Tag: Catholic Church

This is why the Pope can’t change the teachings of the church on faith and morals.

January 21, 2023 / Greg Garda

A reading from the Holy Gospel according to St. Mark:

“Jesus went up the mountain and called to him those whom he wanted, and they came to him. And he appointed the twelve, whom he also named apostles, to be with him, and to be sent out to proclaim the message, and to have authority to cast out demons.”

Reflection

Have you ever found yourself in a situation when it appeared that everything around you started to break, even though it wasn’t your fault?

By Sixteen Miles Out from Unsplash.com

A couple of years ago my mom went on vacation and asked me to look after her home. Everything was going well until the final day she was scheduled to return home. I went to turn on the shower and the faucet broke. The water just kept flowing at full pressure. Now on one hand it’s not something terrible, since nothing flooded. All I had to do was shut the water off to the house and call a plumber. I was more concerned about my mom. My mom is the type of person who would be quick to blame me if something didn’t meet her expectations. Her expectation was that the house would be in the same running order she left it in. Instead she came home to a plumber’s van on the driveway and tools all over the upstairs bathroom. She looked at me with a terrifying look that I haven’t seen since my teenage years.

In today’s gospel, Jesus appoints and gives authority to twelve apostles to have authority in the early church. More notably Jesus gives Peter special authority by calling him “the rock” on which the church is built and gives “the keys to heaven.” In other words whatever decision he makes on earth will have eternal consequences. Jesus giving authority to Peter and the twelve apostles is not arbitrary.

In the ancient world, when a king left his kingdom he periodically handed his authority over to his prime minister – first servant. The prime minister had to carry out the duties of the king in everything, except he couldn’t change anything or make up new laws. He was the protector of his king’s kingdom. So when the king returned everything should be the way he left it.

Similarly, the apostles in unity under their leader, Peter, – the first pope – do not have the authority to change what Jesus has established. Their job is to protect what is established to ensure that it is secure and in place upon Christ’s return.

Let us pray,

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Heavenly Father, Thank you for getting me through another week. Have mercy on me for the times I have allowed envy to consume me. Help me to see the goodness in my life, even if during this time I may be facing many challenges. Inspire me with the fortitude to overcome my negative emotions, the wisdom to prioritize my studies in the coming exam week, and with the charity to treat others around me with love. I pray this in Your name. Amen.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Even God Runs Out of Patience

March 18, 2020 / Greg Garda

One of the benefits of being Catholic is that suffering is not without meaning nor is it accidental. The meaning that I derive from suffering helps me persevere, even in the face of the greatest uncertainty.

Moreover, as a Catholic I find peace in the history of the Church, including the history of the Israelites found in the Old Testament.

Photo by Bill Oxford on Unsplash

The worldwide challenges we are experiencing today in the face of COVID-19 (Coronavirus) should not shock the well informed and devout Catholic Christian.

Today’s first mass reading from the prophet Daniel presents a situation that is very similar to ours.

The Israelites are in exile from their homeland and are being persecuted. The first line of the reading (Daniel 3:25) places a person (Azariah) in the middle of an execution being burnt alive.

As Azariah is being burnt alive he pleads for God’s mercy on behalf of his people. In the Old Testament, it is clear the Israelites consistently turn away from God and adopt the ways of the pagan cultures that surround them. One prominent example that stands out is found in 1 Maccabees 1:10-15 when the Jews took on the liturgical practices of their Greek occupiers; going so far as to turn their Jewish places of worship into Greek gymnasiums. You’re only a google search and a few clicks away from discovering what took place in ancient Greek gymnasiums. Let me put it this way: Many “shepherds” whom recently been persecuted for decades of exploitation of young men would have felt right at home.

As Azariah pleads for God’s mercy he lists the consequences for Israel’s sins. They look eerily similar to what the Church has been facing in recent times. Let’s list them:

“For we, O Lord, have become fewer than any other nation, and are brought low this day in all the world because of our sins.” It you look around the world, the church is bleeding faithful Catholics. Recent studies have shown that Catholics leave a rate of 6 to 1, while mass attendance hovers around the 10% mark in the West.
In our day we have no ruler, or prophet, or leader, no burnt offering or sacrifice, or oblation, or incense, no place to make an offering before you and to find mercy.” While I will refrain from commenting on Church leadership, at the moment Catholics are facing situation where they are being deprived of the Eucharist, or the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.

