What's up and welcome to Ask Father Josh, the podcast why get to hear you out, listen to your heart and pray with whatever it is you send me.

And after I spend time with what you send me your questions, I try to answer them from the heart of the church and from a living relationship with Jesus Christ.

Here's the deal. Your life, my life, our lives can get really, really messy sometimes.

And there's not always going to be that easy, thin and blank, easy to go to, Catholic answer to all of our life's problems.

There's not always stuff that's black and white. There's a lot of great.

And whenever we encounter the gray, we get uncomfortable.

And so the purpose of this show is for me to walk with you in those gray areas of life where it's really messy and when we're trying to discern what is God's plan for me right here, right now in this particular situation.

I can't always promise you that my answers to your questions will be best for you, but I can assure you that I really do spend time praying with them and studying them in the church's teachings and trying to apply principles from the church's teachings to your situations.

If I give you advice that's helpful, then I want to invite you to please chew on it, spend time with it.

But if my advice is not helpful, please be free to reject it. You don't have to accept everything I say because guess what I'm not perfect.

I'm not infallible and I'm likely to mess up every now and then if that's the case, you can let me know and hit me up at askfatherjosh.net.cens4press.com with your comments, your critiques, and your follow ups on my questions that I answered on today's episode.

Also, if you are first time listening here so the show goes for you, we're going to address 35 questions per episode dealing with everything from morality, injustice, prayer, spirituality, apologetics, catacletics, evangelization, relationship advice, pretty much anything and everything under the sun.

And then after that, you comment back and ask fatherjosh.net.cens4press.com as askfrjosh.net.cens4press.com.

To let me know what you thought about the way I respond to the episode also, please don't forget to rate us and to review us on iTunes. This helps other people find out about the gift of the show. It's a gift. If it's a gift for you, if it's not a gift, then don't rate it and don't review it. That way people won't find out about it.

On today's show, we're going to discuss a number of really, really great topics. We're going to discuss Catholic social justice, Catholic morality and Catholic spirituality.

So on today's show, we're going to discuss institutional racism. We're also going to talk about the morality of donating organs and the morality of receiving cosmetic plastic surgery. And finally, we're going to address ecumenical Bible studies whenever we are invited to attend Bible studies that are put on.

And led by our brothers and sisters in Christ of different faith backgrounds.

Before we jump into the show, let's talk about a glory story.

So my glory story is we could super, super simple, but it was just something really cool to happen this past week. I was I had a really great day of ministry on on Saturday this past week.

A lot of sacraments. I had adoration and confession in the morning and I had Saturday morning mass. After that, I had some more confessions and then I had a baptism in the afternoon.

And then later in the afternoon, I had another more confessions, my anticipatory mass and other baptism. It was just a sacrament of day ministry. Great day.

Between my last baptism in the afternoon and my anticipatory mass or my confessions in the afternoon, I had like a 30 minute break. And so I said, man, I'm going to chill with Jesus.

...