Fr. Barron visits Lourdes: Mary, the Immaculate Conception

The following comes from Ellyn von Huben at the Word On Fire blog:

Today we celebrate Our Lady's appearance to a young peasant girl, Bernadette, in 1858 in Lourdes, France. Through a set of private revelations, Mary revealed herself as "the Immaculate Conception." What does this title mean, and what should we know about Our Lady of Lourdes? Ellyn von Huben explains.

1. The Story of St. Bernadette is Not Just for Girls

Bernadette is a perennial favorite when young ladies chose their confirmation names. And girls certainly do love watching the film version of “The Song of Bernadette”. (Winner of the very first Golden Globe award for best motion picture, by the way!) I wouldn’t say that watching this movie was the thing that led to my conversion…but it sure didn’t hurt!

Our Lady did not appear at Lourdes just to touch the hearts of tween girls throughout the ages. There is, indeed, much that speaks to the heart of the young girl. But anyone, of any age or gender can find in the story of St. Bernadette a story that will resonate truth within their hearts.

The appearance of Our Lady at Lourdes was not just for Bernadette – it could be heard by all; a sign for all pointing to Our Lady’s son, Jesus Christ.

2. This Great Saint was a Product of ‘Poor Catechesis’

Much is being discussed on Catholic internet sites regarding the state of modern catechesis and how it should be improved. St. Bernadette could be called a product of poor, minimal catechesis. But Bernadette started her faith life the best way possible – whether for a provincial child of the 1850s or a very modern, prosperous young person. She was the product of a strong “domestic Church”.

She had the minimal schooling of a poor girl of her time, compounded by missing lessons due to ill health and the fact that she was needed at home to help care for siblings. To the chagrin of the teaching Sister preparing her for her First Holy Communion, Bernadette was a technically abysmal Catechism student. But she received the most important preparation – that which can hardy be replicated in a classroom – being raised in a family whose greatest riches were their faith. There is profound understanding in this heart which would one day write, "I was nothing, and of this nothing God made something great. In Holy Communion I am heart to heart with Jesus. How sublime is my destiny."

It was the young Bernadette’s lack of schooling which made her testimony regarding the apparitions all the more believable. The dogma of the Immaculate Conception had been defined by Pope Pius IX just four years before Bernadette’s visions. The quote “I am the Immaculate Conception” coming from the lips of a young, rural girl possessing minimal scholarship had an indisputable veracity.

3. Belief in the Apparitions at Lourdes are not an Article of Faith for Catholics

The appearance of Our Lady to Bernadette is considered to be private revelation and adds nothing to the public deposit of faith – and so no Catholic is obligated to believe. The millions of believers, Catholic and non-Catholic, who visit Lourdes each year are, though, a testimony to the fact that those who do not believe in Our Lady’s appearance at Lourdes must be something of a minority.

4. “The Song of Bernadette”

A variety of authors wrote about St. Bernadette and the apparitions at Lourdes. But 20th century cultural popularity of St. Bernadette owes much to “The Song of Bernadette” and the efforts of its author. Franz Werfel, a Jewish German writer found himself in Lourdes while trying to escape to Portugal after France fell to the Nazis. Families who took in Werfel and his wife told them the story of Bernadette and her visions of Our Lady. Werfel vowed that if they should be able to escape, he would write the story of St. Bernadette. True to his promise, his first task when arriving in the United States was to write the beautiful work of historical fiction (which is more historical than fictional), The Song of Bernadette. An interesting bit of trivia: the structure of this bestseller is itself a reference to the holy rosary – five sections of ten chapters each.

5. Pope Benedict XVI

Lourdes has had a special place in the hearts of many popes in the past 156 years. Blessed Pope John Paul II made three pilgrimages to Lourdes. He also proclaimed February 11, the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes, as World Day of the Sick.

