Following Christ Amid Division
In this episode, Peter Buckley and Mark O'Donnell explore the primacy of God's call when family tension, campaign spectacle, and misleading polls tempt people to seek signs instead of faith using the example of St. Alphonsus Liguori's pamphlet Uniformity with God's Will as way to accept what God allows and act on the light of conscience.
Notes
- As October ends and the U.S. midterms approach, Peter and Mark discuss a controversial Ohio campaign video in which a candidate featured his opponent's mother calling her daughter a liar and telling citizens not to vote for her. The Gospel from Luke 12, about a household divided and a mother set against her daughter, does not justify that ad; it underscores following God's call even when family objects.
- Fresh from a men's conference at Arnold Hall, Mark urges fathers not to give a 14-year-old a smartphone merely to avoid unpopularity, since a measure of suffering can form strength the Holy Spirit supplies.
- We must keep our Catholic witness even when relatives resent daily Mass or joining a group, the answer is not to cower but to stand firm in God's grace, trusting that friction can become the pain of conversion.
- A report of contrived polls passed off as a social experiment leads into Luke's warning that people read the weather yet fail to interpret the present time. Mark contrasts the old trust in Walter Cronkite with manipulative media, and says Christians should resist the pull of the majority, stand by Christ, and act up to the light God gives.
- For choices such as a move, a job change, or a marriage proposal, he points to the testimony of conscience, which John Henry Newman called evidence that God exists: pray, seek sound advice if useful, and go with your best guess. God nudges through ordinary inconveniences rather than dictating orders, and Mark recommends the short pamphlet Uniformity with God's Will by St. Alphonsus Liguori.
- On the feast of St. John Paul II, they recall Jan Tyranowski, the Krakow tailor whose small evening groups introduced young Karol Wojtyla to St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila, and they close with a mechanic whose waiting-room spiritual books showed how simple efforts leave the results to God.