https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=WifSmqf8NIc
Yeah, thank you. For those who are just tuning in, we have Deacon Thomas Rausch from the Diocese of Sioux Falls. He, like me, is a transitional deacon awaiting ordination and he’s joining me and Deacon Riley Durkin from the Diocese of Fargo currently stuck in the St. Paul Seminary under lockdown orders. House arrest, I mean. House arrest, yes. What’s the difference? So anyway, we’re excited to get our How to Read the Bible Part 2 series going. So here we have information about how you can submit questions. As last week, you are certainly free to call during the presentation. Just call the parish Our operator, who is named Father P. Ackerman, he will take your questions and make sure they get to me. Otherwise, we have a live chat on YouTube and for those of you kids out there who actually know what Discord is, you could just plug that into your web browser and it should take you to our chat room and you can ask questions there if you really want to. But I got a feeling most people are just going to use a live YouTube chat. Before we get started, I just want to say a great big thank you to my friend Steve R. He heard I was doing a lot of stuff on the internet and he went and purchased me a brand new microphone, a desktop microphone. And so if my voice sounds even more magnificent than usual, it’s on account of Mr. Steve R. So thank you. And I also want to thank Father Phil for being on the line to take your questions and Deacon Tom and Deacon Riley for joining us. So let’s go ahead and review what we did last week. So last week we started off covering the problem of interpretation and we discovered that there’s no such thing as a point of view from nowhere. All of us have ideas that we bring with us everywhere we go. And so in order to interpret the scriptures properly, we’ve got to have an appropriate framework which can also be called the hermeneutic to interpret the scriptures correctly. We looked at Luther and Calvin and the basic conclusion is that they were brilliant men who thought they were trying to save the biblical faith but that their systems ultimately collapsed due to a vacuum of authority. We then looked at critical biblical scholarship that’s like a scientific approach to the sacred scriptures and it’s a huge huge field containing many facts and theories. And so I think the basic test we can do there is test everything and retain what is good. And just remember oftentimes that people who are writing from a critical point of view have atheistic presuppositions and that can color their reading of the text. So you might remember our example from the book of the prophet Isaiah. Can you explain a bit again about what it means to have an atheistic presupposition? Does that mean that anybody that’s studying in this way is an atheist? What does that mean to be an atheistic way of studying the Bible? So basically if you’re doing a critical biblical scholarship, you’re looking at the text and you’re looking at historical evidence. And so what that usually ends up meaning is that you’re not drawing from let’s say you know St. Augustine or Thomas Aquinas, you’re not drawing from magisterial documents, you’re trying to explain everything you see just from a scientific perspective. And that approach to scriptures can really open up a lot of things, but because you’re not explicitly importing things that come from our faith tradition, you’re just looking at the text of the Bible and you’re looking at whatever historical evidence you can get. That can end up leading to interpretations which before you even get to the text, exclude the possibility of God doing anything with the Bible. Does that make sense? Yeah, so like I said last week, it would be the same way that scholars would study the Iliad and the Odyssey. They’d be studying the Bible. An ancient text, correct. And then we looked at the new atheists very briefly. Somebody like Sam Harris thinks that the Bible is a primitive form of science. We would call that the God of the Gaps, the God that humans were just trying to project an explanation for the universe out. And ultimately I think he ends up has a distorted view of what knowledge is, what we can know, that human knowledge is actually quite a bit broader a category than he gives it credit for. So we get to start today with how the church reads the Bible, how the Catholic Church reads the Bible. And I think the most important thing that you can remember about how the Catholic Church reads the Bible is it always happens in an ecclesial context. It always happens in the context of the whole church. So none of us are ever alone if we’re reading the scriptures in faith. We’re always a part of the universal church. We’re always a part of a long tradition stretching all the way back to Adam, right? Because that’s when Revelation first began, the very first human. So if we’re gonna be reading the Bible ecclesially now, something that might be helpful to know is what is the church, right? I mean are we really gonna say that it’s a brick building on 3rd Street? Is that the church? And I think obviously many of you people, you people, you my listeners, my beloved listeners, what do you mean you people? My beloved listeners would already know that that’s false. So the word church comes from a Greek word that means call out of. So the way we usually would translate it would be like an assembly or a convocation. So it can actually be used in three different ways. So any particular liturgical assembly like a Sunday mass or praying the liturgy of the hours or doing a Eucharistic procession, those could be called the church. Also a local organization as a diocese or maybe the Eparchy if you’re into the eastern stuff, that could be called the church, right? So we have the church which is in Fargo and that covers the eastern half of North Dakota. And then finally we’ve got the church in the whole world and that’s the main definition that we’re gonna be using, the church in the whole world. And so what is the church then? It’s the community of all believers in the world and you can tell that you’re a member of the Catholic Church by the threefold unity. There’s first the unity of faith, second a unity of sacraments, and third a unity of governance, right? So we can break this down into little parts by looking at the two major scriptural images of what the church is. These come from St. Paul. He first off talks about the church as the body of Christ. And so you could think about a body, well it’s supposed to be a single unity, right? Your soul brings all the individual parts of your body into one. So it’s not like your left foot is a different thing than your right foot. They’re distinct but they’re all within that one unity of a body. So just as our body is one, though it’s made of many parts, so the church is one joined by the power of the Holy Spirit. And so I think that’s a really good way of looking at faith as a principle of unity because faith is the root and source of all salvation, the root and source of all justification, and faith is the gateway into the Catholic Church. Without faith, you’re not in the Catholic Church. And then just as our one body is, you know, fed by the same source, so too we are fed spiritually by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit’s the one that draws us all together. And the principal way that the Holy Spirit would do that would be through the sacraments, through the sacraments of the church, especially the seven sacraments. And then finally we can look at the church as the kingdom of God, right? So the church as the kingdom of God. And so the church is governed by one king. And you know, so sometimes you’ll ask Catholics like, who’s the head of the Catholic Church? And they’ll say the Pope. It’s like, not quite. Jesus is the one head of the Catholic Church. And he operates in the church through his vicars on earth. It is his lieutenants on earth. And that’s the Pope in union with all the bishops. So the vicars of Christ are not the head of the Catholic Church. That’s Jesus Christ. Yeah, I think that’s a good analogy when it comes back to what we were talking about last week about