Look in the Mirror - "What's wrong with the world? I am." - GK Chesterton

Look who's defending Europe's Christian heritage! A Muslim!

2012-03-05T11:49:00.000-08:00

I was so heartened to read this transcript of a speech given by an English Muslim baronness and current UK cabinet minister. The article speaks for itself. Praise God for her.

Saints news for February 2012

2012-03-03T17:25:00.005-08:00

Boys Town Founder Could be a Saint

Actor Spencer Tracy up for beatification!

Well, actually, not ol’ “Spence,” but the man he played in his 1938 Oscar winning performance as Fr. Edward Flanagan, the founder of the Boys Town orphanage in Omaha.

The impact Fr. Flanagan had can be measured in the fact that the faithful in nine countries and 36 of the United States have expressed a profound devotion to him, according to the Archdiocese of Omaha.

The archdiocese says it will open Father’s beatification on March 17, the Feast of St. Patrick, which is appropriate for this Irish born priest. They also have six cases of people who claim to have been miraculously cured through his intercession. We should stress the archdiocese has not yet closely investigated any of these.

Fr. Flanagan came to the US in 1904 at age 18 and was ordained at age 26 for the then-Diocese of Omaha. As anyone familiar with his biopic knows, at first, he worked with homeless men. Then, however, he began noticing all the street kids, so he opened a home for them, regardless of race, creed, or ethnicity.

Soon there were so many street urchins that the streets of Omaha couldn’t hold them. So he bought a large farm on the city’s outskirts, and pretty soon there was a school, post office, and shops where boys could learn all sorts of different trades.

Oh, and that Oscar Spencer Tracy won for playing Fr. Flanagan? “Pops” gave it to the Boys Town founder.

After World War II, President Truman asked him to travel the world, investigate the situation of orphans in former war zones, and advise governments on what to do in their particular situation. However, it was on that trip that he died of a heart attack in Berlin in 1948.

When I lived in Omaha, Fr. Val Peter, then the executive director of Girls and Boys Towns, would some time say in his sermons. “That is a bee-ewe-tee-fuhl thing.” Well, I’m sure Fr. Peter is saying that very thing right now: It is a bee-ewe-tee-fuhl thing. And that it is, indeed, Father.

Cause of Down’s Syndrome geneticist moves forward

The archdiocese of Paris has completed diocesan phase of the beatification cause of Dr. Jérôme Lejeune has recently concluded and documents relating to the cause are now with the Congregation for the Causes of Saints.

Born in 1926, Lejeune was a pediatrician and geneticist best known for his discovery of Trisomy 21, the gene that causes Down’s Syndrome. Ironically, this brilliant discovery was quickly advertised to parents as a way of finding out whether the baby they had on the way was not going to be perfect. They would then, of course, have the option destroying that life. Well, God blessing him, for the rest of his life, Dr Lejeune fought to keep these unborn jewels from being aborted.

Sadly, he was not very successful. Today 90 percent or so of all Downs babies diagnosed in utero lose their lives to the abortionist’s scalpel. However, God doesn’t ask us to be successful, he asks us to be faithful, right? And that is something Dr. Jérôme Lejeune.

Cause of Communion and Liberation founder opens

On February 22, Fr. Julián Carrón, successor to Communion and Liberation founder, the late Msgr. Luigi Giussani, formally petitioned the Cardinal Archbishop of Milan, His Eminence Angelo Scola to open the monsignor’s beatification cause. If Cardinal Scola agrees, then the diocesan phase of the investigation into Guisanni’s life and virtues will begin. If that goes well, the cause will then move to Rome.

According to the website Vatican Insider, “Luigi Giussani was born in Desio, in the Italian Province of Monza and Brianza in 1922. After entering the diocesan seminary in Milan at a very young age, he continued his studies, completing them in the Faculty of Theology in Venegono in the Province of Varese in Northern Italy. He was ordained priest and started teaching in this same seminary, specializing in the study of Oriental Theology, Protestant American Theology and the analysis of the rational motivation for joining the faith and the Church. In the mid 1950s, Fr. Giussani left his seminary teaching post to teach religion in middle school and high school for ten years, from 1954 to 1964, at “Berchet” high school in Milan.

“These were the years of the birth and diffusion of the Catholic Student Youth movement (Gioventù Studentesca -GS). He taught an Introduction to Theology course at Milan’s Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore and went on to become the leader of the Communion and Liberation movement. On 16 March that year, during the 5th celebration of the Law of the Lombardy Region, Fr. Luigi Giussani was awarded one of the sixteen Longobard Seals (Sigilli Longobardi) which are given to citizens who have distinguished themselves in social work.

“Fr. Giussani died on 22 February 2005 at his home in Milan. The then cardinal Joseph Ratzinger presided over his funeral in Milan’s Duomo Cathedral, as a special envoy sent by John Paul II. He was buried in the memorial chapel at the Monumental Cemetery of Milan and his corpse was later moved to a new Chapel in the same cemetery. Fr. Giussani’s tomb is a popular pilgrimage destination.”

Bishop Baraga case moves forward

People with a devotion to Bishop Frederic Baraga’s beatification cause got a big boost on Tuesday, February 7, when the Congregation for the Causes of Saints agreed that he lived a life of “heroic virtue,” and thus should be called Venerable. The Congregation has forwarded its finding to the Holy Father who will rule on whether he concurs with those findings or not.

Ethicists Argue for Post Birth Abortions

2012-03-01T22:44:00.000-08:00

It's been seven days. Did you miss me? Didn't think so.

"Ethicists Argue for Post Birth Abortions." You read that right. See here for more: http://bit.ly/zJb2U5.

It's the logical end result of the "It's an unviable mass of tissue" argument, no? After all, if it's not a person in utero, and you can stick scissors into the back of its skull just before the head come out and have it be perfectly legal, or you can inject a woman's uterus with saline solution or have the baby vacuumed out into little grotesque, bloody bits and pieces at any moment before it's actually born, why not after it's born? What makes it any more a person after it's fully out of the mom's womb and the umbilical chord's been cut than it was before any of that happened?

Bravo for these ethicists for painting such a clear logical conclusion of the pro-choice argument. Disagree? The onus, then, is on you to demonstrate in a logical fashion why these "ethicists" have it in any way wrong.

Understand, I don't agree with them in the slightest. Instead, like Lenin with capitalists, I find them useful idiots.

Hat tip to Matthew Archbold.

Your single, it's Lent ... what to do?

2012-02-23T20:13:00.000-08:00

I spoke with a friend yesterday, and she got to telling me about this new book for Catholic singles, and how it's really affecting and powerful. Based solely on her recommendation, I'm going to get a copy, a) because I trust her that much, but b) because it sounds really intriguing, even though I haven't been single for 15 years.

Published by CatholicMatch.com, a Catholic online dating service, The Catholic Playbook: Lenten Reflections for Singles features 40 daily meditations for Lent written by the website’s members. In their stories, these singles reportedly examine the occasionally humorous frustrations and even rewards of unmarried life as refracted through the prism of this penitential season. Evidently, while it's often challenging and even sobering, each unique story ultimately has the same theme, which is hope.

I think the book's worth supporting because there is just this amazing dearth of great books for single Catholics. We want and need this book to be successful. Now, granted, there are some very good reasons that parish and dioceses almost exclusively focus their pastoral resources toward families and their formation.

That said, the United States has 27 million single Catholics. Isn't it about time someone got on the ball and got something for these folks to use? Huzzah, CatholicMatch.com, huzzah, indeed (FYI: Huzzah's like "Hip-hip-hooray").

Another thing, with declining marriage rates, it's not like the number of Catholic singles is going to shrink, you know? So the Church needs fresh, effective resources to minister to this important and growing demographic. Growing demographic. Huh. It's a tragically underserved group.

A look at the Hermit Kingdom and the death of Kim Jong Il

2012-02-22T20:39:00.000-08:00

Here is the first in the series of articles Catholic World Report is running on North Korea. CWR is an utterly fab magazine, and it's worth checking out their many great articles. But read the one on North Korea first. It's really interesting.

O Lord, I worry so!

2012-02-21T09:46:00.000-08:00

A lady who I consider dear and have known since we were both in 7th grade asked yesterday, “How do I stop worrying?”

It got me to thinking, and because all the world, of course, is just pining, practically dying to know the thoughts of lil’ ol’ moi, here’s what I came up with:

The amount of we worry is directly commensurate/proportionate (however you want to put it) to our adherence to God’s will.

That is the more we adhere our minds to the idea that anything that happens to us is either part of His active will—i.e., He means for us to experience this—or His passive will—i.e, He doesn’t necessarily want us to happen to us but will allow it for some greater good—and that “He has us in His loving hands regardless, so take heart,” then the less we will worry.

Another way of putting it is this: The more we think the prayer says, “Thy kingdom come and my will be done,” the more we want control, to be in charge, to not “let go and let God,” the more we will worry.

Getting to a point where we don’t worry doesn’t happen without prayer, but it does happen, and it can make a world of difference.

“Just SHUT UP!!!, won't you?” No.

2012-02-20T12:15:00.000-08:00

A lot of people in our culture today (e.g., those running the Obama Administration and those who put them there) want to us (i.e., Christian conservatives in general and Catholics in particular) to just “Shut UP!!!” They love Martin Luther King, Jr. (never mind that he was a Christian minister), so maybe they'll listen to him as to why we can never listen to them: “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

That stupid tree!

2012-02-16T10:04:00.000-08:00

On Facebook the other day, I posted this picture ...

An old high school chum commented on it, essentially asking:

"Why did God place the tree right there? If He's God, He should have known what they would do, so why not place it on some other continent?"

It's a good question, and one I imagine others asking. Here's my argument in response. If you can add, challenge, or detract from it, please, by all means. I'm eager to learn what people think.

Well, if you know God's reason for creating the earth and all that's in it, especially us, it's pretty simple. What do we give God? When you were married, you gave her certain things she didn't have and vice versa. I know that's the case with Karyn and me, and I'm sure with the Jacobys and the Malamocos, as well. But what do we give to God He didn't already have? Nothing.

So why did He create us? Out of love. To share in His happiness, His joy, peace, and love for ever, especially the love, out of which all the other things are born. Think of any time you were in love, especially at first. Wasn't it just so joyful? I know it was for me. I was walking on clouds.

But by its very definition, love requires sacrifice. For love of her baby, a woman will not only undergo tremendous pain in labor to deliver it, but during the pregnancy, if she's sick, she might even refuse necessary medical treatment if it would either harm or mean losing the child. Your mom, did she love changing your diapers or telling you or one of your siblings the same thing over and over again? No, but she did it because she loved you and wanted what was best for you. Your dad, did he love his job? Maybe, but most dads don't. Why did he do it? So he could provide for your mom and you three kids because that's what was best for you. Someone rushes into a burning building to save another human, whether they're related to them or not. That's love. A priest runs about a live battlefield to comfort and give Viaticum to the dying.

The common thread connecting these examples is that there's no self-interest there. None of this is about "ME." It's about the other. Because what is love? It's not a feeling (although it can involve feelings, like a cake can involve frosting or filling). It's actively willing the good, the true good, for the object of that love.

But if I put a six-shooter to your head and ask, "Do you love me?" and you out of fear don't answer, because the answer's no. And then I lock the firing hammer and ask you again, and this time you say, "Yes," because you know if you say, "No," you'll die, do you really love me, just because you said it?

When I ask you if you love me, if I'm sincerely wanting your love, then I want your answer to be sincere. Therefore, I'm going to give you the freedom to choose the answer that you know is true.

Now Genesis doesn't state these things explicitly, but Adam and Eve lived in God's love. This is why they had been created: to receive His love and to love Him in return. So if God had given them no conditions, no sacrifices to make, how could they have known whether they did or didn't love God? How could they have made the choice to say, "I'm not going to do XYZ because I love God."

It's like a spouse who says, "This person of the opposite sex in front of me is ready, willing, and able. Part of me is, too, but I love my beloved so much, I won't do that. I won't eat of that forbidden fruit."

The tree being both right there and verboten, John, wasn't about the tree. It was about the people who had access to it. And really, it was less of a tree and more of a floating question: Do you love Me, especially enough to not do this one thing -- this one little, measely thing I ask you not to do? Look at this place, Adam and Eve. It has everything you could possibly ever really need or want. It's yours for the taking. Just don't do that one thing, OK? So do you love Me enough to respect what I'm asking of you? Do you trust Me? Those two questions run throughout the Bible, especially the trust one. And it's why people in Scripture (and we) often fell (fall) into sin: Lack of trust in the promises of God.

That's getting a little off topic. In any event, it's the same question God asks us today. Do you love Me? What does Jesus Christ say are the two greatest commandments? "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.” This sums up all the 10 Commandments. Concerning the second, do you will the good for yourself, or do you purposefully do things that will destroy or even kill you? Most people would say they will the good for themselves. Great, Jesus is saying, do that to others, too. But first love God above anything else, no matter what the cost, because look at what it cost our first parents.

That's why the tree was there: To help them trust in God's promises and to help know what love was all about. And they blew it. And if you look at the punishments each received, they're directly related to teaching us to love, each according to the distinctiveness of the two sexes.

So sorry for the very long reply, but that's the answer to your first two responses. And the reason is that this response is so long is that I respect your intelligence enough -- trust me, I know how formidable it is -- to not give you a sustained and thorough argument.

A post-St. Valentine's Day thought for all my very few readers

2012-02-15T08:45:00.000-08:00

As a post-St. Valentine's Day thought, I read this passage this morning from Chesterton's novel, Manalive. I just loved it and wanted to share with you:

"Imprudent marriages! roared Michael. "And pray where in earth or heaven are there any prudent marriages? Might as well talk about prudent suicides.... You never know a husband until you marry him. Unhappy! Of course you'll be unhappy! Who the devil are you that you shouldn't be unhappy like the mother that bore you? Disappointed? Of course we'll be disappointed! I, for one, don't expect till I die to be so good a man as I am at this minute, for just now I'm 50,000' high, a tower with all the trumpets shouting."
   "You see all this," said Rosamund, with a grand sincerity in her solid face, "and do you really want to marry me?"
   "My darling, what else is there to do?" reasoned the Irishman. "What other occupation is there for an active man on this earth, except to marry you? What's the alternative to marriage, barring sleep? It's not liberty, Rosamund. Unless you marry God, as our nuns do in Ireland, you must marry Man; that is Me. The only third thing is to marry yourself--to live with yourself--yourself, yourself, yourself--the only companion that is never satisfied--and never satisfactory."
   "Michael," said Miss Hunt, in a very soft voice, "if you won't talk so much, I'll marry you."

Good news, only sorta bad news

2012-02-10T07:56:00.000-08:00

Thank you to this Baptist pastor for doing the right thing and pledging to go to jail rather than comply with an illicit law. The contention that law is no law if it is immoral or goes against God's laws is a long standing one, as we see from St. Augustine (“an unjust law is no law at all”) and St. Thomas Aquinas (“Human law is law only by virtue of its accordance with right reason; and thus it is manifest [i.e., evident, obvious, clear to anyone who can see] that it flows from the eternal law. And in so far as it deviates from right reason it is called an unjust law; in such case it is no law at all, but rather a species of violence.").
However, I only wish the first person to have said it would have been one of the bishops, archbishops, or, better yet, a cardinal. Still, it's been said. And in a way, the heartening thing is that it wasn't said by a Catholic. Rather, it was said by someone outside our fold. That shows this argument is getting legs. Maybe that's what helped seal the deal for the Obama Administration.

That said, am on deadline so don't have to read about the putative compromise that was announced this morning. However, CBS news reported it's based on the policy in effect at DePaul University in Chicago. Hearing that, I groaned. Have you ever been there? Have you ever heard or read what some of their philosophy and theology professors say? Judging by what I've read, I can confidently say several are heretics (or at least what they say about a subject is often totally in opposition to what the Magisterium teaches and what the Catechism says). These teach modernism, which Pope St. Pius X says, what's the quote? "The synthesis of all heresies"? "The mother of all heresies"? One of the two. Anyway, you get the picture. This means that people sending their children there are paying big bucks to have their children taught and likely infected with beliefs that are not designed to help them grow in holiness. They're the very modernist teachings that caused the implosion in teh Catholic Church since 1965.

Furthermore, quotes I've read from their administrators and about what they've allowed at a supposedly a Catholic university don't make me confident that they crafted a compromise with the state of Illinois that held the line on authentic, traditional Church teaching. Again, I haven't read the terms, so I don't know. I hope I'm pleasantly proven wrong. Nothing would make me happier.

Please, please, please Lord, do not let the bishops cave on this. Please. I think these secularists/atheists have shown their true colors too many times. Don't let them be like the frog or fox in the story where the snake asks for a ride on his back across a river he couldn't otherwise traverse. No way, says the fox/frog, you'll bite me, and I'll die. Nooooooo, says the snake, I promise. How do I know I can believe you? I don't think I can, he replies. The snake soothingly reassures him he has nothing to fear. Eventually, the fox/frog agrees and just as they've crossed over and are emerging from the water, the snake bites him. As fox/frog lays their dying, he asks the snake, Why did you do that? I thought you promised. I can't help it, says the snake. It's in my nature, and he left his helper there to breath his last.

So it is with these people. Give them an inch, and they will ultimately find a way to take a mile. We can't let them. By God's grace and our work, we won't.

Saints News from January

2012-02-03T01:24:00.000-08:00

Possible patron saint of those who are angry with God to be canonized

At the same time the Vatican announced Bl. Kateri Tekawitha and Bl. Marianne Cope would receive canonization, it also said Bl. Anna Schaeffer would receive the same honor. Now, who is Bl. Anna Schaeffer, you may be asking? She was a young woman in the late 1800s who was trying to earn a dowry to become a religious missionary. That’s when she suffered an industrial accident that made her legs useless. For eight to nine years, she begged, pleaded, cajoled, yelled at, got angry with, and badgered God endlessly to give her a miracle. And there was no miracle. The reason she was angry was that she wanted to go bring souls to Christ as a missionary sister. And, of course, because she wanted something so good, even great, Bl. Anna just assumed that this was what God wanted, as well.

She’s in my book, 39 New Saints You Should Know, and it was only through this very tender priest that she came to accept that her wishes were not God’s will for her life. And when she did, she got exactly what she wanted. Because she became progressively holier, people started writing her and coming to her for advice. Some challenged her to prove various points of the Faith. So, you see? She became a missionary. It’s just that she ministered to souls from her bed rather than in a jungle or out in a desert.

She’s one of my favorites in my book 39 New Saints You Should Know, and I love her because she shows what God will do with us once we get out of the way and stop resisting Him.

Seelos Sainthood Cause Has New Legs

You could say the canonization cause for Bl. Francis Xavier Seelos has new legs now that Fr. John Murray can walk again.

Murray, who is renowned for his preaching, broke his neck and became completely paralyzed after tripping on his walkway in October 2010. Doctors told him after emergency spinal cord surgery he would never walk again. The thought that he had forever lost the ability to move left Father feeling quite hopeless.

In late November, however, just six weeks after the accident, he moved his leg. It was a very small movement, but it was an actual movement and not the sort of phantom phenomenon one often hears about in those who have lost limbs or become paralyzed.

While he needs a Zimmer frame to get around, Fr. Murray is now completely self-sufficient. His explanation? A first class relic of Bl. Francis Seelos he carries with him wherever he goes and the intercession he asked Bl. Seelos to make. The two have a lot in common. Like Seelos was, Murray is a Redemptorist priest. Both served in Baltimore, and both were once the rector of same parish.

Fr. Murray’s doctor, a born-again Christian, says she believes Father’s recovery is a miracle. However, before it is credited as such, it must pass a rigorous review by the Congregation for the Causes of saints. If it is authenticated by the Congregation’s medical board, the Congregation will then determine if all the combined evidence warrants recommending Bl. Francis’ canonization to the Holy Father. This could take several years.

Cause of Two British Nuns – One of Whom Saved Jews from Nazis – Moves Forward

The investigation phase of the beatification cause for two Servants of God – Mother Riccarda Beauchamp Hambrough and Sr. Katherine Flanagan – has been forwarded by the cause’s postulators to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints. First introduced in July 2010 by the Diocese of Rome, investigators say they have found nothing that would contradict the finding that the two lived lives of heroic virtue.

If the Congregation agrees, it will forward this information to the Holy Father, and if he concurs, the two will be declared “Venerable.” To become blessed, each would need a miracle. The same for each to receive canonization.

Both of the women religious were members of the Bridgetine Sisters founded by St. Bridget of Sweden back in the 14th century.

Mother Riccarda came from Brighton, England, and she was received into the Church at age 4 when both her parents converted. Not long thereafter, her family moved to Rome, where she spent the rest of her life. After the Germans occupied Rome, she hid over 60 Jews in the Casa Santa Brigida, the Order’s generalate. She took such good care of those people, many took to calling her “Mama.” She died at 79-years-old in 1966.

Sr. Katherine, on the other hand, was from Clerkenwell, England, and was baptized at the parish church in Earlsfield, south London. At first, she made a living as a dressmaker, before discerning at age 19 a call to the religious life and the Bridgetine Order, in particular. So much did her order trust her, they made her the founding prioress of three convents, including one at Vadstena, Sweden, where St. Bridget had died and where Sr. Katherine herself passed in 1941.

Average Catholics Can Help Nun’s Beatification Cause in an Entertaining Way

Now there average Catholics have a way to help promote the beatification cause of the Servant of God Sr. Marie de Mandat-Grancey. She is the woman many credit with rediscovering the Blessed Virgin’s house in Ephesus, Turkey. On January 5, Bishop Robert Finn of the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph hosted a book signing of a brand new biography that will help people learn more about Sr. Marie in an entertaining way while raising needed funds for the process at the same time. The diocese is promoting her cause since the diocese that encompasses Ephesus is too poor to do so.

According to the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph’s diocesan newspaper, The Catholic Key, “Adele Louise Marie de Mandat-Grancey was born in 1837, the fifth of six children of the Comte and Comtesse de Mandat-Grancey. While still a child, she began to consider the religious life. Marie joined the Daughters of Charity in 1858, and made her first solemn profession of vows in 1862. Her first mission was an orphanage in northwestern France, where she served as a nurse and in the pharmacy; she also taught 55 orphans and 60 day students. While there, she started the Children of Mary association.

“In 1870, Sister Marie was asked to serve as Sister Servant, or superior, for the orphanage at Le Pecq, a suburb of Paris. In 1880, the private revelations of Anne Catherine Emmerich, a German nun and mystic who had visions of the life and death of the mother of Christ, were published. Although the nun had never traveled outside Germany, in the 1850s she dictated her visions of the ruins of Mary’s house in detail to Clemens Brentano, who later wrote the book. Sister Marie obtained a copy to share with her community, and it made a deep impression on her.

“In 1886, she answered a call by Pope Leo XIII for volunteers to Asia Minor and was assigned to the French Naval Hospital in Smyrna, now Izmir, Turkey. It was not lost on her that Smyrna was a mere 75 kilometers or 46.6 miles from Ephesus, where Emmerich had said Mary lived out her final years in the company of St. John and visiting Apostles.

“Sister Marie was appointed Sister Servant of the hospital in 1890 and dedicated herself to the care of the sick and children. Father Schulte said she met Christ in each student, patient and the poor, whether Christian or Muslim. She “brought all the beauty of God’s world in prayer to all she met,” he said.

“In 1891, she encouraged Lazarist (as Vincentian priests are known in France) Fathers Henri Jung and Eugene Poulin to travel to Ephesus, following the roadmap given by Emmerich’s revelations, and see if there was compelling evidence that Mary truly had lived there.

“Closely following Emmerich’s revelations, the priests found the house said to have been built for Mary by St. John and local Christians on the mountain top named Bulbul Hill (Nightingale Hill). Greek Orthodox and Muslim oral traditions have held for centuries that that is where St. John took Mary, the mother of Jesus, after the Crucifixion, fleeing persecution of Christians in Judea. On the Aegean Sea, Ephesus, some 700 miles from Jerusalem, became a haven for early Christians. St. Paul is said to have lived there for three years around 45 A.D.

“Sister Marie used her personal fortune to acquire and restore the ruins, and five years before her death in 1915, signed the deed to Meryem Ana Evi, Mary’s House, over to Father Poulin. The American Society of Ephesus, founded in 1955 by telecommunications pioneer George Quatman, has since then organized and helped fund large-scale reconstruction and restoration efforts of Mary’s House, the nearby tomb and basilica of St. John the Apostle and Evangelist, and other shrines around the world.”

To get your own copy of the book, go to your local Catholic bookstore (find it here) or if you don’t have one in your area, go here. To learn more about Sr. Marie’s beatification cause, go to http://www.sistermarie.com/.

Important Date for Snowshoe Priest Cause Next Week

Diocese of Marquette Bishop Alexander Sample is asking all faithful Catholics to pray between now and next Tuesday, February 7. That is the day that the cardinals on the Congregation for the Causes of Saints will meet to determine whether the Servant of God Bishop Frederic Baraga deserves the title of “Venerable.”

Bishop Sample is particularly asking for prayers and penance on Monday, February 6. There is already a miracle attributed to Bishop Baraga, and there are plans to move his tomb to a prominent place in Marquette’s cathedral if he receives the Venerable designation.

Bishop Baraga was arguably one of the most impressive bishops in US history. Born to Slovenian nobility, he could speak six languages by age 16. After his ordination in 1823, he answered a call from Cincinnati’s Bishop Edward Fenwick for priests to minister to the increasing number of Catholics in the diocese. Because of his facility with languages, he was sent to a mission in northern Michigan to better learn the Ottawa Indians’ tongue. He became so proficient at this that he wrote the first book in that language, which was a combined prayer book/catechism. Additionally, he wrote an Ojibwa language dictionary, and worked very hard to ensure that the Indians were not forced to relocate.

Since there were no roads to reach the different remote settlements, he trudged to each on snowshoes. That’s how he came to be called the “Snowshoe Priest,” and he traversed hundreds of miles on those things, often in the worst weather imaginable. A lot of times, he would have to walk across frozen portions of Lake Michigan. He did this until he was in his 60s when he became too infirm to do so anymore.

