Today's Mass readings (God speaks to people / Jesus and the demons

[erikd]

I really love that story, but, she didn’t start praying only after he became a priest, it
was before he was a priest.

incidentally, one person speaks up at morning mass every day during prayers of
the faithful, to pray for people to become priests and nuns. What if there is
someone having a dream of a whole congregation praying for them? thanks for that
story!

You’re welcome Cheeto1, and I should have clarified something. The nun, when met by the Bishop, was a young nun, the same young nun he had seen in his dream 30 years earlier. If I didn’t clarify that, I apologize. The moral of the story is that because God is outside of time, so are the petitions. The woman in the story prayed for a Priestly conversion which hapenned probably before she was born even though she contributed to the conversion with her prayers. Keep praying.

 

[distracted]

God is omniscient - all knowing. “All” includes the aspect of time also – all actions throughout all of time. This is a Church dogma.
Vatican Council I (1870) states it thus:
…For “all things are naked and open to His eyes” (Heb 4:13), even those which by the free action of creatures are in the future.

Here is an interesting bit I just came across in “Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma”:
The dogma of human freedom is not abrogated by the dogma of the infallible certainty of the Divine prevision of future free actions. The Fathers point to the eternal character of the Divine knowing and conclude that the Divine foreknowledge imposes as little compulsion on future actions as human remembering does on the past. …
Cf. St. Augustine…“As thou through thy remembrance dost not oblige that which is past to have occurred, so God through His prescience does not compel that which shall be in the future to happen.”

The test was for Abraham’s benefit - not because God didn’t know what was in Abraham’s heart and how he would respond.

Like St. Peter, most of us who love the Lord think we would suffer anything rather than deny Him. We may really believe it - be absolutely positive in our mind/intellect, that our faith is that strong. But there is the sense in which that faith is not yet real. For it to be completely “real” it has to be demonstrated, lived out. To do this, trials must arise that challenge our faith; situations that test and give us an opportunity to demonstrate the strength of our faith. Faith may start in the intellect and heart, but it has to be lived out to be real.

Trails and tests serve as a means to strengthen the faith we have.

These tests also serve as *a means of self revelation for us *-- to discover whether we truly have the faith we claim in our thoughts and words, or whether we are instead mistaken in our confidence (as Peter discovered). Until it’s undergone the test, we do not know for sure whether our faith is as strong as we think it is.

God knows how strong our faith is; it’s we who don’t.

I’m not sure i totally u/stand what the fathers have said or maybe it is being taken out of context…

all i know is… God gave us free will and that means we can be angels one day and devils the next. . and angels the next all over again…

a person like Hitler is (was) - like everyone - given numerous chances to repent. The fact that he apparently didn’t does not mean that he was doomed from the beginning or whatever…

God does not create certain pepole and “know” beforehand that he/she will choose Hell… that does not make sense to me and i don’t care wht the Fathers or whomever said or allegedly said…