'Our Lady of Guadalupe' Video & Article Resources for Contemplating the Supernatural & the great Miracle of 9 million converts hundreds of years before WIFI.
We invite you to pray at 5 PM EST / 10 PM BET: Join the Rosary with Fr. Michael J. Kane's parish community via his St. Augustine's SPACE which broadcasts from Coatbridge, Scotland, UK.
Apparition of Our Lady:
“My Dear Juan Diego, go to the Lord Bishop and tell him that I want a little house built so that I can show my all my Love to my children.”
12 December, 2022 [2nd Edition, Revised] Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe
THE ROSARY HOUR PODCAST NEWSLETTER
We hope you enjoyed a memorable Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
Father Phalan, Director of Family Rosary in today’s sermon on Guadalupe notes:
The Aztecs were seized by the despair of thinking their gods had betrayed them. The situation became worse and worse, reaching an extremely explosive point in 1531; until Our Lady appears, bearing Jesus in her womb, calling all to her Son. Immediately the war stopped. In ten years, nine million Mexicans became Christians.
As today’s Feast ends, we invite you to apply the four questions Father Looney taught us during his podcast on Oct. 13, 2022 in this clip [CLICK HERE to jump to Karen’s discussion].
What is the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe all about? (What are we recalling?)
How does the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe and her apparition give me hope?
What am I to love as a result of this apparition?
How do I express this love? What is the message of Guadalupe that moves us today to share with others Our Lady’s desire to “show my all my Love to my children”?
EXTRA RESOURCES ON OUR LADY OF GUADALUPE
Below, we picked some videos & articles that might entice your review of an aspect of the message of Guadalupe before retiring this evening.
#1: Guadalupe The Miracle and the Message (2015)
A one hour exploration which includes footage of the surfing Father Don Calloway, MIC, at minute 42:54. A useful overview of Guadalupe.
A MESSAGE ABOUT OUR LADY OF GUADALUPE FROM ISRAEL:
NEW VIDEO: FR. CHRIS ALAR, EPISODE 66: OUR LADY OF GUADALUPE
Fr. Chris posted this video on Dec. 15 for his show Living Divine Mercy. Enjoy.
MARIAN APPARITIONS 101: GUEST CONTRIBUTOR - FR. GRAMLICH
Fr. Anthony Gramlich, MIC provides a very short intro to Marian Apparitions. This quick 101 can assist those new to the concept of an “apparition”.
QUICK SUMMARY IN 3.5 minutes
Our Lady of Guadalupe appeared as Madre de Deus. In the following video, Fr. Chris Alar, MIC explains the story of “Our Lady of Guadalupe” as the “Patroness of Life”.
He cites a very useful video for teaching the story in a short 3.5 minutes at the 7:50 minute cued here for you:
Why would “9 million people embrace the baby Jesus?” in 1531?
Juan Diego’s knowledge of Our Lady can be contextualized for skeptics with points from the following article shared by @HolyRosary_TO from Aleteia. The headline: “Scientists can’t explain why Guadalupe tilma hasn’t decayed”:
BUT WHAT ARE MIRACLES?
AN ANSWER FROM OUR GUEST CONTRIBUTOR: FR. EDWARD LOONEY
To further explore the idea of a “Miracle”, we asked Fr. Looney to teach a short lesson on the definition of a Miracle [CLICK HERE]:1
See the following article: "Our Lady of Guadalupe ‘completely beyond' scientific explanation, says researcher”
KEITH NESTER MEETS GABRIEL CASTILLO
Methodist Pastor turned Catholic, Keith Nester will be returning to The Rosary Hour Podcast in 2023 to talk about the Luminous Mysteries from his brand new and engaging book “Unpacking the Mysteries of the Rosary”.
Nester will co-guide a Marian pilgrimage to Guadalupe in January 2023, the most visited pilgrim site in the world with over 20, 000, 000 vistors (more than Lourdes and Fátima).
In this discussion, Nester sits down with Gabriel Castillo (who wears a Miraculous Medal) here. They discuss many of the amazing facts related to Our Lady of Guadalupe:
NOTE: If you haven’t yet watched the summer Live Record, here is our first totally impromptu conversation at the Digital Café with Keith Nester:
BISHOP BARRON PROCESSION AT MISSION SANTA BARBARA, USA
Below is the video shared out by Bishop Barron’s Word on Fire team (Spanish) today to inspire perhaps a desire for more citywide processions that honour the Mother of God and “prepare the way for the Lord”:
PRAY THE ROSARY WITH FR. KANE’S COMMUNITY IN SCOTLAND
If you missed the chance to join in prayer of the Rosary this evening, we invite you to listen to the recording of tonight’s SPACE. Fr. Kane’s pastoral team, led by our friend Jan, posts their Rosary regularly. See a reminder here:
Fr. Kane’s parish is just 1 hour from Edinburgh in Motherwell Diocese where he also supports Bishop John Keenan (Diocese of Paisley); Keenan is a strong advocate for Dr. Blythe Kaufman’s Children’s Rosary Prayer Apostolate.
VIRTUAL CONCERT FROM ST. AUGUSTINE’S IN TORONTO
An invitation from Toronto, Canada to Save-the-Date: Thursday, December 15 at 7:30 p.m. listen to a virtual concert at St. Augustine’s Seminary.
Our upcoming guest, author of “Experts in Humanity” and theologian, Dr. Josephine Lombardi teaches Pastoral Theology at St. Augustine’s Seminary. This will be Lombardi’s second visit to the Digital Café, and she will be joined by another guest — the most Reverend Fr. Charles Nahm, a special theological advisor to our podcast who was also ordained to the priesthood by His Holiness, Saint John Paul II in Rome, Italy in the 1990s.
