Our Lady of Mount Carmel: Feast of the Brown Scapular

Today is the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel! Let's pray today for all the Carmelites throughout the world and especially for those who are cloistered and praying for the world!

Also, the Church celebrates on this day the feast of the Brown Scapular of Mount Carmel. The scapular, which derives its name from the Latin word scapulæ, meaning shoulders, is a dress which covers the shoulders. It is mentioned in the rule of Saint Benedict as worn by monks over their other dress when they were at work, and it now forms a regular part of the religious dress in the old Orders. But it is best known among Catholics as the name of two little pieces of cloth worn out of devotion to the Blessed Virgin over the shoulders, under the ordinary garb, and connected by strings. The devotion of the scapular, now almost universal in the Catholic Church, began with the Carmelites. The history of its origin is as follows: During the thirteenth century the Carmelite Order suffered great persecution, and on 16 July 1251, while Saint Simon Stock, then general of the Order, was at prayer, the Blessed Virgin appeared to him, holding in her hand a scapular. Giving it to the saint, she said,

"Receive, my dear son, this scapular of thy Order, as the distinctive sign of my confraternity, and the mark of the privilege which I have obtained for thee and the children of Carmel. It is a sign of salvation, a safeguard in danger, and a special pledge of peace and protection till the end of time. Whosoever dies wearing this shall be preserved from eternal flames."

It is much to be wished that people should everywhere join this confraternity, for the honor of Mary and for the salvation of souls, by a life fitted to that end.

In order to have a share in the merits of the sodality every member must:

1. Shun sin, and, according to his state of life, live chastely.

2. Say every day, if possible, seven times, Our Father, Hail Mary, and Glory be to the Father.

3. Strive to serve God by venerating Mary, and imitating her virtues.

Our Lady of Chiquinquirá: The image that healed itself!

While I was in Quito I was able to spend 3 weeks with Salesians from all over Latin America. They came to Quito for the Salesianity class just as I had and I was grateful to hear some of the stories and devotions that are popular in their home countries. One of these devotions has its Feast Day on July 9! That devotion is Our Lady of Chiquinquirá! This is a devotion related to an image of Our Lady of the Rosary that was damaged and moved to Chiquinquirá, Columbia. The image also included St. Andrew the Apostle and St. Anthony of Padua. This image, by the grace of God, began to mend itself on December 26, 1586! Today Our Lady of Chiquinquirá is the patroness of Columbia. In Venezuela the image is honored as La Chinita. The following comes from the Patron Saints Index:

In the mid-16th century the Spanish painter Alonso de Narvaez created a portrait of the Virgin of the Rosary. He painted in pigments from the soil, herbs and flowers of the region of modern Colombia, and his canvas was a rough 44" * 49" cloth woven by Indians. The image of Mary is about a meter high, and stands about a half moon. She has a small, sweet smile, both her face and the Child's are light colored, and she looks like she's about to take a step. She wears a white toque, a rose-coloured robe, and a sky blue cape. A rosary hangs from the little finger of her left hand, and she holds a sceptre in her right. She holds the Christ Child cradled in her left arm, and looks toward him. Christ has a little bird tied to his thumb, and a small rosary hangs from his left hand. To the sides of Mary stand Saint Anthony of Padua and Saint Andrew the Apostle, the personal patrons of the colonist and monk who commissioned the work Don Antonio de Santana and Andrés Jadraque.
In 1562 the portrait was placed in a rustic chapel. It was exposed to the air, the roof leaked, and soon the damage caused by the humidity and sun completely obscured the image. In 1577 the damaged painting was moved to Chiquinquirá and stored in an unused room. In 1585 Maria Ramos, a pious woman from Seville, cleaned up the little chapel, and hung the faded canvas in it. Though the image was in terrible shape, she loved to sit and contemplate it. On Friday 26 December 1586 the faded, damaged image was suddenly restored. It's colors were bright, the canvas cleaner, the image clear and seemingly brand new. The healing of the image continued as small holes and tears in the canvas self-sealed. It still has traces of its former damage, the figures seem brighter and clearer from a distance than up close. For 300 years the painting hung unprotected. Thousands of objects were touched against the frail cotton cloth by pilgrims. This rought treatment should have destroyed it, but it healed and survives. Pope Pius VII declared Our Lady of Chiquinquirá patroness of Colombia in 1829, and granted a special liturgy. In 1897 a thick glass plate was placed over it to stop the weather and the excesses of the faithful. The image was canonically crowned in 1919, and in 1927 her sanctuary declared a Basilica.

