In this episode, I continue a multipart series in which I adapt some of the lesson plans I used as I taught the Catholic faith for 30 years. I’m not here to convert anyone. I’m just sharing my stories. In this episode, we explore how Scripture looks at historical events through God’s eyes and not from a human perspective. We will also debate how and when to use God’s Divine Name.

Hello, this is Chris Young. Welcome to Episode 91 of Contemplating Life.

In this episode, I continue a multi-part series based on my 30 years teaching the Catholic faith in my local parish’s inquiry program.

Whenever I talk about religion, I always include this disclaimer that I’m not out to convert anyone to my beliefs. As with all topics, my purpose is to educate, entertain, enlighten, and possibly inspire. But that doesn’t include trying to evangelize you into Christian or Catholic traditions. I’m just telling my stories.

At the end of the previous episode, I said, “In the next episode, I will talk more about how scripture scholars use historical critical analysis to help us understand the deeper truths to be found in Scripture.” Well… as usual, I’m going to go off on a couple of tangents in this episode, so we will barely scratch the surface of what I thought we would be talking about this week. Still, this is good stuff, so let’s dive into what will already be a pretty long episode that will not get nearly as far into the material as I anticipated.

This episode is part 2 of the first class I ever taught for the RCIA program.

That lesson was titled “Revelation and the Bible.”

Not everything in the Bible is considered “Revelation,” that is, something that can only be known if God reveals it. Some things we know to be historically accurate from outside sources. For example, we can be pretty sure that Jesus was a real historical figure who the Romans crucified because we have nonbiblical sources that record these events. So, the existence of the historical Jesus is not revelation.

On the other hand, there are things that we would only know because God revealed them. For example, God revealed his name to Moses in Exodus 3:13-14, which says,

“But,” said Moses to God, “if I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what do I tell them?” God replied to Moses: ”I am who I am.” Then he added: “This is what you will tell the Israelites: I AM has sent me to you.”

So, God reveals to Moses that his name is “I am”. The actual word used is a form of the Hebrew verb HAYAH, which means “to be”. This Hebrew word, transliterated into English, could be pronounced Yahweh. So, in effect, the name of God is Yahweh, just like my name is Chris, or you might be Joe, Pete, Sally, or Sue. Words such as “God”, “Lord”, or “Almighty” are what He is or how He is, but His name is Yahweh. More on that in a moment.

The point is that we wouldn’t know that name if God hadn’t told us. Later in Exodus 6:2-3, God makes a bigger deal out of this revelation when He reminds Moses that when He appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, He just referred to Himself as God Almighty, which in Hebrew is El Shaddai.

When I used to teach this lesson, I also gave the example of the Trinity as something we wouldn’t know if God hadn’t revealed it to us. Yet, as I have become more familiar with critical scriptural scholarship through the works of Dan McClellan, it is debatable that the Bible really discusses the Trinity as we know it. Sure, it mentions the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but it doesn’t explicitly lay out the doctrine of three persons in one God as we understand it today. There are other concepts in Scripture, such as God’s plans for our salvation, that we would not know had he not revealed them to us.

We are going to go off on a tangent here for a minute because we need to discuss further the use of the Divine Name as God revealed it to Moses.

Old Testament manuscripts depict this name with four characters, YHWH, which Scripture scholars call the tetragrammaton (a fancy way of saying the four-letter name). Hebrew has vowels, but they aren’t always put in written text. Vowels are implied or deduced from the context. So, if you put the right vowels in YHWH, it would be pronounced Yahweh.

One of the 10 Commandments in Exodus 20:7 says, “You shall not invoke the name of the LORD, your God, in vain.” The Jewish people were so afraid that they would use his name in vain, they were afraid to say it at all. When reading Scripture, the practice was to use the Hebrew word Adonai, which means “Lord”. Greek translations of the Old Testament use the word Kyrios, which also translates as Lord. When Scripture was translated into Latin, these four characters were usually replaced with the Latin word Dominus, which also translates as Lord.

The New American Standard translation of the Bible, which we use for all the Scripture readings at Mass and is considered the official Catholic translation, uses the phrase “the LORD” to render the tetragrammaton, but it uses small uppercase letters for ORD. So, whenever you see this version of the word LORD with an uppercase “L” and a small caps “ORD,” you know the original Hebrew used the Divine Name. The word Lord in any other type style it simply means Lord. It doesn’t mean that Divine Name.

Various forms of this word evolved over the ages. The letter “Y” can sometimes be pronounced like a “J”, and if you throw some vowels, change the W to a V, you get the word Jehovah, which is also used as an alternative to say the name of God without really saying it.

One exception to the rule that you can’t pronounce the Divine Name is in the word hallelujah or alleluia because these words are created from the phrase Hallelu-Yah (Praise Yah). Apparently, the shortened form Yah, when combined with the word “praise,” has been and remains acceptable.

In modern times, the use of the word Yahweh grew in great popularity thanks to a translation of Scripture known as the Jerusalem Bible (JB). Published first in French and later in English in 1966, it used the word Yahweh wherever the tetragrammaton appeared. It was updated as the New Jerusalem Bible (NJB) in 1985.

The Jerusalem Bible was published as an official Roman Catholic translation with full imprimatur. Imprimatur is a kind of stamp of approval by the Catholic Church. It is a Latin word meaning “let it be printed.” English-speaking countries outside North America used the JB in Mass and other liturgies, while North America uses the NASB..

The JB and the NASB were created as a response to Pope Pius XII’s call in 1943 for new translations of Scripture to be prepared. These translations were to be based not on the Latin version, which had been used for centuries, but on the original Greek and Hebrew texts.

The JB was extremely popular in my parish. It also had extensive footnotes, which made it a huge volume. See the YouTube version of this episode for a photo. My mother joked that she was going to get her orthopedic doctor to write her prescription for a small print version of the Jerusalem Bible so that she wouldn’t hurt her back. She finally did get a smaller edition with very thin pages and very small text.

On June 29, 2008, the Vatican wrote to the presidents of all conferences of bishops at the behest of Pope Benedict XVI, stating that the use of the name Yahweh was to be dropped from Catholic Bibles in liturgical use as well as from songs and prayers, since pronunciation of this name violates long-standing Jewish and Christian tradition.

Dan Schutte, of the St. Louis Jesuits, who has composed many popular Catholic hymns, explained that he and other composers were attracted to the use of the word Yahweh in the JB and thought that it added something significant to the lyrics of their songs, most of which were adapted from the Psalms. He is the composer of a popular Catholic hymn, “You Are Here,” which begins with “Yahweh, I know you are here, standing always at my side”. His publisher, Oregon Catholic Press, has rereleased versions of his and other songs that use the word Yahweh. They have suggested alternative lyrics so that these songs can continue to be used in our liturgy. Typically, the revisions use “Oh, Lord,” because it keeps it to two syllables to fit the music well.

Schutte notes that the Jerusalem Bible does have an imprimatur from the Catholic Church. He suggests we should feel free to use the Jerusalem Bible for any other prayers privately that use the word Yahweh if we feel that will make it a richer experience for us. I personally agree. Sometimes I like to use the word. It makes it more personal if you are addressing God by name.

One problem translators have with using the word LORD to render the tetragrammaton is that there are, by my count, over 300 places in the JB that have the phrase “Lord Yahweh.” In Hebrew, this would be “Adonai Yahweh.” That would translate into English as Lord Lord. The translators have been told that the word Adonai should be translated as Lord (without the small caps) and that Yahweh should be translated as God. So instead of saying “the Lord Yahweh,” or “Lord Lord,” it would say “the Lord God”.

I don’t know how to discuss the above without occasionally pronouncing the Divine Name directly. It is my policy in this podcast not to use the Divine Name unless I have to out of respect for Church policy and feelings of our Jewish brethren. Because my Scripture quotes are from the NASB, which uses LORD, this shouldn’t be a problem.

Okay, let’s get back on topic.

We need to understand that the Bible is primarily theology, not history. It interprets history and world events, especially about Israel and the chosen people, from God’s point of view. Let’s take the example of the epic Old Testament story of Joseph, son of Jacob, which appears in Genesis chapters 37-50.

Joseph was the youngest of 12 brothers, and as is often the case, the baby of the family gets a lot of attention. His father spoiled him so much that he gave him a coat of many colors. The story is the basis of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.”

Joseph had prophetic dreams that predicted that someday his brothers would be bowing down to him. This made them quite jealous. One day, while they were all out tending the flocks, they grew so angry with him that they threw him down a cistern, and then calmly went off to share a meal. A group of traveling traders from Egypt came by, and the brothers decided to get Joseph out of the well and sell him into slavery to the Egyptians

Joseph was a handsome fellow and attracted the attention of the Pharaoh’s daughter, who tried to seduce him. When he refused her advances, she accused him of assaulting her and had him thrown in prison.

Joseph continued to have prophetic dreams and could interpret other people’s dreams. When he correctly interpreted the dream of one of his jailers, the word got around to Pharaoh, who called him in to interpret the Pharaoh’s dreams. Joseph said that he could not only interpret a dream for Pharaoh, but he could tell him what the dream was without having been told in advance.

Without going into the details here, Joseph explained the dream meant there would be seven years of prosperity with good harvests. This would be followed by a drought of seven years in which there would be little or no harvest. The Pharaoh was so impressed that Joseph knew the dream without having been told what it was, he put Joseph in charge of the program to save up resources during the seven prosperous years so that they could withstand the seven lean years. Joseph went from being a slave in jail to becoming a very powerful person in the court of the Pharaoh.

As predicted, the drought came. Joseph’s father, Jacob, sent the brothers to the Pharaoh to see if he would give them provisions to survive the tough times. When they arrived in Egypt, they were sent to Joseph, who was in charge of the Pharaoh’s reserves. In Genesis 45:3-11, we see what happens when they realize their salvation lies in the rejected brother Joseph.

“I am Joseph,” he said to his brothers. “Is my father still in good health?” But his brothers could give him no answer, so dumbfounded were they at him. “Come closer to me,” he told his brothers. When they had done so, he said: “I am your brother Joseph, whom you once sold into Egypt. But now do not be distressed, and do not reproach yourselves for having sold me here. It was really for the sake of saving lives that God sent me here ahead of you. For two years now, the famine has been in the land, and for five more years tillage will yield no harvest. God, therefore, sent me on ahead of you to ensure for you a remnant on earth and to save your lives in an extraordinary deliverance. So it was not really you but God who had me come here; and he has made of me a father to Pharaoh, lord of all his household, and ruler over the whole land of Egypt. Hurry back, then, to my father and tell him: ‘Thus says your son Joseph: God has made me lord of all Egypt; come to me without delay. You will settle in the region of Goshen, where you will be near me–you and your children and grandchildren, your flocks and herds, and everything that you own. Since five years of famine still lie ahead, I will provide for you there, so that you and your family and all that are yours may not suffer want.’”

If this were an episode of ABC 20/20 or Dateline NBC, it would be told as the lurid tale of jealous brothers who turned against Dad’s favorite son. But it’s not a true crime drama or the story of a family feud. From Joseph’s perspective, and that of the Bible, this is the story of divine providence. It was God’s will that all of these horrible things happened to Joseph so that he would later be in a position to save his family.

It tells the story from a theological perspective, not from a simple human drama. Let’s take a couple of other examples.

According to the Bible, Kings rule because God lets them. In Wisdom 6:1-9, we read

Hear, therefore, kings, and understand; learn, you magistrates of the earth’s expanse! Hearken, you who are in power over the multitude and lord it over throngs of peoples. Because authority was given you by the LORD and sovereignty by the Most High, who shall probe your works and scrutinize your counsels. Because, though you were ministers of his kingdom, you judged not rightly, and did not keep the law, nor walk according to the will of God, Terribly and swiftly shall he come against you, because judgment is stern for the exalted. For the lowly may be pardoned out of mercy, but the mighty shall be mightily put to the test. For the Lord of all shows no partiality, nor does he fear greatness, Because he himself made the great as well as the small, and he provides for all alike; but for those in power a rigorous scrutiny impends. To you, therefore, O princes, are my words addressed that you may learn wisdom and that you may not sin.

Around 20 years ago, when I taught this lesson, I would say, from a historical point of view, George W. Bush became president either because Florida voters did know how to operate a punchcard voting system or perhaps because the Supreme Court handed it to him. But if this were a Bible story, it would say that God chose him to be president and will scrutinize his actions to an extremely high standard. While our current president and his minions believe that he was appointed by God, it’s not so much that God wanted him to be president, but that God allows him to be president and will hold him to a very high standard. In the words of Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben, “With great power comes great responsibility.”

One final example, when Jesus is on trial before Pontius Pilate, we read in John 19:10-11

So Pilate said to him, “Do you not speak to me? Do you not know that I have power to release you and I have power to crucify you?” Jesus answered (him), “You would have no power over me if it had not been given to you from above.”

We can imagine that when Pilate heard this, he was thinking in worldly terms. He thought that Jesus was talking about Caesar in Rome, who was the source of Pontius Pilate’s power, but Jesus was talking about God, who allowed Pilate to rule. That’s the difference between a secular view of history and a theological view. The Bible looks at things from God’s perspective and not from a secular human perspective.