Lourdes and St. Bernadette also figure prominently in the life of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. He was born on St. Bernadette’s feast day of April 16 in 1927. In his Angelus address on the first Sunday of Lent in 2008 – the 150th anniversary of Our Lady’s first appearance at Lourdes – the Holy Father reminded us of its enduring significance , “The message that Our Lady continues to spread in Lourdes recalls the words that Jesus spoke at the very beginning of his public mission, which we hear several times during these days of Lent: 'Repent, and believe in the Gospel,' pray and do penance. Let us accept Mary's invitation which echoes Christ's and ask her to obtain for us that we may 'enter' Lent with faith, to live this season of grace with inner joy and generous commitment.”

Culminating his years as Pope, serving with “inner joy and generous commitment”, it was on February 11 of last year (2013) that he took the unprecedented (in modern times) step of announcing his stepping down from the papacy.

6. Lessons of Humility

Those who are looking for lessons in humility - and shouldn’t we all? - can find multiple examples in the story of St. Bernadette. From Bernadette and her humble, devout family, to the Church and civic officials, all the way to her teacher – who learned her lesson rather late – there is great food for contemplation in the stories of those characters who surrounded the young saint. Be they actual persons or fictionalized composites, they are all studies in growth in humility.

7. There is Nothing in the Water

The spring at Lourdes was uncovered by St. Bernadette at the command of Our Lady, who asked her to drink of the as-yet-unseen spring and wash in it. Since then, millions have imbibed and bathed in the water of Lourdes. Early on, some entrepreneurial sorts had hoped to find particular properties in the water which could turn Lourdes into a popular spa destination. But the water was found to be only pure and potable. Faith is the ‘secret’ ingredient. As Bernadette said, “One must have faith and pray; the water will have no virtue without faith.”

8. St. Bernadette Did Not Avail Herself of the Waters at Lourdes

Never in good health, St. Bernadette suffered greatly, and with silent good nature, in the final years of her life. She held fast to Our Lady’s promise that she wasn’t promised “happiness in this world, but in the next.”

When she was 22, she joined the Sisters of Charity of Nevers. She was content to be apart from public life, regarding herself as a tool, such as a broom, which had served its purpose and then “the broom placed behind the door once it has been used.” The teacher who had been harsh to her in her student years was to be her novice mistress and as harsh to the young sister as she had been to the student. It was not until this nun realized the sanctity with which Bernadette was bearing her final affliction of tuberculosis of the bone that she realized what a truly holy young woman she had been privileged to teach and guide. Despite her agony, Bernadette declined the opportunity to revisit Lourdes in search for a miraculous cure.

9. There is Independent Medical Evaluation

Pope Saint Pius X established the Lourdes Medical Bureau to investigate cases of medical miracles. This Medical Bureau is a medical institution and not under Church supervision. Over 7000 people have asked to have their cases declared as miraculous cures, yet fewer than 70 been signed off on by both the Church and the Lourdes Medical Bureau as being cures with no scientific explanation. Because this system for rigorous investigation was established early and openly, verified miracles from Lourdes are considered to be the most reliable and least controversial.

10. You, Too, Can Go to Lourdes

If you are suffering or merely curious, a pilgrimage to Lourdes may be just what you are looking for. Volunteers of all sorts, not only medical professionals, are needed to help in a variety of ways, including helping the sick prepare for their opportunity to bathe in the water of Lourdes. A week of time given in love brings its own miraculous gift to the hearts of those who spend time with the ‘malades’ on their pilgrimages. 

Bishop Robert Barron on Christmas

Fr. Barron on St. Theresa of Avila

Today is the feast day of St. Theresa of Avila.  She was a great reformer, mystic and spiritual writer and is recognized as a Doctor of the Church.  The following comes from the Vatican News:

The daughter of a Jewish convert and his second wife, Saint Teresa of Avila, was born on March 28, 1515. She had a happy childhood with her brothers and cousins, and was fascinated by novels that told tales of chivalry. After the death of her elder brother, John, in 1524 and the loss of her mother, Beatrice, the young woman was sent to study at the Augustinian Monastery of Our Lady of Grace, where she was struck by a first existential crisis. After serious illness, she returned to her father’s home, and witnessed the departure of her beloved brother Rodrigo for the Spanish colonies overseas. In 1536, she was hit by the so-called “great crisis” and came to the firm decision to enter the Carmelite monastery of the Incarnation at Avila. Her father, however, was  opposed, and Teresa fled home. Accepted by the nuns, she made her profession on 3 November, 1537.

