1. Do not be Afraid – Conquering Coronavirus, COVID-19, plagues and fear
Recorded in April 2020 with Ellen
An interview by Ellen Finn with Fr. Charles Emmanuel McCarthy. This is a very intelligent and spiritual analysis of the issue of plagues, virus, war, fear with a concrete solution. Probably the best video you would listen to this year and possibly for your life time. Do not miss it!
– How do we find peace, and what is the role of the Church during a pandemic of fear?
– What lessons can we learn from the plagues on Egypt as they appear in Scripture?
– Is there a conflict between Church and State?
– How should the Church and the government react to crisis like COVID-19 and related virus?
– What should the Church leaders be doing right now?
– Can authoritarianism work without church leadership?
– What is the spiritual significance of this moment in history?
– Is this the beginning of a massive social and economic engineering?
– Is there a solution on how to deal with the mass media, COVID-19, Corona virus, war and all the associated fears?
2. Advent Reflection (Week 1) by Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
3. Advent Reflection (Week 2) by Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
4. Advent Reflection (Week 3) by Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
5. Advent Reflection (Week 4) by Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
6. A concise 10 minutes on Resurrection
The Christian vocation is about hope. The Christian vocation is about working for the impossible. One of the fathers of the church, Tertullian, said that the word impossible is not found in the Christian dictionary. For nothing is impossible for God.
But Christianity says Christ is risen, it’s the central proclamation. Easter is our great feast. As improbable as it is that a human being died and rose, that’s what we proclaim. But Christianity beyond that utter improbability is a religion based on other impossibility—that God, the creator of the Universe, God the holy, God who made every atom, every molecule, sustains this whole thing from galaxies to the blade of grass, that God became human in Jesus—that’s impossible. But look, if we accept the utter improbability that Christ is risen. And if we accept the utter impossibility that God became human in Jesus Christ, which is what we do every time we pray to Jesus and through Jesus. If we accept the utter impossibility and the utter improbability, isn’t it a little late in the game at that point to say, his teachings are impractical. That following the Lamb of God, the non-violent Lamb of God is naive and fantasy. It is not naive and fantasy. It is the way to eternal life. It is the way to the empty tomb. It is the way of hearing love speak your name personally and tell you that all is well for you and for those you love. Following the Lamb of God is not fantasy; it is the way to eternal life for more than we know.
Our lamb has conquered, Him let us follow.
7. A concise 10 minutes on The Gift of Nonviolence
We are here because of the gift of God. We give the gift of life to others by our own willingness to suffer on their behalf. Christian love is a free gift or its not Christian love.
The ultimate purpose for the entire existence of the Church is to glorify God, to glorify God.
The willingness to serve in the model of Jesus, it has to be free and it has to be understood that one is doing it because this is what Jesus called us to by the gift of faith, to serve, but to serve without any desire for reciprocation.
8. A concise 10 minutes on Putting on the Mind of Christ
The destruction of the mind, the psyche, the emotions, the heart of children, that is destruction by sexual means, sometimes called by the more generalized term, child abuse, is only one means to destroy the mind, psyche, emotions, and heart of a child. Drenching children’s minds in glory-filled, noble, heroic, honorable, self-righteous, “holy” violence—through the churches, the schools, the media, the electronic and physical toys and games given to them, the incessant beat of military propaganda to which they are permitted to be exposed—is another and equally insidiously destructive means of child abuse. It is a form of child abuse whose long term, savage consequences fill the graveyard, mental institution, prisons, hospitals and alleys in numbers that far exceed the numbers of victims of sexual child abuse. It is the radical opposite of “putting on the mind of Christ.” And, the behavior it brings forth is behavior that is radically opposed to the behavior that Jesus insist His followers exhibit.
9. A concise 10 minutes on Gospel Nonviolence and the Right to Life
For the Christian, capital punishment, abortion and war are not only “right to life” issues, they are also “right to be loved” issues—”right to be loved as Jesus loves” issues. What Christian among us would dare to vest himself or herself with the illusionary authority to decide and to declare to a fellow human being, to another son or daughter of the Father, “You have lost the right to be loved by Jesus,” or “You have lost the right to be loved as Jesus loves you by Christians?”
