Real Presence, The (Alt)

"My purpose will be to defend the following thesis: that the Holy Eucharist is Jesus Christ, who is in the Blessed Sacrament both as Reality and as Presence. He is in the Eucharist as Reality because the Eucharist is Jesus Christ. He is in the Eucharist as Presence because through the Eucharist He affects us and we are in contact with Him - depending on our faith and devotion to the Savior living really in our midst." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

"The Eucharist is a sacrament giving us the real body, blood, soul and divinity of Jesus, the Son of God. Although it does not look like the body and blood of Jesus we see on a crucifix, His Real Presence is hidden within the appearance of a small white consecrated host (altar bread). This is a great mystery, something we cannot fully understand." - Lee Ann Schoofs

When Christ, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity became man he assumed our human nature by taking on the flesh of Mary. He became man for four reasons: 1) to save us by reconciling us with God; 2) that we might know God’s love; 3) to be our model of holiness; and 4) that we may be partakers of the divine nature. "He himself declared that the reason of His advent among men was this, that He might bring them the assured fullness of a more than merely human life."

"There is so much confusion in professedly catholic circles about the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist that someone had better make things clear. We begin to understand what the real presence means once we realize that the Holy Eucharist began in the womb of Mary the moment she told the angel, "be done to me according to your word," God became man and began to dwell among us. God was in the world He made from the moment of creation He had to be. Otherwise the world He created out of nothing would have lapsed into the nothingness from which it came." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

Real Presence and Perpetual Adoration (Alt)

"Although I have said this before, I wish to emphasize that what I have been doing in these teleconferences, and surely in today's, is carrying out an explicit order of Pope John Paul II. The order is to do everything in my power to restore faith in the Real Presence where it has been lost. Strengthen that faith where it is weak. In the plainest language, Pope John Paul II declares, I repeat, unless faith in the Real Presence is strong, stronger than it is now, I fear for the survival of the Catholic Church in many dioceses in the United States." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

"In speaking about Holiness it is remarkable how we can overlook the obvious. For example it is obvious that we cannot become holy unless we obtain the extraordinary graces needed to reach sanctity. Hearing about holiness; reading about it; even seeing holiness, does not make one holy. We need grace. It is equally obvious that the graces we need must come to us from Christ since as He told us, "Without Me you can do nothing." If that nothing refers even to salvation, it most certainly refers to sanctification." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

Part of The Most Holy Eucharist Series, a group of six brochures by Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

It was the present Vicar of Christ who gave us two terms that describe the modern world. There is a culture of life and a culture of death. The culture of death had become the dominate philosophy of the affluent countries, including our own beloved United States. I never thought I would live to describe the president of our nation as a professional murderer. But he is. As anyone with normal intelligence understands, partial birth abortion is infanticide. It is the murder of a helpless infant. Given the gravity of our subject, I thought this conference should be an exception to our normal procedure. It will be in the nature of a mini-catechism. The questions and answers will be drawn from Pope John Paul’s encyclical On the Gospel of Life. In the limited time at our disposal, we will have to choose and pick from the Holy Father’s encyclical. We will cover the following areas: present day threats to human life, the Christian message concerning life, God’s holy law and how to re-Christianize America for a new culture of human life.

The greatest means of converting souls is one more Mass, one more Mass during the week, and, with sacrifice, two or three more Masses; if possible, daily Mass, to pay for the eternal salvation of souls so dear to you. That is the great thing - the Chalice filled with the Precious Blood. You will never see souls go astray if you pay the ransom, hearing one more Mass, two, three, four, and, if possible, daily Mass, with sacrifice; then you are apostles, paying the ransom for the Sacred Heart.

There is no substitute for experience, especially the experience of suffering. That is why what the Holy Father, John Paul II, has to say about suffering is so revealing. He understands, from experience, and that is one reason why his words come from the heart and reach the hearts of those who hear them or read what he says. Wherever the Pope goes, and to whatever group he speaks, his message on suffering is always the same: Be patient and endure the cross of Christ, but at the same time seek to find ways of relieving human suffering caused by hatred, injustice and greed.