the way scripture is written. The divine author versus the human author. Who authors the scriptures? Well, it’s God, but he uses people to do it. Put their own personality, their own idioms, their own culture, the way they wrote, in much the same way when we’re talking about the governance in the church, who’s governing the church? Well, it’s Jesus through people. Through very fallible people. Yes, yes. So anyway, with the authority they’ve received from God, the Pope and the bishops are supposed to bring the church on earth to heaven, right? To shepherd God’s faithful people into heaven for the glory of his name. And so in order to accomplish that mission, it’s very important that you keep the people unified, that you don’t split us up. And so since faith is the foundation of unity of the church, it is a top priority to maintain, which means that bishops need to have special authority from Christ to teach and even when needed to condemn error. The church doesn’t seem to be condemning error quite as much these days, but if you look at the history of the church, they used to have an index of banned books. And usually when they put those on there, they became best sellers. So they’re like, maybe we need to back off with that because it wasn’t really working. I know, I’d check it out. Banned books meaning things that go against truth, against things that against what the church teachings against… Well, it basically meant that these things are actually harmful to people. Right. You think of social distancing now, you know, we’re in this area of the coronavirus. Like there are certain activities now that we are used to doing that actually are harmful to our health or those who are medically fragile. The same way the church would put kind of restrictions on reading material because in the same way you can get ideas that are harmful in your head and they can spread like a virus and they can really poison people’s faith and ability to receive the truth of Jesus Christ in a way that actually leads to salvation. It’s a slippery slope down a dark path. And if the people who are reading these books are professors or teachers, then they’re teaching these false teachings to other people. So if the bishops have a priority to protect the faith of the people, then banning books is right along with what they ought to do because they want to protect people from harmful ideas. Right. Right. And I guess my main point is we don’t do it so much because it didn’t really help that much. Once the printing press was invented, they just became bestsellers. So if you don’t… Right. Right. Right. So it’s… We’re in a different historic period. We have to do different things. Yeah. All right. And then one last little point we got here is the teaching authority of the church is called the Magisterium. That’s just like the Latin word for meaning teacher. So you might hear me casually reference the Magisterium. That’s all I’m talking about. So we talked about the church and let’s talk about revelation. So God is telling humanity all about himself. He wants us to know him so that we can love him. Now, revelation can come about in two different ways. You can think of natural revelation. So if you’ve ever been, let’s say, looking at a beautiful mountain peak or walking on a beach or any place out in nature, and you just look at how magnificent and sublime everything you’re beholding is, and you say, wow, God, you’re great. And you obviously made all of this. That’s perfectly legitimate. God does reveal himself through the things he has created, but there’s only so much you can learn that way, which is why it’s very important that we pay attention to supernatural revelation. And as I kind of alluded to earlier, supernatural revelation began with end it Adam, and it ended with Jesus Christ. So God began revealing who he was and what he wanted us to know about him. Right. The first chapters of the Bible. And then he gave us the complete, the complete truth of everything we needed to know for our salvations with Jesus Christ. And so we believe that there’s no new revelation since the death of the last apostle, that everything you need to believe in order to be saved has already been laid down. So that’s nice. We don’t have to wait for, you know, St. Paul’s fourth letter to the Corinthians or anything like that. Now, the way we believe about this is the Catholic churches, God is the one source of revelation and you can access this revelation in two different places. And so the first and probably the one you’re most familiar with is of course, the text of the Bible itself, the texts of the sacred scriptures, but also in the sacred tradition. And so I think this quote from the second Vatican council explains that beautifully. This commission to preach the gospel was faithfully fulfilled by the apostles who by their oral preaching, by example, and by observances handed on what they had learned, what they had received from the lips of Christ, from living with him and from what he did or what they had learned through the prompting of the Holy spirit. And the early church remembered what the apostles said, even if they didn’t write it down, they remembered what the apostles did, even if they didn’t write it down. And that memory sort of lives on in the institution of the church. And so those would be called the monuments of tradition. And there’s a lot of them. We don’t have time to go through them now, but some of the principal ones where you can find the sacred tradition is in the liturgy, especially in the rights of mass and the writings of the fathers of the church. So those early theologians who started to explain and articulate our faith and early Christian art, you can get a lot of what the church believed then by prayerful observation of early Christian art. And so the magisterium is obligated to guard this, to protect this as a treasure because it’s necessary for salvation. And we call everything that God has revealed the deposit of faith. I just remember that the only authority that bishops have are on matters of faith and morals. So they can’t decide a scientific matter. They can’t decide scientifically how old the universe is. They can’t decide on what the best book ever by an author, a human author is. They can’t decide on the best book ever. They can’t decide what the best flavor of ice cream is. They have a limited authority, not unlimited authority. Yeah, I think that’s, you said it perfectly. I think that’s an important thing to point out. When we talk about papal intelligibility, what does that mean? You can still get math problems wrong. It doesn’t mean he’s without sin either. Right. It’s not perfect. Some people. I do want to say before we keep moving on, we’ve got a few more people that are watching. If anybody has any questions, there’s a chat feature next to the video. Go ahead and type it in, or you can text Father Phil or call the parish number. And he’s by the phone. We’ll be happy to answer questions in that way. And then we’ll be taking the questions at the end of the program. So we don’t get too lost here. All right. So that’s revelation. Now we’re just moving on to what the church believes about the Bible. And so the church believes that the Bible, the Holy Spirit is the principal author of the Bible. And that’s what we call inspiration. Right. So you can see the word spirit kind of contained in there and that God uses a human author as his instrument. And you don’t want to think about that as like a degrading use, you know, like slavery or abuse. Basically the power of the Holy Spirit would come upon whoever God had chosen to put his words down and elevate his mind to be able to say the things that God wants him to say. So it’s perfectly legitimate to say that God is the author of all scriptures. And it’s also perfectly legitimate to say that, let’s say St. Matthew was the author of the gospel of Matthew. They’re both authors. It’s just one of them’s a principal author. The other one’s the secondary author, but both true authors. And so that leads very naturally to the doctrine of inerrancy, the inerrancy of all sacred scriptures. And you got to, you got to be careful with that one. A lot of people get