(Given at the 5:30 pm Sunday youth Mass at OLP)
Jesus is the light to all nations. He is the Light of the World. Even more so, as Truth himself, Jesus is the light to our minds. During my high school years, as I grew in my relationship with Jesus, I had questions, and this was good. It was good for my faith to question. To inquire. To seek deeper understanding. This is what we celebrate today in the Epiphany. And this is what the Magi were doing. They were scientists, astronomers, and the like, from the east. They see this sign in the heavens, this star, that’s unlike anything they’ve ever seen before, and they journey to where it leads them: to Jesus. God has revealed himself through our Faith, fully in the person of Jesus Christ, yes, but also through the natural world. The Church infallibly teaches that God’s existence can be found using reason alone. Hence, science and religion go together! Faith and reason go together! Truth does not contradict truth. God has revealed himself and the truth about reality through our Faith because, even though one can come to the truth that he exists through reason alone, it can be a very difficult to do. Not everyone has the mental capacity or the time to do it. Aristotle and Plato did it. They weren’t even Jewish or anything, but they came to the existence of God and the realty of the invisible world. Just using their minds and what they observed in the natural world. Using logic and reason. But thanks be to God, faith builds on reason. And reason helps in understanding faith. And this is for the rest of us. God has bridged the gap to help us. It’s not just for the smartest among us. We, as Catholic Christians, should never be opposed to faith and reason. To science and religion. It is both and not either or! We don’t believe in what’s called scientism, the idea that science alone proves the truth about reality. Why? Well, for one thing, the scientific method can’t prove itself. What scientific evidence is there, that science alone proves what is true? As one author put it, there is no empirical evidence to support the claim that we should only believe claims supported by empirical evidence. Given this lack of scientific proof, scientism is a self-refuting view. The scientific method itself comes from a different school: philosophy. We also don’t believe in fideism, the idea that it’s just about blind faith, and our reason has no room to play. Remember: truth cannot contradict truth. And some of our greatest Catholics have been scientists as well! To name a few: Fr. Georges Lemaître first proposed the big bang theory. There’s Fr. Giovanni Battista Riccioli, a seventeenth-century Jesuit astronomer and the first person to measure the rate of acceleration of a free-falling body. Fr. Gregor Mendel was the founder of modern genetics. The point of all this is that Jesus is Truth himself and the author of the natural world. He desires our questions and wants to enlighten our intellects. When receiving Holy Communion or Spiritual communion tonight, we can ask him to do just that.