May 2019

Every human person desires to know God. Every human heart longs for communion with him. Whether we recognize that longing or not, the desire for happiness that we all feel is really a desire for God. It’s a desire to be in a relationship with the One who made us and who is the source of all good things. St. Augustine (354–430) expressed this idea in his Confessions:

The desire for God, it has often and wisely been observed, is written on the human heart. It is a kind of inscription, or imprint, telling us who we are; an image or template, as it were, impressed upon the soul. Part of our spiritual DNA.

As parents of seven children, we often get the feeling that we are living on a different planet. People gawk at us when we are out in public. We routinely hear negative comments from strangers. Some of the comments include: “Are those all yours?”; “Don’t you have a television?”; or, our favorite, “You must be Mormons.” We’ve learned to laugh off such questions, but the fact that we hear them so often makes us realize just how far our society has gone in its outright opposition to the family.

The history of redemption is a story that involves human participation. The Apostle Paul spoke of this mystery when he stated, “We are God’s co-workers” (1 Cor 3:9). How is this? Can’t God get the job done Himself? Of course He can. But since He is a Father, His job is to raise up mature sons and daughters by making us co-workers.

The light of the Son of God is so brilliant that it reaches throughout history, even into the far corners of the Old Testament. Just as the sun’s light is reflected by the moon, so too, where the light of the Son of God shines, that light will be reflected by Mary. In keeping with Catholic tradition, Saint Pius X taught that where Christ is prefigured in the Old Testament, Mary was usually prefigured as well: “In a word, after Christ, we find in Mary the end of the law and the fulfillment of the figures and prophecies.” One example of this is the ark of the covenant, which bore the presence of God and thus foreshadowed Mary’s bearing of Christ as the Theotokos, or Mother of God.

I recall the days when I was still in a sort of spiritual “no man’s land” between my Evangelical past and my eventual home with Rome. I could no longer honestly preach as a Protestant minister, but I still had lingering doubts about Catholic doctrine. One by one, however, my doubts fell away as I studied Catholic theology and tradition until, finally, only the Marian doctrines remained.

As an author, speaker, and scholar, Scott Hahn has spent decades teaching Catholics how to read the Bible from the heart of the Church. Dr. Hahn is not only renowned for his biblical scholarship, but also for his ability as a speaker to convey the truths of the faith clearly—and always with a good story and a good pun to go around. If you’ve ever heard him speak, you know the impact of his personal testimony and his wealth of knowledge on the Catholic faith.

We live in a world deeply hungry, even desperate, for friendship. But it seems that true friendship remains in short supply. We now have multiple social networking sites where people can claim “friends” by the hundreds, but these same people report being lonelier than ever. It is not difficult to see why.