We are featuring a two part Catholic Vitamins Podcast. We’re calling them Vitamin M1: Mission and M2: Mission Continued. We hope you’ve listened to guest Jim Burnham. What a gift to us and to Catholics everywhere.
Jim is a cradle-Catholic, the second-oldest in a family of ten children. In 1989 Jim graduated as valedictorian from Michigan’s Hillsdale College with a degree in philosophy. Questions from Evangelical classmates forced him to rediscover the biblical and historical basis for his Catholic faith.
Jim co-authored the hugely popular series of Beginning Apologetics booklets–clear, simple handbooks showing ordinary Catholics how to effectively explain and defend their faith.
Jim has given apologetics seminars all over the world. He has appeared on EWTN’s “Carpenter Shop” and is a regular radio guest on “Catholic Answers Live.” He is the co-author of Christian Fatherhood along with Steve Wood. Jim and his wife Lisa have been married 15 years and have six children.
Here is a review of the work of Jim Burnham’s work through the San Juan Ministries effort. This review is copied from the www.averagejoecatholicc.wordpress.com and we thank them for allowing us to borrow this material.
The Eucharist is really Jesus!
September 9, 2007
I came across some good insights on the Eucharist in the San Juan Catholic Seminar’s booklet Beginning Apologetics 3: How to explain and defend the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. This booklet is just one in an excellent series of Apologetics materials. Each booklet breaks things down into easy-to-understand pieces, and this one is no exception.
One observation that is made on page 23 of the booklet seems so obvious once you think about it, but I had never thought about it in quite that way. in the section of “Evidence from History”, they pose the simple question that, if Jesus was speaking only symbolically at the Last Supper and the Apostles understood him to be speaking as such, “How then can we explain the development of the doctrine of the Real Presence?”
This incredible teaching that Jesus is truly present Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity in the Eucharist would surely have seemed incredibly preposterous and heretical if it had not been a teaching from the very beginning. Whenever someone came along and taught something about Jesus that had not been taught before, Saints and Bishops cried out in defense of the true faith. One would expect the same response to the Doctrine of the Real Presence if it were a novel doctrine.
But that is not the case.
Instead, you have no record of anyone denying the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist for the first 1500 years of the Church (except for Berengarius in the eleventh century who later retracted his disbelief). Rather you only find the Church Fathers unanimously teaching the Real Presence.
So, if someone asks you why you believe in the Real Presence, simply ask, “If it has not been a teaching from the very beginning, when did it start and where is your evidence?”
LISA MLADINICH’S NEW PUBLICATION
We’d also like to share with you that we have received a new publication from Our Sunday Visitor publishers. It’s an exciting addition to the work of a great teacher and catechetics instructor (and author and blogger and new media maven 🙂 LISA MLADINICH. Picking up with the approach and style she demonstrated in her first work BE AN AMAZING CATECHIST — Lisa adds another way to Be An Amazing Catechist: SACRAMENTAL PREPARATION.
Lisa was a guest on Catholic Vitamins several months ago, and she brings an infectious love of our Faith, our Church and the Sacraments in her persona and in her writing.
Sacramental Preparation is an easy-to-read overview of what any CCD teacher, parent or priest or deacon would want to see shared with the young ones to be taught about the sacraments. What is a sacrament? What is a sacramental? What is sacramentality? What does it mean to ‘be made in the image and likeness of God?’ These questions and wonderful explanations of the sacraments are found in these 32 pages. Yes, 32 pages! Anyone can tackle this booklet-like publication — yet it’s full of the truths and treasures of our faith.
Catholic Vitamins highly recommends BE AN AMAZING CATECHIST: SACRAMENTAL PREPARATION. Available through OSV Publications at this web address:
https://catalog.osv.com/Catalog.aspx?SimpleDisplay=true&ProductCode=X1206