exact topics. After watching the video (which I unfortunately can’t find now to post here), A. said, “Wow. It really all makes sense now.”
I guess A.’s been in good (or at least plentiful) company with his doubts on the Real Presence, aka the Eucharist (consecrated host) being the real Body and Blood, Soul, and Divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ.
According to a 2019 Pew Research poll, only 30% of Catholics believe that during Mass, the bread and wine are really transformed into the body and blood of Jesus—the so-called “transubstantiation.” Considering that this is the center piece of our faith, those numbers are abysmal. The transubstantiated host… Protestants wonder why we sit in church adoring a wafer made from flour and water. That’s why.
[If you missed my post on how I got a first-hand taste of the Eucharist truly being Jesus, you can read it here.]
So I can’t really blame A. for feeling dubious about it, even after I show him part of Fr. Chris Alar’s excellent talk on Eucharistic Miracles where the consecrated host visibly turned into a piece of bloody tissue. Many of those samples were eventually tested in independent labs, and the tests proved it was human heart tissue, blood type AB, from a man in his early thirties. The most amazing part is that the white blood cells were still alive at the time of the test (!), which would typically mean the heart tissue was removed from a body that would have been alive only fifteen minutes earlier. Some of those miraculously transformed Eucharists being tested were hundreds of years old.
Well, I taught A. even as a little kid to always question things, to never believe anything just “Because I said so.” So he starts doing his own digging online.
After half an hour, he comes back, slightly pale. “It’s all true,” he says. “Oh my G-d, it’s all true. I found the lab reports.”
Somehow, he managed to unearth the original Italian lab reports and to partially translate them via Google Translate. They clearly say that the specimen that was examined is human heart tissue. Here’s the PDF that proves it. Wow. Even I’m impressed.
“You are rewarded not according to your work or your time but according to the measure of your love."
—St. Catherine of Siena
It’s hard to wrap my mind around this sometimes—that doing good works in God’s name actually doesn’t give us the rewards we hope for. Good works are the fruit of our love for the Father and His Son, Jesus Christ. They do please VatiGod, but more as a way of showing our love for Him than because of the time and effort we put into them.
In other words, if you do good works, but you don’t do them with a joyful heart, gratitude for God’s gifts, and a childlike, deep love for God…
…if you just go through the motions, either because you want earthly rewards—that is, recognition and praise from others—or because you have a social-justice mindset but without thinking of Jesus and VatiGod…
…they’re not worthless, but they’re worth less.
In my personal experience, if you wander in darkness, Satan doesn’t bother you much because he knows he’s already got you. But when you manage to brighten your little candle—through an increase in faith, love for God, humility, or charity—you become like a beacon in the night for the Dark Side, and he’ll be there instantly, trying to claw back what he thinks is his.
My son is working a summer job at a nearby luxury resort, and one of his bosses, a Freemason, immediately started heckling him after his conversion. He mockingly calls him “Father” and does everything he can to convince A. that Jesus isn’t real and believing all this “Christian bull****” is just stupid. A. said he was tempted to respond with some truths about the satanic aspects of Freemasonry, but as he opened his mouth for a retort, the Holy Spirit said, Don’t do it, so he didn’t. I’m so proud of him.
On my part, after Jesus told me to offer the Vermont house to K.—which, as it turns out, does not just entail letting it go for $100,000 less, but also to agree to be his co-signer in a refinancing—Satan has been bombarding me with nasty, seductive dreams last night, something that hasn’t happened in months. I didn’t give in to the temptation in my dream, though, and it feels like I’ve won another battle.
Upon waking, I told him, “Vade retro, Satana,” and prayed a Hail Mary. That’s usually all it takes to deal with these things. Mary’s name suffices to send the demons packing. Thank you, Holy Mother, for being such a good mom to me and my son.
Here’s another thing I noticed about myself recently. Maybe it’s a very small thing, or maybe it’s a great triumph in VatiGod’s eyes—who can really tell?
As a pro-life advocate, I’ve felt appalled and infuriated by the pro-abortion activists who have turbo-charged their levels of aggression since the overturn of Roe v. Wade last month. Here in Vermont, they’re about to enshrine an “anything goes” article in the state’s constitution that will enable women—oh, excuse me, “birthing people”—to abort their children with no restrictions, for any reason, up to the moment of birth and possibly beyond. Abortion (aka child sacrifice) is the new sacrament for the woke religion, and “good Catholics” like Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi are its sinister high priests. All I could feel for these people was rage.
But this morning—for the first time—I felt great sadness for the fate of those wretched souls when they stand, unrepentant, before the Lord at the end of their lives. If The Warning by Christine Watkins taught me anything, it’s that each of us will face our personal Illumination of Conscience at the moment of death, a complete review of all our sins, which is much scarier than the Warning for the whole world since no more change is possible at that time. Perhaps, by VatiGod’s* infinite mercy, we may still have a split-second to make our choice for or against Him. But that’s it.
In St. Catherine of Siena’s seminal work, The Dialogue (an absolute must-read if you want to even begin to understand the mind of God), God tells her that at the moment of death, all our choices, sins, errors, and false beliefs will be cemented, and there is no more free will. Either we have submitted to the will of God by then and are on our way to Heaven, or we have succumbed to the influence of the Tempter and are on our way to Hell. In any case, no more change is possible at that point.
I don’t know if my sorrow for the immortal souls of the pro-abortion activists will last and how I’ll be feeling about them tomorrow, but… baby steps, Vati, baby steps.
[*VatiGod: “Vati” means “Daddy” in German and is pronounced “Fuh-tee.”]