Since I gave my life to Christ 27 years ago, I have longed to share the gift of his life with the world. At each opportunity that God gives me, it seems that I am fulfilling the very reason for my existence, that nothing else can be of greater importance—that even heaven can wait. I know at these moments that, had I the choice to go directly into the presence of God, I would choose to remain here on earth—if God would have it—mindful that, when at last I arrived in heaven, it would be the beginning of eternity.
In the almost four years that I’ve been a staff apologist with Catholic Answers, the opportunities for sharing our glorious faith have been numerous and often surprising. One such opportunity occurred recently.
We received a call from a woman named Joan Portman in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who had been invited to appear as a phone-in guest on a non-Catholic Christian radio program to speak about the Catholic Church. Joan is a fan of “Catholic Answers Live,” and she asked if one of our apologists might come on the program with her to be the primary spokesman for our faith. I was available at the time, so the request came to me, and I agreed to appear with her.
The program, “The More Better Man Show,” airs on WOL-AM (1450) in Baltimore, Maryland, beginning at midnight Saturday. Joan and I were to be on from midnight to 2:00 A.M. EST, which for me in California was Saturday 9:00 P.M. to 11:00 P.M. PST. At 8:55 P.M. I called the station’s toll-free number as requested.
Better Man: Hello?
Rosalind: Hello!
B.M.: Who’s this?
R: Rosalind Moss.
B.M.: Who are you?
R: I’m your guest for this evening.
B.M.: Oh. Good. You’re the Catholic lady. You’re gonna tell us about the Catholic Church, right?
R: Yes, Mr. Better Man. Should I call you Mr. Better Man? Is that your name?
B.M.: My name is Mo’ Better Man, a name I picked up in Vietnam. You call me whatever you want.
R: Okay. Thank you for having us on.
B.M.: Are you white?
R: Yes, I am.
B.M.: That’s okay. It’s just good to know. It’s all the same. God loves us all.
R: I agree.
Joan had explained to me that More Better Man was an African-American whose radio audience in the Baltimore-Washington, D.C. area was predominantly black. He put Joan and me on hold for a few minutes, then at midnight EST we began.
B.M.: Hello folks. We have a Miss Joan and a Miss Rosalind from Pittsburgh with us tonight. [Since Joan is from Pittsburgh, he assumed I was as well.] They are two blue-eyed, European Caucasian, or white—however you want to say it—ladies. They’re here to talk about the Catholic Church. Miss Joan, introduce your guest to us.
J: I’d like to introduce Rosalind Moss. She’s with “Catholic Answers Live” and is a wonderful spokesman for the Catholic Church.
B.M.: Okay, Miss Rosalind, tell us something about the Catholic Church.
Briefly I told Mr. Better Man and his audience that this would be my eighth Easter as a Catholic. I summed up my journey to the Church: my Jewish upbringing, my coming to believe in Christ as the Jewish Messiah through Evangelical Protestantism, and finally my conversion to Catholicism in 1995.
B.M.: You worship on Sunday?
R: Yes.
B.M.: Why did the Church change the Sabbath to Sunday?
R: Well, actually, the Sabbath is still the Sabbath and falls on Saturday. What was changed was the day of worship, from the Sabbath to Sunday.
B.M.: You Catholics changed that.
R: The early Christians, who, yes, were Catholic, began to meet on the first day of the week because it was the day the Lord of the Sabbath rose from the grave. They celebrated his Resurrection in coming together, in the breaking of bread, taking up a collection “on the first day of the week” as it says in Acts 20:7 and 1 Corinthians 16:2.
We spent the next half-hour talking about the Sabbath. I had been told prior to the program that Mr. Better Man was a Christian possibly of the Baptist faith (we never did ascertain exactly), but it seemed that he was being persuaded by Seventh-Day Adventists on Sabbath worship as one of the Ten Commandments binding on us today.
The phone lines were full at that point, so our host thought it best to begin taking calls. Most of the callers were antagonistic toward the Catholic Church, and their objections were standard. “Why do Catholics worship Mary?” “Why do you pray the rosary? Our Lord condemned vain repetition.” “Why do you have all these rituals when Jesus condemned the traditions of men?” “Exodus 20:4 says no graven images. Why do you pray to all those statues?” The Crusades, the corruption, the priest scandal, the time the Church forbid Catholics to read the Bible—on and on.
