The Best of What We Believe... Why We Believe It: What We Believe, #1

By Joe Sixpack

Learn Things About the Catholic Church You Have Never Heard Before!

Joe Sixpack—The Every Catholic Guy is a welcome visitor to parishes across the United States every Sunday through his parish subscription based What We Believe... Why We Believe It bulletin inserts. Using humor, immutable truth, great storytelling and ignoring political correctness, Joe Sixpack helps the average Catholic in the pew better know and understand our holy and ancient faith in a way that is refreshing, awe-inspiring, and makes readers chest-pounding proud to be Catholic… and readers love it! Look at what they are saying.

The gospel letters, though written thousands of years ago, are supposed to draw me closer to God. They, for the most part, don't. You do. YOUR words are more effective in reaching me. I know, for the most part, what the apostles have said. I'm looking for someone who can relate it to today. I have a greater chance of returning back to the flock with what you do.—Robert M

Please accept my sincere thanks for the extraordinary work you are doing to shed light on and share the truth of the Catholic faith. Your strength is the comprehensive and faithful exposition of the faith in language "Joe Sixpack" can appreciate and embrace. You are sharing an amazingly rich gift with others and I pray that your audience continues to grow. —Fr. Willy Raymond, President

Holy Cross Family Ministries

Catechesis is the missing element of our Catholic renewal.  Joe knows!  Listen to him!—Chuck K

Joe Sixpack is a well-trained and faithful consecrated Marian Catechist. I enthusiastically endorse Joe Sixpack's "What We Believe ... Why We Believe It" as an innovative means of helping parish priests promote the doctrinal and moral literacy of their parishioners. —Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke

Through the What We Believe... Why We Believe It bulletin inserts, the JoeSixpackAnswers website and free weekly webinars, Joe Sixpack—The Every Catholic Guy is building a huge following of fired-up Catholics who know and understand the faith… then pass it on to others in our society who so badly need it.

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Cassock Media, LLC
• Release date: Oct 22, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386370994

Book preview

How This Came To Be

What a great year! In fact, it’s been such a great year that I wanted to share with you this first volume of the Best of What We Believe... Why We Believe It.

It’s entirely possible you’re reading this and don’t even know what I’m talking about. Well to put it simply, What We Believe... Why We Believe It is a bulletin insert for parish bulletins. Let me tell you why it exists and how it started.

Providence

As is the case with most things that help souls, God’s providential actions seem always at first to be accidental. It all began with my late pastor Fr. Timothy Bannes. He and I were chatting one day when he began excitedly telling me how a few parishioners (few in this case means three) had approached him to ask if he would help them learn more about our Catholic faith. I’ll digress here a moment to explain to you why this was such a big deal.

Did you know…

One out of every 10 Americans is an ex-Catholic

If they were a separate denomination, they would be the third-largest denomination in the United States, after Catholics and Baptists

One out of three people who were raised Catholic no longer identify as Catholic

6.5 people leave Catholicism for every one that joins

50% of young people who were raised Catholic are no longer Catholic today

79% of former Catholics leave the Church before age 23

The Catholic Church is losing members faster than any denomination

10% of parishioners provide for 90% of parish support

The vast majority of Catholics are so catechetically illiterate that they can’t even tell you how many sacraments there are, much less what they’re called

70% of Catholics don’t believe in the Real Presence

These statistics tell a sorrowful but very true story about the Catholic Church in the modern world. They tell us the Catholic laity is as ignorant of the primary teachings of Catholicism as I am of neurosurgery. And the reason why is astounding.

The greatest tragedy in the Church is the ignorance of the laity."—Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman

Perhaps the best explanation of what has happened to our lay faithful is from a letter Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke wrote to me in 2015. He wrote:

A gravely defective catechesis which marked the life of the Church in the years following the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, though not because of the Council , contributed to the loss of faith, the lack of a devotional life and left the subsequent generations devoid of a concrete way to know the Catholic faith and live it.

So while Vatican II was a great council (despite what you may have heard), there were a number of betrayers of Christ just waiting to wreak havoc upon an unsuspecting priesthood and lay faithful.