His work won many admirers and so in 1853, he was consecrated first bishop of what became the Diocese of Marquette. His letters to the Society for the Propagation of the Faith struck their readers as so exotic and thrilling that they were eventually published. A young John Neumann read these and they helped him decide to come to the US. He is, of course, St. John Neumann, the US’s first male saint. After 45 years as a priest and over 35 years amongst the Indians and settlers in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, he became deaf, had a number of strokes, and went to his reward on January 19, 1868.

To learn more about this wonderful, holy man, go to http://www.bishopbaraga.org/. Also, I encourage you to join the Bishop Baraga Association, of which I’m a proud member. You’ll support a good cause and their newsletter is always very interesting.

Cause of Maryknoll co-founder, Tar Heel state denizen to open soon

The Diocese of Raleigh in North Carolina has announced it will formally open the beatification cause of Fr. Thomas Frederick Price, a Wilmington native, on March 9.

In 1886, at age 26, Price became the first man native to the Tar Heel state to receive Holy Orders. For the first 25 years of his ministry, he served as an itinerant preacher, riding hundreds of miles on horseback, often through [hostile] fundamentalist territory to serve the state’s Catholic community, which numbered just 1,000 at the time.

Then in 1911, he partnered with Fr. James Walsh to found what we would eventually call the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers. He died in Hong Kong just eight years later of a ruptured appendix.

The Raleigh diocese is the third to attempt to start his cause after Hong Kong and New York. The effort to move his cause happened because so much of the documentation concerning him exists in local archives.

Stunning new DVD out to promote Sheen beatification cause

A new documentary has been released by those leading the beatification cause of Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen. Titled Servant of All, all proceeds go to help fund the often costly canonization process. In December, the Diocese of Peoria, Illinois, sent to the Vatican its review of an allegedly miraculous saving of a baby boy. If the Congregation for the Causes of Saints approves the case and the Pope accepts it, this would qualify Archbishop Sheen for beatification.

The documentary features such both obscure and well-known known personalities such as Regis Philbin, Fr. Andrew Apostoli, CFR, Fr. Jonathan Williams, and Cardinal-designate Timothy Dolan, whom many compare to Sheen.

The film costs $24.95 and is available through your local Catholic bookstore and was produced by Ignatius Press. For more information, go to http://www.sheenfilm.org or call 877-71-Sheen.

Austrian Woman Becomes First Female Politician Ever Beatified by Church

On Sunday, January 29, an Austrian politician named Hildegard Burjan was beatified in Vienna’s Cathedral of St. Stephen.

Her family was Jewish that valued education, and as this precocious girl grew up, she developed an abiding interest in politics. After high school, she studied philosophy at the University of Zurich, where she earned her PhD magna cum laude in 1908. She had married the wealthy industrialist Alexander Burjan in 1907, and in 1909, following a serious illness, came into the Church.

Moving with her husband to Vienna that same year, she saw the poverty and unjust social conditions that permeated the city. Instead of ignoring these problems, she instead she founded the Association of Christian Women Home Workers, which not only provided poor housewives with both material and emotional support, but also struggled to put a stop to child labor. She also created the Congregation of Sisters of “Caritas Socialis.”

When she became pregnant with her daughter, her doctor advised her to abort because they feared she would die. Valuing her child’s life more than her own, however, she flat out refused, and both ended up perfectly fine.

It is said that everything she did was marked by an effort to see Our Lord’s face in everything we do. “We cannot help people with money and small offerings,” she would say, “rather we must give them the confidence that they are capable of doing something for themselves.”

In 1919, she ran for and was elected to the Austrian parliament, becoming the first woman to do so. Her platform was Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum, and while in office, she promoted equal wages for men and women, minimum wage, and social security. She also worked across party lines, and her colleagues recognized her as the “conscience of the Parliament.” Despite a promising career, however, she served only for one term and dedicated the rest of her life to social work. She died June 11, 1933, at the age of 50. She is the first female politician to achieve beatification in the Church’s history, and her feast is June 12.

In his homily during a Mass of Thanksgiving this past Tuesday, January 31, Archbishop of Vienna Christoph “Cardinal Schönborn noted that Hildegard Burjan is proof that sanctity is also possible in political life. She ‘announced the Gospel through action,’ he said. ‘Her beatification comes at a good time to highlight that action is a core issue. . . . Hildegard was a convincing Christian because, without too many words, she acted. In our own time we must again learn to understand what it means to be disciples, and to this end what we need are not theories, but examples of people who speak through their actions.’”

Santorum ... please help him

2012-02-02T09:08:00.000-08:00

If for no other reason than that you'd like to slow Mitt Romney's juggernaut to the GOP nomination (please, Lord, spare us), please strongly consider the following. Thanks.

Dear [Me]:
I started the week giving a speech to a crowd of nearly 1,000 in St. Louis and then continued on a tour across America to the next contest states.
That’s why we are launching a Rick Across America Money Bomb today -- to fuel our campaign as we continue to crisscross Nevada, Missouri, Colorado, Minnesota and more over the next week.
Just yesterday a poll was released showing that I am leading Mitt Romney by double digits in Missouri. [Editor's note: YES!] This is very encouraging news and very accurately reflects the groundswell of support I felt when I was there earlier this week.
Your contribution right now of $25, $50, $100 or even more will keep our TV and radio ads on the airwaves and mail in the mailboxes.
Rush Limbaugh stated yesterday “everybody is guilty of some transgression somewhere against conservatism… except Santorum.” And in addition to leading in the polls in Missouri, voters also have the highest favorable opinion of me in Missouri and Ohio.
Voters across America are joining the fight and know that I am the only one with a positive message and track record as a true conservative. We can and will defeat Obama in November.
We are on the right track, have the right message, and the right plan for America. Join with us in our Rick Across America Money Bomb right now.

For America,

Rick Santorum

P.S. You can be an active part of our Rick Across America Money Bomb team by creating your own donation webpage, and inviting friends and family to contribute through your personalized page. We can really use your help to spread the word, and encourage you to create your own page today.

For you United States readers, please, if you can

2012-02-02T09:04:00.000-08:00

This will (should) be very easy: Just like I asked with some of the blog's foreign readers, please, can you tell me what is your nearest major city, something generally about you (male/female, age range, general occupation or field/religion/politics/etc.), you how you came to find this blog, and why you keep coming back? Not that I mind, of course. It's just that I'm curious. Thanks!

Russia, Germany, and Ireland, please

2012-02-02T09:03:00.000-08:00

After the US, it seems my most frequent readers come from Russia, Germany, and Ireland. Please, can you tell me what is your nearest major city, something generally about you, and you how you came to find this blog, and why you keep coming back? Not that I mind, of course. It's just that I'm curious. Thanks!

If William Shatner can get it, why not President Obama?

2012-02-02T08:57:00.000-08:00

Saw this wonderful ad featuring William Shatner on YouTube today, and in light of the recent HHS ruling denying freedom of conscience to Catholics, thought it appropos to share. Enjoy!

Waiting patiently for the Lord ...

2012-02-02T08:28:00.000-08:00

This post is going to be very confessional and spiritual, even religious. That's actually why I started the blog, to be an outlet for such thoughts. However, it's morphed into just the regular blah-blah-blah blog, frankly. Anyway, if you're not comfortable with such confessional posting, then move on. Forewarned is forearmed, as my mom has told me.

Lately, I have been discerning, or trying to discern God's will. Life lately has been at turns wild, bewildering, exciting, terrifying, depressing, filled with hope, filled with despair. Sometimes, it's all these things all at once.

That's to be expected when life throws disappointment at you. I would think that is a universal experience. Maybe not. In any event, it's what I typically experience in such times, and I've experienced in my life a lot of terrible disappointments -- many of my own doing -- that have left me with so many unanswerable whys. (To be sure, I have had, have, and will have many untold blessings; sadly, however, it's easy, so unbelievably easy to lose sight of those. I need to work on that on counting those and giving thanks for them.)

The cure to the disappointment is to give up asking "Why?" to give up the pride that forms the soil in which that question grows. However, the injustice that planted the Why's seed burns and propels, compels me to pursue, relentlessly pursue, relentlessly pursue an answer, like a mongoose chasing down a rat.

It is an answer that will most likely never come or that is here and simply cannot face, and its continued presence is a recipe for insanity. And the question, really, is not, "Why?" After 35 years, I have realized that just this moment. The question is not, "Why did this happen to me?" At least not so much.

The question really is "Why did no one love me? Why was I bullied? Why was I rejected and ignored? Why was I so often left to my own devices?" And at the heart of those questions are others too terrible to imagine, that are even more horrifying to contemplate, like the visage of a demon that manifests itself and is more chilling and frightening than any description had prepared you for: "What about me was unlovable? Am I unlovable?"

And the answer is yes. Or, rather, no. I am lovable. Maybe not by people (my wife tells me--frequently, in fact--that people find me tiresome, intimidating, imposing, and that I often lack certain social skills, and, no doubt, there is some truth in that), but by God.

Thus, my worth does not come from what kids did to me in Third Grade (or Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, Tenth, Twelth, and at university). What I feel is my parents' abandonment of me (they and my good sister, who I love and idolize, might disagree) does not determine whether I am worthy or lovable . My worth is not relected in my depressingly spotty employment history (putting the best spin on it).

No, my worth comes from one place and one place alone: I am a child of God, His adopted son. Had I been the only person to have ever sinned, and if I was the last person who ever would have sinned, there still would have been a Christmas morning. There still would have been an Easter Sunday.

For He loved me so much, that He sent His only begotten Son into the world to redeem my sins (cf., John 3:15). He created me in His likeness (cf. Gen 1:20-29) and destined me for eternal relationship with His triune majesty, the only analogy for which that is adequate here on earth is the spousal relationship. He wants to relate with me, love me, enfold me to that degree. He is, as the title of that fantastic book puts it, This Tremendous Lover.

He knew me before I was formed in the womb (cf. Jer 1:5). He chose me in Him before the foundation of the world that I should be holy and blameless before Him (i.e., consecrated/set apart and unblemished). He knows the plans He has for me, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give me a future and a hope (cf., Jer 29:11).

The point of all this reflection, which has taken a huge turn down the road I intended to go, is several fold.

First, I know but had not remembered, God's will is not to be discerned amongst the moment as if one is finding one's way through a dense, dense fog. God's will is the moment. As painful as that moment may be, He has "plans for welfare and not evil, to give you a future and a hope." He works everything -- not some things, not most things, not many things, but everything -- to the good (cf., Rom 8:28). So I need to pray to be faithful in this moment. When I'm so frenzied in wanting to accomplish all I believe I need to, prayer period ... it's tempting to make it an afterthought (sorta like, "Oops! I could've had a V-8!".).

Second, my prayer should have been less, "Lord, what is Your will?" (in fact, given the above, it should not have been that at all) and more, "Lord, where do You want me to go?"

Here's a quote from a wonderful book by Fr. Timothy Gallagher, OMV, titled Discerning the Will of God:

"To do Your will is my delight." These words of Psalm 40 [click it: It's not what you think] express the deep desire of Jesus' heart: to do the will of the Father by Whom He knows Himself loved (cf., John 5:20; Heb 10:5-10). They also express the deepest desire of every human heart rooted in the foundational truths described [i.e., the discovery of faith, joy-filled encounter with God, continuing relationship with God, and desire to respond to God, and through this experiencing the joy of freely responding to God --- the joy of doing God's will.].

With this in mind, I came home from Mass today (I only mention that I went to Mass because I don't believe these reflections would have come to my heart if I hadn't; maybe by this point, you're cursing the fact that I did). I put my elbows on my desk, folded my hands, closed my eyes, and asked God, "Do you want me to do X?" Before I got to "to," the answer spread through my consciousness like food coloring in water: "Yes."

I've resited doing X for almost 20 years because it could never make me a lot of money. I grew up financially comfortable. I want to be comfortable myself. Hell, let's be honest: I want to be rich. I want to be independently wealthy. I have my persecuted, enslaved children in Pakistant. There's the pirate radio station I want to put in Korea. I want to create. I want that so I can travel and study and fill my boundless curiousity. I want to have the endless freedom wealth brings to write and research and think and create.

And maybe God wants that, too. Someday. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe a few years from now. Maybe never. But I have to trust He knows me better than me, that He knows better than me period, and right now, He seems to be asking me to do X. When I think of doing X, I have peace.

As Fr. Gallagher writes, "... the human will thirsts for that communion with the divine will, which is mutual love --- the love for which we are made, and which, as Augustine says, alone gives rest to our restless hearts.

Mind you: It's not what I want to do. I don't. I like X, love it even, but I don't want to do it. There are too many obstacles standing in the way. Mostly, I don't want to endure the privations that will inevitably come from having to do what's necessary to make X happen. If I could forego the hoops and get paid based on my experience in the workforce, I'd do it tomorrow. That's not going to happen, so I think, "Ehhhh, why bother? Got a family to support. Wanna take a trip with the kids this Spring or summer. Yada yada yada."

God, however, has been around forever. He's a lot smarter than me. And there's that whole "plan for welfare and not for evil" thing I need to keep remembering.

I'll close with an awesome, soul-lifting quote by Bl. John Henry Cardinal Newman:

I am created to do something or to be something for which no one else is created; I have a place in God's counsels, in God's world, which no one else has.... God knows me and calls me by name.

Be well, my friends, and may you really come to feel how immersed you are in God's love, care, and compassion. "We love because He first loved us" (1 John 4:19). And let us, as this piece does, praise God for His boundless mercy and sacrificial, saving Love poured out for us on the cross.

Dignity wells up like a fountain from within

2012-01-31T15:25:00.000-08:00

A recently discovered letter from a slave to his former master is not only a tiny masterpiece of American literature, but it shows the indominitable dignity of the human person.

It brings to mind what may be the best scene in the movie Braveheart. In it, Mel Gibson's character William Wallace is trying to rally the troops of the Scottish army. The soldiers are about to disband and flee in the face of their English enemy's overwhelmingly superior numbers.

WALLACE

I see a whole army of my countrymen here in defiance of tyrany. You've come to fight as free men. And free men you are. What will you do with that freedom? Will you fight?

SOLDIER

Against that? (He nods toward the English army across the field). No. We will run. And we will live.

WALLACE

And you will live. Aye. Fight, and you may die. Run, and you will live. At least a while. And dying in your beds many years from now, would you be willing to trade all the days from this day to that for one chance, just one chance (!), to come back here and tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they may never take our FREEDOM!

Men must be free. We were made for freedom. God gave us free will. It's why the Fall happened, right? He wanted to give our original parents the chance to freely love Him and to do so by following His commands. To follow those commands bespeaks trust in Him that He knows what He's doing, that He has our best interests at heart. That is how God asks us to freely love Him. For if love is coerced, it is not love. If loyalty is coerced, it is not loyalty. If conscience is coerced, likewise.

This former slave Jourdan had his freedom long before he left the confines of Col. Anderson's plantation. And now he was simply demanding the respect for his human dignity that the colonel had never fully shown him in Tennessee. He as much says (or at least strongly implies) he would rather die than return and have his or anyone else's dignity assaulted or not respected. Wallace showed his men that choosing to live under tyranny can be a slavery in and of itself, regardless of what a government does to the individual.

Incidentally, the back wages Jourdan is demanding, the $11,680? That would roughly equate to US$165,000 today. I like his style.

Anyway, read the letter, and let me know in the combox: Do you find it as inspiring as I do?

The key to winning this battle

2012-01-30T00:01:00.000-08:00

First a little imaginary correspondence ...

Dear Mr. President and Madame Secretary: George Washington said about conscience, "The conscientious scruples of all men should be treated with great delicacy and tenderness; and it is my wish and desire, that the laws may always be extensively accommodated to them." Do his words mean nothing to you? Sincerely, Look in the Mirror

Aaahhh, what did the Father of our Country know, anyway? Your truly, Barack Obama and Kathleen Sabelius

Anyway, something caught my attention today watching Session 6 of Fr. Robert Barron's amazing Catholicism series. He mentioned the scene in Exodus 17:10-13:

So Joshua did as Moses told him, and fought with Am'alek; and Moses, Aaron, and Hur went up to the top of the hill. Whenever Moses held up his hand, Israel prevailed; and whenever he lowered his hand, Am'alek prevailed. But Moses' hands grew weary; so they took a stone and put it under him, and he sat upon it, and Aaron and Hur held up his hands, one on one side, and the other on the other side; so his hands were steady until the going down of the sun. And Joshua mowed down Am'alek and his people with the edge of the sword.

Immediately the relevance to our current situation with the violation of our conscience struck me.

We need troops on the ground. Each of us needs to be a soldier, not in the sense that we pick up a gun, but that we pick our pens, our minds, and our keesters off the proverbial couch and get involved in this really frightening situation. So we need to fight in that sense.

But as the above Scripture passage makes clear, the battle is not to us "troops" alone. Instead, it will be to those who do not lose heart, and it will especially be to those who keep their hearts and minds lifted up in prayer.

You know, it's interesting. A few years ago, I heard from a priest who was there that then-Bishop Jerome Listecki (now the archbishop of Milwaukee) predicted to his priests at a retreat that within 15 years, at least one of them would be arrested simply for preaching the Church's teachings on topics such as homosexuality. This could be the opening salvo in that effort.

I thought the letter by Bishop William Patrick Callahan of La Crosse read at all Masses in the diocese was excellent. It's not available online yet, but when it becomes available, I'll post it.

Until then, I'll leave you with this thought from his blog:

On 23 March 1775, Patrick Henry delivered a passionate speech before the members of the Virginia legislature at St. John's Church in Richmond, convincing them to send troops into the revolutionary war. His highly successful and memorable line stirred the listeners to join him in calling out: "Give me liberty, or give me death."

Unfortunately, St. John's Church was destroyed by the Confederates during the Civil War. It seems that now, however, in the twenty-first century, we are about to destroy the very concept of liberty itself - or least for some citizens of our country. Catholics are most definitely included in this effort, and, in fact, almost appear to be the targeted group.

French films ... and we bother with them why?

2012-01-28T21:57:00.000-08:00

I have seen some great French films in my time. But sometimes, I gotta admit: I just don't get it.

For instance, I saw this one a while back about a man (he's horrible with women) and his best friend, a woman (she's married and has known the male protagonist since college). So he's a nice guy who just happens whose having love problems, and she's married to a wonderful man with whom there is no passion. Their marriage is in a rut, and their love making is perfunctory.

Male lead reveals to his friend he's having trouble with his girlfriend (he's bad with women but lands a pretty stewardess as his girlfriend ... hmmm). The girlfriend thinks he's a bad kisser, and his best friend offers to see if she agrees with his girlfriend's take. So they kiss. And then they kiss some more. And then ... well, you get the picture.

In the end, she ends up with him and leaves her bewildered husband, whose new wife is severely tempted to do the same thing to him with a man she meets on a business trip. All of it is slowly paced, very little of it is humorous, there is no dramatic tension, the end is largely predictable, and the only point to the film seems to be, "Vive la narcissism! Vive la nihilism! Vive la relativism!"

Now tonight, I watched A Prophet. If I see a review of a film that gets kudos and seems relatively interesting, I put it on my Netflix queue. That's how A Prophet ended up in my mailbox. It's about a guy who won't turn snitch, and so he takes the rap for a crime, and that earns him six years in the slammer. This prison happens to be run, in effect, by the Corsican mafia. They make the crew in any of the Godfather trilogy or the movie Goodfellas or even The Sopranos look like just the nicest bunch of guys in the neighborhood. Malik has no one, knows no one inside or outside, so when he's threatened, "Off a guy who's about to be a star witness at a trial or we'll off you," he feels he has little choice. Now why the French authorities place a material witness for a mafia case in a prison of any type isn't explained. We're just supposed to go with it.

Nor is the amount of freedom these guys have explained. How likely is it that prisoners are allowed to have people in their closed door cells, that they can access prostitutes in the visiting booths, have five person meetings in the capo's cells, and the many other things that do not square with my experience of visiting prisons on tours or visiting prisoners. Either France has really lax security measures for their inmates or this was as about as unreal as anything Hollywood releases.

But I digress. So Malik does the job and thereby starts moving up the criminal ladder. Will he double cross the capo or not? Will he turn to a life of crime or realize just in time that crime simply doesn't pay?

Ah, the suspense of it all. Yes, there are interesting character turns, at least on Malik's part. Why, however, does his friend Fyed turn to crime? After all, he's a husband and father of a baby boy has nothing to gain by doing so (well, nothing unless you watch the deleted scenes)? Too many oddities, curiousities, and questions are left for you to ponder throughout this, let's just put it charitably and say languidly paced film that is over 20 hours long. Sorry. I mean 2 hours long, but at times, it felt like it was 20. As my wife asked, "Is this move never going to end?"

So why do I do it? Why do I keep watching French films?

Because once in a while, just every now and then, I hit the jackpot and see something brilliant, a film with something to say and is bright and bold and beautiful. Take Paris, Je T'aime (i.e., Paris, I Love You), which is a superb movie of 15-20 five-minute vignettes. A few, very few are quite dreary and dreadful. The vast majority, however, sing like birds who are simply happy Spring is here again. The African illegal immigrant who falls in love with the paramedic, the man who learns to love his wife, the middle aged curmudgeon who is hit by love in the most unlikely way, these and more are are just wonderful. La Femme Nikita ... another great film. Every so often, the French, they just hit the nail on the head.

To find these gems, however, you have to slug through so much time wasting crap. It's no different from American cinema, granted. At least with that, though, I know exactly what I'm getting before I get into it. With French films, on the other hand, it's always a flip of a coin.

Anyway, don't waste your time with A Prophet. Lots of nudity, sex scenes, implied sex scene, lots of violence, lots of vulgar language, not for anyone under 18.

Oh, almost forgot: I also saw Get Low with Robert Duvall, Sissy Spacek, and Bill Murray this week. It's about a recluse named by Felix Bush (serviceably played by Robert Duvall) whose good friend dies. This "good friend" he hadn't seen in who knows how many years. That gets him thinking about his own death and thus his funeral. The only problem is, he doesn't have anyone who would want to attend. See, people in this rural Tennessee town tell all manner of wild tales about him: that he killed a man, that he's insane, that he's a cannibal (well, that one didn't come up, but it may as well have). So he hands Murray's character, Frank Quinn the undertaker, a wad of cash and says he wants to have a funeral and that he wants to be there.

"Oh, you will be," says Quinn. No, Bush tells him, I want it before I die so that I can be there.

The rest of the movie deals with how will they get folks to attend a funeral of a man they don't know anything about except that he scares them and who will be there, alive. Will all of the pieces come together? What will happen at the funeral? What will happen after?

Get Low is a decent, slowly paced film, but that's because, as you might be able to guess, there's not a lot of drama going on. Nothing riveting happened to draw me in and make me care. Even when Bush revealed why did all this, it caught my attention not because I'd come to have feelings for this man. Rather, it was that I'd spent this much time with the film, so I may as well find out why he's such a wounded man of mystery. Get Low wasn't terrible, it just wasn't fantastic. Basically, the best that can be said for it is that it was an interesting twist on the standard redemption tale. Or if your nerves are frazzled and just want a movie that's quiet and and clean and not full of bang-bang shoot-'em-ups, this one's a good call in that way.

Sissy Spacek is marvelous, Bill Murray isn't half-bad, and Lucas Black who plays Murray's assistant in a funeral home turns in the best performance of them all. IMDb says the movie is partially based on a real story. No nudity, one fight scene, no sex, mention of an adulterous affair. Because of themes such as death and Duvall's admitting an affair at one point, as a parent, I wouldn't let anyone under 14 or so watch it.

Finally, Secretariat was good. Saw it finally last night. I'm not normally, "Wow, isn't it great that they showed a strong woman character on screen!" but I did come away thinking that and really admiring Mrs. Tweedy as played by Diane Lane. The always fantastic and underappreciated Lane presents her character as a model of a womanly strength who didn't sacrifice one scintilla of her femininity. You know, it's that old saw: "Why is that if a man is tough, he's just doing what he needs to do to get things done, whereas when it's a woman doing that, she's a b---h?"

Lane's portrayal of Mrs. Tweedy shows there is no contradiction between being a tough woman and being decidedly unb---hy. It's a nice family popcorn movie, with no violence, no nudity or sexual immorality, and only a little bit of adult language (I think I remember a "damn" and maybe one use of the Lord's Name in vain). The only thing to which I objected was that Diane Lane's character was being torn between her vocation and her desire to turn things around for her family of origin's horse business. Sadly, being a good wife and mother (in the sense that she was actually present to her husband and four children) lost out. The movie shows her practicing her vocation over the telephone and by dropping in now and then. That's definitely not positive. Yet the movie also shows how torn she is between her heart's passion and her vocation, so it's not like it just blows off the topic. All in all, a very solid film.

My nation has betrayed me

2012-01-28T12:24:00.000-08:00

My nation has betrayed me. My motherland has violated the ideals, the very milk I drank as a babe at her once nourishing breasts, the notions of right and wrong on which she weaned me. My country, my mother has spat upon me as though I was a second class citizen and my conscience no more worth respecting than that of an animal used for lab testing.

She has done so by implementing a rule in the Obamacare law that will force employers – especially religious institutions such as hospitals, schools, etc. – to violate their consciences by providing contraception, sterilization, and abortion as part of the health plans they offer employees.

Oh, what a cruel trick, Mother. To tell me, to make me believe I have basic freedoms. You have taken away my most basic freedom after life itself – the freedom of conscience and to act in concert with that most precious gift – and you will take away more. Mark my words, Mother, you will take away more, and soon.

Oh, what a cruel trick, Mother. To tell me, to make me believe we are a diverse country, and this diversity makes us stronger. To tell me, to make me believe you have valued the contributions of your sons and daughters, my brothers and sisters, whose creed is also mine. That you have valued the men and women who fought and died in our wars, whose sweat erected our buildings and laid our roads, whose artistic endeavors made us shine, whose contributions in the public square made us great. Except it is only the right type of diversity that you want, isn’t it? Except that in your burning, glaring, despising eyes, our creed is like so much used toilet paper: repugnant, unbearable, and best when disposed of as quickly as possible.

Oh, what a cruel trick, Mother. To tell me, to make me believe we ought to have tolerance for opinions different than our own. Except when it comes to my opinion. For that, you reject me from your embrace, you cast me from our family’s home, you disinherit me with your coldness.

