Being Catholic but spending time among Christians from other denominations, once in a while the question about why Catholics put so much emphasis on Mary, mother of Jesus, comes up. Until recently I would have had difficulty answering that question as that was "just the way it is". However, that is not the best way to live out one's faith. One has to understand what one believes in order to explain, defend or share it with others, otherwise not having a firmly grounded faith based on reason is like living in a house built on sand - the first storms that come will wash it away. So why is Mary so important to Catholics?

Has intellect been stripped away from Christianity, specifically Catholicism resulting in a remnant seeking only personal encounters or remaining only out of obligation? Is having an experience seen as a prevalent factor for Parish renewal? I would suggest that of the few churches demonstrating any interest in Parish renewal this is believed to be true. The proof is, that for many, even the suggestion of reason to nurture one’s faith is an insult to their trust in their Holy Spirit experience. I do not want to belittle that because I had one myself. However in my opinion such an experience, by itself, is a factor in the Church’s decline, because experience is subjective. Your truth doesn’t mean it's true for me and vice versa. Just because you believe chocolate ice cream or Toyotas are the best doesn't mean they are objective truth. I think St. Jerome in the 4th century sums it up best about the fullness of the Gospel and being selective not to portray a false Jesus, he said, “ignorance of scripture is ignorance of Christ.” The almost total elimination of intellectual engagement in church teaching is simply another breach in its fire wall.

Who decides what music is “epic” enough to be used for the Mass entrance, during communion and the closing recessional? Is epic music subjective to someone's age, culture and taste, like wine or beer? For example, some wine drinkers, view beer as being laughable as an inspiring tribute. However, for many craft beer enthusiasts, their carefully balanced brew is a glimpse of heaven and that some wine drinkers are pretentious phonies.

Can you be rational and believe the stories of the bible? How is believing that the sun will rise and fall everyday or that the trees will lose their leaves and flowers and die, but magically be reborn in the spring? Can a creator who designs a universe as complex as ours and a little blue planet called Earth with numerous factors that have to work in synergy to create life, be any more believable than someone rising from the dead? To me, the latter seems a heck of a lot more plausible to believe.

In one of Saint Benedict Parish’s recent preaching series, Set Apart, Fr. Simon used the word ‘ontological’ to refer to our spiritual DNA. Ontology looks at the big WHY? questions, like what it means to exist, and what is reality, really? From our point of view, sometimes reality can pounce on us like a roaring lion seeking what it may devour, and that can be a pretty bruising encounter. As children, when we ran home crying with our playground bruises or ouchies, we looked to our mother to kiss our ouchie and make it all better.

It’s hard to imagine what the world must have looked like in a pro Christian world vs the very anti-Christian modern world we live in. A time when society revolved around the Church seems like a fictional movie to me, especially as I try to picture what it would have been like, in centuries past, without the Godless radical left and their hatred of Biblical morality. Growing up in a theocracy viewing the church and state being in synergy is hard to imagine given today’s freedom of expression society.

When I reflect on the disaffiliation and or apostasy from the Christian church since the 1960’s, I can't help but think that it’s a result of a perfect storm, or as the saying goes, the stars and moon aligned. Was it a coincidence or was it a calculated siege on religiosity, as described by Pope Leo 13th in 1885, by the mastermind of Satan battling the church on numerous fronts such as: