The Best of What We Believe... Why We Believe It: What We Believe, #4

By Larry Ford

A Turning Point for the Catholic Church!

As Joe Sixpack—The Every Catholic Guy put the finishing touches on this fourth volume, the Pew Research Center released a survey of Mass-attending Catholics that said only 30% of them believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist. A decade ago this figure was 70%. The biggest problem is that 100% of Catholics should believe in the Real Presence.

It is feckless to believe that 70% of Catholics woke up one morning and suddenly decided that they no longer believed in the Real Presence. These Catholics didn't suddenly decide this, but rather they were never taught in the first place. Since the Eucharist is at the very core of Catholic beliefs, we have to assume that this means at least 70% of Catholics are wholly ignorant of the divinely revealed truths of Catholicism.

All four volumes of The Best of What We Believe... Why We Believe It will cure Catholics of their catechetical illiteracy. In fact, these four volumes are the best way to learn the faith in a way that boredom never becomes a problem. Joe Sixpack—The Every Catholic Guy's unique style of conveying Catholic truth so that every common-Catholic-in-the-pew can understand it, as well as his down to earth explanations of why the Church teaches what she does, makes this book and its companion three volumes must reading if you want to know anything about Catholicism.

Joe Sixpack—The Every Catholic Guy uses stories, anecdotes, humor, and no small amount of political incorrectness to convey the constant 2000 year teachings of the Church. Check out a few of the chapter titles:

• Proving the Inspiration of Scripture
• Yankees Is Differ'nt
• How to Respond to Scandal
• The Husbands' Survival Guide
• The Cantankerous Catholic
• Jesus and Moses—A Modern Twist

Get your copy of The Best of What We Believe... Why We Believe It today and start a whole new adventure!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cassock Media, LLC
• Release date: Jan 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393812524

Book preview

An Exciting Fourth Year!

Well, this is the year we can finally afford to market the What We Believe... Why We Believe It bulletin inserts to parishes all across the nation instead of just regionally. This opportunity couldn’t have happened at a better time, because in August of this year the Pew Research Center published a survey indicating that only 30% of Mass attending Catholics believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist.

What’s exciting about that? No one can convince me that 70% of Mass attending Catholics simply woke up one morning and decided they no longer believed in the Real Presence. I believe that they never believed in the first place because nobody bothered to teach them about it! What makes that exciting is, Joe Sixpack—The Every Catholic Guy is all about teaching the divinely revealed truths of the Catholic faith.

It was just a decade ago that surveys showed that only 70% of Mass attending Catholics believed in the Real Presence. The decline in belief is dramatic… especially since 100% of Mass attending Catholics should believe in the Real Presence! Worse yet is that if the laity don’t believe in the very most core doctrine of the Catholic faith, they really have no idea what the other doctrines and dogmas of Catholicism are. John Henry Cardinal Newman was right 150 years ago when he said, The greatest tragedy in the Catholic Church is the ignorance of the laity.

I’m redoubling my efforts this year to share the faith with Catholics in order to cheat hell out of its greatest victory: the catechetical ignorance of the lay faithful. Making new converts has been my primary mission over most of the last thirty years, but now my focus is solely on saving Catholics from themselves.

Someone may look at this and think, Who does this arrogant so-and-so think he is? I’ve been a Catholic all my life! Of course I know the faith! If you’re someone who believes that, I’m just going to be straight up with you: You’re lying to yourself and to God.

That’s a hard truth—an uncomfortable truth. Truth is seldom comfortable, though. Truth is usually very uncomfortable, especially when it’s a truth we don’t want to face. Comfort and Conviction don’t live on the same block. Comfort denies or ignores truth. Conviction embraces truth, even if it’s a truth we don’t like.

You know, I’ve lived in the Archdiocese of St. Louis for five years. Known as the Rome of the West because of its incredible Catholic presence, you’d expect this archdiocese to be filled with committed Catholics who know and understand the faith well. You’d be disappointed in your expectations, though. In the five years I’ve lived here, I haven’t found five lay people who can tell me how many sacraments there are—much less name them. Is this situation only in the Archdiocese of St. Louis? No! I’ve been all over the nation and in many, many dioceses, and catechetical illiteracy is identically present in every diocese I’ve been in.

