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Featured Article
Oct
31
Beauty of Holiness
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Here is a very brief meditation on the communion of saints on this All Hallows’ Eve.
One of the most moving plainchants of the Church is the Litany of Saints, sung during Easter Vigil, Ordinations, Canonization of Saints, and during Papal Funerals. After invoking the mercy of the Trinity, the Church on earth names the glorious saints beginning with the Blessed Virgin Mary, to the Archangels and Angels, John the Baptist, Joseph, the Prophets and Patriarchs, Peter and Paul, down through the glorious martyrs, and saints of God, rank upon rank of the glorious heavenly company whom we ask to pray for us.
What a wonderful cloud of witnesses, those who have triumphed and are now beholding God face to face. These are our elder brothers and sisters in the Faith whose lives are masterpieces of the Holy Spirit’s work. Through their Yes to God, extraordinary things were accomplished so that we may have hope in our daily striving here on earth. The lives they lived are witnesses to the transformative power of the Holy Spirit. The holiness they lived is the splendor of God’s Truth worked out in ordinary living. It is this splendor that attracts us and pulls us into the interior life of the Trinity. There is nothing more powerful than a changed life lived for the glory of God.
Veneration of the saints is a confusing concept for our separated brothers and sisters in the Christian faith. There is an assumption that to venerate the saints takes away or even reduces the glory that is due to God. The vision given by St. John in the Apocalypse gives us the answer to this concern. God doesn’t reign in isolation. The glory that is his cannot but be reflected by his saints who behold him.
One of the important things to remember about the doctrine of the Communion of Saints is that as the Mystical Body of Christ, the Church is One…even though she is in three stages, Church Militant struggling here on earth, Church Expectant in the process of purification in purgatory, and Church Triumphant in the Beatific Vision of Our Triune God. But she is still One unified by the Holy Spirit who is her soul and who animates her and gives her supernatural life.
So to venerate the saints is to be led to worship the Lord. The saints point not at themselves but to Christ Crucified and Resurrected. When Catholics venerate the saints it is in its essence to be in thanksgiving for the untiring work of the Holy Spirit who perfects our faith and transforms each of us to be images of God. Saints show us that it is possible to be holy as our Father in heaven is holy.
Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis…Omnes sancti Angeli et Archangeli, orate pro nobis…Omnes sancti Patriárchæ et Prophetæ, orate pro nobis…Omnes sancti Apóstoli et Evangelistæ, orate pro nobis…Omnes sancti Mártyres, orate pro nobis…Omnes sancti Pontifices et Confessores, orate pro nobis… Ut Ecclésiam tuam sanctam regere et conservare dignéris…. Te rogamus, audi nos.
Oct
31
The Franciscan Friars are hosting World Youth Day events in Sydney and Brisbane. Before the official celebrations in Sydney begin, the three-day International Franciscan Youth Gathering will take place in Brisbane, one week before the official program in Sydney. This is also place to go for those who want to be Franciscan WYD08 volunteers.
- www.franciscans.org.au/wyd
Oct
31
“Jews Demand Signs” | An Interview with Roy Schoeman, editor of Honey From the Rock: Sixteen Jews Find the Sweetness of Christ
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Carl Olson Roy H. Schoeman was born in a suburb of New York City of “Conservative” Jewish parents who had fled Nazi Germany. His Jewish education and formation was received under some of the most prominent Rabbis in contemporary American Jewry, including Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, probably the foremost Conservative Rabbi in the U.S. and his hometown Rabbi growing up; Rabbi Arthur Green, later the head of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College who was his religion teacher and mentor during high school and early college; and Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, a prominent Hasidic Rabbi with whom he lived in Israel for several months.
His secular education included a B.Sc. from M.I.T. and an M.B.A. magna cum laude from Harvard Business School. Midway through a career of teaching and consulting (he had been appointed to the faculty of the Harvard Business School) he experienced an unexpected and instantaneous conversion to Christianity which led to a dramatic refocus of his activities. Since then he has pursued theological studies at several seminaries, written the acclaimed book Salvation Is From the Jews, helped produce and host a Catholic Television talk show, and edited and written for several Catholic books and reviews. His website is www.SalvationIsFromTheJews.com.
Schoeman was recently interviewed by Carl E. Olson, editor of Ignatius Insight, about the book, Honey From the Rock: Sixteen Jews Find the Sweetness of Christ, which Schoeman compiled and edited.
Ignatius Insight: The sixteen stories of conversion in Honey from the Rock come from a wide range of backgrounds, cultures, and historical eras. How and why did you go about compiling them?