Let’s be clear, while God’s patience and mercy are infinite, we are finite. We only have so long to respond to His mercy. For us, God’s patience does run out and sometimes He needs to send a massive wakeup call. How we respond to this wakeup call will d

Loving God All Our Heart When We Can’t See Him…?

November 3, 2018 / Greg Garda

Looking to outsmart Jesus a scribe asks, “Which is the first of all commandments?” Jesus responds: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength.” Jesus continues: “The second is this: You shall your neighbour as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these.”

Isn’t it strange that the scribe asked Jesus for one commandment, yet Jesus answers with two commandments? Did Jesus not hear correctly? Did Mark make a grammatical mistake? I don’t think so.

Keep in mind that the gospel writers did not have Microsoft Word where they can start writing without much thought and not have to worry about using up paper. Papyrus went for a premium in the ancient Near East, so those who were able to afford it used it with intention. So why did Jesus respond with two commandments instead of one?

#LoveIsLove….?

I think the answer is quite clear; you can’t have one without the other. Skeptics or atheists may respond by saying that they don’t believe in God, much less love him, yet they are capable of loving their neighbour. I agree, you don’t need to love God to love your neighbour. As a Catholic Christian I believe that every human person is created in the image of God. Since God is love (see 1 John) he can only create out of love; therefore, it follows that humans are created from love to love (though sin distorts authentic love).

Yet when I was an atheist I found it difficult to find an objective source for what we call love. Is love merely a feeling associated with survival that is the result of an evolutionary process. Do we love in order to survive. We know that’s not always true. Many people throughout history loved to the point of suffering and even death.

In our relativistic society some believe that love is subjective, evidenced by popular phrases as #LoveIsLove. This is an incoherent phrase because if anyone can define love to be whatever they wish. Love is…euthanizing one’s neighbour; Love is…aborting one’s neighbour; Love is…a cozy feeling towards my cat. Love can quickly be twisted into something unrecognizable if the source of love is not affirmed in our lives.

Everyone appears to have a sense of love, yet no one can point to one love that is perfect – a love that is not lacking. Yet, we all have a sense of perfect love – the sense that things can always be better. The source of this perfect love, I believe, is God, whose very essence is love.

Tapping into the Right Source

So if we acknowledge God as perfect love and ground ourselves in Him we tap into the source of authentic love and we can learn to see our neighbours a little bit more like God sees them.
We all know the saying, “You are what you eat.” I believe we also are what worship. Does this mean if we worship God we can become gods ourselves? Of course not. We can no more become a god anymore than we can become the salad we had for dinner. Like food that can effect our physical health, our object of worship affects our spiritual health, which in turn affects how we treat others around us.

The process of learning to see things as God sees them is called “theosis.” When we love God with all our heart, mind and soul it becomes impossible to not see the inherent dignity of other people, independent of their social status, personal struggles or utility.

Getting to Know Perfect Love

So if we want to love our neighbour to our fullest potential then we must tap into perfect love first. Tap into God.

Luckily, we as Christians believe that God became human in the person of Jesus Christ, so knowing God and loving him becomes a little easier. St. Paul writes that Jesus has become “the visible image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15). God is no longer an abstract concept or entity, but a person, so it can become a little easier to love him.

I can only speak for myself, but there is a major difference in how I see the people closest to me and even those who I may not like that much since becoming a Christian. Knowing Jesus allows me to know others as Jesus knows them. That changes everything.

Perception Is Not Always Reality: Reflecting on the Eucharist

August 20, 2018 / Greg Garda

By Insight Not by Sight

Perception is not always reality. In other words, our eyes can sometimes deceive us.