Catechetical illiteracy is caused by not having been taught in the first place. The bishops have allowed catechesis to become so namby-pamby, milquetoast and watered-down that the Catholic faith formation you got as a youngster was little more than Protestantism with a Catholic label on it. That’s not your fault. It’s the fault of our nation’s bishops. But you’re not off the hook either.

Everyone has a mind, which is the thinking and reasoning part of the soul—not the brain. Your mind possesses intellect and free-will. Because it possesses intellect, your mind was designed and obligated to know truth. Because you have free-will, only you can decide whether you will do anything about it. Choosing not to pursue and acquire truth is a sin. Therefore, you can either live in your apathy, or lukewarmness, or you can correct your catechetical illiteracy.

Do you know what Jesus said about our lukewarmness? In Revelation 3:15 He said, I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were cold or hot! So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of my mouth. The Douay-Rheims version says He will vomit us from His mouth. I would imagine the Douay-Rheims version is the more accurate because it more vividly describes the contempt Jesus has for lukewarmness.

If being vomited from Jesus’ mouth isn’t very appealing to you, then you need to do something about it. Now!

Assuming you want to avoid becoming divine barf, visit JoeSixpackAnswers.com right now. There is a form in the right sidebar. Enter your first name and best email. You’ll begin getting an email course delivered to your inbox every three days. You’ll also begin receiving personalized invitations to webinar presentations I host each week called Sharing the Catholic Faith. I can promise every single lay person, without exception, that three things will happen if you register for these free live events.

You’ll learn things about the faith you never knew, and you’ll find it all fascinating. I don’t care how much you already know, I guarantee you’ll learn a lot of new things.

You’ll never get bored. I’ve been doing this for more than thirty years, and the Holy Spirit has used me to make hundreds of converts. People don’t learn and convert if what they’re being taught is boring. You won’t get bored.

Just by registering for these live events you’ll get a link to a recording the next day. This is for people who can’t attend the live event, but many of those who attend the live event like to go back and watch the recording.

Many regular attendees of the webinars I host tell me the material is something akin to attending a Catholic college. That really isn’t true at all, but in actuality a sad statement on how bad things are for catechesis in the Church in America. You see, with the exception of very brief comments on the heresies of fundamental option and situation ethics, everything I teach is what Catholic children had to know by the time they finished the eighth grade seventy years ago!

Join us. Learn the faith… perhaps for the first time. You’ll be glad you did!

1

Practical Apologetics—Part I

I’m going to begin sharing with you the little bit I know about apologetics—both the how-to’s of argument, what to argue, and research. I hope you enjoy it!

Almost everyone has been through one of these three scenarios.

You hear someone knocking at the door, usually ay the most inconvenient time, so you answer the knock and a man outside on your porch is standing there with an open Bible and a wide grin. As soon as you ask him what he wants, he says, Are you saved, friend?

You tell the man you’re a Catholic, hoping that will scare him off, but he opens the satchel on his shoulder and pulls out several Bibles. He asks, "Which would you prefer—the New American, the Revised Standard, or the Douay-Rheims?

At this point you realize there is no escape without appearing to either not care about Christianity, or that you’re a mindless automaton who checks in your brain at the church door and mindlessly accepts whatever the priest tells you.

Or you come out of church after Mass to find people in the parking lot distributing tracts against Catholic belief. You try to get to your car before one of them confronts you, but you make the mistake of looking one of them in the eye and he rushes over to you, because you can’t weave through the crowd quickly enough to get away from him. In an insistent voice he says, Here’s a tract on the idolatry of the Mass. Read it.

You say, No, thanks. I’m not interested. So he begins telling you, almost word for word, what is in the tract. He keeps backing you up toward the curb while talking, until you are forced to either engage him or walk out into traffic. You try being brusk with him to the point of being almost uncharitable, but even that doesn’t deter him.