really, really confused by what they mean when they So, you know, young earth creationism, the people who would say that the earth is only 6,000 years old because the Bible says that God burying the dinosaur bones to test our faith. I’m just going to invite everybody listening to this, not to be afraid of inerrancy, to embrace it. And this is what the church teaches about inerrancy. Since everything asserted by the inspired authors or sacred writers must be held to be asserted by the holy spirit, the holy spirit is the holy spirit. That’s God himself. It follows that the books of scripture must be acknowledged as teaching solidly, faithfully, and without error, that truth, which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation. And so that’s the key phrase to biblical inerrancy right there. For the sake of salvation. The Bible is an errant in all of those things for the sake of salvation. So we can look at a controversial verse in the 16th century with Galileo. He got in trouble with this one, Psalm 104. You fixed the earth on its foundations forever and ever. It shall not be shaken. And so quite naturally, you can imagine the imaginative cosmology there would be like a flat, you know, flat earth with a dome on top of it. And you’ve got foundation pillars right underneath it. So that’s how the church interpreted that for centuries. And there weren’t any scientists who’d say otherwise. It wasn’t until the 15th and 16th centuries that they started building telescopes. They started to come up with a useful sun at the center model of the solar system. And, you know, that caused some controversy and some debate, but at the end of the day, what matters? We could be saved just as well on a round earth as we can on a flat earth. It doesn’t really matter where you are or what the earth is like. You can still be saved by the words of Jesus. And it’s easily interpreted spiritually because, you know, you could just interpret that as the earth won’t be moved by anything other than the power of God. So it’s not that hard to get a spiritual interpretation of the scriptures. And then finally, liturgical reverence for the word. Yes, the Bible is a way for Christ to be present to us. So you might, if you’ve ever watched carefully during the Holy Mass, at the end of the gospel, either the priest or the deacon will go down and kiss the book of the gospel, so kiss the gospel text. The church believes that the Bible is a way that Jesus Christ becomes present to us, a way that Jesus Christ becomes real to us. And so when you’re reading the scriptures, it’s God himself who’s trying to speak to you. And that’s a real powerful way of getting to know Christ. And so you may be asking at this point, how do I get into this? And so what should I be doing in order to read the Bible? Well, the first thing I’d say is maybe go to confession, especially if it’s been a while. The Holy Spirit can really only speak to you if you have a healthy relationship between you and God, and grave sin will disrupt that relationship and a sincere sacramental confession will restore it. And maybe even go to confession if you aren’t aware of any grave sin, because the holier you become, the more God can reveal to you. And confessing those smaller, venial sins, those less grave sins is a great way to grow closer to God because you start noticing those parts where you’re still resisting his grace. And then definitely, definitely want to spend time in prayer. The more time you spend with God, the more he’s able to reveal himself to you. And so if your way of reading the Bible is founded on prayer, the Holy Spirit will always be there with you and the Holy Spirit will enlighten those passages, which we have a hard time understanding, a hard time believing. Number two, I just say trust your instincts. Most of the time, your gut reaction to a Bible passage will be right. God is love is not hard to interpret correctly. Much of the Gospels you could read and I would trust just about any faithful Catholic in the pew to get the basic message and to not distort it. And I don’t think if somebody was reading the Psalms, they would conclude that they should be murdering their enemy’s children. That’s the passage in scripture. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Psalm 137. Something like that, yeah. Yes, always interpreted spiritually. Also, feel free to research and ask questions. There’s a lot of good Catholic websites out there. And if you reach a tricky passage that you don’t understand, a smart thing to do is to ask for help. The church has been reading the Bible for a long time. The church has been reading the Bible for hundreds and hundreds of years and we’ve learned a lot along the way. And then it’s also good to be humble and trusting before I meant to put trusting there before God’s word. It’s inspired. It’s an errant. Christ himself is present. So a healthy attitude towards the Bible would be to let the Bible judge you and not to start judging the Bible yourself. And then finally, just remember that the church has not infallibly interpreted every single passage of scripture in the Bible, nor has she exhausted the riches of the Bible. There’s always, always, always more because it’s God himself who’s present there. There’s always more in the scriptures. Any other suggestions, fellas? Yeah, I was thinking of this analogy with your first point of going to the Bible. Going to confession. I mean, I don’t know who’s tuning in, but my guess is it’s mostly people in married relationships, right? So when you’re angry at your spouse for something they’ve done or something you’ve done has created this division in your marriage, then sometimes any little thing that they do, even if they’re trying to make it better but you haven’t actually addressed the root of the issue, every little thing they do that is good can become super annoying and can trigger, like, oh, they’re just doing blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, because of whatever. I mean, so this is the analogy of going to confession, right? Unless you approach your spouse and actually address the issue and seek forgiveness for what one has done or what that person has done and be reconciled with each other, then we tend to misinterpret intentions of the other person. And so while sin separates us from God in a really real way, God never ceases to love us. But sin kind of clouds our vision and so we start seeing God’s acts of love towards us as, like, attacks and we start misinterpreting. We’re not able to actually hear the good word that he wants to give us. And so that would be the analogy that I would offer in that moment where, if you’re not reconciled with your spouse, then the good things that they do, it’s hard for us to recognize them as good things and we can become resentful and start being competitive in our relationships. And then again, with lesser faults, we know that if we let the little things build up in our relationships with one another, especially with our spouses, those things can become big things, right? And the pebble in the shoe after a hundred miles is probably the most irritating pain. And so that’s the analogy that I would give. And then in any relationship, you need to spend time with each other in order to understand each other, right? So confession, confessing the little things and spending time in prayer with God can be very analogous to what we already do and what we ought to be doing in our spousal relationships of seeking forgiveness for the big things and trying to stay on top of the little things and spending time with each other so we can grow to love each other more. Right? So that’s what I would offer just for that first part. Yes. Why it’s so important for us to go to confession. It’s not just like, go to confession. It’s like, no, this is huge. It’s huge to go to confession. It’s huge to be in a relationship with God. We do it with everyone else and everything else. Why not do it with God? We have an opportunity and we have the means to be in good relationship, in healthy relationship with God. Right. And just to add, when we talked about prayer with scripture and prayer in general, I once had a spiritual director who