When we read the Bible, we need to be aware that it is literature that uses the various forms (history, poetry, myth, parables, law, proverbs, hymns, and epic stories) to reveal God’s truths. You don’t read poetry the same way you read a legal text. You don’t read an epic story of a hero in the same way you read a history book or a political analysis. Nothing in the Bible is intended to be a science textbook.

In episode 89, I discussed the use of myth in the Bible. Recall that we said that a myth teaches truths that facts cannot reveal. I read to you portions of two different creation stories: one of them in Genesis chapter 1 and the other in Genesis chapter 2. We pointed out the inconsistencies between these two versions of creation.

Different communities wrote these different stories at different times. You might think that because we’ve ordered them as Genesis 1 and 2, that is how they were written, but Scripture scholars believe that Genesis 2 is older.

It begins with the earth already formed, and then God creates humans out of the dust of the earth, followed by plants and animals. Some argue that this simply fills in the details missing from Genesis 1. However, Scripture scholars believe that after Genesis 2 was written, they went back and wrote Genesis 1 to emphasize that God had not just created humans, plants, and animals but created the entire heavens and earth. So, it is Genesis 1 that is filling in earlier details that were skipped over by Genesis 2.

By the way, when Scripture speaks of “heaven and earth,” it is because they didn’t have a word for the universe. So when we read “heaven and earth,” you need to think of it as “the universe” or “everything.”

We discussed these two different creation stories in Episode 89, and I mentioned that Genesis 1 came from a source that scholars call “J” and that Genesis 2 came from a source they call “P”. I gave you homework asking you to think about what we could learn about these two different communities of believers who are the source of the oral traditions behind these written narratives.

Let’s look in more detail.

Genesis 1 is all about water. They believed that the universe initially consisted of an infinite ocean of water until the second day, when God created the dome of the sky to separate the waters above the dome from the waters below it. Then, God separated the land from the sea on the third day. Note, it doesn’t say he created the land. It was already there, presumably beneath the waters, or who knows? It doesn’t really say. It just says that he separated the land from the sea. Genesis 1 also talks a lot about sea creatures. It discusses the sun, moon, and stars. One can easily conclude that these were people who lived near the sea. Their livelihood comes from the sea. How does one navigate the sea? By tracking the sun, moon, and stars. So, they wrote a creation story about the things that were important to them.

In contrast, Genesis 2 was probably a community of farmers. It’s all about the land. It explains that no plants existed because God had not yet created a man to till the soil. Adam lives in a garden that is full of food to sustain him. God creates animals for man, but concludes they are not suitable companions and, almost as an afterthought, decides to create woman. What does that tell you about the community that wrote this story?

Each of these communities discovered God in the nature around them, but one saw it connected to the water, and the others saw it connected to the land.

After publishing Episode 89 in which I read these sections of Genesis, I’ve begun to read Dan McClellan’s new book, “The Bible Says So: What Scripture Gets Right and Wrong About Today’s Most Controversial Topics.” Dan points out that if we strictly focus only on what Scripture really says, God didn’t create everything out of nothing. In Genesis 1, the water and the land already existed, and he just divided them with the help of the dome.

Other passages that seem to imply that God created everything out of nothing actually talk about God creating things out of some sort of primordial raw materials. Greek philosophers believed that this disorganized nonbeing matter, which had no function, was coeternal with God. It wasn’t until the second century CE that Christians began to argue that God created everything out of absolutely nothing.

This was an uphill battle because 1800 years ago, the Greeks had already deduced that matter could be neither created nor destroyed. That is a very modern scientific concept. It wasn’t until Einstein illustrated that matter and energy can be transformed into one another that we understood that matter could be created and destroyed. But the total amount of matter/energy in the universe remains constant. Energy eventually dissipates to the point where it is no longer useful, but there is still a fixed amount of matter/energy.

Going back to that dome issue again, if you look around social media, you will see that many of the people who believe that the Earth is flat also believe that this dome exists. See the YouTube version of this episode for a drawing illustrating how ancient people viewed the world. They believed that when God opened up the floodgates of the dome, it would rain. These modern-day flat-earth fanatics think that all of space travel has been faked because obviously, if you went up in a rocket, you would crash into the dome. It’s truly sad that ancient Greeks understood the nature of the universe better than these religious fanatics who still believe such ridiculous things as a solid dome in the sky, because they insist that a 3000-year-old model of the universe has to be accurate, simply because it is recorded in Scripture. It’s just sad.

Moving on, McClellan explains that the typical translation of the opening phrase of the Bible, “In the beginning…” is a bad translation. We tend to think of the phrase “In the beginning” as referring to “the beginning of time.” In my own teaching, I used to describe that word as meaning “forever ago.” That’s all wrong.

The Hebrew word used here is bereshit. However, if the author intended to mean “in the beginning,” the first word wouldn’t have been bereshit; it would have been barishonah. Some have suggested that the word be translated as “in a beginning,” But that isn’t completely right either.

McClellan explains this word doesn’t mean “In a beginning something happened.” Rather, it means, “In the beginning of something happening…”

The printed NASB version that I’ve had for many years says, “In the beginning God created…” The NASB 1995 edition at the Bible Gateway website also uses that same traditional translation. However, the latest update on the website of the US Council of Catholic Bishops, which I presume is from the 2020 NASB update, says, “In the beginning, when God created…” McClellan likes the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition (NRSVue), which says: “When God began to create the heavens and the earth…”

If Scripture scholars are still debating how to translate the opening word of the Bible, what hope do we have in really understanding it? Well, we just have to trust the latest information that we can obtain from the most trustworthy scholarship.

In our next episode, I will finally get around to talking about some of the techniques that Scripture scholars use to come to a deeper understanding of the original intent of the author in the context of the culture in which they wrote and their intended audience.

So, as always… if you find this podcast educational, entertaining, enlightening, or even inspiring, consider sponsoring me on Patreon for just $5 per month. You will get early access to the podcast and other exclusive content. Although I have some financial struggles, I’m not really in this for money. Still, every little bit helps.

As always, my deepest thanks to my financial supporters. Your support means more to me than words can express.

Even if you cannot provide financial support, please, please, please post the links and share this podcast on social media so that I can grow my audience. I just want more people to be able to hear my stories.

All of my back episodes are available, and I encourage you to check them out if you’re new to this podcast. If you have any comments, questions, or other feedback, please feel free to comment on any of the platforms where you found this podcast.

I will see you next time as we continue contemplating life. Until then, fly safe.

In this episode, I continue a multipart series in which I adapt some of the lesson plans I used as I taught the Catholic faith for 30 years. I’m not here to convert anyone. I’m just sharing my stories. In this episode, we try to understand how Scripture was created from oral traditions. We engage in an exercise where we write some Scripture of our own.

Hello, this is Chris Young. Welcome to Episode 90 of Contemplating Life.

In this episode, I continue a multi-part series based on my 30 years teaching the Catholic faith in my local parish’s inquiry program.

Whenever I talk about religion, I always include this disclaimer that I’m not out to convert anyone to my beliefs. As with all topics, my purpose is to educate, entertain, enlighten, and possibly inspire. But that doesn’t include trying to evangelize you into Christian or Catholic traditions. I’m just telling my stories.

This episode is based on the first class I ever taught for the RCIA program, so it was someone I taught at least 30 times. I spent weeks developing a lesson, practicing it, reworking it, and sweating over the details. I felt like I had to amass at least twice as much information as I put into the lesson in case someone asked a question. I didn’t want to be ill-prepared. After about 8 years or so, in which I adapted and adjusted the material, I had a lecture that worked every time. I had revised it into a really well-thought-out outline that I could deliver without any further preparation. Just print out copies of the handouts and my notes, and I was off and running.

As my repertoire of topics grew, I went through the same process. Sweat blood over the initial development, revise over the course of 4-8 years, and then deliver the same well-tested material thereafter.

First, a bit of housekeeping that I should have included in the last episode. All of the Scripture quotes I’m using are from a translation known as the New American Standard Bible or NASB. Although not strictly a Catholic edition, it is the translation approved for use in US Catholic churches for all of our liturgy. I provided links to all of the passages from the NASB provided on the website of the US Council of Catholic Bishops. There is also a Wikipedia article talking about the origins and updates to the NASB.

Moving along… Typically, we would begin the evening with an opening prayer, and while I don’t intend to do so in all of the lessons I present here, I have an opening prayer I usually use on the first evening that I would like to share with you. It set the tone for what I was trying to achieve with my teaching and what our entire program was trying to achieve with our participants who were considering this spiritual journey with us. I also used this prayer in a program I presented called “Catholics Returning Home,” which was designed to help people who had left the church for whatever reason to consider returning and becoming active again.

It is called “The Prayer of Thomas Merton.”

Thomas Merton lived from 1915 to 1968. He was a Catholic Trappist monk from the Abbey of Gethsemane in Kentucky. He studied at Cambridge and Columbia. He is known as a poet, social activist, and student of comparative religion. He wrote more than 70 books on spirituality, social justice, and pacifism.

Let us pray, [The Prayer of Thomas Merton]

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so.

But I believe that the desire to please you does, in fact, please you. And I hope that I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.

And I know that if I do this, you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore, will I trust you always, though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

Amen.

The title of this lesson is “Revelation and the Bible.”

This is the first of four lessons in a row that I taught about Scripture. The overarching theme of these lessons is that our God is a God who speaks. We know what we know about God because it has been revealed to us throughout the ages. We talked earlier about the various ways that people come to know God, such as through nature, their upbringing, personal spiritual experiences, and so on.

What do I mean by revelation?

I would ask the class, “Tell me everything you know about my friend from Arizona.” Well, you know that they are from Arizona. You don’t know if they are male or female. You don’t know how I met them. You can speculate it’s an old college buddy. Maybe it’s a former girlfriend. Perhaps it’s someone with a disability like mine. Unless I reveal it to you, you can speculate, but you wouldn’t know.

What we know about God, we know because He has revealed things to us in a variety of ways. God speaks to us.

In Scripture, we are told that God spoke directly with Adam and Eve in Genesis 3:9. In Exodus 3:4, we read that God spoke directly to Moses. In 1 Kings 19:11-18, we read how God spoke to the prophet Elijah. We will discuss the role of a prophet in more detail in a future lesson. And finally, in the letter to the Hebrews 1:1-3, it says, “In times past, God spoke in partial and various ways to our ancestors through the prophets; in these last days, he spoke to us through a son, whom he made heir of all things and through whom he created the universe.”

God has revealed mysteries. Eph 1:8-10 says, “In all wisdom and insight, he has made known to us the mystery of his will in accord with his favor that he set forth in him as a plan for the fullness of times, to sum up all things in Christ, in heaven and on earth.”

So, Scripture outlines for us various ways that God has spoken to us. But in order to understand Scripture properly, we need to understand who wrote it and how it was written.

As we explained in the last lesson, while God is the ultimate authority behind Scripture, it is mostly the product of human authorship written over the course of about 1000 years in a variety of places around the Middle East. It was written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. The sacred authors came from a variety of backgrounds and cultures, and they had a variety of audiences in mind when they wrote what they wrote.

Except for perhaps the letters of the New Testament, called epistles, all of Scripture began with oral traditions. People would sit around campfires and tell stories. Some of it was in the form of, “My God is better than your God.” They would recount the history of their culture and how God had guided them throughout that history. They would tell stories of battles won because God was on their side. They would talk of times when they were unfaithful and turned away from God and were forced to suffer the consequences of their misdeeds.

Eventually, as these stories grew in importance to the people, someone would write them down. Keep in mind that in ancient times, most people could not read or write. You had to hire scribes to write for you. I like to think of computer programmers and IT specialists as modern-day scribes who understand the mysterious ways to keep records in formats that only they can read.

I would then invite the class to engage in an exercise where they would attempt to write Scripture of their own. This was an exercise I experienced in my first RCIA program as a participant. It was led by Father Conrad Cambron, but I think he got the idea out of a book.

I would explain to the class, “We are going to write our own Gospels. Use the blank side of the handout I gave you this evening and write down about 8-10 or so things you know about Jesus. Assume I just landed from Mars and asked you, ‘What can you tell me about this guy Jesus?’ Take about 10 minutes to do that. Just random sentences.”

As I explained before, the participants were sitting at cafeteria tables with about 5-6 people per table. I would then say, “Have everyone at your table read off the list of things that they wrote. Then appoint one person from your table to be your official scribe. With the help of the entire group, the scribe should create some sort of narrative based on the things that each of you wrote. Try to include at least one thing from each person at your table. Put them in whatever order makes sense to you. Some people will duplicate items, of course. After all, we are all talking about the same guy. Put it in whatever order makes sense to you. Take about 10 minutes to do that. You should come up with something that’s maybe 12-15 sentences long.”

When they were finished, I would ask the scribe from each table to stand up and read the gospel that was produced by their table. I would say, “Who is the scribe from this table? Stand up and tell us your name.” A woman would stand and say, “I’m Susie Smith.”