Your coldness, dear Mother, your coldness. Well have I imbibed it. I have drunk it to the dregs, and it has made me hot with fury.

Consider this:

· The Catholic Church in the United States has 68.5 million members (some estimates put it at 77.7 million) representing 22 percent of the nation's population.

· That makes it the single largest denomination in America. The only countries with more Catholics are, in order, Brazil, Mexico, and the Philippines.

· In the US, the Catholic Church has the third largest number of churches. Only the Baptists and Methodists, respectively, have more.

· These cathedrals, basilicas, parishes, and missions are spread amongst 178 dioceses.

· There are the 18 additional dioceses for the various Eastern rites. This does not count dioceses in overseas territories (e.g., Guam, Puerto Rico, etc.).

· We have 33 metropolitan archbishops, and at least 17 cardinals.

· Of the cardinals, at least nine would be electors if a conclave were held today.

· This doesn't count several archbishops who occupy traditionally cardinatial sees who are simply waiting for the space in the College of Cardinals to open up (canon law allows for only 120 electors, so the red hats are going to archbishops in order of importance, or so it appears).

o These include Archbishop Jose Gomez of Los Angeles, Archbishop Charles Chaput of Los Angeles, whoever gets named to the open seat in Baltimore, and, if Detroit continues to be a cardinatial see (which is open for speculation), Archbishop Allen Vigneron. St. Louis was once a cardinatial see, but hasn’t been since 1979. Keep in mind that the equivalent political rank of a cardinal is a prince.

With all of that is backdrop, will the Obama Administration reconsider their hubris or are they so arrogant, they have convinced themselves the Catholic Church in the United States is a paper tiger?

If so, that tiger is at least fighting.

See what various bishops have said. These are the most heated episcopal statements I can remember in my nearly five decades upon the earth.

“It is really hard to believe that it happened. It comes like a slap in the face. The Obama administration has just told the Catholics of the United States, ‘To Hell with you!’ There is no other way to put it.” ~ Bishop David Zubick of Pittsburgh (emphasis mine)

“If these regulations are put into effect, they could close down every Catholic school, hospital and the other public ministries of our Church, which is perhaps their underlying intention. What is perfectly clear is that this is a bigoted and blanket attack on the First Amendment rights of every Catholic believer. I am honestly horrified that the nation I have always loved has come to this hateful and radical step in religious intolerance. [We must] vigorously [oppose this] unprecedented governmental assault upon the moral convictions of our faith. Have faith! Have courage! Fight boldly for what you believe! I strongly urge you not to be intimidated by extremist politicians or the malice of the cultural secularists arrayed against us. [As it says in First Letter of John,] ‘the One Who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world.’” ~ Bishop Daniel Jenky of Peoria

“In opposing unjust laws, we can positively articulate the truth we have been given. In the weeks and months to come, we can witness to the Catholic belief that sexual relations are a beautiful and integral part of marriage, and that contraceptives rob them of their true and full meaning. If the Catholic Church is forced to comply with this rule, it will be forced to compromise the core principles of its Christian identity. This is a grave violation of religious liberty and is unacceptable. [This action treats pregnancy and fertility] pregnancy and fertility “as diseases instead of gifts. [Pointing to the example of the Servant God Francis Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan, he said the] greatest failure [in leadership is for the leader to be] afraid to speak and act as a leader. Today, more than ever, Christianity needs leaders committed to truth in the face of injustice. Imitate the courage of [Cardinal] Van Thuan. Commit to Christian leadership. Let’s join together in witnessing to the truth of the Gospel and the dignity of the human person.” ~ Auxiliary Bishop James Conley of Denver

“Although this new rule gives the agency the discretion to authorize a ‘religious’ exemption, it is so narrow as to exclude most Catholic social-service agencies and health-care providers. Under the new rule our institutions would be free to act in accord with Catholic teaching on life and procreation only if they were to stop hiring and serving non-Catholics.” ~ His Eminence Daniel Cardinal DiNardo

“The administration’s brazen attempt to attach the binding strings of its secularist agenda to something as basic as health insurance constitutes an unprecedented threat to individual and institutional religious freedom. Never before has the government required private health plans to include coverage for such morally objectionable procedures as contraception and sterilization. In a free society, women and men of faith cannot be compelled to fund medical practices that violate their religious principles.” ~ Archbishop Timothy Broglio, Military Services Ordinariate

“Pregnancy is not a disease. We must insist that sterilization, prescriptions, and contraceptives be dropped from the list of preventative services that the federal government is mandating. This is especially important to exclude any drug that may cause an early abortion.” ~ Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio of Brooklyn

“[George Washington said,] ‘Conscience is the most sacred of all property.’ Scarcely two weeks ago, in its Hosanna-Tabor decision upholding the right of churches to make ministerial hiring decisions, the Supreme Court unanimously and enthusiastically reaffirmed these longstanding and foundational principles of religious freedom. The court made clear that they include the right of religious institutions to control their internal affairs.

“Yet the Obama administration has veered in the opposite direction. It has refused to exempt religious institutions that serve the common good—including Catholic schools, charities and hospitals—from its sweeping new health-care mandate that requires employers to purchase contraception, including abortion-producing drugs, and sterilization coverage for their employees.

“ ... As Catholic Charities USA’s president, the Rev. Larry Snyder, notes, even Jesus and His disciples would not qualify for the exemption in that case, because they were committed to serve those of other faiths.

Since then, hundreds of religious institutions, and hundreds of thousands of individual citizens, have raised their voices in principled opposition to this requirement that religious institutions and individuals violate their own basic moral teaching in their health plans. Certainly many of these good people and groups were Catholic, but many were Americans of other faiths, or no faith at all, who recognize that their beliefs could be next on the block. They also recognize that the cleverest way for the government to erode the broader principle of religious freedom is to target unpopular beliefs first.

“Now we have learned that those loud and strong appeals were ignored. On Friday, the administration reaffirmed the mandate, and offered only a one-year delay in enforcement in some cases—as if we might suddenly be more willing to violate our consciences 12 months from now. As a result, all but a few employers will be forced to purchase coverage for contraception, abortion drugs and sterilization services even when they seriously object to them. All who share the cost of health plans that include such services will be forced to pay for them as well. Surely it violates freedom of religion to force religious ministries and citizens to buy health coverage to which they object as a matter of conscience and religious principle.

“The rule forces insurance companies to provide these services without a co-pay, suggesting they are “free”—but it is naïve to believe that. There is no free lunch, and you can be sure there’s no free abortion, sterilization or contraception. There will be a source of funding: you.

“Coercing religious ministries and citizens to pay directly for actions that violate their teaching is an unprecedented incursion into freedom of conscience. Organizations fear that this unjust rule will force them to take one horn or the other of an unacceptable dilemma: Stop serving people of all faiths in their ministries—so that they will fall under the narrow exemption—or stop providing health-care coverage to their own employees.

“The Catholic Church defends religious liberty, including freedom of conscience, for everyone. The Amish do not carry health insurance. The government respects their principles. Christian Scientists want to heal by prayer alone, and the new health-care reform law respects that. Quakers and others object to killing even in wartime, and the government respects that principle for conscientious objectors. By its decision, the Obama administration has failed to show the same respect for the consciences of Catholics and others who object to treating pregnancy as a disease.

“This latest erosion of our first freedom should make all Americans pause. When the government tampers with a freedom so fundamental to the life of our nation, one shudders to think what lies ahead.” ~ President of the USCCB Cardinal-designate Timothy Dolan of New York

Catholics of America, unite! Take back our land from those who look upon us as vermin and scum, benighted souls unworthy of consideration, who see us as slaves to beliefs that are not only antiquated now but were never acceptable in the first place. Refuse to let this go unchecked. Refuse to let this stand. Take a stand, make a stand with your holy mother, the Church, who is Christ’s spotless Bride on earth and is His Body. Do not let them sully and blasphemy Our Lord Jesus in this reprehensible, filthy manner.

The bishops have provided this website www.usccb.org/conscience. Go to it and make your voice heard. You non-Catholic Americans, too. Or do we too soon forget the poem about the Lutheran pastor in Nazi Germany that starts off, “First they came for the communists,and I said nothing for I was not a communist …”

Saints news for December 2011

2012-01-27T08:02:00.000-08:00

Van Thuan beatification effort gets new impetus

Cardinal Jean Baptiste Pham Minh Man of Ho Chi Minh City has appealed to Catholics to bear witness to the late Cardinal Francis Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan’s beatification process before a Vatican delegation in March.

Cardinal Man announced on January 1 that the delegation from the Vatican-based Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace plans to visit Vietnam from March 23 to April 9 to meet and listen to witnesses with regard to Cardinal Thuan’s beatification cause, which was officially launched by the pontifical council on October 22, 2010.

Cardinal Thuan was named coadjutor archbishop of Saigon archdiocese seven days before South Vietnam fell to the communist North on April 30, 1975.

The communist authorities rejected his appointment and imprisoned him for 13 years, nine of them in solitary confinement in the north. Released in 1988, he was allowed to travel overseas in 1991. While abroad, he was barred from returning to Vietnam.

In 1994, Blessed John Paul called him to Rome and appointed him vice-president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. He later became president of the council from 1998 until he died of cancer at age 74 in 2002.

He was the first Vietnamese prelate to hold a high Vatican office.

Vice postulator of Irish beato passes

Dom Mark Tierney of Glenstal Abbey, Co. Limerick, has died at age 86. While best known for his history books, one could say his main interest was the beatification of Bl. Dom Columba Marmion, OSB.

According to the Irish Times, “he wrote Dom Columba Marmion: a Biography in 1994. Another edition of this was published under the title Blessed Columba Marmion: a short biography in 2000 to coincide with the beatification of Columba Marmion that year.

Fr Tierney was vice-postulator for the cause of Blessed Columba Marmion who, like himself, was a Dubliner and a Benedictine.

On September 3rd, 2000, Columba Marmion was beatified by Pope John Paul II alongside Pope John XXIII and Pope Pius IX. In attendance at the beatification ceremony was Pat Bitzan, from St Cloud, Minnesota, the woman believed to have been “miraculously” cured from cancer in 1966 thanks to the intervention of Dom Columba Marmion.

Born in Dublin of an Irish father and Belgian mother in April 1858, Dom Columba studied at Belvedere College and Holy Cross seminary in Clonliffe, as well as serving as a curate in Dundrum, before deciding to become a Benedictine monk. It meant moving to Belgium as there were no Benedictine monasteries in Ireland at the time. He spent most of his adult life in Belgium, dying at the monastery of Maredsous there in 1923.”

Taos, NM, artist helps move along a beatification cause

Taos artist Lloyd Rivera has unwittingly become an assistant in the beatification cause of Ven. Mary of Agreda.

Ven. Mary, who is still famous for her famous work, Mystical City of God, and whose corpse is incorrupt inside the chapel of the abbey where she died in 1665 at age 63, had her cause introduced in June 1672.

However, something else for which she is famous is bringing the faith to the indigenous tribes of Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico, and that’s before the first missionaries to the region even had left Spain, even though she never left that country. She appeared to them as the lady in the blue mantle. Thus she must have had the ability to bilocate.

Rivera, noticing that “santeros,” painters of traditional religious folk art were creating plenty of representations of Our Lady of Guadalupe, St. Raphael, St. Michael, and other saints, none were painting Ven. Mary of Agreda.

The Taos News reported, “The Lady in Blue was venerated shortly after her death by Pope Clement X, but her status has never changed since due possibly to a variety of misinterpretations of her writings. However, international efforts to move her beatification process forward apparently are underway.

“It’s been almost 410 years since she was born, but Rivera is determined to never let her name be forgotten.”

Beatification cause of early female Opus Dei member goes to Rome

On November 21, 2001, Antonio Maria Cardinal Rouco y Varela, archbishop of Madrid, formally opened the canonization cause of Guadalupe Ortiz de Landazuri. Now word comes that a complete study of her life along with a possible miracle have been forwarded to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints for consideration of her beatification.

The first time she met St. Josemaria Escriva, she walked in, and there was the best reproduction of the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, for whom she’d been named, she’d ever seen. She had been named for La Virgen given that she was born on her feast in 1916. And she had gone to see St. Josemaria for spiritual direction because she didn’t know what to do with her life. She was profoundly committed to God, but she also had all this education and this beauty and these talents. People were telling her, “Marry! Marry!” but her heart longed to follow God. So St. Josemaria told her that “professional and ordinary life are where she could find Christ.” Keep in mind: At the time, especially before Vatican II, which essentially encouraged the laity to do just this, this was a somewhat radical idea (although you can find its expression in St. Francis de Sales and others throughout the centuries; it’s just that this message was easily obscured).

It wasn’t long after that that she decided to request membership in Opus Dei. From this point on, she lived in the world but was not of the world, and the range of apostolic initiatives she undertook were pretty impressive.

In 1951, St. Josemaria asked her to begin the work for women in Mexico, and she helped so many young ladies come to Christ and find the joy that only comes by living in Him. She also worked with professionals and young mothers.

Because she was a numerary, she never married, and she was just this beautiful woman. And so smart, too. She held a doctorate in chemistry, she taught, and she worked in the government of Opus Dei. To the end of her life on July 16, 1975, she never stopped trying to bring people closer to Christ, and did so usually by simply being a friend, by being cheerful and joyful.

Cause of Cuban patriot priest advances

When people think of the drive for Cuban independence, they’re not likely to think of Fr. Felix Varela. And yet Fr. Varela’s patriotism made him a wanted man. King Ferdinand of Spain had issue a warrant for arrest precisely because his agitation for the liberty of his island nation. In fact, things got so hot for him, he fled his homeland in 1823.

After this, he spent the next 30 years as a priest, mostly in the Diocese of St. Augustine, Florida, but he was even vicar general for the Archdiocese of New York for a while. He died in 1853, and in 1985, the bishops of Cuba asked Bl. John Paul II to open Fr. Varela’s cause.

Now, 26 years later, theologians at the Congregation for the Causes of Saints are reviewing the Cuban patriot’s case file, which is the last step before they decide whether or not to recommend that the Holy Father declare Fr. Felix Varela venerable. Remember, Benedict XVI will travel to Cuba this March, and wouldn’t it be great if he used that opportunity to promulgate the decree of heroic virtue and thus make Fr. Varela titled “Venerable”?

Salesian priest gets beatification nod

The Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI has approved the miracle put forth for the beatification cause of Ven. Louis Brisson, who founded the Institutes of the Oblates and the Oblate Sisters of St. Francis de Sales. The miracle is really remarkable because it was a little 8-year-old boy from Ecuador who had his foot crushed by a tractor. Some Oblates of St. Francis de Sales sisters prayed a novena asking for the intercession of Ven. Louis, and the boy was cured and went on to join the US Air Force.

Ven. Louis was a French priest, born June 23, 1817, and he was handsome. He looked a lot like actor David Soul (remember the 1970s American police TV drama, “Starsky and Hutch”?). Upon receiving ordination in 1840, he was sent to teach at a monastery boarding school, where he not only taught theology and science, but he invented and astronomic clock so precise, that NASA asked to study it.

Now St. Francis de Sales – and if you don’t know him, please, Google him or, better yet, go to your local Catholic bookstore; he’s truly one of the Church’s greatest saints – even those who know a lot about him don’t know that he intended to found an order of priests, but got too busy and so never did.

Well, with the nagging and incessant nudging of a local mother superior, he finally founded that order of priests. It took a long time, though. First he founded the Catholic Association of St. Francis de Sales, which ran boarding houses for single female factory workers so they could continue their religious formation and wouldn’t be forced to rely on loose morals to pay for their board.

Then he founded with St. Leonie de Sales the Oblate Sisters. And then finally, in 1872, he founded the order of priests.

Persecuted by French secularists, he always put his trust in God. Indeed, he had this great quote: “If everything seems lost,” he said, “and everyone has already surrendered his hope, the Lord will show His might and His influence. Then it will become clear to all that the decision lies only in His hands and we are capable of nothing.”

He died on February 2, 1908, and now he will soon be declared “Blessed.”

New Zealand bishops keen on getting their own saint

On December 13, during their recent ad limina visit to Rome, which each episcopal conference takes every five years, the bishops of New Zealand, held a meeting with the Congregation for the Causes of Saints to discuss the cause of beatification of Sr. Suzanne Aubert. According to Catholic News Agency, “She was a French-born nun who arrived in New Zealand as a young woman in 1860. Albert undertook great works of charity among the sick and orphaned. She died in 1926 in Wellington.”

The Kiwi news source VOXY said Aubert founded “New Zealand’s only indigenous religious Order - the Daughters of Our Lady of Compassion…. She is known and revered throughout New Zealand and the Pacific since she was among the first missionaries to come to [that] part of the world. She is remembered for her life and sanctity and for her unstinting care of the Maori people.”

Benedict’s favorite Catholic feminist favorite Hildegard of Bingen proposed as next Church Doctor

The blog "Vatican Insider" is predicting Pope Benedict XVI will canonize Hildegard of Bingen this October “and at the same [time] recognize her as a Doctor of the Church.”

Bl. Hildegard was truly a remarkable lady, perhaps the most remarkable woman of her age. She was a prioress, a mystic, a composer, she had a theological mind like a steel trap, and her writings are still influential to this very day. She even beat the inventors of Esperanto to the punch by inventing her very own language.

If the predictions come true, she will be just the fourth female Church Doctor. And by “Doctor,” of course, we don’t mean like a medical doctor, but someone whose learning and scholarship have had a profound influence on Church teaching and such.

Busy year for Archbishop Romero cause

For those unfamiliar with Archbishop Óscar Romero, he was the bishop of San Salvador, capital of El Salvador who was assassinated as he consecrated the sacred blood during Mass on March 24, 1980. He had always been a fairly traditional priest in terms of doctrine, and because of this, his ascension to the See of San Salvador as archbishop in 1977 was greeted with dismay by some of the priests. But when the government murdered a priest friend of his for simply trying to give the poor dignity and a way of improving their lives, and the government, of course, did nothing about it, he began speaking against the poverty that was allowed to fester while the rich enjoyed the good life, the assassinations, and all the other ways the regime abused the dignity of its citizens as human persons.

An El Salvadoran blog released its annual Top 10 events concerning the beatification cause of Archbishop Oscar Romero, noting that “2011 was a strong Romero year.”

Last year, for instance, President Obama visited the late archbishop’s tomb, the website advocating his beatification put his writings online. Archbishop Romero’s being beatified apparently is such a point of national pride that El Salvador Foreign Minister lobbied the Congregation for the Causes of Saints during a trip to Rome last year. And it noted that the man suspected of having organized the hit on the Servant of God was found by one of the nation’s newspapers living in a foreign country. He reportedly is impoverished and “living in squalor.” Not surprisingly, today he totally sympathizes with what his victim was attempting to do for the poor.

Archbishop Sheen cause moves forward

On Sunday, December 11, 2011, Peoria’s Bishop Daniel Jenky celebrated a Mass that marked the formal closing of the investigation phase of a miracle they will submit in support of Archbishop Fulton Sheen’s beatification cause. The miracle is that a baby boy did not breath the first 61 minutes of life. His doctors were just about to declare him dead when the child started breathing. The parents attribute Archbishop Sheen’s intercession for which they were asking throughout the ordeal.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend?

2012-01-27T07:51:00.000-08:00

I learned from a friend in Mauritius that pro-abortion forces had attempted last year to legalize the killing of babies in the womb (i.e., abortion). However, thanks to a coalition of Catholics, Hindus, and Muslims, this heinous, barbaric, and murderous practice remains illegal. And yet ...

Isn't it ironic that it took such a coalition to maintain the status quo? Granted 49 percent of Mauritians are Hindu and 16 percent Muslim (27 percent are Catholic and 0.5 percent Protestant). But it seems worth noting that the very same people who in their home countries persecute and murder us Christians have helped us maintain the sanctity of life on this tiny island nation.

In the end, though, who cares? The sanctity of life was maintained in this remote corner of the world, and praise God for it.

A cultural illustration on the seductiveness of evil

2012-01-27T07:19:00.000-08:00

Sometimes when we read Scripture or have some religious belief proposed to us, we might find it hard to understand. This is especially true if we have not thought about or studied the issue in any great detail. That's why I love, for lack of a better term, cultural devices. Movies, books, songs, TV shows, they all can provide, often unintentionally, the most abject lessons on the truths taught by our holy faith.

What brings this to mind now is a conversation I had with a friend about Theology of the Body, which both of us love. In fact this friend and I met because I used to sell TOB products, and she was one of my customers.

She is preparing to give an age-appropriate retreat on TOB to her parish's middle schoolers, and she wanted my input. I suggested using lots of stories, and I gave her the example of a scene from the 1999 film Felicia's Journey starring Bob Hoskins (why that man didn't win an Academy Award for that performance, I don't know, but his performance is chilling).

So dumbfounding and, more importantly, so illustrative is this scene, I thought it worthwhile to share it with you.

Here's the context for the scene. Hilditch is the serial killer played by Hoskins. Ada is his late wife. Felicia is an Irish lass impregnated by her boyfriend Johnny. Abortion is illegal in Ireland. If girls want an abortion, they must travel to England to obtain one. Felicia doesn't want an abortion, though. She just wants to find Johnny, have their baby, and begin their lives together. In the scene, Felicia and Hilditch are having dinner in his house (he, seemingly a gentle, kind man, has given her a place to stay until she gets on her feet). She has just told him she thinks she'll be moving on so she can look for Johnny elsewhere. This alarms Hilditch.

Hilditch: Well there's no doubt that Johnny loves you, dear. Nothing you said to me contradicts that. Now, the point I'm trying to make to you is, a situation like you and Johnny and it, can all too easily be affected by misfortune. Ada said that, Felicia. Ada had a considerable insight into matters of the heart. The thing is Felicia, you're over here now. This isn't Ireland. And we have -- certain facilities available. What I'm saying to you is what I'd say to any daughter Ada and myself might have had. We're giving you the benefit of long experience. There isn't a doubt in my mind, Felicia. I thought of nothing else since I rested poor Ada in the ground.

Felicia: Some would call it murder.

Hilditch: Murder? We're not in this world to cause pain, dear. Of course you have to think of yourself on occasion. I'm not saying you don't. But there are other people, too. Which is something you're daily more aware of as you grow older.

Felicia: What are you talking about?

Hilditch: I want you to know when you've been through it, Felicia. But so has your dad. And your great-gran. Imagine them -- trying to hold their heads up. There's that to think about, too. We all have to do terrible things, Felicia. We have to find the courage sometimes. And you're a young girl. When you find Johnny again you can both make the choice to have a child. But the circumstances have to be right. A child needs to be surrounded by all the love it can. The love of the mother -- of course you have that. But the love of the father ... and the grandfather ... and the great-great grandmother. Why deprive this baby of that? I put by a little that I'd gladly donate in order to do the decent thing by your family.

Isn't that just the most demonic, chilling thing you've ever read? And yet it's the rhetoric of pro-"choice," isn't it? It's phenomenal. My friend agreed with my assessment, but applied it only to the 5th Commandment, "Thou shall not murder/kill" (commentator Dennis Prager says the Hebrew in the commandment is not as simple as "kill," that the context is more like "murder").

This scene goes beyond the 5th Commandment, though, doesn't it? Isn't it simply a modern-day updating of the discussion we see between the adversary and Eve in the Garden (see Genesis 3)? "'Did God say you would die? You will not die. You will be as gods. ... And so she took of the fruit and ate it."

It's the lie, the seductive, appealing, "no worries, no remorse" lie that has caused the fall of so many since the dawn of time. It allows us to deceive ourselves that something wholly evil is all right in just this one instance. We can say with great bravado but little certainty, "Aye, this is good. It is evil for others, but not for me." And from this wretched womb is born so much misery.

Is there a solution? Yes, and its most basic level, we find it in the Act of Faith:

O my God, I firmly believe that You are one God in three divine persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I believe that Your divine Son became man and died for our sins, and that He will come to judge the living and the dead. I believe these and all the truths which the holy catholic Church teaches, because You have revealed them, Who can neither deceive nor be deceived.

This isn't asking anyone to be a mindless automoton. Indeed, it requires great thinking and formation on our parts, precisely because the lies of the age are so exceedingly seductive. But if I'm walking a path for the first time and someone who has walked that path their whole life tells me, "At the fork where you see the waterfall, under no experience take the left fork. It will spell your doom," I'm listening to that person. I don't need to say, "Oh, that's just an old, patriarchal male (or whoever) trying to spoil my fun" or "Hmmmm, that may be true, but I have to experience this for myself and make my own judgment." Absolutely not. I'm listening, because I know I'll be happier in the end. If the person is wrong, what do I really lose? Anything? If the person is right ... and as long as I'm convinced of their good will and wanting the best for me, and thus have no reason to doubt them ... then I have everything to gain, no?

Anyway, don't fall for the lie. Easier said than done sometimes, I know, but always keep your vigilance. As 1 Peter 5:8 says, "Be sober, be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour." Don't let that someone be you.

New feature on this blog

2012-01-13T17:27:00.000-08:00

Ever since the death of the "Dear Leader," Kim Jong-il, president of North Korea, I've been studying the Hermit Kingdom on an almost obsessive basis. One thing I really get a kick out of is reading the official news organ, Korean Central News Agency. So I thought I'd take innocuous news stories like the following and gussy them up in that inimitable KCNA style. It's a tough call whether to treat the situation in the DPRK with satire or not, but if it can help increase awareness even a little of what a nightmare is happening there, then it will have served it's purpose.

Explorers Thank Kim Jong-un for Ability to Find Rare White Penguin in Antarctica

National Geographic explorers are heaping effusive praise, the likes of which have people have never seen, on Kim Jong-un for their ability to find spotted an extremely rare, nearly all-white Chinstrap penguin this week. Despite efforts to hide the rare gem of a bird by the thrice-cursed US and Japanese imperialists and their toady stooges in the south in a sea of black and white penguins, the explorers saw the reclusive penguin waddling on Antarctica's Aitcho Islands.

David Stephens, a naturalist on board the Lindblad Expeditions' National Geographic Explorer ship, snapped the photo above of the rare leucistic bird, which he described on their blog as "whitish, but not quite an albino."

"I am a man, but it almost brings tears to my eyes to think that this is the sort of thing Kim Jong-un's father, Kim Jong-il, would have done for us. First there was the Great Leader Kim Il-sung. Second there was the Dear Leader Kim Jong-il. Now we have Kim Jong-un, a man with unlimited talents. We truly are not worthy."

