CONVERSION PHENOMENON

We do not have the answers to every question – maybe only a partial answer that could set you in the right direction. But the very asking of the question is the beginning of the answer. So why don’t you send us your questions and together we will search.

Now there was a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. This man came to Jesus by night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do, unless God is with him.” Jesus answered him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God. Nicodemus said to him, “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?” Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit (Jn3:1-6, RSV).

Some English translations use ‘born again’ where the Revised Standard Version says ‘born anew’. The Church has always interpreted this as meaning that we need to be baptized in order to be saved. From the beginning, those who accepted the Gospel or Good News were baptized ‘in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, No 1213, describes baptism in this way: Holy Baptism is the basis of the whole Christian life, the gateway to life in the Spirit and the door which gives access to the other sacraments. Through Baptism we are freed from sin and reborn as sons of God; we become members of Christ, are incorporated into the Church and made sharers in her mission: “Baptism is the sacrament of regeneration through water in the word.”

Each of us as a son or daughter of God - ‘sons’ in the official English translation means both ‘sons and daughters’ – has the duty to Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age (Mt 28:19-20, RSV).

It is God who gives the gift of faith but He has given us the obligation of making the Risen Lord known to the ends of the earth.

I think that many of those who leave the Church in order to become so-called ‘Born Again’ Christians do so because they know very little about their faith. They don’t even know that they are already ‘born again’ by the very fact that they are baptized. They often have a false understanding of the prayer of the Church. For example, the prayer of the Church in its liturgy, the Mass and the Sacraments, for example, is never addressed to our Blessed Mother or to the saints but always to God, in most cases God the Father but occasionally, as on the Feast of Corpus Christi, to God the Son.

They are usually unaware of the fact that the Church came before the Bible and that it is the Church that has declared that the Bible is the Bible, the Word of God.

Some Fundamentalist Protestant groups in the Philippines - the term ‘Born Again’ is very often associated with such - make a specific target of young Deaf people. Here in Bacolod City about 20 years ago one such group bought a vehicle very similar to that of the priest who worked with the Deaf and went around on Sunday mornings to the pick-up points for Deaf children to take them to their place until their ploy was discovered.

Sometimes people leave the Church because they have had a bad experience with a priest or some other figure of authority. Sometimes people leave and join Fundamentalist groups because they find their worship more lively. I must confess that I have been at Catholic funerals where the priest showed no sense whatever of the deceased having been someone who had been loved and who was now mourned. I have felt like walking out on such occasions. On the other hand, I’ve seen a Mass on TV on Pentecost Sunday where the priest’s ‘homily’ consisted of TV advertising jingles. It’s no wonder that people leave. ‘The hungry Sheep look up and are not fed’ (John Milton, Lycidas).

BLESSED TRINITY
What is the meaning of Triune God?

The term ‘Triune God’ simply means the Blessed Trinity. Here are some quotes about that from the Catechism of the Catholic Church Nos 232 to 237.

Christians are baptized ‘in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’ Before receiving the sacrament, they respond to a three-part question when asked to confess the Father, the Son and the Spirit: ‘I do.’ The faith of all Christians rests on the Trinity.

Christians are baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit: not in their names, for there is only one God, the almighty Father, his only Son and the Holy Spirit: the Most Holy Trinity.

The mystery of the Most Holy Trinity is the central mystery of Christian faith and life. It is the mystery of God in himself. It is therefore the source of all the other mysteries of faith, the light that enlightens them. It is the most fundamental and essential teaching in the ‘hierarchy of the truths of faith’.

The Trinity is a mystery of faith in the strict sense, one of the ‘mysteries that are hidden in God, which can never be known unless they are revealed by God’.

CHOOSING JOSEPH
Why was Joseph chosen to be the foster father of Jesus? What did he have that others did not?

Joseph was a descendant of King David of whose line the Messiah was to come. He also had the grace of God for the special role to which God called him. St Matthew’s gospel describes him as ‘a just man’, ‘a designation that implies conformity to the law of God, the supreme Jewish standard of holiness’ as Scripture scholar, the late Fr Raymond E. Brown SS puts it in his booklet A Coming Christ in Advent. Father Brown quotes the angel’s message to St Joseph from St Matthew’s gospel, ‘she will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus’. Father Brown quotes from the Mishna, an authoritative work of Rabbinical Judaism written some 200 years after Jesus’ birth, ‘If a man says “this is my son” he is to be believed’. Father Brown then comments, ‘Joseph gives such an acknowledgment by naming the child; thus he becomes the legal father of Jesus. (This is a more correct description than adoptive father or foster father.) The identity of Jesus as son of David is in God’s plan, but Joseph must give to that plan a cooperative obedience that befits a righteous man’.

The Church honors St Joseph above all as the Husband of Mary. It was as such that he took care of Jesus as if he were his own son and formed him in his humanity and taught him all the things a young Jewish boy needed to be taught.