The Catholic Passion: Rediscovering the Power and Beauty of the Faith by David S

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Presenting the Catholic faith as a spiritually fulfilling, this work answers to the most important human questions: why are we here?; what can we know of God?; and how should we live?. It is not an argument for the Catholic faith but a journey to the heart of it.

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In his new book, David Scott, biographer of Mother Teresa ( A Revolution of Love), presents the Catholic faith as a spiritually fulfilling, intellectually coherent answer to the most important human questions: Why are we here? What can we know of God? How should we live? The Catholic Passion is not an argument for the Catholic faith but a journey to the heart of it, a richly rewarding reflection on prayer, the Bible, sacraments, the Church, and God-m, ade-human in Jesus Christ. These are mysteries, Scott concedes, but living mysteries that pulsate with meaning for us. "We see miracles every day," he writes. "We see lives changed by the encounter with the risen Jesus." Scott illuminates the Catholic mysteries with the insights of great Catholic figures of modern times-the American writer Andre Dubus, the French composer Olivier Messiaen, the Chinese human rights activist Henry Wu, the French martypr Charles de Foucauld, the American reformer Dorothy Day, and others.

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The CATHOLIC FAITH is not a set of rules or a body of doctrines, but is a way of life, writes David Scott. It's a lived faith that contains convincing, intellectually coherent, and spiritually fulfilling answers to the biggest questions: Who is God? Who is Jesus? Why are we here? Where are we going? T he Catholic Passion invites readers into a conversation about the things that matter most. It is not an argument for the Catholic faith but a journey to the heart of it-a richly rewarding reflectin on prayer, the Bible, scraments, the church, and God-made-human in Jesus Christ. Scott does not tell the story of the faith through church documents or catechism quotations. Instead, he looks at the faith experience of real Catholics-people like the American writer Andre Dubus, the French composer Olivier Messiaen, the Chinese human rights activist Henry Wu, the French martyr Charles de Foucauld, and the American reformer Dorothy Day. These and other Catholics embody a faith that warms the heart as it enlightens the mind. One theme emerges from Scott's reflections on the lives of Catholics and the Scriptures: God's passion of love for humankind burns on in the Catholic Church. The Catholic passion is the conviction that there is nothing God will not do to win our love.

Author Biography

David Scott's essays and reporting have appeared in L'Osservatore Romano, National Review, Commonweal, beliefnet.com, and elsewhere. He holds an advanced degree in religion and the Bible, and he was formerly editor of Our Sunday Visitor. Currently, he is editorial director for The St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology and contributing editor to Godspy.com. He resides in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Long Description

In his new book, David Scott, biographer of Mother Teresa ( A Revolution of Love), presents the Catholic faith as a spiritually fulfilling, intellectually coherent answer to the most important human questions: Why are we here? What can we know of God? How should we live? The Catholic Passion is not an argument for the Catholic faith but a journey to the heart of it, a richly rewarding reflection on prayer, the Bible, sacraments, the Church, and God-m, ade-human in Jesus Christ. These are mysteries, Scott concedes, but living mysteries that pulsate with meaning for us. "We see miracles every day," he writes. "We see lives changed by the encounter with the risen Jesus." Scott illuminates the Catholic mysteries with the insights of great Catholic figures of modern times-the American writer Andre Dubus, the French composer Olivier Messiaen, the Chinese human rights activist Henry Wu, the French martypr Charles de Foucauld, the American reformer Dorothy Day, and others.