Priests were directed to attend workshops presented by these traitors who had passed themselves off as experts rather than actually read the conciliar documents on their own, which was okay with them because they were already overworked and lacked sufficient time. As a result, they bought into the garbage taught by the heterodox teachers. This resulted in unauthorized liturgical experimentation, Communion in the hand, milquetoast homilies, watered down and confusing morality, and woefully deficient catechesis.

The laity were victimized by unwitting priests who attended these workshops full of horrible misrepresentations of the work of the Council Fathers. The result is that more than 90% of the laity are catechetically illiterate. Here’s a typical comment from one of my readers, followed by a comment from an attendee of my weekly webinars. I’ll tie it all together for you after the quotes.

The gospel letters, though written thousands of years ago, are supposed to draw me closer to God. They, for the most part, don't. You do. YOUR words are more effective in reaching me. I know, for the most part, what the apostles have said. I'm looking for someone who can relate it to today. I have a greater chance of returning back to the flock with what you do. —R.M.

Joe's work is very informative, maybe too deep for most Catholics until they have a better understanding.  Think of it as going to Catholic College! —M.K.

These two typical actual quotes seem to make it appear my work is deep, profound or complex, don’t they? Believe me, my work or the things I teach are not deep, profound or complex. Fact is, with very little exception I’m teaching exactly what was taught to Catholic sixth graders sixty or seventy years ago. So that should tell you just how badly the laity need catechesis.

And that brings us back to why Fr. Bannes was so excited about a few parishioners asking him to help them learn more about our holy and ancient faith. Father was thrilled at the prospect of helping his flock—even if it was only three souls. But their request presented Father with additional challenges.

We are a small country parish with very limited resources. It would cost hundreds or maybe even thousands of dollars for a course or program of study that only three people would take advantage of. And who would facilitate it? Father was way too busy for that. If he facilitated it, some other important duty would have to be placed on the sideline. Besides, after spending all that money he would have no assurance these folks would actually finish the course.

Father thought about giving them all a reading list. He nixed that idea pretty quickly, because he knew human nature well enough to know the books would end up collecting dust… if they got purchased at all. On the outside chance that one of the three people happened to be industrious enough to buy and actually sit down to read the books, those books could not answer a reader’s questions. After all, you can hold even this book in your hand asking it questions all day long and it won’t reply with an answer… unless perhaps you’re a lunatic or a poet. And another reality of human nature is that most folks won’t write down a question and remember to ask it of Father after Mass the following Sunday.

The other option Father considered was setting up an hour a week to meet with these people to teach them personally, despite his busy schedule. The problem with that is, to do a competent job of teaching the faith in an hour lesson requires three to six hours of preparation. It goes without saying that time was too much of a factor. So Father asked me to brainstorm on it a bit.

The following Sunday, I noticed something peculiar before Mass. I noticed quite a number of people reading the parish bulletin. That particular issue had an insert advertising an upcoming Knights of Columbus event, and when people opened the bulletin they read the insert first. Why? Because it was intrusive; it was the first thing they saw. After Mass, I watched outside as nearly all the people who didn’t already have one took a bulletin from the ushers. I had an inspiration and needed to do some research.

When I got home, I hit the Internet. What I learned was astonishing! Did you know 70% of Mass attending Catholics get 100% of their Catholic information from the Sunday bulletin? And that more than 95% of all of them read the bulletin each week? Yeah, it pretty much surprised me too.

I had to see Father the following day, so I told him about what I’d observed and learned. Then I suggested that he allow me to write a weekly insert for our parish. Father knew I am a consecrated member of the Marian Catechist Apostolate under Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke, that I have made several hundred converts, and that I have been a lay evangelist for 30 years. So that is how What We Believe... Why We Believe It was born.

One reason that What We Believe... Why We Believe It works is because it is intrusive, meaning that it is the first thing people see when they open the bulletin and so they read. Another reason it works is because every one of them is engaging, often entertaining, and never boring. But What We Believe... Why We Believe It has actually morphed into an entire system. The bulletin insert is just the first phase of that system.