The Question for Our Age: “Quo Vadis?”

The following comes from the Catholic World Report:

Secular liberalism is at odds with Catholicism. The point seemed obvious to most people until the postwar period, when the thought took hold that an essentially harmonious relationship could be established that would draw on the American model. America, it seemed, was different from Europe with its long tradition of statism and anti-clericalism. It rejected an established church, but embraced religious freedom, an active and diverse civil society, and a limited and decentralized government that did not try to dominate culture and gave the Church the protection and freedom she needed to thrive.

The attempt to establish a harmonious relation with the liberal state has been less fruitful than hoped, and even in America has run into profound difficulties. Our government and other authoritative institutions have become more centralized and more concerned with remodeling all aspects of life, including the beliefs and attitudes of the people. We are becoming more like Europe, and to make matters worse the outlook of the governing classes on both sides of the Atlantic has moved in a direction radically opposed to both religion and natural law. Throughout the Western world, Catholics and Catholic institutions are increasingly required to conform to anti-Catholic norms, and in much of it you can be punished as a criminal for public assertion of Catholic moral doctrine.

The intolerance is aimed less at Catholicism in particular, although the Church is a highly-visible target, than any form of Christianity that does not reduce without remainder to progressive politics and private therapy. We are increasingly ruled by practical utopians who believe themselves comprehensively responsible for human relations, and their efforts leave no place for an independent and refractory organization like the Church that proposes a contrary vision that now counts as intrinsically antisocial and oppressive.

So where will the present situation lead if—as seems quite possible—our secular authorities continue on their present course? Will the blood of the martyrs once again be the seed of the Church, or will multiplying restrictions and disabilities wear down Catholic life until the Church all but disappears?

Many societies have been anti-Catholic. How effective their anti-Catholicism has been has depended on the nature of the society and its guiding principles. Roman society, for example, had nothing to propose that could fill the needs Christianity satisfied, and the Roman empire was more loosely organized and its activities more limited than modern states. As a result, Roman persecutions, however savage they might be, were mostly local, sporadic, and ineffectual. By the time the Romans saw a need for comprehensive enforcement of religious loyalty the Christians were too strong and the empire too divided for the policy to be effective.

Some of the Church’s more recent opponents have been more organized, focused, steady, and successful. The Muslims eliminated Catholicism from North Africa, the home of Cyprian and Augustine, and the Protestants did much the same over large stretches of Europe. They were able to do so because the governments they established had more comprehensive concerns than the Roman government did, they took the issue of religious unity more seriously, and they stood for principles that had the broad-based appeal and staying power needed to establish themselves at least somewhat durably among the people.

In the last century the most severe attacks were carried on by secular systems that functioned as religions but excluded transcendent truth and authority. The attacks were organized and focused to the point of fanaticism, and they often led to widespread martyrdom of clergy and ordinary believers, as with the radically anticlerical regimes in Mexico and Spain and the totalitarian regimes that ruled Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and their respective empires.

Those attacks were not enduringly effective because the regimes carrying them on were too much at odds with human nature and with the societies they dominated for their vision to endure. Thus, for example, religious belief has bounced back in Russia, and Christianity is making unprecedented advances in China. Both countries had been searching for some sort of guiding principle, and when communism failed Christianity stepped into the gap. (In regions like East Germany and the Czech Republic, where communism was imposed from outside on a society in which religion was already weak, Soviet domination does seem to have accelerated the loss of faith.)

It appears, then, that as a human matter suppression of Catholicism is likely to work if the system that carries it on endures, takes the effort seriously, and offers a reasonably appealing way of life that provides somewhat of a substitute for what is suppressed.

So what does that mean in the case of secular liberalism, assuming it remains as ideological a system as it now seems? It has been enormously successful as a practical matter, and the way of life it offers evidently appeals to a great many people. Further, its opposition to Catholicism has become much more serious and active during the post-60s period. The result is that it has been very successful in changing religious views and weakening Church authority among the laity and even among many clergy and religious.

Given all that, the obvious question as to the future of Catholicism in the West, humanly speaking, is how much staying power secular liberalism will have, and whether it will maintain its appeal to ordinary people. Luckily for Catholics (and for humanity in general), those requirements bring weak points of the liberal system into focus. Secular liberalism makes maximum equal satisfaction its highest good. That principle is what gives it popular appeal, but it means ever-greater demands on public resources, since people require more and more to be satisfied, and it also means ever-less discipline, loyalty, and public spirit to support the system, since it undermines ideals of love and sacrifice.

