De Omnibus Dubitandum Est.

My Parish Priest said to me a long while ago, something like: 'Don't follow any one man, only follow Christ'. The conversation occurred within the context of my applauding a "media priest" who had impressed me on EWTN  with a forthright exposition of the Gospel. I think Father's advice was really important and it has often resonated with me since. A priest's job is to be a man for others; to show Christ to the people, to diminish so that He can increase. There are many who do this wonderfully and help us on the path to salvation. But there are many who do not help us to know Christ, and instead impose their own version or flavour of Christianity on us. This seems to be increasingly prevalent presently, contrary to secularists’ claim that Catholic clergy are nothing more than papal agents bent on enforcing rigid moral controls that smother our human instinct for pleasure and freedom. Father Alexander Lucie-Smith has written an article in the Catholi...

Something I think is central to real discipleship is efficacy. I remember my main question about the faith growing up was "what does it actually do?", in other words, what's the point of believing the faith? No one ever explained it to me & I really had to find out for myself. Perhaps the process begins with the Kerygma , what Pope St John Paul II defines in Catechesi Tradendae as ' the initial ardent proclamation by which a person is one day overwhelmed and brought to the decision to entrust himself to Jesus Christ by faith'  and this can be summed up in ten seconds as Scott Hahn does in Evangelizing Catholics , p.119: ‘It takes exactly ten seconds to proclaim the Gospel: (1) God loves you; (2) we have sinned; (3) Christ has died for our sins and risen from the dead; and (4) we have to respond to those gifts by faith.’ Our response in faith is the challenging bit, but honestly these days I'm not finding it so hard, because I have learned, diffic...