“I felt shaken to the core”

Teresa’s health once again failed her. Despite the consequent return to the family, her case is deemed hopeless, and Teresa is returned to the convent, where the nuns begin to prepare her funeral. Inexplicably, however, the gravely ill Teresa returns to life and health. Partially released from the commitments of cloistered life owing to her convalescence, cheerful of character, a lover of music, poetry, reading and writing, Teresa would weave a dense fabric of friendships, drawing to her person various people eager to meet her. She would quickly come to feel these encounters a distraction from the principal task of prayer, and experience her “second conversion”: “My eyes fell on a picture ... It was our Lord covered with sorrows. As soon as I looked at Him I felt completely shaken ... I threw myself before His feet and shed tears, and I begged Him to give me strength not to offend Him anymore.”

Portrayed by Bernini

The most mysterious and interesting parts of Saint Teresa of Avila’s life, are her visions and ecstasies. In her Autobiography (written on the order of the bishop), and in other texts and letters, Teresa describes the various stages of divine, visual and auditory manifestations. She is seen to levitating, falling into disarray, and laying still as death (as Bernini depicts her around 1650, in the statue in the church of Our Lady of Victory in Rome). These events corresponded to a great spiritual growth, which Teresa, who had a natural gift for the literary, would pour into her mystical texts, which are among the clearest, most powerful poetics ever written.

Her intense spirituality did not always meet with understanding. Some of her confessors would even consider her a victim of demonic illusions. She was supported by the Jesuit, St. Francis Borgia, and the Franciscan friar, St. Pietro d'Alcántara, who dissipated the doubts of her accusers.

Read more here.

Ask Fr. Robert Barron: To be deep in history is to cease to be protestant? or secular?

Fr. Robert Barron comments on C. S. Lewis

Fr. Robert Barron on Thomas Merton

The following comes from Fr. Robert Barron at The Font:

I write these words on the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Thomas Merton, one of the greatest spiritual writers of the 20th century and a man who had a decisive influence on me and my vocation to the priesthood. I first encountered Merton’s writing in a peculiar way. My brother and I were both working at a bookstore in the Chicago suburbs. One afternoon, he tossed to me a tattered paperback with a torn cover that the manager had decided to discard. My brother said, “You might like this; it’s written by a Trappist monk.” I replied, with the blithe confidence of a sixteen year old, “I don’t want to read a book by some Buddhist.” With exquisite sensitivity, he responded, “Trappists are Catholics, you idiot.”

The book in question was The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton’s passionate, articulate, smart, and deeply moving account of his journey from worldling to Trappist monk. Though much of the philosophy and theology was, at that time, over my head, I became completely caught up in the drama and romance of Merton’s story, which is essentially the tale of how a man fell in love with God. The book is extraordinarily well written, funny, adventurous, and spiritually wise. In one of the blurbs written for the first edition, Fulton Sheen referred to it as a contemporary version of St. Augustine’s Confessions, and it was fulsomely praised by both Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene. Moreover, it contributed massively to the startling influx of young men into monasteries and religious communities across the United States in the postwar era.

I was so thrilled by my first encounter with Merton that I dove headlong into his body of writing. The Sign of Jonas, a journal that Merton kept in the years leading up to his priestly ordination, became a particular favorite. That work concludes with an essay called “Firewatch: July 4, 1952,” which Jacques Maritain referred to as the greatest piece of spiritual writing in the twentieth century. In this powerful meditation, Merton uses the mundane monastic task of walking through the monastery checking for fires as a metaphor for a Dantesque examination of the soul. The Sign of Jonas is marked by Merton’s playful and ironic sense of humor, but it also gives evidence of the enormous range of his reading and intellectual interests. To devour that book as a nineteen year old, as I did, was to receive an unparalleled cultural education. For many people of my generation, Merton opened the door to the wealth of the Catholic spiritual tradition: I first learned about John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart, Teresa of Avila, Bernard of Clairvaux, Odo of Cluny, the Victorines, Origen, Thérèse of Lisieux, and Hans Urs von Balthasar from him.

