Pillory of Truth

I have been very annoyed the last few days about the talking heads in the MSM. To put it bluntly, they have no idea what they are talking about in regards to Catholicism. They more or less impose a Protestant model of the Church onto Catholicism. They speak as if the Pope, and/or the Bishops could simply snap their fingers, and change the teachings of the Church if they wanted to.

The MSM is always blathering about the same issues: birth control, homosexual activity, and women priests. John Paul II has already made clear that the Church has no authority to change these teachings, i.e. they are part of the deposit of Faith given by Christ Himself. In other words, the Magisterium (teaching office of the Church) is the CUSTODIAN of the Faith, not the INVENTOR of the Faith. These teachings have been constant for 2000 years; in actuality more like 4000+ years if the Jewish tradition is included.

But instead of taking the issue seriously and taking the time to find knowledgeable people within the faith, they bring on prominent but theologically illiterate Catholics like Mario Cuomo, who simply declare that the Church teaching could be changed - this is little more than wishful thinking on his part.

One thing is for sure: all of this wishful thinking is summed up in Sacred Scripture in II Timothy 4:3-4, "For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own likings, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander into myths."

I'm similarly tired of Vatican II being used as the excuse and justification for dissent and endless liturgical antics. I'm convinced that none of these folks have ever read the documents of Vatican II, with the possible exception of some very selective quotations taken out of context.

I'll make one exception to this rule: Fox News has been a breath of fresh air over the last week. The commentators they have brought in, by and large, actually know the Catholic faith.

Pillar of Truth

I've been inspired by the events of the last few days to create my own blog, after years of cluttering up the comments boxes of other great blogs. The main inspiring events are the judicial murder of Terri Schiavo and the death of perhaps the greatest man of the 20th Century - Pope John Paul II.

In a more general sense, this blog will tend to center around the truth of the Catholic Church, hence the name of this blog, derived from the Biblical passage I Timothy 3:14-15, which reads "I hope to come to you soon, but I am writing these instructions to you, so that if I am delayed, you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the Church of the living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth. "(RSV)

I will also discuss various other topics close to my heart, such as baseball, science fiction, music, technology, politics, and family life, but Jesus Christ and His Church will be the main impetus of this site, and the filter through which I evaluate everything else.

A short testimony...I grew up Lutheran, had a conversion experience in my teenage years, during which I became a fervent believer in Christ, and went down the Evangelical path for a couple of years. I devoured a lot of books at this point, and the one thing I discovered for sure from my guides was that the Catholic Church was very wrong. However, I soon began to despair of finding the truth, as these same very educated men, often PhD's who were honest followers of Christ and students of Scripture did not agree with each other on foundational issues such as Baptism, how we are saved, the nature of the Church, and many moral issues. I reasoned that if these honest, highly educated men could not agree on very basic Christian tenets, how was I supposed to find the truth? I continued to fall away at this point due to the logical inconsistency of it all, but before essentially lapsing into a vague practical atheism, I cried out to God, "please help me find the truth!!"

Eventually, God answered this prayer. It's one prayer that is guaranteed to get an answer; Jesus told us in Scripture that whoever seeks the truth will find it. It took a while for me to shed my anti-Catholic tendencies and my first encounter with Catholicism was in the form of my girlfriend. At that point, I figured that Catholics couldn't be all that bad, though she was not very fervent at the time. Some time later, I heard about Medjugorje, a small village in then-Yugoslavia where the Virgin Mary was purportedly appearing. At first, I was not that interested, but I kept coming across this literature, in various places, and eventually I was captivated. This apparition is neither approved nor disapproved by the Church, but at the time (1987), it was the vehicle God used to open my heart to consider the truth claims of the Catholic Church.

I then splurged on a series of Catholic books, to see what Catholicism was all about. With a few years distance between my the period of my anti-Catholic prejudices, and with a more open outlook, it only took a few books, and a month's time, to convince me that Catholicism was, indeed, the Pillar of Truth. Since then, I have given talks about the Catholic faith at Catholic parishes, though now, with six children and a full-time engineering job, I have to a large degree suspended operations insofar as giving talks.

Hopefully, I'll have a few interesting things to say each day.