Or maybe it starts in a social setting. After your pro-life meeting when everybody settles back for a little conversation and a cup of coffee, fundamentalists begin to seek out Catholics to save them from the evil clutches of Rome. You see what’s going on, so you sit in the corner to have your coffee, trying to be unnoticed, but one sits down with you anyway. Before you can ask her about her opinion on any nonreligious topic, she leans over and asks, Wouldn’t you like to have an absolute assurance of salvation?

You reply, Sure, but… She interrupts you by whipping out a heavily highlighted New Testament to rebut the comment you never had a chance to make. From there on it turns out to be a long evening that steadily goes downhill from there.

Regardless of the scenario, you know the person talking to you is taking things out of context, but you can’t recall what the context is. A lot of snappy answers to your adversary’s comments are on the tip of your tongue, but they never make it past your teeth and out of your mouth, and later you’ll want to kick yourself for not being quick-witted. Some of the questions being asked, you haven’t the foggiest notion of what the answer should be, and you’re left with the nagging feeling your opponent is on to something (heaven forbid).

You end up dissatisfied, and no one—least of all you—seems at all convinced at what you have said. In fact, your adversary seems more set in anti-Catholic prejudices than ever. You didn’t handle the situation well, and you know it. Archbishop Fulton Sheen once said, There are not one hundred people in the United States who hate the Catholic Church, but there are millions who hate what they wrongly perceive the Catholic Church to be. And you’ve just managed to confirm your opponent’s worst suspicions about Catholicism.

The point to all this is, it’s just as important to know how to argue as it is to know what to argue. First of all, you need to realize that every tenet of Catholic belief can be proven from scripture, history, and logic & reason. The next thing you need to be aware of is that becoming an apologist requires an adherence to St. Benedict’s motto: Ora et Labora. You have to begin your formation as an apologist with prayer. You will accomplish nothing—and I do mean nothing at all—without a serious prayer life. Even good works, such as instructing the ignorant, will go nowhere unless you place everything in God’s hands.

Therefore, it is my intention to show you how to argue, what to argue and the best tools to use for both study and presentation, such as Bibles, Patristics, and books, videos, and audios. So I suppose you can consider this a resource lesson.

Let’s begin with Bibles. Every apologist should have and use a King James Version of the Bible (KJV). The reason for this is, the vast majority of Protestants (especially fundamentalists) use the KJV. It’s the Bible we Catholics have, except it’s incomplete—it’s missing the seven books Martin Luther removed: Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, I Maccabees, II Maccabees, as well as parts of Esther and Daniel.

Every Catholic, apologist or not, should have the Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition (RSVCE). The KJV’s real name is the Standard Version, but it has over 1500 errors. Around the beginning of the twentieth century, Bible and language scholars of every sort—Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and secular scholars—came together to revise the Standard Version. Hence the reason we have the Revised Standard Version (RSV). The RSV is the most accurate English version of Scripture there is. In fact, when Bible scholars use an English version of the Bible, they always turn to the RSV because of it’s accuracy.

Finally, there is the New International Version (NIV). While not absolutely necessary, you may want to get an NIV because of its popularity among Protestants, if you think they will be those you most engage in apologetical discourse.

We’ll continue with a look at the necessary resources next week. I’m engaging in this series of discussions so you can better know What We Believe... Why We Believe It.

2

Practical Apologetics—Part II

In last week's installment I began telling you about the resources you would have to have if you want to learn about apologetics. We finished up by talking about the various versions of the Bible. To begin this installment, let's talk a little about the Bible in general.

To begin, there are a few realities you need to understand about the Bible. First, the Bible came from the Church, not the Church from the Bible. Protestants and some others will want to argue that point with you, and we’ll cover how to handle that objection in a couple of weeks.

Second, the Bible is not the sole rule of faith. This is another point Protestants will want to argue with you, and we’ll be covering it too. For now, though, you need to understand that the Bible is just one leg on the stool of Divine Revelation; there are two others beside the Bible.