I would reply, “Ladies and gentlemen, we will now have a reading from the Gospel According to Susie.”

Invariably, the scribe would always say, “It’s not my gospel. I just wrote it for my table.”

To which I would reply, “That’s the point. Your name is on it. But it is a product of your community. You may have contributed something of yourself, but it’s not just you. It’s the work of the collected traditions of your people. It’s a world of their experiences of who Jesus is.”

Here is an example of two typical Gospels I might have heard. I made these up, but this is the type of thing I would get.

“Jesus was the son of God. He was born in Bethlehem to the Virgin Mary. He was visited by shepherds and wise men. When he was 12, he was lost in the temple, but his parents found him conversing with the elders, who were impressed by him. He began his public ministry at age 30 by calling 12 people who were apostles to follow him. For three years, he preached a message of forgiveness and repentance and talked about the kingdom of God. He was betrayed by one of the apostles, Judas, who handed him over to be tried and sentenced by the Roman governor Pontius Pilate. He was tortured and crucified and died. Three days later, he rose from the dead and appeared to the apostles several times before he ascended to heaven, where he sits at the right hand of the Father. He will return in the end times.”

The class would applaud. Another table might write something like this…

“Ladies and gentlemen, the Gospel according to Steve. Jesus is my Lord and Savior who sacrificed himself for the sins of the world. He is the son of God, and he is God as well, along with the Father and the Holy Spirit. He became human and taught us that God is love and we should love one another. He healed the sick. He raised the dead man named Lazarus. He gathered with his apostles the night he was arrested and celebrated the Last Supper with them when he offered bread and wine, he said, ‘This is my body. This is my blood. Do this in remembrance of me.’ He was crucified, died, and rose from the dead three days later. He sent us the Holy Spirit to guide us and remind us of all that he taught. He has prepared a place for us in heaven.”

Then I would ask questions. Susie, did your Jesus heal sick people, raise a dead man, and have a Last Supper with his apostles? She would respond, “Yes, but we just didn’t have time to put in all those details.” Then I would ask Steve, “Was your Jesus born in Bethlehem and visited by shepherds and wise men? Was he betrayed by Judas? Is he coming back in the end times?” To which Steve would reply similarly, “Yes, but like Susie, we couldn’t tell everything in all that detail. We had to pick and choose what our people said.”

I would ask them each, “Is there anything in the other Gospels you heard here that you disagree with?” They would always say no.

I explained… Note that there is an overlap in the essential items. Jesus is God. He taught. He died for us. He rose 3 days later. But the differences don’t make any of it less true. Along the way, we could have had details that didn’t line up 100%. You might have put things in a different order. You put emphasis on different things. One of our Gospels focused on what Jesus did. But the other one focused on what it meant. Jesus is a personal savior.

While this isn’t exactly how the Gospels were written, it’s pretty close. The stories written in the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are the result of the experience of early Christians. In an upcoming lesson, we will take a more detailed look at each of these gospels and how they compare to one another. We will learn something about the communities that generated the scriptures and the intended audience for which they were written.

I want to talk about two views of Scripture. This discussion is based upon a lecture seriesl by my colleague from St. Monica Parish, Jim Welter.

On the one hand, we have what we will call “The Descending View.” God handed down His word. Human authors wrote exactly what God wanted written. In essence, “Divine dictation.”

On the other hand, we have “The Ascending View.” The community of believers experienced God in their lives and created oral traditions about His works in the world and their relationship with God. These oral traditions were then assembled into the written word by human authors. In effect the community offers up the Scriptures they wrote saying to God in prayer: This is what you revealed to me that I will hand down for generations. Although it is the work of human authors, it is still the revealed word of God protected from error by the Holy Spirit.

The Bible is word of God. God is the author but there is also human authorship too. However, the Bible is not the result of Divine dictation. In 1 Thes 2:13 we read, “And for this reason we too give thanks to God unceasingly, that, in receiving the word of God from hearing us, you received not a human word but, as it truly is, the word of God, which is now at work in you who believe.”

Scripture is divinely inspired, written at God’s will, at his inspiration. We read in 2 Peter 1:19-21, “Moreover, we possess the prophetic message that is altogether reliable. You will do well to be attentive to it, as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts. Know this first of all, that there is no prophecy of scripture that is a matter of personal interpretation, for no prophecy ever came through human will; but rather human beings moved by the holy Spirit spoke under the influence of God.”

We can rely on scripture. According to 2 Tim 3:14-17, “But you, remain faithful to what you have learned and believed, because you know from whom you learned it, and that from infancy you have known (the) sacred scriptures, which are capable of giving you wisdom for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for refutation, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that one who belongs to God may be competent, equipped for every good work.”

It’s time to depart a bit from the “official positions” and acknowledge the fact that we are using Scripture to say that we should use Scripture. It’s reliable because it tells us it’s reliable. This is obviously highly circular reasoning. In this instance, I’m not trying to “prove Scripture is true.” I’m merely explaining how Christian apologists defend their dogmatic beliefs about Scripture.

I also have to refer back to Scripture scholar Dan McClellan, whom I introduced you to last time. He points out that when these passages talk about “Scripture,” they’re not talking about the entire Bible as we know it today. Much of the New Testament had not yet been written when the Epistles were written. And even if they were written and widely distributed and known, they had not yet reached the level of importance of “Scripture” that we assign to them today. So, when he says “all Scripture is inspired by God,” he is probably just talking about the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament, as we call it. Even then, scholars debate when the official list of writings that make up the Old Testament today was officially approved

Back to the official dogma…

Given all the caveats we have made about Scripture, is the Bible true? It may sound like we are engaging in doublespeak or parsing words in a manipulative manner, but we need to talk about the difference between “truth” and “facts.”

Factually, there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of mistakes in the Bible. It is not scientifically accurate. It is not historically accurate. But it contains deeper truth about who God is, what his plan is for us, and how we can develop a relationship with him.

The word “inspiration” means “breathing into” or “life-giving,” In the same way that God blew into the nostrils of Adam and brought him to life. It comes from the same root as respiration, which means to breathe in and out.

Inspiration is the activity by which the Holy Spirit influences a person to act, think, speak, or write, according to God’s will and plan. Inspiration does not preclude the free will, experience, or disposition of the one inspired. It is not equivalent to divine dictation. When Catholics say the Bible is “inspired,” it means what the Bible says about God is reliably true. However, other historical facts or details may have been adapted or created to fit the purpose of the story.

We also need to discuss the ancient concept of authorship and how it is vastly different from what we think of today. To say that someone is the author of the work means that it was written under their authority. For example, it appears that parts of the Gospel of John were written by one of his disciples rather than by John himself, but was written under the authority of John.

Also, because Scripture is based upon oral tradition, the source of that tradition comes from the community and not from any single individual, as we saw in our Scripture writing exercise earlier.

The goal is to try to understand the original intent of the author in the context of their culture and their intended audience. To do that, we need to rely on Scripture scholars who can analyze various samples of ancient texts. The scholars have a deep understanding of ancient languages and can interpret the meaning for us so that we can appreciate the true message and not get hung up on factual errors or inconsistencies.

In the next episode, I will talk more about how scripture scholars use historical critical analysis to help us understand the deeper truth to be found in Scripture. This is still a continuation of my first lesson on Scripture.

So, as always… if you find this podcast educational, entertaining, enlightening, or even inspiring, consider sponsoring me on Patreon for just $5 per month. You will get early access to the podcast and other exclusive content. Although I have some financial struggles, I’m not really in this for money. Still, every little bit helps.

As always, my deepest thanks to my financial supporters. Your support means more to me than words can express.

Even if you cannot provide financial support, please, please, please post the links and share this podcast on social media so that I can grow my audience. I just want more people to be able to hear my stories.

All of my back episodes are available, and I encourage you to check them out if you’re new to this podcast. If you have any comments, questions, or other feedback, please feel free to comment on any of the platforms where you found this podcast.

I will see you next time as we continue contemplating life. Until then, fly safe.

In this episode, I begin a lengthy multipart series in which I adapt some of the lesson plans I used as I taught the Catholic faith for 30 years. I’m not here to convert anyone. I’m just sharing my stories.

Hello, this is Chris Young. Welcome to Episode 88 of Contemplating Life.

In this episode, I kick off a multipart series in which I return to the topic of religion.

Whenever I talk about religion, I always include this disclaimer that I’m not out to convert anyone to my beliefs. As with all topics, my purpose is to educate, entertain, enlighten, and possibly inspire. But that doesn’t include trying to evangelize you into Christian or Catholic traditions. I’m just telling my stories.

For 30 years, I taught classes to people considering converting to Catholicism. The classes were part of a program called RCIA, which stands for Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults. Note that “rite” is spelled RITE, not RIGHT or WRITE, because the program includes a series of rites or rituals that are part of the initiation process. Recently, the program has been renamed OCIA for the Order of Christian Initiation of Adults. I continue to call it RCIA because that’s what we called it when I was teaching.

The classes met one night per week, usually Thursdays, beginning in late August or early September and running a few weeks past Easter. The program’s first half is just basic instruction in Christianity and the Catholic faith. We clarify that there should be no pressure for you to join. In fact, sometimes, our pastors would say to the group, “Don’t tell me you are ready to join the Catholic Church. You don’t know what the Catholic Church really is.”

Sometime in January, the priest would interview each participant privately and see if they were still interested in converting to Catholicism. They could continue the classes even if they didn’t want to convert. The second half of the curriculum focused more directly on preparing you to receive the Sacraments of Initiation: Baptism, First Communion, and Confirmation. These sacraments would be administered at a special ceremony the night before Easter.

Two categories of non-Catholics attend the program. First, we have catechumens who have not been baptized in any other Christian religion. We also have candidates who are people who have been baptized but want to convert from some other form of Christianity to become Catholic. The program was essentially the same for both of them. The only distinction was which rituals they would participate in for their initiation.

In addition to the non-Catholics who attended the program possibly to convert, nearly half of the class participants were already Catholic. Often, these were Catholic spouses, fiancées, or fiancés who were there to support their partners in their faith journey. Some attendees had converted the previous year but wanted to come back again for a deeper understanding of what they had learned the prior year. Others were simply Catholics who wanted to update their faith.

I first attended the program in 1984-85 as someone who had left the church in their late teens and was returning to investigate whether or not the Church was right for me.

A year or two later, I began teaching some of the classes as part of our RCIA Team. I will explain later about my failing recollection as to when I actually started teaching.

In this series of episodes, I will dust off some of my old lesson plans and turn them into podcast episodes. When I taught these lessons, I felt obligated to adhere to official Catholic teaching to the extent I could. However, in this series, I might diverge a bit and talk about my own personal beliefs that may not be 100% the Catholic doctrine. I will talk about things I’ve learned about theology, especially interpretation of Scripture, in the few years since I retired from teaching. I will try to clarify what portions of my discussion represent genuine Catholic doctrine and where I go off on a tangent from time to time.

What I am about to present is not exactly how I would’ve taught it in my 30 years of service to my parish. I’m simply using my old lesson plans as an outline or a jumping-off point to talk about religion in general.

Before we get started, let me provide some context and background.

In previous episodes, I talked about the early part of my faith journey, from my indoctrination in the Roman Catholic Church beginning in first grade through my eventual departure from the Church in my late teens and my return to the Catholic Church in my late 20s. The details are in episodes 6, 7, 11, 12, 13, and 14. Although it’s not 100% necessary to review those episodes if you haven’t already heard them, I encourage you to check them out. It gives you a deeper understanding of how I got to where I felt that my faith had grown sufficiently that I was confident I could teach.

Additionally, I did a series of episodes about my early ministry in the Church once I returned. Most of that was about work I did as a member of the Saint Gabriel Parrish Finance Committee and Pastoral Council. These topics are covered in episodes 37 through 42. It’s not as necessary that you hear those episodes before we proceed, but I just thought I would mention them here. My ministry with the finance committee was ongoing during my first years of teaching.

You’re probably wondering how a guy with a BS degree in computer science ended up teaching Catholic Theology. Here’s the back story…

In addition to the full year of attending RCIA as a returning ex-Catholic, I also attended many other adult education programs offered by my parish. The most influential and inspiring one was a series of lectures on the Catholic approach to Scripture given by Jim Welter of nearby Saint Monica Parish. He called his lecture series “The Ascending View.” I already explained what he meant by that phrase in episode 13, but I will cover it more in later episodes here. I was quite impressed both intellectually and spiritually by Jim’s work. I was particularly interested in the sections where he would share part of his personal faith journey in the context of his teaching.

Whether one is teaching an adult education program, Catholic Sunday school, or religion in a Catholic parochial school, we are not called “teachers.” The term we use is “catechist.” This is defined as “someone who instructs by sharing their faith.” Jim taught me by his example what that means.

In preparation for these episodes, I tried to locate Jim Welter. His website domain has been taken over by someone else. I found him on Facebook, and I’m trying to contact him to thank him for all I learned from his work. I always gave him full credit for teaching me much of what I know about the Catholic approach to Scripture. One of my lessons was essentially a stripped it down condensation of what he taught over a series of three or four lectures.

