Michael -- Who is like God

Today is the Feast of the Archangels -- Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael.  The Office of the Readings, in the Liturgy of the Hours, has as the non-biblical reading for this day, a section of a homily by St Gregory the Great.

He discusses the meanings of the names of the three Archangels who's names are used in the Bible.

Michael -- Who is like God
Gabriel  -- The strength of God
Raphael -- God's Remedy

In the Church where my granddaughter was Baptized, a week ago, is a stained glass window of St Michael the Archangel.

Let us pray this day for those named Michael, Gabriel and Raphael,
that they may know whose name they bear and why, and that they may experience God's Remedy.

Cardinal George Pell and True Mercy and the Indissolubility of Marriage

Cardinal Pell, at Catholic World Report, writes in  a forward to a new book:

Christianity and especially Catholicism constitute one historical reality, where the apostolic tradition of faith and morals, prayer and worship, is maintained. The doctrines of Christ are our cornerstone.

Interestingly, Jesus’ hard teaching that “what therefore God has joined together, let no man put asunder” (Mt 19:6) follows not long after his insistence to Peter on the necessity of forgiveness (see Mt 18:21–35).

It is true that Jesus did not condemn the adulterous woman who was threatened with death by stoning, but he did not tell her to keep up her good work, to continue unchanged in her ways. He told her to sin no more (see Jn 8:1–11).

Read it.

 

Mass Readings For Sept 23 2014

I was struck by the Gospel Reading for this day.  In particular: 

Jesus "said to them in reply, 'My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and act on it.'"

I thought of a passage from the Letter of James.

Then the reading from evening prayer of the Liturgy of the Hours on 24 Sept 2014 was:

Act on this word.  If all you do is listen to it, you are deceiving yourselves.  There is on the other hand, the man who peers into freedom's ideal law and abides by it.  He is no forgetful listener, but one who carries out the law in practice.  Blest will this man be in whatever he does. (James 1:22,25)

 

Baptismal Candle

This past weekend I visited with my daughter and her family, for the Baptism of their younger daughter, Ember.

She was baptized in the context of the Mass, with the first part occurring before the procession at the Baptismal Font near the main entrance of the church.  The meat of the Baptism occurred after the homily, also at the Baptismal Font, and took the place of the Creed.

All the members of the congregation renewed their Baptismal promises, while the parents and godparents made the Baptismal promises on behalf of Ember.

The priest was the same one who was at Meg and Mike's wedding; and the Baptism, like her sister's, was at the same Church where Meg and Mike married.

It was wonderful. 

Afterwards, Meg and Mike treated their family members and the godparents, to a brunch at Jines.

Ember slept very well that evening.

I had a very nice visit with my daughter and her family.

Humanae Vitae

I have been reading Humanae Vitae of late and have been struck by a few things.

Firstly, I was struck by paragraph 13 (Faithfulness to God's Design).  In it, Paul VI writes:

But to experience the gift of married love while respecting the laws of conception is to acknowledge that one is not the master of the sources of life but rather the minister of the design established by the Creator.

I think this is a key point.  It goes with my understanding of the confusion which grips our society.  Our culture believes, and is taught, that man is an accident; the result of a random comingling of organic molecules.  But the Church correctly teaches that we are not accidents, that each of us is called to life by God.

Without "the design established by the Creator," there are no human rights.  This perspective is written into the founding documents of our country, but has been abandoned in recent decades.

How long can a country founded on the perspective that human rights are founded in a "design established by the Creator," survive without it?

 Secondly, there is the paragraph to Christian Couples (25), in which Pope Paul says:

While the Church does indeed hand on to her children the inviolable conditions laid down by God's law, she is also the herald of salvation and through the sacraments she flings wide open the channels of grace through which man is made a new creature responding in charity and true freedom to the design of his Creator and Savior, experiencing too the sweetness of the yoke of Christ.

and

For the Lord has entrusted to them (Christian husbands and wives) the task of making visible to men and women the holiness and joy of the law which united inseparably their love for one another and the cooperation they give to God's love, God who is the Author of human life.

