Post by johnbc on Oct 12, 2020 6:33:22 GMT
I have always found it curious — to say the least — that so many people created opinions about Christianity without ever having the curiosity to ascertain the essential element of this religion: miracles. In other religions the miraculous events may only be posterior additions which are given a validating value, but Christianity begins with a miracle, the virgin birth of Christ, culminates in another miracle, the resurrection, and continues from miracle to miracle today. When we speak of “Christian revelation”, what is meant correctly by this is not the text of the Gospel, but the facts it reports: life, passion, death and resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ, that is, a sequence of miracles. Sto. Thomas teaches that we speak through words, but God speaks through words and facts. The facts of the Gospel revealed to the world what the text later recorded. You may not believe any of these facts, but you cannot deny that they, and not its later narrative, much less the conclusions that theologians, popes and councils have been drawing from them over the centuries, constitute the essence of Christian revelation. Therefore, there is no way to understand anything about Christianity without paying attention to miracles, on which the whole meaning of doctrine depends. You have no way of confirming or denying the truth of evangelical miracles, but Jesus promised that He would continue to work miracles through the centuries, and, strictly speaking, there are no facts of any other kind in the world that exist in such large numbers and that is so well documented, especially today. The lack of interest in getting to know them, on the part of people who nevertheless express their opinions about Christianity, reveals that these people prefer to know only the edges of the subject of which they speak, for fear of getting too close to the center and being singed.
Many, before having examined just one of these facts, already cling to the idea that one day they will all have a “scientific explanation” — it is understood: materialistic — and it will be proven that they were not miracles at all. Although this expectation has never been fulfilled in relation to any miracle confirmed by the Church, and although the promise of the devastating explanation has repeatedly postponed its fulfillment again and again in each specific case (recently it failed again to “explain” the Holy Shroud of Turin), the fact is that these people continue to trust the promise as if it were a test already carried out, complete and unanswerable. There can be nothing more irrational than this act of faith that takes as a proof a promise of proof and is renewed with every new failed attempt to carry it out. However, the people who practice it believe that, in doing this, they are tremendously scientific.
If I had any money, I would pay the luminaries of materialism to study, for as long as they wanted, the miracles of Father Pio, who knew in advance of the sins of others and events in distant lands, (for example he knew whether the son of an anguished mother had been killed in the war) and who healed a blind girl who had no pupils, or those reported by dr. Ricardo Castañon in his videos, who reports the event of a bleeding wafer and who, after taking it for examination by one of the best doctors in the United States, (who is an atheist, and does not know the origin of the sample) he strongly states that it belonged to a patient who died in pain and agony, that in his last moments of life he had difficulty breathing, and that this blood came from the heart, and then give us a “scientific explanation” of each one.
Many, before having examined just one of these facts, already cling to the idea that one day they will all have a “scientific explanation” — it is understood: materialistic — and it will be proven that they were not miracles at all. Although this expectation has never been fulfilled in relation to any miracle confirmed by the Church, and although the promise of the devastating explanation has repeatedly postponed its fulfillment again and again in each specific case (recently it failed again to “explain” the Holy Shroud of Turin), the fact is that these people continue to trust the promise as if it were a test already carried out, complete and unanswerable. There can be nothing more irrational than this act of faith that takes as a proof a promise of proof and is renewed with every new failed attempt to carry it out. However, the people who practice it believe that, in doing this, they are tremendously scientific.
If I had any money, I would pay the luminaries of materialism to study, for as long as they wanted, the miracles of Father Pio, who knew in advance of the sins of others and events in distant lands, (for example he knew whether the son of an anguished mother had been killed in the war) and who healed a blind girl who had no pupils, or those reported by dr. Ricardo Castañon in his videos, who reports the event of a bleeding wafer and who, after taking it for examination by one of the best doctors in the United States, (who is an atheist, and does not know the origin of the sample) he strongly states that it belonged to a patient who died in pain and agony, that in his last moments of life he had difficulty breathing, and that this blood came from the heart, and then give us a “scientific explanation” of each one.