One of the questions I cannot answer is, “Exactly when did I begin teaching?” We are talking about events from 40 years ago so my recollection is a bit fuzzy on the details.

The timeline begins on April 21, 1984, when I attended the Easter Vigil service at the invitation of my friend Judy to see her husband Paul initiated into the church. They had just completed a year of RCIA classes. Attending that service was my entry back to the church after an absence of about nine years. Judy and Paul returned to the classes in the fall of 1984, and I joined them. I attended through the 1984-85 sessions.

If you had asked me a few days ago when I began teaching, I would’ve said it was the following year in the 1985-86 sessions. But the more I think about it, I don’t think I started until 1986-87. Upon deeper reflection over the past day or so, here’s what I think really happened.

In the 84-85 sessions, our Associate Pastor, Fr. Conrad Camberon, taught the Introduction to Scripture lesson. He used a class participation exercise that I later incorporated into my introduction to Scripture lesson.

Sometime, probably in 1985, I attended those lectures by Jim Welter, where I learned more about the Catholic approach to Scripture.

For the 1985-86 sessions, our pastor, Fr. Paul Landwerlen, taught the Scripture lesson. He seemed to me to be struggling a bit with teaching the lesson. Because I was freshly armed with abundant knowledge on the topic from Jim Welter, my reaction was, “I could do better than that.” After class, I approached Fr. Paul and asked if perhaps I could teach the class next year. He agreed.

In the second week of the 1986-87 season, I presented a lesson about the Catholic approach to Scripture. Father Paul attended. I was happy to have him there as backup lest I accidentally preached some heresy or misrepresented the Church doctrine. After class, he approached with a big smile and said, “You teach that material better than I do. We were taught all of that in the seminary, but it’s not something we preach or teach about on a regular basis.”

I’m pretty sure I simply thanked him for the compliment and for placing his trust in me, but I know inside I was thinking, “Yeah… I know I can do it better than you. That’s why I volunteered.”

So anyway, that’s how I got started.

Let’s talk about a typical year in the program after I had been teaching a few years.

Father Paul would teach the vast majority of the lessons. He was supported by a small team of parishioners known as the RCIA Team. That consisted of me, my mom, Judy, and our Pastoral Associate Sr. Mary Timothy Kavanagh. Father Conrad had been reassigned as pastor of a different parish so we only had one priest going forward. I would teach 4-6 lessons per year. Sr. Tim would do one or two. Judy and my mom were there to help keep things organized, provide hospitality, and moral support.

For many years, we would attract as many as 20 or more people to the class. We met in the parish meeting room sitting around cafeteria tables that would seat 6-8 people. The class was scheduled for 2 hours from 7-9 PM but we would take a 15 minute break in the middle for refreshments and socializing.

Parts of each lesson generally included a discussion period. The team would position themselves at different tables around the room to help facilitate the discussion and to be eyes and ears for Father to see if there was anything he needed to address with individuals or the entire group. Often the Team would sit around after class to discuss how the evening went. Sometimes these debriefing sessions ended up at Denny’s for coffee and pie.

As I mentioned, we started the class either in late August or the first week of September. The first session was just to get acquainted. Father would give an overview of the program and present an outline of lesson topics. Then he invited everyone to introduce themselves. He had a brief outline: Who are you? Who or what brought you here? What do you hope to gain from these sessions? He would invite the Team to share first to get the ball rolling.

When it came to my question of, “What brought you here?” I typically said, “I rode in that blue van in the parking lot.” I’m sure my team got sick of the joke, but it always got a big laugh from the new people. The team members, including Father, always insisted that we got as much or more from the sessions as the participants. The example of Judy’s husband and others who joined the church at the Easter Vigil inspired me to return to the church. Seeing more and more people joining the church through the RCIA program and playing a part in their journey greatly recharged the spiritual batteries of the entire team.

The following week, the lesson was a basic introduction to some core concepts about who God is and what is our relationship with Him. Both Father Paul and, years later, Father Larry Crawford taught a similar lesson. What follows in this episode is based on an outline by Father Larry with my own personal spin on the topic.

Father Larry would begin with a reference to the 1966 Michael Caine film “Alfie,” in which the opening song asked the musical question, “What’s it all about, Alfie?” Father explained that we all want to know what life is all about. Why are we here? How did we get here? What is our purpose in life?

By the way, I’m old enough to remember the film and the song, but many of the people in the class had no idea what he was talking about in referring to the film. Sometimes, they were a bit less confused if he prefaced the reference with something like, “There was this movie years ago about a guy named Alfie, and the theme song of the movie asked the musical question, ‘What’s it all about, Alfie?’” It always illustrated to me that whether teaching a lesson or writing fiction, you should ensure your audience understands your cultural references.

For Father Larry, the answer was, “It’s all about God and our relationship with Him. That’s what life is all about.”

It’s part of our human nature to ask these questions. The Church has tried to address those. Even back in first grade, when I was learning Catholicism from the Baltimore Catechism, the first three questions were:

Q1. “Who made me?”

A. “God made me”

Q2. “Who is God?”

A. “God is the Supreme Being who made all things.”

The third question asks, “Why did God make me?” The answer was, “God made me to show forth his goodness and share with his everlasting life.”

The fourth question is, “What must I do to share in God’s everlasting life?”

Answer: “To share in God’s everlasting life, we must know, love, and serve him.”

For a further discussion about these four questions of the old catechism, see episode 6.

So, the process is to know God, love God, and serve God.

How do people come to know God? Here’s an overview of just a few of the ways as presented by Father Larry.

Some people grow up with knowledge of God. That probably accounts for the majority of believers. If you are raised in a religious tradition, that is your first encounter with the divine. It’s where I began. Along the way, that was insufficient, and I left. But I came back for my own reasons.

Some people come to know God by reflecting on the course of their life. They look at their blessings. They reflect on the times that they survived hardship. They conclude God’s presence in their life.

Some people find God’s presence in nature. I once heard astrophysicist and science educator Neil deGrasse Tyson explain that when out in the wilderness away from city lights, looking up at the stars, he can rightly describe it as a spiritual experience. For him, that is insufficient to lead him to believe in an anthropomorphic supreme being. However, it is common to find God in nature. I’ve experienced some of that as a sense of awe or wonder that I find in nature. I’ve often described science as the study of things God made. For better or worse, this phenomenon among fundamentalist Christians leads them to try to develop a science of intelligent design. While I have no problem considering God as the architect of the universe, I don’t use that philosophy to justify interpreting Scripture in a manner that defies scientific fact. The fundamentalist do that to maintain a false view of the inspiration, inerrancy, and univocality of Scripture.

Some people are convinced they have personally experienced God. I’m not talking about necessarily hearing voices from God. They simply have had transcendent, spiritual experiences in which they feel in contact with the divine. For example, a father witnessing the birth of their children or a woman giving birth can be a spiritual experience when they realize the miracle that is human life and the fact that they were able to participate in it. Perhaps surviving an accident, illness or disaster can lead you to the divine. As the saying goes, “There are no atheists in a foxhole.” These personal experiences of God are similar to the nature issue we discussed earlier, but it doesn’t always have to be an encounter with nature to instigate such feelings.

Some people are helped to know God by demonstration from reason. There are many philosophers throughout the centuries who have attempted to prove or disprove the existence of God. The most common one is titled “prime mover” argument. Take any object around you. A table, chair, lamp, your computer… Whatever. Where did that come from? The table is made from wood. Where did the wood come from? Where did the tree come from? Where did the seed from which the tree grew come from? No matter what you encounter, you can continually ask what came before. Even scientists cannot explain what happened before the Big Bang. Ultimately, when you can go back no further… they argue that is God.

If you go back to my earlier episodes about my spiritual journey, you will see that my “argument from reason” is that you don’t prove there is a God. You simply assume there is and see where that takes you. In mathematics, geometry, and logic, you always begin with axioms. These are unprovable truths that you accept as fact to have a basis from which to build everything else. If all of mathematics is based on axioms that are taken without proof, why can we not have axioms for religion? For me, God is an axiom. See episode 14 for more details on this topic.

Some people come to God through their desire for perfect unconditional love. In some respects, this also reflects my philosophy. I look at the blessings in my life, especially the people in my life–my family and friends who take care of me, and I sometimes feel unworthy to be so blessed. My logical conclusion is that these people were put in my life by a God who loves me. And I see it as my mission to be a blessing in their lives as well.

Some people are led to God by people who love God. This is similar to being brought up by believers. However, this can occur later in life. You associate with religious people, see the value it brings to their lives, and you adopt new traditions to get a piece of that peace.

Finally, some people cannot express why they believe or what God means to them.

It is simply beyond their capability to express what it means to them. And that’s okay. God is hard to explain. I think a saying attributed to St. Thomas Aquinas is illustrative. He said, “To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible.”

I look to Matthew 22:21, Jesus says, “Render unto Caesar, that which is Caesar’s and render unto God, that which is God’s.” I adapt the idea to deal with the dichotomy of faith and reason. I render unto reason that which requires reason, and I render unto God that which requires faith.

Going off-topic for a moment. I recently wrote a sci-fi murder mystery in which a church official is murdered. I invented a fictitious religion that claimed they could merge faith and reason. This fits my general category of sci-fi stories: “You can’t do that. But what if you could?” For me, I don’t try to merge or reconcile faith and reason. I give them each their own domain.

Anyway, back to God… Ultimately, what it takes to know God is experience. And we’ve already listed a variety of ways in which people come to experience and know God.

Father Crawford would say that God is wholly other. That is, wholly spelled WHOLLY, not HOLY. By definition, God is beyond human understanding. But we can talk about what we do know about God. We can discuss some of God’s attributes. We can say God is all-powerful, all-knowing, all-forgiving, and unconditionally loving. Can we really understand what those things mean? Can we really experience unconditional love? That’s ,eyond human experience

For many people, God is distant. Jewish tradition is that only Moses was able to be in the presence of God. That is why many of them failed to accept the idea that Jesus was God in human form. It was a radical concept that God would be with us personally here on earth.

For others, their relationship with God is quite personal. The image of a divine Jesus walking the earth as one of us and calling us brothers and sisters makes God more accessible and people have a personal relationship with God much more easily than they would with a distant God the Father sitting on a heavenly throne.

The theme of the four lessons that I taught after the opening lesson about God Is that our God is a god who speaks to us. He has revealed himself to us in a variety of ways. We will talk about what has been revealed, how we preserve and pass on that revelation, and what we have learned by reflecting upon what has been revealed.

Ultimately, we know most of what we know about God through Jesus.

We are going to wrap things up for today. In the next episode, we will discuss human nature. How we view ourselves as human beings affects how we see our relationship with God. We will also discuss good and evil and how we use the metaphors of Angels and Demons to discuss these concepts. All of that was included in our opening lesson in the RCIA program.

Remember that our weekly sessions were about 90 minutes or more, and I try to keep these podcasts not much longer than 30 minutes. So, it will take a while to get to each lesson plan.

Before we conclude, a bit of housekeeping. On this podcast’s website, contemplating-life.com, our spam-blocking software has been disabled because it was for noncommercial use only. Because I solicit donations and Patreon sponsors, that makes me a commercial entity even though I’m not making any appreciable money here. Therefore, I have disabled comments on the blog posts where I promote each episode. I would have to make four times as much to afford that software. So, I’ve had to disable comments on the blog post where I promoted each podcast. If you want to comment, please continue to do so on Spotify, YouTube, or Facebook. I encourage you to do so.

So, as always… if you find this podcast educational, entertaining, enlightening, or even inspiring, consider sponsoring me on Patreon for just $5 per month. You will get early access to the podcast and other exclusive content. Although I have some financial struggles, I’m not really in this for money. Still, every little bit helps.

As always, my deepest thanks to my financial supporters. Your support means more to me than words can express.

Even if you cannot provide financial support please, please, please post the links and share this podcast on social media so that I can grow my audience. I just want more people to be able to hear my stories.

All of my back episodes are available, and I encourage you to check them out if you’re new to this podcast. If you have any comments, questions, or other feedback, please feel free to comment on any of the platforms where you found this podcast.

I will see you next time as we continue contemplating life. Until then, fly safe.

Unfortunately, we have had to disable comments on this website. Please comment on Facebook, YouTube, or Spotify.

In this episode, I conclude a series of episodes about my life of ministry in my local Catholic Church. I discuss the struggles I had with our new inexperienced pastor in my experience of a miracle worthy of canonization of a saint.

Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 42 of Contemplating Life.

This week I’ll continue with more stories of my many years of volunteer ministry for Saint Gabriel Catholic Church. This week we discuss the challenge of adjusting to a new pastor and my experience of a miracle.

Standard disclaimers: I’m not trying to evangelize or preach to anyone. I’m just telling my stories. Also, this is my best recollection of events from over 20 years ago. I may have some of the details wrong or out of sequence but this is what I remember… the way I remember it. I believe I served briefly on the Board of Education. They not only covered the management of the school but the CCD Sunday school program as well as RCIA and other adult education programs. Naturally, my interest was in RCIA and adult education.

