{"id":1443,"date":"2012-10-11T00:51:03","date_gmt":"2012-10-11T00:51:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/doxacommunications.com\/kolbe\/?p=1443"},"modified":"2012-10-11T00:51:03","modified_gmt":"2012-10-11T00:51:03","slug":"kolbe-center-apologetics-am-i-not-here-who-am-your-mother","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kolbecenter.org\/kolbe-center-apologetics-am-i-not-here-who-am-your-mother\/","title":{"rendered":"Kolbe Center Apologetics > Am I Not Here Who Am Your Mother?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Am I Not Here Who Am Your Mother?<\/strong><\/h2>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Imprimatur<\/em>: Archbishop Cyril S. Bustros, Eparch of Newton, 25 January 2011.<\/p>\n

Download<\/span><\/a><\/span>\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 Donate<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Part I<\/strong><\/p>\n

You Have a Mother in Heaven<\/strong><\/p>\n

There are few people on earth who do not love their mothers.\u00a0 Even people whose relationships with their mothers are strained recognize that their mothers suffered and sacrificed to bring them into the world.\u00a0 Most people have some fond memories of the unconditional love that they received from their mothers in the first years of their lives. \u00a0The purpose of this pamphlet is to show you that God, the Creator of the universe, has not only sent His Son Jesus Christ, into the world to be our Savior.\u00a0 Through Jesus Christ, God has also made us members of His divine Family.\u00a0 The Word made flesh, Jesus Christ, has given us His own flesh and blood to eat.\u00a0 He has given us His Holy Spirit.\u00a0 And in the last moments of His life on the Cross at Calvary, He gave us His Mother to be our Mother.<\/p>\n

The Blessed Virgin Mary: The New Eve<\/strong><\/p>\n

When God created our first parents, he formed Adam first from the dust of the earth.\u00a0 The Fathers of the Church often described the earth of the first created world as \u201cvirgin earth\u201d because as yet no death, deformity or disease had corrupted it.\u00a0 The Fathers saw the \u201cvirgin earth\u201d as a type or foreshadowing of the Blessed Virgin Mary from whose immaculate womb the body of Jesus, the \u201cNew Adam\u201d would be formed, just as the body of the first Adam had been formed from the \u201cvirgin earth\u201d at the beginning of creation.<\/p>\n

After Adam had searched in vain for a companion suitable for him among the animals that God had created, God put Adam into a deep sleep and formed Eve\u2019s body from Adam\u2019s side and placed her soul within it.\u00a0 God gave Eve to Adam to be his companion and helper and to be the mother of his children.\u00a0 God made her immaculate and beautiful in body, mind and spirit.\u00a0 According to the Fathers of the Church, Mary summed up within herself all of the beauty, order, and harmony of the first created world. \u00a0She was the queen of the entire universe.<\/p>\n

God made Adam to be the spiritual head of his wife and children.\u00a0 This is why God did not reveal to Eve the commandment not to eat of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden.\u00a0 Instead, Eve had to receive the commandment through her husband, Adam.\u00a0 Lucifer, one of the greatest and most powerful angels in Heaven, exploited this dependence of Eve upon her husband when he tempted her to disobey the commandment not to eat of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.\u00a0 According to the Fathers of the Church, God had revealed to Lucifer that he and all of the angels had been created to serve human beings.\u00a0 St. Maximilian Kolbe taught that God had also revealed to Lucifer that the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, Jesus Christ, would assume a human nature in the womb of a Woman, and that He and the Woman would become the King and Queen of the Angels.\u00a0 The thought of serving a limited bodily creature was too much for Lucifer, and he refused to obey, taking a large number of other angels with him.\u00a0 From that time forward, Lucifer and his demons dedicated themselves to destroying God\u2019s plan for mankind by leading as many human beings as possible to rebel against God.<\/p>\n

In His infinite love for mankind, God endowed Adam and Eve with the power to think, to love, and to freely decide what to do, just as God Himself freely loves, thinks, and acts.\u00a0 To give Adam and Eve the opportunity to prove their love for God, it was necessary to give them a test\u2014to allow Satan to tempt them to disobey God\u2019s only commandment: not to eat of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.\u00a0 Since God had given this commandment directly to Adam, Lucifer, now known as Satan, or \u201cthe Adversary,\u201d refrained from tempting Adam directly, and, instead, used his exalted intellect to tempt him through Eve.<\/p>\n

