For many years, we had a seasonal residence in Windham, New York, a small town in the northern Catskill mountains. Often called “Land in the Sky”, Windham is so high above sea level that one can see five states from nearby “Point Lookout”.
Our home was located on a quiet country road. The presence of the forest preserve directly across the street enhanced its seclusion.
Unencumbered by street lights, Windham nights were unrelentingly dark. There were countless occasions when I was unable to see my hand in front of my face – literally. Those same nights, however, offered rich rewards. For I could gaze skyward, see a dazzling panoply of jewel-like stars, and marvel at what was no more than the tiniest speck of an unfathomably vast universe.
Doing so allowed me to step away from my own narrow world – my house, family, friends, career, dreams, hopes and worries – and contemplate the majesty of creation. And every single time I did so, the same question puzzled me deeply. How, I wondered, could anybody seriously believe that such astonishing orderliness came about accidentally?
BEYOND SCIENCE
Science certainly doesn’t support that proposition. It can toss around terms like “Big Bang”, but can’t explain what caused it to happen. It can talk about evolution, but can’t explain what set that in motion either. Simply put, the universe could only have been created by a cause that, itself, was uncaused. That uncaused cause has to be a supreme being who always was. And that inescapable reality facilitates the faith-based belief that he "is now, and always will be”.
Tellingly, most scientists believe in God. Indeed, some of the greatest scientific minds in history were believers. They include Charles Darwin, the most celebrated biologist in history; Isaac Newton, the iconic physicist; and the renowned chemist Marie Curie.
In a 2015 study, researchers at Rice University found that, in some countries, more scientists believe in God than do members of the general public. Principal investigator Elaine Howard Ecklund, founding director of Rice’s Religion and Public Life Program, also reported that only 29% of scientists in the United States believe there’s a conflict between religion and science. That percentage is even lower in a multitude of places, including Hong Kong, India and Taiwan.
So, if atheists want a solid reason to not believe in God, science doesn’t provide it.
This NASA image shows hundreds of thousands of stars in the swirling core of our Milky Way galaxy
Proof of God’s existence can also be found in the countless number of miraculous cures and other supernatural interventions for which science can offer no rational explanation. For instance, over 7,000 miracles are attributed to the intercession of Our Lady of Lourdes.
Beginning on February 11, 1858, the Blessed Mother appeared a total of 18 times to young Bernadette Soubirous in the small village in southern France. A total of 70 of those miracles have been analyzed and approved by the Catholic Church after scrupulous investigation by the International Medical Committee of Lourdes. Each was found to involve a complete, spontaneous, immediate healing from a serious medical condition declared by medical experts to be permanent and incurable.
The most recent of these involved Sister Bernadette Moriau, who was fully disabled and confined to a wheelchair when she visited Our Lady’s shrine in Lourdes in 2008. The pain that racked her body was so severe that she was forced to take morphine every day.
After participating in a blessing for the sick and infirmed, Sister Moriau, in her words, “felt a [surge of] well-being throughout my body, a relaxation, warmth…I returned to my room and there, a voice told me to ‘take off your braces'. [Then] Surprise! I could move”. At that moment, she got up from her wheelchair, removed her braces and walked.
Similarly, countless miracles have occurred at the shrine of Our Lady of Fatima in Portugal where, between May 13, 1917 and October 13, 1917, the Blessed Mother appeared to three shepherd children. Lucia, 9, and her cousins Francisco, 8, and his sister Jacinta, 6, saw Mary a total of six times.
According to Lucia, during the first apparition, the children saw “a woman all in white, more brilliant than the sun". She was wearing a white mantle edged with gold and holding a rosary.
“Please don’t be afraid of me,” she said, “I’m not going to harm you.”
When Lucia asked who she was, she said, “I come from Heaven”.
The woman asked the children to pray, dedicate and devote themselves to the Blessed Trinity, and “say the Rosary every day, to bring peace to the world and an end to the war”.
She cautioned the children that they would endure suffering and hardships, particularly from disbelieving family and friends. She also said that Jacinta and Francisco would soon be taken home to the Lord, but that Lucia would live a long life to reiterate her message and promote devotion to Mary’s Immaculate Heart.
On October 13, 2017, the last apparition of the woman to the three children, she revealed her identity in response to a query from Lucia: “I am the Lady of the Rosary.”
Since the Lady had promised a sign that the apparitions were true, an estimated 70,000 people congregated at Fatima on that same day in anticipation of seeing it. And indeed they did. The “miracle of the sun” was widely reported by the media.