The biggest transition after leaving the finance committee was that we had a new pastor. A relatively young priest named Father Bill Marks was assigned to St. Gabriel. He was a tall, blonde, handsome man who somewhat resembled a young Robert Redford.

Let me talk about clergy assignments for a moment.

In my earlier faith series of episodes, I talked about getting private tutorship from Father Paul Rehart at St. Christopher Parrish when I was about six years old. He was the youngest of 3 priests assigned to that parish. While having three clergy in one parish was rare, the standard was 2. There would be an experienced priest assigned as pastor and a young priest newly ordained as an associate pastor. One typically did not get to be a pastor until they had served a considerable time as an associate.

As I was growing up in St. Gabriel we always had 2 priests. When I returned to the church in my late 20s we also had 2. Father Paul Landwerlen was the pastor and Father Conrad Camberon was the associate. Father Conrad was eventually moved and assigned as pastor of another parish but I don’t remember which one. We then had Msgr. Fred Easton lived at our parish rectory and celebrated mass but his regular job was as the Judicial Vicar of the Archdiocese. He didn’t have any other duties at the parish except to celebrate the sacraments.

The Catholic Church as a whole is suffering from a severe lack of new priests so the days when you could have 2 or 3 per parish are long gone. These days, one priest might have to serve multiple parishes.

As our story approaches the turn of the century, that shortage is just beginning to be felt. Father Bill Marks had only briefly served as an associate pastor before being assigned full pastor at St. Gabriel. Having Father Bill assigned as pastor so early in his career was quite unusual.

Having listened to Father Paul Landwerelen preach for a decade, I was looking forward to someone with a new perspective. I got something new all right but it wasn’t anything I could use. Father Bill would tell stories that we knew could not have happened to him and he would tell them as if he was the originator of the story. He would say something like, “I was on a flight to Chicago this week to visit my family and…” he would describe an encounter with a famous person. The likelihood that he would encounter such a person on a flight from Indianapolis to Chicago was near zero. I’ve heard that there are magazines that clergy can subscribe to that contain articles and anecdotes that you can use for a homily. But the idea behind it is that you’re supposed to stand up there and say, “I read this article with an inspiring story I want to relate to you.” Instead, he was taking these articles and making himself the center of the story.

Sometimes it was an old joke that I’d heard many times before but rather than say, “Did you hear the one about the guy…” Again he would tell the story as if it had happened to him.

There were other instances in which his duplicitous nature caused me great trouble.

In addition to our weekly bulletin that was printed and distributed after Mass each Sunday, we had a monthly newsletter with feature articles about the activities in the parish. Sometimes it was a thank you article from a parishioner whose spiritual needs have been met perhaps during the loss of a loved one or an extended illness in which parishioners helped out.

There was a woman who came to my RCIA class who converted to Catholicism and wanted to get involved. She went to Father Bill and said that she wanted to be the editor of the monthly newsletter. He suggested she form a small working committee and come up with a proposal on how to revamp the newsletter and make it more useful. She put countless hours into that committee putting together a proposal. Just before she was ready to present it to him, I had a conversation with him and learned that he was going to cancel the monthly newsletter. I later ran into the woman and said something like, “I guess your newsletter ideas didn’t go anywhere. I’m sorry to hear that.”

She said, “What!?”

I told her I had heard the newsletter was being shut down. She was furious. She had not yet presented her proposal to Father Bill. She was livid that her work was for nothing and was dead on arrival. She ended up leaving St. Gabriel and I don’t know but I think she may have left the Catholic Church completely.

There were also major changes he made in the staff. Many of them affected my friend Judy who was the parish secretary and bookkeeper. Under Father Paul, Judy had a great deal of responsibility. In any other parish, I think someone with her responsibilities would have had the title “business manager” which many parishes had. Saint Monica parish had a man named Jim Welter who I greatly admired. His title was business manager and pastoral associate. A pastoral associate is someone who is a priest but deals with many of the spiritual needs of the parish. It’s the kind of thing that an associate pastor used to do. Our pastoral associate was Sister Timothy Kavanaugh. I think that the titles business manager and pastoral associate could have fit Judy considering the work she was doing. I had often been disappointed that Father Paul had not given her a title that more closely reflected what she was doing.

But Father Bill was offended that a lowly secretary was running the parish. The clashes between Judy and this new inexperienced pastor are not mine to tell. I only mention these things here because they so deeply affected me. It hurt me personally that someone who had dedicated so much of her life above and beyond her job description to work for the parish was being so devalued. She eventually resigned and took a position as an administrative assistant at the Church Federation of Greater Indianapolis. I continued to work with her as her favorite computer consultant for several years in that position.

Judy wasn’t the only staff person who was driven out. We had a part-time staff person named Joan who served as Youth Ministry Coordinator. He redefined her job description such that the position required a college degree. She didn’t have one so it was his backdoor way of firing her. When she filed for unemployment, he contested it in court. He said she was free to apply for the new position of course ignoring the fact that he knew she wasn’t qualified under his new standards.

He went into court with his priestly collar on and testified that he didn’t fire her and therefore she didn’t deserve unemployment. The judge practically laughed in his face and ruled against him. When a man of his position testifies under oath to something with his hand on the Bible and the judge rules against him it says a lot about the kind of person he is.

The obvious fabrications from the pulpit, his disrespect for the staff, and his manipulation of volunteers created an atmosphere where it was impossible to respect anything that he said or to receive any sort of spiritual direction from him.

All of the incidents I’ve described and others I haven’t described affected other people. They were people I cared about but they didn’t affect me directly. I kept telling myself he hadn’t done anything to me personally so I shouldn’t react too strongly. But it was becoming more and more difficult to stay involved in the parish I loved.

It came time for the parish to buy a new computer. I consulted with him and others on what they should purchase. I don’t recall the details of the controversy that arose around that purchase. It all boiled down to the question, “Had the computer been ordered or not?” I was told that it had been and had made major preparations to get it set up and configured. I think I recall we were in a time crunch. Again I don’t remember all of the details but I remember having to make a lot of arrangements that turned out to be unnecessary because the new machine had not yet been ordered.

When I confronted him about it, he argued over the sentence, “It has been ordered.” He argued over the meaning of the word “has” which reminded me of Bill Clinton. Clinton had made a statement under oath during a deposition in the sexual harassment civil trial which came out in public after the Lewinsky scandal. Clinton famously said, “It depends on what your definition of the word ‘is’ is.” Clinton was so duplicitous and chose his words so carefully that he could argue over the meaning of the word “is”.

The idea that my pastor, a man of the cloth, and an ordained priest of God in the Holy Roman Catholic Church could be a deceptive, manipulative, bender of words similar to William Jefferson Clinton completely destroyed any hope that I could work with the man in the future.

I tried repeatedly to get an appointment with him to discuss some church business and he kept blowing me off. When I finally did get to sit down with him, he admitted he was avoiding me because he knew how disgruntled I had become. I told him he was making value judgments. I did have important things to discuss with him. After discussing them, I gave him an earful. I told him that I was done working in any administrative capacity.

I told him I couldn’t keep up with his lies and cover for him when he got caught. The only way to avoid that was to avoid having to deal with him at all. Then I wouldn’t have to worry about whether or not something he told me was going to burst someone’s bubble and drive them away from the church when they discovered they couldn’t trust the priest.

I did spend some time crunching budget numbers for the school because the principal there, a wonderful woman named Barbara Shuey, knew my skills as a number cruncher and respected me.

I would keep teaching RCIA because it meant I didn’t have to deal with Father Bill directly. By the way, Father Paul used to teach all but about 8 weeks of the classes throughout the year. RCIA was a high priority for him. I would teach 4 or 5 lessons. A retired history professor from our parish would do two weeks on church history and Sister Timothy would do a lesson on prayer. Father Paul would do nearly 20 lessons to fill out the course. In contrast, we were lucky to get Father Bill to teach 4 or 5 lessons all year. It just wasn’t his priority. So I could continue to do nothing for the church but teach and avoid having to deal directly with him.

I would go to Mass on Sunday and sit through his lies from the pulpit and hate every minute of it. I seriously considered moving to a different parish. St. Christopher in Speedway and St. Michael’s on 30th St. are almost the same distance from my house in St. Gabriel. The problem was, that I attended Mass with my mother, and although she was aware of everything that was going on and disturbed by it, I don’t believe she would change parishes. As upset as she was about the situation, she was in the mode where I had been in that he hadn’t done anything to her personally.

Both my mother and I were devoted to the church and our parish. It wasn’t like we had to be good friends with the pastor as we had been with Father Paul. But there are limits to what we can tolerate.

I also had to consider what kind of message it would send to my students if I wasn’t attending Mass at Saint Gabriel. Here I am saying, “Come join this Church but I can’t stand being here so I’m going elsewhere.” I didn’t know was there would be a teaching opportunity for me at St. Christopher or St. Michael.

As I was dealing with all of this, we had an outside guest speaker come to RCIA. It was a nun from the Sisters of Providence St. Mary of the Woods. They are an order of religious sisters based out of Terre Haute Indiana about 70 miles west of Indianapolis. Their special ministry was as teachers. They had been providing teachers to Catholic schools around central Indiana for over a century. They founded and ran St. Mary of the Woods College. It was an all-girls institution again focused on training educators whether they were vowed religious sisters or not. I had attended a couple of weekend seminars there and it was a very nice facility.

This sister, I’m sorry I forgot her name, was giving a talk about the founder of their order Mother Théodore Guérin who had recently been beatified by Pope John Paul II. This is the final step before becoming canonized as an official Saint of the Catholic Church. The speaker was the nun who was in charge of the program to try to get their matriarch declared a saint.

Mother Guérin was born Anne-Thérèse Guérin in France in 1798. She entered the convent in 1823 and took the name Sister Saint Theodore. In 1840, at the request of the Bishop of Vincennes Indiana, a group of sisters from France led by Sister Theodore came to Vincennes to found a school and convent and to assist with the influx of Catholic immigrants to the area. In those days, Vincennes was the capital of Indiana. This was before the founding of Indianapolis and its establishment as the state capital.

They arrived in the small village known as St. Mary of the Woods and in a small log cabin founded a convent and school that later grew into the institution it is today. Sister Theodore was their Mother Superior.

Apparently, Mother Guérin was quite a character. She was known to hang out in town and engage in intellectual debates with the movers and shakers of the community discussing religion, politics, philosophy, or whatever topic and she could hold her own with the best of them.

Although she was there at the invitation of the Bishop, he tried to micromanage her and interfere in the way that she ran the convent and the school. When she returned to France briefly on a fundraising mission, he tried to hold an election in her absence to have her replaced as Mother Superior. She was unanimously elected to retain the post by her community.

At one point, she was so upset with the interference from the Bishop that she wrote a letter to the Bishop of Detroit and asked if he would sponsor their move to his area. He wrote back rejecting the request and told her to stay faithful and that God would provide. After that, the Bishop of Vincennes never interfered with her again. Probably the Detroit Bishop wrote him a nasty letter telling him to stay the hell out of her way and let her run her convent or he would end up losing them altogether.

Mother Théodore Guérin died in 1856 at age 57.

Under the rules of the Church, one cannot be considered for sainthood until 50 years after their death although there have been exceptions made. In 1907, a process was begun to have her considered for canonization as a saint. To be declared a saint, one has to have two miracles attributed to them. The first was in 1908. One of the sisters in her community had breast cancer and other medical issues including an abdominal tumor and a neurological problem that affected the use of her arms. One evening she prayed at the crypt of Mother Théodore Guérin not for herself but for another sister who was ill. The next day, she regained the use of her arms, her abdominal pain disappeared, the cancer never spread and she lived into her 80s. They never said what happened to the woman she was actually praying for. Let’s hope she recovered as well.

Once you have one miracle attributed to you, can be “beatified” which is a step along the way to becoming a saint. The sister who visited us talked about going to Rome for the beatification ceremony and how beautiful it was. After beatification, you earned the title “Blessed”.

I was greatly inspired by the story of this amazing woman who dedicated her life to God and to education. She also had clashes with clergy that nearly drove her away from her ministry as a teacher. I could identify with that situation. My primary ministry for the church was as a teacher and I was worried that my troublesome clergy was going to make it impossible for me to continue that ministry just as it had happened with Mother Guérin.

That night I went home and prayed to Blessed Mother Théodore Guérin. I told her, “You know what it’s like to try to teach the Word of God under the authority of a troublesome member of the clergy. Yet you persisted and succeeded. Mother Théodore… give me the strength to endure this challenge the way that you endured your challenges.”

The following week it was my turn to teach. Throughout the lesson, I kept thinking that this might be the last time I would teach for Saint Gabriel and perhaps the last time I would teach forever if I could not find a position in another parish.

When I returned home from class that night, my mom had a huge smile on her face. “I’ve got some juicy gossip for you.”

“What is it?”

“Father Paul heard that they are moving Father Bill to a new parish. He will be leaving in just a few months.”