These are my private thoughts and musings, yet as I re-read them it occurred to me that these certainly are not just my experiences. These words can apply to just about anyone who spends time in the Lord’s presence. So, please enjoy reading and reflecting on these words as I do, and hopefully your heart will be as filled as mine is with the awe and wonder of being here in His presence. -- Andy Cirmo

Credo asked some who have known Fr. John Hardon to tell us about the impact the Jesuit had in their lives. "He was a man of holiness" From Dominic Aquila, Provost Ave Maria College, Ypsilanti This summer when I came to the position of provost here at Ave Maria College, Ave Maria Press had just received the publishing rights to Fr. Hardon's manuscripts. I met with him so that he might speak about his vision for carrying on his work. I had met him only once before, at a conference, but had been following his work for many years and even reviewed his book A Treasury of Catholic Wisdom.

Books on comparative religion are mainly of three kinds: the informative kind, whose purpose is to review in more or less detail the beliefs and practices of various religious systems; the analytic, which presume on the information and go on to evaluate a number of living (or archaic) faiths according to certain normative principles; and the projective, where an author combines factual data and personal theory to anticipate what the future of man’s religion may (or should) be like.

Never before were there more urgent reasons to learn about the religious faith and practices of other people, beyond the universal instinct to know all we can about our fellowman in order better to know ourselves.

It is only a concession to common usage that we may speak of primitive peoples or of a primitive religion. Strictly speaking there are no genuine primitives anywhere on earth today. Evidently we have no direct knowledge of the earliest beginnings of religion and therefore of the true chronological primitive. Our observation of present-day backward tribes does not obviate this difficulty, for such people are after all our contemporaries, with as long a history behind them as our own and the possibility of degeneration cannot be excluded. Simply to equate the backward with the actual primitive is uncritical and unwarranted.

Hinduism can better be described than defined. It is less a religion than a religious culture, and less creedal than ethical or racial, which historically identified the people living in a particular region, namely, beyond the Indus River, which runs in a southwestern direction from the present State of Kashmir to the Pakistan city of Karachi. The correlative words Hindustan, Hindi, and the modernized India have the same origin.

Apologists of Buddhism describe it as the richest, broadest and most lasting of Aryan religions. Yet the name itself is of recent origin and refers to the vast system of teachings that trace their ancestry to the Indian sage, Gautama or the Buddha, who lived and died about the fifth century before the Christian era. There is even question of whether Buddhism should be called a religion and not rather a religious culture, which has permeated Asia to the point where it is impossible correctly to estimate the number of professed Buddhists in the world. Figures range from less than two hundred million, to more than five hundred million, with the lower number closer to reality.

Jainism is a sectarian offshoot of Hinduism, whose origins are traditionally dated with the lifetime of Vardhamana Mahavira (599-527 B.C.), a contemporary of Buddha. The name itself is derived Jina (conqueror), which his followers applied to Mahavira in much the same sense that Gautama’s disciples called him the Buddha or "enlightened one."

Confucianism is the whole body of religious, ethical and political doctrine which Confucius gathered together from antiquity, personally taught by word, writing and example, and passed on to his successors. It is this same body of doctrine which Mencius in the pre-Christian era consolidated into a compact system and to which Chu His in the early Middle Ages gave the naturalistic interpretation that, at least in learned circles, has prevailed into the present century. Some historians prefer to consider Confucianism neither a religion properly so-called nor a system of philosophy, but a way of life that for our two thousand years has inspired the religious sentiments of the Chinese people and given them ethnic solidarity. Having no creed, priesthood, or ecclesiastical organization, it is yet a religion in the broad sense of an expression of belief in spiritual reality and of man’s ultimate attitude towards the universe. Confucianism makes no claim to an original divine revelation, and its sacred books are highly respected but, unlike the Koran of Islam or the Vedas of Hinduism, are not considered supernatural communications to chosen prophets or seers.