used to tell me that prayer is when we talk to God, the scripture is when he talks back. So being able to approach reading the Bible in your holy hours or reading weekly gospel, the Sunday gospel, the daily gospels, and saying a prayer before, God, what are you trying to tell me in this time? Yeah, I think the key really to reading the Bible as any Catholic anywhere in the world is being a disciple. I’m a disciple of Christ and that’s how I’m reading this. And I think that really kind of ties everything together. So thank you. Thank you. Both of those were great contributions. All right. Now, we finally, finally, finally, finally get to read the Bible now. I would just encourage everybody, if you’ve got a Bible handy, go ahead and crack it open to Genesis chapter one and we’ll start reading from there. And just a reminder, I’m not giving a full theological commentary on this. That would take a very long time. What our goal is, is to go to places where people get stuck. And hopefully, hopefully I’ll be able to help people get unstuck. And so it’s not going to be a full commentary. We’re just going to answer common objections, you know, where people go astray when they’re reading the Bible. So I just got a little bit of an axe to grind here. Let’s take a look at Genesis chapter one. And we’re going to look at several different translations here. All right. So we got the King James Version. That’s a very famous early English creation. In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. All right. New International Version. That’s a modern Protestant version. Very, very common. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. We look at the English Standard Version. That’s an even newer Protestant translation. Update of the Revised Standard Version. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Let’s move on to some Catholic translations. We’ve got the New Jerusalem Bible saying, in the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. The old reliable Dewey Reems. In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. And just for fun, there’s the St. Jerome’s Latin translation. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. So let’s look at the New American Bible. The New American Bible that we read at mass every Sunday. And the New American Bible that’s the most common Catholic Bible in the United States. In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth’s without form or shape, with darkness over the abyss and a mighty wind sweeping over the waters. So the kind of staple verses one and verses two together. So what is going on here? This is a footnote from the US bishops website. Until modern times, the first line was always translated, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Such comparable ancient cosmologies, discovered in recent times, have a when-then construction, confirming the translation, when-then here as well. When introduces the pre-creation state, and then introduces the pre-creation state. And then introduces the creative act affecting the state. The traditional translation in the beginning, does not reflect the Hebrew syntax of the cause. Wow, a lot going on there. Can you explain that in a sentence or less? Because I don’t understand the footnote. Yeah, yeah. So they looked at ancient myths. And they saw the when-then kind of verbal construct. And they thought, well, that was probably supposed to be in the Bible. Now, the first words of the scriptures are ambiguous, right? So if we were to translate it really, very literally, it would be in beginning. So not in the beginning. So it can be a little tricky to translate. But we saw that the tradition of translating the Bible had always had, in the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. So what really happened here, when you read that, do you think that God is creating the earth out of nothing? And it really muddies the waters there. This rendering, this translation of the first, passage of scripture makes it seem like the earth was already existing, and God formed it properly. So in the standard American Catholic Bible, what’s not clear here, if you’re just a regular Catholic in the pew, crack and open the Bible, is that this is actually a minority opinion, right? A minority opinion that’s driving the translation of this passage. Traditional Christian and Jewish translations have always rendered the passage differently. Now, the new American Bible came out in the 1970s, and then we’ve got the English Standard Version here, as we saw on the previous page. That was published in 2001. So they knew about this opinion, and they decided that it wasn’t what they wanted to go. It wasn’t, they didn’t think it was a legitimate way to translate it. And so this is just something about the new American Bible we have. A lot of times in its notes, you’re going to have historical critical hypotheses in those notes. Now, all I’ve got to say about that is that the Bible is inerrant, and translations and commentaries are not. And so if something is just striking you funny, it might not be right, or it might be right, you know? I don’t, it depends on whatever passage we’re talking about. So if you’re ever confused about something, definitely ask for help. I remember, I think sometime in high school, I cracked open the new American Bible that my parents got me for my first communion, and I didn’t like the notes. I just didn’t like reading the notes. It was like, it’s just something didn’t seem to be really fitting there. And I found commentaries on the Bible that I prefer to those commentaries that we have in the new American Bible. So I don’t think this is like a silly thing we can just kind of ignore. Trust your instincts, trust your gut, and don’t be afraid to ask questions, because there might be good answers to your questions. And so one thing I can certainly recommend for everybody, the Ignatius Catholic Study Bible, that’s a major source in my presentations. The Catholic Introduction to the Old Testament is a major source for these presentations. So, yeah. Eric, do you have those books on you where you’d be able to show them? Yeah, yeah. I showed them last week, but I’ll never get tired of promoting these. So here we have a Catholic Introduction to the Bible by two absolute heroes, John Bergsmuh and Brandt Petrie. The Old Testament is, the Old Testament is in individual volumes. So we’ve got Ignatius Catholic Study Bible, Scott Hahn did a lot with this, Curtis Mitch did a lot with this. And then the New Testament, you can currently get in a one-volume form. So that’s the entire New Testament right there. So yeah, I absolutely love, love, love those commentaries that I just showed you. So, and if you’re really interested at the bottom, I’ve got a link to a very scholarly refutation of implications for translating Genesis chapter one, verse one. And it’s got a lot of Hebrew on the page, which means it’s very scholarly because they never write anything in there except in the original languages and scholarly works. I just skipped over the Hebrew parts. Yeah. And then they use this symbol and then they use this other symbol. That’s fine. It’s like, could you just transliterate it into English letters so I could read it? I don’t know. It’s interesting though. So a comment on this passage in the beginning, the Hebrew character that they use for beginning. In this part, I think in this passage, it’s unique in that it’s like a bracket and it’s unique to the scriptures. I don’t think they use it in the same way all the time. But so they use this unique character for the beginning. And it’s a bracket that to the, well, they write backwards. So to the right of the bracket, there’s nothing. And then this slash comes in. And then God speaks to heavens and the earth into being. This is his revelation. So before this character, there was nothing. So it’s really cool. The Hebrew itself is really awesome. If you do study it a little bit, how they use it. And there’s a whole psalm that every first word starts with the same character. So it starts with the same letter. And I think there’s 22 different letters in the Hebrew Bible. And it’s a whole psalm where they go through like, there’s 22 sections and each section is its own letter. It’s an enprostic. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s incredible though that they do the entire alphabet. I’m like, it’s insane. I just can’t imagine doing that. It’s the longest psalm of the Bible. We pray it over like three weeks in the brewery as deacons and priests. It’s just nuts. It’s nuts. Anyways, sorry. I geeked out there for a little bit. No, that’s really cool. It’s like the first passage of the book of Genesis. If we were to render that in audio form, it would be like 30 seconds of silence. And then, God created the heavens and the earth. Yeah. Yeah. That’s cool. I’ve never heard that one. I’m learning things too. Thanks for sharing that, Tom. That’s really cool. Deacon Tom. Deacon Fitcheck now? Yeah. Deacon Fitcheck now. It’s in the mail. Don’t worry. Okay. Okay. Good. Thanks. All right. These are all just things that go to show you that the translations don’t… The English translations or any translation doesn’t give you the full depth of what God is intending by the scripture. So something like that. Deacon Tom, maybe you could help something like that. Little space before the… In the beginning. Would that have been considered inspired or was that just stylistic? Well, it’s actually written text, right? It’s like something they wrote on the manuscript, right? Right. Right. So it’s part of the word. Yeah. Okay. You can’t have that… Yeah. It’s the word. You don’t have it. It’s not the beginning. Right. It’s… It’s… If we would have… It might have been… I don’t even think it’s calligraphy. I think it’s a special character that they use to mean… I think it’s some linguistic or syntactical thing where it meant before this, there is nothing. So you could say in the beginning of basketball, right? And so before there was basketball, there was nothing like basketball. And then there’s basketball, right? So it’s at the moment when basketball existed, now basketball exists. But before, there’s no concept of basketball. So it’s like a special character used to indicate like there is nothing before what has followed. What we’re talking about. There’s a meaning and there’s a concept contained within that word or that character. Right. Right. Besides just the word itself. Right. So I think you brought up Deacon Eric, excuse me, that the win of when God created the heavens and the earth could imply that there was other things going on in the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth. Right. Like among other things. But when God did this in the beginning. And so the emphasis of like, you know, in the beginning, God created. Right. Before the beginning, God wasn’t creating. Now he is and now he does. Right. So there can be like… Yeah, I don’t know why these scholars wouldn’t have looked at that and asked the question, do we need the win and then clause because in the beginning is doing something very interesting here. It’s very unique. Yeah. It’s a little tricky to translate just in the light research I did. Right. It’s not obvious how to translate that. So here’s a very… Thanks for your input, fellas. That was a great discussion. Now here’s a very common question that we get is did God actually create the world in seven days? And I think the answer to that question is what do you mean by days? And so most people when they hear the word day, they think a period of 24 hours. So seven periods of 24 hour days. And it seems like kind of the consensus of the church’s tradition is probably not. Although I can’t stop you from believing that. Now we could think about it instead as a mythological representation of a balanced and well-ordered universe. Now, I don’t want you, my listeners, to freak out when I use the term myth or mythological. It does not have to mean fake and it does not have to mean invented. When I’m using the word myth or mythology, I’m talking about the genre of mythology, the literary genre of the mythology. And that has its own genres and it has its own tropes. It has its own themes. It has its own toolbox that it uses to express things. And if you try and read a mythological passage in the Bible, most of which are going to be in Genesis chapters 1 to 11, if you try and read that with the wrong lens, you’re going to get distortions in there and that can really confuse people and that can really mess people up. So most of Genesis 1-11 is not written in the genre of an ancient history. It’s written in a genre of ancient mythology. So it’s very good to have that clear in your mind right as we’re going out to it. And so what that means is… I think a way to think about it is that it’s like a mythological genre is kind of like country music, right? Like it’s not a scholarly work on the life in the country, but country music captures the spirit of what it’s like to live out in rural life, even though how many of us have actually done a lot of the things that they talk. Okay, granted everyone’s written in a tractor, but like they capture a deeper meaning to what it means to be a country boy or a farmer or a rancher than a scientist could in an explanation of it, right? Yeah. So myth is kind of like that where it’s getting at something deeper than just the science behind everything. So was there actually a place where… was it Garth Brooks where he had friends in low places? Was that like a specific bar then? Yeah. Maybe not necessarily, but… Was it called Low Place? Yeah, not necessarily, but boy that song is true, right? Like everybody’s got a little bit of resonating with that. So thank you. That’s a really good way of explaining it. So what’s important to remember when we’re reading the book of Genesis is that science, as we know it, didn’t begin to exist until the 16th century AD. The biblical author was not trying to ask questions or answer questions about evolution or the Big Bang or the formation of hydrogen, the formation of stars, quantum mechanics, general relativity, special relativity, unified field theory, and every other thing. Yes, yes, yes. The biblical author was just trying to answer questions about God, about human beings, and about the origins of the universe from God. So you could say theologically it doesn’t matter if God created the universe 10,000 years ago or 13.8 billion years ago. What matters is that God created a good universe with good creatures out of love. But I guess where I’m falling and where I… What I believe is that God created the universe in an instant and let it develop for billions of years. That’s a very common way of understanding how the Bible and science can get along. I think plenty of people would back me up on that, so I don’t think I’m too far afield here. You don’t have to believe that it was literally seven periods of 24-hour days. You don’t have to literally believe that light existed before the stars existed. What that’s trying to communicate is that God created a good orderly universe. And it’s communicated in a way that we can understand, which is through this myth genre. This truth is communicated in this way. Right, because the Bible had to be for all time, right? And all peoples. All time and all peoples. And mythology, we really understand that on a deep level. When you read the first chapter of Genesis, especially on a solemn occasion like the Easter Vigil, it still sounds fresh. It still sounds new. There’s still more we can learn about it despite the fact that it’s an incredibly ancient text. All right, so you don’t have to believe that God created the world in seven periods of 24-hour days. So if you’re worried about that, fear not. All right, let’s take a look at the creation of Adam and Eve. So kind of the so-called second creation story begins with Genesis chapter 2 verse 4. And so Genesis chapter 1 presents a very transcendent idea of God. He’s just out there somewhere and he’s just speaking creation into existence. Once you get to Genesis chapter 2 verse 4 onwards, God suddenly is very close to humanity. And so people are trying to account for these differences. The historical critical method, you’ll usually say that these were originally two different stories. That Genesis chapter 1 is from the priestly source and Genesis chapter 2 is from the Yahuas source