Thank you Blessed Mother Théodore Guérin. All I asked for was the strength to endure. I would never have had the gall to pray that the man goes away. But that prayer was answered. He was leaving my life for good. I could continue to serve my parish as I had been doing for many years.

I don’t recall exactly how long Father Bill was assigned to our parish but I think it was under two years.

We would be getting a new pastor. With new challenges. Like all priests in my life, I had some serious disagreements. But things were much much better after that.

Overall, I taught RCIA classes for 31 straight years.

I wrote a letter to the sister from St. Mary of the Woods who had come to our parish to tell us about Blessed Mother Théodore Guérin. I told her how untenable things had become under my pastor. And how I had prayed to Mother Guérin not for a solution to my problem but for the strength to endure it. And I told her that my troublesome pastor was leaving. I said I didn’t know if it was the kind of thing that would count as the second miracle to get her matriarch canonized but I had no doubts whatsoever that I had my own personal miracle through the intercession of Blessed Mother Théodore Guérin.

The cause for canonization finally succeeded.

The second miracle occurred in January 2001 when a maintenance man who worked at the college wandered into the chapel attracted by sacred music. He was suffering from an eye condition that was going to require surgery. He prayed that the crypt of Mother Guérin and awoke the next day to find that his vision was much clearer. He no longer needed complicated eye surgery and doctors were at a loss to explain how his condition resolved itself.

She was canonized as Saint Theodora Guérin in 2006 and at the time was only the third American Saint.

Father Bill was assigned a new parish in southeastern Indiana just across the border from Cincinnati. I pray from time to time that he is doing well and is growing in experience as a priest and a pastor.

I could continue to talk about my work under our next pastor but I think it’s time to take a break from the religious topics. I know not all of my audience is that interested in this area of my stories. Next week, we go to college. I will talk about my nine semesters at IUPUI earning a BS degree in computer science and I will probably follow up with the two years I was employed as a computer programmer starting with my eighth semester in college.

If you find this podcast educational, entertaining, enlightening, or even inspiring, consider sponsoring me on Patreon for just $5 per month. You will get early access to the podcast and other exclusive content. Although I have some financial struggles, I’m not really in this for money. Still, every little bit helps.

Many thanks to my financial supporters. Your support pays for the writing seminar I attend and other things. But most of all it shows how much you care and appreciate what I’m doing. Your support means more to me than words can express.

Even if you cannot provide financial support. Please, please, please post the links and share this podcast on social media so that I can grow my audience. I just want more people to be able to hear my stories.

All of my back episodes are available and I encourage you to check them out if you’re new to this podcast. If you have any comments, questions, or other feedback please feel free to comment on any of the platforms where you find this podcast.

I will see you next week as we continue contemplating life. Until then, fly safe.

In this episode, I continue a series of episodes about my life of ministry in my local Catholic Church. I discuss more work on the church finance committee and talk about my relationship with my pastor and good friend Father Paul Landwerlen.

Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 41 of Contemplating Life.

This week I’ll continue with more stories of my many years of volunteer ministry for Saint Gabriel Catholic Church continuing with stories from my eight years serving on the finance committee and later on the Parish Pastoral Council.

Standard disclaimers: I’m not trying to evangelize or preach to anyone. I’m just telling my stories. Also, this is my best recollection of events from over 30 years ago. I may have some of the details wrong or out of sequence but this is what I remember… the way I remember it.

As you’ve seen in these past few episodes, the work on the finance committee at Saint Gabriel was intense but it built a camaraderie among us. We worked hard but we had a good time as well often joking around with one another. One of my fondest memories was a discussion in which we were trying to decide how much to increase a particular line item. Should it be 10% or 11%? I don’t recall if it was me or a committee member named Julie who suggested 11% was a better number. Someone asked why. Julie and I looked at each other and grinned and simultaneously said, “Because it’s 1 more.” And then we both burst into laughter hysterically at the reference to the classic film “Spinal Tap”. Neither of us had any idea that we were fans of the movie before that day. The other committee members looked at us like we were crazy and wanted to know what was so funny. We said, “Spinal Tap.” They still had no idea what we were talking about. By the way, if you don’t know what I’m talking about, I included a YouTube clip in the description.

We also very much enjoyed our December meeting because that was our annual Christmas party. We would dispense with our business as quickly as possible then bring out the snacks, turn on the Christmas music, open a bottle of wine, and have a really good time. Larry, the chairman of the committee, always brought a really great cheese ball made by his wife. Somehow that started a tradition that the chairman brought the cheese ball. When I was the chairman, they liked my mom’s recipe almost as well as the one made by Larry’s wife.

As much fun as we had, there were still times when controversies arose and differences had to be worked out.

The Parish Pastoral Council was governed by a set of bylaws. We loosely followed the normal parliamentary procedure of making a motion, having a second, and discussion followed by a vote. The strange thing was that we had to find what we called “consensus”. The theological theory was that God has a plan for us and it’s our job to prayerfully discern that plan and implement it. And there can be no division among us. So consensus in essence meant a unanimous vote on everything. If we are really guided by the Holy Spirit there can be no division among us. The Holy Spirit guides each of us differently so maybe that one dissenting voice has the right answer.

In practice, what we said was, “You don’t have to totally agree with it 100%. But you have to be able to live with it.” Council members were strongly encouraged to sort of go with the flow and side with the majority. I’m not saying rubberstamp whatever we brought in. You could raise objections and often people did. The bottom line was that one individual had the power to block, veto, or essentially filibuster anything.

On one occasion, when I was the finance chairman there was a guy named John on the pastoral Council. John was the finance chairman before me so we had worked together for a couple of years. We were pretty good friends. He objected to the budget which sort of pissed me off because he knew the kind of work that had gone into it having been in our position before. We spent the entire evening listening to his objections, trying to understand his concerns, and to address them. The evening ended with an impasse. We were all sent home to pray over it and come back again in a week.

The finance committee met in a special meeting a few days later to see if we could come up with a proposal that would address John’s concerns. I made a little speech which got me in some hot water. I really screwed it up. I intended to speak in John’s defense but I started out really poorly. I really regretted it. Rather than starting out saying, “I want to defend John but…” instead I said, “I want to say a few things about John. I like the guy but he can be a real pain in the ass…”

Before I could finish my sentence, Father Paul tried to stop me. I insisted on continuing and said, “But I’m not here to criticize him. I’m here to empathize in support him. I’m a pain in the ass also. As much as he frustrates me. I have to defend him because I want the right to be the same kind of pain in the ass as he is.”

When we came back for the second meeting, John didn’t show up. The budget passed through consensus without him. I don’t recall if we made adjustments or if it passed in its original form. He later explained he wasn’t happy with it. But he could live with it. And that was the definition of consensus. You had to be able to live with it.

As I mentioned previously, the chairman of the finance committee automatically had a seat on the parish council as part of their job. Somewhere along the way, they amended the bylaws and said the chairman of the finance committee could not participate in the consensus on budget issues. The finance chairman was otherwise allowed to participate in consensus on non-budgetary matters just like any other council member. They thought that the finance chairman would be biased in favor of the budget that they had worked so hard to present. I was always proud of the work we did but I recognize that we serve at the pleasure of the Council.

I was offended by the idea even before I was the chairman. Did that mean that a school board representative also should not participate because the school budget was on the line? That was a big, big line item. Or what if you represented the maintenance committee? Did they not also have a vested interest in the budget? Even if you’re a member at large and didn’t have a specific role on the Council, everyone there had their own priorities.

My concern was, why would you exclude this veto power from the one person in the room who was the most knowledgeable about the budget? If the Council voted to change the budget in a way that could be significantly detrimental to the financial status of the parish, the chairman of the finance committee would be the one person in the room who would be most likely to know that and to raise concerns about it. The idea that their opinion should not count in the final consensus seemed completely idiotic to me.

After I was no longer on the finance committee but was serving on the parish council for other reasons, I tried to get them to reverse that policy but I was unsuccessful.

I want to conclude this series were some comments about my dear friend Father Paul Landwerlen who was our pastor throughout this time. I’ve mentioned him several times in this series and in my previous faith series in which I talked about my return to the church after a nearly 9-year absence.

Father Paul and I had a great working relationship and I always felt that he respected me and I deeply respect him to this day. But we both got on each other’s nerves on several occasions as you’ve already seen.

One time there was controversy about someone on the school staff doing some bad paperwork on finances. There wasn’t anything nefarious going on. Nobody was dipping into the till. It’s just the record-keeping sucked. Everything didn’t always balance. It was just a procedural problem.

Father met with the person in question to try to work things out but he took John, who was the finance chairperson at the time, with him. Word got out about the meeting. Several school people came to various finance members and asked, “Why is the finance committee involved in a private personnel matter?” Most of us on the committee had no idea what was going on. We didn’t even know about the meeting. At the next finance meeting several of us complained why we were out of the loop on this issue. Father explained it was a staff issue and had nothing to do with our committee. Father seemed upset that we were making a big deal out of this. In his mind, it was none of our business. John simply said, “Father asked me to be there so I went.” I wasn’t upset with him. He was just doing what the boss asked.

So I asked Father, “Then why did you take John our chairman to the meeting with you? He is the public face of the committee. When you take him to a meeting you’re taking this committee. Sure he knows our procedures and was probably a useful resource in straightening things out. Still, either this was a private internal manner that should not have involved anyone from the committee, especially the chairman who everyone sees as the representative of the committee, or it was the work of the committee. We all needed to be at least aware of what was going on and not hear it secondhand and get the 3rd° from people what to know why we’re meddling.”

As I was speaking, Father had a nasty scowl on his face because I was continuing to complain about something he didn’t want to discuss any further. When I finished, his expression changed. He sort of raised his eyebrows and then cracked a grin. Finally, he said, “Uhh… you’re right. Now I get it. He is the public face of the finance committee. Now I get it. I probably should not have gotten him involved.”

“That satisfies me,” I said. The rest of the committee seemed satisfied as well. One of the other committee members, a woman named Betty, used to pick me up at my house in my van to go to the meeting and take me home afterward. After the meeting that night when she brought me home, she gave me a kiss on the cheek and said, “I’ve never felt closer to you than I did tonight.” She was glad I raised a stink.

The point of the story though is not that I had this great victory in a disagreement with Father Paul. It was that most of the time, if not always, Father really listened to what I and others said when we complained. We didn’t win them all. I’m sure that I and many others frustrated the hell out of him on occasion. And he frustrated the hell out of me. But he would listen when you pinned him down and if you could make a good argument, you could win one now and then. That’s why I love the man so much. I didn’t need to win every argument but I needed to know that my opinion mattered and it did matter to him.

I’ve mentioned before that I taught classes for our RCIA inquiry program for new converts. Father trusted me with that responsibility. I would also attend most of the classes that he taught and afterward, the RCIA team which consisted of Father, me, Judy, my mother, and Sister Timothy would go out to Denny’s after class for a late-night cup of coffee and some snacks. On the evening as we didn’t go out to Denny’s we would generally hang out at church for a while to talk about how the class went or just socialize.

It was on those occasions after class Father and I would have our share of theological debates as well. You may recall way back in Episode 6, I had been asking priests tricky theological questions since I was six years old so I guess this was just an extension of that.

A lot of it had to do with the nature of miracles in the relationship between religion and science. Science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke famously said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” The same is true for theological miracles that seem magical. It might just be science we don’t understand it. We would debate the nature of miracles.

One time we had a debate about the “Star Trek The Next Generation” episode “Who Watches the Watchers?” season 3 episode 4. We watched that episode together.

The most interesting part of the discussions was the time that I speculatively asked him one time, “What if someday they scientifically proved that Jesus rose from the dead by a completely explainable scientific method? Theologically, Jesus was fully human and completely suppressed his divinity while here on earth so he could fully embrace the human condition as an example for us. Theoretically, anything that Jesus did, if we had strong enough faith we could do as well.

And because we are told that someday we will rise as well, what if science proved that under the proper circumstances, any of us could rise from the dead by the same method that Jesus used?” My point was that I think it would not diminish its miraculous nature. Just because there is a scientific explanation, does not for me mean that God is not involved. For me, science is the mechanism by which God does everything. Science is the study of the things God did.

Father’s response was, ”If you scientifically proved how the resurrection worked, I would hang up my collar and walk away.” I guess he needs his miracles to be mysterious in order to be miraculous.

Father and I spent other social time together over the years. Sometimes we would hang out at Judy’s and watch football or movies. We would often gather at her house on Good Friday and re-watch “Jesus Christ Superstar” over and over every year. He would celebrate Christmas Eve at our house for many years and would visit us at our lakeside cabin in Brown County about an hour south of here.

But sadly, all good things come to an end. Priests are typically appointed to serve at a particular parish for a term of six years and most of the time that is extended for another six years. It is quite common to rotate them to a new place after that. He served at St. Gabriel from the summer of 1982 until the summer of 1996 so he exceeded the typical 12-year term.