At first, Satan did not tempt Eve directly to disobey God\u2019s commandment.\u00a0 Instead, he subtly influenced her to doubt God\u2019s Word by slightly twisting what God had revealed to her through Adam.\u00a0 Only once he had gotten Eve to doubt the utter reliability of God\u2019s Word did Satan focus her attention on the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and on the knowledge, power and delight that she could obtain by eating it.\u00a0 When Eve\u2019s fascination with the fruit made her forget God and His Word, she became overwhelmed with desire to eat the fruit\u2014and she did eat.\u00a0 But Satan knew well that he could only break the bond between God and man if Adam\u2014the head of the whole human race\u2014disobeyed God.\u00a0 With that in mind, he prompted Eve to offer the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil to Adam, and he prompted Adam to want to please his wife, and in wanting to please her to forget God\u2014and to focus on the delight that eating the fruit would bring him.<\/p>\n

God had commanded Adam to guard and protect his wife and lands, and Adam should have rebuked his wife for her disobedience and remained true to God\u2019s Word.\u00a0 But his desire to please his wife and to experience the delight of the fruit overwhelmed him and diluted his sense of God\u2019s presence.\u00a0 Adam ate, and the heavenly glory that had filled his body (and the body of Eve) immediately disappeared, leaving them naked and ashamed.\u00a0 The wonderful unity with God that they had experienced from the moment of their creation was destroyed, leaving them empty and incapable of recognizing God\u2019s presence in other creatures or in each other as they had done effortlessly until that moment.<\/p>\n

God gave Adam one last chance to take responsibility for his actions and to restore his relationship with God by admitting his guilt.\u00a0 But, when God spoke to Adam about his newly-exposed nakedness, Adam refused to take responsibility for his sin and instead blamed Eve for tempting him to eat the fruit\u2014and God for creating the woman!\u00a0 Eve also refused to accept responsibility for her actions and tried to blame the devil for leading her into sin.\u00a0 Consequently, out of respect for their free choice, God allowed them to suffer the consequences of their rebellion against Him, and ordered his angels to remove them from the Garden of Eden.<\/p>\n

The bodies of our first parents, which had been created in a state of incorruption, now began to experience weakness and decay.\u00a0 And, as Adam and Eve, the king and queen of the first created world, began to experience corruption, and decay, so all of the creatures in the entire universe became subject to what St. Paul would call the \u201cbondage to decay.\u201d\u00a0 Death, disease, and deformity entered the world\u2014along with genetic mutations, those \u201cerrors\u201d in copying genetic instructions, which evolutionists hail as the engine that transforms reptiles into birds and land mammals into whales.\u00a0 In reality, these genetic \u201cmistakes,\u201d only degrade the exquisitely organized genetic information that God originally placed in each kind of organism \u201cin the beginning of creation.\u201d<\/p>\n

God\u2019s Promise of Redemption<\/strong><\/p>\n

According to the Fathers of the Church, the memory of Eden and of their original state of holiness filled Adam and Eve with such sorrow that they wept and grieved continually for the rest of their long lives.\u00a0 Only one thing kept our first parents from absolute despair, and that was the promise that God had made to them before their expulsion from the Garden of Eden.\u00a0 Addressing the devil in the presence of Adam and Eve, God had said, \u201cI will put enmity between you and the Woman, and between her seed and your seed.\u00a0 She will crush your head, but you will strike at her heel.\u201d<\/p>\n

With these words, Adam and Eve understood that God was not going to leave them and their descendants in darkness forever.\u00a0 He was going to restore everything back to the beauty and goodness that it had in the beginning of creation, and to something even greater than that.\u00a0 They understood that God was going to accomplish this through a Woman who would crush the head of Satan, and through her seed: a Child who would be completely opposed to Satan\u2014untouched by him.<\/p>\n

For thousands of years this hope was passed down from Adam and Eve to their descendants, from generation to generation.\u00a0 About four thousand years ago, a descendant of Adam and Eve through the line of their son Seth, a man named Abram (later expanded by God to \u201cAbraham\u201d) was chosen by the Lord to be the father of a great nation, from whom would come the Holy Child who would crush the head of Satan, redeem, or free, souls from their sins, restore the world back to its original holiness and fulfill the purpose that God had intended for it from the beginning of creation.<\/p>\n