At the end of each issue of the bulletin insert the reader is invited to visit one of my websites, JoeSixpackAnswers.com. This is a website I set up so that readers of the bulletin insert could get answers to all of their questions. There are very few questions any Catholic can have that this website doesn't answer. And if a site visitor can’t find an answer to the question, all that person has to do is visit the Ask Joe page to ask me the question directly. If I don’t know the answer, you can bet I know where and how to get it! This website is the second phase of the system. But the website leads into the third phase of the system.

On the right hand side of each page of the website is a form inviting visitors to sign up for a free email course, and to get special invitations to weekly webinars. According to the analytics of my website, about 53% of new visitors sign up for the free course and invitations. The email course arrives in a person’s inbox every three days with information I can promise you they never knew about the Catholic faith. But the big hook is the flow of webinar invitations people begin to get when they sign up for the free email course.

The webinars are actually the third phase of the system. Every week, I either teach basic catechism, apologetics, ecclesiastical history, Catholic spirituality, moral theology, or some other aspect of Catholic teaching. These webinars have been very widely accepted. That’s really sort of an understatement. Fact is, the people have really gone nuts with these webinars! There isn’t a week go by that people don’t email me to thank me for teaching them the things they learn, and I don’t think a month goes by that a priest doesn’t thank me for helping his parishioners gain a better understanding of and defenses for the Catholic faith.

But it all began with What We Believe... Why We Believe It, the weekly bulletin insert. And that's what this book is all about. So now you can read all of the installments from the first year and keep them for your own.

Let's get started!

1

Not One Among Many, But the Only One

When talking about religion, I find it sad when I hear people say things like The only thing that matters is that we all believe in the same God or One Christian religion is just as good as another or Let’s just agree to disagree. Why are these comments saddening? Well, they all demonstrate a scandal of Christianity. That scandal is, there are so many Christian religions to choose from that people have become indifferent to the whole idea of thinking about which church is the right one.

But we Catholics can honestly and should assertively say, Jesus founded one Christian religion, and that religion is the Catholic Church!

The ecumenical movement of the ‘70s did far more damage than good. We squandered a perfect opportunity to gather millions of converts to Jesus’ Church, but those leaders of the movement were terrified about the idea of offending non-Catholics. In reality, we should have demonstrated to people the things we have in common with their Christian religions, then led them to the reality of the Church founded by Christ. And proving the Catholic Church is the only one founded by Christ is the focus of this article.

There are a number of proofs that the Catholic Church was founded by Christ. The first one I always point to is history. John Henry Cardinal Newman, arguably the greatest Christian apologist of the 19th century, was a member of the Oxford Movement—a vehemently anti-Catholic organization in England. Fellow members tasked the young Anglican scholar with writing a history of Christianity. On the day his new Christian history was rolling off the printing press, Newman was being received into the Catholic Church. When asked what caused him to turn from his vehement anti-Catholicism so much that he actually became a Catholic, his response was quite simple. He said, To know history is to be Catholic. Why? Because history alone proves that the Catholic Church was founded by Jesus Christ. We should all read Church history, as nothing will instill pride more than doing so.

By the way, it was also Cardinal Newman who said the greatest tragedy in the Church is an ignorant laity. That’s food for thought.

That Jesus founded the Catholic Church can also be proven from Sacred Scripture. The establishment of the Church came in the very act where Jesus made St. Peter the first pope. Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, ‘Who do men say that the Son of man is?’ And they said, ‘Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.’ He said to them, ‘But who do you say that I am?’ Simon Peter replied, ‘You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.’ And Jesus answered him, ‘Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jona! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.’ (Matthew 16: 13-19)

This passage is incredibly pregnant! Indeed, so much is said in these few words that we cannot possibly cover it all in the limited space here. We will, however, spend a lot of time covering this passage thoroughly in later installments of this column. For now, though, let’s just deal with the elephant-in-the-middle-of-the-room.

Anti-Catholic Protestant’s who believe in sola scriptura—the belief that all divine truth comes from the Bible alone—love to bring up the fact that the word Catholic is nowhere in the Bible. That is most certainly true, but it’s a paper tiger argument. After all, neither Trinity nor Bible are anywhere in Sacred Scripture, yet all of Christianity believes in the Bible and the Trinity.