There were people in the parish who disliked him greatly. It eventually reached the point where it was apparent that he needed to move on and we needed fresh blood. As much as I was going to miss him and as much as I admired and respected him, I also had the sense that he had taught me everything that he could teach me. I needed a fresh perspective if I was going to continue to grow spiritually. The Archbishop assigned him to St. Vincent Depaul Parish in Shelbyville about 45 minutes southeast of here. He served there for many years and then took the mandatory retirement at age 70. In January, he will celebrate his 95th birthday and is still going strong.

Because there is a severe shortage of priests, he serves as a substitute priest in parishes all over the Archdiocese so he is still celebrating Mass in front of some congregation almost every Sunday even though he doesn’t have any administrative duties any longer.

Overall Father Paul Landwerlen is a great spiritual director and a great pastor, and he remains a good friend to this day. I’m very blessed to have him in my life.

We were assigned a new priest who was quite young. It was his first assignment as pastor. Next week we will talk about that experience and how it nearly drove me away from Saint Gabriel Parish. On the bright side, I will tell the story of how I experienced what I believe to be a genuine miracle worthy of the canonization of a saint.

If you find this podcast educational, entertaining, enlightening, or even inspiring, consider sponsoring me on Patreon for just $5 per month. You will get early access to the podcast and other exclusive content. Although I have some financial struggles, I’m not really in this for money. Still, every little bit helps.

Many thanks to my financial supporters. Your support pays for the writing seminar I attend and other things. But most of all it shows how much you care and appreciate what I’m doing. Your support means more to me than words can express.

Even if you cannot provide financial support. Please, please, please post the links and share this podcast on social media so that I can grow my audience. I just want more people to be able to hear my stories.

All of my back episodes are available and I encourage you to check them out if you’re new to this podcast. If you have any comments, questions, or other feedback please feel free to comment on any of the platforms where you find this podcast.

I will see you next week as we continue contemplating life. Until then, fly safe.

In this episode, I continue a series of episodes about my life of ministry in my local Catholic Church. We talk about the struggles of maintaining a budget in a Catholic parish in the various strategies we used to meet those challenges.

Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 40 of Contemplating Life.

This week I will continue my story of my many years of volunteer ministry for Saint Gabriel Church continuing with stories from my eight years serving on the finance committee.

Standard disclaimers: I’m not trying to evangelize or preach to anyone. I’m just telling my stories. Also, this is my best recollection of events from 40 years ago. I may have some of the details wrong or out of sequence but this is what I remember… the way I remember it.

It’s difficult to remember what happened in what order when you’re talking about things nearly 40 years ago. This week I have two different stories and I don’t recall when these events occurred or what order. Some of it could’ve been before events I’ve already described in previous episodes. I don’t remember the order of these two separate stories I want to tell this week.

Like last week’s episode, it’s a bit of a best-of-times and worst-of-times story. Let’s get the bad one out of the way first and try to end on a high note.

As I mentioned a couple of episodes ago, the plan to reinstate tuition for Catholic families was not well received but it did solve our immediate budget crisis and saved us from having to close the school.

Although tithing had worked wonders for us initially, there was a certain percentage of the population that just wouldn’t buy into it so the dramatic increases we had experienced tended to flatten out. I don’t think many people gave up on tithing but we just weren’t getting new converts.

There was pressure to do more fundraising. My belief was that any fundraising we did should be for particular projects and not for ordinary operating expenses. Part of the promise of tithing was that we wouldn’t do other fundraising. That promise eventually faded away. The school wanted to further subsidize its income and started something called “Market Day” where you could order frozen food from some service. They would deliver it to the school and you could pick it up once a month. They also sold trash bags after Mass. School volunteers handled all of the logistics of these programs.

I was a bit uncomfortable with it. I seem to recall Jesus got pretty pissed one time about all of the people selling things in the temple and he threw them out. At least this just took place in the school cafeteria and not the actual church sanctuary. All of this was mostly harmless but I would’ve preferred people do their shopping at the store probably at better prices and put the savings in the collection plate. But I didn’t feel strongly enough to raise a stink about it.

I did raise a stink about other things.

I was very upset about how aggressively we pushed people to increase their financial pledges. The standard philosophy of fundraising is that you put your efforts into the big donors because they are the only ones who are going to make or break your budget. You do a minor amount of effort courting smaller donors because they are not going to help anyway. That might work for some big fundraising organizations like a United Way agency where your corporate sponsors are your bread-and-butter and the five-dollar donors help a little. Or perhaps if you are trying to raise big dollars for a capital campaign I can see that is an appropriate strategy. It’s one we used many years later for capital campaigns when we raised money to renovate the church. More on that in future episodes.

But when it came to ordinary income in the Sunday collection, I STRONGLY objected to pushing the large donors and ignoring the little guys. The reason was, our big donors were already tithing. If we kept coming at them more and more, all we were going to do was alienate them.

I wanted to focus on the people who were not tithing. We would have people get up at Mass and give a witness talk about how using tithing and putting God first in their finances had really helped them. I wanted to see everyone have those benefits. We were supposed to be preaching Gospel values and not just fundraising.

I got so emotionally caught up in the arguments over fundraising philosophy that I nearly had a nervous breakdown. The politics and greed were too much for me. I needed to get back to more spiritually-based activities. I signed up to go back on the team for Christ Renews His Parish renewal retreat for a second time.

One of the lessons that I used to teach in my inquiry classes was about the Old Testament prophets. They weren’t just about predicting the future. Their primary responsibility was to be God’s spokesperson and to call people back to God when they went astray. They were almost always persecuted for that. I felt like I was being called to be a prophet. People needed to understand that we were drifting away from spiritually-based fundraising. I was failing at that job and I felt like I was being persecuted for my views.

My entire personality was changing. I was becoming extremely withdrawn and shutting people out. I was bitter and angry all the time. I knew that I was withdrawing. I knew that that was bad for me. I knew it was bad for the people around me. And I didn’t care. I was just too depressed.

The definition of a mortal sin is when you do something wrong, you know it is wrong, and you do it anyway. It also has to be a serious offense. I don’t think going into a deep emotional withdrawal in a self-destructive way necessarily rose to the level of mortal sin. I didn’t steal money or kill anybody or anything. But I certainly was aware that what I was doing was self-destructive and I didn’t care and I did it anyway. So it’s the closest I’ve ever come to a mortal sin.

The thing that brought me out of the self-destructive cycle was when I realized it was hurting the people around me. I was cutting myself off, isolating myself, and pushing people away. I thought about the end of the classic Pink Floyd album “The Wall”. It’s a semiautobiographical story by Roger Waters about how he shut the world out. The final song called “Outside the Wall” goes…

I could see people pounding on my wall trying to pull me out of that situation. And so I had to drag myself out. Like Roger Waters, I had to tear down the wall.

I suddenly realized that if I was in such a personal mess, I really didn’t have anything to give as a member of another CRHP renewal team. I had signed up for the wrong reasons. On the evening that I was supposed to be at a team meeting discerning what job I would take on in the team, I didn’t go to the meeting. Instead, I tracked down Monsignor Fred and I went to confession.

After confession, I joined the team meeting late and told them I was withdrawing from the team. I explained that I joined for all the wrong reasons and that I needed to take care of my personal demons before I could have anything to give of myself to the team or the people who would come to our renewal.

The team was understanding. Father Paul… not so much so. He was a bit upset with me. They barely had enough people to form the team. Without me, they were going to be a man short and someone would have to double up on duties. Trust me, if I had stayed… They still would’ve been a man short. I was not in a state where I could contribute in a positive way. My first trip through the renewal program was emotionally and physically draining on me. I never would’ve made it through a second one.

Eventually, I simply resigned myself to the idea that I wasn’t getting through to the people I wanted to. I was powerless to do anything about it. They were making mistakes and they were going to have to deal with the consequences. It was going to be difficult not to say, “I told you so” when the strategy failed or backfired. I just kept thinking of how the prophets felt when they preached and no one listened to them. How sad it must’ve been to see the people they loved fail to heed warnings. There’s no pleasure in being right under such circumstances.

The policies I opposed did ultimately fail. There was negative backlash as I predicted. I took no pleasure in being right.

So, I think that was the lowest point in my many years of ministry. But there were other successes to celebrate. Here’s another story about the finance committee that’s a little more upbeat.

One day the finance committee was meeting on a Saturday afternoon to stuff envelopes for financial statements. It was that complicated procedure I described a couple of episodes ago where we had to send different letters to different groups of people based on whether or not they were a school family and whether or not they had met their pledge. While we were doing it we brainstormed about strategies for solving our financial difficulties.

As I explained a couple of episodes ago, my best efforts to project our income were unsuccessful. Trying to figure out how much money we could spend in a given year was a challenge we weren’t meeting. One of our members, a very dedicated and gregarious guy named Tom, said, “What we need is a sugar daddy who will come along and give us one year’s worth of income. Then we would know how much money we had to spend that year. The following year, we would have banked all of our income and we would know how much we had to spend for the following year.” Unfortunately, none of us knew any filthy rich people who could do that. Our annual ordinary income in those days needed to be about $600,000 per year.

It was several days later thinking about Tom’s proposal that I realized how brilliant it was. He had the right strategy but he overcomplicated the solution.

We didn’t need a sugar daddy to kickstart the process.

The core of the idea that Tom proposed was to base this year’s expenses on last year’s income. All we had to do was project a 0% increase. We could still do that. It would be tough the first year because we had been counting on those increases. But if we held the line and counted on a 0% increase, we could build the budget on that. We were already basing school budgets on the 12-month rolling average ending February 28. Let’s take that number with no projected increase and use it as our income for the following year.

There’s an old adage, I’m not sure if it’s actually in Scripture or not, but it goes, “Don’t tempt God to perform a miracle.” That’s what we were doing when we proposed budgets with income increases. Let’s say for example our rolling average through February was $600,000. That’s the amount of money that God gave us during a 12-month period. So that must be how much he expects us to spend during 12 months. So use that as the income figure for the following fiscal year. If by chance, we get more than that, wonderful. Spend it next year. The only problem will happen if our income decreases and if it does, we make some midyear adjustments to expenses. We were doing that anyway when we didn’t meet our targeted income.

I really liked the idea because it was theologically based and I thought I could sell Father Paul on it. That’s what he liked about tithing. It wasn’t purely a fundraising strategy. Tithing is a theological principle based on the idea that everything you have comes from God and you give back 10% in gratitude. My plan says it’s sacrilegious to say, “We don’t have enough money.” God gives you everything you need. So if the budget didn’t balance, it’s something we’re doing wrong. You can’t say, “We don’t have enough.” That’s saying, “God didn’t take care of us.”

So that means either our spending priorities were wrong or we weren’t working hard enough to explain to people the value they were receiving for their donations. It was our fault that the budget didn’t work– not God’s.

The committee bought my idea. Tom was a strong supporter because it was really his proposal, to begin with. I just had the insight that we didn’t need a rich person to kickstart the program.

For the last couple of years that I was on the finance committee, that was the principle that we used going forward. No projected increase in income. If it goes up, spend it next year.

There was a catch… One that I didn’t see. But fortunately, it was a catch in our favor.

I hate to bog you down with numbers especially since these are hypothetical and I don’t remember the real figures but I don’t know any other way to explain the hidden positive consequence of this plan.

Let’s say that our running income from 1985 was $600,000. We base our 1986 budget on that amount. Now presume it goes up $10,000. So in 1986 we actually took in $610,000 instead of the $600,000 the year before. So we base our 1987 budget on $610,000. Let’s say that in 1987, the income went up another 10K so our 1988 budget is based on $620,000.

In 1986 we spent 600,000 but took in 610,000. In 1987 we spent 610,000 but took in 620,000. We end up with $10,000 extra in the bank each time the income goes up. The original idea was, “If it goes up… we’ll spend it next year.” But we didn’t. We kept basing next year’s expenses on this year’s income and I didn’t realize we would be banking that extra money.

Probably what we should have done when it went up by $10,000 in 1986, Our 1987 budget should have been $620,000. That is the $610,000 that we expected to continue to get plus the $10,000 windfall that we got through the grace of God.

When the money finally started getting significant, and we realized we had this extra cash lying around we began to use it for some long overdue maintenance projects. We started talking about our capital needs. We formed a special committee. I think it was called something like the “capital planning committee” or something like that. Their goal was to look at all of our big-budget capital needs and try to prioritize them. As I mentioned previously, there were maintenance projects that had been deferred year after year and we were only doing the bare minimum.

Windows needed to be repaired and replaced. The parking lot needed resealed and restriped. My mother came up with an idea for remodeling part of one of the downstairs restrooms into a handicapped restroom. All of these projects were funded out of this unspent increase which was an unforeseen side effect of our zero increase budgeting.

The only problem would come if we reached a year if our income decreased year-over-year. So it probably would’ve been a good idea to keep a little of that cash in reserve especially if that income graph flattened out too much. Because we were keeping a 12-month running total continuously, I think we would have seen it starting to flatten out and could’ve held back some of that windfall in the event that it did actually decrease.

So Tom had a brilliant idea. We needed a sugar daddy.

It turns out we had one all along.

His name was Jesus.

Next week we will continue telling stories of my days serving on my parish finance committee.