The Holy Bible records dozens of divinely inspired prophecies about that Child and His Mother.\u00a0 The Patriarch Jacob foretold that the Child would belong to the tribe of Judah, one of the twelve grandsons of Abraham.\u00a0 King David foretold in detail the sufferings that the Child would have to endure to redeem the world.\u00a0 Isaiah predicted that He would be born of a Virgin; that He would be called \u201cmighty God\u201d; would work all kinds of miracles; and would suffer and die to atone for the sins of the world.\u00a0 Micah identified Bethlehem in Judea as the place of his birth. \u00a0The prophet Daniel predicted the very year of his death, almost 500 years in advance.<\/p>\n

No one in history has ever been announced beforehand with so many detailed predictions as the Child Jesus and His Mother Mary.\u00a0 And just as Adam was brought forth from the \u201cvirgin earth\u201d by the divine power of God, so Jesus Christ, the New Adam, the Redeemer of the world, was brought forth from the Virgin Mary, the New Eve, by the power of the Holy Spirit, two thousand years ago.<\/p>\n

The Fathers of the Church recognized that, in God\u2019s Providence, the fall of Adam and Eve had to be undone by the New Adam, Jesus Christ, and the New Eve, Mary, and for this reason their lives unfolded in perfect parallel with the lives of Adam and Eve.\u00a0 The parallels began with the very incarnation of Jesus in the womb of the Virgin Mary.\u00a0 Just as the Fall of mankind began with the false message of a fallen angel to the virgin Eve, so the redemption of mankind began with the true message of the holy Archangel Gabriel to Mary, the New Eve.\u00a0 The Archangel Gabriel addressed Mary with a title never given before or after to any other woman: \u201cHail Mary, you who have been made full of grace\u201d and told her that she had been chosen to become the Mother of the Messiah, the promised Redeemer of the world.\u00a0 And whereas the first Eve doubted the Word of God at the word of an angel, the New Eve held fast to the Word of God and said, \u201cBehold the handmaid of the Lord.\u00a0 Be it done unto me according to your Word.\u201d As the body of the first Adam was made from the \u201cvirgin earth,\u201d now, as the Holy Spirit \u201covershadowed\u201d Her, the body of the New Adam was made from the sinless flesh of the Virgin Mary.<\/p>\n

Throughout her life, Mary the New Eve, reversed the first Eve\u2019s sin of pride and disobedience.\u00a0 In all of her thoughts, words, and deeds, Mary gave her fiat to the Holy Spirit reigning within Her.\u00a0 She obeyed St. Joseph her husband, and, after her husband died and her Son reached adulthood, She obeyed her Son Jesus in all things.\u00a0 From the beginning to the end of His public life, Jesus highlighted His Mother\u2019s maternal role in the family of believers.\u00a0 At the wedding at Cana in Galilee, when Jesus performed His first miracle, it was His Mother who informed Him of the emergency: that the host family had run out of wine for the feast. \u00a0Thus, when Jesus responded to Mary\u2019s concern, and instantly changed six large containers of water into delicious wine, He showed His disciples for all time to come that His Mother is the Queen of the angels and saints, and the most excellent intercessor for sinners in all of our needs.<\/p>\n

Jesus confirmed and completed this lesson from the Cross when with His last words to a human being He entrusted His Mother to St. John the Evangelist, giving Her to him to be the Mother of the Church and Mother of all of His disciples until the end of time.\u00a0 That is why, on Pentecost, the birthday of the Church, when the Holy Spirit descended upon the Apostles, empowering them to proclaim the Gospel to the ends of the earth, Mary stood in their midst as their Holy Mother, asking her Spouse the Holy Spirit to descend upon her children and make them holy.\u00a0 From her place in Heaven, Our Lady continues to watch over us.\u00a0 And to those who freely accept Her as their Mother, She intercedes just as powerfully as She did at Cana for our transformation into the likeness of her Son.<\/p>\n

