Our Catholics, Sacramentals, Super Stitious and Magical, Sean McAfee. Next.

Hello and welcome to Focus the Catholic Cancer's Podcast for Living,

Understanding and Defending Your Catholic Faith. I'm Cycle at Your Host and

one of the things that we find ourselves having to defend as Catholics is all the physical

stuff of the Catholic religion, the images, the statues, the crucifixes, the holy water,

all of that, even the blessings. Sometimes to the outsider, whether that outsider is a secular

person or, in many cases, our Protestant brothers and sisters, all of that physicality,

all of the smoke, the smells and bells, as they say, can seem like a religion of magical practices,

but images can be deceiving. The surface of things can be deceiving. Is it magic that we're

doing? Do we have superstitions about the sacramentals? Are we teaching superstition by

teaching things like the use of holy water or the use of oils or even the use of the crucifix?

Sean McAfee has a new book from Catholic Answers Press. It's called 20 Answers

Relics and Sacramentals, so we thought this was a good time to talk about sacramentals. We'd

had done one earlier on Relics with Father Huber, where you can find that in the files,

but this time we thought we'd talk about sacramentals, but Sean. Sean is a well-known

Catholic writer. He's one of the founders, editors and writers at EpicPew.com, and he's got a whole

bunch of Catholic books. And so we asked him, Sean, how do we distinguish between sacramentals

and magic? And here's what he had to say.

Sean McAfee, famous Catholic author and personality. Thanks for being here with us. I didn't

know what to follow up famous Catholic author with, so I went with personality. Catholic author,

thank you. All right. Nice to meet you, Sy. Very nice to be with you. I have in my hands

your latest book from Catholic Answers Press, 20 Answers Relics and Sacramentals,

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