If you find this podcast educational, entertaining, enlightening, or even inspiring, consider sponsoring me on Patreon for just $5 per month. You will get early access to the podcast and any other benefits I might come up with down the road. Although I have some financial struggles, I’m not really in this for money. Still, every little bit helps.

Many thanks to my financial supporters. Your support pays for the writing seminar I attend and other things. But most of all it shows how much you care and appreciate what I’m doing. Your support means more to me than words can express.

Even if you cannot provide financial support. Please, please, please post the links and share this podcast on social media so that I can grow my audience.

All of my back episodes are available and I encourage you to check them out if you’re new to this podcast. If you have any comments, questions, or other feedback please feel free to comment on any of the platforms where you find this podcast.

I will see you next week as we continue contemplating life. Until then, fly safe

In this episode, I continue a series of episodes about my life of ministry in my local Catholic Church. We talk about the struggles of maintaining a budget in a Catholic parish in the various strategies we used to meet those challenges.

Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 39 of Contemplating Life.

This week I will continue my story of my many years of volunteer ministry for Saint Gabriel Church.

Standard disclaimers: I’m not trying to evangelize or preach to anyone. I’m just telling my stories. Also, this is my best recollection of events from 40 years ago. I may have some of the details wrong or out of sequence but this is what I remember the way I remember it. Now on with the story…

As I mentioned before, some of my volunteer activities for the church, especially regarding my computing skills, were before I made the decision to return to the church. In previous episodes, I chronicled how I drifted away from the church and what brought me back. Once I was back attending mass regularly and attempting to grow spiritually and deal with my remaining doubts, volunteering for the church became a huge part of that process.

One of the first spiritual growth opportunities I availed myself was attending the Christ Renews His Parish weekend retreat. We used the acronym CRHP but pronounced it “chirp”. The goal of that program is not only to renew spiritually but to motivate you to become actively involved in the church. After attending the weekend retreat, you begin attending a series of weekly meetings of discernment and formation. You try to discern what role you will play in the parish or as we called it “What is your ministry?” Although it isn’t mandatory, nearly everyone who goes through the process begins forming a team that will present the program to a new group of parishioners six months later.

I someday may do an episode about that experience but for now, I just bring it up to explain that the program worked on me because I felt a very strong motivation to become as involved in the parish as I possibly could. Of course, much of this was an extension of my sense of volunteerism which we have discussed extensively. It’s just that now I was spending my volunteer time for the church and not for other secular activities.

I believe it was about a year or so after I returned to the church that there was a vacancy on the Finance Committee and I lobbied hard to fill it. I was already heavily involved in the finance of the parish because I was helping train people how to use spreadsheets and accounting software. I was very happy when I received an appointment to the committee.

The committee consisted of about six or seven people. The chairman of the committee automatically was appointed to the Parish Council. We also had a Board of Education and they had a representative on the Finance Committee as well. Our pastor, Father Paul attended every meeting. The parish bookkeeper also attended as part of their job.

Shortly before I joined the committee, my friend Judy was hired as the parish bookkeeper. She was the one who had invited me to the Easter Vigil service which led me on my journey back to the church. Judy and I spent countless hours together working on budgets for many years.

The church and the entire archdiocese operated on a fiscal year that ran from July 1 through June 30. This was convenient because the largest item in the budget was our subsidy to our parish elementary school. They had a budget of their own that they prepared. Having the fiscal year start and stop in the summer worked well with the school year schedule.

One of the problems with the system was that we had these two entities – the church and the school, preparing budgets that were dependent upon one another. It was a question of who went first. Did the parish need to hear from the school how much money it needed as a subsidy? Or did the school need to know how much money the parish was going to give it? The parish could not determine what it could afford until it made its overall budget.

There was also a great tension between those who supported the school as being absolutely essential to our parish life versus those who thought that the school represented the tail wagging the dog. There was resentment that the school took too much of our resources that could’ve been used for other ministries. And there was resentment on the other side that not everyone felt that the school was our top priority.

Our pastor, Father Paul, hated having to stand in the pulpit and beg for money. That wasn’t what the pulpit was for. It was for preaching the Word of God. Then he heard about the program which promoted tithing. As I mentioned in a previous episode, that was the scripturally based principle that everything you have is a gift from God, and in thanksgiving for that blessing, you give 10% back to the church. Even if you have financial troubles of your own, we encourage people to put God first in their finances. You were encouraged to take a leap of faith. If 10% was completely out of the question, pick a percentage of your income as close to 10% as you could manage and stick to it.

Father brought in a priest from somewhere else that had already implemented the tithing program. He preached every Mass to start the process and then Father took it from there.

After the program had been running, he would recruit ordinary parishioners to speak at Mass to give witness testimony about how tithing and putting God first in their finances had worked wonders for them.

It did work. We worked on both the parish and the personal level.

Our parishioners told inspiring true stories of how putting God first in their finances had reaped its rewards in their lives. People who were facing serious financial difficulties took a leap of faith, adopted tithing, and saw many blessings come their way.

We saw a significant increase in our Sunday income. I think it was a combination of Father Paul preaching tithing and the renewed dedication of parishioners who had attended the CHRP program. At one point, we were able to put a much-needed new roof on the school at a cost of about $90,000 without having to add to our mortgage.

Because we were seeing steady increases in our income, we couldn’t resist the temptation to count on those increases. We would prepare our expense budget and then see how much money we needed to cover that. If it required an 8, 9, or 10% increase in our income, it was easier to just plug that number as a goal on the income side and hope that tithing and Parish renewal continued to produce those results.

Our finances were in such solid shape for a few years that we completely eliminated school tuition for active Catholic families. By the way, on several occasions, I’ve talked about tuition for active Catholic families. We also had a good number of students whose families paid full tuition because they were not Catholic at all. They just wanted their kids to go to a quality private school. Or perhaps they were inactive Catholics who were willing to pay full price.

About the second or third year of our tithing program, I did an extensive analysis of our income trends. I created a graph showing our 12-month rolling average of contributions. We had to use rolling averages in all of our estimates because our contributions were seasonal. People tended to give more during the winter months especially right before the end of the tax year and they gave less during the summer because they were often gone on vacation or not motivated to contribute when school was out.

My projections showed a clear trend of growth of approximately 10% per year. For once, we did the budget the way you’re supposed to. We made a credible estimate of our income and then built an expense budget based on it. This was in contrast to the previous way in which we computed our expenses and then plugged in a magic number to cover that and hoped and prayed we could meet that income target.

When we presented the budget to the parish council, many of the members were skeptical that we could meet such a goal. I tried to explain to them, supported by my graphs and spreadsheets, that for once we had done it the right way. When a council member named Craig questioned the projected income I tried to explain that if they wanted us to lower that projection, we would have to redo the budget to keep it a balance. That’s what I said. But I concluded with, “If that’s not our income number the budget won’t balance.”

Craig became irate and accused us of picking a number out of thin air just to make the budget balance. That’s what we had been doing for years. The one year that we didn’t do that, we got accused of doing that.

I don’t recall if they ended up accepting our projections or if we had to go back to the drawing board and recompute the budget based on a smaller number. What I do recall distinctly was that the projections that I had spent countless hours producing did not come true. The big bump that we had gained by introducing tithing had run its course. The inflation of the late 70s was putting pressure on everyone’s finances. Those who had brought into the concept of tithing were remaining faithful to it but we were getting no new converts to the concept. Almost immediately after approving the budget, that graph of the 12-month rolling average income began to flatten out.

So, if our income did not continue to grow at the rate it was growing, we would have to make cuts to expenses. But where? There was very little in our budget that was discretionary. The problem was similar to the problems faced by government budgets and I suppose any other large entity. A huge percentage of our expenses are fixed. Clergy salaries were set by the archdiocese. We had to pay other staff a reasonable wage. Healthcare costs seemed to go up disproportionately to everything else. Utilities, mortgage, and ordinary maintenance were fixed costs. Much of our maintenance had to be deferred which of course would be more costly down the road.

One of the few things that was discretionary was the liturgy budget. My mother was the chairman of the liturgy committee for about 10 years. The budget included the cost of sacramental bread and wine, flowers and decorations for the sanctuary, cleaning, and occasional replacement of vestments and robes used by the priest and altar servers. So we could do less decoration of the church for various seasons, and have fewer banners, flowers, or other displays. But our services would have been much less meaningful and enjoyable.

There is a hymn titled “Nothing but the Blood of Jesus” the theme of which is that that’s what’s necessary for salvation. Mom warned them that that was going to be our theme song if the budget cuts went too deep. The only thing we would have in the liturgy budget would be the bread and wine.

I wrote a bit of a parody…

I put a link to a Carrie Underwood version of the song. She does much better than me.

The problem was, that taking 10 or 20% out of the liturgy budget, which was only a few percent of the overall budget to begin with, wasn’t going to solve our financial problems. But it would have a dramatic, visible effect on our celebrations each Sunday. She rightly objected to having to make drastic cuts in her small budget that weren’t going to help our overall financial stability.

To deal with the crisis, we put together a special committee consisting of three members of the Parish Council, three members of the Finance Committee, and three members of the Board of Education. We had several meetings which I recall were a bit contentious, to say the least. The solution came at a meeting of the special committee around my dining room table. I don’t recall why we were meeting at my house rather than at church. I can only speculate that perhaps there was a nasty snowstorm that would’ve made it difficult for me to get out. So to accommodate me, we met here. But I don’t really remember what the reason was.

It was the chair of the school board, a wonderfully dedicated woman named Kathy who is a friend to this day, who brought in a proposal. We would have to resume charging Catholic families tuition to send their kids to school. We had eliminated the tuition when we first brought in tithing. But that just wasn’t sufficient anymore. The only other viable alternative would be to close the school.

To further attempt to put things on firmer financial grounds, we made a commitment that the school subsidy would be a percentage of our parish income. That would ease the tension that the school was consuming all activity and income from the parish. I seem to recall that in our previous year, the school subsidy was 28% of our income. Like I said at the top of this episode, this was over 30 years ago and some of these details may be wrong or out of order. Anyway, everyone agreed that this was a reasonable percentage. But then came the question, 28% of what? The previous calendar year? The previous fiscal year? Although the curve had flattened out, our income was still increasing gradually.

We came up with a solution that solved one of our other budget problems which was who would make their budget first? The parish or the school? Working backward from our June 30 deadline, we concluded that we would take the 12-month rolling average income through February. Take 28% of that and guarantee it to the school. That would give them time to prepare a budget during March and April. The finance committee could meet in April and May. We would present the budget to the Council in either May or June and be ready by the June 30 deadline.

The committee approved the proposal as did the full Parish Council and School Board. Naturally, it was not well received by the school families. When you had been getting your kids a Catholic education for free and now had to pay tuition–even at a reduced rate, you can imagine the turmoil. For some, it was proved that tithing didn’t work.

I remember a few years later talking to Kathy about the years we had served together on the finance and education committees. Shared our disappointment and how poorly our hard work and difficult choices were appreciated. She said to me, “I didn’t expect them to be happy about the idea that they were going to have to begin paying tuition again. But not once did anyone express gratitude for the fact that we saved the school from folding completely.” I totally agree.

Personally, I’ve never been a fan of Catholic schools. Yet I respect that it is important to many people. They were raised in an era when it was sacrilegious if not outright sinful to not send your kids to Catholic school.

My Mom was a vocal critic of our school. She was firmly in the camp of those who thought it was an overwhelming drain on our resources and an unnecessary luxury we couldn’t afford. She felt sorry for families who felt obligated to send their kids to Catholic school when they couldn’t afford it. Private school was for rich people. Let them pay their way and not burden the parish or Less wealthy families with the cost.

I seem to recall there was one proposal that suggested we should eliminate the school subsidy completely. Let the school be financially self-supporting through tuition and then we could use church money to give scholarships to those who had financial need. I might have supported that however it really would’ve almost been a divorce between the church and the school. It would’ve made them totally separate entities. While I didn’t see the school as a top priority, I recognized that it was an important part of the overall work of our church. I think such a divorce between the church and the school would’ve had disastrous effects on the church community as a whole.

Although we survived our immediate crisis by reinstituting tuition for Catholic families, it didn’t solve all of our problems. We still needed more strategies to deal with the difficulty of projecting income in wrestling with the fact that we had many more ways than means.

Next week we will continue telling stories of my days serving on my parish finance committee.

If you find this podcast educational, entertaining, enlightening, or even inspiring, consider sponsoring me on Patreon for just $5 per month. You’ll get early access to the podcast and any other benefits I might come up with down the road. Although I have some financial struggles, I’m not really in this for money. Still, every little bit helps.

Many thanks to my financial supporters. Your support pays for the writing seminar I attend and other things. But most of all it shows how much you care and appreciate what I’m doing. Your support means more to me than words can express.

Even if you cannot provide financial support. Please, please, please post the links and share this podcast on social media so that I can grow my audience. I just want more people to hear my stories.

All of my back episodes are available and I encourage you to check them out if you’re new to this podcast. If you have any comments, questions, or other feedback please feel free to comment on any of the platforms where you find this podcast.

I will see you next week as we continue contemplating life. Until then, fly safe.