Here’s how a local newspaper recounted it: “Before the astonished eyes of the crowd, whose aspect was biblical as they stood bare-headed, eagerly searching the sky, the sun trembled, made sudden incredible movements outside all cosmic laws—the sun ‘danced’ according to the typical expression of the people”.
And here, from Lucia’s memoirs, is what the children saw:
“After our Lady had disappeared into the immense distance of the firmament, we beheld St. Joseph with the Child Jesus and Our Lady robed in white with a blue mantle, beside the sun. St. Joseph and the Child Jesus seemed to bless the world, for they traced the Sign of the Cross with their hands. When, a little later, this apparition disappeared, I saw Our Lord and Our lady; it seemed to me that it was Our Lady of Sorrows (Dolors). Our Lord appeared to bless the world in the same manner as St. Joseph had done.”
In 1950, Pope Pius XII was weighing whether to proclaim the dogma of Mary’s assumption into Heaven. While in the midst of prayer in the Vatican gardens, something miraculous caught his eye.
According to Zenit, the pontiff penned a handwritten note in which he said, “I have seen the ‘miracle of the sun,’ this is the pure truth”.
He viewed the astonishing event as evidence that he should, indeed, proclaim the Dogma of the Assumption.
October 13, 1917 was the last time that Mary would appear to Jacinta and Francisco at Fatima.
For Lucia, however, she returned one additional time. On this occasion, in 1920, Lucia was praying in the Cova before leaving Fátima to attend a boarding school. Mary came to urge her to dedicate herself wholly to God. Lucia did precisely that, entering the Carmelite order where she continued serving the Lord until her death in 2005 at age 97.
While countless miracles have been attributed to the intercession of Our Lady of Fatima, some of the early ones are recounted in Father John de Marchi’s classic book “The True Story of Fatima”. It may be accessed here: https://bit.ly/3gmTDmu.
Father Marchi resided in Fatima from 1943 until 1950 and was personally present at virtually all of the cures that occurred there during that time.
There have been countless other miracles performed through the ages, all inexplicable by science, the medical community, or the rational bounds of coincidence. Viewed cumulatively, or, for that matter, even individually, they're compelling evidence of the existence of God.
Thousands at Fatima witness the Miracle of the Sun
But there is something more in the way of proving God's existence than deductive reasoning and/or inexplicable miracles. It's something far more fundamental; an inexhaustible yearning; an instinct, if you will.
St. Augustine seems to have captured it perfectly: "Thou hast made us for thyself, Our Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in thee".
St. Augustine of Hippo; portrait by Philippe de Champaigne
Jesus is the central figure of the Catholic Church.
While Catholics worship him as the Son of God and the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, nobody can rationally deny the depth and breadth of his extraordinary influence on the affairs of mankind for over 2000 years. A famous poem about Jesus, One Solitary Life, captures this particularly well.
The divinity of Jesus is asserted numerous times in the New Testament. In fact, the Gospel of John makes it crystal clear from the outset:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God... And the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us, and we saw his glory, the glory as of the Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth”. (John 1:1); 1:14)
Then there’s Jesus saying this: “The Father and I are one” (John 10:30)
And this: “Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I speak to you I do not speak on my own. The father who dwells in me is doing his works”. (John 14:10)
As recounted in the Gospel of Mark (14: 61-62), as Jesus is being tried by the Sanhedrin, he’s asked directly: “Are you the Messiah, the son of the Blessed One?”. To which Jesus, replies: “I am; and ‘you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the Power and coming with the clouds of heaven’”.
It's also illuminating that Jesus acted as if he were God in forgiving sins (Matthew 9:2; Mark 2:5; and Luke 5:20).
Jesus also did miraculous things, healing the blind (John 9: 1-11); the crippled (Mark 2: 1-12); and the deaf (Mark 7: 33-36). More dramatically, he raised three people from the dead: Jairus's daughter – (Mark 5:22-43); A widow’s son in the town of Nain – (Luke 7:11-15); and Lazarus (John 11: 1-44).
Jesus exercised dominion over the elements, calming stormy seas (Luke: 8:22); multiplied five loaves of bread and two fish to feed 5,000 people (Matthew 14: 13-21); and turned water into wine to save a wedding feast (John 2: 1-11).
All of which culminates in the supreme triumph of Jesus's life, the Resurrection.
This picture of the Sacred Heart has been hanging in my bedroom since I first obtained it age 7
That Jesus was crucified, died and was buried is a matter of historical record.