I knew the origin of their questions. I had been there. I recalled well the days when I myself wished to save Catholics from the “traditions of men” and bring them into a “true personal relationship” with Christ.
I listened and answered each objection as best I could, using Scripture as much as I could, particularly since there were a few callers who would accept nothing I said unless it came from Scripture. There were some issues I wished I had better answers to.
But I called on God in my heart and tried to remain calm and trusting. At those times I would think: Apologetics is not only about, nor dependent on, our having all the answers. It cannot be. No one, no matter how brilliant or informed he is, will have every answer for every soul. God is the one who opens the heart to hear. He is able to give grace even in the midst of our lack.
So I didn’t worry so much about all the accusations that were hurled at me that evening about the corruption of the Church through history. I simply acknowledged that it is a remarkable thing that a Church with such a history of sin and sinners should still exist in unity after 2,000 years, while in less than 500 years Protestantism has split many thousands of times. If the Catholic Church were man’s doing, it never could have stood amid today’s scandals nor the sins of the past—for 200 years, let alone for 2,000.
The program broke for advertising about every 15 minutes. During many of the breaks, Mr. Better Man would pick up the phone and shout off a couple of sentences to me directly. The first such “conversation” took place about 45 minutes into the program:
B.M.: Man, you’re gooood. You got a Scripture for everythin’! This is good stuff!
R: Thank you, Mr. Better Man. I’m happy to be able to help people understand.
At another break:
B.M.: Sister, you got some soul in you! You know what I mean? [He thought for a moment.] No, you don’t know what I mean.
R: Yes, I do know what you mean. That’s a compliment—thank you.
Then, as we neared the end of the two hours, during a break:
B.M.: This is really good. We’re gettin’ some meat here! Can you stay on a bit longer?
And near the end of the third hour:
B.M.: Can you stay with us? This is great. We need to have you on again!
Joan and I were on that program for five hours straight, from 9:00 P.M. to 2:00 A.M. PST (my time), midnight to 5:00 A.M. EST (Joan’s time). You should have seen my kitchen. I spoke on my cell phone the entire time. I had to keep it plugged into the charger that was plugged into the kitchen wall. I had two Bibles, the Catechism, a concordance, an encyclopedia, a dictionary, materials on the Sabbath, a rosary—all open and spread over my kitchen counters, sink, and stove.
About midway through those five hours, I think I began to gain an advocate in Mr. Better Man. He truly listened to every caller, and to me. His heart seemed open and hungry for truth. If the men and women calling in seemed interested only in making their points against the Catholic Church and not in my answers to their questions—or, in more cases, their charges—he would interrupt them after a time: “Now, you let Miss Rosalind respond. She can’t talk if you keep talking!”
Two of several instances stand out in my mind where he actually became a bit forceful with a caller.
Rick: I want to read from Mark 7, verse 8, where Jesus came against the Pharisees for holding fast to the “tradition of men.”
R: Yes, Mark. Jesus did condemn their exchanging the commandments of God for the tradition of men. But there’s a distinction between the tradition of men and the tradition that God gave. Would you look with me at 2 Thessalonians, verse 15?
Rick: Sure.
Apparently Rick turned to the verse but was hesitant to read it aloud. So I read it. I explained that God, who used fallible men to write infallible Scripture and who has preserved the written word through 2,000 years, could also use fallible men to transmit his infallible word orally and maintain that truth equally intact through 2,000 years.
Rick all but dismissed what I had pointed out and went back to Mark 7. Mr. Better Man interjected to Rick, “That’s hot, man! I ain’t never seen that before. You deal with that verse, man.”
At the second instance, a woman called in, probably the third that evening to accuse Catholics of worshiping Mary.
Linda: Why do you Catholics worship Mary? She’s not God. [Linda went on to vent her disgust toward Catholic practices of praying to statues, graven images, and particularly prayer with the rosary.] We don’t need all that stuff. God wants us to have a personal relationship with him. All we need is Jesus. Nothing else.
R: Linda, you probably weren’t listening in earlier this evening when we explained that Catholics do not worship Mary. She is a creature. God alone is to be worshiped—
L (angrily): Catholics do worship Mary—
B.M.: Wait a minute. Didn’t the lady just tell you that Catholics don’t worship Mary? So why you sayin’ they do? Are you callin’ for understanding or just to make a point?
There was only one lull in the five-hour marathon when phone lines were not busy. At that lull, Mr. Better Man said, “Keep talking, Miss Rosalind. Tell us about the Catholic Church.”
