Episode 396: How Do You Become Catholic?

So the gospel that we're gonna hear proclaimed this next Sunday comes from Matthew 16:21-27.

"Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer greatly from the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.

Then Peter took Jesus aside and began to rebuke him.

'God forbid, Lord! No such thing shall ever happen to you.' He turned and said to Peter, 'Get behind me, Satan! You are an obstacle to me.

You're thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.' Then Jesus said to his disciples, 'Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.

For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.

What profit would there be for one to gain the whole world and forfeit his s- his life? Or what can one give in exchange for his life? For the Son of Man will come with his angels in his Father's glory, and then he will repay all according to his conduct.'" Father John, Jesus is asking something from those of us who follow Him that is far more radical than we realize, isn't he?

Absolutely.

S- so what if we try to break this open by asking you a series of, like, really basic, basic, but really critical questions?

I love-

[laughs]

... questions

Yes.

Fire away.

Yeah, so l- let me start by, by going right after our title of today's podcast.

How does a person become Catholic or Christian?

Yeah, so let me just say something about the title.

We were joking about it before we hit record.

I mean, obviously the ...

We, we try to choose titles to provoke people, right? [laughs] Maybe somewhat intentionally, and, uh, maybe sometimes they work, sometimes they don't.

But, but I wanna pull people into this really quickly, and it's not just how do you become Catholic, it's how do you become Christian? Which of course begs another question right away, which is something like what does it mean to be Catholic? Or what does it mean to be Christian? And the answer to that is It means to be a disciple.