Read the entire paragraph.  It is wonderful and encouraging.

Calvary -- a couple of reviews

I've read two reviews of the movie, 'Calvary'.  One by Fr Robert Barron, and the second by Archbishop Charles Chaput .

Archbishop Chaput:

One of the truths at the heart of this film is that the sins of the past bear a bitter kind of fruit in the present, in pain, anger, and revenge. Hypocrisy never stays hidden forever. But the opposite is also true: Love also leaves its indelible mark on the world.

Both are highly enthusiastic about the film.  I'll probably see it when comes to my local library.

The First Amendment

 
Over the last week or so there have been many articles that address the proposal by more than 40 Democrat Senators to rewrite the First Amendment to the US Constitution:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

These include Editorials and OP-Ed pieces:

NRO Editors: Free Speech, Thank You very much

NRO Editors: Free Speech without Objection

George Will: Amend the Bill of Rights?

David Harsanyi: Who's a Threat to the Country?

My Senator, listed in George Will's column, seems to have no respect either for "the freedom of speech" or for "the free exercise thereof" (religion), as attested to by his association with the proposal to amend the Bill of Rights, but also his support for the HHS mandate involving Sterilization, Abortifacient drugs and contraceptives as it relates to Catholics, whose religion clearly teaches that such things are immoral.

I wonder how he thinks he's supporting and defending the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic?

Fulton Sheen through the eyes of David Limbaugh

Kathryn Jean Lopez has a nice article involving a new book by David Limbaugh, which cites Sheen's "Life of Christ."

She quotes from Limbaugh's work, and from works by Sheen.

A sample:
 
For his part, Limbaugh has an encouraging word for the faithful. He benefited from the kindness of friends who would give reasons for the faith they embrace. He writes about a friend of a friend who, one Christmas after law school, patiently talked about Christianity with Limbaugh, while he responded by expressing some of his doubts.

Limbaugh writes:

I shared with Steve certain doubts I had about the God of the Bible and told him I just didn’t buy into Christianity. I will never forget a couple of things about this exchange. Steve did not fit my perception at the time of the stereotypical young Christian — a judgmental holy roller who accepted Christianity uncritically. He exhibited an extraordinary measure of grace. He not only didn’t take offense at my skepticism, but he patiently retrieved his Bible from his bedroom and began to walk me through a few fascinating verses. This might have been the first time outside of Sunday school or church that someone went directly to the source and shared it with me.

Undaunted and unoffended by my challenge, he gave me a model Christian response. Despite my skepticism, I was not close-minded and was genuinely interested in learning. I knew, after all, that I hadn’t really given the Bible a hearing, much less a fair one. To my surprise — and this is embarrassing to admit — Steve showed me how verses of Scripture, both Old and New Testaments, were tied to others in content and theme with remarkable frequency.

Limbaugh goes on to say that because Steve wasn’t remotely judgmental, “for the first time in my life  the Bible appeared to me to be thematically integrated. The scales of my eyes started peeling away.”

And from Sheen's work:

In an address in 1936, Sheen talked about the “Forgotten Man.” Digging deep, you can find him everywhere, Sheen said:

Our problem today then is the problem of the Forgotten Man — not the forgotten man in the sense of the man who is unemployed or hungry; not the forgotten man who is economically dispossessed, or socially disinherited; not the forgotten man of the bread lines, but forgotten man in the sense of forgotten human dignity, forgotten human worth, forgotten divine destiny, forgotten personality, forgotten power to rise above the state and the collective to commune with the Life and Truth and Love which is God. This is the real Forgotten Man of our day — the man who can enter into himself and find down in the depths of his soul that he was made for God and only God can make him remembered — even for eternity.

This article is worth reading just for the quotations from Sheen.

Rome Again -- in memory

One year ago, today, I was in Rome, It, for a pilgrimage.  That was the beginning of this blog.

The post for last year is:
http://variousthoughtsbymart.blogspot.com/2013/10/evening-came-and-morning-followed-first.html

Repent therefore -- that your sins may be forgiven.