Secular liberalism lacks a grounded principle of authority, and its aspiration to universal satisfaction makes it adverse to widespread use of threats and force. As a result, its basic method for maintaining control is a system of payoffs, propaganda, and ever-more comprehensive regulation. That method has mostly been rather successful. Material benefits have been funded through the extraordinary productivity of capitalist economies in a technological age, propaganda facilitated by alliance with the mass media and the expertise and training industry (otherwise known as the educational system), and regulation made effective by a comparatively high degree of bureaucratic discipline and efficiency.

None of those resources are infinite or everlasting. Organizational discipline and efficiency don’t sit well with an emphasis on equal satisfaction, so they are unlikely to be maintained. Also, it is becoming harder and harder to fund public programs or provide individuals with satisfactory employment, so much so that public finance has been reduced to an endless series of short-term expedients that everyone knows cannot go on forever. When the money runs out, people start feeling real economic pressure, and the government is unable and seems unwilling to do anything for them, will they keep on believing what they are told? Why should they, when the basis of what they have been told is that they have a right to get what they want?

So it seems that during the coming decades it will be increasingly difficult for secular liberalism to maintain itself among the people as a minimally satisfying system of practice and belief. Still, historical change is generally slow, and liberalism has been very effective at weakening its competitors, so it is likely to be with us in an ever-less appealing and successful form for some time to come. The best analogy to the period we may have before us is therefore the Brezhnev era in the Soviet Union. Catholics can expect any number of petty restraints and stupid oppressions, but no terror, and less and less real belief in the official system. As a result, we can very likely expect a fertile field for Christian witness and for the growth of new forms of Christian life and revival of very old ones.

Dr Peter Kreeft on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Harvard Address

Dr. Peter Kreeft comments on the Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Commencement Address, "A World Split Apart," given at Harvard University on 8 June 1978. Solzhenitsyn diagnoses the roots of all our ills in the West.  He was a modern prophet and Dr. Kreeft gives an explanation of the Harvard address that everyone needs to hear!


Below is the original talk as given by Solzhenitsyn at Harvard:

Bishop Barron on Shakespeare and the Fading of the Catholic World

The Appeal of The Young Messiah

The following comes from Kathy Schiffer at Aleteia:

“Captivating, inspiring and deeply moving” is the endorsement offered by Cardinal Sean O’Malley, archbishop of Boston, for Motive Entertainment’s new film, The Young Messiah.

Charles J. Chaput, archbishop of Philadelphia, is similarly enthusiastic. He called it, “a portrait true to biblical faith but without sentimentality … an exceptional movie, engaging from start to finish; a film worth seeing and owning and seeing again.”

And Archbishop Thomas Wenski, of Miami, said of the film, “This presentation of The Young Messiah perhaps opens a door into people’s hearts that otherwise would have been shut because of their fear of God, anger with God or indifference to God.”

The Young Messiah, which opened in theaters yesterday, promises to be one of the best Christian-themed releases during this Lenten season. Steven Greydanus gave it a “thumbs up” in his review at the National Catholic Register, calling it “a smart, moving take on a hidden year in Jesus’ life that both believers and nonbelievers can enjoy.” Steve McEveety, CEO of Mpower and a producer of The Passion of the Christ, has said that it “succeeds beautifully in imagining the mystery.” Praise continues to pour in from pastors and church leaders across America.

The film, directed by Cyrus Nowrasteh and his wife and writing partner, Betsy (The Stoning of Soraya M), imagines a year in the childhood of Jesus, a time about which the Scriptures tell us little. Oh, we know from Luke’s gospel about the infant Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem, and about his family’s flight into Egypt to escape the evil Herod. But then we don’t see him again until years later, in the Temple at Jerusalem, when he had somehow become separated from his parents — and then not again until he begins his adult ministry at age 30.

But when he was a child, did he understand his divinity? Could he heal the sick, raise the dead and work other miracles?

