These are remarks delivered by Mike Church at the Saint Benedict Center Conference, October 13-14, 2023. The theme of the Conference was Cultivating and Passing on a Catholic Worldview".

There is a term used in usury finances to describe a bank taking something back from you that they never owned in the first place and loaned you money to buy that wasn’t there’s either: it’s called REPOSSESS. That’s an odd choice of wording because RE possessing something implies POSSESSING it at some point in time and when a bank REPO’S your home, because you couldn’t make the usury obligation,  it takes possession for the first time so how can this be a RE-PO! The only exception to this rule is when the bank REPO’S a piece of real estate it had previously REPO’D from some other poor sucker. I dwell on this seemingly silly point because I use the term in this talk’s title: Repossessing the Real Estate of the Catholic Mind. This sounded great in July when Brother threatened me at Rosary point to give him a title but as I started to develop the talk the Holy Ghost insisted I override Brother’s veto and changed the title to the more catchy one of:

DO YOU BELIEVE IN MIRACLES!? And WHAT is a miracle? 
 “There is no impropriety in saying that God does something against nature when it is contrary to what we know of nature. For we give the name ‘nature’ to the usual and known course of nature; and whatever God does contrary to this, we call ‘prodigies’ or ‘miracles.’” - Saint Augustine
Now I’m going to conduct an informal poll right now and sure that almost everyone in this room is going to vote the same… AFTER you show me your picture ID and voter registration card!

 

LISTEN TO THE ENTIRE TALK HERE (Available on Monday, 16 October)

 

The votes are in and miracles own in a landslide but did they REALLY win!? Outside of this room, I will wager you that Miracles would lose in a landslide especially if we gave the old school definition of what a miracle is AND what is required to “believe in them”; and this is where I want to start the meat and taters of this talk and hope to assist many Catholics to begin the work of repo-ing this lost real estate in our minds, the ACTUAL belief in miracles.

Let’s get started by getting an idea of what the modern world thinks a miracle is. Some of you will remember this clip from the year that was 1980. 

Now, I’m not saying that the defeat of the intrinsic evil that was the Soviet Union in a hockey game wasn’t “miraculous”, in fact at least 2 members of the team, Mike Eruzione and Ken Morrow were Catholics,  but they’ve never said that the win was a “Hail Mary”. The point I wish to make is that this game is still called “The Miracle On Ice”, in fact you can still buy a Miracle on Ice 1980 USA Hockey Team Lake Placid Celebration Photo!

Much as I argued here back in 2019 that Catholics should smile and say an Ave everytime sports announcers say the home team needs a Hail Mary, I will argue here that having tens of millions of ‘Muricans calling something a “miracle” is good thing… at least the spell they word correctly! But I want to talk about REAL miracles where we know the hand and Graces of God actually interceded for or just inspired men and women of Christendom.

There’s a new book out that added lots of fuel to the fire that is this talk, it’s called THEY FLEW - A HISTORY OF THE IMPOSSIBLE by Carlos Eire. 

This passage from the book is a is a perfect starting place.
“The advent of the Protestant Reformation brought about a sudden redefinition of concepts such as religion, magic, superstition, and idolatry, as well as of assumptions about the relation between the natural and supernatural realms. Distinctions that had reigned largely uncontested in the Catholic Church of the West and the Orthodox Churches of the East since the first century suddenly began to be challenged in the early 1520s when an earth-shaking paradigm shift took place.