Can a Catholic Have a Personal Relationship with Jesus?

I posted this over at the National Catholic Register and thought that you might find it helpful…

We have our deacons and our religious directors, our priests and bishops and our cardinals … and our pope. We have confession, the Eucharist, penance, indulgences, litanies and prayers repetitively prayed to Christ’s mother. Yet, what of Christ? As our protestant brothers and sisters contend, has the Catholic Church inserted a bloated bureaucracy of man-made religious practices between Christ and his people?

In contradistinction, our Protestant brothers and sisters — especially evangelicals — speak of a personal relationship with Christ as the primary mark of the faith. There is no mountain of rituals populated by ecclesial bureaucrats. They speak of a certain sweet simplicity. It is just them and Jesus — together, without any need for ancient mediations or the authority of men. They just go to Jesus, and Jesus answers.

We all know their mantra: “It’s a relationship, not a religion.”

In her book Come Meet Jesus: An Invitation from Pope Benedict XVI, Amy Welborn presents the proposition that it is exactly an intimate friendship with Christ that has energized Pope Benedict XVI throughout his life. Welborn provides a compelling and convincing compilation of texts from the Holy Father’s speeches and books in which he describes the importance and nature of a living and personal relationship with Christ.

Welborn’s work is interwoven with insightful quotations and superb commentary. However, simply stating that an intimate friendship with Christ is important or even necessary in Catholicism does not exonerate it from the charges brought against it. On one hand, we tout a friendship with Christ, and on the other we demand an adherence to ancient rituals. In her own words, Welborn comments on the Pope’s thoughts about this:

[Pope Benedict XVI] speaks often about listening to Jesus through his body, the Church, through the word of God, and through the liturgical life of the Church. Our first instinct might be to see this in a negative way, as if he is trying to tell us that the ways in which we can meet Jesus are limited and must be controlled. But this is truly the opposite of the pope’s intention. He wants us to see all of this, not as places with walls and rules, but as gifts through which Jesus really and truly comes to meet us.

To those who question the compatibility of a personal relationship with a hierarchal and ritualisitc Church, we quote one of Cardinal Ratzinger’s most antidotal descriptions of the papacy: the pope is the “advocate of Christian memory.” The Catholic Church is not a pile of bureaucratic intermediation, but a wondrous set of gifts that guide us to Christ. The papacy and the doctrines of the Church are guideposts, they are there to remind us of the Christian path revealed to the apostles and handed down by our forefathers. By reminding us who Christ truly is, they save us from falling off into cheap cultural or relative imitations of Christ. The gifts of the Church present to us the reality of Jesus Christ.

The doctrines of the Church are no more limitations than truth itself is a limitation. Though dogma is a pejorative to many, to Catholics it is a word that should ring with freedom. It is the freedom to embrace the true identity of Jesus Christ, and not spend our lives wondering if our understanding of Christ is simply a personal projection or cultural trend.

Welborn further shares our Holy Father’s words on the encounter with Christ:

The encounter with Jesus Christ requires listening, requires a response in prayer and in putting into practice what he tells us. By get¬ting to know Christ, we come to know God, and it is only by starting from God that we understand man and the world, a world that would otherwise remain a nonsensical question.

Drawing from Pope Benedict XVI’s wisdom, Welborn touches upon two main considerations: first, that there is a knowledge and intimacy that only comes from living like Christ, and secondly, that the Church affords us the confidence to embrace the true Christ, we in turn are able to embrace the world according to the wisdom given to us by Christ. Christ is the Truth, and the clarity that Truth has in the Catholic Church allows for an authentic relationship and clear illumination of how to engage in and with the world.

The beauty of the Catholic Church can stand on its own, but at times it is good to have clarification by contrast. While our Protestant friends do promote a personal relationship with Christ, it is a radically antiseptic and often shallow contractual “gospel” (see Galatians 1 for more on this) that suffers from the rejection of the ecclesial and sacramental gifts passed down to us from Christ himself.

The true Church of Christ should be able to understand, live, and clearly articulate what it means to have a personal relationship with Jesus and Pope Benedict is a sure and wise guide to this reality.

Welborn’s work Come Meet Jesus: An Invitation from Pope Benedict XVI carries on this discussion of embracing the true Jesus Christ in a deep and relevant manner.

Amy Welborn will be appearing on EWTN’s literary show Bookmark this Sunday at 9:30am ET and then again at 11:30pm ET. If you miss these you can catch them again on Monday at 5:30am ET and then Wednesday at 5:30pm ET.

Everything in the Catholic Church is christocentric. Everything points and guides us to Christ. Let us as Catholics find joy and freedom in the doctrines and rituals of the Church. They free us to live and love the real Jesus Christ — especially the gift of the holy Eucharist.

As Catholics, it is our Christ-centered religion that enlivens and purifies our relationship.

What about you – are you a Catholic with a personal relationship with Jesus?

For More on This Topic

What does it mean to have a personal relationship with Jesus?