Roy Schoeman: After I wrote Salvation is from the Jews: The Role of Judaism in Salvation History from Abraham to the Second Coming, I found myself being invited to speak about the book, and to give my witness testimony, in more and more places. When I recounted the, frankly, miraculous events – a direct encounter with Christ, and later an extremely vivid and awake-feeling dream of the Blessed Virgin Mary (my witness testimony appears, in various forms, in both of my books as well as on my website) – people were surprised that such extraordinary graces had been granted me in order to bring me, an anti-Catholic Jew, to the truth of post-Messianic Judaism: that is, the Catholic Church.
Yet I knew from both my reading and my encounters with other Jewish Catholics that such experiences were more the norm than the exception for Jews who come to faith in Christ; after all, St. Paul himself said, “Jews demand signs” (1 Cor 1:22). I thought it would be useful to collect a group of such stories – first person witness testimonies whenever possible – that showed the lengths that Jesus was prepared to go to to bring home those who were first His people – the Jews. This is particularly important today, since we are living in a time when the pernicious falsehood is being spread, even by some Catholic theologians, that there is no need to evangelize the Jews because they are already in their own saving covenant with God. Nothing could be further from the truth – after all, it was to Jews that Jesus said “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God”(Jn 3:5) and “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you” (Jn 6:53); it was Jews, and only to Jews, that Jesus evangelized during His time on earth (”Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” — Mt. 10:5-6); and it was for evangelizing Jews that He was crucified. Read more
Oct
31
Summorum Pontificum
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It marks a new era of liturgical seriousness.
The forces in the Church most responsible for dividing Catholics from magisterial teaching are the quickest to use the word “divisive” in any controversy. A “divisive moment” is the Catholic left’s euphemism for any papal action that seeks to unite Catholics to the actual teachings and traditions of the faith.
So it goes with Pope Benedict XVI’s Motu Proprio, Summorum Pontificum, which authorizes wider use of the traditional Latin Mass. “Any liberalization of the use of the Tridentine rite may prove seriously divisive,” British prelate Kieran Conry, Bishop of Arundel and Brighton, said to the Telegraph shortly before the Motu Proprio’s release. “It might send out an unfortunate signal that Rome is no longer fully committed to the reforms of the Second Vatican Council…”
No, what it signals is a welcome new era of liturgical seriousness and the beginning of the end to the demoralizing liturgical chaos and distortions of the last four decades. In Summorum Pontificum, Pope Benedict has not only revived a venerable liturgical tradition but supplied a catalyst to reform the new liturgy.
By making the traditional Latin Mass and the new Mass two uses (extraordinary and ordinary) of “one and the same rite,” Pope Benedict is fostering a climate of healthy coexistence, perhaps one could even say healthy competition, in which false innovations may fall away and a sense of the sacred can be recovered. Read more
Oct
31
UK Christians Retired from Foster Parenting over a “Misunderstanding”
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Hilary White October 29, 2007
Vincent and Pauline Matherick, the Christian couple who retired from fostering needy children to avoid a government requirement to promote homosexuality, were the victims of a “misunderstanding” says Somerset social services.
After national news coverage in the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail in Britain and international coverage by LifeSiteNews.com which included their telephone number and email address, Somerset Council has changed gears.
The Daily Mail carried comments this weekend from Linda Barnett, head of Somerset County Council’s children’s social care saying there had been an unfortunate “misunderstanding” between the Mathericks and their social worker. The comments also followed the Council’s receipt of a legal letter warning of possible further action against social services.
“We do not and would never ask foster carers to promote homosexuality,” Barnett said. What we ask for is no different from any other authority, in that we ask carers not to discriminate against a child on the basis of race, gender, background, religion, accent or sexuality, among other things.”
“The Mathericks,” Barnett said, “were very good foster carers and so I have invited them to meet me next week to see if we can reach some kind of agreement, so they can continue to work with us.”
The Somerset couple told media they had been interviewed by Somerset Council social workers and told that under the new Sexual Orientation Regulations they would have to support any interest a foster child might express in homosexuality. Read more
Oct
31
Britney’s newest publicity stunt involves inappropriate photos with “priest”
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Los Angeles, Oct 30, 2007 / 01:08 pm (CNA).- Britney Spears is attempting to stir-up controversy with her new album “Blackout” by posing suggestively in a confessional with a priest. The Catholic League’s president of Media Relations, Kiera McCaffrey, has dismissed Britney’s antics as “cheap tricks” that won’t really influence people’s image of the Church.Spears’ album photos show her leaning suggestively against a confessional wall while a “priest” listens to her sins. Another shows her sitting on the same “priest’s” lap clad in fishnet leggings.