Catholicism, indeed all of Christianity, depends on the validity of the additional astonishing claim that he rose from the dead three days later. And the evidence strongly supports it. For not only did many people actually see the risen Jesus, but many of them gave their lives proclaiming their faith in him.
While it’s likely that Jesus first appeared to his mother following his resurrection, the first recorded appearance was to Mary Magdalene. (John 20: 11-18) describes it this way:
“But Mary stayed outside the tomb weeping. And as she wept, she bent over into the tomb and saw two angels in white sitting there, one at the head and one at the feet where the body of Jesus had been.
And they said to her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping?’ She said to them, ‘They have taken my Lord, and I don't know where they laid him.’
When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus there, but did not know it was Jesus.
Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?’ She thought it was the gardener and said to him, ‘Sir, if you carried him away, tell me where you laid him, and I will take him’.
Jesus said to her, ‘Mary!’. She turned and said to him in Hebrew, ‘Rabbouni’ which means Teacher.
Jesus said to her, ‘Stop holding on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and tell them, 'I am going to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God'.
Mary of Magdala went and announced to the disciples, 'I have seen the Lord,' and what he told her.”
On that same day, Jesus appeared to Mary, the Mother of James, Salone, and Joanna (Matthew 9:10); Peter (Luke 24:34); two disciples on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24 13:33); and to his disciples, minus Thomas, behind locked doors (John 20: 19-20).
A week later, Jesus once again appeared to his disciples, and this time Thomas was with them. Having now seen Jesus for himself, Thomas, too, believed.
But Jesus upbraided him, saying "Have you come to believe because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed”.
Nor were Jesus’s appearances limited to individuals who had known him before his crucifixion. St. Paul, for instance, notes that on one occasion, the risen Jesus appeared to over 500 people (1 Corinthians 15:6)
"Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?’"
Rational people aren’t willing to give up their lives except for the most compelling of causes. Yet, literally millions of people have willingly died rather than deny their faith in Jesus.
Most impressive of all, however, are those early Christians who actually knew Jesus, preached his word far and wide, and were ultimately put to death for doing so.
St. Paul, formerly “Saul”, is arguably the most influential saint in the Catholic Church. His letters, which are an integral part of the New Testament, are an invaluable source of information about those critical early years of the Church.
Between the years of 45 and 58, Paul undertook three major missionary journeys, traveling by land and sea through what is today Greece, Turkey, Israel and Syria. All told, it’s been estimated that he traveled over 10,000 miles under extremely trying circumstances. Ultimately, he was seized, taken to Rome, imprisoned and beheaded.
This alone would have been enough to solidify Paul’s status as an icon of the Church. But that status is magnified dramatically by the way he came to embrace Jesus in the first place.
As Saul, he had been a fierce persecutor of Jesus’s followers. Not only was he complicit in the murder of St. Stephen, the first martyr, but his hatred of all Christians was positively obsessive. As Luke notes in the Acts of the Apostles, “Saul, meanwhile, was trying to destroy the church; entering house after house and dragging out men and women, he handed them over for imprisonment” (Acts: 8:3)
Saul’s dramatic conversion occurred as he was traveling to Damascus to persecute its Christian community. Suddenly, he was surrounded by an extremely bright light from the heavens. Blinded by it, he fell off his horse.
At that point, he heard a voice say, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”.
He replied, “Who are you, Lord?”
To which the voice proclaimed, “I am Jesus who you are persecuting”.
Shaken to the core, Saul recovered sufficiently to continue to Damascus. He was baptized there, took the name “Paul”, and began his extraordinary service to Jesus's Church.
While some question whether Paul ever actually saw the risen Jesus, he, himself, makes it clear that he did: “Last of all, as to one born abnormally, he appeared to me” (1 Corinthians 15:8).
The early martyrs of the Church are highly probative of Jesus's divinity. They also launched a willingness among Catholics to die for their faith that continues in dramatic numbers and myriad ways to this day.
In an address to the United Nations Human Rights Council in May 2013, Vatican spokesman Archbishop Silvano Maria Tomasi declared “Credible research has reached the shocking conclusion that every year an estimate of more than 100,000 Christians are killed because of some relation to their faith”.
Saul, on his way to Damascus, was surrounded by a great light from heaven and fell to the ground.
ST. PETER
Peter, whose actual name was “Simon”, was introduced to Jesus by his brother, Andrew. Both men were Galilee fishermen.