EXTRA FOOTNOTES ON MIRACLES: NATURAL vs. SUPERNATURAL
N.B. Musings — From her apparitions, Our Lady has by her presence encouraged us to restore the supernatural aspects of the Gospel, which some argue have been lost in our times. Stories about the tilma can often assist others to overcome the reduction of “Faith” into blind simplicity, ignorance, or contrived blind obedience manufactured by some imagined power structure which is ideologically concocted. Such forecasting can encourage mainstream thinking which abstracts “Faith” and relegates the idea of miracles into the realms of superstition, imagination, fiction and delusion.
Such commentary is something that C.S. Lewis attempted to battle and explore in his apologetics chapters on “Miracles” where he attempts to examine Naturalism vs. Supernaturalism.
According to the OED, “NATURALISM” refers to:
“the philosophical belief that everything arises from natural properties and causes, and supernatural or spiritual explanations are excluded or discounted: i.e. this romanticized attitude to the world did conflict with his avowed naturalism.”
The term “Supernatural” in the ODE: so͞opərˈnaCH(ə)rəl is defined in this way:
an adjective (of a manifestation or event) attributed to some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature: a supernatural being.
The website, https://www.cslewisinstitute.org/resources/c-s-lewis-on-miracles/ summarizes “The Problem with Naturalism” as explored by C.S. Lewis in his book on miracles.
We cite here the author, Arthur W. Lindsley, Senior Fellow for Apologetics, of CSLI who attempts to explore these ideas in a summative way. Here are Lindsley’s notes which we’ll try to annotate later on in this newsletter, for our second edition of this post when time permits. [First Edition sent by e-mail]:
ON NATURALISM
"Lewis begins Miracles with a section on naturalism—nature is all that there is. You might represent naturalism and supernaturalism in these terms.
Naturalism presents nature as a closed box with everything being explained by natural cause and effect, whereas super naturalism sees nature as an open system, operating by natural law most of the time, but open to intervention by God.
C. S. Lewis’s strategy, before even dealing with specific objections to miracles, was to show that naturalism had a tendency to self-destruct. In other words, if naturalism was true, then we could not be certain of the arguments that attempt to establish it. Some of this argument moves into more technical distinctions which I do not want to discuss in this context, but I do want to sketch the argument so that you can see its significance. If you want to look at the details, read Miracles or one of the sources noted at the end of this article.
The argument goes something like this: in order for naturalism to be true, it must account for everything under the naturalistic premise. Yet the one thing naturalism cannot account for is the reasoning process necessary to establish naturalism. If a theory provided an explanation for everything in the universe but undermined the very thinking used to establish it, then it would either disprove the theory or make it very unlikely. If naturalism undermines reason itself, Lewis says:
…it would have destroyed its own credentials. It would be an argument which proved that no argument was sound—a proof that there are no such things as proofs—which is nonsense.
Yet naturalism does undermine reason itself. Lewis says that naturalism
...offers what professes to be a full account of our mental behavior; but this account on inspection leaves no room for the acts of knowing or insight on which the whole value of our thinking, as a means of truth, depend.
If only blind, unconscious, material forces are working by chance within the closed box of nature, then what is the status of the conscious, thinking being that arises out of that chance process? How can we have confidence in reason? Do we not need to somehow get outside the box in order to see it and describe it clearly? But, according to naturalism, we are chance products of that box and cannot get outside it. Forces that are material, working by chance, might produce an ability to think in a way that was sound, but also more likely would give us defective, distorted reasoning abilities. Richard Purtill, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Western Washington University, restates Lewis’s argument (taking into account the critiques that were given of it) in his Reason to Believe:
If I pose a mathematical problem and throw some dice, the dice might happen to fall into a pattern which gives the answer to my problem. But there is no reason to suppose that they will. Now in the Chance view, all our thoughts are the results of processes as random as a throw of dice. …(A)ll our thoughts result from processes that have as little relation to our minds as the growth of a tree.
If you throw the dice to get the solution to your math problem, how likely do you think that the first or second throw would give you the right answer? The complexity of the universe is far greater than 2 + 2 = 4. It would always be more likely that you would come up with an erroneous result than the true one. Lewis is dealing here with something much more than a math problem: the whole validity of our reasoning shaped by the cosmic dice roll. Even if perchance these reasoning powers were valid, we would never know or have an adequate basis to know that they were valid. Thus, on a naturalistic foundation, all our confidence in the reason used to establish naturalism is undermined. The only slim hope is that one in a billion rolls of the dice has produced the correct result.
This is pretty abstract stuff, and perhaps your eyes have glazed over if you have read this far. I think that this general critique is perhaps better seen in the critiques Lewis gives to Marx and Freud. For instance, if according to Marx all philosophies and religious views come out of material forces—particularly the economic realm of matter—and thus are suspect, would not that same suspicion apply to Marx’s views?
Arthur W. Lindsley, is the Vice President of Theological Initiatives at the Institute for Faith, Works, & Economics. He has served at the C.S. Lewis Institute since 1987 both as President until 1998 and currently as Senior Fellows for Apologetics. Formerly, he was director of Educational Ministries at the Ligonier Valley Study Center, and Staff Specialist with the Coalition for Christian Outreach. He is the author of C.S. Lewis's Case for Christ, True Truth, Love: The Ultimate Apologetic, and co-author with R.C. Sproul and John Gerstner of Classical Apologetics, and has written numerous articles on theology, apologetics, C.S. Lewis, and the lives and works of many other authors and teachers. Art earned his M.Div. from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of Pittsburgh.
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Wishing you a wonderful Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe!
The Rosary Hour Podcast Team.