Taoism, which literally means the religion of the "Way" (Tao), has had the most chequered career of the three main religious cultures of China. According to its own historians, it once commanded respect from the nation’s leaders, until Confucianism replaced it as the guardian of the State. For a time, too, it appealed to the simple and uncultured people, but then Buddhism came along to win the alliance of the masses. Its final and present stage is an elaborate complex of polytheism, whose priests are regarded as the most expert magicians and exorcists, yet whose philosophy has won the admiration of Western scholars. Historians of China regard Taoism as perhaps the most characteristic of the Chinese people. In its fundamental concept, Taoism has always been a worship of nature inside and outside of man, and an attempted harmony between the two. The perfect man, in Taoist language, is not the person who obstructs nature, but who gives himself completely over to nature, thereby producing what some have called the highest ethical standards of the Chinese character, and others a repudiation of all objective law.

Zoroastrianism is one of the oldest living faiths, and yet it has the smallest number of adherents. Although its ancestry is traceable to the sixth century before Christ, there are less than two hundred thousand professed Zoroastrians, only the Parsis in India and a small community in Persia (modern Iran). But their religion merits careful study because of the attention it has received in the history of Western thought, and because of the influence which many scholars believe it exercised on other religious cultures. "Christianity," according to a modern writer, "claims to be the heir of the prophets of Israel. If there is any truth in this claim, it is no less heir to the Prophet of ancient Iran, little though most Christians are aware of the fact." (R.C. Zaehner, Living Faiths (Zoroastrianism), 1959, p. 209).

The origins of Shinto are lost in the dim past of Japanese history, and over the centuries its role has been to integrate with other systems, notably Confucianism from China and Buddhism from India, to give the people of Japan the most complex religious amalgam in the Orient. At the same time Shinto has served to consolidate the nation and became the religious expression of patriotism, where the divine right of kings, familiar in the West, was an object of faith and the emperor a descendant of the gods.

Sikhism is one of the least known living religions of the world, and yet one of the most interesting from the viewpoint of comparative history. Although practically confined to a single province of the Indian Republic, the Punjab region in the north-western part of the country, the Sikhs have made more than a proportionate contribution to the religious culture of their times. They are sometimes lightly dismissed as a hybrid of two old religions, Islam and Hinduism, made into one, as though it were really possible to fuse two such completely different concepts of life. Or again they are described as Hindus who have simply grafted Moslem monotheism on to the trunk of the ancient Vedas; that most of their other doctrines are taken directly from Hinduism, with little if any change. Sikhism, therefore, is an example of conscious syncretism and one of the few that has ever been successful.

Judaism is the oldest living religion of the Western world, and historically is the parent of Christianity and Islam, which together count one half the population of the human race. The pre-Christian phase of Judaism is not our concern, both because its vital elements have remained substantially unchanged and because, paradoxically, the Jewish people have greatly changed since the coming of Christ---and our interest is in the religious cultures of the present day.

Christianity is unique in the history of world religions. Its ancestry derives from almost two millennia of Judaism, whose prophets for centuries had foretold the coming of a great religious leader who would establish a new spiritual kingdom on earth; its origins are rooted in extensive historical facts, from the birth of Christ to His crucifixion and resurrection from the dead; its message centers around a core of doctrines which Christ revealed to His followers not as a philosophy of speculation nor even primarily as an ethic for self-conquest, but as mysteries whose inner essence lies beyond human reason, yet on whose acceptance would depend human salvation; its character from the beginning was social in the most comprehensive sense of that term, with a communal structure, a body of truths, rites and obligations that had for their purpose not merely the personal sanctification of those who believed, but their corporate unification and internal consolidation by the invisible Spirit of God.