Jesus called Simon “Cephas”, which means “Rock”, because he would become the foundation upon which Jesus would build his Church. Peter was an outspoken ally of Jesus, and the first apostle to recognize him as “the Messiah, the Son of the living God” (Matthew 16:16).
As the Acts of the Apostles clearly establishes, Peter was the head of the Church after Jesus’s Resurrection and Ascension. He was, in effect, the first Pope.
In the latter years of his life, Peter was in Rome where he continued leading the Church in what were extremely perilous times. When he was seized and about to be crucified, he asked his executioners to hang him upside down because he felt himself unworthy of dying as Jesus did.
Peter, like Paul, would never have undertaken such a vigorous defense of Jesus, nor willingly died for him, had they harbored even the slightest doubt about his divinity or his mission.
St. Peter asked to be crucified upside down because he felt unworthy of dying as Christ had died
The Catholic Church is the one true Church.
That’s a bold statement to be sure, but it’s demonstrably accurate.
There are over 200 documented Christian denominations in the United States alone, each claiming to be Christ’s true church. But only the Catholic Church dates back to its founder, Jesus, himself. Every other church sprang forth long thereafter, the invention of some very ordinary men and women.
This, of course, has led to a very predictable result. For, while they all repudiate the Catholic Church, they also repudiate each other.
Truth is truth. Either God exists or he doesn’t; Either Jesus is the Son of God, or he isn’t; Either Jesus was born of an immaculate and virgin mother, or he wasn’t; Either Jesus rose from the dead or he didn’t; Either the apostles and others saw the risen Christ, or they didn’t; Either Jesus is actually present in the Eucharist or he isn’t; Either Mary was assumed into heaven, or she wasn't. And the list goes on and on and on.
One of the most fundamental problems with all of these subsequently invented Christian denominations lies with their belief in the private interpretation of the Bible. Telling their adherents to read the Bible and interpret it for themselves obviously leads to the same passages being interpreted differently.
As a consequence of these conflicting interpretations, the Bible – the Word of God – is effectively turned into a conduit of confusion, deception, and falsehood. Clearly, God, the Author of all truth, would not sanction such an untenable result.
The oft-heard claim that Catholics are discouraged from reading the Bible is plainly false. In fact, the very first Bible was compiled by Catholic scholars during the 2nd and 3rd century, printed under the supervision of the Catholic Church by Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press and himself a Catholic, and approved by the Council of Hippo in 393 and the Council of Carthage in 397.
Which is why Martin Luther, despite inventing a religion of his own, nonetheless credited the Catholic Church for handing down the Bible. Thus, he wrote in his Commentary on St. John, “We are compelled to concede to the Papists that they have the Word of God, that we received it from them, and that without them we should have no knowledge of it at all”.
So, yes, of course, Catholics are encouraged to read the Bible. They are not free, however, to interpret it in way that’s contrary to Catholic teaching. Rather, they’re bound to Church teaching as it relates to both Biblical interpretation and sacred traditions. Therefore, Catholic beliefs are unified and consistent. For the reasons that follow those beliefs are also true.
PAPAL INFALLIBILITY
Contrary to the ignorant, often mocking remarks of some, the Catholic Church doesn’t believe that the Pope is infallible in all things. He can’t, for instance, reliably predict the outcome of the World Series, or a presidential election, or even the weather for the next day. Being thoroughly human, his opinion on such things is no more valuable than yours or mine.
When he speaks ex cathedra, however, that is, from the Chair of St. Peter, on matters of faith and morals, he is, indeed infallible. This is true simply because it has to be true. Either that, or Jesus's words are false.
Consider what Jesus said to Peter:
“And so I say to you, you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it.
I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven." (Matthew 16: 18-19)
Obviously, whatever Peter were to “bind on earth” couldn’t possibly be false if, at the same time, it were “bound in heaven”.
Consider, too, that in Matthew 18: 15-17, Jesus advises his followers to listen to the Church, and to treat those who refuse to do so as Gentiles or tax collectors.
Jesus would hardly tell his followers to listen to the Church if, what they were to hear from the Church, were wrong.
Finally, Jesus assured his disciples that he would be with his Church until the end of the world (Matthew 28: 18-20):
"Then Jesus approached and said to them, "All power in heaven and on earth has been given to me.
Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.
And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age."
From the foregoing it’s clear that Catholic beliefs are unified, consistent, and promulgated with the authority of Jesus himself. Which makes the Catholic Church, - and only the Catholic Church - the one true Church.
Blessed Sacrament Roman Catholic Church in Staten Island, New York