Now to Julie in Detroit, Michigan, watching on YouTube Live. Julie, thank you
for joining us. Your question for Father?
Good evening and thank you for taking my call! My pleasure.
Um—oh go ahead, I apologize. No, please. It's all you, Julie. We were
just welcoming you. Go right ahead. Haha! Sorry.
My heart is out there very much for the addicts and those that are in the throes of
addiction, whatever addiction it is. What is...
what do you believe would be the best avenue to work for helping those
individuals, and also bringing them into
the Catholic Church, as well as
hopefully getting them free from that addiction?
Yeah. That's a big question. Number one, I think,
is to, you know, really keep them from despair and show them that God loves
them even in the throes of their addiction, and that ultimately—I mean
really, with some addictions, ultimately it is God's grace that's going to get them
out of it.
So to really, really be there for them in that way. If there are
addicts with faith already, to really push that point home, that, you know,
God still loves them as they struggle with their addiction, that their struggle
is precisely in the cross. You know, recently I learned of a martyr,
actually, recognized in China—I forget his name, it always escapes me—
but he himself was a doctor, he became an opium addict— Oh, I've heard this story! Yeah,
yeah, share it! So he became an opium addict, and would go to confession for his
addiction, and then over time eventually his confessor, for whatever reason,
determined that he wasn't of a proper disposition to be absolved.
He couldn't absolve him because he didn't think he was really sorry for his
addiction—which of course he was.
So he said, "Until you get over this, I can't absolve you." And so
he took that, and he never stopped going to Mass, he went to Mass, and his
prayer eventually became: "God, make me a martyr; because I fear that
that's the only way I'm going to be able to save my soul."
And then, you know, not too long after that, the Boxer rebellion broke out in
China, it was a big thing against all things foreign in China, and the Church
was seen as an agent of that; and so he was gathered up with a bunch of
Christians and taken to be beheaded. Yeah, so I'm probably gonna butcher his
Chinese name, but we just pulled up here: St. Mark Ji Tianxiang is his name. That
was way better than I was gonna do! I think you kind of nailed that. I
don't know, we'll find out if anyone calls to complain. If there's any Chinese
listeners out there, call us and tell us how it's actually pronounced. But,
so eventually he was martyred, and he determined that God gave him the strength and
faith that even though, in spite of his addiction, he wasn't happy about his
addiction, he was given the grace to be the last one in his family to be martyred.
He wanted to be the last one so that no one in his family had to die alone. And so he
encouraged them all through their martyrdom, and then he himself was martyred and
he was declared a saint for that. So the biggest thing, too, is: while they're
struggling with their addiction, remind them that as long as they want the good,
as long as they don't want their addiction, they're not giving in to their
addiction with their will and they're struggling against it, God is very much
with them. You know, God is very much giving them the grace to pull away.
And some addictions, a lot of addictions actually, you know, require
treatment too. It's not a question of just, "If my will is strong enough I'm gonna
get away from it." Some of them are very real physical addictions, very
real emotional addictions, and so just encourage them to get the help that they
need and to know that in their addiction God is not abandoning them. This is one
of those things where those of us who are judgmental, man, we just gotta stop.
Just gotta stop. Because...what do we know about it? I mean, there are
saints who are addicts. Deal with that. Absolutely. And it's not—
the thing to remember is, it's not because of their addiction, but because of
where their will was in it, what they wanted, what they were seeking, was
holiness. And they found themselves in a bad way, and God still gave them the
grace to be holy, even at least in their last moment.