In his second letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul famously writes, “For we live by faith and not by sight” (5:7). Is Paul telling us that we should just put on blind folds and blindly walk through life hoping that everything will turn out fine? Not at all! At the time of Paul’s writing Corinth was a wealthy metropolitan port with several “shiny” distractions that were not too different from major metropolitan hubs today, like my own Toronto.

Photo by Yeshi Kangrang on Unsplash

Emerging from the subway steps onto Dundas Square in the heart of downtown Toronto we are immediately bombarded with shiny colourful advertisements, loud music, and several restaurants, cafes, and outlet stores swarming with people. All these distractions can easily lead us to miss a reality that exists under the surface.

Homeless men and women begging for food and money, drug addicts, the garbage in alleyways, police attentively scanning the area for any possible crime and those things that are even hidden from all our of our senses, like the inner brokenness or happiness of the people who fall into our sight. These are all things that lie under the surface of regular sight.

The Closing of the Canadian Mind: Selective Open Mindedness and Learning to Take Offence

August 15, 2018 / Greg Garda

There have been a few people on mind lately for various reasons. An Amazon delivery man who recently delivered a package to us. This gentleman patiently waited at our front door until I was able to open it. Most amazon delivery persons drop the package and book it. He kindly greeted me as “sir” (even though he was at least twice my age) and with a warming personality wished me good night. Two of my admittedly favourite people to speak are two of my wife’s friends from her days in university. Warm hearted, compassionate, and loving are the first three ways I can describe them. One my good friends, who has a great sense of humour, is classy, and just a joy to hang out with. My sister is hard working, always puts her whole being into tasks and is a loving aunt of whom my daughters can’t get enough of. Finally, last year, at an interfaith event I spoke at I had a brief discussion with a young woman who had two toddlers who were about the same ages as my daughters. We shared a few laughs about the similarities of our experiences.

Besides being exceptional human beings they all share something else in common. They all have different belief systems then myself. The Amazon delivery gentlemen, one of my wife’s friends, and the young woman with toddlers are Muslim. My wife’s other friend is Hindu. My close friend and sister are agnostic, based on previous conversations we’ve had about religion. Oh by the way, I respectfully disagree with their belief system and I love asking them critical questions.

Wait a minute…. So I am delighted to be around these human beings, I respect and even love some of them, but I am critical of what they believe? For some, the idea of caring for individuals, disagreeing with them and potentially offending them is oxymoronic, even if the criticisms are regarding matters of facts. It is in this “oxymoronic” mode of thought that I witnessed the closing of the Canadian mind this past weekend.

Why Some Catholics Miss Out on the Christian Life

August 5, 2018 / Greg Garda

There are many things in my life that are routine. I wake up sometime between 5:30am and 6am to pray and have a coffee. I get ready for work. I kiss my wife and my two daughters before I head out the door. I will attend morning mass at my parish and then tackle my ministry related “to do list.” When I get home in the afternoon I usually play with my daughters or prepare dinner. Then we go for a walk as a family and upon returning home we proceed with our bedtime routine with the girls. This is a general snapshot of an average day in my life.

Photo by Josh Applegate on Unsplash

I got to be real with you. My mind isn’t always focused on the activities at hand out of the ones I mentioned above. Some mornings, my mind is on something important I have to finish at work, so I passively and quickly kiss my wife and girls and quickly shoot an impassionate “I love you” at them. Sometimes when I am playing with my daughters in the evening my mind is on a YoutTube video I’m looking forward to watching after they go to bed.

Early this morning I was sitting with my morning coffee in the silence of our home gazing out at the sun creeping over the horizon. A cliché question popped into my mind as I was listening in prayer. If I knew that I had a short time left to live, but I still had to do the routine things in my life, how would I approach them?

The word “intentional” popped into my mind. To spare you the boredom of reading through my intellectual gymnastics as I processed my thoughts, in short I resolved to focus on the task/activity at hand and nothing more. FULL immersion in all the moments I mentioned above.

Checklist Catholicism

Like the everyday routine moments in our lives, Catholics (including myself) risk the danger of reducing their faith to a list of routine tasks void of significance.

March 4, 2017 / Greg Garda

January 4, 2017 / Greg Garda

How Can We Know About God?

Part 2: Human Persons