The Young Messiah asks that question and then shows the child Jesus exercising powers that are unique to God. But the film isn’t the first to consider this possibility: When the seven-year-old Jesus holds a drowned bird in his hands in The Young Messiah and gives him new life, I am reminded of the apocryphal Infancy Gospel of Thomas which dates to the second century. In that narrative, Jesus breathed life into inanimate birds his friends had fashioned from clay. In the same story he resurrected a friend who fell from a roof (similar to the boy who trips on an apple and dies in the streets of Alexandria in The Young Messiah).

Must we believe these imaginative tales from Jesus’ boyhood? Of course not — but there is nothing in the Scriptures to prevent us from pondering what it must have meant to be God in the body of a small boy.

Anne Rice imagined Jesus’ boyhood in her 2005 bestseller Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, on which the movie is based. It hints that although Herod the Great was dead, the Holy Family was still threatened by his son, Herod Antipas. The Young Messiah assumes that the younger Herod followed in his father’s footsteps, launching a search for the child Jesus that placed his family in peril once again.

And beyond Herod, there is an otherworldly antagonist, a dark-caped demon who is visible to the Christ Child but not to others in his vicinity. The boy Jesus struggles to understand what this means and seeks to understand his own inexplicable powers. His parents and extended family have shielded him from the truth of his unusual birth, of the visit by the Magi and of the tragic slaughter of the innocents that occurred at the command of Herod the Great. At the Temple he finally hears those stories for the first time.

Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty: "You have a God given right to live!"

Literature and Art: Two Great Pillars of Any Great Catholic Culture

The following comes from Russell Shaw:

One way to describe the present situation of the Church in the United States is to say American Catholicism is in a state of cultural crisis. And if that is true, then restoring a healthy Catholic subculture is necessary not just for the Church's flourishing but for its very survival.

Literature and art have to be part of it. There's a powerful link, a genuine two-way street, between culture and art. Writers and artists are products of their culture, which they also do much to create and shape and sustain. A religious body lacking writers and artists is impoverished at its roots and at risk of stagnation and atrophy.

I was reminded of these things while reading an essay-review of a new collection of letters by the late novelist and short story writer J.F. Powers. The piece was by the distinguished essayist and critic Joseph Epstein and appeared a while back in the Wall Street Journal.

Epstein calls Powers a "superb artist" who wrote "some of the most striking fiction of his day''--fiction which, he adds, "holds up well in ours." He has no doubt that something besides Powers' own talent accounts for his achievement. What that something was, he explains like this:

"Catholicism in those years [the mid-20th century, that is] provided a distinct culture within America. For Catholics the church, capital and small letter C, was both the center and periphery of life. It had an authority and a hold on American Catholics that has long been leaching away."

Although Powers died in 1999 at the age of 81, he was essentially a chronicler of American Catholicism in the years before the Second Vatican Council--the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s. His writing output dropped off markedly after the middle decade of the latter decade.

True, his second novel, and last book, Wheat That Springeth Green, appeared in 1988. But few readers find it up to the level of his earlier work. Some parts are admirable, but the narrative as a whole is diffuse and rather wandering, as if by then Powers didn't know quite what to make of the Church. The old Catholic subculture he'd known so well had vanished, and what replaced it resembled bits and pieces from a broken kaleidoscope.

But that old subculture was something else. Epstein, a Chicagoan, recalls his hometown as a place where Catholicism was "a natural part of the cityscape." Priests in Roman collars and nuns in habits rode the buses and frequented the libraries. Catholic kids went to Catholic schools where they learned Latin and theology and labored under "unremitting discipline."

Numerous writers besides Powers found this to be culturally rich soil. And not just in Chicago. Edwin O'Connor mined the soil of Irish-American Catholicism in Boston. Walker Percy, a convert, found inspiration in Louisiana's Catholic culture. Another O'Connor, Flannery, played variations on the theme by contemplating Bible Belt fundamentalists in light of the great tradition of her Catholic faith. The list could easily be extended.

And now? There are still talented American Catholics who write, but there is no recognizable body of writers drawing upon a Catholic culture to produce work comparable in cultural density to that of Powers and the rest.

I repeat: literature and art are products of culture, and culture is a product of literature and art. Separate the two things, and the art is in trouble--as is the culture itself. And that in a nutshell is the cultural crisis in American Catholicism as we are experiencing it today.

Paul Harvey: "If I were the Devil"

Era of Comfortable Catholicism Is Over

The following comes from the NCR:

Catholics at the 10th anniversary of the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast got a startling wake-up call on Tuesday morning: They have lost the luxury of being comfortable in their faith in 21st-century America. More than ever before, they must embrace the risks of discipleship by encountering others and witnessing to the Gospel.