Third, the Bible is not necessary. Yes, I really said that. Jesus commanded His disciples to go out and preach, not to go out and write a book. Because Jesus gave the Church His own authority to teach, if we never had a Bible it wouldn’t be missed because the Church alone proclaims Christ’s truths and has done so for 2000 years in perfect continuity.

People can give a lot of reasons why God gave us the Bible, but all those reasons really boil down to just two. I don’t care who you are, everyone—from the pope down to you and me—has to be re-evangelized every day, and reading the Bible daily aids in that. The other reason is, since we’re displaced 2000 years from our spiritual ancestors, the Bible affords us a tool to fulfill Christ’s command that we go into all the world and preach the gospel to the whole creation (Mark 16:15).

Simply having Bibles as resources is not where it ends. You must get in the habit of daily Bible reading. You can’t explain what you don’t know. I've read the entire Bible through from cover to cover six times, and I'm really a pretty seasoned apologist who has read the Bible daily for years, so the advice I'm about to give you comes from experience.

Begin with the Gospels and Acts, because these are the historical books of the New Testament. It’s better to read the New Testament twenty times than to read the Old Testament twice, but don’t neglect the latter either. Read it enough so you’re at least familiar with what’s there.

Immerse yourself in the Gospels above all else. Once you’ve read them through, go back and read Matthew, Luke, and John through twice more, followed by one more reading of Acts.

But, Joe, you’re talking about a lot of reading.

A lot of reading? Is it a lot of reading when you curl up on the sofa or in your bed with your latest novel? In the time you take to read a novel in one sitting you could read all four Gospels through one time—they really aren’t that long. I’m only advocating that you read your Bible a mere fifteen minutes a day. Anyone can do that.

After you’ve gone through the Gospels once and Matthew, Luke and John a second time, then move on to the Pauline epistles. Read all Paul’s letters, then go back and re-read those which (in my opinion) have the greatest apologetical value: Romans, I Corinthians, Ephesians and Hebrews. Then finish up by reading the general epistles, and Revelation.

Let me give you a word of caution about Revelation, also called the Apocalypse. Please pay attention, as this is very important.

Do Not Get Caught Up In The Protestant Trap Of Becoming Obsessed With Revelation.

Protestants (many of them anyway) get all caught up in Revelation and the end times. They get so obsessed, in fact, that they think and talk about the end times to the point of neglecting growth and development in their own Christian life. And this is exactly what the Church feared from the beginning.

It was the Church that gave us the canon of scripture at the Council of Hippo (A.D. 393) and the Council of Carthage (A.D. 397). When the bishops of the Church were deciding what books were inspired and should be included in the canon, the book of Revelation was almost not included. It wasn't because they doubted its inspiration, but rather because they feared exactly what many modern Protestants have done; to become obsessed with the end times. The Catholic Church very clearly teaches us to be concerned more with our own end times (which could happened before you take your next breath) than to be concerned with the end of time. So again, do not get caught up in the Protestant trap with becoming obsessed with the book of Revelation.

I'll finish our series on apologetical resources in the next week's installment. I'm doing this so you can know What We Believe... Why We Believe It.

3

Practical Apologetics—Part III

Today we’re going to continue this introduction to apologetics. In the two previous installments, we covered things concerning the Bible. In this week’s installment, we’re going to talk about the other resources you’ll need if you want to learn apologetics. Then I’ll finish up next week.

There are only two reasons why Catholics learn apologetics. The most common reason why Catholics learn apologetics is, they want to learn the arguments in defense of certain Catholic doctrines, dogmas, and practices to reaffirm why they believe what they believe. I know that when I began learning apologetics, as I learned the various arguments it solidified my faith. I knew what I believed, but studying apologetics allowed me to articulate why I believed it.

The other reason Catholics learn apologetics is, they want to share the faith with others. It’s one thing to be able to tell people what the Church teaches, but it’s quite another to answer them about why the Church teaches something when they ask. Apologetics is great for that, and i hope you end up learning apologetics for both those reasons. I’m certainly going to give you what you need to learn!