Perhaps the central theme of all of Merton’s writings is contemplation. What he stressed over and again in regard to this crucial practice is that it is not the exclusive preserve of spiritual athletes, but rather something that belongs to all the baptized and that stands at the heart of Christian life. For contemplation is, in his language, “to find the place in you where you are here and now being created by God.” It is consciously to discover a new center in God and hence at the same time to discover the point of connection to everyone and everything else in the cosmos. Following the French spiritual masters, Merton called this le point vierge, the virginal point, or to put it in the language of the fourth Gospel, “water bubbling up in you to eternal life.” In his famous epiphanic experience at the corner of 4th and Walnut in downtown Louisville, Merton felt, through le point vierge, a connection to the ordinary passersby so powerful it compelled him to exclaim, “There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”

Sadly, for many younger Catholics today, Merton, if he is known at all, is viewed with a certain suspicion, and this for two reasons. First, when he was a man of fifty-one, he fell in love with a young nurse who cared for him after back surgery. Though it is almost certain that this was exclusively an affair of the heart, it was certainly, to say the very least, unseemly for a middle-aged monk and priest to have been so infatuated with a much younger woman. At the same time, Merton worked through this confusing period and returned to his vowed monastic life. And the journal that he kept during that year is so spiritually alert and illuminating that I often recommend it to brother priests who are wrestling with the promise of celibacy. To dismiss Merton out of hand because of this admittedly inappropriate relationship strikes me as disproportionate.

The second reason that some younger Catholics are wary of Merton is his interest, in the last roughly ten years of his life, in Eastern religions, especially Buddhism. They see this as an indication of a religious relativism or a vague syncretism. Nothing could be further from the truth. Merton was indeed fascinated by the Eastern religions and felt that Christians could benefit from a greater understanding of their theory and practice, but he never for a moment felt that all the religions were the same or that Christians should move to some space “beyond” Christianity. In order to verify this, all one has to do is read the prefaces to his major books on Zen and Buddhism. About ten years ago, I had the privilege of giving a retreat to the monks at Merton’s monastery of Gethsemani in Kentucky. Just after the retreat ended, Merton’s secretary, Br. Patrick Hart, took me in a jeep out to see the hermitage that Merton occupied the last few years of his life. While we were sitting on the front porch of the small house, he looked at me intently and said, “Could you tell anyone that’s interested that Thomas Merton died a monk of Gethsemani Abbey and a priest of the Catholic Church?” He was as bothered as I am by the silly suggestion that Merton, at the end of his life, was on the verge of leaving the priesthood or abandoning the Catholic faith.

Thomas Merton was not perfect, and he might not have been a saint. But he was indeed a master of the spiritual life, and his life and work had a profound effect on me and an army of others around the world. I offer this birthday tribute as a small token of gratitude.

Fr. Robert Barron on the Resurrection of Jesus

A Heroic Pope

The following comes from Bishop Robert Baron at Word on Fire:

As all of his biographers remind us, Karol Wojtyla came of age at one of the darkest moments of the twentieth century. When he was 19 years old and just commencing his university career, the Nazis rolled through his native Poland and instigated a reign of terror over the country. Almost immediately, the conquerors decapitated Polish society, killing the intelligentsia outright or sending them to concentration camps. All distinctive forms of Polish culture were cruelly suppressed, and the church was actively persecuted. Young Wojtyla displayed heroic courage by joining the underground seminary run by the Cardinal of Krakow and by forming a small company of players who kept Polish literature and drama alive. Many of his colleagues in both of these endeavors were killed or arrested in the course of those terrible years of occupation. Sadly, the Nazi tyranny was replaced immediately by the Communist tyranny, and Fr. Wojtyla was compelled to manifest his courage again. In the face of harassment, unfair criticism, the threat of severe punishment, etc., he did his priestly work, forming young people in the great Catholic spiritual and theological tradition.

