In this clip, Cy Kellett welcomes Joe Heschmeyer to discuss whether a Catholic can marry a Protestant and celebrate Mass at their wedding. Joe explains the guidelines and considerations that come into play during such ceremonies, emphasizing the importance of proper discernment regarding communion.
Transcript:
Joe Heschmeyer: There was a baby, he’s now 16, James Fulton Ingstrom. When he was born, the umbilical cord was knotted, and so he came out not breathing. His heart was not beating after 10 minutes. Two thirds of babies in this situation died. 100% of them had severe damage from the loss of oxygen to the brain. He made a full recovery. Not after 10 minutes, after 61 minutes. There is no medical explanation for that. I read the book they Flew by Carlos Gere. St. Joseph of Cupertino was, like, called the Flying Friar. Extremely detailed accounts of levitation and bilocation. How do you parse these, like, really extreme Catholic miracles? Do you think if someone, like, really pays stock to that, that’s harmful or maybe beneficial? It’s a good question. So my thoughts on miracles are as follows. Number one, God can and does work miracles in the world. He has throughout all of. Certainly all of salvation history. And there’s no indication that he stopped doing that. And in fact, we have abundant evidence that he continued to do that. And that evidence continues. I actually just recorded a short that’ll come out tomorrow about this. So this week we’re celebrating the. What’s called the beatification of Fulton Sheen. It’s one stop before becoming a saint. I’m going to be there in St. Louis. And when somebody is on the road to becoming a saint, there is a human investigation. We look into whether the person lived a holy life, and we look at all their writings, public and private. We do interviews with people and we determine if they have what’s called heroic virtue. Like, this person seems to have been very holy. But that kind of natural investigation can only take you so far, because it could be that there was something going on that we don’t know about, you know, that that was in their heart or something like that. Only God knows the heart. And so we turn to God to really get us across the next step. So to become beatified, it’s not enough that you seem to have lived a heroic life. You also have to have at least one miracle attributed to your intercession. So in the case of Fulton Sheen, there was a baby. He’s now 16, James Fulton Ingstrom. And he, when he was born, the umbilical cord was knotted, and so he came out not breathing. His heart was not beating, and he was completely blue and limp. And they immediately intervened to do what they could. You know, he was actually born at home, but then they called an ambulance and they took him to the hospital and they tried to save his life, but they could not get a heartbeat now, after 10 minutes, 2/3 of babies in this situation die or will die, like they will not survive the hospital. And 100% of them, in a study, there was a big study done in Australia that looked at a couple dozen of these cases, found that 100% of them had damage, usually severe damage from the loss of oxygen to the brain, like severe developmental disabilities and everything else. He made a full recovery. Not after 10 minutes, after 61 minutes. There is no medical explanation for that. And so it shows that miracles do happen and the saints have powerful intercession. And the church actually works with secular scientists, including non believers, to investigate to, you know, when we have what appears to be a miracle, we want to know, well, is there a scientific explanation? Because you don’t want to say, yeah, we think this is miraculous. And then it turns out it’s like you just don’t understand the science. This kind of stuff happens all the time. So we want to work with the best scientists to make sure, well, this can’t be explained away at a natural level. It does point to it being miraculous. So all that is to say miracles do happen. We see the miracles. We’re seeing them, you know, this week. The church’s position is we’ll give a green light to say this appears to be of divine origin, but it is not required to be Catholic. You don’t have to believe that the miracle I just told you about was in fact miraculous. That’s not necessary. To be a Catholic, you are free to believe or disbelieve in any of the particular miracles. But I would say this. If any of the what are called vindicatory Catholic miracles are true, that points to the Catholic case being true. You have to reject certain positions. You can’t be an atheist. You can’t be a cessationist Protestant. You can’t be someone who thinks intercession of the saints is bad. But the saints are hearing prayers and interceding and God’s working miracles because of that. So certain options are taken off the table and the Catholic claim becomes that much stronger. So you get these saints where really incredible sounding things happen and you say that, you know, that sounds absurd. And oftentimes it does sound absurd, but you have plenty of people writing about it at the time. There was a. Oh, what is it? I think it’s called they flew. Let me see if that’s. Yes, they flew. A History of the Impossible by Carlos. I think it’s era. He’s a Yale professor who investigated these claims of levitating saints and realized that like, no, the historical documentation for this is actually really good. The best historical analysis is, yeah, they really did. They flew. And I think we should take those kind of claims seriously and say, yeah, maybe the same God who can do something that sounds ridiculous, like Jesus rising from the dead can also do something ridiculous like levitating a saint off the ground or, you know, bringing Elijah up to heaven or whatever the case may be. Those, those situations, I can understand somebody balking at them because we live in such a deeply anti miraculous kind of culture. But I think if you’re going to accept the claims of Christianity, we shouldn’t dismiss these other claims out of hand. And I think even a skeptic shouldn’t dismiss these claims out of hand because it’s actually not a very good skeptical attitude. Does that make sense, Remy? Yes. That was a great answer. Thank you, Remy. Yeah, you bet. Brought us right to the break. We’ll take a break right back with more Ask Him Anything. Joe Heschmeyer on Catholic Answers Live.