Part II<\/strong><\/p>\n

Modern Science Confirms God\u2019s Revelation<\/strong><\/p>\n

Do all of these beautiful thoughts about the Mother of God seem like a fairy tale in this age of skepticism and selfishness?\u00a0 If so, you should know that Almighty God has granted to this skeptical age a miraculous, scientific and technological confirmation of the importance of His Mother to the whole human race and to you in particular.\u00a0 In the next few pages of this pamphlet, we will briefly summarize the facts surrounding this marvel, which began in the mountains near Mexico City, in December, 1531, but which very much concerns you and your loved ones here and now.<\/p>\n

Juan Diego Meets the Blessed Virgin Mary<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Christian faith was brought to Central America in 1519 when ships under the command of Hernando Cortes landed on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico.\u00a0 Cortes unloaded a small army of men, horses, weapons and other supplies, and headed inland.\u00a0 Unbeknownst to Cortes, the area he had begun to explore belonged to the Aztec Empire, a technologically advanced but morally and spiritually corrupt civilization, with its capital in the mountains of present-day Mexico City.\u00a0 The Aztec religion involved the practice of human sacrifice, and it is estimated that 100,000 human beings had their hearts ripped out of their chests and were offered in sacrifice to the gods atop the pyramids of Mexico City just a few years before the first Catholic missionaries arrived in Central America.<\/p>\n

This is not the place to relate how Cortes and his small company of men triumphed over the Aztec forces, abolished human sacrifice, and established a Christian government in Mexico.\u00a0 What is important to emphasize is that most of the Mexican people did not respond favorably to the Christian religion of their conquerors.\u00a0 This natural resistance of a conquered people to the imposition of a foreign religion was compounded by the bad example of many of the Spanish settlers and government officials who scandalized the indigenous people with their immorality, cruelty, and greed.<\/p>\n

One of the indigenous people who did embrace the Christian religion from the beginning was a man known to history as Juan Diego.\u00a0 Juan Diego and his wife seem to have received the gift of Faith into well-disposed hearts.\u00a0 As often as he could, Juan walked more than ten miles round trip from the mountains outside of Mexico City to the nearest church to assist at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.<\/p>\n

Early on the morning of December 9, 1531, Juan Diego was on his way to Holy Mass when he heard a lovely voice calling to him.\u00a0 \u201cJuanito, humblest of my sons, where are you going<\/em>?\u201d A beautiful lady appeared to him, dressed in the garments of an Aztec Queen, and he answered her: \u201cMy Lady and Child, I have to reach your church in Mexico, Tlatilolco, to receive holy things, things taught to us by our priests, the representatives of Our Lord.\u201d Then the Lady replied:<\/p>\n

Know and understand well, least of my sons, that I am the ever virgin Holy Mary, Mother of the True God for Whom we live, of the Creator of all things, Lord of heaven and the earth. I wish that a temple be erected here quickly, so that there I may display and give\u00a0 all my love, compassion, help, and protection, as your merciful Mother\u2014to you, and to all who dwell in this land, and to all the rest who love, invoke and confide in me.\u00a0 There I will listen to their woes and heal all their miseries, afflictions and sorrows. To accomplish what my mercy proposes, go to the palace of the bishop of Mexico, and you will say to him that I am making known my great desire, that here on this plain a temple be built to me.\u00a0 You will accurately relate all that you have seen and admired, and all that you have heard. Be assured that I will be most grateful and will reward you, because I will make you happy and worthy of reward for the effort and fatigue it will cost you to fulfill the task that I have entrusted to you. Behold, you have heard my request, my humble son; now go and put forth all your effort.<\/em><\/p>\n

Reluctantly, Juan obeyed the Lady\u2019s request and made her request known to the Bishop.\u00a0 Bishop Zumarraga listened politely to Juan\u2019s story, but did not believe him.\u00a0 Juan Diego returned to the Lady and urged her to find someone else to carry out her mission, but she insisted that he was the one she had chosen and that he must go back to the Bishop the next day and try again.<\/p>\n

The next day Juan Diego went to the Bishop\u2019s palace a second time and after a long wait was granted an audience.\u00a0 This time, the bishop questioned him thoroughly about the Lady, but privately resolved to suspend judgment until God should provide a sign to confirm the truth of his story\u2014Castilian Roses, native to Spain, but unknown to the vicinity of Mexico City.<\/p>\n