At National Review Online, Kathryn Jean Lopez writes about the controversy regarding the
the St Patrick's Day Parade, in 2015.

All are welcome. The life of Christ demonstrates this — and then some. Cardinal Dolan has said this. Pope Francis said it in his Tuesday-morning homily in Rome. Across the street from Penn Station in midtown Manhattan stands St. Francis of Assisi Church, where there is a sign outside that says the same. St. Francis’s has Eucharistic Adoration from 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. every weekday, and there is Confession there too, for many hours throughout the day. Be reconciled to Christ. That is the invitation. Fallen away, lost, miserable, confused, trying. Come to the healing waters of eternal life.

Yes, we are all sinners in desperate need of God's Mercy.  We must all repent of the evil we participate in.

St Peter, in the Acts of the Apostles, says to the Jewish people in Solomon's Portico: Repent therefore, that your sins may be forgiven. (Acts 3:19).

That saying is no less pertinent today than it was in 33 AD.

Cardinal George and a tale of a real and a fake church

In his column in the Diocesan Paper of the Archdiocese of Chicago, Francis Cardinal George, O.M.I.,
writes of a tale of two churches.

The tale involves the history of the Church in this country, and some recent developments.

A Sample:

This church, a hierarchical communion, continued through history, living among different peoples and cultures, filled with sinners, but always guided in the essentials of her life and teaching by the Holy Spirit. She called herself “Catholic” because her purpose was to preach a universal faith and a universal morality, encompassing all peoples and cultures. This claim often invited conflict with the ruling classes of many countries. About 1,800 years into her often stormy history, this church found herself as a very small group in a new country in Eastern North America that promised to respect all religions because the State would not be confessional; it would not try to play the role of a religion.

This church knew that it was far from socially acceptable in this new country. One of the reasons the country was established was to protest the king of England’s permitting the public celebration of the Catholic Mass on the soil of the British Empire in the newly conquered Catholic territories of Canada. He had betrayed his coronation oath to combat Catholicism, defined as “America’s greatest enemy,” and protect Protestantism, bringing the pure religion of the colonists into danger and giving them the moral right to revolt and reject his rule.

You'll want to read it in its' entirety.

http://www.catholicnewworld.com/cnwonline/2014/0907/cardinal.aspx

Kathryn Lopez -- Beacons in the Dark

From an article on Townhall, Kathryn Lopez writes about the killing of Steven Sotloff,
in the light of a talk given by Fr. Paul Murray, an Irish Dominican.

A sample:

Fr. Murray talked, among other things, about the dangers of relativism. While it appears "apparently sane and humane," and "identified in the popular mind with such fine and necessary things as tolerance and affirmation, openness and freedom," Fr. Murray said, relativism, despite its quiet air of inevitable reason, leaves us "disarmed just at the moment when we should be armed," unable to successfully respond to challenges to faith.

"Surely, now is the time for us to hold fast to our Catholic faith and joyfully proclaim it," he said, adding that that is exactly what Catholic studies programs exist to help people do.


You will probably want to read the whole column.

Archbishop Charles J. Chaput and a lesson in priorities

Saw this by the archbishop of Philadelphia about the HHS mandate(for Sterilization contraceptives and abortifacient coverage under ObamaCare) and the extermination of religious minorities in the middle east.  Here is a sample from the archbishop.

The extermination of religious minorities in the Middle East — what Syriac Catholic Patriarch Ignace Joseph III Younan calls “attempted genocide” — has so far drawn a very different response.

How should we as Catholics respond? We can start by realizing that a discomfort about dealing with religious liberty issues abroad has been part of the culture of America’s foreign policy bureaucracy for a long time, despite the 1998 law. Our current national leadership has simply made it worse. As much as we love our country — and Catholics have proven that love again and again in public service and in combat — our primary loyalty as Catholics is to Jesus Christ, to the Church as our community of faith and to our fellow Christians. They come first; and if in our hearts we don’t place them first, then we need to take a hard look at what we mean when we say we’re “Catholic.”
 

It is well worth reading.  Read it all.  A lesson in priorities