Alflf
Choosing “not to know” reality is your curse.
On the Gospels, no one has been able to break their historicity, yet you fantasise that one or more main points could be false – without any evidence.
You might listen to that great convert John Henry Cardinal Newman: With an unhealthy doubt, “a person suspends judgment even when the evidence is conclusive and completely adequate. This is skepticism, intellectual cowardice……A difficulty is a problem, a not-seeing how two realities fit together….a situation we do not yet understand and perhaps will never understand. It is a limitation on our knowledge, a passing or permanent limitation.”
John Henry Cardinal Newman said “ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt, as I understand the subject; difficulty and doubt are incommensurate.” (Apologia pro vita Sua). [Fr Dubay, *Faith And Certitude
, Ignatius Press, 1995, p 82-4].
To continue with the mirage that the eyewitnesses did not give the words of Jesus, but yet died for Him because they believed Him and saw His divinity expressed in His Resurrection, belies sanity.
Perhaps you haven’t heard of miracles. But you didn’t have to be a Catholic to experience this one:
Eyewitnesses in the modern era saw, and it is historically recorded, the miracle of the sun at Fatima:
As Avelino deAlmeida, the chief editor of “O Seculo,” the large “liberal” anticlerical and masonic daily of Lisbon, writes:
Before the dazzled eyes of the people, whose attitude transported us to biblical times, and who, dumb-founded, heads uncovered, contemplated the blue of the sky, the sun trembled, it mad estrange and abrupt movements, outside of all cosmic laws, “the sun danced”, according to the typical expression of the peasants…(2)"
Attacked violently by all the anticlerical press, Avelino de Almeida renewed his testimony, fifteen days later, in his review, l “Ilustra‡ao Portuguesa”. This time he illustrated his account with a dozen photographs of the huge ecstatic crowd, and repeated as a refrain throughout his article: “I saw…I saw…I saw.” And he concluded fortuitously: "Miracle, as the people shouted? Natural phenomenon, as the experts say? For the moment, that does not concern me, I am only saying what I saw… The rest is a matter for Science and the Church.” (3) [My emphasis].
Note:
2) O Seculo of October 15, 1917.
3) Article of October 29, 1917.
I can give you a curious account of this “miracle of the sun” phenomenon. When my dad met my mum, during the sixties, in a city in southern Portugal called Beja, they would often stroll by a park. My mum got intrigued by an old man who prayed the rosary everyday while staying by his window. My dad happened to know the old man and some day he introduced them. Well, his account of the miracle was moving. He had gone to Fátima for the single purpose of laughing at the peasants there. He was a young adult in 1917, and he had an attitude that, at the time, was thought to be “progressive” in Portugal, especially in the South; contempt for Catholicism was mandatory. The problem was - he got overwhelmed by the “miracle” and, as he told my mother, from that day on not a single day passed without him praying the rosary, in obedience to what the Virgin Mary told the little shepherds. Now, it must have been an very strong experience for such a radical change of mindset. People are very fond of their a priori beliefs. But that young man changed. Another curious thing was that he died shortly after, of natural causes, while my parents were still in Beja. It was a 13th of May. The bottom line is: you can be a Catholic without believing any of this. But it still makes you thing about whether this intricate, complicated and beautiful thing we call Catholicism isn’t true after all. As a note, my beloved father died more than twenty years ago; my mother is alive and very well; she’s in her early seventies and I hope to have her with me and my brothers for another twenty years - at the very least!