For the 800 people gathered in Washington, the morning’s speeches were mainly divided between Princeton professor Robert George’s sobering assessment of what Christian discipleship requires in America’s current cultural-political landscape and Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston’s cheerful exhortation for Catholics to embrace the missionary spirit of the early Church.

The breakfast coincided with the feast of Our Lady of Fatima as well as the 33rd anniversary of the near-assassination of St. John Paul II in St. Peter’s Square.

Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington set the tone for the morning with his invocation, asking God’s blessing “in this time of spiritual renewal and New Evangelization” on the breakfast participants gathered “together here in faith and testimony to the Holy Spirit.”

The cardinal asked that God might “lift our hearts, enlighten our minds and strengthen our souls,” and he asked for the intercession of St. John Paul II and Mary under her titles of Our Lady of Fatima and Our Lady of Guadalupe, as they prepared to “re-propose the Gospel to the world.”

“We ask you to inspire us to be more courageous in responding to the challenges of religious liberty, social justice and to the gift of human life,” he said. “Let us be agents of the New Evangelization, living as faithful followers of Jesus, your Son, in sharing our faith with those around us.”

After a short video introduction from Jim Caviezel about his new film, When the Game Stands Tall, the audience  settled in for the two main speakers.

No More ‘Tame Catholics’

George told Catholics that he had a “somber” message for them: “The days of acceptable Christianity are over. The days of comfortable Catholicism are past.”

He warned that a “price is demanded” of all committed believers, as mainstream America registers its preference for Catholics who might go to Mass but do not embrace the totality of the Church’s teachings — or those who know the Church’s teaching but prefer safety in their silence.

“In other words, a tame Catholic who is ashamed of the Gospel is socially acceptable,” said George, even as he called on his audience to “take risks” and follow Christ’s words to “take up thy cross and follow me.”

The costs of discipleship may be personal, familial or professional, he said. Standing up for the Church’s teaching on the dignity of human life and marriage — teachings which he said are “not fourth-class Gospel truths” and must be proclaimed with all of the Church’s revealed teaching — may lead to charges of “bigotry” or waging a “war on women” or that Christians are an “enemy of reproductive freedom.”

“To believe in the Gospel is to make oneself a marked man or woman,” he said.

Culturally, the Church in America has found itself in “Good Friday,” George observed.

The shifting, more hostile cultural landscape indicates American society’s “love affair with Jesus and his Church is over.”

George reminded his audience that while Jesus Christ has won the ultimate battle, those who live during this time must one day “give an account for all we do” before the “Lord of truth, the God of history.”

“One thing and one thing only will matter: Was I a faithful witness to the Gospel?”

“My friends,” he said, “the Gospel is true, and that is the most important thing to know. … We’re betting our whole lives on it.”

Happy Gospel Warriors

Following upon George’s somber analysis, Cardinal O’Malley livened the mood with a couple of humorous anecdotes. But the cardinal’s levity served to underscore his point that Catholics must embrace Pope Francis’ call to foster a “culture of encounter” and practice “the art of accompaniment” as modern-day disciples of Jesus Christ.

“Our task is to turn consumers into disciples and disciples into disciple-makers,” he said. “We need to prepare people to witness to the faith and not to send people into the witness-protection program.”

Read the rest here.

Kathryn Jean Lopez: The Truth and Abortion

The following comes from Kathryn Jean Lopez:

“The most disgusting part of this to me is these folks lied, lied to gain access to clinics,” Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards said on This Week Sunday, in reference to the undercover videos showcasing Planned Parenthood executives talking about selling fetal body parts (including a now-infamous Lamborghini reference). 

She’s right. Lies are a problem. And we’ve been lying for decades. We’ve been hiding the destruction of human lives behind words like “choice” and “freedom” and placards with “women’s rights” and ”women’s health” written on them to keep us looking away from the dehumanizing details of abortion — dehumanizing for all involved. 

At this point in human history, the consciences of the people at the Center for Medical Progress should not be the primary cause for chattering-class concern so much as the “conscience of our nation.” 