Leucistic penguins, sometime referred to as albinistic penguins, have a reduced level of pigmentation and are set apart from albinos due to their pigmented eyes, according to National Geographic. It is not known whether their "washed-out" coloring, which clearly distinguishes them from the traditional black and white coat of the Chinstrap penguin, is a result of the sort of foul imperialist experiments that have threatened to ruin the environment everywhere but Korea. However, thanks to the efforts of Kim Jong-un, whom all the world acknowledges as a peerless leader and the ultimate environmental visionary and lover of animals, science has found this rare and beautiful bird.

It's so rare to find nearly all-white penguins, Stephens noted, because the birds' black and white coloring serves as crucial camouflage while diving for fish. Still, the leucistic penguins manage to breed normally, according to Stephens, but finding them is hard, which is why all should redouble their praise of the venerable Kim Jong-un.

UPDATE: The author of this piece was arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced in the space of one minute for not having praised the new leader Kim Jong-un in an ebullient enough fashion. He will be sent to Camp no. 12 for 25 years.

At long last, October & November 2011 saints news

2011-12-23T05:27:00.000-08:00

Seelos cause slows down

The cause for sainthood of Bl. Francis X. Seelos ran into a slight road bump when it was announced that the Vatican’s board that reviews miracles will not consider the apparent healing of an Annapolis, MD, woman from esophageal cancer as the miracle needed for Bl. Francis’ canonization. In a Nov. 21 news release, the Redemptorists announced that a Vatican review panel agreed that while Mary Ellen Heibel’s disappearance of metastasized esophageal cancer in 2005 was extraordinary, it hesitated to confirm it as miraculous because Heibel died in 2009 of pneumonia – making it impossible to ascertain a “complete and definitive healing.”

Cause of saintly ex-slave and Denver convert may get introduced

A Capuchin priest in Denver has finished a manuscript he and others hope will promote awareness of and possibly lead to the opening of Julia Greeley’s beatification cause. He and other Denver residents have even formed the Julia Greeley Guild for this purpose.

Greeley was a slave who, upon emancipation, migrated to Denver and entered the Church in 1880. She was known especially for her great acts of charity, even though she herself was not at all wealthy. She was a domestic servant. “Greeley was often seen carrying firewood, clothes, or food down alleyways to someone in need. She begged for dresses from wealthy women and restored them for working class girls so they would be able to attend church or go to a social gathering. She also passed out Catholic literature to firemen, especially leaflets about the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which she became an apostle for after” her conversion.

Her charity and devotion extended to the point when she reportedly gave her own burial plot to a destitute man and participated in 40 hours of devotion, kneeling motionless and absorbed in adoration of the Eucharist.

Scottish Venerable’s cause gets publicity boost with star’s death

The death of British television legend Sir Jimmy Savile has re-ignited hopes for the beatification of the Scottish nun he always believed saved his life as a baby. The host of the famous British TV show “Top of the Pops,” which hosted the Beatles, Stones, Who, and other noted rock acts, attributed his recovery from a serious illness when he was two years old to the intercession of the Venerable Margaret Sinclair.

Sinclair was born in 1900 and brought up in poverty in an Edinburgh slum. She worked in a local biscuit factory and was active in the trade union movement before joining a cloistered order of Poor Clare nuns in London’s Notting Hill area in 1923.

Upon becoming a nun, she took the religious name Mary Francis of the Five Wounds. However, she died just two years later from tuberculosis at the age of 25.

She quickly gained a reputation as “Edinburgh’s wonder worker” and was declared venerable by Pope Paul VI in 1978. The papal declaration means that the Church found she lived a life marked by virtue.

Despite numerous claims of a miracle, such as Sir Jimmy’s, none have fully satisfied the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints. If a miracle is approved, it would pave the way for her beatification.

Pope canonizes three new saints

Pope Benedict canonized three new saints on October 23. Luigi Guanella, founder of three religious orders, including one in Chicago; Guido Maria Conforti, founder of the Xaverian Missionaries, who lived 1865-1931; and the Spanish religious Bonifacia Rodriguez Castro, 1837-1905, founder of the Servants of St. Joseph, a congregation originally dedicated to educating poor women.

Iraqi martyrs remembered

An anniversary that sadly went unremarked upon in most places was beautifully commemorated on October 31 in Rome at its famous “bones” church. On that day no fewer than three cardinals commemorated the 42 Iraqi men and women, priests, religious, and laity, who lost their lives one year before when terrorists burst into Baghdad’s Our Lady of Salvation Church and opened fire. Because they were killed precisely for their religious faith, their beatification cause as martyrs is being sought in Rome. This does not require the same five year waiting period that is normally needed after someone’s death. Furthermore, if the Holy Father recognizes them as having died for the Faith, they will not need the usual miracle required for beatification. They will, however, need that miracle to receive universal recognition as saints. In other words, they can be declared blesseds, which means that, while they are in heaven, their veneration will be technically limited to their local diocese or nation. Canonization, on the other hand, would extend recognition of their presence in heaven to the universal Church.

New Miracle for Bl. John Paul II?

Vatican investigators can expect to investigate a possible second miracle attributed to the intercession of Bl. John Paul II. The alleged miracle concerns the healing of a Mexican woman, Sara Guadalupe Fuentes Garcia who was suddenly cured of a life threatening tumor that blocked as much as 80 percent of her throat.

According to the woman who lives in the Yucatan, during the time relics of the late beloved pope were visiting, she had placed a photograph of Bl John Paul II on her chest and throat and prayed for his intercession with God to heal her.

The Vatican reveals that the Most Rev Juan Gomez Parada, Bishop of Yucatan is now investigating the incident and gathering medical documentation and independent testimonies. The extensive paperwork and detailed research he gathers from independent doctors and scientists will then be submitted to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints in Rome.

If on further study and investigation, the miracle is recognized and approved by the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, the verifying documents will be presented to the Holy Father, at which point an announcement of the canonization of Bl John Paul II can be expected.

Beatification cause for Spanish nun opened

On October 19, Archbishop Carlos Osoro of Valencia opened the beatification cause of Carmelite nun Maria Carmen Crespo Roig, who lived 65 years in Ontinyent’s Monastery of the Most Precious Blood.

Sister Maria Carmen Crespo Roig, or Teresa of the Incarnation, was born in Beniarres, Spain on March 25, 1912. “From a young age she was very involved in the life of her parish and worked tirelessly in its activities and movements,” the Archdiocese of Valencia said.

During the Spanish Civil War in 1936, she risked her life to help priests and nuns who were in need of assistance. In 1941, she entered the Carmelite convent at Ontinyent, “where she lived for the Church and the salvation of souls” until her death on Feb. 4, 2006.

New Mexico man promotes cause of Fr. Kapaun

John Moore, 61-years-young, of Gallup, NM, is on a 630-mile walk from the National Cemetery in Santa Fe to the hometown of the Servant of God Fr. Emil Kapaun to promote the beatification cause of the holy priest who died as a POW in a North Korean prison. Fr. Kapaun was a chaplain in the Korean Conflict who was captured in battle and who, despite starvation, torture, and other abuse, spent the rest of his earthly life ministering to his fellow POWs. Eventually, the maltreatment cost him his life. So great was his dedication to his fellow prisoners, that, after the POWs’ release, a Jewish soldier who’d been incarcerated with him, even sculpted a beautiful crucifix, a replica of which Moore carried on his back from New Mexico to Kansas.

Maryknoll founder’s cause opened

The Archdiocese of New York has formally opened the beatification cause of Bishop James Walsh, co-founder of the Maryknoll Society. A complicating factor in helping the cause go forward is that it apparently is something of an afterthought. There are very few people still living who actually knew His Excellency, who died in 1936. As a result, his will be what is called an “historical cause,” which will mean that the proof given of his sanctity will depend less on eyewitness testimony and more on historical records such as news accounts, his writings, and other documents.

Bishop Walsh was born in Cambridge, MA, home of Harvard University, where he actually studied accounting. He eventually received his degree from nearby St. John’s seminary. He had done some post-seminary work with the Vincentians at St. Sulpice where he learned of a famous martyr in Vietnam, St. Théophane Vénard, MEP. The more he studied St. Théophane’s story, the more certain he became that the maxim “The blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church” was amongst the truest statements ever recorded. Recognizing that martyrs were often missionaries, he increasingly recognized the importance of evangelizing foreign nations. In 1903, he became diocesan director of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, where he had to raise money for overseas missions. There he further developed his thoughts on the importance of missionary work, even founding The Field Afar magazine to promote foreign evangelization work. That publication eventually became Maryknoll magazine, which I got as a kid, and which I really enjoyed. Finally, in 1911, with the approval of Pope St. Pius X, he and Fr. Thomas Price obtained approval for the Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America, which is now better known as the Maryknoll Fathers.

First class Pope relic comes to Colorado parish

Parishioners and pastors around the country were made guilty of violating the 10th Commandment in mid-November when it was announced that St. Mary Church, a parish in Greeley, CO, had received a first class relic of Bl. John Paul the Great from no less than the late pontiff’s own secretary, Stanisław Cardinal Dziwisz. The relic was a drop of blood from the beatified pope, which makes it a first class relic , and it was given because the pastor, a native Pole wanted something personal of Bl. John Paul’s to have as a reminder of the impact of World Youth Day 1993, which did so much to change the Church in Denver and this nation, really.

Interestingly, if the archdiocese’s exorcist needs a powerful relic, he ought to ask the parish to borrow theirs. Several exorcists have reported that when John Paul II is called upon during this ancient rite against demonic possession, the demon screams in great anguish. He’s like St. Gemma Galgani and Bl. Mother Teresa in that respect.

Anti-Nazi bishop beatified

Sixty-seven years to the day and minute after the Nazis caused his death by decapitation, Angelo Cardinal Amato, prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of the Saints beatified His Excellency Carl Lampert, Apostolic Administrator for the Diocese of Innsbruck during World War II. After Hitler became Germany’s Chancellor (like our nation’s president), he set in wheels the annexation of Austria to help accomplish his vision of a pan-German state that would encompass all Germanic peoples regardless of national boundaries. Despite huge popular support for this, the Church by and large opposed this, and Bishop Lampert was a leader in this effort in his state of Tyrol. This set in motion the events that led to his martyrdom when the Nazis guillotined him on November 13 at 4:00 pm, along with Frs. Herbert Simoleit and Friederich Lorenz. He died saying, “Jesus and Mary.”

Bl. Carl was the youngest of seven children, and he lost his father at a very young age. At 20, he entered the Prince Archbishop Seminary in what is now Bressanone, Italy, but which was then Brixen, Austria, and received Holy Orders four years later. After a successful stint as a college chaplain, his bishop sent him to Rome to study canon law, where he not only earned his degree but the title “Monsignor.”

The Vatican made him essentially deputy bishop—or “pro-vicar”—of Innsbruck in 1936, and this is what led to his clashes with the Nazis. The regional governor was a rabid anti-Catholic Nazi named Franz Hofer, who began closing monasteries and convents and having consecrated persons arrested. Because Msgr. Lampert opposed him for this, he had him arrested. Then when diocesan priest, Bl. Otto Neururer, the first priest martyred by the Nazis, was murdered, Lampert had the news printed in the diocesan newspaper, which violated Nazi censorship rules, and so he was arrested again, and this time he was deported to first Dachau and then Sachenhausen, where his sentence consisted of hard labor. After three months, he was sent back to Dachau, where he spent another eight months. In August 1941, he was paroled to his home province. A year-and-a-half later, however, the Nazis once again arrested him on trumped up charges. In the ensuing trials, one court found him guilty, another innocent (after which the judge committed “suicide”), and another guilty again, after which the judges sentenced him to death. His beatification process has only been in process since 1997, which is a really short time. Fourteen years between the start of a process and beatification is really the blink of an eye.

Passing on a prayer request

2011-12-09T10:54:00.000-08:00

I saw this prayer request via e-mail. It seems worth sharing. See what you think. And if you have the time and want to do a spiritual work of mercy, please pray for this soul.

Oh, Lord, heal this man’s soul. Heal his brokenness. Heal the damage. Heal the hurt, the shame, the fear, the wounds, and let him know to cast those on Your holy wounds, Lord. Let him know and feel the love You have for him, the plans for hope and welfare You have for him (cf. Jer 29:11), and that You have had a plan for him since before the dawn of time (cf., Jer 1:5; Eph 1:1-5). Let him know it’s OK to come in from the cold, that there are people who love him and want him to finally be happy. They want him to know that things can’t bring happiness. Only You can, You and the love You represent, the love You pour out through the gifts You gave us in baptism and confirmation, where they, of You, Holy Spirit, became full-fledged and powerful and activated in our souls. And that among these gifts are joy, love, peace, true happiness, and the grace to be truly happy with You in heaven for eternity.

Help us to show him, despite everything, the love we have for him and that awaits for him in ever greater abundance if only he will turn, to us, and most especially to You. Help him to resist his urge to push us away, Lord. Help him to welcome and fold himself into our embrace.

And Guadalupana, you told Juan Diego that you would protect him in the loving embrace of the crook of your arms, that you would enfold us in your protective mantle. Obtain from your Son the favor we now beseech of you, that He would expel the demons that torment and oppress and harass [Name], O Blessed Lady. Obtain from your divine Son deliverance from the demons that haunt and torment your beloved son [Name]. Pray for him, Madonna. Pray that he be healed, and pray a prayer of protection for [his wife]. Obtain for her from your Son strength, protection, and peace. Shield their beautiful child from the damage to her soul that this separation will otherwise bring. Protect this beautiful being made in God’s image and likeness from the wickedness and snares of the devil that too often situations like this put children into.

O Lord, You tell us in Malachi 4 You hate divorce. Let not [Name] sin again, Lord. Let him not tempt Your wrath. Give him a proper fear of You so he will not carry about this diabolical plan, this tempted plan, this evil plan, this plan that can come to no good.

Free Your servant [Name], whose namesake was so devoted to You and was thus made so powerful, thus showing forth so strongly Your power. Show Your power now, we humbly beseech Thee, O God of Power and Might, O Lord of Hosts. Thy will be done. Keep him safe from every foreign power. Restore him, we beg of Thee, O God, and renew in him a peaceful devotion so that he may love You with his heart and may serve You zealously with his works, may glorify You with praises and may magnify You with his life. Let [Name] know the justice and goodness of you, God our Father, and let him abjure the pride, anger, hurt, and resentment that feed on his soul to the detriment of all who love him.

Hear, O God of Israel, lover of human salvation, the prayer of your Apostles Peter and Paul and all the saints who, by Your grace, emerged as victors over the Evil One. Through their loving and tender intercession, may [Name] be liberated from the prince of darkness’ wiles and temptations and provocations toward self-pity and inwardness. Hear, holy God, the groanings of us, Your supplicants. Do not suffer your son [Name] to labor under this pain and darkness anymore. Do not suffer your servant [Name], whom Christ redeemed by His Precious, Sacred Blood, to labor under the sin that makes him captive of the father of lies. Do not suffer him, a temple of Your Holy Spirit by virtue of his baptism and confirmation, to allow into that temple through his actions the spirits that would damage him beyond hope.

Lord Jesus Christ, through Your overcoming of the temptation in the wilderness and through Your victory over death on the cross, You have given hope to all mankind. Give hope and peace and love to [Name] in this hour of his need, we humbly beseech Thee, O merciful God. For You alone are holy, Lord, You alone are the Highest, You alone are the Lord, Jesus Christ, Who lives and reigns with God the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever unto ages. Amen.

Mary, you who are the geberah to your Son, Who is King of kings and Lord of lords, you who are Theotokos, as defined by Your Son’s Bride, the Church, you who instill so much fear into the hearts of demons and all who do evil, do thou, we beseech thee, by God’s almighty power and through the honor shown you by Our Lord Jesus Christ – Who fulfills the law perfectly, including the commandment to honor His parents, and we understand that the Hebrew word for “honor, kaboda/kabbed literally means to glorify – that He can refuse you nothing you ask for the sake of His greater glory. And since nothing pleases Him more than the return of the prodigal, of the finding of the lost sheep, of the conversion of a lost soul (cf. Luke 15:7), please ask Him for that which will cause the greatest rejoicing in heaven, the return of our brother [Name] to his rightful place with his family and to his duties as an adopted son of God (cf. Gal 4:5), as he was fearfully made in the Triune God’s image and likeness.

Help him see that this is where his dignity lies, not in booze, not in womanizing, not in material possessions, or anything else, but in Jesus, as a son of God through adoption by virtue of Jesus’ blood, shed for him.

And, Lord Jesus, let that knowledge pierce his wounded heart just as St. Longinus sword pierced Your own Sacred Heart while You were lifted on the cross. Furthermore, may that knowledge thereby draw him into Your Sacred Heart, where he can find the healing he needs and be hid from the malignant enemy. Please, Lord Jesus, we humbly beg and beseech these things of You in Your Holy and Heavenly Name. God’s will be done and not ours. Amen.

St. Gemma, so powerful in your prayers against Satan, pray for us. Bl. John Paul II, pray for us. St. Therese of Lisieux, pray for us. Bl. Mother Teresa, pray for us. Lord Jesus Christ, only Son of the Father, hear our prayer offered jointly by us in Your Name. Amen.

It's a great day for a feast day

2011-12-08T11:21:00.000-08:00

A Happy Feast of the Immaculate Conception to you and yours. If you think that the Immaculate Conception is when Mary conceived Jesus or have problems with it, etc., then please read here. It's quite persuasive and well-done.

The meaning of Advent

2011-12-06T06:19:00.000-08:00

We often hear of the "meaning of Christmas." What about the period leading up to it, though, Advent? What is its meaning?

As we prepare for Christmas, it is important that we find time for self-contemplation and carry out an honest assessement of our lives. May we be enlightened by a ray of the light that comes from Bethlehem, the ligh of He who is "the Greatest" and Himself small, He Who is "the Strongest" but became weak. ~ Benedict XVI, Angelus address, Sunday, December 4, 2011

Reason for the silence in November

2011-12-01T05:46:00.000-08:00

One reason people regularly check this blog is for the saints news features. The site was silent for October, however, because I was in Rome leading a group of pilgrims. We got to have Mass with Joseph Cardinal Zen, see Florence, and do so many other wonderful things that could not have been planned if we tried. Truly magnificent. So October and November will be posted together tomorrow. Until then, have a blessed and fruitful Advent!

Bl. Miguel Pro and Liberation Theology: Kindred souls?

2011-12-01T05:36:00.000-08:00

Patrick Madrid has this excellent post on his website about Bl. Miguel Pro. In response to a question in the combox about whether Bl. Miguel Pro was aligned with Liberation Theology, a heretical movement within the Church, I wrote the following:

"Liberation Theology" as such didn't develop until at least 30 years after Bl. Miguel Pro's death. The term wasn't even coined until 1971. Bl. Miguel's concern was for the poor and oppressed, especially the religiously oppressed (which was just about every faithful Catholic at the time). In other words, he was simply a good priest. The LT movement may have adopted him as a patron of sorts, but to me, that's simply expedient and convenient. It allows them to pretend at a veneer of orthodox respectability by claiming as their own one who probably never would have acceded to their bad theology, disobedience, and dissent. Am I wrong? I'm open to being corrected if so.

If you want to learn more about Bl. Miguel Pro, be sure to get the small, easy-to-read biography from TAN, titled, imaginatively enough, Blessed Miguel Pro. There's also his bio and that of another Cristero martyr, Bl. Jose Luis Sanchez del Rio in 39 New Saints You Should Know.

Catholic comedy and "Mass Appeal"

2011-11-14T10:50:00.000-08:00

Saw this today in CMN's newsletter and found it fit for reposting.

The pilot episode of an original CatholicTV sitcom “Mass Confusion” will premier Thanksgiving night at 8:30 (Eastern) on the CatholicTV Network. Greg and Jennifer Willits, co-hosts of The Catholics Next Door, a daily three-hour talk show on Sirius XM’s The Catholic Channel and Mac and Katherine Barron from Catholics is a Small Town blog wrote the pilot and star in the show. The shows about two Catholic families, each with a bunch of kids,” explained Willits. “It’s about Jennifer and me with our kids, and our good friends Mac and Katherine Barron with their kids, and of course hilarity ensues.”

Father Robert Reed, who heads up CatholicTV believes that the show is a real winner. “This type of programming has never been attempted,” explained Father Reed. “Through Mass Confusion we’re bringing wholesome, funny and entertaining content to families that are hungry for this type of show.”

For more information see: www.CatholicTV.com

From the, "Why not? I have nothing else to lose" department

2011-10-10T06:06:00.000-07:00

Based on this, the Dalai Lama seems to have given up any hope he ever had of getting back to his homeland or that the Chinese leaders would ever begin to act like rational human beings, rather than the power-at-all-costs monsters that they are. The Chinese don't take well to people who make them "lose face." Do you know what, though? It's often the only thing that works with them. Take the situation reported by Steve Mosher. He recounted in a recorded talk how a Chinese official was giving a news conference concerning China's forced abortion policy. Said Mandarin was asked whether if the one baby allowed a couple was born with birth defects, would they be allowed to euthanize that children. And the guy essentially said the court of international opinion hadn't made itself known on that. Now USAID, Peter Singer, PETA, and Planned Parenthood may have no issue with that sorta thing, but most people would. So China wants to save face and not be known for a nation with the barbarous policies that it has.

Readers, please tell me

2011-09-25T08:04:00.000-07:00

Where are you from? If you from a foreign country, what is the nearest major city? If you live in the US or Canada, from what state or province do you view this page?

Also, what brought you here? Do you read regularly? What are your interests? Do you agree or disagree with the things you've found posted here?

Any feedback would be great and highly appreciated.

In Christ,
Look in the Mirror

In Germany, the Pope makes a good point

2011-09-25T08:00:00.000-07:00

With so much of the ridiculousness (and here) of contemporary German Catholicism swirling around him (and the ridiculousness of contemporary Catholicism period), you almost are tempted to give B16 points for simply showing up for this visit to his homeland, especially since it is to the heart of German Protestantism and atheism. That he is able to do so and move the ball forward to the extent he is perpetually able, I find remarkable.

However, in this address, he makes a point that seems to bear more reflection:

Faced with a new form of Christianity, which is spreading with overpowering missionary dynamism, sometimes in frightening ways, the mainstream Christian denominations often seem at a loss. This is a form of Christianity with little institutional depth, little rationality and even less dogmatic content, and with little stability.

For those who can't figure what he's on about, he's talking about the evangelical movement, the new/emergent/emerging church movement, the megachurch movement, etc. It seems to me that evangelicalism as it is becoming will become the death knell of Christianity in the future. So much of it is founded on emotionalism. There is little taste for doctrine as such. Holding something as dogmatic is itself often held as anathema, and much of it is about what religion gives "me," and not what I bring worship, honor, service, and praise to my God, "who art all good and worthy of all my love."

I once had a fundamentalist criticize the Church's not inviting to the eucharistic table those who simply said, "I want to be Catholic." Why, he asked, do you make catechumens take anywhere from six months to two years of instruction to become officially Catholic? Well, simply put, it's because doctrine matters. It would be like saying back at one of the early Councils, "Eh, who cares if Jesus is wholly God and wholly man or simply God under the appearance of man or God's highest creature?" Had the Church not insisted on the the meeting of Christ's divinity and humanity as the hypostatic union, Christianity would today be a dead letter. Had the outcome of the Council of Nicaea not been what it was, the same would be true.

And yet the growth in Evangelicalism as a "non-denominational" denomination is an outgrowth of an idea that such dogmatism is no longer needed, if it ever was (and let's not kid ourselves: Calvary Chapel, etc., they're all very denominational with a strict set of beliefs, yet beliefs that can morph and change as times and circumstances require with no reference to the truth, e.g., Ron Bell and Rick Warren et al). It is not doctrine that is important, we're told, but one's personal relationship with Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. How else to explain, "Once saved, always saved," or, "I'm a good person, and Jesus and I love each other, and thus I will go to heaven," or "If Jesus was here today, He wouldn't bother with XYZ. He would just tell us to love one another."

If that's the case, why bother? It's an offshoot of what Miss Flannery O'Conner once said about the Eucharist: "Well, if it's a symbol, to hell with it." Dogma and doctrine are the glue that bind us together with our predecessors in the Faith, and they ensure we will pass on the faith handed down whole by the apostles to our progeny and beyond.

Megachurches and the new or emergent church movement may look impressive on paper now, but they are ultimately nothing more than today's fad, a flash in the pan. They are, in short, just another form of Modernism. Thus, they will only further undermine institutional Christianity than has already happened.

God help us and save us from this, please.

I ask my Iranian friends again ...

2011-09-21T11:10:00.000-07:00

If even half of this is true, I ask my Persian friends again: When will you come to realize that Islam is not incidental to your woes but the direct cause of them.

Bl. Bartolomeo Longo, pray for us.

Boy, did I need to read this. Do you?

2011-09-21T11:01:00.000-07:00

This comes at just the right time. Are you just incredibly busy these days? I am, man, I tell ya. My life is way too stressful, and I'm looking for ways to cut back.

Let's see:

A huge campaign at work with even bigger pressure coming from those above me and those above them and those above them, and so on.
A manuscript that is due November 1, where my word limit is 40,000 words, and I'm about 10,000 words above that. And cutting words for me -- details, really -- is a hateful thing. Hateful. Still, I have to do that.
A pilgrimage to Rome that I'm leading that starts November 3. There are still so many loose ends to wrap up, it's mind numbing.
There are yard projects to finish before winter (rabbit hutch, winterizing the chicken coop), and there's no time to do so. Plus, my wife is pressing me to cull all our animals, which I don't want to do a) because I like our animals, especially my rabbits and b) I want to see if I can get animals alive through the winter.
I teach CCD.
I lead my parish's Bible study.
I do our family's grocery shopping.
I'm out of certain types of animal feed and am scrambling to feed them each day until I can get to the feed store.
We're (I'm) caring for our weekend neighbors farm animals during the week.

It's just nuts. So tonight, as much as I want to just work on my MS when I get home tonight, I'm going to play with one of the kids. That article I linked to above clinched it for me. Did it have any effect on you?