and later editor combined them. Well, here’s an alternative. Maybe Moses had access to two different ancient traditions when he wrote Genesis. That’s a possibility. Another alternative, Moses was a genius and could change his writing style to make a theological point. Another alternative, the Holy Spirit made Moses into a genius and he could change his writing style to make a theological point. All of those are possible. And there are also other possibilities that maybe I haven’t talked about. And the church has not made a definitive judgment on these. So just, I don’t know, the whole point of that little exercise was just if you hear something is a scholarly opinion or even like a scholarly consensus, doesn’t necessarily make it true. You know, that’s just a theory. And maybe you can come up with your own theory as to why Genesis chapter 1 and Genesis chapter 2 are different. That’s a little more traditional way of reading the Bible. So. Right. And as we talked about last week, what is the Bible for? It’s for our salvation. Who put pen to paper doesn’t matter. We can have scholarly opinions. We can have people smarter than any of us. Say this may have been what happened. This may have been what happened. Could be true. It could not be. It doesn’t matter. Yeah. Yeah. It’s more important to see what God’s trying to communicate to you through the Bible than it is to do scientific biblical studies. Now, the interesting thing about Genesis 1 and 2 is they can be read together as a singular whole with two different perspectives and styles. So Genesis chapter 1 obviously gives you the big picture. And then Genesis chapter 2 also gives you a very focused picture. So a common objection, I think even in ancient times was. So Genesis chapter 2 talks about Adam being created first and then certain plants and then certain animals. And so an old objection was God didn’t make plants on the third day. But didn’t God make plants on the third day and animals on the sixth day before humanity? And you know we can have several replies to this. Genesis chapter 2 is a very agricultural focus. So if you look at verse 8, it says God plants a garden. So that doesn’t necessarily exclude the existence of other plants on the earth at that time. And he plants trees good for food. Right. So he doesn’t plant a random forest. And then in Genesis 2 19, you can make the argument that God makes domestic animals who are potential helpers who could come bring those forward to Adam. But at the end of the day, what’s really important is the ancient author wasn’t really all that interested in giving a strict time account of how things happened at that time. Because again, it’s a mythological genre. That’s just not how we do things here. Right. And that wasn’t the point he was making of the order of things happening. Because if you look at something like Genesis chapter 1, and if you were to write down days 1 through 6, what was created, day 1 he created something and day 5 he filled it. Day 2 he created something. Day, what are we on? Day 4 he filled it. Day 5. It should be 1 and 4. Then he filled that same thing. If you make two columns, they line up and that would be a point that you’d be trying to make. It’s more of an artistic stylistic approach rather than a strict dictation of history. So God creates light and darkness and then God creates on the first day, and then on the fourth day he creates the stars and the sun. He creates the sky and the sea and then he creates the birds and the fish to fill the sky and the sea. Then he creates the dry land and the plants and he creates animals and humans to live on the dry land and the plants. So it’s an artistic way of expressing these ideas. It doesn’t have to be literal chronology. So anyway, that’s not a huge deal I think for most people. Moving on, moving right along, we’ve got the fall. So did Adam or Eve commit that first sin, that original sin? The answer is both. Here’s something that I just learned very recently is that a lot of high quality translations actually omit key passage. So right here we’ve got the New Jerusalem Bible who has it in there. She also gave some to her husband who was with her and he ate it. So that was the eating the fruit off the forbidden tree. I come down here to the Revised Standard Version which is one of my favorite translations. Doesn’t include there. You can see that little highlighted section. That’s where who was with her was supposed to be. And for some reason, translations for a very long time have been omitting that. And I find that very odd and hard to believe. I’ve even got the old Latin translation from Saint Jerome there. And again, you’ll just have to take my word for it most of you I imagine. That’s where that’s supposed to be, that highlighted spot, and it’s not there. So a lot of people say, yeah, it was Adam or Eve who committed the first sin. But it’s like, I was kind of both of them because only Adam was given the order not to eat the fruit. When God told him that, Eve didn’t even exist yet. Even hadn’t been created yet. And so Adam sitting there watching this snake talk to his wife and he says nothing. So it’s hard to say that it was 100% Eve’s fault. The only real good interpretation is that both of them sinned. Right. And we can also see two types of sin, the sin of commission and the sins of omission. Eve was the one that ate the apple and Adam didn’t say anything. He was a sin of omission. He had a duty to intervene there. Yeah. So there’s another truth that scripture’s teaching us that’s not written clearly. Yeah, it’s a hidden meaning. A hidden meaning, kind of a spiritual meaning that you have to extract out of it, right? Yeah, I think we covered last week the different spiritual senses of scripture. So that would be sort of hidden in the moral sense of scriptures. I think that’d be the right way to think about it. Yeah, yeah. All right. And then finally we’ve got just one last point. The church does permit us to interpret the first sin as something other than eating a piece of fruit. Given that it’s a mythological genre. But it’s also not impossible that the first sin was literally don’t eat the fruit off this tree because God told you not to. So a lot of people might think, oh, that’s silly. Why didn’t, why weren’t they allowed to eat this piece of fruit? Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps the fruit was a symbol of something. The fruit is a symbol of some other offense that Adam and Eve might have committed against God. What’s really important here is to keep this sense of original sin. So the term original sin doesn’t occur in the Bible. It was coined by St. Augustine, a fifth century bishop and probably the most influential theologian of all time. I’m going to go ahead and stand by that. He’s the most influential theologian of all time. He coined that phrase in his theological arguments. The church has since accepted that phrase as its own. So let’s talk about why that phrase is both useful and important. So let’s imagine we’re arguing with somebody and that person says, God, who is good, created a good universe. And I’d be like, yes, yes, I agree. But we are suffering and dying in this universe and those things aren’t good. It’s like, oh, I suppose. Therefore, either God is not good or he wasn’t able to create a good universe. It’s like, oh, I suppose. Now what? So anyway, I’m not. Oops. Wrong button. Where did that go? Okay. I don’t understand my own PowerPoint. Sorry about that. I don’t like either of those conclusions. So let’s let’s see if we can fix this difficulty. Why are we suffering? Because of Adam and Eve’s sin. Now, at the time, Adam and Eve were suffering. Adam and Eve were suffering. Adam and Eve were suffering. Adam and Eve were suffering. Now, at the time they were created, their souls were in complete harmony with God. Their souls were in complete harmony with their bodies. As persons, they were in complete harmony with each other. And they were in complete harmony with creation. And so there was no death and no suffering. It wasn’t until the harmony between God and all those other harmonies that flowed from it that Adam and Eve disrupted that harmony. And they were not able