On December 12, 1531, Juan Diego went to look for a priest to anoint his uncle Juan Bernardino who was dying.\u00a0 To his astonishment, the Lady appeared to him once again and spoke to him tenderly:<\/p>\n

Hear me and understand well, least of my sons.\u00a0 Let nothing frighten you or grieve you. Let not your heart be troubled. Do not fear that sickness, nor any other sickness or anguish. Am I not here, who am your Mother? Are you not under my protection? Am I not your health? Are you not within the crossing of my arms? What else do you desire? Do not grieve or be disturbed by anything. Do not be troubled by your uncle\u2019s illness.\u00a0 He will not die of it now. Be assured\u2014he is now cured<\/em>!<\/p>\n

Then She told Juan to climb to the top of the hillside where he found beautiful Castilian roses in full bloom just ten days before the first day of winter.\u00a0 The Lady arranged the roses in Juan Diego\u2019s tilma, or cloak, and told him to take them to the Bishop.\u00a0 With great difficulty Juan Diego hurried to the bishop\u2019s palace, holding the miraculous flowers, and managing to keep them wrapped in his cloak until he was finally ushered into the Bishop\u2019s presence.<\/p>\n

As soon as Juan appeared before the Bishop he unfurled his cloak and let fall the Castilian Roses\u2014the sign for which the bishop had prayed!\u00a0 At that very moment, before the entire assembly, a perfect image of the Lady as she had looked to Juan appeared on his cloak, like the photographic image on the film from an instamatic camera.\u00a0 At the sight of the beautiful image of the Queen of Heaven, the Bishop and all the on-lookers knelt down in veneration.<\/p>\n

The Woman in the image was dressed as an Aztec queen.\u00a0 Like the woman described by St. John in chapter 12 of the Book of Revelation, the Lady was \u201cclothed with the sun\u201d and had \u201cthe moon under her feet\u201d (Revelation 12:1).\u00a0\u00a0 Around her waist She wore the kind of belt worn by pregnant women in Aztec society; and around her neck a black cross, like the black crosses painted on the sails of the Spanish ships.<\/p>\n

The next day, the Bishop asked Juan to lead a procession to the place where Our Lady had asked for a shrine.\u00a0 From there, the Bishop and his aides accompanied Juan to his uncle\u2019s home where they learned that the Lady had appeared to Juan on his deathbed, identifying herself as Our Lady of Coatloxopeuh in the native Nahuatl language, which sounded like \u201cOur Lady of Guadalupe\u201d in Spanish, which was the name of a famous Marian shrine in Estremadura, in Spain.\u00a0 With its strong associations in both Spanish and the local Nahuatl language, the title \u201cGuadalupe\u201d beautifully blended meanings of great importance to both cultures.\u00a0 In Nahuatl, the name meant \u201cShe who crushes the serpent.\u201d This was at once a reference to the serpent god Quetzacoatl, whose cult occupied a central place in the ritual of human sacrifice (long associated with the mountain of Tepeyac where Our Lady had asked for a shrine), and at the same time a direct reference to God\u2019s promise in Genesis 3:15 to put enmity between Satan and a \u201cWoman\u201d who would one day \u201ccrush\u201d his head.<\/p>\n

From the moment it was installed in a chapel on Tepeyac, the miraculous image and the testimony of Juan Diego drew the indigenous peoples in constant streams to receive Baptism at the hands of the missionaries.\u00a0 During the next ten years, nine million Indians renounced Satan, embraced the Catholic Faith, and consecrated themselves to Jesus at the invitation of His Mother\u2014who had also become their Mother.<\/p>\n

The wonders performed through the miraculous image of Our Lady of Guadalupe continued and continue to this day.\u00a0 Over the centuries, millions of people have received graces of physical and spiritual healing from the Lord Jesus Christ, through the prayers of his Mother, and countless testimonials from grateful pilgrims have been preserved at her Shrine.\u00a0 Even the efforts of anti-Christian groups to destroy her image have been turned into testimonies of God\u2019s favor.\u00a0 In 1921, when an intensely anti-Catholic Masonic regime held power in Mexico, a powerful bomb was placed under the altar in front of the Image.\u00a0 The explosion blew out the windows in the basilica and twisted the wrought-iron candle holders on the altar.\u00a0 But the miraculous image survived unscathed.<\/p>\n