10. A concise 10 minutes on Trust in Nonviolence
Gospel Nonviolence and Trust, the sine qua non of Holy Thursday, Good Friday—and Easter Sunday
Nothing, but nothing, requires us to trust Jesus as does a commitment to completely give up the protection and use of violence and enmity in order to follow the Nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels and His Way of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies. To daily chose to confront evil in every form in which it manifest itself through human beings—whether it be by deceitful words or by murderous deeds—with only Christlike Nonviolent Love towards every human agent of evil encountered, rationally necessitates believing that Jesus is absolutely trustworthy. “Jesus, I trust in you,” allows for no timeouts from trusting in Him as the Way, the Truth and the Life, as Lord, God and Savior. When I chose not to follow Jesus and His Way—which are ineradicably one—I am choosing not to trust Jesus as the Messiah, the Christ, the Word (logos) of God Incarnate. I am not simply choosing to distrust merely another smart or holy guy. When I distrust His Way, I distrust Him. When I distrust HIs teaching, I de facto say, “Jesus, I do not trust in you,” “God, I do not trust you.” As William James writes in his classic work on religious consciousness, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902):
So long as any secular safeguard is retained,
so long as any residual prudential guarantee is clung to,
so long as the surrender is incomplete,
fear still stands sentinel
and mistrust in the Divine obtains.
The Christian’s enfleshing of trust in Jesus in daily life, whether in common affairs or in crisis moments, is evidence of belief in Him as Lord, God and Savior, the Way, the Truth and the Life—as Him as risen from the dead. To not believe in Jesus as the Christ or as Lord may be a rational choice a person can make. To believe in Him, however, but not to believe Him is a self-evident absurdity. Partial trust of another human being can be reasonable. Partial trust of God can never be reasonable. After saying, “I believe in you, Jesus,” to then not believe the will of God as He reveals it by His words, deeds and person is logically and spiritually preposterous. It is the same as saying, “Lord! Lord!” but then not doing the will of the Father in Heaven (Mt 7:21-23). Chosen and enfleshed trust in Jesus, the Word of God Incarnate, e.g., by rejecting without reservation violence and enmity and choosing only to follow Jesus’ new commandment, “love one another as I have loved you,” is the bridge of trust over which the Father walks to bring the almighty power of God, which is love, to humanity in order to heal and to save each and all by events that before they occur are beyond all calculation, imagination or prediction.
If total trust in Jesus and His Way of Nonviolent Love of all, friends and enemies, is missing from a Christian’s life or from a Christian Church’s life, their daily prayer, said in heartfelt sincerity must be:
Jesus, I trust in you.
Help my untrust.
For a Christian or a Church to knowingly and willfully remain in a state of distrust of God and His Word, and to simultaneously refuse even to ask God’s help in overcoming this nonsensical way of living a Christian life is itself a significant moral problem with severe consequence far beyond all human calculation, imagination or prediction.
11. A concise 10 minutes on Nonviolence and Hope
The Christian vocation is about hope. The Christian vocation is about working for the impossible. One of the fathers of the church, Tertullian, said that the word impossible is not found in the Christian dictionary. For nothing is impossible for God.
Hope is seeing possibilities of something good in the future. You’re only speaking in that little 2 by 4 that we live. We are taught to keep our hopes reasonable. However in Christianity, Jesus teaches us that our hopes should not only be beyond reason but beyond imagination. Jesus comes to give a different kind of hope. The hope that Jesus comes to give us is the hope that evil and death in every form and every manifestation will be conquered. And what I would submit to you today is – that is the only hope. Christ hope is the only real hope. It is the hope that each human heart longs for.
Take any one of the reasonable hopes in the 2 by 4 World. The greatest of them. Suppose you hope to become president of the company or president of Ireland, or president of your religious order. And it comes and you get it and here on Saturday you become president of whatever it is you wanted. Or you win a million pounds or whatever it is in the lottery. Your greatest hope in that little 2 by 4 world has come to pass this Saturday. Now suppose on Monday you got the diagnosis that you have terminal cancer. What you know and what I know is that hope, that great, great hope in this little 2 by 4 world, would be irrelevant. It would be nothing. It would be dust.
12. A concise 10 minutes on Gratitude
13. A concise 10 minutes on Nonviolence/Resurrection Ethics
With the Resurrection of Jesus, justified Christian violence and enmity become staggeringly irrational and morally impossible.
Without the Resurrection of Jesus, His Way of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies becomes staggeringly irrational and morally impossible.
14. A concise 10 minutes on History and Conscience
Untaught Christian History: War and the Contagion of Erroneous Conscience
Just before a battle with the Gauls at Borbetomagus, Saint Martin of Tours (316-397), then a military officer, determined that his faith in Christ prohibited him from fighting, saying, “I am a soldier of Christ. I cannot fight.” He was charged with cowardice and jailed. In response to the charge, he volunteered to go unarmed to the front of the troops.