Three cheers for Lichtenstein

2011-09-19T10:59:00.000-07:00

This is great. Somewhere in Western Europe they have stood up for life. However, not to be Debbie Downer, but it was just a six percent margin. How long will the culture of death liberal Catholicism that runs rampant in neighboring Austria and Switzerland be held at bay on this issue? In any event, a win's a win. Kudos to His Majesty Prince Alois, Liechtenstein's monarch. His threat of veto must have had a very positive influence.

Big Brother is watching you

2011-09-16T05:35:00.000-07:00

Can you believe this? How have we devolved to this level?

You know what the funny thing about this sordid situation is? The very people who have set this in motion are those who cry "Christian Taliban!" and "theocracy" at the drop of a hat. When did an established Christian state -- Catholic or otherwise -- ever do something like branding a 3-year-old, thus jeopardizing or at least limiting their entire future? Dear God, help us.

What do you do?

2011-09-15T20:38:00.000-07:00

Have you ever felt your efforts on behalf of Christ are so much rubbish in the face of your manifest sins? What do you do in response? Truly, I am very deeply interested in your thoughts.

In His powerful and holy name.

Has the fat lady sung for Pat Robertson

2011-09-15T05:52:00.000-07:00

In the Gospel of Matthew, Our Lord makes it very clear that "what God has joined, let no man rent asunder [i.e., tear apart]. In other words, man and woman upon marrying become a fabric. They are interwoven together like threads in a garment. And Our Saviour says the only reason to part is for "unchastity," from the Greek porneia, which is either taken to mean serious sexual unchastity or, as the Catholic Church has historically defined it, that the marriage was never valid in the first place.

Now Rev. Pat Robertson is saying you can divorce your spouse if he or she has Alzheimer's. What about "for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, forsaking all others"? How is the sola scriptura (i.e., the Bible as the sole rule of faith) authorized to overturn two millenia of Christian teaching? Where does he find this in Tradition or Scripture?

As depressing and disappointing as this is, I think it clearly shows what happens when we become a magisterium unto ourselves or reject the Church's legitimate magisterium. Eventually, traditional doctrine will slough off to become a religion made in the image of man and not a reflection of the one, true, triune God.

Please pray for this man's return to orthodoxy.

Hints of sunshine poking through the forest's darkness

2011-09-14T10:55:00.000-07:00

I tend to be very cynical and fatalistic. However, Kathryn Lopez is right: There are signs of hope. It's not that Bob Turner shares my party affiliation. It's that he favors a traditional worldview that the so-called intelligentsia view as not only passe but bigotted. It's not. It's the truth, it's God's plan, and we ignore it our peril.

Canada has gone insane

2011-09-13T11:01:00.000-07:00

Peter Singer must be proud. Taking the idea that newborns aren't persons and are thus not protected by the law, a judge in Alberta has found innocent a woman who admitted she had strangled ... a mother strangled ... her newborn baby. See more here.

New contraceptives even more dangerous than before

2011-09-13T10:59:00.000-07:00

Hey, ladies, does getting a blood clot sound good to you? If not, see here.

What does this say to you?

2011-09-13T10:55:00.000-07:00

The BBC reports that more Chinese attend church on Sundays than in all of Europe. Belloc famously said, "Europe is the Faith." Now maybe China owns that distinction, just it's starting to own everything else.

See here for more information.

9/11 aftermath - bit of unknown history

2011-09-12T11:06:00.000-07:00

When the jihadists make a huge attack such as 9/11, etc., research the date. If you do, you'll usually see that something significant -- and usually bad for their side -- happened on that date, even if it was centuries ago. It's as if they see their choosing these dates as both advancing their cause and exacting revenge.

September 11 is no different. Vienna was theirs. It was in their grasp. That is, until Poland's King Jan (i.e., John) Sobieski came to the rescue. Christendom was saved. It also marks the the advent of drinking coffee in the West, but that's a different story.

Read more from Fr. Z in this short article here.

Warning: All potential converts to Catholicism

2011-09-12T06:02:00.000-07:00

I'm reading this conversion story. As I'm doing so, it calls to mind a warning I'd like to give all thinking about coming into the Catholic Church. You've come to the point where you want to call the local parish and ask the priest some question. After you explain your situation, the first question you should ask, however, is, "Do you sometimes recommend that people should just strive to be the best Anglican they can be, the best Methodist, the best Muslim/Zoroastrian/Taoist, etc.? Or are you convinced the Catholic Church is the one, true Church founded by Jesus Christ on the apostles, and that all her teachings have been handed down from by the Christ through the apostles and their successors, especially the successors of Peter?" If he answers the former, thank him for his time and call another parish. Keep going until you find someone who affirms the latter. If he affirms the latter from the get go, proceed accordingly and good luck. Our prayers are with you!

RIP - the last living connection to Bl. Emperor Karl I of Austria has gone

2011-09-07T19:44:00.000-07:00

From my friend Br. Nathan Cochran, OSB, vice postulator for the cause of Emperor Karl I of Austria:

The family of Archduke Felix of Austria has requested the prayers for the repose his soul. He died earlier today, and his grandson reports: “His death was very quick. He didn’t suffer at all. He just fell into a deep sleep. He was laughing and praying before he fell asleep and died.”

Archduke Felix was the last surviving child of Bl. Emperor Karl of Austria, King of Hungary and his wife the Servant of God Empress Zita of Austria, Queen of Hungary. He was born at Schoenbrunn Palace in 1916, and was married to Anne, the Duchess of Arenberg, who preceded him in death. He was an industrialist who made his long-term home in Mexico City. He had a marvelous sense of humor and spoke English with a Brooklyn truck driver’s accent.

May the soul of Archduke Felix and all the souls of the faithfully departed through the mercy of God rest in peace. Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them. Amen.

Just curious

2011-09-03T22:41:00.000-07:00

Is anyone actually reading this blog? My "stats" page tells me I get several hits most days (and, frankly, that's not why I do it, i.e., to get hits; I write because I need to). However, I notice a lot of my traffic seems to come from something called "TrafficFaker," which makes me wonder. Anyway, make it a great Sunday and have a blessed week.

Had you ever heard about this? I hadn't.

2011-09-03T20:07:00.000-07:00

Have you ever heard about the devshirme, Christian boys -- and only Christian boys -- kidnapped/conscripted every 4-5 years in the Ottoman Empire and given highly specialized education, privileges, rank, and all the rest, although they were essentially slaves and they had to convert to Islam to stay in the system. Why do historians and such take such glee in throwing the Crusades and Inquisition in the face of the Church (even though the conventional wisdom on these is largely so very wrong) and say nothing, absolutely nothing about such an attrocity that lasted for several hundred years?

"Well, they were Catholics. They deserved it." Most weren't. Most were Greek or Serbian Orthodox. "Oh, well, whatever. They were Christians, and Orthodox ain't much better than Catholics, are they?" Why did they deserve it, though? "Because they were Christians. Don't you get it? They deserved whatever they got.... And you'll deserve whatever you get, too, buster."

"They will hate you for My Name's sake."

The approach of 9/11

2011-09-02T20:55:00.000-07:00

On September 11, 2001, I was getting ready to go into work at the state Capitol. My boss called me and sounded very strange. "You can't go in," he told me. "What?" I asked him in an incredulous tone. "Why?" Thoughts started racing through my mind. "You haven't seen the television?" he asked me. "No," I replied. "Go turn it on. There's been an attack in New York, they think it might be a terrorist attack, and they're worried about an attack on the Capitol. They're not letting anyone go in."

Now I was really confused. I sorta stumbled to the television, wanting to see the news out of curiousity, not wanting to because if it was big enough to close down our distant although major state Capitol, it must be really, really big.

I turned on the set. The first tower had just been slammed into. Confusion, panic, fear, incredulousness, we saw this in the people pictured live at the scene, in the people broadcasting the news, and in those of us watching. Then the next plane hit. As I remember it, it was about 9:30 a.m. when the first tower collapsed (whether Eastern time zone or my own, I don't recall).

I couldn't believe it. This was one of the Twin Towers. When I was a kid -- I think it was in 1977 -- the remake of King Kong came out with Jessica Lange. The promotional posters showed that iconic shot of King Kong atop a skyskraper, and for the 1977 Kong, that skyscraper was one of the Twin Towers. I mean, c'mon, give me a break: This is the building up which climbed King Kong. For a brief instant, the part of me that is still 10-years-old thought, 'If it was strong enough for Kong, how could it collapse, right?'

But before our disbelieving eyes, it did collapse. Both of them did. In between the planes hitting and the final collapse, we saw it all, especially the people. No, not the people who were covered with dust, who were injured or grossly maimed or stumbling in a daze toward what they hoped was safety (but, hey, at that point, who actually knew?). No, it wasn't them. It was the people jumping. The most basic instinct in life is not food, is not sex, is not shelter. It is survival. Only something that is more motivating like love of Christ or love of country will make a person willingly give up their life. Those who jumped, they were not giving up their lives. They were doing the only thing that might have possibly saved their lives, the only thing that made sense. Think of jumping off a high dive or even from a two storie window. For the majority of us, that's a frightening or at least unnatural prospect. Now think of being 52, 78 floors above the ground. How bad, how hellish must it be behind you that you look at the prospect of jumping from that height as the better choice? Or was it fear, even cowardice, a fear of what it would be like to burn and die from what is coming toward you, so let's jump? And, again, how bad, how hellish must it have been behind you, to see that nightmare slowly creeping up like a demon, prowling its way closer, inch by inch, smacking its lips in anticipation of devouring you?

As I a boy, I lived for a time in Iraq. It was one of the best times of my life. I loved it there. And I grew to love Muslims there. I loved their generosity, their openness, their hearty laughter, their fatalistic look at life, their kindness, their common sense that meshed with their ability to be absolutely maddening. Growing up, I always stuck up for Muslims. As an adult, I did the same thing.

Until that day. Until 9/11. Until I saw celebrating in places not far from where I had lived as a boy, cretins dancing a jig glorifying death on cafe tabless and in the streets. Until I heard nary a word of condemnation from supposedly moderate Muslims. Until I heard cries of, "You deserved this." Until I heard the cries of mothers now unwillingly left to raise their children on their own. Until I heard the sobs of grown men over the loss of their soul mates, of fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, godparents, godfamilies, and even mere admiring acquaintances. Until I heard my own sobs, until I felt my own anger, which has not failed to be felt, to be acutely felt each and every time in the last 10 years I have seen those damnable scenes, listened with my soul and with horror to the retelling of stories of lives lost and forever damaged by the decision of 20 some insane men to serve as Satan's agents and to do so in the name of an all good God. Truly, this must rank as the greatest single blasphemy ever committed.

We are supposed to turn the other cheek. We are supposed to bless our enemies, to love them, and to bless those that curse you. By that measure, I obviously have a long way to go toward sanctity; it is not something of which I'm proud. I suppose that will change when I get over the disbelief that something like this could have happened 10 years ago on Sunday. God help us. God forgive us. God lead us, and God unite us all the world over under the love that is Jesus Christ and within the secure embrace of His Bride, the one, holy, apostolic, Catholic Church. We pray these things in the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ and through the intercession of His Blessed Mother, the Virgin Mary.

Beatification and canonization news for August

2011-09-02T05:25:00.000-07:00

Funds needed

The cash-strapped canonization cause for Bl. Joseph Vaz has issued an appeal for donations. According to Asia News, Bishop Fernando Vianney of Kandy, president of the bishops’ Secretariat which deals with the canonization cause explained the Secretariat has submitted miracles to the postulator general, but the process of canonization of Bl. Joseph is at a “critical” stage.

To find out more, fill out the form at this page: http://www.kandydiocese.net/contact/

You can send donations to:

Bl. Joseph Vaz Secretariat

Bishop’s House

873 Peradeniya Road

Kandy, Sri Lanka

Sanctuary of Bl. Joseph Vaz

413, Sancoale

P.O.

Cortalim

403710 Goa

India

Guatemalan pilgrimage

To help promote the canonization cause of the Servant of God Fr. Stanley Rother, 38 pilgrims from Arkansas and Oklahoma journeyed to the small village of Santiago Atitlan, Guatemala for the 30th anniversary of his death. On July 28, 1981, he was shot in the rectory of the parish here that he served for the last 13 years of his life.

According to the Little Rock diocesan newspaper Arkansas Catholic, Fr. Rother “was a farm boy from an ordinary town in western Oklahoma. He struggled as a student in his first year of studies at the seminary. He served the first five years of his priestly ministry without much notice in a series of little known Oklahoma towns. Then everything changed when Father Rother answered the call to serve at the mission in Guatemala, finding his heart’s vocation as a missionary to the Tzutuhil people.

“Rother was only 46 when he was shot to death in his rectory. “Padre Apla’s” as he was called in Tzutuhil, was so beloved by the people of Santiago Atitlan that they requested permission to remove his heart before his body was returned for burial to Okarche, Okla. His heart, both figuratively and literally, will always remain with his beloved Tzutuhil as part of the church’s altar.”

New Doctors in the offing?

Not counting St. Juan de Avila, who is a shoe-in, 17 saints are under consideration for declaration as doctors of the Church. According to the Chiesa website of the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, the candidates include six women: St. Veronica Giuliani, St. Hildegard of Bingen, St. Gertrude of Helfta, St. Bridget of Sweden, St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, and Bl. Julian of Norwich.

Besides St. Juan, the men include: St. Gregory of Narek, St. John Bosco, Ss. Cyril and Methodius, St. Lorenzo Giustiniani, St. Antonino of Florence, St. Thomas of Villanova, St. Ignatius of Loyola, St. Vincent de Paul, St. Louis-Marie Grunion de Montfort, and St. Bernardino of Siena.

Saint once was lost but now is found

In early August, a lead container was uncovered thought to contain remains of St. Edburg, who was the daughter of a pagan King and born in around 620 AD.

According to the UK paper Daily Mail, "St Edburg was a nun at Castor, Northamptonshire, under her sister St Cuneburga, before building a monastery on land given to her by her father King Penda of Mercia.

She died in 650 AD and from 1182 her relics were kept at Bicester Priory, Oxfordshire, until 1500 when Pope Alexander VI ordered her remains to be removed and relocated to Flanders in Belgium."

The tomb was located when construction workers had made excavations for a large redevelopment project in Bicester, England.

Mass for the “Grunt Padre”

Finally, on Tuesday, September 6, Archbishop Timothy P. Broglio of the US Archdiocese for the Military Services will celebrate a memorial Mass in the crypt church at Washington, DC’s Basilica of the National Conception for the Servant of God Vincent R. Capodanno, a Maryknoll Father and Navy chaplain who was killed performing his duties for soldiers in Vietnam.

Women's suffrage

2011-08-28T12:50:00.000-07:00

Thursday, August 25, was the 91st anniversary of American women gaining the right to vote. Here is the story of my meager brush with that moment in history.

It was election day in Chicago, 1995, and I was living in Lincoln Park. Daley's opponent was a clown. Literally That was actually his profession. Anyway, I hadn't voted that day. My choice was between Daley and a clown, so I wasn't sure I was going to make it to the polls that day (and I always vote, so that would have been a pretty big deal).

On my way home from work that day, shuffling down the street toward me was this woman, old enough to be the little sister of Methusaleh. I had never seen her before, but she stopped me, a perfect stranger, and asked, "Have you voted yet?" I hemmed and hawed but basically said no.

Then she told me, "The first time I voted was the first election in which women had the right to vote." That would have been the presidential election in 1920 that put Warren Harding in the White House. She said she'd voted for Calvin Coolidge, even though he was only the VP candidate. Who knows? Maybe she voted for Harding because she liked Coolidge. Back then you had to be 21 to vote, right? So she had to have been born in at least 1899, and it was 1995. That meant she was at least 96.

In parting, she told me, "You make sure you vote," and I did.

Anyway, it was an amazing moment that, to have met someone who was amongst the first American women to vote and certainly one of the last alive. I was very lucky, and that night, I couldn't get it out of my mind what an incredible moment that had been.

A great way to start your Sunday ... or any day

2011-08-28T09:17:00.000-07:00

Do yourself a favor: Listen to this. It's a great way to start off your Sunday. Oh, and ignore the first 30 seconds where Giovanni is speaking his native tongue, Italian. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLkePftWjCE Indeed, check out Giovanni's channel. He's a master and a gift to both the Church and the world.

What you will never regret

2011-08-28T09:13:00.000-07:00

In the days of college and early adulthood, I was promiscuous. My numbers -- my bedpost notches, if we're going to be even more crass -- are above those of the average heterosexual male (but a pale, barely distinguishable shadow of those experienced by upwards of 30-plus percent). I am only in vague contact with two of those women, both of whom I dated seriously, one of which to the point of engagement. She turned 44 yesterday, the other sometime earlier in the month. Happy birthday, sweeties. Seems all my significant girlfriends were born in August. Wonder what that means. Hmmm.

Anyway, I've a relative who's just graduated from college. She has committed several sins against chastity of late, and it makes me sad. She had such an excellent formation from her mother, and her siblings were good roll models in this respect, too. And yet there's this man who she knows is just using her for cheap thrills, and she doesn't care. That's what sin does to you. At first you're horrified by what you've done. Then it becomes habitual and you think, "What's the big deal."

She wrote recently to say loves me, and I responded thusly:

I love you, too, sweetheart. More than you can know, and that's why I have been praying and sacrificing for you per our last conversation. Please trust me. Don't repeat my mistakes, honey. Please be that rare young person who simply trusts the counsel of those older and more experienced, we who look back on our past with weeping sadness and regret at the tricks of ol' hairy hooves into which helped us all too eagerly fall. Remember, always remember, keep in mind constantly, the sacrifices your mom offered for you from the moment you were born, and especially those she made as she drew to that door. Don't let them be in vain, Ang. If you do, it will only be the spiritual equivalent of defecating on her grave as a piece of performance art with a large crowd in attendance.

As I have constantly told my teenage CCD students, "You will never regret your chastity, but you will always regret your giving in to your lust."

If you don't understand the philosophy behind chastity or the Church's teachings on this subject, then let me suggest you look into the Theology of the Body. Chastity is not some white knuckle thing where you have to squirm, grin, and bear it until that day -- which may or may not come -- when you get married. It is a gift, a beautiful gift, and it even exists in marriage, although in a different form. But to violate it, to fritter it away, it leads to so much else that is just poisonous in your life and your soul.

Please, take it from someone who knows.

Beatification and saints news from July

2011-08-05T04:49:00.000-07:00

The saints and beati news over the last month has been pretty thin, but here is what we have:

On June 28, Pope Benedict XVI issued a decree of heroic virtue for Mother Laura Meozzi, who is now known as Ven. Laura Meozzi. She was from a noble Florentine family and went to Rome around 1895 to complete her medical studies, but while in school, she discerned a call to join the Salesian Sisters, and from 1898 through 1921, she worked in Sicily, before moving to Poland. When she arrived she had nothing, but trusting totally in God's providence, she made it known she would give help to whoever needed it: homeless, sick, persecuted, prostitutes, wayward children, orphaned and abandoned children, etc. When WWII broke out, she could have gone home to Italy, but she stayed behind. Some of her sisters were shipped off to concentration camps. After the war, she had to move further west in Pogrzebien, Poland, and she reestablished the novitiate in a castle the Germans had used to exterminate women and children. This is interesting because the Church has always gone to great lengths to establish itself in, say, former pagan temples or has built over these to physically demonstrate the triumph of Christ. So here, Ven. Laura established the novitiate of an order that helped mothers and children in a place where the occultic Nazis had murdered them.

It was announced in early July that at long last, the beatification cause of Queen Catherine of Aragon looks like it's getting off the ground. Here is where you can find more: http://katharineofaragon.com/wordpress/

On July 1, the Sisters of St. Francis of the Neumann Communities of Syracuse, NY, announced the Vatican medical board that rules on miracles says there is no medical explanation for the reversal of a woman's allegedly fatal medical condition. Bl. Mariane's cause still must pass two more Vatican examinations before it is presented to the pope for final approval for canonization. The first is by a board of theologians who will determine if the healing was the result of prayer for Mother Marianne's intercession, and then by a committee of cardinals and bishops who will examine the entire case and give a final verdict.

On July 4, it was announced that the beatification cause of Ven. Pius XII, the Pope during WWII, may have its miracle. An Italian woman named Maria Esposito had contracted Stage IV Burkitt's lymphoma, a rare and particularly aggressive form of cancer. She suffered setback after setback, and after her family and she prayed for his intercession, she not only survived but was totally cured after a single, six-week cycle of chemotherapy. Her own oncologist says this is inexplicable.

Why reinvent the wheel?

2011-07-31T07:12:00.000-07:00

Normally, I try to do my own thing here, but I thought the following commentary by Fr. Robert Sirico and comments by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf (in bold and in red) were so spot on, I'd simply copy and paste them. However ...

I once read that in 1948, the average federal tax burden on a family of four in the United States was $0.02 of every $1.00. Think about that. Let it soak in. Go find your pay stub. Look at what you paid to the federal government there and year-to-date. Now aggregate this to all the families in the United States. Is it any wonder why so many families in the United States are convinced the wife/mother have to work in order to simply make ends meet, much less get ahead? (And, yes, indulge themselves in SeaDoos, etc.)

And it has undermined the family in ways non-economic, as well. One of my fraternity brother's wife left him for a man with whom she worked. It was devastating. Yes, men have been doing to their wives this for eons, and this sort of thing could and maybe even would have happened given what must have been problems in the relationship. However, how much more of this goes on because couple decides "We must have this extra income for XYZ reason," and at some point down the road, husband and wife fall into a rough patch, either spouse knows someone else at work who seems more attractive/attentive/whatever, they can't see that the rough patch is just a passing phase that will go, come back, and go again ad nauseam for the rest of their lives, and pretty soon, an affair is in full bloom, it gets discovered, and the family is destroyed. Add into the mix Paul VI's admonitions in Humanae Vitae of what would happen if birth control became widely available, and each of the gazillion studies that show the societal consequences of the breakup of the nuclear family come into sharper focus.

And so it makes me wonder: Why isn't the USCCB more firmly pressing for tax relief for families so moms don't feel they have to go to work but can stay in the home (as many working moms have told me is the case)? Why aren't they insisting that the portion of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that abolished the family wage or any family considerations when employers seek to remunerate their workers be repealed? Why is it -- or has it historically been -- "SPEND, SPEND, SPEND!", even though overwhelming evidence shows this does more harm than good? Why have we so blithely ignored 2 Thessalonians 3:10, where St. Paul commands us, "If anyone will not work, let him not eat"? When has that factored into the equation?

And, yes, you don't hear this sort of "SPEND, SPEND, SPEND!" mantra that led one wag to call the USCCB "the Democratic Party at prayer" as much anymore if at all. However, nothing has replaced it (or have I missed something)? In any event, I pray that what Fr. Sirico has written is becoming the conventional wisdom amongst Church types. Government spending on the poor is not bad, but if we're going to use precious tax resources for that purpose, they ought to be verifiably effective and we shouldn't protect government spending on the poor just because it's government spending on the poor.

Anyway, would love to know what you think about the following or the above.

The Church as the Bride of Caesar
July 27, 2011 4:15 P.M.
By Fr. Robert A. Sirico

It is telling that the Washington Post report on the religious Left’s Circle of Protection campaign for big government describes the effort as one that would “send chills through any politician who looks to churches and religious groups as a source of large voting blocs,” because, in fact, this is not an honest faith-inspired campaign to protect the “least of these” from Draconian government cuts, as claimed. It is a hyper-political movement that offers up the moral authority of churches and aid organizations to advance the ends of the Obama administration and its allies in Congress.

The Circle of Protection, led by Jim Wallis and his George Soros-funded Sojourners group, is advancing a false narrative based on vague threats to the “most vulnerable” if we finally take the first tentative steps to fix our grave budget and debt problems. For example, Wallis frequently cites cuts to federal food programs as portending dire consequences to “hungry and poor people.”

Which programs? He must have missed the General Accountability Office study on government waste released this spring, which looked at, among others, 18 federal food programs. These programs accounted for $62.5 billion in spending in 2008 for food and nutrition assistance. But only seven of the programs have actually been evaluated for effectiveness. Apparently it is enough to simply launch a government program, and the bureaucracy to sustain it, to get the Circle of Protection activists to sanctify it without end. Never mind that it might not be a good use of taxpayer dollars.

It is also telling that the group’s advertised “Evangelical, Roman Catholic, mainline Protestant, African-American, and Latino Christian leaders” who are so concerned about the poor and vulnerable in the current budget negotiations have so little to say about private charity, which approached $300 billion last year. [QUAERITUR: To what extent would a rise in interest rates coupled with the abolition of tax breaks for charitable giving impact help for the poor and other worthy efforts?] To listen to them talk, it is as if a prudent interest in reining in deficits and limiting government waste, fraud, and bloat would leave America’s poor on the brink of starvation. It is as if bureaucratic solutions, despite the overwhelming evidence of the welfare state’s pernicious effects on the family, are the only ones available to faith communities. This is even stranger for a group of people who are called to “love the neighbor” first and last with a personal commitment.

Although the Circle of Protection has been endorsed by a few Catholic bishops, the predictably left-leaning social justice groups, and Catholic Relief Services, the Catholic Church in America has long moved beyond the heady (and increasingly-distant) days of the 1980s when knee-jerk opposition to any reduction in government spending was the norm. That still holds, even if some of the staff and a few of the bishops at the Bishops’ Conference still imbibe such nostalgia.

The actions of Wallis and the co-signers of the Circle of Protection are only understandable in light of political, not primarily religious, aims. Wallis, after all, has been serving as self-appointed chaplain to the Democratic National Committee and recently met with administration officials to help them craft faith-friendly talking points for the 2012 election. And when Wallis emerged from that White House meeting, he crowed that “almost every pulpit in America is linked to the Circle of Protection … so it would be a powerful thing if our pulpits could be linked to the bully pulpit here.”

Think about that for a moment. Imagine if a pastor had emerged from a meeting with President George W. Bush and made the same statement. I can just imagine the howls of “Theocracy!” and “Christian dominionism!” that would echo from the mobs of Birkenstock-shod, tie-dyed, and graying church activists who would immediately assemble at the White House fence to protest such a blurring of Church and State.