Excerpt from Book

Preface This is a book about Catholics--who we are, what we believe, and why we believe and do the things we do. It is not really intended as a book about Catholicism--that set of dogmas, doctrines, rules, and rituals that makes it one of the great world religions. Maybe this is a distinction without a difference. It is true that what Catholics do is not easily separated from what Catholicism teaches. But what the faith looks like and how we understand and live that faith depend on where we allow the stress to fall. If the accent is on dogmas and doctrines, the faith will come across one way. Put the accent on the lives and works of flesh-and-blood Catholics, and we will see things differently. The one is not wrong and the other right. They are two ways of trying to understand the same complex reality. For example, we can quote the Baltimore Catechism: God is an infinitely perfect supreme being who made us to show forth his goodness and to share with us his everlasting happiness in heaven. Or we can talk about Paul Claudel. One of the nineteenth century''s finest poets and playwrights, Claudel also spent forty years as a French diplomat, serving as ambassador to Tokyo, Brussels, and Washington, DC. Early in his life, Claudel fell away from the church, convinced that God was a figment of the imagination of a prescientific world. Nonetheless, out of nostalgia or habit, he went to Mass on Christmas Eve at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris in 1886. During the service he heard a voice from on high say, "There is a God." It changed his life. In describing his experience of God''s love for him, Claudel once wrote: "Overcome with wonder, I can only say it is madness, it is too much. . . . Look, see God striding across the earth like a sower; he takes his heart in both hands and scatters it over the face of the earth!" Now, Claudel is saying nothing different from what the Baltimore Catechism says. Both statements are beautiful. Both statements are true. In this book I chose to go with Claudel, to explain Catholicism by way of the experience and faith expressions of real Catholics--saints, composers, poets, playwrights, missionaries, ordinary believers. This approach seems appropriate to Catholicism, which is not a philosophy of life so much as a personal encounter and relationship with a divine person, Jesus. The church''s creeds, dogmas, and doctrines are indispensable--they ensure that this encounter with Jesus is true--but if this neat order of rules and laws is the theorem, then Catholicism''s proof will always be found in what Catholics think and hope for, how they pray, and what they do with their lives. That said, this is not a gathering of various personal visions or idiosyncratic approaches to Catholicism. The Catholics you will meet in these pages--and the works of art, literature, and music that are discussed--have been selected to reflect the ancient and authentic faith of Catholic orthodoxy. This book is not about what individual Catholics might wish the church to believe. Instead it is about what the church actually does believe--as that faith is expressed in its Scriptures, prayers, and authoritative teachings. If this is a book about Catholics, it is also a book for Catholics. It is unfortunate that many of us receive our entire education in the faith at a relatively young age. Often we discover, as did Claudel, that the explanations of Catholic beliefs and practices we learned in Sunday school are inadequate or irrelevant to the cares and demands of our adult lives. On many of the most important questions, the Catholic answers we were given in our youth seem less compelling than the answers offered by scientists, philosophers, politicians, and the mass media. As a consequence, many of us end up drifting away from the faith, finding other things to believe in, other passions to occupy our days. But the faith was never meant to be something we "graduate" from as we do high school. Our knowledge and understanding of what we believe is meant to deepen as our relationship with Jesus deepens. The early Christians spoke of mystagogy, a kind of lifelong immersion in the mysteries of the faith. This book is a small exercise in twenty-first-century mystagogy. Whether or not you are Catholic, this book invites you to take another look at the Catholic faith. In this book you have the chance to enter into a conversation with Catholics from every continent and walk of life from the last two thousand years. It is a conversation about the biggest questions--the only ones that matter, really: Who is Jesus? Who is God? Why do we need a church? Who are we, where do we come from, where are we going, and how do we get there? 1 Son of Mary, Man of Heaven On a chill evening in March 1897, an ex-monk named Charles de Foucauld entered Nazareth, a village in the hill country of Galilee. He had walked about 125 miles in little more than a week since climbing off a steamer in the Mediterranean port of Jaffa. He made his way to Bethlehem and then to Jerusalem, sleeping in fields and begging bread along the way. Charles had come to Nazareth to breathe the same air and to live the same obscure life of poverty and manual labor that Jesus Christ had nineteen centuries before. Charles was thirty-nine years old and had already led a colorful life. Of French aristocratic blood, he scandalized his family by washing out of the military academy and squandering his inheritance on feeding his extravagant appetites for food, wine, and love. Then, to everyone''s surprise, he enlisted in the French army to fight in the deserts of North Africa. Later, he embarked alone on a dangerous and groundbreaking geographical expedition to Morocco. In the deserts of the Sahara, Charles found God. Coming home, he slowly rededicated himself to the Catholic faith he had been born into and had fallen away from. He went off to live in a monastery in Syria for seven years. He quit that to become a hermit in Nazareth--"to be one with Jesus, to reproduce his life . . . to imitate as perfectly as possible our Lord''s hidden life," as he wrote to a friend at the time. Charles''s search for Jesus of Nazareth was the most Catholic of impulses. All Catholics are natives of Nazareth, though most of us will never see the place. In Nazareth, we believe, the creator of the universe took flesh in a woman''s womb and became one of us. For thirty years God lived in that village, made his home with a mother and a father, held down a job, and answered to a common name, Jesus. We believe that God came to Nazareth to share his life with the human family he had created, that he came to reveal a plan of love that includes you and me and every person ever born or yet to be born. Here, God came to live a man''s life so that we could live God''s life. This is an audacious claim, unique among the world''s religions and philosophies. The history of religion is the history of the human search for inner peace, prosperity, and transcendence--in a word, for God. Singular in that history is the Catholic confession that the tables have been turned, that God has come in search of us. Nazareth is where he came to start looking for us, and from there the name Jesus has gone forth to the ends of the earth. In Guatemala, the people revere him as el Seor Cristo Negro--the Black Christ who suffers with a suffering people. In Mindanao, one of the isles of the Philippines, he is Manluluwas-Kauban, two words that mean every good thing: "He who cares, who gives aid to the hungry, who travels with his people, who protects the persecuted, who pardons sinners; the liberator." In Papua New Guinea, Catholics pray to him simply as Kamungo--"The Big Man." In every culture and language, the name Jesus has brought strong men to their knees, raised up the weak, changed lives, saved people from ruin, made sinners into saints. Jesus of Nazareth has inspired the most exalted achievements of human art and science and formed the spiritual, intellectual, and moral foundation of Western civilization. The deepest longings of the human heart, Catholics believe, have a single name: Jesus. On his knees in prayer, St. Francis of Assisi once asked: "Who are you, O Lord? And who am I?" The two questions can never be pried apart. Who you are and who I am, and what our respective destinies are, depend on our answer to the question Jesus first put to his disciples and continues to ask men and women in every age: "Who do you say that I am?" As Charles de Foucauld knew, the answer takes us back to Nazareth--a place so obscure that until Jesus arrived, it had never been mentioned in a single book or included on any map. "Salvation Is from the Jews" It was no accident of history that caused Jesus to be born in that time and place. Jesus was born a Jew, of the elect race to whom God first revealed himself somewhere in present-day Iraq nineteen hundred years before Jesus'' birth. Why was Jesus born of this people? Because, as he would later say, "salvation is from the Jews." To know Jesus we must know the history of this special people. For it was in the history of the Jews that God disclosed the purpose and destiny of the world. In its broadest outline, that history reads like this: The father of the Jewish people was Abraham. God made a covenant with Abraham, vowing to give him a vast land and to make his descendants more numerous than the stars in the sky. God swore he would bestow his blessings, his salvation, on all the nations of the earth through Abraham''s children. Abraham''s beloved son Isaac bore a child named Jacob. God renewed his covenant with Jacob and changed Jacob''s name to Israel. Ten of Jacob''s twelve s

