De Omnibus Dubitandum Est.

  Occasionally, in discussing the unmitigated disaster which is Pope Francis, someone will say to me something like this: "that's just the media, read what he actually says and judge him on that". The problem with this is I do. I read pretty much all his stuff and pretty much everything is σκύβαλα, as St Paul puts it in  Philippians 3:8 .  Reading his stuff has made me more upset, not less upset and it makes the people who defend him look utterly ridiculous, because pretty much all of it wouldn't get a "D-" from any high school teacher. It is repetitive, self-referential and verbose. Why is everything about him as well? Take his recent ECONOMY OF FRANCESCO three day conference on economics. What's that? Never heard of it? Well that's because not a single major secular media reported substantively on the three-day jamboree.  This was despite media-savvy presenters like economist Jeffrey Sachs, eco-feminist Vandana Shiva, pantheist ex-priest Leonardo B...

I enjoy reading Dr Ian Paul's blog , and this one caught my eye. It is a review of a book by Savvas Costi, a graduate from the London School of Theology who currently leads the Religion and Philosophy department at a secondary school in East Sussex. It caught my eye because it pertains to one of the key issues for me growing up and thinking about faith: what's the point of following Jesus? Born in 1971, and raised as a Catholic by my Irish mother, I accepted the practices of the faith and found prayer a natural and easy thing. I formed a real relationship with Jesus and this has always been part of my life. I always really enjoyed thinking and talking about religion and faith. In youth discussion groups, with priests and even with Jehovah's Witnesses or Latter Day Saints who knocked on the door of my family home. Despite this, I found it difficult to connect the friend I had made in my prayer life with Mass and what we did "in" the Church. I don't really mea...

  Given the poisonous atmosphere in the Catholic Church at the moment and the division and confusion I feel is a direct result of the current occupant of the Throne of Peter, I have found myself increasingly returning to Sacred Scripture, which is a great love of mine. It makes me wonder why I don't see more clergy addressing basic questions about the faith in the public sphere.  The New Atheism we are experiencing today has a tendency to ridicule Christian beliefs. It portrays them as ridiculous and meaningless, but they objectively are not and one does not need to rely purely on faith in order to demonstrate that is the case. My 8 year old daughter asked me this week why Jesus asks us to eat Him in Holy Communion. What a great question. How many of us can answer it? Why did Jesus have to die? Why did God create Hell? Why does God allow suffering? These are all completely reasonable questions people have and explaining them constitutes the real business of Christian proclamat...

My dear brothers and sisters, we need to evangelise. The world needs the Gospel message today more than ever, and that message means more to people alienated from the reality and true nature of being by today's noisy, busy, atheistic world, than ever before. The world thinks it knows what that message is, but somehow it has twisted and confused the message so that it bears little relationship with the reality. So we need to be that reality and we need to have our conversations in the context of where people are and what their misgivings/ misunderstandings about the Christian proclamation are. Simply put, that message is that you are created, you are loved and you are redeemed by Jesus Christ. We need to assert the simple truth that followers of Christ follow because they believe in love, in truth, in honour & integrity. Being a Christian means standing for family, for society, for justice, and these are all things that bind us together in a positive way. So much of ...

This has been an exciting weekend for evangelisation in the UK as Sherry Weddell, author of the best-selling book Forming Intentional Disciples has been visiting from the US. She was at Ealing Abbey on Friday and Saturday delivering a seminar to a packed hall of priests and lay people entitled Evangelisation: Where to Begin . According to Sherry herself, she was expecting huge kick-back after the book's release and little wonder. In reality it is a factually backed up, damning indictment of the approach and lack of success  in the Church's central mission over the last forty or fifty years: making disciples. In a brave attempt to do something about this personally, and born of an evident and deep love of Jesus, Sherry researched and presented a well rounded study of the reality of Church attendance today followed by a plan of what to do about it. Now, having seen extraordinary fruit in literally hundreds of parishes all over the world, Sherry is one of the "go-to...

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...

As you probably know, each week I sit down at my desk in the evenings after work and look up the Scripture readings for the coming Sunday. I then write an exhaustive investigation into the context and history of each reading. I then attempt to draw all the readings together with the Psalm, and look at what we can learn from them. I have to say despite my efforts, most Sundays, as I sit and listen attentively to the liturgy of the Word, I hear a new dimension, or gain a new insight which I invariably wish I had picked up studying at my desk. I suppose this is the power of the kerygma —that is the Gospel preached. It is alive and supposed to be heard—preached—with vigour. That is, of course, an inherent part of what I would like to achieve from my Sunday Scripture blogs. I would like any reader at Mass who has spent some time reflecting via the blog to be able to deliver the Scripture with renewed vigour born of a thorough understanding. It is cathartic in this regard as I a...

Kerygma (Greek: κήρυγμα , kérugma ) is the Greek word used in the New Testament for preaching (see Luke 4:18-19, Romans 10:14, Matthew 3:1). It is related to the Greek verb κηρύσσω ( kērússō ), to cry or proclaim as a herald, and means proclamation, announcement, or preaching. Preaching or proclaiming, is distinct from teaching or instruction ( didache ) in the Gospel of Christ. Before the Gospel was written, it was first preached (Romans 16:25), but beyond preaching it was also to be taught (Matthew 28:19) in order that, as far as possible, it might be understood (Matthew 13:19). The New Testament teaches that as Jesus launched his public ministry he entered the synagogue and read from the scroll of Isaiah the prophet. He identified himself as the one Isaiah predicted in Isaiah 61 (Luke 4:17-21). The text is a programmatic statement of Jesus' ministry to preach or proclaim ( Kerygma ), good news to the poor and the blind and the captive. If one carefully considers the ea...

St. Luke with his symbol, the winged ox on the Cathedral Portal at Sienna. I've been working hard on this week's exploration of Sunday's Scripture and reflecting on what's being said. This week we move away from the Gospel of Mark, with whom we have been travelling for a number of weeks, and take up Luke's narrative. We haven't had Luke since I started writing my reflections so I have written a short survey of the book as is my habit. Obviously, this sets one's mind racing in various directions. I remain fascinated with Scripture, especially it's extraordinary depth, and part of my prelim' notes how Luke shapes his account. I thought it might be useful to post a concise examination of how this theological shaping (which is evident in each of the Synoptics) effects the historic veracity of the Gospels.  It can be demonstrated that the Evangelists carefully chose their material and that they have varied their accounts to accentuate them...