But in the moral calculus of Jim Wallis and his Circle of Protection supporters, there’s no problem with prostrating yourself, your Church, and your aid organization before Caesar. As long as he’s on your side of the partisan divide.

— Rev. Robert A. Sirico is president and co-founder of the Acton Institute in Grand Rapids, Michigan

Transitions and my ever so brief brush with them

2011-07-23T08:52:00.000-07:00

Two developments took place over the last week.

The first and more cheerful of the two is that Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver has been named to take over the See of Philadelphia. This is good news. It means that he will get the red hat and that the bench of American red hats is very strong. I can't think of any previous US cardinal with whom I'd have been comfortable being elected pope. Now with ++Dolan and ++Chaput as probable papabile, that has changed. ++Dolan would be marvelous, but ++Chaput would be absolutely phenomenal. With the possible exception of Cardinal Burke, he is quite possibly the brightest light in the American episcopal firmament.

My friend knows him well and, until September 8, works for him. He loves playing racquetball, and once, when my friend related a story of how someone woman with whom he had spoken told him she had converted in her heart simply upon seeing some bishop in his episcopal finery, ++Chaput said, "Oh, yeah, [Name]. That happens all the time," and said it like it was no big deal.

In 2003, I took a trip to Rome. During Bl. John Paul II's pontificate, if you knew the right people and could pull the right strings, you could get in to his private morning Mass. We did and we pulled, but, alas, it was not to be, as we got a message upon returning to our pensione that, well, it was not to be.

Had we gone, Mass would have been followed by a small receiving line, where we would have had a chance to receive a rosary blessed by him and say a few words. I told myself that if I got a chance to say one thing to him, it would have been, "If you want to cement your legacy, Holy Father, make Archbishops Pell and Chaput cardinals." Because, you know, popes and such are always calling moi for such pearls of wisdom. Oi vay.

In any event, ahem, Bl. John Paul II did make ++Pell a cardinal, and now it looks as though B16 will do the same at some point with ++Chaput. So it looks like, despite my ever-growing pride, God agreed with my assessment, at least insofar as it is good for the Church to have these two men as pope-makers and possibly even popes themselves.

The second note, and decidedly sad, is that Dr. Warren Carrol, founder of Christendom College, Seton High School, and Seton Homeschooling and author of a multi-volume history of Catholicism, has passed away in Front Royal, VA, at age 79. Dr. Carrol helped keep aflame my love of history and enabled me to see there were perfectly rational explanations for things such as the Inquisition and Crusades, etc.

I never formally met him. My only encounter with him was this past May, when my sister-in-law graduated from Christendom. At a reception afterward, there he sat against the wall with his walker sipping pink punch. He had evidently suffered a stroke some time before, and like many stroke victims, didn't have full use of his motor abilities. The punch spilled on the floor, and I helped clean it up and saved what I could for his further consumption. I had no idea who this man was.

A few minutes later, my newly graduated suocera came up to me and asked, "Did you see that old man against the wall with his walker?" "Yeah." "That's Warren Carrol." "No kidding. He doesn't look so great." "Yeah, he's had a stroke." I resolved to go up and introduce myself, but he was no longer there. Thus my brush with a good man who did great things for the Church. Hooray for me. Ain't I just soooooo special. OK, let's not answer that question.

Movie review: My Name is Khan

2011-07-17T20:30:00.000-07:00

Ever since 9/11, I have burned with fury over what Muslims did to our nation that day. As I've written here, I've grown increasingly bewildered and frustrated and angry and scared over the actions of some Muslims, both against America and against my fellow Christians around the world. I am becoming acquainted with a religious in Pakistan, who tells me of the fear she encounters in dealing even with those Muslims whom she helps. Fear because one never can know when they will falsely accuse her of blasphemy against Muhammed or Islam.

However, tonight I realized how misplaced my growing and blanket antipathy of all Muslims has been misplaced, and the movie that did it for me is the remarkable-by-any-standard My Name is Khan.

This is a movie of great power and features tremendous acting. It has the complete menu one could want in a film: compelling, quick-paced, tragic, funny, uplifting, upbeat, tense ... In what is truly a masterwork, one experiences all of these emotions and feelings and then some.

The story centers on Rizvan Khan, an autistic man who comes to America. Through a tragic circumstance in his family, he sets out to tell the President of the United States, "My name is Khan, and I am not a terrorist."

This is a hard movie to describe, but suffice it to say you know a drama is special when it clocks in at two hours, forty-one minutes, and it doesn't at all seem that long. Every moment, the acting and story captivate you. Why wasn't Shahrukh Khan, the actor who plays the title role, nominated for an Academy Award? You never for a moment believe this is simply some actor playing someone with autism. Also, Rizvan's falling for the female lead Mandira is made so believable because of the incredible performance by the Indian actress Kajol. From top to bottom, this is a really well-done film. I can't say enough good things about it.

As for the effect it had on me, it made me realize my growing prejudice against all Muslims -- what else can I honestly call it? -- is no more rational than the jihadists hatred against "infidels" like me.

This isn't to say I am no less concerned about the jihadists or those who would make my children and me dhimmi. Not one bit. Only 10 years later, I realize I need to keep a more balanced view and approach. Being vigilant doesn't mean you become a vigilante or any shade thereof.

See this movie. You won't regret it.

Catholicism and homosexuality

2011-07-17T20:02:00.000-07:00

This post is by a homosexual man who does not choose that distinction as his first identity. In the piece, he has many compelling things to say.

For instance, this chestnut puts it better than I've ever seen it put, and I've been working on this subject for probably 10+ years:

Is it hard to be gay and Catholic? Yes, because like everybody, I sometimes want things that are not good for me. The Church doesn't let me have those things, not because she's mean, but because she's a good mother. If my son or daughter wanted to eat sand I'd tell them: that's not what eating is for; it won't nourish you; it will hurt you. Maybe my daughter has some kind of condition that makes her like sand better than food, but I still wouldn't let her eat it. Actually, if she was young or stubborn enough, I might not be able to reason with her -- I might just have to make a rule against eating sand. Even if she thought I was mean.

So the Church doesn't oppose gay marriage because it's wrong; she opposes it because it's impossible, just as impossible as living on sand. The Church believes, and I believe, in a universe that means something, and in a God who made the universe -- made men and women, designed sex and marriage from the ground up. In that universe, gay marriage doesn't make sense. It doesn't fit with the rest of the picture, and we're not about to throw out the rest of the picture.

I also liked this:

So, yes, it's hard to be gay and Catholic -- it's hard to be anything and Catholic -- because I don't always get to do what I want. Show me a religion where you always get to do what you want and I'll show you a pretty shabby, lazy religion.

Read the whole piece. It's worth it.

I probably shouldn't say this, but ...

2011-07-17T07:51:00.000-07:00

I was reading a news post about the release of Casey Anthony, accused (but acquitted) murderer of her daughter Cayley.

After her release, and as she was driving away, someone screamed thusly:

"A baby killer was just set free!" Bree Thornton, 39, shouted at the passing SUV.

I would love to ask Ms. Thornton this question: "Excuse me, but are you pro-life or 'pro-choice?'"

After all, as Rush Limbaugh and any number of others have noted, we are so outraged -- and rightly so -- what Casey is said to have done to this beautiful, defenseless little girl. And yet, the same thing is done to the tune of 1.2 million times per year to beautiful, defenseless little girls and boys, except that these happen to be in utero. Where are the hordes or protestors over this? How many people vigorously donating to Planned Parenthood have themselves in a lather over Casey Anthony but don't see any contradiction or cognitive dissonance between that outrage and their practical deification of the "right" to do what Casey is said to have done by women whose only difference from Casey is that they haven't yet given birth?

I would also love to find each and every person who spat in the face of a Vietnam vet and screamed "Baby killer!" and ask them the same question I would pose to Ms. Thornton.

An ongoing, heartbreaking tragedy in Pakistan

2011-07-10T11:00:00.000-07:00

Years ago, I can't remember where -- maybe it was National Geographic, maybe the Los Angeles Times -- I read about the "brick kiln" children. These were Pakistani children as young as three who for any number of reasons ended up as slaves making bricks.

Today, a woman religious who ministers to them sent me the following, which I cleaned up for language and readability.

This Sister originally started out in a convent but left a few years back because she did not believe her vocation was to teach in a classroom the rest of her life. Furthermore, she was also interested in the poor Christians and Muslims brick kiln children who, with their families, make bricks. The whole family earns $1 a day. They can never move on to something more profitable or less difficult because their owners have them laboring to pay off debts that most will hardly have brought down even after decades. It probably goes without saying that these children have no opportunity for schooling or any access to doctors. Indeed, their slave masters forbid their formal education. It takes away, after all, from their being able to work. Their life is one of total slavery and brutality.

This brave woman, however, has obtained permission to come to the Christian children in the evening to teach them their Christian faith. She also helps the poor Muslim community because, she relates, "not all the Muslims are bad. Many are very, very loving and friendly people," and, regardless, "they need help."

She is helping children, women, and young girls by providing them very basic needs such as food, clothing, and medicines. She also tries to provide the children with toys because they have no childhood. The "only things they know to play with is MUD, so I buy cheap toys for them." She also procures stationery, composition books, and note books because her team also helps the children learn to read and write.

To learn more about the huge tragedy, indeed, abomination of the brick kiln kids (numbering up to a quarter of a million children) read here and here.

The greatest bio in history

2011-07-08T17:54:00.000-07:00

At work yesterday, management noted they wanted us to write or revamp our bios so they could put a story behind the voices our customers hear when they call.

I patently hate these sorts of things. The things I want to write, I can't, and the things that pass muster make me wonder, "Why is this anyone's business?" I'm an intensely private person (probably why I feel I have no one in the world with whom I can talk or to whom I can open up).

But I have to do it. Today, I made this first stab (mind you, not a word of it is true). See what you think:

NAME grew up in abject poverty in the woods of West Virginia, weaning himself on foraged roots, berries, and Nocturnal Oriental Tree Grubbing shrews, a species only found within a five mile radius of his birthplace, and which he singlehandedly helped place on the federal endangered species list (thankfully, the population has started to recover in recent years). While his parents were at the bar during the day and most nights, he ran with wolves, which is where he learned his world renowned and award winning survivor skills that have been regularly featured on ESPN, ESPN 2, ESPN Classic, "Delilah," and the Home Shopping Network, which sells a full range of his monogrammed survivalist products.

Unfortunately, these vaunted skills are also what landed him in the New York State Penitentiary at Sing Sing when he unwittingly fell in with a group of white supremacists whom he thought were simply folksy outdoorsmen like him.

Upon his release 15 years later, he received his degree in Symbology from Harvard University under Dr. John Langdon. Following graduation and three years of unemployment, he went to work in both the Johnson and Nixon Administrations as the aide-de-camp to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, after whom he named two of his 11 sons (with so many children, he had forgotten he had already given his first son this name by the time no. 9 came along).

This was followed by a brief, six day stint in the US Army in Vietnam, where he served as a liaison between the Green Berets and ARVN forces, where he was awarded the Bronze Star, the Silver Star, the Distinguished Service Medal, the Valor Under Fire Medal (which was especially created for him), and the Congressional Medal of Honor, 1^st class.

After leaving the service with the rank of SP5, NAME moved his family of 16 back to West Virginia. There they farmed sheep, cattle, and smokable hemp.

Since coming to work for COMPANY in 1985 (before the company was even thought of), NAME has adapted well to life in Wisconsin well, although he says the wolves here speak a different dialect than the one he is accustomed.

His hobby is star gazing at noon, and he regularly competes in underwater nude ice fishing competitions in the Overly Hairy division. His sign is Taurus, he drives a Prius, and he loves Chinese noodles.

Lessons learned from a movie

2011-07-07T06:17:00.000-07:00

Over the last few nights, I watched a German film, Nowhere in Africa. It concerns a Jewish family that leaves Germany in 1937 before it's too late to get out. They settle in Kenya on a farm, and the story is largely about the sacrifices we make in life, painful sacrifices, but sacrifices we make either because we have to or because we choose to do so out of love. And in this film, it is just as often the latter which are made as the former.

So first lesson learned: Love is not love without sacrifice. If sacrifice is missing, or, if you prefer, dying to ourselves for the good of another is missing, then love is mere sentiment (and probably self-delusional sentiment at that). More likely, we use people in the name of love. "If you loved me, you would gratify my desires in XYZ way." There are occasions where that statement can be born out of a legitimate need (I'm starving; you have food; I don't. If you really loved me, you would take care of me, someone who hasn't the ability to take care of themselves). Just as often, however, (if not more) it is a manipulative attempt to gain our own ends. People are never means; they are always ends. The realization of this and the acting on it is often the beginning of happiness. I'm speaking to myself, as well, incidentally.

In one scene, the mother and daughter are discussing why they had to leave home, and the mother says that it's because the Nazis hate the Jews. And the daughter says, "You and papa aren't really Jewish," to which the mother replies, "Judaism has never been so important for Papa and me. We thought we were as German as anyone could be. German culture, the language ... that was home to us.... Do you remember Uncle Saloman and Aunt Ruth? Of course they're different they live according to the Jewish religion, and that makes them different."

Well, you could transpose that to our own situation, couldn't you? What makes us different? Does anything? I grew up in a household where there was no difference than our next door neighbors, the Llewelyns, good people but not at all Catholic. A lot of people could say, "We're not really Catholic. Catholicism has never been so important for us. We go to Mass on Sunday," or "We go to Mass on Christmas and Easter. We thought we were as American as anyone could be. American culture, the language ... that is home to us." Which may be true, but it's not a culture that will breed vocations or make a better, more beautiful world for us and our progeny if it is not a culture informed by first principles, right values, and virtue. Only by building a Catholic culture in the home will do that, no?

One way we can do that is by encouraging our sons to serve at the altar. I think of Bl. Carlos Manuel Cecilio Rodriguez y Santiago, the first United States citizen to be beatified. For him, being an altar boy was not something he only did as a boy but continued to do throughout his life. Serving at the altar was just another opportunity to serve the Lord. Some boys, once they get confirmed or once they get to high school or once they graduate from high school, that's it. They will never serve at Our Lord's altar again, and it's too bad. Actually, it's tragic because a) no man is ever too old to serve Christ at the altar and b) it is such an honor and privilege and blessing. Why not try it and see, sir?

Some lines in the movie puzzled me. For instance, during the aforementioned scene, the mother says, "Tolerance doesn't mean that everyone is the same. That'd be stupid." Maybe it was a bad translation from the German. These lines could be taken to mean any number of things, but I wasn't able to come up with any certain meaning. Have you? Please share.

The father also says something very interesting at one point: "This land saved our lives, but it isn't our nation." If we are headed toward a persecution of Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular, as several prominent, mainstream people believe, if we, too, flee somewhere, will we say the same thing? Or will we adapt and assimilate? I suppose it depends, eh?

Finally, near the end of the film, the wife asks her husband, "Do you love me?" to which he replies, "If you will let me."

That answer very much seems to miss the mark. The definition of love is that it is an act of the will that constantly seeks the good of the one who is its object. To some extent I get what he is saying: I can't love you if you don't let me in, if you treat me like a "leper," as he accuses her of doing at one point. At some point, we can only be rejected from giving a gift for so long before it becomes increasingly difficult to keep giving.

On the other hand, we can always seek the good of another, even if it is to only always treat them with kindness, to never ascent to anything that would be to their detriment, or that would be sinful, and to, at the very least, pray for them.

All told, the movie was involving enough that I didn't say, "This is pointless," and turn it off. As with many foreign films, however, its pace was slower than that which we in the US are accustomed. Then again, life in most foreign lands is slower than that which we in the US are accustomed, at least in my experience. You typically won't find Americans as a matter of habit or culture taking a break in the middle of the day or eating their meals in a very languid, leisurely meals so as to prolong our experience of another's company. Italians, Spaniards, etc., they do that, and I envy them for it. Man is made for relationship (as Aristotle wrote, "Man is a social being and only in his propher sphere when associated with his fellow man"), and in America, we have built our culture on separateness, on individuality.

OK, I digress. There is upper nudity, both on the the part of the wife, the teenage daughter, and the African women, but with one exception, none of it is titilating. You see rear male and female nudity on the part of the husband and wife, but in the context of the story, I didn't mind (except when the wife departs the shower in another part of the film; as a man, I didn't need to see that, but then I recognize that what immediately follows drives home the part that this woman isn't in Kansas anymore, Toto). The film makes clear this couple hadn't made love with each other once since coming to Africa, and as soon as they learn the war is over, life bursts upon them, shall we say. It wasn't offensive, but I wouldn't let anyone but adults see it.

The one thing I really loved about the film, however, is the innocence. The innocence in the movie is wonderful. For instance, the pre-pubescent or adolescent daughter Regina does not want to get her school uniform dirty, but she does want to climb a tree with a boy her age who is very handsome. So what does she do? She takes off her white blouse (she has no breasts for which to wear a bra) and climbs the tree. This is not a prelude to a sexual coming of age, as it would be in every one of our wretched films. It's just two kids climbing a tree. They are naked without shame, just like Genesis 2.

We also learn she often spends the night in this boy's family one room hut. Again, while we get the sense that they like each other, it is not something titilating or prurient. He is her best friend. It's just two kids having a sleep over. It's all so natural.

Finally, the daughter, whose love for the African cook and housekeeper, a man with 1,000 watt smile, is deep and immense, comes to him one night to talk. In the end, she turns off the kerosene lamp and the two cuddle and fall asleep in his bed. In a different film, this would be the setting for something terrible, filthy, and awful. In this film, it is just a young girl, a child seeking security and reassurance from those she knows love her and will protect her. Nothing bad happens. Nothing disturbing. He is for her like another parent, and as such, he is a port in the storm.

Innocence. Sigh. It's all so desperately missing in our culture, and it was so bracing and surprising and yet gratifying and beautiful to see. It was like being in a lush, all-enveloping oasis in the midst of a tremendous desert.

I'd probably give Nowhere in Africa three stars.

Movie Review: Defiance

2011-07-04T12:59:00.000-07:00

Last night, I watched Defiance with Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber via Netflix. Before getting into the movie, let me note this: If Netflix wants people to wean themselves off of getting movies by mail, they have to do a better job of delivering a non-pixilated film

That said, I don't know why Defiance got so many iffy reviews. It is an excellent, engrossing film, full of action, suspense, tension, humor, and even some romance.

The story concerns a group of Jews in what was then Poland and is now part of Belarus. After the Nazis exterminate most of their co-religionists in the area, a family of brothers makes for the woods. There then forms around them a growing cluster of other survivors and refugees. Soon, they build what amounts to a town, albeit a town that survives on "liberating" stores from local farms and evading the ever encroaching Nazi patrols. The film is based on a true story, and [SPOILER ALERT! SPOILER ALERT! SPOILER ALERT!] I'm happy to report it features a happy ending.

If I had to nitpick, it is embued with a somewhat socialist-friendly tinge. For instance, the only philosopher quoted is by Isaac, a former socialist magazine editor. The only philosopher he quotes is Descartes, who started the beginning of the end of historic Western civilization as he was arguably the first herald of the so-called Enlightenment.

Then there was the quasi-Marxist sentiment thrown out here and there. For instance, to a group of new arrivals, Isaac and the village rabbi tell people to give them their valuables. "This was my grandmother's," says a woman, who obviously doesn't want to give up the valued heirloom. "And now it belongs to the Otria [i.e., brigade]," says Isaac. "Everyone sacrifices for the sake of the collective. We can trade everything for food or weapons."

To the new recruits, the camp commander Tuvia tells them, "Pregnancies are forbidden. We cannot acommodate an infant's needs here." Naturally, a baby comes along. The mother tells Tuvia's love interest that the baby growing inside of her is "the only thing that's keeping me going." After the child comes forth from the womb, Tuvia tells his lady that rules are rules, and that the next day, mother and infant must leave (mother was raped by a German soldier, so it would be just her and the baby). Tuvia's paramour tells him, "You told us to hold onto our humanity, not to become like animals. And what better way than to bring a life into this world of suffering and death? It is our only hope." That was nice.

So was the subtle message to those who favor the outlawing of abortion except in cases of rape and incest. This scene shows a baby does not choose how it is conceived, and, furthermore, the circumstances of its conception neither negate its dignity and right to life nor mean that it cannot provide joy and hope. Witness the mother's comments above.

At one point, the Jewish castaways capture a German soldier and bring him into camp. While Tuvia pours over the man's satchel, which contains intelligence that the Nazis will attack their camp two days hence (on Passover, no less), the settlers surround the soldier. They spit on and occasionally punch or kick him, barely holding back their fury. The man begs for mercy because "I have a wife and two small children," to which one camp resident shouts back in anger, "So did I!" This scene is especially poignant, I thought. Isaac, an atheist after all, begs Tuvia to step in and do something. But Tuvia stands by and lets the crowd do what they will. Soon this or that person, with tight camera shots on all, hits or stabs or clubs the soldier, giving voice to the anguish within them conceived by the Nazis killing their loved ones and ruining their lives. Isaac again appeals to Tuvia, and by Tuvia literally turning his back on the question, the crows rage is unleashed. At this point the camera pulls back and shows this maelstrom of vented revenge. It's frightening, almost demonic to behold.

The inhumanity of the secular humanist ideology that animated communism and animates so much else today gets center stage at one point. Tuvia's brother Zus has been fighting a guerilla war against the Nazis with the Soviet-back partisans. When he learns of the impending German attack, he goes to his commander. The commander, too, has learned of it, and he informs Zus they are falling back. Zus and he then engage in a dialogue about what really is their duty, to help those who will be slaughtered if their force don't help or to retreat and live to fight another day, damn what happens to anyone else.

"We all must make sacrifices," the Soviet officer tells Zus. "I find your Hebrew sentimentality rather touching," he continues, giving just a moment's hope that he will at least release Zus to go help those in the camp. "However, I must tell you," he continues, his lip forming into a sneer and his tone turning quite menacing, leaving no question as to his seriousness and the maliciousness behind it, "that it is quite counter-revolutionary." The person didn't matter to the Soviets. Only the collective did, the State. All had to be subordinated to the state, even love of family. If they die, so be it. As long as the Motherland emerges better off for it. It's a chilling scene.

There are many such chilling, thought-provoking scenes. There are the "forest wives," how Tuvia handles a potential mutiny, what does it mean to keep one's humanity in a time of inhumanity, and the moral tradeoffs one encounters in such moments the way one encounters gnats on a hot summer morning (i.e., the choices to be made are unrelenting).

All said, the film is inspiring and thought provoking, and well worth the 2:15 hours you will spend watching it.

A bishop reviews a book

2011-07-04T12:23:00.000-07:00

A thousand "Look in the Mirror" thanks for His Excellency's consideration:
Get to know the modern day saints

39 NEW SAINTS YOU SHOULD KNOW (Servant Books, 2010, supplied by Pleroma Christian Supplies); New Zealand$27.99. Reviewed by Bishop JOHN MACKEY.

In The Creed, we profess belief in the communion of saints. This belief has many corollaries, the most important one being that here we have no lasting city. As children of God, our own destiny is to play out our part as loving children of God in the cosmic drama that the Creator initiated, and in which human beings are made in the image of God.

We thus, although physical in stature, are called to transcend our physical nature and to rise to the realms of spirit and eternity. As sacred Scripture warns us, “For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city which is to come. Through him let us offer God an unending sacrifice of praise” (Hebrews 13:14-15).

The praise of God embraces his wonderful works, especially those that are exemplified in the lives of the saints. Hebrews 12 reminds us that this great company of witnesses spurs us to victory to share their prize of everlasting glory.

This anthology of modern saints (and beatified) assures us that our own modern times are as present to the loving God as were the times past, in which veneration of the saints was a special Catholic devotion. It is recorded that Pope John Paul II canonised 482 saints and beatified 1339 individuals. All of this is indicative that the Holy Spirit is active in holy Mother Church, so is active also in us as we respond to the invitation to holiness.

An acquaintance with these modern saints can be a spur to our own devotion. This book is also an interesting read with its variety of personalities, and inevitably leads us to the wonder of the love for us that is Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour.

Bishop John Mackey is Bishop Emeritus of Auckland.

Beatification and canonization news from June

2011-07-01T05:18:00.000-07:00

On June 2, it was announced that the Pope could name St. John of Avila -- one of my favorites -- could be named a Doctor of the Church. He was a friend to both Ss. John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, and helped make several other saints, as well.

On June 5, a Mass was held commemorating the cause for sainthood and the 125th anniversary of the ordination of Fr. Augustus Tolton, the nation’s first black priest. The Mass was celebrated by the incredible Bishop Joseph Perry, auxiliary bishop of Chicago, who many consider a saint himself.

On June 8, the Brazlian bishops opened the beatification cause of one of their own, Archbishop Luciano Mendes de Almeida, SJ, who Brazilians love for his love of the poor and attention to human rights.

Possibly the biggest saints news of the month is the Archdiocese of Boston’s opening the cause of Fr. Jose Muzquiz, the first Opus Dei priest in the US, and one of the first three priests ordained for Opus Dei. My goodness, this story was picked up in so many outlets.

On June 12, Pentecost Sunday, the Pope named as a patron of world peace, Bl. Alois Andritzki, who was beatified the next day. Bl. Alois was a sports fanatic, a priest, and a youth minister who made no secret of his antipathy for Nazism. Because of this the Nazis arrested him and sent him to Dachau and that concentration camp’s infamous priest block. And you know what he did when he got there? He formed a Bible study. You know what else he did? He resolved to show joy at all times. Think of how that must have effected his fellow inmates amidst that misery and squalor, because joy and happiness are choices, acts of the will, just like love, aren’t they? “After more than a year in the camp, sick with typhoid, [he was beginning to recover when] he asked a guard if he could receive Communion. Instead, they gave him a lethal injection. He died February 3, 1943, at the age of 28.”

The beatification cause of Bl. William Joseph Chaminade, founder of the Marianist Order, announced on June 15 that a St. Louis woman’s miraculous cure from cancer might be the miracle needed to achieve canonization for him. Bl. Chaminade, as he’s known, founded the order to which Bl. Jakob Gapp, the first saint profiled in my book, belonged.

On June 19, Cardinal Angelo Amato, prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, presided at the beatification of Sr. Marguerite Rutan, who refused to renounce her faith during the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror. Because of this, the Jacobites guillotined her.