Or, as President Ronald Reagan put it in Human Life Review in a manifesto with that very title ten years after the Supreme Court legalized abortion in all trimesters of pregnancy (a little-known American fact): 

As an act of “raw judicial power” (to use Justice White’s biting phrase), the decision by the seven-man majority in Roe v. Wade has so far been made to stick. But the Court’s decision has by no means settled the debate. Instead, Roe v. Wade has become a continuing prod to the conscience of the nation. Abortion concerns not just the unborn child, it concerns every one of us. The English poet, John Donne, wrote: “… any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” We cannot diminish the value of one category of human life—the unborn—without diminishing the value of all human life. 

Later in the essay, President Reagan wrote: 

The real question today is not when human life begins, but, What is the value of human life?The abortionist who reassembles the arms and legs of a tiny baby to make sure all its parts have been torn from its mother’s body can hardly doubt whether it is a human being. The real question for him and for all of us is whether that tiny human life has a God-given right to be protected by the law—the same right we have. 

And he quoted Malcolm Muggeridge as going “right to the heart of the matter”: “Either life is always and in all circumstances sacred, or intrinsically of no account; it is inconceivable that it should be in some cases the one, and in some the other.”

Read the rest here.

Fr. Longenecker: Is It Time to Hunker Down?

The following comes from Fr. Dwight Lonenecker:

As Ireland votes overwhelmingly for same sex marriage and the rest of the Western world, it seems, can’t wait to follow their example, is it time to throw in the towel in the cultural slugfest?

As radical Islam advances giving us nightmares and as the economic “recovery” looks increasingly shaky is it time to hunker down?

Over at The Week Damon Linker analyzes what Rod Dreher calls “The Benedict Option”.

This is the idea that the church will follow the pattern of St Benedict. To understand what this means we have to understand the social conditions in Benedict’s day.

It was the end of the fifth century. The once mighty Roman Empire was collapsing. Economic decline was forcing a retreat of the Roman armies across the empire. Famine and plague decimated the population. Moral decay ate away at the family and robbed the population of energy and ambition. In the vacuum the barbarians were invading from the North and the East.

Benedict headed for the hills.

He established small monastic communities of prayer, work and study to survive the social upheaval.

These Christian communities went on to become little havens of peace and lighthouses in the storm. Before long they became the only centers of education, health care, social justice and learning. They preserved the remnants of the earlier classical civilizations and went on to be the kernels of what would be medieval Christendom.

The Benedict Option is the idea that this is where we are headed. It’s not a new idea. T.S.Eliot predicted the continued decay and disintegration of Western civilization and that a new monastic movement would arise and carry the flame and become the nexus of a new Christendom. Cardinal George’s famous prophecy considered the same.

I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history.”

The classic novel, Canticle for Lebowitz is set in a future where this has already happened.

The Benedict Option has a double meaning because it can also connect with the prophecy of Pope Benedict XVI who, as Joseph Ratzinger…

Read the rest here!

Fr. Benedict Groeschel on Isolation And Today's Culture

Fr. Dwight Longenecker on The Body of Christ (Substance and Reality)

Corpus Christi

The following comes from Fr. Dwight Longenecker: 

Not too long ago while celebrating Mass I drifted into a kind of silence.

I had spent the day paddling through the shallow waters of contemporary culture and mainstream media and was feeling both tired and soiled.

Then as I celebrated Mass it seemed to me that what I was doing there was real. It was somehow solid and real in a way that nothing else in the world compared to.

The flippy flappy headlines of the day with their superficial concerns, the cycle of economic worries or delights, the celebrity gossip and ecstasy or sorry at the triumph or loss on the sports field–all of it was seen for what it is: ephemera.

But at Mass. Now there we have something solid. I recalled Newman’s words on leaving the Church of England to become a Catholic: “Now this is a real religion.”

Read the rest here.

Fr. Robert Barron on Modernity and Morality

When things don’t seem to get better

The following reflection comes from Fr. Thomas Berg at Legatus:

Arriving at the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars annual conference in Philadelphia last September, I was delighted to find out that Archbishop Charles Chaput would be the main celebrant and homilist at Mass the following day.

I have long been a fan of the archbishop, not least of all for the depth of his message, the clarity of his thought — and for his candor. True to form, he opened his homily with the following reflection (paraphrased): As he now reflects back on his years of priesthood and episcopacy, the one thing that has surprised him is that during these years things have not gotten any better in the Church!

How’s that for candor?! The archbishop’s point, of course, was not to throw a wet towel on our conference, nor to get us all depressed. He certainly did, however, intend to reconnect us with what we might call the realism of the Gospel as it applies to our efforts at personal holiness and at evangelizing the culture.