to pass that harmony onto their children who also have to suffer and die. So Adam and Eve didn’t have that balance, that harmony, that gift that God had given them. And you can’t give what you don’t have. And so they pass on this disorder, this disunity, this disharmony. They pass that on to all of us. And so therefore, God created a good universe which included the possibility of sin. And if sin is possible, then love is also possible. And God deemed the possibility of love to be worth it. So another way to phrase that is if there is love, then it must be possible to sin. And love is worth that. Right? Without free will, we cannot love. Love is not possible. Love is not a thing. So God could have created a bunch of puppets, you know, and the puppets would have done exactly what he wanted. But the puppets couldn’t love him back. It’s only a human being that can love him back. So I think that’s all the time we have today for our presentation. We’ll pick up next week. We got through two whole chapters of Genesis. So, man, we’re making progress here. I mean, to be fair, these two chapters of Genesis are probably some of my favorites in the Bible because it’s so loaded with who we are and who we’re meant to be. Yeah. Who we’re called to be. The commentaries on these passages by the great theologians are very, very common. So, yeah. Yeah, well, hopefully by the end of this four sessions, we’ll get through Genesis chapter 11. I’m hoping to get there. We’ll probably make it to Abraham. All right. I think it’s a good time for some listener questions. Yeah. So one of the things we were talking about, well, actually, Deacon Tom, this was your question. Help me like that. What were we talking about when you put it forward? Yeah. So you propose a probable opinion. Did God create the world in seven days? Page 29 for you, Eric. Probable opinion. God created the universe in an instant and let it develop for billions of years. Right. It’s probable opinion makes sense. But I think the image of that is the clockmaker. Right. That guy created this mechanism that he didn’t have to touch. He didn’t have to be personal to that. It just is this thing that spins off on its own and he’s developed it to or he’s created it so that it can just function without him being around. Yeah. And I think a lot of people experience that about about God. I think these are we would call them deists. Right. Deists who believe that God doesn’t have any meaningful interaction with the universe he’s created. So what would your response be to that? No. Thanks. Oh, OK. It’s that easy. No. If you’re going to put it like that. Yeah. Yeah. So I guess the response is that the Christian faith has always been that God has created the universe out of love and he created the universe in order that he would have something somebody else to share his goodness with. And he saw that as a good thing that he should be doing. Not only to share his goodness with us, but to create us in order that he would share his goodness to us with us. And, you know, that’s that sounds like the exact opposite of the clockwork universe that the the 18th century was so fond of. Yeah, like Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, who wrote Common Sense, Thomas Paine. A lot of them would have been deists. Yeah, no, it’s a much it creates a nice, you know, home of your universe, I think, where, you know, God’s just trying to peek out from behind every atom and every subatomic particle. Water. Yeah, so just a little, little bit more definition of terms. Deists is someone that says God exists, but doesn’t really care much about us. He’s a creator and nothing else. And the theist is is what everybody listening is, is someone that says God exists and he loves us and he cares about us and he’s working in our lives. And he gave us the Bible, which is huge. He’s willing. He wants to communicate with us. He sent his son. He created us and he wants us best. That’s fine for us. Yes. Yes. So, so no, no to deism. Yes to theism. Yes. Yeah. And then could you do a little bit more explanation on what it means what it means to be a myth when you’re talking about a genre. Right, right. So you can look at just about every culture that’s been able to leave behind writings and all of them will have an origin story of some sort. So I believe there was maybe Deacon Tom could help me with this. There was some Far Eastern religion that what the world was an egg that cracked or something. Do you know what I’m shooting at, Tom? Well, there’s a lot of Far East myths. Why don’t you why don’t you go through your favorite? I would actually study these. I didn’t know about it. Watch those Japanese TV shows. I think you were really into it. Yeah, yeah, you think. I’ve been meaning to. Sorry, I’m trying to gather my thoughts. You caught me by surprise. You asked me something I have no opinion on. That’s rare. I know. So we’re talking about mythology. Yep. Right. As a genre is a style. It’s a style of writing. And so there’s it’s like it’s not just the difference between poetry and prose. It’s like, well, we have myths, we have drama, we have tragedy, tragedy, we have comedy. I still can’t say that word right comedy. We have a romance. We have all of these different kinds of genres, detective novels, horror detective novels. Think of I think of rom coms, you know, on TV shows like that. That’s what a genre is. And so when you when you’re talking about myth, where you’re kind of talking about in today’s like modern use of it would be fantasy. Right. The fantasy genre, the Lord of the Rings. And what myth in the ancient genre of myth is trying to do is it’s trying to explain why a culture has its culture without actually having direct access to its own origins. Right. So that’s kind of where the the origins of myth comes from. Fantasy definitely doesn’t do that now. But fantasy does today. It explores culture from different angles and different perspectives. Right. And I think the best fantasies are the ones that are more mythological, the ones that are trying to explain the origins of something that are trying to. And what what that allows you to do then is you’re able to say something true for the audience that you’re writing for or the audience that you’re shooting a movie for, for example, even though you’re not actually present in society. It’s different than a than a character drama or or a thriller or historic bio, a historical piece. Right. Like 1917 is a great movie. Saving Private Ryan. Those are great movies. They’re historically based. They’re grounded in reality. And they say something true about the wars that those movies are grounded in. But the Lord of the Rings is a fantasy movie. It’s a war movie, but a fantasy movie. It’s not grounded in reality. And yet it still says something true to us today about nobility and the horrors of war and the horrors of evil. And just how good good is in the face of darkness. And these universal truths are still present even within fantasy and mythology. And that’s how you use mythologies that you’re trying to say something true, even though you might not be present in a temporal way. Yeah. And you’re communicating the truth in a different way. Right. And that’s why it’s really important to understand the difference between different genres. So you can imagine, let’s say you got a romance movie. Right. And we’ll even say that at some point there was a murder in this romance movie. Right. Well, it would be really odd to have the detective at the end of the movie show up and say, this is how the murder was done. Right. Because you’d be importing something from a detective novel into a romance movie. I don’t know. Maybe it would make sense, but it would be considered kind of like a genre twisting. You know, it’d be like, oh, that’s not, you know, the detective coming out and explaining everything. That’s not a part of the romance movie genre. Yeah. The chick flick genre. Right. So, yeah, so in the same way, in the same way we can look at the book of Genesis and it would have been very odd for the writer to say in the beginning, all the matter and energy of the universe was combined into a singular, non-dimensional point. And then it spread out