(LifeSiteNews) — On this week’s two-part episode of The Bishop Strickland Show, Bishop Joseph Strickland offers commentaries on John 3, discusses the calls for President Joe Biden to be excommunicated, and speaks about an old letter of his on morality and marriage.
The first part of the episode begins with show host Terry Barber calling for a boycott of CVS and Walgreens, as the two drug stores have begun to sell abortion drugs. When asked for comment, Strickland says that “we have to do everything we can” to defend life.
Moving on, the bishop offers commentary on John 3:7-15, in which Christ is speaking to Nicodemus about baptism. Strickland observes that through baptism, we share in all that was just celebrated in Holy Week and Easter, namely salvation offered to the world by Christ. He further says that we need to “highlight” baptism and think of life as a “day-to-day living out [of] our baptism.” Baptism, furthermore, is the “primary sacrament that is necessary.”
“I think it beautifully reminds us of how significant that sacrament is,” Strickland says about the Gospel. He encourages us to discover our baptismal and confirmation dates, just as we would not forget our own birthdays. Speaking to the rites of baptism and confirmation, Strickland says that we are anointed with sacred chrism, a sacramental blessed during Holy Week that signifies what happens to us when receiving those sacraments. The bishop adds that we should pay attention to it, even though Christ here is silent about the anointing’s significance.
As Christ alludes to His Passion and Resurrection in the Gospel, Strickland says that it helps us to further understand baptism’s significance, and what it means to live as someone changed in Jesus Christ. While there are some in the world and the Church who will tell us that we can embrace Christ without having to change, Strickland asserts that “baptism is a change, and that’s what we need to be reminded of.”
“It’s an ongoing change, a deeper conversion for all of us,” he continues.
The prelate also speaks to calls made by other bishops, including former head of the Congregation (now Dicastery) for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) Cardinal Gerhard Müller and former nuncio to the United States Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, for the excommunication of President Joe Biden.
Strickland says he would join them in calling for such an excommunication. Comparing the Church’s rules to that of baseball, Strickland notes that too many in the Church are not playing by the rules, which apply to all equally as baptized Catholics. Furthermore, “to turn a blind eye” to those breaking the rules is not charitable to Biden and those he is likely scandalizing, making them believe that the Catholic rejection of abortion is optional rather than dogmatic.
Noting that some people may find the call strange, Strickland says that the purpose of the Church is the salvation of souls, and thus the excommunication would be a “medicinal” means of showing people that what is being done is wrong and Biden is being called back to the truth.
True love, Strickland continues, means laying down one’s life for one’s friends. Thus, one must be willing to sacrifice peace for the sake of the other’s salvation, since it is not real love to withhold the truth from someone. “Real love is always going to be connected to the truth,” says Strickland. Love, he also notes, is sacrificial in nature. Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross shows us that the “only real authentic love is that kind of sacrificial love.”
In the second part of the episode, Strickland comments on John 3:16-21. Looking at the Gospel, Strickland calls it a “very good mini-catechism” – the call to embrace Christ. Those who believe, Strickland observes, will not be condemned, while those who do not believe are already condemned. He also notes that the world needs not just John 3:16, but the rest of the passage, maintaining that it must be “understood and embraced by all.”
“It would go such a long way to helping us heal the divisions and heal the things that we condemn ourselves to, because we ignore the truth, we ignore the message of Jesus Christ,” Strickland says. To believe in Christ while also clinging to falsehoods is “contradictory” and “unsustainable.”
The Gospel, Strickland says, is just as true today as it was when it was written. The bishop also speaks to why people prefer darkness to light, saying, “When people create their own truth, and they’re in darkness, they don’t wanna let go of it because they’re doing it their way.”
“They’ve shaped the world in their image, and they stubbornly hang on to that darkness, because the light calls them to change, and they don’t want to change,” he continues. Because of this, Strickland says that we in the Church must always call people to be changed in Christ and convert. This conversion is an “ongoing effort for all of us,” he further states. The conversion itself, while joyful, is not without its sufferings.
Later in the second part, Strickland speaks about marriage in light of a letter he wrote in The Wanderer called “The Return of Proportionalism Threatens the Church.”
Considering marriage, Strickland says it is part of God’s “blueprint” for humanity. “The basic fabric of marriage is part of the fabric of human civilization, of family, and as Pope St. John Paul II said so clearly, ‘As the family goes, so goes the world,’” he says.
While not every family is perfect because of life circumstances, what happens to marriage in light of moral relativism is that as the truth relativized, the model for marriage is thrown away, and people do as they please in this regard. However, as people do this, it proves deleterious to the family and begins to affect everything else.
“We’re really seeing so many of the consequences of that kind of unraveling,” Strickland observes of our society. Finishing the point, the bishop says that if we define marriage based upon momentary feelings, then the very meaning of marriage is undermined, with any children of such marriages having to deal with the consequences of the marriage. Furthermore, God has revealed that children must have a mother and father for the child to receive existence.
“When we play God, and we manipulate all that, it just unravels more and more, and suddenly that’s what we’re seeing in the world,” he says.
For more from Bishop Strickland, tune in to this week’s two-part episode of The Bishop Strickland Show.
To watch all previous episodes of The Bishop Strickland Show, click here to visit LifeSite’s Rumble page dedicated to The Bishop Strickland Show.