How Can I Know What’s True?
Pilate asked, “The truth, what is that?”
There is no such thing as my truth and your truth. God gives all of us a hunger for the truth and a mind and heart to find it. Even though two people may see the same thing, yet perceive it completely differently, the thing they see remains the same. A painting may be considered ugly by one person, and beautiful by another. Yet the painting remains the same.
God doesn’t change. He is the Eternal Truth. We can never perceive all of the wonders of God, but we are made with a hunger to acknowledge the truth that He is wonderful. We can believe many true things about God, but we need to also know what isn’t true.
How do we know what is and isn’t true? God gave us an infallible guide to the truth. That guide is not the Bible. The Bible itself tells us that the Church, not the Scriptures, is the pillar and bulwark of Truth.
If you have decided that the Church is wrong, look again. The Truth doesn’t change, but you can, if you want to. When we embrace the truth, it sets us free and makes us happy.
written by Laura Weston, widow of Deacon Michael.
IF YOU LIKE, READ ALONG WHILE YOU ARE LISTENING:
The feast of St. Albert the Great
There is a key to knowledge. There really is. There is a key to know whether or not what you are contemplating regarding Jesus, the Catholic Church, morality and everything else, that gives you the ability to know whether or not, after you go through a process of thought, whether you are correct. And it is very simple. If you come to a conclusion that is contrary to the teachings of the Catholic Church you're wrong. That's it.
If you look and you go, like at the Lambeth Conference*, "Well, we really do have a lot of sympathy for a lot of these women who were divorced, these men who were divorced. They really are devout people, through no fault of their own, we really need to be nice and… [change Christ's teachings]." You're wrong.
Because you are pulling that string that you can't pull.
The corollary of this that we see through Albert the Great and all through many other great saints that we have is: We are made in the image of God.
The world, the universe, Creation, is a creation of God. Within the Creation itself, it (Creation) is consistent with the teachings of God. It has a logic within it imposed upon it by the Divine. Moreover, the source of knowledge, other than a source of knowledge that starts with the basic premise that the Catholic Church is wrong, and even those sources, if you read them very carefully and analyze the underlying aspect, are not, in and of themselves, pernicious. Because the thought process necessary if you use the logic that they have, just like Aristotle was used by Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, and the logic of great Islamic theologians and philosophers, were used by them to come to the truth. As long as you have the ultimate truth that is there, then your conclusion, if it’s inconsistent with the teachings of the Catholic Church, aren’t wrong.
That means, and you will see this is the Gospel because Jesus says this, that if Nathan (Mayve’s little grandson) were here and able to speak, and Nathan started talking about something that was important, within the wisdom that that child is speaking, it’s the wisdom of God.
We see many instances of Jesus saying, "Listen to the child." The child is wise.
We see many, many instances, more instances, where it says, "Don't listen to the scribes. They went off track. They got to the wrong conclusion." Listen to them to the degree that they are consistent with the teachings of Christ.
We have a situation where He's describing the separating of the good fish and the bad fish. How do they know? How does someone sitting there know if it is a good fish or a bad fish? They have been taught the knowledge. And then they use and apply the knowledge to come to what is required to be done. Similarly the angels are going to be doing that. It is the knowledge, the knowledge from whatever source it comes, that is important. We are required to think about, you hear me saying this constantly: Our faith is a faith that requires us to think!
Darlene has a situation periodically where she really wants to either slap Lan or Bob up the side of the side of the head. And then she stops to think: "Well, no, that really wouldn't be a good idea." She probably does it anyway. [laughter] But it really wouldn't be a good idea. We are required to think about it.
The universe itself, being a creation of God, people themselves, being made in the image of God, are the source of the knowledge that we can use to brings ourselves to the truth of Christ, to the truth of the Catholic Church.
It's like I said. I'll go back to Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, from a close-your-eyes, put-blinders-on, perspective, Albert the Great should not have read Aristotle because Aristotle was a pre-Christian pagan. What good could he possibly have? Yet he reads it and is able to go, "Wow! The truth of God is within the teachings of the Church, yes, but look at this. Aristotle is articulating the same things in a different way, that will lead other people to faith."
The same thing is with the Islamic scholars. The same thing, and we see this process with a lot of bad things, the same process, the thought process is coming out of people like Nietzsche, leading to Marx and Engels, led to many bad thoughts of how you do it, but when you took it from a Catholic perspective, and analyze it within the teachings of the Church, then all of the sudden you go, "Oh! They are addressing a realistic situation in the world and I don't like the way they got there, but the reality of where they got with regard to the recognition of the dignity of the human person, and the dignity of labor, is correct.” Because using the analysis of the Catholic Church with Aristotle and all the years we have of the teachings of Christ, yes, being made in the image of God, people have an inherent dignity.
So when we go through our world, [good morning, Wisdom]remember, there are sources of knowledge out there, sources of thought processes where they are wrong, yet the intrinsic thought process behind it comes to the conclusion that is correct if its teaching accords with the teachings of the Catholic Church.
Nathan, when he gets older and talks, may spout a wisdom, and a faith and a love of God that is the deep faith that you might find in a Thomas Aquinas or an Albert the Great. But it is a love that reflects the teachings of Christ with regard to love because it comes from the wisdom of the knowledge that he is loved by his mother, he is loved by his father, he is loved by his grandparents. And when Mayve is bringing him to church on a Sunday, which we expect to happen soon, his wisdom may simply come from the wonder of loving his grandmother so much and coming to this wonderful place.
So allow your eyes to be open, to learn and to recognize in the reality of the created world, and the reality of humanity, if you allow yourself to listen and think about what is there you can come to the truth, even if it comes from a pagan source like Aristotle, if you look at it the prism of this one single standard: if it is contrary to the teachings of the Catholic Church, if this conclusion that you read because you think Karl Marx is so fascinating, and by the way he is boring, or Nietzsche is so fascinating, remember, if you come to a conclusion where you are going to the Catechis of the Catholic Church and say, "What does the Church say about it?", and it says X and you are coming to the conclusion of Y, you're wrong, not the Church.
So open your eyes and your hearts and your minds because God is giving us all this knowledge from every source possible, and use it to bring yourself to the condition that we all pray for. The purpose of the Church is to bring us all to salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ.
November 15, 2018 2
*A Lambeth Conference is called every ten years by the Episcopal/Anglican Church to come to a consensus about the beliefs of the Anglican Communion. At these conferences a statement is issued wherein certain beliefs of the last ten years are either affirmed, modified, or rejected. From these conferences have come the acceptance of contraception, divorce, homosexuality, women priests, gay “marriage”, and other attacks against the truth of Catholic faith which comes to us from the apostles. See his sermon “He Died For All Or For Many”.