What does the “born again” experience have to do with our salvation, and with our friendship with Christ?

Q: Dear Father John, I am a fairly recent convert to the faith. My conversion took place over a period of 3 years in which I had a series of powerful experiences of God’s presence and action in my life. It wasn’t just coming into the Church for me – it was discovering that Jesus is a real person, someone interested in my life. During my conversion, I understood this turn-around (this discovery of Jesus) as being “born again.” I also have understood this kind of experience as being necessary to have my place secure in heaven. And yet, I now know so many Catholics who have never had this kind of experience. They don’t talk about Jesus as if he is a real person. But they seem to think their place in heaven is secure anyway. This is all kind of vague, but I guess my basic question is: What does the “born again” experience have to do with our salvation, and with our friendship with Christ? Am I overemphasizing it, or are other people under-emphasizing it?

A: I think I detect two different questions in your note.

God and Emotions

The first is: Does someone have to have a deeply felt born-again experience in order to get into heaven? The answer is no. It doesn’t have to be deeply felt. It doesn’t have to be emotional. It just has to be real. There is a difference between “emotional” and “real.” On the one hand, I can have a profoundly moving emotional experience in the movie theater, but the drama that caused it wasn’t real. On the other hand, I can have a profound but un-dramatic relationship with a relative who is confined to a hospital bed, someone I visit regularly over an extended period of time without experiencing any strong emotions during those visits. Normally, some kind of interaction happens between the realm of real interpersonal experience and the realm of intense emotion, but we must keep in mind that the two realms only overlap; they are not equivalent. The same thing goes for our friendship with Christ.

Remember, God deals with each of us in a personal, individual way. He has given you (and many of us) a very dramatic, emotionally undeniable experience of his love, his truth, and his presence. But to others he gives different graces. I have known people who have lived in deep intimacy with God for more than 80 years without ever having a “born-again” experience. It’s as if they are continually, quietly born again every day, every time they go to confession, every time they go to Mass. This is real. It proves its reality in the way they live, the way they pray. Remember Matthew 25? The “final exam” on Judgment Day isn’t whether or not we had an emotional, dramatic born-again experience. The wisdom of the Church also provides for a gradual growth in intimacy with Christ, and a quiet, discrete way of giving one’s life to Christ over and over again through the years, through the liturgy and the sacraments. I think you and I should be grateful for the dramatic, emotional born again experiences that God has given us. God knows we need them, and that’s why he gives them to us. But it is not our place to define how God should work in everyone else’s life. We need to trust his wisdom, and the wisdom of his Church. And we also need to make sure that our love for Christ isn’t built solely on those positive emotional experiences; it would constitute the classic mistake of loving the gifts more than the Giver of the gifts, and it can get us into trouble.

Our Place in Heaven

Second question: Is your place in heaven secure? Yes. Is mine? Yes. Is everyone’s? Yes. The place is secure. God “will’s all men’s salvation” as St Paul puts it. The INSECURE part is whether we will end up occupying it. That doesn’t depend just on God. It also depends on us. Remember, the essence of Christianity is a living relationship with Jesus Christ, a friendship with him. Now, common sense tells us that no real friendship automatically lasts forever. I can break a friendship. I can leave my friends and not come back to them. This is because I am a human being; I am free. This freedom is not eliminated by Christ. He doesn’t make us less human when he offers us his friendship. It is possible to backslide. It is possible to be seduced by the devil and to abandon Christ. Just look at the New Testament – Judas, Peter… This is why the New Testament at times seems to contradict itself. Our salvation is assured, because it depends on God; AND our salvation is a process, to be “worked out in fear and trembling” (Phil 2:12). It’s kind of a paradox, but it’s clear. We can fall away: “We ought, then, to turn our minds more attentively than before to what we have been taught, so that we do not drift away” (Heb 2:1). The most eloquent scriptural explanation of this comes from Revelation 2, 3, and 4. It’s all about Christ warning the Churches that they need to keep watch, they need to do their part to keep the faith, to keep their friendship with Christ vibrant and growing. This isn’t meant to be scary. If we make a decent effort to keep our prayer life in shape, if we stay close to the sacraments and continually follow God’s will as shown in Church teaching and in our well-formed conscience, the friendship will keep growing. That’s why we can have that quiet assurance in our hearts and look forward to heaven (this is the virtue of hope). But we can’t put it on automatic pilot. Real friendships don’t work like that (this is the sin of presumption).

Both of these issues can have a strong effort on our efforts towards spiritual growth. If we are too concerned about concocting emotional experiences, our prayer life and sacramental life may start leaning towards self-centeredness instead of Christ-centeredness. If we become obsessed about whether or not our salvation is assured, the devil can use that worry to cause interior turbulence, leading to distractions and, once again, self-absorption.

I hope these reflections have settled your mind, and I also hope they help you discover the magnificent variety of ways in which God touches the hearts of his beloved children.

Yours in Christ, Father John Bartunek, LC