15. A concise 10 minutes on The Church and War
Christians, whether they be bishops or bumpkins, who speak 99% against war, capital punishment, abortion, violence and/or enmity are not proclaiming the truth that Jesus taught. They are treating Jesus’ teaching as if it were philosophy. It is not! It is the revealed will of God, or it is nothing The spiritual blind spot, that underlies proclaiming this “99% Gospel,” this “Gospel with Loopholes,” is that such Christians have not grasped the totality of the difference it makes if God has really spoken His definitive Word to humanity in Jesus. For a Christian to say that God has to be corrected by him or her by their making the logical opposite of what Jesus taught as truth the new truth of the Gospel is just silly—but catastrophically destructive.
16. A concise 10 minutes on Post Constantinian Christianity
A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.
The history of war is the history of powerful individuals willing to sacrifice thousands, and even millions, of other people’s lives for personal gain. As Patrick J. Buchanann writes in his book, The Unnecessary War, “War is the creations of individual not of nations.” The struggle of human beings against those who lust to have power over them is the struggle of memory against forgetting. A long habit, systematically nurtured and systematically sustained, of not remembering the violent, vile and vicious as wrong gives them a superficial appearance of being right—which then morally permits, indeed fosters, further violence, vileness and viciousness. To justify an evil is to perpetuate that evil. To justify an evil is to be a perpetuator of that evil. To ignore an evil is to guarantee that it will perpetuate itself with evermore lavish zeal.
17. A concise 10 minutes on Just/Unjust War
The first weapon of war is the lie. The first casualty of war is the truth. These two universally known and historically validated facts are truths that Christian just war theory, Christian just warists and Christian just war Churches are adamantly and chronically culpably blind to. And this, despite the verifiable fact that this head-in-the-sand moral posture has resulted in and is resulting in Christians destroying ten of millions of human beings and inflicting intolerable human suffering on tens of millions of others by their Ostrich based just war.morality. Morally culpable self-deception is refusing to look because I know I won’t see what I want to see.
18. A concise 10 minutes on The Ripple Effect of Nonviolence
Day in and day out, we live by the invisible ripples that come to us over time and space that would never thought when they were started that they were going to be working and controlling the moment. This is the way normal life works. The invisible side of existence is real. It is real. In fact most, spiritually speaking, most of what is most important in life happens on the invisible side, where no one can see it.
Fidelity to Christ means fidelity to the means of Christ here and now, and the reason we’re faithful is because each of our individual actions sends out ripples over time and space that we can’t imagine. We have a responsibility to those around us in the history, which means Jesus, which means God.
So the monk Thomas Merton sums this up in one beautiful sentence, a really beautiful sentence — Merton says: the first and most important thing to be a good Christian, the first and most important thing to be a good Christian is to be willing to be your own good person here and now, love as Christ loved here and now, and then be willing to let everything else fall in its own good time, good place, and good way. The first and most important thing to be a good Christian is to be willing to be your own good person here and now. Love as Christ loved in the only place where you have any control over existence — right now, here and now, and then be willing to let everything else fall in its own good time, good place, good way.
Mother Theresa says, my business is fidelity, God’s business is success. The church and so many Christians have literally reversed that, figuring their business is success and God’s business is fidelity. It’s not so, and its causing chaos in the individual life and in the Christian communities. The issue is to love as Christ loved here and now because those are the only Christ like means that can build a Christ like life, a Christ like home, a Christ like convent, a Christ like parish, a Christ like diocese, a Christ like church, a Christ like world. The only means. We are to be faithful and loving as Christ loved. And then let the ripples go out and leave the rest in the hands of God. For fidelity is our business and success is God’s.
19. A concise 10 minutes on Truth
All human beings desire to know, and truth is the proper object of this desire. Everyday life shows how concerned each of us is to discover for ourselves, beyond mere opinions, to know how things really are.
People cannot be genuinely indifferent to the question of whether what they know is true or not. If they discover that it is false, they reject it; but if they can establish its truth, they feel themselves rewarded.
It is this that St. Augustine teaches when he writes:
I have met many who wanted to deceive,
but none who wanted to be deceived.
John Paul II, Encyclical Fides et Ratio
20. A concise 10 minutes on Self-Deception
It is all but impossible to get a person to see a truth if his or her livelihood or status, or even just comfort, depends on him or her not seeing that truth.
ECM
21. A concise 10 minutes on Culpable Conscience
The effort one is obliged to make in order to acquire moral certainty that an action is morally permissible is to be measured by the importance of the action itself and the consequences which can be reasonably anticipated. If the life of a neighbor is liable to be imperiled by actions of ours, we must choose the safest course of action so as to avoid this evil effect. War with its dire consequences can never be waged on the grounds of probable right.