During the past 480 years, many scholars and scientists have studied the image, only to admit their inability to explain its origin. Richard Kuhn, a 1938 Nobel laureate in chemistry, concluded that the image was not painted by a human hand and that the coloring of the image cannot be attributed to any known substance.\u00a0 The material of Juan Diego\u2019s cloak, upon which the image appeared, ought to have disintegrated hundreds of years ago\u2014yet it shows no signs of decay after almost 500 years!<\/p>\n

The physical preservation of the image has a profound spiritual significance.\u00a0 We have recalled that the first Adam and Eve were created in a state of incorruption and that the whole earth participated in that state of incorruption until sin entered the world.\u00a0 Like the first Eve, Mary, the second Eve, was conceived without sin, and thus in a state of incorruption.\u00a0 Only in this way could She provide pure flesh for the Body of the Son of God in her womb.\u00a0 And that is also why\u2014according to the constant tradition of the Church\u2014Mary\u2019s body did not decay when she \u201cfell asleep\u201d at the end of her life but was assumed into Heaven by God in a glorified state, an event commemorated throughout the Christian world as the Feast of the Holy Dormition or the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.\u00a0 (This also explains why the most famous woman in history has no tomb!)\u00a0 The miraculous physical preservation of Our Lady\u2019s image testifies to the truth of her incorruptibility and to God\u2019s power to bring all of His faithful children to that same state of incorruptibility by the resurrection of the dead at the end of the world.<\/p>\n

\u00a0The Eyes of the Virgin of Guadalupe<\/strong><\/p>\n

During the past several decades, much of the scientific study of the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe has focused on her eyes.\u00a0 In 1929, a photographer named Alfonso Gonzales studied a negative of the image and found the reflection of a bearded man in Our Lady\u2019s right eye.\u00a0 Subsequent investigations resulted in the discovery of other reflections of other human images in the Virgin\u2019s eyes\u2014a discovery quite unforeseen and impossible without modern photographic knowledge and technology.\u00a0 For more than 20 years, beginning in the 1970\u2019s, a civil and environmental engineer named Dr. Jose Aste Tousman, used state-of-the-art equipment to study the eyes of the Virgin, magnifying them up to 2500 times. Tousman eventually identified more than ten individuals in each of the Virgin\u2019s eyes, including figures reliably identified as Juan Diego and Bishop Zumarraga.\u00a0 The relative positions of these figures in the two eyes of the image perfectly correspond to the difference in perspective between the two eyes of a living human being.\u00a0 No other non-photographic image known to man has ever displayed this characteristic.<\/p>\n

On the one hand, the existence of the images in Our Lady\u2019s eyes confirms the miraculous character of this divine portrait of the Blessed Mother.\u00a0 But there is deeper meaning to the discovery.\u00a0 The eyes that lovingly followed the Lord Jesus Christ from the moment of His birth to the moment of His death on the Cross\u2014those same eyes are fixed on you.\u00a0 And to those who, like St. Juan Diego, entrust themselves to the prayers of the Mother of God and become true followers of her Son Jesus Christ in His Church, the words of the Queen of Heaven will always be true:<\/p>\n

Hear me and understand well, least of my children.\u00a0 Let nothing frighten you or grieve you . . . Am I not here, who am your Mother? Are you not under my protection? Am I not your health? Are you not within the crossing of my arms?<\/em><\/p>\n

Through the prayers of the Holy Mother of Jesus, may God grant you the gifts of faith and repentance and transform you into the perfect likeness of her Son by the power of the Holy Spirit!<\/p>\n

*\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 *\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 *\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 *\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 *\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 *\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 *<\/p>\n

If you would like to contact a member of the Church that Jesus Christ founded two thousand years ago, please contact us at<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

or email us at howen@shentel.net<\/a> and we will help you to find a church community in your area. \t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Am I Not Here Who Am Your Mother? \u00a0 Imprimatur: Archbishop Cyril S. Bustros, Eparch of Newton, 25 January 2011. Download\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 Donate Part I You Have a Mother in …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[124],"tags":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kolbecenter.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1443"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kolbecenter.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kolbecenter.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kolbecenter.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kolbecenter.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1443"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kolbecenter.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1443\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kolbecenter.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kolbecenter.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kolbecenter.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}