 Even as a bishop, Wojtyla was subject to practically constant surveillance (every phone tapped; every room bugged; his every movement tracked), and he was continually, in small ways and large, obstructed by Communist officialdom. And yet he soldiered on. Of course, as Pope, he ventured into the belly of the beast, standing athwart the Communist establishment and speaking for God, freedom, and human rights. In doing so, he proved himself one of the most courageous figures of the twentieth century.

 That Karol Wojtyla was a man who exhibited the virtue of justice to a heroic degree is impossible to contest. Throughout his papal years, John Paul II was the single most eloquent and persistent voice for human rights on the world stage. In the face of a postmodern relativism and indifferentism, John Paul took the best of the Enlightenment political tradition and wedded it to classical Christian anthropology. The result was a sturdy defense of the rights to life, liberty, education, free speech, and above all, the free exercise of religion. More persuasively than any other political figure, east or west, John Paul advocated for justice.

 Next, it’s worth noting that George Weigel titled his magisterial biography of John Paul II, Witness to Hope, by identifying Karol Wojtyla with a theological virtue. In October of 1978, the newly elected Pope John Paul II gave his inaugural speech to a packed St. Peter’s Square. This man, who had witnessed at first hand the very worst of the twentieth century, who had intimate experience of how twisted and wicked human beings can be, spoke over and over again this exhortation: “Be not afraid.” There was, of course, absolutely no political or cultural warrant for that exhortation, no purely natural justification for it. It could come only from a man whose heart was filled with the supernatural sense that the Holy Spirit is the Lord of history.

Finally, was Karol Wojtyla in possession of love, the greatest of the theological virtues? The best evidence I can bring forward is the still breathtaking encounter that took place in a grimy Roman jail cell in December of 1983. John Paul II sat down with Mehmet Ali Agca, the man who had, only a year and a half before, fired several bullets into the Pope. John Paul spoke to him, embraced him, listened to him, and finally forgave him. Love is not a feeling or a sentiment. It is, Thomas Aquinas reminds us, an act of the will, more precisely, willing the good of the other. This is why the love of one’s enemies—those who are not disposed to wish us well—is the great test of love. Did John Paul II express love in a heroic way? He forgave the man who tried to kill him; no further argument need be made.

Saints exist, not for themselves, but for the Church. They are models and intercessors for the rest of us here below. We can only give thanks to God who has provided the world with this heavenly friend. Saint John Paul II, pray for us!

Fr. Robert Barron: How Should We Address Spiritually Dry Periods?

Fr. Robert Barron visits Lourdes: Mary, the Immaculate Conception

Fr. Robert Barron: The Key to Joy

Father Barron on New Year's Resolutions

Fr. Robert Barron on The Spirituality of Advent

Why Are Some Saints Called Doctors of the Church?

What the Church means by Purgatory?

Fr. Robert Barron: Why we pray for the dead

Bishop Barron on Atheism and Assisted Suicide

Bishop Barron on Pope Francis and Mercy

The following comes from Bishop Barron at Word on Fire:

Having just returned from a week covering Pope Francis’s triumphant journey to the United States, I can confidently tell you that the news media are in love with the Vicar of Christ. Time and again, commentators, pundits, anchorpersons, and editorialists opined that Pope Francis is the bomb. They approved, of course, of his gentle way with those suffering from disabilities and his proclivity to kiss babies, but their approbation was most often awakened by this Pope’s “merciful” and “inclusive” approach, his willingness to reach out to those on the margins. More often than not, they characterized this tenderness as a welcome contrast to the more rigid and dogmatic style of Benedict XVI. Often, I heard words such as “revolutionary” and “game-changing” in regard to Pope Francis, and one commentator sighed that she couldn’t imagine going back to the Church as it was before the current pontiff. 