The earliest known use of the word Catholic comes from St. Ignatius of Antioch in the year A.D. 107. Writing to the other churches (called dioceses today) while on his way to martyrdom, St. Ignatius wrote: "Where the Bishop is, there let the multitude of believers be; even as where Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church." ¹ Notice that St. Ignatius didn’t write of the Catholic Church as if he were giving it a new name, but rather as though the name had been long in use. It’s reasonably safe to assume, then, that the Church was probably called Catholic during the latter part of the first century. Indeed, it’s likely that St. John the Apostle knew the Church by the name of Catholic, since he died around AD 100.

What is the significance of the word Catholic? It comes from the Greek word, katholikos, which means universal. The Catholic Church is most certainly universal; that is, for all men of all times in all places.

St. Ignatius is the earliest recorded person to call the Church Catholic, but he most certainly isn’t the only one to do so. The Martyrdom of Polycarp mentions The Catholic Church (AD 155) in three passages (viii, 1; xvi, 2; xix, 2). Tertullian (AD 200) uses the word katholikos when he means the Catholic Church (Ad Marcion, iv, 4; De Praes., xxx). St. Augustine (AD 340) uses the same word as a synonym for the Church 240 times in his writings.

Now, as mentioned earlier, the evidences for the Catholic Church being founded by Christ are far too many to cover in this brief article—space simply will not allow all of it. We will, however, cover this topic in its entirety during the next several subsequent installments and in later installments after getting in some other basics. Until then, let’s resolve to learn What We Believe…Why We Believe It!

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1. Ad Smyr., viii, 2

2

The One True Church (Part I)

Last week, we began our examination of how Christ founded the Catholic Church. This week, we are going to take it a step farther… perhaps several steps farther.

The most telling point about the divine origins of the Church is the papacy. Non-Catholics—particularly those who are not exactly friends of the Catholic Church—all tell us there is nothing in the Bible about the papacy or St. Peter being the first pope. That could not be further from the truth.

Biblical evidence for the papacy is overwhelming. Following the logical presentation of Karl Keating in his modern classical work Catholicism and Fundamentalism, we find the evidence to be irrefutable.

Keating notes first that St. Peter was almost always named first in the Gospels’ listings of the Apostles (Mt. 10:1-4; Mk. 3:16-19; Lk. 6:14-16; Ac. 1:13), and that sometimes the Apostles were referred to only as Peter and those who were with him (Lk. 9: 32). He points out that St. Peter was the first of the Apostles to preach, the first to perform a healing miracle, and the one to whom the revelation came that Christianity was for Gentiles as well as Jews (Ac. 2:14-40; 3:6; 10:46-48).

Keating goes on to tell us that "Peter’s preeminent position among the apostles was symbolized at the very beginning of his relationship to Christ, although the implications were only slowly unfolded. At their first meeting, Christ told Simon that his name would thereafter be Peter, which translates as Rock (John 1:42). The startling thing was that in the Old Testament only God was called a rock. The word was never used as a proper name for a man. If one were to turn to a companion and say, ‘From now on your name is Asparagus’, people would wonder. Why Asparagus? What is the meaning of it? Indeed, why Peter for Simon the fisherman? Why give him as a name a word only used for God before this moment?

Christ was not given to meaningless gestures, and neither were the Jews as a whole when it came to names. Giving a new name meant that the status of the person was changed, as when Abram was changed to Abraham (Gn. 17:5); Jacob to Israel (Gn. 32:28); Eliacim, to Joakim (2 Kg. 23:34); and Daniel, Ananias, Misael, and Azarias to Baltassar, Sidrach, Misach, and Abdenago (Dn. 1:6-8). But no Jew had ever been called Rock because that was reserved for God. The Jews would give other names taken from nature, such as Barach (which means lightning; Jos 19:45), Deborah (bee; Gn. 29:16), and Rachel (ewe; Gn. 29:16), but not Rock. In the New Test-ament James and John were surnamed Boanerges, Sons of Thunder, by Christ (Mk. 3-17), but that was never regularly used in place of their original names. Simon’s new name supplanted the old (pgs. 205-206).

St. Peter’s name has been firmly established by Christ as a name synonymous with God. Throughout Jesus and St. Peter’s relationship the reason became gradually clearer, but it becomes crystal