Not the least difficulty in writing about Catholicism is the problem of isolating the subject. The history of the Catholic Church is so closely woven into Christian civilization that the one cannot be told fairly without the other, and to do justice by the Church would mean to retell the story of Christianity. Moreover not only Catholics claim the first millennium of Christian history as their own. The Orthodox and Protestants might therefore resent having all the centuries from Christ to Photius and Caerularius, or to Luther and Calvin, called Catholic instead of simply Christian. Practically speaking, however, there is no choice except to treat the first thousand years in the East and fifteen hundred in the West under Roman Catholicism. The characteristic features of the latter today are imbedded in the Church’s life before the Eastern Schism and the Reformation; Catholicism makes the claim of continuing these features and retaining them substantially unchanged through all the vicissitudes of time; and, most importantly, the institution of the papacy is a historical phenomenon that reaches back to the early centuries to give Christianity that cohesion which even the sharpest critics of Catholicism are willing to admit while they deplore, in Harnack’s phrase, the lot of those who “have subjected their souls to the despotic orders of the Roman papal King.” (Adolph Harnack, Das Wesen des Christentums, Leipzig , 1933, p. 164.).

To most Christians, Mohammedanism is only a vague religious movement that somehow gave rise to the Crusades and that presently affects the culture and political aspirations of certain people in North Africa, the Near East and Pakistan. Actually Mohammedanism is the most powerful force among the living religions outside of Christianity, and to many observers its greatest competitor for the spiritual domination of the world. The correct name of Mohammedanism is Islam, which Mohammed himself adopted as a description of the faith he proclaimed. Grammatically Islam is the infinitive of a verb that means to resign, submit, or surrender, by implication oneself or one’s person to God. Those who profess it are called Muslims, of which the Western form is Moslems, meaning "believers" who offered themselves to God, as distinct from Kafirs or Mushriks, "the rejectors" of the divine message of salvation. Moslems dislike the word Mohammedan because it suggests worship of Mohammed, even as the term Christian implies the worship of Jesus Christ.

Eastern Orthodox writers justly complain that for over a thousand years Christianity has been identified with Europe. In the eyes of Asiatic and African people, Christendom is a West religion and its culture equated with the civilization of Western Europe. Yet almost one-fourth of all contemporary Christians do not belong to the West but call themselves Eastern and their religious position Orthodoxy. Geographically the Eastern Oriental Churches form a vast triangle, whose base is twelve thousand miles long, reaching across the Russo-Siberian plain from Petzamo in the West on the Arctic Ocean, to Alaska in the East where the Indians were evangelized by Russian missionaries in the last century. The western side of the triangle cuts through Finland, Estonia and Latvia, goes south towards Galicia and the Carpathian mountains, divides Yugoslavia in half, touches Albania on the Adriatic Sea and reaches the southern apex of the triangle in Egypt. On its eastern side, it passes across Palestine and reaches all the way to Japan and Korea. The great majority of Eastern Christians now live within this area, with substantial numbers in other countries, including the United States, as descendants of immigrants from the original Orthodox triangle.

There is a legitimate sense in which Protestantism refers to all Christian movements, other than the Roman Catholic Church, that share the heritage of Western Christianity. Even the Churches of Eastern Orthodoxy have been called "Protestant," because they place the seat of ecclesiastical authority outside the papacy and within the believing community. But these are extensions of a term that has historical rootage. Protestantism as a type of the Christian religion stems from the Reformation, and especially from the work of Luther and Calvin. Four hundred years have changed many things in Protestantism, but they have not effaced the spirit and theological emphases first created by the Reformers in the sixteenth century. Indeed every effort at renewal within Protestant ranks has been based on the principles of the Reformation, whose importance in religious history can scarcely be exaggerated. It marked a turning point in Western civilization and developed a form of religion that is baffling in its complexity, and yet so influential there is no part of Christianity whose life has not been affected by the faith and polity of Protestantism.