rapidly. According at the plank time of the universe, we can measure this. It’s like, no, that’s not a mythological genre. That would be how Albert Einstein would want to talk about the origins of the universe when he’s acting like a scientist. That would be a scientific way of understanding things, not a mythological genre way of understanding things. Right. And then it becomes that truth of the universe becomes inaccessible to someone who doesn’t have a basic understanding of physics. And astrophysics and all of that theoretical science. Like if you don’t have that kind of knowledge, then it’s inaccessible to you. Even but if it’s a myth, you know, genre speaks to every human. Yeah. The truth can still be spoken about and talked about without having to go to school for it. Right. This is how people in the gutters can encounter Jesus Christ. And you can, you know, even tell them the Genesis story and they can encounter something real there. They don’t need to understand science or have a degree or anything to get that God is a personal God who created man out of the clay. And that he has a care for him, that he created a place for him and that he wants him to live in harmony with him. Like that is all present in Genesis 1 through 11. Right. So you can tell the story of Genesis 1 through 11 to someone with no education and the universal truths are still present there. But if you went off on the molecular and the atomical behavior of stars, anybody before the 20th century wouldn’t understand that. Right. Exactly. And then the truth of Jesus Christ wouldn’t actually be accessible to all people in all times. And that’s problematic. It kind of makes me glad that, you know, it was God who wrote the Bible and not just man. Right. Right. He could avoid those pitfalls. Right. Father Phil made an excellent point on the YouTube chat here when talking about genres. He’s saying newspapers have genres, different genres depending on the page. For example, on the sports page, if it says, Holy Family School beat St. Mary’s, that would mean we beat them, like Holy Family won. But on the first page, it would be referring to an attack. Right. Well, that’s a great way of explaining that. I’m going to have to keep that one in my back pocket, you know. Yeah, we just don’t have newspapers anymore. St. Michael beats St. Hubert. Yes. So what are some other genres that are used in the Bible in general? Oh, well, you’ve got kind of a historical narrative. That’s there. You’ve got legal texts. For example, historical narrative being something like the gospel, where it is word for word. This is what the gospels are kind of their own genre, honestly. So a historical text would be like, I would say, Joshua. Sorry, Joshua. Yeah. Right. It’s an account of the Israelites conquering the promised land, right? Like straight up, that’s what it is. Chronicles, Maccabees. Yep. Yep. All of those. These are history texts. That’s what the author intended them to be. Right. It’s an account of what happened. Yeah. And they’ll do things like giving dates. You know, they’ll say in the fifth year, the fifth year of the reign of King Nebuchadnezzar, it’s like, OK. That’s when it happened. It’s like, OK, well, I know I’m reading the historical genre right now. You know, when we’re Adam and Eve around, you know, in the beginning. You know, it’s just not asking that question. They were pretty early on. Yeah, they were pretty early. They were way back there. There’s like, there’s law genre, right? So I don’t know if anyone has ever opened a law book before like that reads a particular way. Well, Leviticus and what’s Deuteronomy? Numbers, Deuteronomy. That’s a numbers. That genre is kind of a law text, right? It is the law and it’s delineated. There’s wisdom literature. There’s poetry. Prophets are kind of their own. They’re their mix of like history and poetry with wisdom. But it’s very much their own style. And each one of them are different. The oracles. Whoa, to you, Jerusalem. Yeah, that’s usually how it starts. The letters. That’s a genre, you know, of Paul and the other apostles. The Gospels are their own genre. Apocalyptic literature. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sections of Ezekiel, sections of Daniel, the whole book of Revelation. That’s apocalyptic literature. That’s got its own conventions. So yeah, genre is huge. Genre is really, really. What genre am I reading? Yeah, right. And that’s when you pick up the Bible as the question to ask yourself is what’s what’s the author’s intention in this book in this passage? Is he trying to tell me history or is he trying to tell me again? We use the word myth, trying to tell me a myth. And there’s even myths in other parts of the Bible, right? So there’s this. Yep. Jonah. Jonah is a myth. Job is a myth. There’s a section in Judges. That’s a myth. The forest asking the olive tree to rule over them and they don’t and the olive tree doesn’t. And then the sycamore tree and he doesn’t. And then the brambles agree to rule over the. No, no, no, Eric. That actually happened. That actually happened. Are you telling me that the trees by rush also actually happened? Historical narrative. Actually. Oh, boy. I should find new commentators. So the title of this presentation is how to read the Bible. Well, that’s a that’s a huge part of doing it. It is what is the author trying to tell me? What is he? When what way is he writing? Yeah, yeah, definitely. So genre, very important. Remember that. So how how do you know if I picked up my Bible, opened up to a book, how would I know what genre of the system? Oh, I should be approaching the text. Well, there should be, you know, a fair a fair amount of gut instincts about it. You know, like you’ve read stories before. If I were to hand you a Sherlock Holmes tale that you’ve never read before. And let’s say I even change like any detective novel, I hand you a detective novel that you’ve never read within a few pages. You should probably be able to figure out it’s a detective novel. Right. So most of the time, the genre really shouldn’t be that difficult to figure out. And then if you’re even if you can’t name the genre, right. Right. Oh, this is what this book about. Well, there are tricky ones. One’s like Tobit or parts of King’s. Sure. Yeah, those can be a little tricky. At that point, guess what you need? A really good commentary. Did he just do that thing that you normally. And I didn’t do the dance this time. Oh, we’re on a 30 second delay on the video. For anybody that’s listening, we see the video about 30 seconds or before everybody else does. Well, and I’m not on the video either, so I just heard it. I was like, at any rate. Good. Well, we got any more interesting questions or are we about ready to wrap this up? No, just on the video. No, that’s that exhausts the questions that have been sent in. OK. Is there anything anybody else wants to add? I think we’ve had a good presentation. Good. That’s just my opinion, though. It’s a probable opinion. It’s like your opinion, man. Yeah. And these and I realized these presentations are a bit intense. It’s a lot of academic talk, a lot of big words. And so if you if you have questions, likely everybody else does as well. So I think we’ve had a good presentation. If you remember the future. Yeah. Yeah. Mm hmm. Well, all righty. Thank you very much. Thank you for joining us tonight on this salinity of the Annunciation of Mary. Let’s continue to pray for our world and all these wild things we’ve got going on right now. Pray for the health and safety of everybody. In the medical fields, praying the health and safety of everybody who is affected directly by the virus and for everybody who’s having to live with our new conditions. Let’s pray all these prayers to our lady in the name of the father and of the son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Amen. Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb. Amen. Amen. Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb. Jesus, holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us. Now and in the hour of our death. Amen. In the name of the father and of the son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Amen. Good night.