(Dr. Scott) Hahn Family spends its first Holy Week in Rome

Rome, Italy, Apr 4, 2012 / 05:08 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Scott and Kimberly Hahn have been Catholic for over two decades, but this is the first Holy Week they have ever spent in Rome.

“This experience has been for us overwhelming, and yet the best is yet to come – Holy Thursday, Good Friday and the Easter Vigil. I mean, we’re just standing on tip-toes feeling like kids in a candy store. Like how good can it get?” Scott said to CNA on April 3.

The Hahns are in Rome this week with their three youngest sons, 20-year-old Jeremiah, 17-year-old Joseph and 12-year-old David. This morning they attended Pope Benedict XVI’s general audience in St. Peter’s Square.

“It is always amazing to be here in Rome; to hear all of the languages and see all of the peoples that the Gospel has gone to and realize that this is not an American thing, it’s not even a European thing …God has been at work over the centuries calling all kinds of people to him.”

Kimberly said she is always particularly moved “to hear old Italian men and young German children all singing to the Holy Father with the same sort of love I have for him.”

Since being received into the Church in 1986, Dr. Scott Hahn has become one of the most popular Catholic speakers and teachers worldwide. His wife Kimberly became a Catholic four years later. The Hahns later recounted their conversions in the co-authored international best-seller “Rome Sweet Home.” The couple has been married for 33 years and has six children and, very soon, six grandchildren.

The Hahns first visited Rome 20 years ago and had the chance to meet Pope John Paul II.

But the visit occurred at a hard time for the family as it came only one month after the death of Scott’s father.

“To be able to share from my heart the sorrow that I felt for my natural father but to look into the eyes of my spiritual father,” said Scott in reference to Pope John Paul, “and to hear him say ‘I’m sorry, I will pray for him’” was a bittersweet experience.

The encounter made Scott realize that as a Catholic he now enjoyed “the spiritual fatherhood of God through Christ to Peter and to all of his successors down through the ages which unites us worldwide as this Catholic, as this international, universal family of God.”

This is why, he explained, “Rome sweet home is not just the title of a book but the description of my own life experience.”

Kimberly said that the family enjoyed the chance to pray at the tomb of Blessed John Paul in St. Peter’s Basilica and “to be in St. Peters Square where the Holy Father was shot,” which is “a place I love to touch and be close to him there.”

Scott said that other favorite Roman sites for the family include the catacombs where the martyrs of the early Church were buried and “where you find out about how people paid a price a long time ago.” He suggested that “we too may end up having to pay a price” as we “may end up in a post-Christian pagan environment that is as resistant or hostile as theirs.”

Kimberly also loves Rome’s churches since “you just go a short distance and you find another magnificent church” where “even the little side chapels are more beautiful than most American churches.” She hopes that Americans visiting Rome will “catch a vision as to what a Catholic church should look like physically.”

Any opportunity to visit the Pontifical North American College seminary is also “very special” to Kimberly because “these are young men in training who will come back to the States as priests.”

“That experience of the Universal Church has been so powerful,” Kimberly said, summing up their Rome visit so far. “I really can hardly imagine what the Easter Triduum is going to be like, but I’m also really looking forward to that.”

That's Catholic's version of Catholic history...That's not church history...
Polycarp was among the first of the church fathers and he never mentioned a word about your religion.

There WERE other church fathers besides St. Polycarp.
St. Ignatius of Antioch was consecrated Bishop of Antioch there in the year 69 A.D. by St. Peter himself and was bishop there for some 30+ years. He was dragged away to Rome in 107 A.D. On his way to martyrdom he wrote letters to the Christians in the known world.
In his letter to the people of Symrna he wrote: Where Jesus is, there also is the CATHOLIC CHURCH.
THAT is just history. If you refuse to believe history, and that is your choice, then do so.
Google it. It's not esoteric.

From Catholic Answers:
Full Question:
After the death of Christ, Christians were the ones who evangelized and spread the gospel. Ignatius of Antioch was the first to refer to them as Catholics. What were they called before?

Answer
Originally Christians weren’t even called Christians. They were called "disciples" (i.e., "students") of Jesus of Nazareth. Later, in the city of Antioch, they received the name "Christians" (Acts 11:26). This probably happened in the A.D. 30s. This term spread very quickly—probably to the chagrin of those Jewish individuals who did not wish to acknowledge Jesus as the Messiah (Christ).

Ultimately, however, different groups began to break off from the Christian community, falling into either heresy or schism. These groups still wished to represent themselves as Christian—and many of them were, retaining valid baptism and a profession of faith in Christ. Consequently, a new word was needed to distinguish the Christians belonging to the Church that Christ founded from those belonging to the churches that had split off from it.

The term that was picked was kataholos, which means according to the whole or universal in Greek. The thought was apparently that these were Christians who believed and practiced according to what body of Christians as a whole did, in contrast to what some particular group thought or did. Over the course of time, kataholoscame to be represented by the parallel English word "Catholic."

Ignatius of Antioch did not introduce kataholos. However, his letters contain the earliest known uses of it. It may well have been used in other Christian writings prior to this, but we have simply lost them. It certainly was in general use in speech before this point, because Ignatius writes in such a way that he already expects his readers to know this term and what it means. He also uses the term in more than one of his letters, meaning that he expects people in more than one place to know the term.

This indicates that in his day—at the beginning of the second century (circa A.D. 107)—the term was already in widespread use. For it to be used in such a broad manner, it would have required some time to pass into currency in the Christian community, meaning that the term probably was coined sometime in the second half of the first century. We don’t know who first used it, but it was a suitable description of the Church Christ founded and so was already in general use by the time Ignatius wrote.

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