When asked by CNA if she thought Britney’s marketing ploy would affect people’s perceptions of the Catholic Church, McCaffrey said “ No I certainly don’t think that people are going to think this happens in confessionals…and most people looking at this will think that she’s trying to just get attention.”
McCaffery characterized the pop star’s photos as a product of her personal life and bad advice from her record label: “it looks sad, it looks that this is a troubled girl, whose handlers are giving her this bright idea… and that is really no way to take care of somebody.”
Echoing earlier comments by Bill Donahue, she noted, “If everything were going well, not only in her personal life but in her career, this sort of thing wouldn’t be necessary. Britney Spears has certainly had hits before… and back before she had this crash…she didn’t need to resort to this kind of nonsense.”
Spears has garnered a lot of media attention during the last year. Most recently, she was stripped of all but monitored visitation with her two young sons after the presiding judge called her a “habitual” user of drugs and alcohol.
Oct
31
Dialogue with SSPX? Lefebrivists demand Council be “corrected,” not interpreted
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Rome, Oct 30, 2007 / 01:05 pm (CNA).- In an interview with Italian journalist Paolo Luigi Rodari, the author of the blog “Palazzo Apostolico,” Bernard Fellay, the superior general of the Priestly Fraternity of St. Pius X, said the schismatic movement demands not only a “correct interpretation” of Vatican II, but that the Council documents actually be changed.Fellay defended his fellow excommunicated bishop, Ricard Williamson, identified by some in the media as leader of the “intransigent wing” of the fraternity. Fellay said, “Williamson and I are in agreement that it would be difficult to re-enter to the Church as it currently is.”
“The reasons are simple,” Fellay said, because “Benedict XVI has liberalized the ancient rite,” yet he has been criticized “by the majority of the bishops.” “What should we do? Re-enter the Church just to be insulted by these people?” he said. Read more
Oct
31
What direction does a person choose for his existence if he has decided to tune the instrument of his life to the keynote of “faith”? This question is not an easy one to answer because it obviously reaches down to the deeper levels of human nature, to attributes that are not always visible on the surface but that penetrate and leave their imprint on the whole, yet without being anywhere measureable. All the important fundamental decisions of human existence that go beyond our ordinary concern about the details of everyday living can be understood if we ourselves make some small effort to enter into the movement from which they flow - whether it is a question of a great love, of the passion of the inventor, or of a renunciation required of those who devote their lives to a revolutionary idea; whether it is a question of the attitude expressed in the smile of a Buddha or the faith of a Christian…We can explain what faith really means for an individual only by pointing to the lives of those who have lived it in its fullness: Francis of Assisi, Francis Xavier, IGnatius Loyola, Teresa of Avila, Therese of Lisieux, Vincent de Paul, John XXIII; in such persons, and basically only in them, can we come to know what kind of decision faith is. As we can see in the lives of such individuals, faith is a kind of passion, or, more correctly, a love that seizes an individual and shows him the direction he must go, however fatiguing it may be - the spiritual equivalent, perhaps, of a mountain to climb, which to the ordinary Christian would seem foolish indeed but to one who has committed himself to the venture is clearly the only direction to take - a direction he would not exchange for any conceivably more comfortable one.
From: Glaube und Zukunft, pp.39-40
Oct
31
Guard your eyes that they may not look upon anything contrary to purity; your ears, that they may not listen to evil conversation; your mind, by banishing from it all suggestive thoughts; your heart, by stifling impure desires at their very birth.
– St. John Baptist de la Salle
Oct
31
The Human Experience
Filed Under Events | Leave a Comment
| Nov 3, 2007 | ||
| 8:30 pm |
From Grassroots Films of Brooklyn, New York comes THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE – the story of a band of brothers who travel the world in search of the answers to the burning questions: Who am I? Who is Man? Why do we search for meaning? Their journey brings them into the middle of the lives of the homeless on the streets of New York City, the orphans and disabled children of Peru, and the abandoned lepers in the forests of Ghana, Africa. What the young men discover changes them forever. Through one on one interviews and real life encounters, the brothers are awakened to the beauty of the human person and the resilience of the human spirit. (Source)
November 3, 2007 | 8:30PM
Our Lady of Good Counsel, 230 East 90th St. New York, NY 10128
Hosted by Catholic Underground Manhattan
Other Screening locations and times here.
If you want to know the quality of films they make, watch this clip about the Priesthood, “Fishers of Men“. Really is worth watching especially if you are thinking about discernment. -Reynor