The origin of the Old Catholic movement goes back to Reformation times, and its theological principles derive from a Calvinist theory of grace. As a historical phenomenon the movement is sometimes described almost exclusively in terms of national aspirations that came into conflict with Rome. This is correct enough as a partial explanation, but fundamentally the issue was not a tension between groups of zealous Catholics in Belgium or the Low Countries striving to rise above their environment and inhibited by papal authority; it was mainly a clash of two opposing theologies of man’s relations with God, the Catholic, which holds that human nature has been elevated to a higher than natural order, and the Jansenist, which claimed that such elevation never took place, so that when Adam fell he lost for himself and posterity not the gifts added to nature but something essential to nature itself.

Religious Life: A Prophetic Vision (Book Review)

Diarmuid O’Murchu’s "Religious Life: A Prophetic Vision" is a revolutionary book. …O’Murchu is a social psychologist whose published writings reveal a radical mind. He claims that what Catholics still call the religious life can no longer be contained within the framework of Christianity. Otherwise, in his own words, the vowed life is doomed to stagnation and death. He devotes over two hundred and fifty pages to outline the revolution that must take place in consecrated life in the Catholic Church. My plan in this analysis is to identify the main ideas on which O’Murchu bases his thesis. After each presentation, I will evaluate these ideas from the perspective of authentic Catholic doctrine.

If Jesuit Father John A.Hardon has his way, Catholic children and adults will return to learning the basics of their faith by memorizing catechism questions and answers word for word, as they did until the 1950s, when the Baltimore Catechism was the standard instructional tool.

Christ instituted the sacrament of the priesthood for three reasons, three fundamental reasons. The first reason is so that the Holy Eucharist would be possible. We need the Priesthood in order to have the Holy Eucharist: the Sacrifice sacrament of the Mass; the Communion sacrament of Holy Communion; and the Presence sacrament of Christ’s Real Presence. No priesthood, no Eucharist.

Faith in Our Lord’s resurrection from the dead is also a fact of recorded history. It is part of Catholic catechesis, which I wish to stress during this meditation. In other words, I want to bring out as clearly as I can the importance of explaining the mystery of the Resurrection, so that we in turn can pass on this revealed truth and its implications in the lives of others.

If there is one hidden theme in the New Testament, it is the fact that while Christ certainly wants His followers to imitate Him in carrying His cross and to deny themselves to prove that they are His disciples, at the same time He promises them not only an eventual and eternal glory with Him in heaven, but already on this earth, a deep-souled happiness.

"As we address ourselves to the "Rights and Responsibilities of Parents in Religious Education," you will immediately notice that our focus of attention is on parents. This means that, while recognizing the rights of others, notably the Church, and within the Church, of bishops, priests and religious, we concentrate on the rights of father and mother, hence parents (plural), in the religious rearing of their offspring." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

The complete text of the Rite of Eucharistic Devotion, with prayers and responses.

"If there was one fact of our Christian faith which needs to be stressed today it is the need for a father in the family. At the center of the social revolution today is the attack on men, as husbands and fathers of families. Behind this revolution is the philosophy of Karl Marx. According to Marx, families are the invention of dictating males who created, what we call the family, in order to dominate women in human society." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

"Our title for this conference is unusual. We are not speaking of the family in the third millennium. That would be prophetic because only God knows the future. We are speaking of the family for the third millennium. What do we mean? We mean that family life in the closing decade of the second millennium must be stronger, more solid, more secure than ever before since the dawn of Christianity. Why? Because family life in the Western world is faced with challenges which threaten its very survival." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

"Until recent years, we would hardly have written on a subject like "The Roman Primacy and the Spiritual Life." But much has happened to call for some inquiry into the relationship between faith in the papal primacy and growth in the spiritual life. We now know, more clearly than ever before, that not only progress in the spiritual life depends on people's faith in the supreme authority of the Bishop of Rome. The very survival of Christian spirituality is at stake." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

There are so many wonderful things we can say about the Rosary that I thought we should focus on what I sincerely believe. The Rosary is necessary in order to obtain from God the miraculous graces that the world so desperately needs in our day. The moment we say the modern world needs miraculous graces we imply that these graces are indeed to be obtained from God; but they must come through the intercession of the Mother of God.