On June 25, Cardinal Angelo Amato, prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, beatified Fathers Johannes Prassek, Hermann Lange, and Eduard Müller, three priests martyred by the Nazi regime in 1943. An estimated 5,000 attended an open-air Mass in Lübeck, the northern German city where the three ministered.

A Lutheran pastor, Karl Friedrich Stellbrink, was slain with the three priests, and the beatification caused controversy amongst some Lutherans because the Catholic Church would not beatify him, as well.

On June 27, His Holiness Benedict XVI declared “Venerable” Fr. Matthew Kadalikattil, who was known for his devotion to the Sacred Heart and for his care for the dalits or Untouchables of India.

On June 27, the Pope approved miracles for four Servants of God, which means they all get to bypass the “venerable” stage and will be called “blessed” after their beatifications. He also recognized the martyrdoms of two Spaniards and one German, which means they also will automatically be declared “blessed,” without needing the usual qualifying miracle attributed to their intercession. Finally, in addition to Fr. Kadalikattil, he declared venerable seven other individuals, including Sr. Maria Giuseppina Benvenuti (nee Zeinab Alif), whose story is very similar to St. Josephine Bakhita.

On June 28, Bishop Howard Hubbard of Albany, NY, celebrated a Mass to close a tribunal formed to review a possible miracle attributed to the intercession of Fr. Patrick Peyton, who died in 1992, and who founded Family Radio, as well as the motto, “The family that prays together stays together.”

Today, July 1, is the closing of the 10-year-old diocesan phase of Fr. Emil Kapaun, an Army chaplain who died in a North Korean POW camp in 1951. To watch the commemorative Mass, go to www.cdowk.org to see it streamed live beginning at 5 p.m. Central, Friday, July 1.

Fr. Kapaun was from the little town of Pilsen, Kansas, which was a community of Czech immigrants. After his ordination, he returned to his community but there was a little army airfield nearby, and he would sometimes help out. That inspired him to join the army in 1944, where he began his chaplain’s career near Macon, Georgia. During World War II, he also served in the Burma Theater, and after the war he did like a lot of former GIs did, go to college. After getting his MA in 1948, he reenlisted and was made chaplain at Fort Bliss, Texas.

Not too much later, the Korean War started, and he was sent to the war theater, where he earned the Bronze Star medal. In November 1950, however, Chinese communists captured him and turned him over to the North Koreans. After doing some tremendously heroic things to minister to the men in his camp, he died on May 23, 1951.

Call me a big ol' meany, but ...

2011-06-27T05:02:00.000-07:00

I read the following Scripture passage from 2 Thessalonians from today's Divine Office:

Do not let anyone have any food if he refuses to do any work. Now we hear that there are some of you who are living in idleness, doing no work themselves but interfering with everyone else’s. In the Lord Jesus Christ, we order and call on people of this kind to go on quietly working and earning the food that they eat. My brothers, never grow tired of doing what is right.

My question is this: If Scripture is divinely inspired and thus true and free from error, then why have so many in the Catholic justice field worked for the exact opposite? I know there are some who can't work, and there are widows and orphans, the working poor, and the like, but what of those who won't work, for whom social assistance has become social dependence?

Indeed, the high tax rates needed to support such assistance have become confiscatory. With how many women have I spoken who would gladly give up their jobs in favor of the homes were they not needed to simply support their families? In 1948, the average federal tax rate for a family of four was $0.02 per dollar. Look at your stub now and see the federal income tax. Does it even come close to two cents?

Think of what that extra income would do for families. Mothers could stay home. Families could save. They could more easily afford major purchases like when the dryer goes on the blink and they need a new one. Or when the car broke down, it wouldn't thus be a need to have recourse to the almighty credit card.

When, however, did you hear Sr. Pat of the Greater Tri-County Area Committee on Social Justice or Tim Anonymous from the USCCB or state bishops conference make such an argument. You haven't, you won't today, and you probably never will. These people all still belong to the Democrat Party at Prayer and the Society of Our Lady of the Great Society, and such thinking is anathema to them.

Meanwhile, schlubs like me toil and think, "Man, I am never going to get ahead," for after the tax man cometh, there ain't much left. Praise God we're getting by. But do the people supposedly dedicated to a more just society have to actively work to make that fact less likely? Where's the justice in that?

Hip hip hooray! Good news just learned on this Feast of Corpus Christi

2011-06-26T07:35:00.000-07:00

Until the bishops made standing as the norm, I used to kneel to receive Communion. This was never a problem anywhere. I didn't have a priest come charging up to me after Mass, screaming, "Don't you know it's just a SYMBOL?!?!?!" He may as well have called that person "Raca."

However, after a while, since I preached fidelity to bishops, I figured I ought to practice it, so I began standing to receive and offering up the suppression of my inclinations, beliefs (this is, after all, GOD Whom we are receiving), and instincts as a penance.

Now I read this from Fr. Zuhlsdorf (if you don't read him, please start. He is the best).

What Does GIRM 160 for the USA Really Say?

Posted on 24 June 2011 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf
When the new English translation of the Roman Missal is released, it will sport a new translation of the GIRM, the General Institution/Instruction of the Roman Missal.
There are, of course, adaptations for the USA and other Anglophone regions.
As it happens, the Congregation for Divine Worship has … tweaked some items. I am sure this was to harmonize the language of the GIRM with the language of the rest of the Roman Missal. However, tweaks may have been tweaked for other reasons.

For example, take a look at GIRM 160 for the USA. The Latin is found on the USCCB website.

LATIN:
… Fideles communicant genuflexi vel stantes, prout Conferentia Episcoporum statuerit. Cum autem stantes communicant, commendatur ut debitam reverentiam, ab iisdem normis statuendam, ante susceptionem Sacramenti faciant.

OLDER USA ADAPTATION VERSION:
… The norm for reception of Holy Communion in the dioceses of the United States is standing. Communicants should not be denied Holy Communion because they kneel. Rather, such instances should be addressed pastorally, by providing the faithful with proper catechesis on the reasons for this norm.

NEWER USA ADAPTATION VERSION:
… The norm established for the Dioceses of the United States of America is that Holy Communion is to be received standing, unless an individual member of the faithful wishes to receive Communion while kneeling [emphasis Look in the Mirror] (Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, Instruction, Redemptionis Sacramentum, March 25, 2004, no. 91).

The rest of GIRM 160 remains as it was.

There is no mention of addressing the instances “pastorally” or giving “properly catechizing” people who kneel to receive their GOD.

In other words, when people kneel to receive Almighty GOD, priests and other ministers are to give Communion to the person and keep their mouths shut.

This is good news. Hip hip hooray, Te Deum, Deo gratias, and all that.

Apres le deluge in New York following last's night SSM vote

2011-06-25T11:40:00.000-07:00

Well, it’s happened. When I worked in the California Legislature, I could see it was bound to. Now all it will take is US Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy siding with the Court’s liberals for it to become like Roe v. Wade, a perpetual battle royale. And I bet he will indeed side with the liberals.

In the past, I have staunchly agreed with the argument that our reasons for supporting traditional marriage had to be secular or at least non-sectarian. Given that we live in a post-Christian world where few care about the Bible or the Catechism or Church authority, this seemed to make the most sense.

I still think there is merit to that argument. However, I now also believe we have done ourselves a disservice by restating the classical – and I mean “classical” – arguments, arguments from antiquity against homosexuality, for that is the root, isn’t it? After all, if there is nothing wrong with homosexual genital acts and by extension contraception (which renders the normal sex act homosexual by its virtue of making it fruitless), then what could possibly be wrong with same sex unions (SSUs)? In that event, opposition to SSUs is truly bigotry.

As former Democrat politician David Carlin recently wrote:

“If, on the other hand, we argue that homosexual behavior is unnatural, we are arguing from ancient philosophical premises derived from Aristotle and Stoicism. According to Aristotle, those tendencies are natural that are common to all, or almost all, members of a species; if some individual members of a species deviate from these tendencies, these deviations are considered unnatural. According to Stoicism, nature is a manifestation of God; the study of nature, therefore, will uncover the will of God. Combine those philosophies, and homosexual behavior is seen as unnatural and contrary to the will of God.”

Here is what the bishops said in a statement after the vote:

The passage by the Legislature of a bill to alter radically and forever humanity’s historic understanding of marriage leaves us deeply disappointed and troubled.

We strongly uphold the Catholic Church’s clear teaching that we always treat our homosexual brothers and sisters with respect, dignity and love. But we just as strongly affirm that marriage is the joining of one man and one woman in a lifelong, loving union that is open to children, ordered for the good of those children and the spouses themselves. This definition cannot change, though we realize that our beliefs about the nature of marriage will continue to be ridiculed, and that some will even now attempt to enact government sanctions against churches and religious organizations that preach these timeless truths.

We worry that both marriage and the family will be undermined by this tragic presumption of government in passing this legislation that attempts to redefine these cornerstones of civilization.

Our society must regain what it appears to have lost – a true understanding of the meaning and the place of marriage, as revealed by God, grounded in nature, and respected by America’s foundational principles.

Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio of Brooklyn was just a tad more forceful:

Today, Governor Andrew Cuomo and the state legislature have deconstructed the single most important institution in human history. Republicans and Democrats alike succumbed to powerful political elites and have passed legislation that will undermine our families and as a consequence, our society.

With this vote, Governor Cuomo has opened a new front in the culture wars that are tearing at the fabric of our nation....

In light of these disturbing developments and in protest for this decision, I have asked all Catholic schools to refuse any distinction or honors bestowed upon them this year by the governor or any member of the legislature who voted to support this legislation. Furthermore, I have asked all pastors and principals to not invite any state legislator to speak or be present at any parish or school celebration.

The above request is intended as a protest of the corrupt political process in New York State. More than half of all New Yorkers oppose this legislation. Yet, the governor and the state legislature have demonized people of faith, whether they be Muslims, Jews, or Christians, and identified them as bigots and prejudiced, and voted in favor of same-sex “marriage.” It is mystifying that this bill would be passed on the last day of an extended session under the cover of darkness.

This issue has been framed as upholding marriage equality. This is not the case since one of the principal purposes of marriage is to bring new life into the world. This cannot happen in same-sex marriage. It is not a civil rights issue, but rather a human rights issue upholding the age-old understanding of marriage. Our political leaders do not believe their own rhetoric. If they did, how in good conscience could they carve out any exemption for institutions that would be proponents of bigotry and prejudice?

Republicans and Democrats equally share responsibility for this ruinous legislation and we as Catholics should hold all accountable for their actions.

Of course, this is only the most recent effort of a society increasingly in enthralled by its own hubris and even more intolerant, embarrassed by, and contemptuous of its Christian foundations and roots. As proof, we can look to how left-wing groups have petitioned President Obama to “rescind an amendment to an Executive Order that allows faith-based programs to limit hiring to people of their own faith.”

The great Archbishop Charles Chaput echoes the Catholic League (or is it vice versa?) when he recently said, “And if the state refuses to allow those Catholic ministries to be faithful in their services through legal or financial bullying, then as a matter of integrity, they should end their services.”

When Catholic University of America recently announced it would begin to segregate sexes by gender—not as a means of denying rights to students but to encourage virtue and thus promote the school’s mission—a local lawyer filed a gender discrimination suit.

So what have same-sex unions wrought where allowed?

· In Massachusetts, it has led to indoctrination in schools (to whit, a December 2003 school assembly was held “to celebrate same-sex ‘marriage’ [and] how it is now a normal part of society.” See the previous link for more examples.).

· It has led to an increase of HIV/AIDS cases and an increase in an already bloated state budget to deal with the burgeoning health problem. Spending on domestic violence issues (known to be much higher in homosexual couples than normal relationships) has gone up by $250,000. It has led to increased costs for businesses, who are now required to provide health insurance benefits to employees in such unions, even those with HIV/AIDS.

· It has led to the erosion of the ability of Christians to maintain their morality in their businesses. As such, a Christian bed-and-breakfast owner must allow a couple they do not consider married to sleep and copulate under their roof. A Christian wedding photographer cannot refuse to take photos at these sham weddings. The list is endless. And it often leads to frivolous lawsuits against businesses whom homosexual activists target to see how well they are complying with the new regime of laws. Catholic Charities no longer participates in the adoption process in the state because it refuses to compromise its principles and beliefs by allowing same sex couples to adopt. Justices of the Peace cannot abide by their conscience and refuse to marry same sex couples without losing their jobs.

This is what’s coming to all of America now that the card of New York has fallen and the card of California is likely to do so, as well.

It is also proof positive that the American Catholic Church—progressively emasculated by gender politics, moral relativism, and the priestly ephebophilia scandals—holds absolutely no sway over the majority of her professed adherents. After all, two of the deciding votes were from “Catholic” Republicans who both made it very clear that Church teaching meant nothing to them.

And really, once the Vatican forced Patrick Cardinal O’Boyle to rescind his censure of Fr. Charles Curran and the other theologians who protested Humanae Vitae—indeed, once the Vatican allowed the encyclical to be treated by the entire Canadian bishops conference and the American theological elite as a dead letter—the game was over. Dissent was allowed to rule the day, the Spirit of Vatican II became supreme, and all that was once thought to be wholly Catholic, including obedience to one’s bishop, washed away with the tide. Were it not for a handful of faithful theologians, bishops, and the pontificates of Bl. John Paul II and Benedict XVI, the Catholic Church itself would be a dead letter today. It would be a prettier version of the Anglican Church. Truly, “the gates of death” have not prevailed.

We cannot compromise with this legislation. We cannot retreat from that which has always been true about marriage and will always be true. We must stand firm in our convictions and still loudly proclaim our principles.

That, however, my friends, will come at a cost. You and I are now the enemy. Twenty years ago, such a development would have seemed preposterous. Today, it has happened because it has become amongst our leaders and too many of our citizens the common wisdom. So because of this, we become the bigots, we become the scourge of society. We are beneath contempt and seen as no different than neo-Nazis hiding in the darkness of the wooded Pacific Northwest. This is the beginning of the very end for the respectability of Christianity. Absent a huge grace from God—and with God, all things are possible—should I live to the normal age people in my family attain, thoughts such as those expressed on this blog will put me in jail or before a judge in a civil suit.

This is quite possibly one of the saddest days of my life, but I have no doubt it will be followed by many more of a similar hue.

And on that cheery note, what do you think? Agree? Disagree?

Humility and meekness in the face of recent news stories

2011-06-25T09:54:00.000-07:00

Given certain recent news stories, I want to talk about four saints, all of whom are either very well known or whose names we at least recognize, so I’m not going to go into their stories so much. Instead, I want to focus on one common thing in their lives and how they dealt with that, namely persecution.

Now think about it. When someone persecutes us or falsely accuses us, there is nothing that gets our dander up more than that, is there? For instance, a spouse accuses another spouse of doing XYZ or being disingenuous. Or the boss passes us over for an opportunity we know should be ours, but instead it goes to a coworker we deem less worthy. You know, during the OJ Simpson case, as convincing as the prosecution’s argument was, I remember thinking, ‘What if? What if he really didn’t do this horrible, heinous crime, and he really is innocent?’ I think of a priest in a New Hampshire prison who both Fr. Richard John Neuhaus and Avery Cardinal Dulles both thought was innocent. Because he maintains he’s innocent and refuses to plea bargain, the judge locked him away for 30 years.

So life offers us many opportunities in all shapes and sizes to experience both persecution and unjust accusations. Again, though, how do we deal with that?

For one answer, indeed for the context of all of this, let’s start with Our Lord, and what we see when He is crowned with thorns.

Here He is, being punched, spat upon, having a crown of thorns beat into His head, causing His precious Blood to flow down onto His parched lips. The soldiers mock Him and taunt Him.

Now if that were me, I’d scream in rage at them, “Who are you miserable, cretinous creatures to treat me like this?! I am your CREATOR! I created you! You would not exist other than my divine will! HOW DARE YOU!!!”

But what does Our Lord say, instead?

Nothing.

He says not a word. When He does speak about them, it is only to say, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Following this example, consider St. John of the Cross, the seventeenth century Spanish Carmelite. You want to talk about being persecuted. This guy, all he wanted to do was reform his order, to bring it back to its original charism of poverty. Because of this, his order not only cruelly mistreated him, but they locked him away for years in a dark cell. He didn’t lash out. He didn’t complain. Instead, he used this period to write one of the most powerful spiritual works of all time, Dark Night of the Soul. We’re still reading that book born of pain today.

Then there was St. Gerard Majella. It’s peculiar that this eighteenth century male religious is the patron saint of those who are pregnant, right? I mean, he’s a man and was never pregnant, therefore, so why him?

Well, it’s because some very obviously pregnant woman came to his convent one day and accused him of being the father. And you know what he said when they brought the accusation before him? Nothing. Not a word. He refused to defend himself. Absolutely refused. His superiors couldn’t believe the charge. Yes, he was handsome and virile, but he was also dedicated to his vocation and extremely pious. Because he would not defend himself, however, they suspended him from all pastoral activity within the convent and told him to stay away from the Communion rail for months.

The woman later admitted she had lied. When his superior St. Alphonsus Ligouri asked him, “Why didn’t you defend yourself?” he replied that silence was what he thought was necessary and required in situations where there were unjust accusations.

St. Dominic Savio was once falsely accused of committing a practical joke. “Why did you do this?” he was angrily asked by his teacher. He refused to defend himself, knowing full well he was innocent. And in time, his teacher learned the truth of the matter. Like St. Alphonsus with St. Gerard, the teacher asked why he hadn’t defended himself against these unjust accusations. St. Gerard simply said, “I thought of our Lord when He was unjustly accused. He didn’t say a word either.”

Finally, there is Padre Pio. In the book, I recount the following about him:

At one point, St. Pio was ordered to stop the public celebration of the sacraments. These commands came from his archbishop, who, unlike Padre Pio, was no one’s idea of a saint, and yet he obeyed.[i]

Under Archbishop Gagliardi’s censure, Padre Pio “was stripped of all priestly faculties except celebration of Mass in his friary’s inner chapel…[ii]

Padre Agostino Daniele, Pio’s best friend and confessor for more than fifty years, charged that Gagliardi waged “a veritable satanic war” against Padre Pio, soliciting letters with “accusations, exaggerations, and calumnies” to forward to the Vatican – while it was the archbishop himself who was the center of controversy.

So bad was the situation that a number of priests in the archdiocese petitioned Pope Pius XI to end what they saw as “disorder,” “immorality,” and “clerical degeneracy.”

This was not the case, however, with Padre Pio. He never retaliated against the archbishop, nor even criticized him. In fact the angriest the famous mystical priest was seen to get was with a supporter – a Pio defender – who had attacked the archbishop. Although shattered, Pio was said to have submitted to the bishop’s attacks with what Father Agostino recalled as “holy resignation.”

“God’s will be done,” Pio, a Capuchin monk, is quoted as saying. “The will of the authorities is the will of God.”[iii]

It was not only the questionable archbishop who restricted the scope of his priesthood but also the Holy Office. This happened in 1922, and he was ordered not to bless crowds or display his stigmata. He could not even discuss them. Correspondence was severely restricted, and authorities forbade him from seeing his spiritual director. When someone expressed disgust over Rome’s restrictions, St. Pio replied, “You did a wicked thing… We must respect the decrees of the Church. We must be silent and suffer.”

In her piece on recent news, Secular Carmelite Diane Korzeniewski quotes the Servant of God Fr. John Hardon, SJ on humility and obedience in such instances:

Several times in this post I have used the word, “docility”. What does this mean in the spiritual life? Let’s look at what Fr. John A. Hardon, SJ has to say. Yesterday, June 18, marked not only the day of his birth, but of his priestly ordination. He remarks in an article on virtues concerning “Childlikeness“ about docility thus:

It means therefore to be willing to learn from God and here’s the hard one: the willingness to learn from God not of course as though God will, though of course He might, send us His own divine angelic messenger, normally not. Normally God teaches us through the circumstances of our daily lives. Especially those most painful circumstances called other people. That’s where we tend to be less than docile. Openness then to God’s teaching us especially through all whom He places into our lives. It is great, great wisdom to be so disposed as to be ready to learn from and I mean it, everyone from the youngest child to the oldest speaking to religious golden or diamond jubilarian.

She then asks:

Does this mean we ought never defend ourselves? See the answer below as St. Francis de Sales quotes St. Gregory on this point.

“When any evil befalls you, apply the remedies that may be in your power, agreeably to the will of God; for to act otherwise would be to tempt divine Providence Having done this, wait with resignation for the success it may please God to send; and, should the remedies overcome the evil, return Him thanks with humility, but if, on the contrary, the evils overcome the remedies, bless Him with patience.”

The following advice of St. Gregory is useful: whenever you are ‘justly accused’ of a fault, humble yourself, and candidly confess that you deserve more than the accusation which is brought against you; but, if the charge be false, excuse yourself meekly, denying your guilt, for you owe this respect to truth, and to the edification of your neighbor. But if, after your true and lawful excuse, they should continue to accuse you, trouble not yourself nor strive to have your excuse admitted; for, having discharged your duty to truth, you must also do the same to humility, by which means you neither offend against the care you ought to have of your reputation, nor the love you owe to peace, meekness of heart, and humility.

Humanly speaking, all of this is impossible. It is tough to bite our tongues. I see it when my children feel I’ve unjustly accused them. I absolutely experience this when my wife accuses me of doing something I haven’t or of having reasons for doing something that were never mine.

So it is agonizingly difficult. Still, Our Lord tells us, “Be perfect as Your Father in heaven is perfect.” Since the Father and Son are indivisible, it follows that one way to perfect ourselves in this way is to imitate the Son, as these saints did. This can only happen through much prayer and recourse to the graces found in the sacraments.

In today’s world, we cannot expect this to be a popular option, now, can we? Yet since we are Christians and because we should know better, we should endeavor to make this our most popular option. In doing so, we would help create a more perfect world less focused on self and more focused on God, and that would be good for everyone.

Jesus, meek and humble of heart, make our hearts like unto Thine. Amen.

[i] Padre Pio: The True Story, Bernard Ruffin, http://www.catholicity.com/commentary/20020522.html

[ii] ibid.

[iii] ibid.

Movie review x2: Confessions of a Shopaholic and City Lights

2011-06-25T09:32:00.000-07:00

On such a momentous day, it seems frivolous to start off with this, a movie review. Nonetheless, I was taken with both films I saw this week and wanted to share them.

I'll start with the first I saw, Charlie Chaplin's City Lights. Many of us know of Chaplin and his movies. Until recently, he'd been a household name for about a century. Few of us actually know his work first hand, however, except for the rather becoming biopic ca. 1992, where Robert Downey, Jr. played the title character.

However, in an effort to a) build up my children's cultural literacy (not to mention my own, ahem) and b) provide them with decent films to watch, I've begun taking films from Chaplin's oeuvre via Netflix.

City Lights is a very engaging film. The story concerns a tramp (i.e., homeless vagabond) who sees a beautiful blind girl who sells flowers on the street. She is not only blind but impoverished. Through a series of encounters, she comes to believe Chaplin's character is a rich benefactor and suitor. What follows is much brilliant slapstick, visual foibles (after all, it is a silent film), and touching pathos, although the movie is never maudlin and only rarely manipulative. I liked the ending particularly, because a) it left you wondering and b) it wasn't what most Hollywood films would do today, which would be to go for the easy, sentimental conclusion.

I especially liked the underlying moral. Blind flower girl (she's not given a name; nor is he) is beguiled by her belief that someone of wealth is paying attention to little ol' her. She likes his kindness, yes, and his personality and the things he does for her. But especially given the film's last scene, one gets the sense that she is especially taken -- through pride? insecurity (which is, after all, born of pride)? -- by his imagined wealth, whatever the personal charms with which this man has treated her.

On the other hand, the Little Tramp is motivated by nothing but chaste, chivalric love, the type written about so movingly in the Middle Ages. He is struck by her beauty, her gentleness, her innocence and kindness, her humility, and so many other wonderful qualities. His love for her is truly pure. And because the definition of love is not "It's a powerful feeling we have in our hearts for another person" but rather, "Constantly seeking the good of the other, even at the cost of the good to ourselves," it is a true love. Chaplin's portrayal here is an icon of love properly defined. It is, frankly, a love we see less and less the more and more we become convinced that love is a feeling, and if the feeling dies, well, c'est la vie, so has love. Indeed, it has died by definition, then, hasn't it? So we need more of the sort of portrayal we see in City Lights, and thank God He let Charlie Chaplin leave us a template in this regard.

Bottom line: Good, entertaining, film with a worthy moral. Worth watching before you get Modern Times.

The second film was one that totally surprised me. I often base my rentals of current films on the A-F scores given by Entertainment Weekly. However, while its reviewers are highly intelligent, it is evident we come from two different worldviews. As such, I've ordered films recommended by them as "A" quality that I turned off after 15 minutes or so because they were so atrocious in their world view.

I'm happy to report, however, that Confessions of a Shopaholic lives up to its billing. It's a wonderful film on many levels. The only things I found objectionable were the (admittedly infrequent) abuses of the Holy Name of God and the several scenes showing the lead character's best friend in bed with her boyfriend/fiance. The characters were fully clothed and you never saw anything indecent. Still, why couldn't we have seen them on the couch or at the table or in chairs? Since the characters were simply talking, why this? It seems to back up charges of liberal social engineering.

The story concerns Rebekah (sp?), who is a shopaholic. In an effort to pay off her ever mounting credit card bills (she tallies them to $13,000 at one point) and advance her career ambitions, she takes a job as a writer at a struggling New York financial magazine that has the reputation of "the People magazine of the finance industry." Her handsome editor gives her a shot and helps motivate her to produce something new and fresh, and she becomes something of a hit. However, her past catches up with her, and I'll leave it to you to see how everything washes out in the end.

I liked this movie because it is funny, engaging, and filled wall-to-wall with the incredible vivaciousness of Isla Fisher, who resembles a modern-day Lucille Ball, and not just because of her fetching looks and bright red hair. This movie has an All-Star cast: John Goodman, Joan Cusack, Ed Helms, Fred Armistad, John Lithgow, and Kristin Scott Thomas. However, none of them fill the screen like Fisher. She is amazing.

