I was having dinner with a friend the other night who is not Christian but who was asking me a lot of questions concerning what our Catholic faith is all about. When I explained it to him, he said I pretty much captured it in a nutshell. Since he found it helpful, I thought it might help someone else by posting it on my blog, so here goes!
With Original Sin, Heaven was lost to mankind. Satan had his entry into our world, and with him came his greatest weapon: death. No matter how good any one of us tries to be, because of Original sin, when we die, we would enter into Hell and condemnation for all eternity, and there was nothing we could do about it. A good image would be of us being thrown into a prison and shackled to the wall with the door slammed shut behind us. With Satan, all our pleading and begging for mercy to let us out falls on deaf ears. The only one who can help us is God. We need his help; without him we’re doomed. God did come to our help by becoming a man. He took on our human nature precisely so that now he could enter the realm of death, something he couldn’t do as God alone. He took on flesh in the person of Jesus, who is both truly God and truly man. When he died on the cross – which was his plan from the beginning – he was able to enter into Hell and free us. You can imagine it as Satan letting the one person in who had the key to our shackles and the gate to Hell. When he rose from the dead, he destroyed death’s hold over us. It’s as if Jesus paved a highway that goes right through Hell and up to Heaven. So Jesus totally reversed the power of death by taking Satan’s prime weapon and turning it against him. What Satan intended as the means to enslave us in his kingdom – death – is now the way we leave his power and enter into heaven. We will still die, but death now leads to our salvation and not our condemnation. But in order for us to follow the path, we have to be one with Jesus. God took on our nature, and now we must take on his. This is accomplished through the Sacraments. In Baptism, we die with Christ and are buried with him, but we also rise with him. We inherit heaven and become heirs with Christ to everything he won by his death. In the Eucharist, Jesus gives us his body and blood as our food so that our flesh is now made up of his flesh, and every time we celebrate the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and receive Jesus in Holy Communion, we are on the cross with him in an unbloody and painless manner, are buried with him and risen in him over and over again. It’s as if Jesus created a power line that transverses eternity for us to plug into his death and resurrection and receive the salvation he won for us once and for all. He made the sacrifice he offered on Calvary forever present to us in the Holy Mass. He also gave his teachings to the Apostles with the authority to continue these Sacraments for all of time, and told them to “teach them to carry out everything I have commanded you.” (Matt. 28:20) We still have to walk the path to heaven – there is no moving sidewalk that automatically takes us there – and sometimes, because while Baptism washes away Original Sin, concupiscence (the inclination to sin) still remains – we stray from the path. Christ calls us back to the right path constantly through the Sacrament of Reconciliation, and teaches us through the Church, especially the successor to St. Peter (the Pope) to whom Jesus gave the ultimate authority to speak in his name (cf. Matt. 16:13-20), to help us know when we’re not sure if certain activities or beliefs lead us to heaven or not. So, in order to reverse the effects of Original Sin, we must accept Jesus as God-made-man, be baptized, receive him in Holy Communion every Sunday for the forgiveness of our sins, and allow him to keep us on the path to heaven by following the way he shows us through the teachings of the Church. Do that and you’ll get to Heaven. It’s as simple as that!
P.S. Thanks, Joe, for the inspiration!!
Rev. Andrew P. Carrozza 
Ɍight here is the perfect weƄsite for anyone who wοulԁ like to understand this toρic.
You understand so much its alomost tough to argue with
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You dеfiոitely put a brand new ѕpin on a subject which has been written аbout for dеcades.
Great stuff, just wonderful!
Some questions I never really got answers to when I was attending church. All of my pastors and priests dodged the questions, and I was wondering if maybe you could answer them. Please understand that I am asking these sincerely without any disrespect intended. They’re a large part of why I now consider myself agnostic rather than religious.
If God created everything, then isn’t it true that he also created Satan and all of the other evils in the world? If he loves us, why would he do this?
Why would he bother creating this world at all, when he could have just created heaven and made us in such a manner that made us worthy to be there in the first place?
He created the Garden of Eden. Why would he place the Tree of Knowledge there, with the serpent right alongside and then expect everything to go well?
If the earth is only a few thousand years old, then why do we find evidence of things prior to that time?
Why is homosexuality deemed wrong? I know there’s a verse that says that a man lying with a man is as wrong as a man who lies with an animal, but at one point I looked that verse up in several different translations of the Bible, and the translations were inconsistent. Some outright simply said that it was wrong for a man to have sex with an animal, and only more recent translations said anything about men with men being wrong, and they didn’t necessarily address lesbianism, though I do see that it could be referring to the race of man, rather than men in particular.
Is the Bible supposed to be read as a literal history? If so, then how can I believe it when it has stories like the Tower of Babel, which science shows could not have happened. We can’t build a tower so high that we can shoot an arrow at God. The physical nature of our reality shows us that.
Wow! Thanks for all your questions. Of course, I’ll be happy to answer them, but one by one. I promise I’ll get to all of them in good time.
I’ll start with a simple one you mention: “If the earth is only a few thousand years old, then why do we find evidence of things prior to that time?” and “Is the Bible supposed to be read as a literal history? If so, then how can I believe it when it has stories like the Tower of Babel, which science shows could not have happened. We can’t build a tower so high that we can shoot an arrow at God. The physical nature of our reality shows us that.”
We as Catholics do not believe the Bible is a history book or a science textbook. That is a Fundamentalist notion that somehow keeps getting pinned on us, just like the creation vs. evolution debate. It’s not our problem, as we can reconcile both of them. The Bible is inerrant in what it teaches us about our relationship to God and the things necessary for salvation. It was written by human beings very much influenced and affected by the times in which they lived and what they knew about science. If God revealed it today, it would be very different. So, no need to worry about science. One of my posts talks about how the more science learns, the more it tends to prove God.
I promise I will answer your other questions soon, but i just got a call that there’s a leak in the school roof, so I must tend to it!
Merry Christmas to you and all your loved ones!
Fr. Carrozza
Thank you Father…. That was very helpful & encouraging.
Blessed Christmas…
Vicki Lippolis
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Sorry… I meant God…not “God’s”!!!
I feel terrible to say that this is the FIRST time I am on this site…I didn’t even realize that it existed!!!
I read almost every “blog” (is that what they are called?) … WOW!! So many of my questions and thoughts were answered and explained!!! What an absolute blessing it is to have Father Carrozza as my Pastor and my friend.
You, Father, seem to address the issues that weigh heavily on my mind and of which I wonder about often with so many questions of my own that I hold in my heart … you answer them in a way that is clear and understandable….summing it up “in a nutshell” …. I feel horrible when I am asked the reasoning behind certain aspects of my faith and I haven’t an answer….except “just because”… It is so incredible to be educated on my faith in a way that truly makes sense and sums it up “in a nutshell” once again!!!
Thank you for being who you were destined to be…..AWESOME!!
“My Savior lives, My Savior loves, My Savior’s ALWAYS there for me…My God He was, My God He is, My God’s He’s always going to be”!!! (My Savior My God…..by Aaron Shust)
With love and respect,
Ann M. Del Vecchio-Klingebiel
Thanks Ann! You’re really too kind! I do take requests, so if you have a topic you’d like me to discuss, send it along!