Well, I love Pope Francis too, and I certainly appreciate the novelty of his approach and his deft manner of breathing life into the Church. In fact, a number of times on the air I commented that the Pope’s arrival to our shores represented a new springtime after the long winter of the sex abuse scandals. But I balk at the suggestion that the new Pope represents a revolution or that he is dramatically turning away from the example of his immediate predecessors. And I strenuously deny that he is nothing but a soft-hearted powder-puff, indifferent to sin. 

A good deal of the confusion stems from a misinterpretation of Francis’s stress on mercy. In order to clear things up, a little theologizing is in order. It is not correct to say that God’s essential attribute is mercy. Rather, God’s essential attribute is love, since love is what obtains among the three divine persons from all eternity. Mercy is what love looks like when it turns toward the sinner. To say that mercy belongs to the very nature of God, therefore, would be to imply that sin exists within God himself, which is absurd. 

Now this is important, for many receive the message of divine mercy as tantamount to a denial of the reality of sin, as though sin no longer matters. But just the contrary is the case. To speak of mercy is to be intensely aware of sin and its peculiar form of destructiveness. Or to shift to one of the Pope’s favorite metaphors, it is to be acutely conscious that one is wounded so severely that one requires, not minor treatment, but the emergency and radical attention provided in a hospital on the edge of a battlefield. Recall that when Francis was asked, in a famous interview two years ago, to describe himself, he responded, “a sinner.” Then he added, “who has been looked upon by the face of mercy.” That’s getting the relationship right. Remember as well that the teenaged Jorge Mario Bergoglio came to a deep and life-changing relationship to Christ precisely through a particularly intense experience in the confessional. As many have indicated, Papa Francesco speaks of the devil more frequently than any of his predecessors of recent memory, and he doesn’t reduce the dark power to a vague abstraction or a harmless symbol. He understands Satan to be a real and very dangerous person.

When Pope Francis speaks of those on the margins, he does indeed mean people who are economically and politically disadvantaged, but he also means people who are cut off from the divine life, spiritually poor. And just as he reaches out to the materially marginalized in order to bring them to the center, so he reaches out to those on the existential periphery in order to bring them to a better place. In speaking of mercy and inclusivity, he is decidedly not declaring that “I’m okay and you’re okay.” He is calling people to conversion. As my mentor, Cardinal Francis George, said, “All are welcome in the Church, but on Christ’s terms and not their own.”

Read the rest here.

Fr. Robert Barron: Thomas Merton as Spiritual Master

The following comes from Word on Fire:

I write these words on the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Thomas Merton, one of the greatest spiritual writers of the twentieth century and a man who had a decisive influence on me and my vocation to the priesthood.  I first encountered Merton’s writing in a peculiar way.  My brother and I were both working at a bookstore in the Chicago suburbs.  One afternoon, he tossed to me a tattered paperback with a torn cover that the manager had decided to discard.  My brother said, “You might like this; it’s written by a Trappist monk.”  I replied, with the blithe confidence of a sixteen year old, “I don’t want to read a book by some Buddhist.” With exquisite sensitivity, he responded, “Trappists are Catholics, you idiot.” 

The book in question was The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton’s passionate, articulate, smart, and deeply moving account of his journey from worldling to Trappist monk.  Though much of the philosophy and theology was, at that time, over my head, I became completely caught up in the drama and romance of Merton’s story, which is essentially the tale of how a man fell in love with God. The book is extraordinarily well written, funny, adventurous, and spiritually wise.  In one of the blurbs written for the first edition, Fulton Sheen referred to it as a contemporary version of St. Augustine’s Confessions, and it was fulsomely praised by both Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene.  Moreover, it contributed massively to the startling influx of young men into monasteries and religious communities across the United States in the postwar era. 