So I kept talking. I spoke about the love of a heavenly Father who would not adopt us into his family as his children and leave us orphans to fend for ourselves, to figure out where to get true food, to figure out whom and what to believe. I spoke about the treasure God has given us in the “whole Christ”: the sacraments (including the sacrament of the Eucharist), the communion of saints, purgatory, the blessed Mother, and a teaching authority to pass down “the faith once delivered to the saints” through an unbroken line of apostolic succession that we might know what the Scripture means by what it says.
Only two callers during the entire show were Catholic. The first was a gentlemen who called to affirm what I had said on the issue of graven images and to encourage Protestants to use some tools as simple as a dictionary to clarify their own understanding.
The other was a woman whom I would love to meet one day. She sounded like an extremely lovely and mature African-American woman, soft spoken and gracious. I didn’t get her name, but I’ll call her Nell. She didn’t announce that she was Catholic, but it was immediately obvious. Nell called on the heels of Linda’s antagonistic words about the rosary and simply, and gently, said, “I love the rosary, and I love our blessed Mother.”
Linda—and Rick, for that matter—was still on the line. Often the host would keep several people on the line together so that it became a roundtable discussion.
Linda: Well, then, I fear for your soul! You don’t need the rosary. What you need is a personal relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ!
Nell: I have a relationship with Jesus Christ.
L: You need to be born again.
N: I’ve been born again, through baptism.
L: Did you hear what I said earlier about a personal relationship with Christ?
N: I heard you.
L: Well, all that Catholic stuff won’t get you to heaven. You need to be saved!
N: It seems to me that when someone is saved, they are humble, they are compassionate, they don’t talk over other people . . . [Nell went down the list of Linda’s offenses].
Linda continued her attack, but Nell, in as calm and sure a tone as she had maintained throughout, said to Linda, “I didn’t call to talk to you. I called to talk to the Catholic lady.”
I did spend time responding to Nell, wanting to affirm her faith—though I don’t think Satan’s army itself could shake it. I wanted particularly to take that opportunity to explain the rosary further and to point out its meditation on the life of Christ. I said at last, “The reason we pray the rosary is because we have a Jewish mother who knows how to homeschool her children!” I don’t know if that helped anyone listening in, but Nell and I had a good, warm-hearted laugh.
Mr. Better Man came on the phone at the end of the five hours and could not thank Joan and me enough for being on the program. He said he wanted us on again, to which we certainly agreed and thanked him as well.
Joan was thrilled. She had jumped in with comments about twice each hour, usually when she had had enough of folks attacking the faith, and, in particular, the blessed Mother. I don’t think Joan’s contributions would have won an apologetics war, but they certainly showed unwavering love for our faith, for our Mother, and for our God. I believe her confidence took some of our callers off guard.
When we finished, “The More Better Man Show” had an hour to go. I wanted very much to call in on the toll-free line and listen to the final hour to hear the response to the first five hours, but I resisted. I did not want my listening in to hinder Mr. Better Man from any remarks he may have wished to make. Joan called me immediately afterward at home to thank me, to rejoice, and to thank God, which we did together.
I was in heaven. For five hours I had paced my little kitchen floor—back and forth, back and forth as I listened to each caller and prayed as they spoke, asking God to fill my heart with his love and compassion for each caller whose need he alone could know. For five hours my heart was flooded with gratitude as I listened to those who are sincere in their love for God and in their understanding of Scripture—in their faith—but who are yet in partial darkness and cannot yet see, let alone partake of, the full measure of God’s grace entrusted to his Church.
I may never know what will come of my appearance on “The More Better Man Show,” but I don’t need to know. God, who arranged it, is faithful to bring about his end in the lives of those who seek him. Time is our gift from God. I don’t believe our Lord wastes a minute of it, let alone five hours.
Oh, if only God would fill us all—and continually—with love of him, with compassion for those who have yet to know the full measure of his love in the home he has given us on earth. If only we would be consumed with the desire to do only his will, to be his instruments to a lost world, to be little Christs in a world that needs so desperately the Savior and the fullness of truth and life that resides only in his Church.
And, oh, how I fail over and over again to live such a life, to be such a life! But every so often, God, in his boundless grace, gives opportunities to reach out with his love, to call upon him for grace, for his help in my lack, to be his instrument to a lost, confused, hurting world. In those moments, in all of them, life stops—and, for me, heaven can wait.