(LifeSiteNews) — On this week’s two-part episode of The Bishop Strickland Show, Bishop Joseph Strickland discusses the healing power of confession, how perpetual adoration can transform the Church, how the Mass predates the Bible, and more.
Bishop Strickland begins the first part of the episode by offering commentary on Luke 7:11-17, in which Our Lord raises the son of a widow from the dead in Naim. The bishop pondered what the woman and son’s lives would’ve been like after the son was resurrected by Christ.
“Here he is in a coffin being taken to his grave, and he’s raised from the dead. Wow! What was his life like after that? I mean, we don’t hear anymore, we don’t know, but I guess what I would say is we need, we have the obligation [of] hearing that story for our lives to be changed. We don’t know what happened to that man, but I can imagine that he became a disciple, I bet, of Jesus Christ, and the woman, and probably many others that were in that group,” Strickland said.
His Excellency then emphasized that it’s so easy to think of Gospel passages, especially this one, where we see Our Lord performing such a great miracle, as simply stories rather than actual events that took place, especially when non-Christians often ridicule us for believing these stories to be true. “[T]hey’re not just stories. They are manifestations of God with us. And we need to really deepen our faith and and live in a way [so] that it corresponds better with that same Jesus being among us now the sacraments, especially the Eucharist.”
Strickland underscored that that same Jesus who told the man in this Gospel, “Young man, arise,” and told his mother, “Do not weep,” is present in all the sacraments. He also took a deeper dive into how Our Lord heals the faithful in the sacrament of confession in an analogous way to how He revived this young man.
“[I] would just encourage all of us to hear the Lord in His wonderful compassion. Here’s this woman; He’s just walking by. His procession is moving past, [and] He’s moved with pity. The Lord is always moved with pity when we come to Him. He is Goodness and Beauty and Truth Incarnate,” he explained. “And so when we encounter Him, He’s going to be moved with pity for our sinfulness, our weakness, our compromised life, all the ways that we are not fully with Him. And He’s there to heal – I mean, sometimes [not] as dramatically, it’s not a raising from the dead, but I’ve seen dramatic healing in confession.”
“Where a person really burdened by serious sin is freed from that sometimes, after many years of carrying that burden around, finally they come to the Lord and ask forgiveness. And I think we all need to speak of the sacrament of confession in those terms.”
Later in Part 1, host Terry Barber asked Strickland for his thoughts on the Diocese of Wichita, Kansas’ perpetual Eucharistic adoration in every parish and school for over 40 years. Barber explained that this devotion was started by the late Bishop Eugene Gerber, who said there is no better connection we can make with Christ than in the Eucharist and in adoration. Barber noted that Gerber started this devotion by asking the faithful to come invest in spending time with Our Lord as a part of “stewardship,” and perpetual adoration spread as part of a natural progression. The diocese has even seen a tremendous increase in vocations since beginning this devotion to the Blessed Sacrament.
Bishop Strickland said that what the Diocese of Wichita has done should be a model for transforming the Church. “Bishop Gerber laid the foundation there, and then other bishops thankfully followed on, but that spiritual foundation really allowed them to be a stewardship diocese where the cost of Catholic education is covered by the stewardship of the parishes by people generously supporting, and it makes perfect sense that it began with that spiritual stewardship of being present to the Lord.”
Circling back to the Gospel reading, the bishop stressed that “these people came to know Jesus was really with them, just like in that Gospel where He raises the young man from the dead, and He’s the Lord of life, and not just giving back physical life, but giving us real life, even in the midst of what so often feels like a mundane world, to make us really alive in Him.”
Bishop Strickland begins the second part of the episode by offering commentary on Luke 7:31-35, in which Our Lord describes how the people of that generation rejected Him by comparing them to children who complain about not getting their way. His Excellency highlighted that while Our Lord said this about the people 2,000 years ago, the same can be said about our generation today, as we often see people reject the truth because it challenges their feelings and what they want.
“I think this Gospel reminds us, ‘Why was Christ rejected?’ Because people tend to reject the truth because it challenges us to go beyond feelings. It challenges us to do the harder thing,” he said. “And so, for that reason, it’s sadly almost predictable that when God sends His Son, who is Truth Incarnate, the world’s going to reject Him. Because just like the children in this Gospel, in that image, where we’re looking at what we want, how does it feel? And we’re not looking deeper at where is the truth in this [sic].”
The bishop added that part of what upset the children was that Our Lord dined with the sinners who really needed Him. But His Excellency emphasized what made Our Lord’s teachings so unattractive to some in His time and continues to make them unattractive to some in our own time: it is our tendency to reject the truth because we don’t want to deny ourselves.
“[T]he truth calls us to be more than sometimes we want to be. It calls us out of our comfort zone; it calls us to deny ourselves, to give of ourselves, rather than always receiving,” he explained. “And I think that’s kind of the image we have with the children sitting there saying, ‘We played the flute for you, but you did not dance. We sang a dirge, and you did not weep. You didn’t act the way we wanted you to.’”
Strickland underscored again how our society in 2024 isn’t that different from Christ’s generation that rejected Him because they didn’t deny themselves. They’d have bread and go to circuses, just like us.
“[I]t’s what the Roman Empire did to keep the people happy and keep them distracted from what was going on. Give them enough bread and circuses to entertain them. In many ways, that’s where we are now. Bread and circuses, it’s not the circus, but it’s the internet,” he said. “Bread is fast food, and you know, it may not be quality bread, quality food, but just [enough] to keep the masses focused on those things, satisfied, and you can get by with manipulating the truth. That’s really where we are.”
Later in Part 2, Barber asked the bishop to expand on the fact that the Mass predates the Bible by 350 years, noting that this is an important truth that Catholics don’t always realize.
“It’s so foundational to understanding our Catholic faith, understanding the importance of the Mass, and understanding, you know, how the church has developed through the years,” Strickland said. “I’ve said many times, the purpose of the Church is the salvation of souls, I think to put what we’re talking about in that context, why do we have the Mass? For the salvation of souls. Why do we have Sacred Scripture? For the salvation of souls. To guide us, to help us day by day, to live the truth, to turn from sin, to be more and more seeking to live as God calls us to and be able to share in everlasting life with Him.”
Strickland then noted that St. Justin Martyr actually wrote about the Mass shortly after the year 100: “He describes to a pagan what you do at what we now call the Mass, this Eucharist, this liturgy, all the different names for it. … And he describes a very basic outline that, for anybody who knows what happens at Mass, you’re going to say, ‘Oh, he’s talking about the Mass.’ It talks about proclaiming God’s Word, and interestingly, he says, reading the memoirs of the apostles… they’re reading these before they’re called the New Testament.”
“But it’s part of worshiping God. It’s part of this sacrifice that Jesus Christ has left them with the very heart of it. He says, ‘Do this in memory of me,’ and that is, take bread and take wine that becomes His Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity.”
To hear more from His Excellency, tune in to this week’s episode of The Bishop Strickland Show.
To watch all previous episodes of The Bishop Strickland Show, click here to visit LifeSite’s video page dedicated to The Bishop Strickland Show.