Rev. Bernard Haring, C.SS.R., THE LAW OF CHRIST, Vol I, Nihil Obstat and Imprimatur (1960)
22. A concise 10 minutes on The Mystery of Jesus and His Way
The original name of Christianity was The Way — The Way — in scripture. It was called The Way which meant a way of living; a moral way of existing in the World consistent with the will of God. Jesus’ teachings were the way. We all know deep in our hearts that Jesus really does expect us to live what he taught.
23. Part 1: A Ministry of the Ministry of Truth
24. Part 2: A Ministry of the Ministry of Love
25. Part 3: A Ministry of the Ministry of Peace
26. Part 1 –An interview with Don EdwardsECAPC- Can a Christian be in the military, go to war or kill?
Emmanuel Charles McCarthy remarks that “In a community of cannibals it is difficult to raise the issue that cannibalism is against the will of God” to example how Christians have developed an acceptance of violence and have rejected Jesus as a consequence. “If we cannot know from the New Testament that Jesus rejected violence, then we can no nothing about his personal message.” Fr. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy, Catholic priest, author/lecturer, Nobel Peace Prize nominee, former U.S. Marine and a committed advocate of the non-violent path of Jesus provides a powerfully candid discussion of the failings of the Christian church to reject nationalistic violence and follow the commandment to “Love your enemies.”
27. Part 2 – An interview with Don Edwards ECAPC- Can a Christian be in the military, go to war or kill?
In Part 2, Fr. McCarthy discusses the relationship between faith and violence. He uses the Nagasaki bombing, where an all Christian bombing crew led by a Catholic commander dropped the atomic bomb on the oldest and largest Catholic community in the orient, using the Nagasaki Cathedral as ground zero, as an example how the church is destroying itself by its acceptance and promotion of violence.
28. Faith in Violence – Higher Grounds Interview with Carmen Fields
29. A Conversation on Christian Nonviolence with Mairead Corrigan Maguire and Fr. George Zabelka (deceased)
(Do we really mean “Our Father” – A Conversation On Christian Nonviolence)
30. Every Church a Peace Church #51 Pt. 1 – Interview with John Carmody
31. Every Church a Peace Church #51 Pt. 2 – Interview with John Carmody
32. Every Church a Peace Church #52 Pt. 1 – Interview with John Carmody
33. Every Church a Peace Church #52 Pt. 2 – Interview with John Carmody
34. Every Church a Peace Church #52 Pt. 3 – Interview with John Carmody
35. Part 1 – An interview with C T Vivian ECAPC – Can a Christian be in the military, go to war or kill?
Dr. C.T. Vivian, aide to Dr. Martin L. King, Jr., and Fr. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy, Catholic priest and Nobel Peace Prize nominee, engage in a “Dialogue Among Prophets”. This is an exciting, energizing and enlightening interview in two parts. These episodes are not be overlooked! In Part I, Vivian and McCarthy share their varied experiences and insights about the connections of poverty and violence in our world where one person dies of starvation every 9 seconds, “If you want the most luxurious society in the world then you need to have the greatest military to protect it.”
36. Part 2 – An interview with C T Vivian ECAPC – Can a Christian be in the military, go to war or kill?
Part II. Rev. C.T. Vivian and Rev. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy engage us in a discussion of the clergy’s responsibility to teach the Gospel principles of justice, mercy and peace. Why is the church not standing up for those in the greatest need? “Where is the church in creating a society that works for the human spirit? How is God going to treat us as ministers when he looks at our ministries that remain silent to the core issues of justice, mercy and peace?” Rev. Vivian remarks, “We have the best Christianity that money can buy?” What does McCarthy mean when he compares church today to a Las Vegas prostitute? Tune in!
37. Part 1 – Military Chaplaincy
Part 1 – Why are Christians so easily led, pushed, and lied into war time and time again? Why are we so easily duped? Ellen thinks the Military Chaplaincy is one reason. This video (starts after Ellen’s Introduction) was made by Fr. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy and was originally titled “The Christian Military Chaplaincy: An Orwellian Ministry; Part I, A Ministry of the Ministry of Truth”
37. Part 2 – Military Chaplaincy
Part 2 – This video is the second in a series of three, which was originally called titled “The Christian Military Chaplaincy: An Orwellian Ministry; Part II, A Ministry of the Ministry of Love.”
37. Part 3 – Military Chaplaincy
Part 3 – This video is the third in a series of three, which was originally called titled “The Christian Military Chaplaincy: An Orwellian Ministry; Part II, A Ministry of the Ministry of Love.”