Hello and welcome to Focus, the Catholic Answers podcast with living, understanding, and

defending your Catholic faith.

I am Cy Kellett, your host. Today we're lucky we have

Tom Nash in studio with us. Tom Nash works with us here at Catholic Answers, answering

all kinds of apologetics questions. He's an author and a long-time theologian

in many parts of the Catholic media world, and we thought we'd ask him about accompaniment.

This word has become very popular but also in some cases

popular for the wrong reason maybe that is it's a popular word since Pope

Francis has been using it a great deal, but it's also bandied about in a negative way.

So why all the controversy over accompaniment and what is accompaniment? That's our task today with Tom Nash. Tom, thank you for being here with us.

Great to be here, sir. Thank you very much for having me.

Well, if you could accompany us for the next 25 minutes, that would be very helpful.

I will try to do so, Lord help me.

And you've noticed this trend that since Pope Francis became Pope accompaniment is a more frequently

used phrase.

Yes, and I like how the Pope has said that God will take you where you're at, but he loves you too

much to leave you where you're at.

And true accompaniment means loving someone and wanting

them to be fulfilled in the Lord and therefore charitably taking issue if there is something that needs to be addressed in their life

while also recognizing you yourself are a sinner and in need of God's mercy so being humble so that the person can see

that you truly love them and also recognizes them that you don't see them as a quote

unquote charity case and that you yourself can learn things and don't

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