You're listening to the Taylor Marshall Show episode 109 and we Catholics often deal with this question and that is is our faith a religion or is it a relationship with Christ?

Howdy, and thank you for tuning back into the Taylor Marshall show. This is the

podcast for everyone who wants to create daily habits and learn enough theology

to take their faith to the next level. And my goal this week is to talk to you about whether our faith,

Catholicism, is best understood as a religion or as a relationship.

Well, good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, wherever you are in the world, and welcome back to the Taylor Marshall Show.

I think today's topic is one that will interest all of us

because we've all been challenged

by Evangelicals or Protestants

or maybe even non-Christianians about what is the essence of our

theological commitment what is the bedrock of our faith is it primarily being religious or adhering to a world religion, which we call Catholicism,

or is it something that's intimate, a relationship? Often, you know, evangelicals will say that I follow a relationship with Christ and not a religion,

and that Christ came to do away with religion and yet we Catholics have a little bit of difficulty with that so we're going to talk about that today.

I wanted to open with something that I don't usually do and that is a thought or a recollection about a saint.

I was in mass this morning and I had my little Magnificat Daily Missile with me and today it featured Saint Wolfstan which is a

saint that I was not familiar with before and Wolfston was a Bishop in England and one of the things that this little bio shared about

St Wolfston is it said that he would go down to Bristol and at the time this port city was where poor families and I'm

reading here from the Magnificat where poor families would come to earn some

money by selling their children as slaves to the Vikings.

Determined to end this practice, Wolfston preached tirelessly to the traders themselves urging conversion. He was heated and in his time the

trade in slaves ceased." I was reading this morning, I was just reminded because this was taking place in the ten hundreds so the 11th century

you know sometimes you know we of European descent think of ourselves as you know we come from

...