I was so thrilled by my first encounter with Merton that I dove headlong into his body of writing.  The Sign of Jonas, a journal that Merton kept in the years leading up to his priestly ordination, became a particular favorite.  That work concludes with an essay called “Firewatch:  July 4, 1952,” which Jacques Maritain referred to as the greatest piece of spiritual writing in the twentieth century.  In this powerful meditation, Merton uses the mundane monastic task of walking through the monastery checking for fires as a metaphor for a Dantesque examination of the soul.  The Sign of Jonas is marked by Merton’s playful and ironic sense of humor, but it also gives evidence of the enormous range of his reading and intellectual interests.  To devour that book as a nineteen year old, as I did, was to receive an unparalleled cultural education.  For many people of my generation, Merton opened the door to the wealth of the Catholic spiritual tradition: I first learned about John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart, Teresa of Avila, Bernard of Clairvaux, Odo of Cluny, the Victorines, Origen, Thérèse of Lisieux, and Hans Urs von Balthasar from him. 

Perhaps the central theme of all of Merton’s writings is contemplation.  What he stressed over and again in regard to this crucial practice is that it is not the exclusive preserve of spiritual athletes, but rather something that belongs to all the baptized and that stands at the heart of Christian life.  For contemplation is, in his language, “to find the place in you where you are here and now being created by God.”  It is consciously to discover a new center in God and hence at the same time to discover the point of connection to everyone and everything else in the cosmos.  Following the French spiritual masters, Merton called this le point vierge, the virginal point, or to put it in the language of the fourth Gospel, “water bubbling up in you to eternal life.”  In his famous epiphanic experience at the corner of 4^th and Walnut in downtown Louisville, Merton felt, through le point vierge, a connection to the ordinary passersby so powerful it compelled him to exclaim, “There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”

Sadly, for many younger Catholics today, Merton, if he is known at all, is viewed with a certain suspicion, and this for two reasons.  First, when he was a man of fifty-one, he fell in love with a young nurse who cared for him after back surgery.  Though it is almost certain that this was exclusively an affair of the heart, it was certainly, to say the very least, unseemly for a middle-aged monk and priest to have been so infatuated with a much younger woman.  At the same time, Merton worked through this confusing period and returned to his vowed monastic life.  And the journal that he kept during that year is so spiritually alert and illuminating that I often recommend it to brother priests who are wrestling with the promise of celibacy.  To dismiss Merton out of hand because of this admittedly inappropriate relationship strikes me as disproportionate. 

Read the rest here.

Bishop Robert Barron on the Pope's Visit to USA

(CNA/EWTN News) Chatter over politics – and whether or not Pope Francis is a communist – has taken center stage since he landed in the U.S., but for Bishop Robert Barron, the Pope's visit is about much more.

“I'm expecting the Pope to evangelize, he's come as a preacher of the Gospel,” Bishop Barron told CNA Sept. 23 outside the White House.

The Pope, he said, will “speak across the denominational lines and across even to the secular world about basic human values.”

“It's wonderful” to have Francis in the U.S., the bishop commented, adding that as both a Catholic and an American to have the Pope there as “a symbol of our government and democracy” is exciting.

Known for his online videos which tackle everything from the saints, to the “new atheism,” to the latest blockbuster film, Bishop Barron was appointed as one of three new auxiliary bishops for Los Angeles in July.

He is the founder of the online initiative Word On Fire Catholic Ministries, and is the producer of the popular documentary series Catholicism. His latest series, Pivotal Players, is currently in production.

Also a contributor to NBC News, the prominent internet evangelist was ordained a bishop just two weeks ago on Sept. 8 inside L.A.'s Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels.

Having just finished a spot with the Today Show, Bishop Barron said that after the day’s events – which include a meeting between Pope Francis and U.S. bishops – he will head to New York, where he’ll be on NBC’s Nightly News program following the canonization of Bl. Junipero Serra.

The bishop said that he never expected to be in Washington participating in the Pope’s visit as a bishop, “so that’s part of the novelty of this.”

He said the first weeks in his new role have been “interesting, exciting, a little confusing. A lot of things new being thrown at me, but it’s all good.”

Read the rest here.