I especially like the moral of the story: Things can't make you happy, and our use of them to make us happy begins and ends with their purchase. It's like Rebekah says, buying things gives us a warm glow and makes us feel all is right in the world. Anyone knows this who has struggled financially and then gotten enough of a breather to buy something the heart desires.

That, incidentally, is why some studies show the American poor remain poor. When they gain a windfall, instead of having the ability to deny themselves (and, let's face it, their life is often nothing but denial in all its forms), they spend it by treating themselves. It's totally natural and understandable, but it's also fruitless. But I digress ...

Rebekah begins to become happy when she takes the very difficult step of choosing relationships over things. We love our things. Our things make us feel good. Surrounding ourselves with them gives a sense of comfort and security (although that is mostly an illusion; who are we kidding?).

A thing can't love you back, however. And ultimately, God created us for relationship. Loving relationship with one another here on earth, relationships that imitate the free, faithful, total, and fruitful love we find in the Holy Trinity, and ultimately relationship with Him in heaven for our eternity: This our purpose and the last is our end.

Being chained to things -- to mere material things that will end up in someone's thrift shop, gathering rust, eaten by moths, and ultimately rotting in some landfill somewhere -- is slavery. Being yoked to another person is true liberation, for in it we are free to recognize and become our best selves as givers and not takers. Consumerism and materialism encourage selfishness and everything that serves self. Relationship encourages giving and sacrifice, and it is these things that make us truly, fully human and thus free.

What do you think?

Need your help -- if you can give it -- re: the Fr. Corapi situation

2011-06-22T05:18:00.000-07:00

If -- and only if -- you have had personal relations/encounters with Fr. Corapi (and by personal, I mean actually know the man, have broken bread with him, conversed with him in an intimate setting and not just shaken his hand at a conference ... get the picture?), and you would like to offer any insights on him, then please contact me. I am writing a piece for a Catholic news magazine on his recent headline making news situation and I am looking for insights. ALSO, NO OFFENSE, BUT WHAT I DON'T WANT OR NEED ARE THE PERSONAL OBSERVATIONS OF PEOPLE WHO DON'T FIT THE ABOVE BILL. After all, I can get those from the combox of any blog out there, right? I want to give the fairest most accurate assessment of the situation, and since he is evidently not giving interviews (and neither are the other intimates involved in this affair), I beg your assistance.

Explain for me, please, how this makes sense

2011-06-22T03:45:00.000-07:00

I normally try to keep away from posting on matters purely political. The purpose of this blog, by and large, is to offer reflections on matters spiritual, and the hope is that others will find these helpful.

This, however, bugs me. More than that, it bewilders me. I can't make sense of it.

If I was relatively new to driving a car, and other, much more experienced drivers whose actual job it was to drive a car gave me suggestions on how to drive better, I would hope I'd listen to them. If I was a medical intern or resident, and a more experienced physician told me a procedure I was planning would do more harm than good, I would hope to high heaven I would pay heed.

How, then, is what the above article describes any different? The men prosecuting this war are experienced. They're tested and reliable, and they are there. They are at Ground Zero. They're not reading reports from the battlefield. They're seeing the casualties, seeing reasons for hope and optimism, seeing areas of concern, and basing their opinion on that. They are not sitting comfortably in an air conditioned office in downtown Washington, DC, making decisions based on what it seems are purely political calculations. Decisions, incidentally, by someone who has never put on a uniform. Someone who, despite kind words about what our men and women in uniform do, seems to have that distaste, disdain, and distrust of all things military.

We have lost over 1,500 men and women servicemen since entering Afghanistan in 2001. That is, indeed, tragic, especially for those left behind. We have spent a ton of money, enough to build many new roads and repair much of our crumbling infrastructure. But how many more lives will we lose, how much will we spend if we do not do the job right the first time?

OK, so he doesn't have military experience. Does not mere life teach him that doing a job right the second time is much more expensive than doing it right the first?

Heaven help us.

More thoughts from tilling the garden on Father's Day

2011-06-19T12:22:00.000-07:00

So yesterday saw a tremendous amount of work in the yard and garden. I was out with the boys before 08:00 in the morning, and, with the exception of a siesta/riposa from the warm, Wisconsin sun, a short break for lunch, and an equally short break for dinner, I didn't rest until I came in at 9:53 p.m. at night. I was beat (i.e., exhausted), but it was a good beat, a wonderful beat, a satisfying and peaceful beat.

But it also gave me cause for reflection, especially as this is Father's Day.

The first commandment God gives Adam and Eve is, "Go forth, be fruitful, and multiply" (Gen 1:28). Not, "Go forth, be fruitful, but be ecologically responsible by limiting your children to one child per family, or at most two." Not, "Go forth, be fruitful to the extent that you'll be able to give each of your children separate rooms and more or less easily afford their college education." Not, "Go forth, be fruitful, but only to the extent that you can give your kids all the things you didn't have as a child." "Go forth, be fruitful, and multiply." Multiplyyyyyyyyy.

You go into a garden that you have planted, and in doing so, you have endeavored to be fruitful. You want to multiply the seeds you've sown. You want a bounteous harvest. Now it seems that God has other plans, because some seeds don't germinate, some germinate but quickly die, and sometimes weather, soil, or other conditions (e.g., you neglected/forgot to water) take hold. Maybe your yield is only half of what you wanted, maybe it is next to nothing.

God works the same way. With some seeds -- i.e., husbands and wives -- a bountiful crop is created. God be praised. Scripture makes very clear it is He Who opens and closes the womb. Some seeds/couples produce nothing despite their best efforts, even though they be the best potential parents on earth. One thinks of Mr. and Mrs. G.K. Chesterton. God be praised. More locally, I think of a barren couple who has adopted two children. God be praised.

What really struck me yesterday, however, was God's second commandment to humanity, actually to men in particular: Till and keep the garden (Gen 2:15).

A few thoughts flow from this.

First, work was part of God's plan for man from the start.

Second, we have to work. There are weeds, both literal and figurative, that creep in. For instance, in my garden, crab grass and wild blackberry is always attacking its inner reaches with their tentacles. On the property generally, we have this bush that sends out runners and would take over the entire parcel if it could. You can mow it, but heaven forbid you are running in the yard and step on one of the branch stubs. Ouch!

So you have to dig down to remove the root system. The first time I did this yesterday, I couldn't believe the size of this thing. The roots were huge, and they were interlocking. It was about 2' (48 cm?) in diameter. It brought to mind the Gordian Knot. All weeds are like this. If we let them in, they become more and more established and thus harder and harder to eradicate.

The same with sin or just plain bad habits. We slack off at work one day "just a little." Then it becomes habitual, a habit. We sneak a peak at pornography "just out of curiousity," and then we find it's so alluring, we come back for more, then more, then even more, until we become addicted. We send a note to that old hunky flame on Facebook or their work e-mail, "Hi, just thinking of you," and soon, we have a full-blown affair on our hands, even if it's "only" emotional.

In life as in the garden, once we see a weed, we must pounce on it, musn't we? We can't procrastinate and let it go until another day. We can not ignore it. We must take weed killer or our very own hands, and take it up by its roots. If it's not a single root but a network of them, dig away the dirt so you can follow each to its source, pluck it out, and then throw it away for burning or the garbage dump.

That is not enough, though. If you leave a patch of ground bare, weeds will keep coming back. The ground has to be sown with something else. With my ground last night, it was good, "99%!" weed free grass seed. With my spiritual life, it might be a redication to the Rosary, more frequent Mass, not forgetting (ahem) to say the Liturgy of the Hours, more spiritual reading, getting spiritual direction, more frequent confession, more meditation on reading, more contemplative prayer (the most joyful prayer of all), or all of the above.

Finally, the metaphor within the metaphor. We are to till and keep our gardens, right? After all, God said so. So while we have literal gardens and some figurative gardens (e.g., our spiritual lives, etc.), we all have the most metaphorical and important garden of all: Our wives.

It is our seed that the "soil" of our wives accepts. From that seed and God's good grace and blessing comes forth our ability to cooperate with God in the very act of creation, an amazing power when you think of it. So on this Father's Day, ask yourself, "What am I doing to 'till and keep' my garden, my wife? Am I showering her with affection (and not just of the sexual kind, for, like a garden, she will dry up and not produce or bear fruit if neglected)? Am I concerned for her spiritual life, and do I manifestly exhibit this concern in concrete, practical ways? Am I 'keeping' her, as in a castle's keep, as in guarding her? Do I ensure her basic needs are met, and not only material but spiritual and emotional, as well? Am I talking to her in her own particular 'love language'? If not, what must I do to make this garden thrive?"

After all, that's our job as husbands, isn't it? And the best way to be a good father is to be a good husband, is it not?

Keep in mind, I am not lecturing anyone more than I am myself. "Good advice, doctor. Why don't you take it?" is about the long and short of it. I recognize my duty to my spouse and family, and so often I do not choose them but ME. I choose what I want, what makes me feel good, what satisfies my desires and longings, bugger all what the wife and kids want.

Still, I recognize this, and I also know it's a huge problem for so many of my fellow men. And, sadly, some of them patently don't recognize this. We have to work against it, don't we? Or do you want to stand before God and explain why you blew off doing this work?

Have a Happy Father's Day, and let each of us dads use it not to get breakfast in bed or to be pampered, but to recommit ourselves to being better dads. Without this, the world will fail absent the grace and mercy of God.

What do you think?

New York Times article: "My ex-gay friend"

2011-06-19T12:11:00.000-07:00

I read the NYT piece this morning with the above title with great interest, and I pray Our Lord uses this fascinating article to prick the hearts of those struggling with this lifestyle.

However, I thought Michael Glatze could have possibly given a fuller, more compelling exposition on why the same-sex choice will only lead to despair for those who make it.

His friend wrote, “I rejected his argument that 'homosexuality prevents us from finding our true self within.'”

The answer he implicitly give -- and maybe the quote that follows a paragraph or so later was done without benefit of knowing this sentiment of this -- would have failed to persuade me if I was him. Might I suggest something else, based on the following?

God is not only Love, but He is perfect love. When Genesis 1 tells us He said, "Let Us make them in Our image," He couldn't not have meant an image of a body, as the Father and the Holy Spirit are non-corporeal, and God the Son was not yet incarnate. So it must have meant in an image of total self-giving, as we see in the Trinity. Indeed, we see this implicit in Matthew 22:36-40. And when Our Lord says, "Be perfect as Your Father in heaven is perfect," given that we are sinners, this is practically impossible. However, we can ever perfect ourselves in love, right?

And how do we do that? By becoming holy, sanctified, and we do that by mirroring the image presented to us in the Holy Trinity. And what is that image? It is a love that is free, faithful, total, and fruitful.

Let me give you an example, the most perfect example: Our Lord's salvific act on the cross.

First, it is free. The Gospels all make clear that He was not coerced into the Passion, but went freely. We see this very clearly in John 10:18.

Next, it was faithful, as we see from the the Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus says, "O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou [wilt]."

Then it was total. Our Lord held nothing back, did He? If the film The Passion of the Christ is any indicator of just how bad it was, or even if we simply go by what we know from history and Roman execution methods, that is patently clear.

Finally, it was fruitful, because you and I are communicating by virtue of that once, for all sacrifice.

Going even deeper than this, The first commandment in all of Scripture is Genesis 1:28. This same thought is also the first commandment given humanity after Noah and his family emerge from the Ark, which God says twice (cf., Gen 9:1-7). It is implicit in the two commandments of the new covenant (cf. Matt 22:36-40) and His final commandment before the Ascension, which repeats the formula of Genesis, "Go forth," except here we are called not just to a physical fruitfulness, but one that is spiritual, as well.

Homosexual genital acts, however, can never be free, faithful, total, or fruitful.

They are not free because they are not free to do this by virtue of God's law. That may sound, I don't know, whatever you think it sounds like, but that doesn't make it any less true.

It is not faithful, or often is not, given that the average homosexual man, for instance, has (depending on the study) between 50-500+ sexual partners in his lifetime, with some 18-30%+ having over 1,000. Women naturally have far fewer, but they, too, have double digit numbers of relationships.

It is not total, in that 75% of homosexual relationships find that they have to accept the absence of physical monogamy if they want their relationship to survive. How can my love for another man be total if it is not for him alone?

More fundamentally, however, it cannot be total because I can never give another man my fertility nor he give me hisfertility. I can never image the Holy Trinity. The very nature of homosexual genital acts forecludes that from being a possibility.

Finally, and most importantly, it can never, ever, ever be fruitful. No many how many times two women rub their genitals together or use sex toys, no matter how many times two men sodomize or orally copulate one another, it will never -- can never -- bear fruit. Two men could never produce a baby together. Sara and Phyllis could never produce a baby together in the way God intended it. Homosexual love thus goes against God's design from the very beginning (cf., Gen 1:28, Gen 38:3-10, et al).

More fundamentally, however, it does so because it goes against God's very desire in the beginning: "Let us make them in our image" (Gen 1:26). The love between God the Father and God the Son is so total and so fruitful that the Holy Spirit proceeds from it. Similarly, the love between a husband and wife is so total and fruitful that nine months later, you have to give it a name.

Because we are only right in ourselves when we are in right relationship with God ("Thou hast formed us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in Thee," St. Augustine, Confessions, 1), a homosexual can "never get out of that cave. We go from guy to guy, looking for someone to love us and make us feel OK." It's not that "God is so much better than all the other masters out there." He is. He is our first beginning, and our last end. He made us to know, love, and serve Him in this life so that we may be happy with Him in the next.

But "[going] from guy to guy, looking for someone to love us and make us feel OK" will never make us happy because we are falling for a pale imitation of the love of the Holy Trinity. We are searching for God (Chesterton says, "Every man who enters a whorehouse is looking for God," i.e., for happiness and freedom from "restlessness" that can only be found in God), and we will never find it in a relationship that cannot be fruitful.

And ultimately, we are falling for the same lie for which Adam and Eve fell. The lure of homosexuality tells us that one love between any two or more persons is just as good as heterosexual love. ("You will not die; you will be as gods.") It is not, it cannot be, and we must work to save people with these attractions from this deception.

This is a talk given on this subject in 2007 or so to the national conference of Exodus, the ministry serving those seeking to be free of homosexual attractions. See what you think: http://thetheologyofthebody.com/download/category/19 (or see http://thetheologyofthebody.com under downloads if you don't trust my giving you this link).

What do you think?

Worried about teen sexuality?

2011-06-14T09:46:00.000-07:00

Here's news on the next training session for Theology of the Body for Teens (an effective chastity program for middle schoolers [ages 11-15] and high schoolers [ages 15-18]). Dates are August 12-13 in Chicago. See here for more information: http://bit.ly/jXeY08

Let me tell you this: Four years ago, I was very, very skeptical about this program, and that is putting it gently. No longer. I now consider myself a fervent convert. The reason? I have seen too many good fruits coming from this and -- very important -- no bad fruits. If you want your adolescents or teens to know why God created them, why chastity is not a white knuckle experience but a joyful gift, and what it really means to love (per the Church's definition of love), whether a friend, relative, or spouse, get this program implemented in your home, school, or church. Even Protestants are using it, because they recognize it's the best thing out there. And there are adult versions of the program available, too. Truly, this material is life-changing.

Farming and God

2011-06-11T15:51:00.000-07:00

At long last, after four years of fits and starts, we finally got the garden planted today.

While getting my self absolutely black with dirt, the gardening occasioned some thoughts on God and our relation to Him:

When He said in Genesis 3 that we would have to make our living by the sweat of our brow and have weeds, etc., with which to contend, boy, He wasn't kidding. Although the temperature was quite nice and it was overcast all day, I sweat like I was trying to fill a swimming pool. And weeds. One thing I have done pretty well over the last four years is to keep the garden area pretty free of weeds.

No matter, there they were waiting for me, and I fought a running battle with them for the better part of 4-5 hours. The planting part actually took hardly any time at all. It was quite relaxing and contemplative. The weeding, however, getting down deep to get those shooter roots for crab grasses, clover, and other odd things one doesn't want or need in a garden, if I was anal about it? I could be out there yet.

The thought crossed my mind that God could do all of what it took me hours to do in the blink of an eye. And yet, since we once tried to reach for being gods (cf. Genesis 3), He has made it patently evident we can't do things simply by willing them. As such, He has given us the need to work -- and work very hard -- for the earth to produce what it naturally produced before the Fall. Even so, even amidst this taking us down a peg, He still allows us to participate in the beauty of creating by enabling us to bring fruit from the ground. And there are few things more satisfying than eating that which you helped produce.

And then there were the gnats and odd mosquitoes. One thing I want to ask God if I am blessed to be with Him for eternity (i.e., I have been saved, I am being saved, and I hope to be saved through my running the race, per St. Paul) is, "Why the mosquitoes? Were they like the rock and the weeds, a product of the Fall?"

Before entering the house, I housed myself off, getting all the caked on black dirt rinsed off as much as possible before showering. This necessarily occasioned thoughts on baptism and the washing away of our sins in that sacrament, not to mention what happens every time we enter the confessional.

I'm know there were other thoughts, but frankly, I'm too exhausted to recall them. Exhausted and happy. Content, really.

If you haven't for a while or have never done something like this, plant something this year. It's not too late. Tend it. Water it. Feed it. See what happens. It doesn't have to be a major crop. It could be an already started pot of basil. But see what joy it brings you.

God bless you, and be assured of my prayers.

Several questions for my Green movement friends in Iran

2011-06-10T21:24:00.000-07:00

My dear friends in the Green democracy and independence movement in Iran, I have a question. Please know it is not meant to offend you. It is based on what was made patently obvious to me when I observed your brave protests against an autocratic and repressive regime.

من يك سئوال , دوستان عزيز در اين جنبش سبز دموکراسی و استقلال در ايران. لطفا آن است که منظور این نیست که به كسى برنخوره. بر اساس آنچه واضح است که به جلب توجه من شما را مشاهده كردم كه دليرانه خودكامه اعتراض عليه رژيم حاکم است.

Here it is:

When will those in your movement realize that Islam is not incidental to the regime's autocracy, repression, and suppression of human rights and thus dignity but the very cause of it?

وقتي شما حرکت می کنند در درك اتفاقي نيست که اسلام به اين رژيم استبداد و سركوب, و سركوب حقوق بشر و به اين ترتيب عزت اما اين باعث آن?

Again, I don't want to offend or hurt, but I'm afraid -- know -- I definitely will. Still, I would rather take that chance than to stay silent and see you remain in misery. Khomeini, Khameini, Rafjsanjani, Ahmedinajad, Khatami ... change the person, it will not matter. Your dignity will continue to be crushed, your hopes and dreams thwarted, your spirits trampled upon, because these men ... and whoever succeeds them, Moussavi included ... operate from a worldview, a paradigm based on a theology that cannot see or allow any other way.

بار ديگر, من نمی خواهم به كسى برنخوره يا درد ندارد, اما من مى ترسم میدانید من قطعا خواهد شد. هنوز, من ترجيح ميدهم آنرا خاموش بمانند تا فرصت مى بينيد و بدبختي به جا مانده است. خميني (ره), ‌ khameini, ‌ rafjsanjani, ‌ ahmedinajad, خاتمي بود.. تغيير اين شخص, بلكه موضوع.

Don't believe me. Rather, simply ask yourself this question: When has their ever been a stable, democratic Islamic government that upheld the dignity of the human person?

من اعتقاد ندارم. نه, به سادگی از خودتان اين سوال: آیا آنها که وقتی یک نظام باثبات و مردم سالار كه حكومت اسلامي از حمايت از منزلت انساني.

Again, my friends, I apologize for possibly offending you. Look past the hurt, however, and ask yourselves: What is the answer to both of the questions posed here, especially the last one? And what countries have upheld the dignity of the human person, and what been has the primary religious influence on these nations?

بار ديگر, دوستان, پوزش مي‌خواهم زيرا شايد رنجاندن تو. نگاهی به گذشته درد دارد, اما, و از خودتان: آنچه که در پاسخ به اين سوال مطرح است, به ويژه در سال گذشته است? و آنچه که از وقار فرد انساني, و چه مذهبي اوليه است که در اين كشورها نفوذ?

Seize the moment to do something great. Return Persia, Iran to her exalted status, a status that has not been hers for over 1,300 years. How much longer will you wait? Now is the time!

از اين لحظه به كاري بزرگ شد. بازگشت ايران, ايران به جايگاه والاي او, که يک جايگاه تحلق به مدت بيش از 1300 سال است. چقدر ديگر صبر كنيد? حالا وقت آن است!

I used this website for translation. من اين سايت براي ترجمه كرد.

Movie review -- Mamma Mia

2011-06-10T20:55:00.000-07:00

I love the music of ABBA. Bjorn and Benny are musical geniuses. So when the movie arrived from Netflix, I was pretty excited.

Boy, silly sentiment and wasted anticipation.

Crass, banal, tedious, predictable: These are only a few of the words that describe "Mamma Mia."

And it's too bad, too, because it constantly showed admittedly entertaining glimmers of promise and potential. But each time I got a little hopeful that the film would ultimately redeem itself, the next turn around the corner would bring those hopes crashing down.

First, the movie's good points: The music is great and not just because they're ABBA songs. I really appreciated how these arrangements made much more clear the brilliance of the chord changes and the genius of the instrumentation. The bass lines, the piano playing, the odd guitar licks shimmer much more brilliantly than they do on any ABBA record. It's also much easier to hear the lyrics. And just like the ABBA records, they are infectious and smile-producing.

And Meryl Streep. Wow. Just wow. What a woman. She is incredible. In fact, she is beyond incredible. The woman was almost 60 when she made this film, and she comes across sexier than women 30-40 years younger than she is. Completly so. She has such vivaciousness! As always, her acting is amazing, made even more so by the fact that some of her best acting comes during the musical numbers, which I would think is very hard to do. She gives a very affecting performance that is never not believable (forgive me the double negative). Streep left me constantly amazed and engaged throughout the movie, and if there was a reason I kept with the movie to the end, it was probably her. She is a national treasure, and quite possibly the greatest actress ever known.

Relative newcomer Amanda Seyfried is endearing and has a fine, fine singing voice (and the scene on the beach between her and her on-screen fiance will induce chaste men to avert their eyes if they're wise), and Stellan Skarsgård is, no surprise here, highly watchable. Colin Firth does a good job of, well, playing Colin Firth, and Pierce Brosnan affects his normal suave, debonair, charming man. Indeed, he does this with such ease as to make it look, well, easy. Also, Christine Baranski does her normal fine job of straddling the line between being fun to watch and borderline cringe-inducing. Julie Walters does a good job, as well.

One thing I definitely appreciated about the film is that you get to see the actors doing things to which you're not accustomed to seeing them do: dancing, singing, being silly and goofy, and that sort of thing. The guys dancing on the dock in their flippers was giggle-inducing to the extreme. And the (literally) Greek Chorus: What a hoot! They were so much fun to watch.

OK, enough with the kudos. Did I need to see Ms. Baranski strike a pose with a huge, red tipped phallic symbol between her legs? Give me a break. Is the world really that desperate for even more lowest-common-denominator sexual jokes, double entendres that are more like Beevis & Butthead half entendres, and tidal waves of crass asides in films that we needed to see as many examples of these as we do in "Mamma Mia"? Do we need yet more glorification of the "far out" '60s, the wake of which caused and still causes so much damage? What is so great about everyone giving full throttle to their every base passion with no sign of restraint whatsoever? Why is it so wonderful and gleeful about seeing people getting drunk and a menopausal woman cavorting with a boy who looks like he's still a teen? How is it that self-autonomous individualism of the kind glorified by secular humanists/atheists and this film portrayed as so great when it is wreaking havoc in every crevice of Western culture? And why throw in a gratuitous homosexual relationship at the end? It's so in your face, it's so out of place that it's offensive and just plain stupid. Absolutely pointless. Seriously, I don't understand why mainstream Hollywood feels like a film isn't a film unless it leaves no opportunity to offend the sensibilities of heartland, tradition-minded, conservative Americans unused. Actually, I do, but that's a different post.

Furthermore, beyond all this, while I realize the difficulty of crafting a story around already existing songs, it was just a banal, boring, ultimately uninvolving story. Will Sophie find out which of the three men she lied to in an effort to show up at her wedding is really her dad? Will mom find out what Sophie did? Will her fiance find out what Sophie so connivingly did without telling him and still want to marry her? "Will Sophie find out that one of these three men is actually her dad?" mom frets. Will mom's friends from the past not give in to every stereotype of an aging women absolutely desperate to prove she still has it, baby, and thus retain some degree of her feminine dignity and not look so utterly pathetic and ridiculous? Oh, the suspense of it all.

Uhm, and it's Greece. The whole movie makes patently clear that this is Greece, as in almost completely Greek Orthodox Greece. So who do they have as the clergyman who is to perform the big wedding at the center of all the "drama"? An Anglican vicar. For Pete's sake, guys. What would be so bad about a Greek Orthodox priest? It's just as well with a a marriage that is as secular as this one.

Had this been a movie without ABBA songs, no one would have given it a second's attention. It would have been B movie or Straight-to-DVD if it had ever even been green lighted.

So for all the truly fun things this movie had to offer, I can't recommend it.

Have you seen it? What did you think? What did you agree with in this review? What made you disagree?

Today's feasts

2011-06-10T05:37:00.001-07:00

A happy feast of Bl. Edward Poppe, an amazing priest youth catechist (he’s profiled in 39 New Saints You Should Know), and Bl. Eustachius Kugler, a religious who stood up to both the Nazis and the conquering Americans. Pray well!

The frustrations of fatherhood

2011-06-09T06:02:00.000-07:00

I hate when the baby is sick. He's miserable and can't tell us what's wrong and he's frustrated, and that just makes me frustrated, because it's a constant guessing game as to what will help him. I want to help him, but more often than not. I guess wrong. We just keep trying until we hit on something, and, praise God, he is comfortable in my arms now.

Bl. Juan de Palafox, pray for us in the name of Jesus that my baby be made well.

And, Lord, through the prayers of Ven. Joseph Menochio, please heal baby James, who has a heart problem of which doctors can't diagnose the cause. In Jesus' powerful name we pray. Amen.

Prayer request for a very young baby

2011-06-08T07:12:00.001-07:00

Please pray for baby James, 4.5 mos. He has congestive heart failure & doctors can't discover why. Pray for the doctors & the family, too.