Description for Bookstore

Many writers explain the Catholic faith. David Scott ignites a passion for it. In his new book, David Scott, biographer of Mother Teresa (A Revolution of Love), presents the Catholic faith as a spiritually fulfi lling, intellectually coherent answer to the most important human questions: Why are we here? What can we know of God? How should we live? The Catholic Passion is not an argument for the Catholic faith but a journey to the heart of it, a richly rewarding refl ection on prayer, the Bible, sacraments, the Church, and God-made-human in Jesus Christ. These are mysteries, Scott concedes, but living mysteries that pulsate with meaning for us. "We see miracles every day," he writes. "We see lives changed by the encounter with the risen Jesus." Scott illuminates the Catholic mysteries with the insights of great Catholic fi gures of modern times-- the American writer Andre Dubus, the French composer Olivier Messiaen, the Chinese human rights activist Henry Wu, the French martyr Charles de Foucauld, the American reformer Dorothy Day, and others. He directs his keenly perceptive words to contemporary people--readers, young and old, who seek a faith that burns in the heart as it enlightens the mind.

Details ISBN0829414797 Author David Scott Short Title CATH PASSION Language English ISBN-10 0829414797 ISBN-13 9780829414790 Media Book Format Hardcover Illustrations Yes Year 2005 Subtitle Rediscovering the Power and Beauty of the Faith Imprint Loyola University Press,U.S. Place of Publication Chicago Country of Publication United States DOI 10.1604/9780829414790 AU Release Date 2005-09-01 NZ Release Date 2005-09-01 US Release Date 2005-09-01 UK Release Date 2005-09-01 Pages 234 Publisher Loyola University Press,U.S. Publication Date 2005-09-01 DEWEY 230.2 Audience General We've got this

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