He went on to remind us that the reality is that Christ’s resurrection was preceded by Calvary — and that in the paradoxical ways of grace, the grain of wheat must fall in the ground and die before it bears fruit. It reminds us that we are called not to lay aside our cross and follow Jesus, but to pick it up, drag it, and struggle under its weight. Gospel realism also tells us that it might often seem that things are not getting better, but worse!

Of course, there are victories in the struggle to evangelize the culture — and plenty of them. For example, the fruits of the right to life movement over the past 40 years have resulted in the continued decline of abortion rates in the U.S., the passage of Women’s Right to Know laws with 24-hour reflection periods, partial birth abortion bans, bans on abortion of 20-week-old unborn infants capable of experiencing pain, and education efforts that have moved so many young people to take a stand every year at the March for Life in cities across the nation.

Yet no matter how often we remind ourselves of the victories, we are at times overwhelmed by a sense of paralysis — perhaps even a sense that our efforts seem to go one-step forward and two-steps backward, and even that we’re losing the culture wars.

What to do then? In those moments we need to recall Gospel realism  — that the life of every committed Christian and the life of the Church as a whole, by God’s own unfathomable design, must experience Calvary  through struggle, setbacks, opposition, contradictions and cross. We must remember that if we are faithful, our own Christian experience as disciples and evangelizers will necessarily be cruciform.

Christ on the cross — stretched in all directions — gives definitive form to the Christian life of the members of his Body as we follow Him in the present state of life, still alien-residents and sojourners, still making our way — ever so arduous most of the time — to our true homeland. This explains why we feel stretched to the point of breaking at times — and why an archbishop might honestly sense that “things don’t seem to be getting better.”

This realism of the cross reminds us that we are not good judges of “success,” “progress,” and “victory,” which ultimately must be assessed over time and according to the ways of God’s inscrutable providence and paradoxical designs. More importantly, Gospel realism also reminds us that the Holy Spirit, in spite of appearances to the contrary, is always at work in the world. And His work does obtain victories on a daily basis. But more often than not, those victories happen one soul at a time. Yes, it’s that changing-heartsand-minds-one-at-a-time thing. It’s not a cliché; it’s a reality!

As Lent draws near, let’s remember that when Jesus calls us to follow him and engage in the work of evangelization, he does not promise palpable success. On the contrary, he assures us that “all will hate you on my account,” that our efforts will all be molded in the mystery of the cross, and that consequently, the “mystery of iniquity” resists Christian goodness. We will struggle on a daily basis with our own inadequacies, sinfulness, and many apparent failures in his service.

Jesus does not promise that we will actually see the promised land of a more thoroughly Christianized culture. The important thing today and always will not be the apparent “victory,” but the intensity of our love — genuine Christian agape love — with which we engage the world one heart and one mind at a time.

After a Year with Pope Francis

The following comes from Leah Libresco:

Time, The Advocate, and The New Yorker are just the latest publications to find Pope Francis front-page worthy news and the symbol of a spiritual year in review.  Meanwhile, I’ve gotten an email from a friend who wants a recommendation for a Pope Francis book for a relative who is unexpectedly excited about Catholicism again, and I see non-Catholic friends sharing interview excerpts and photos, talking about the first pope they’ve liked.

And, the whole time, I’ve felt a little odd about not being more swept off my feet.  Maybe it’s the way that each interview comes with a week or two of more arguing, confusing translations, out-of-context quotes, and arguing.  I kept waving off my friends’ questions about Evangelium Gaudii since I hadn’t read the proclamation and was suspicious of brief reporting on long documents.

There’s a palpable sense of urgency when people talk about Pope Francis’s latest comment or act of mercy, and I think that’s the source of my distance.  For the most part, the things Pope Francis does that make news aren’t new.  (For example, when he said it was entirely possible that atheists who follow their consciences go to heaven, that was exactly in line with Catholic orthodoxy – we like to say we know where the Church is, but not where it isn’t.  God can give grace anywhere, but we stick by the sources of grace we can recognize: the Sacraments).

The good works the Pope does aren’t in any way dependent on his being Pope.  Any of us can offer compassion to the sick, feed the poor (with companionship as well as food), and keep offering all this help with a human face.  Francis may be a new wineskin, but what people seem to be desperately imbibing is far from new wine.

And, I start to wonder, what kind of Christian am I that my friends find Pope Francis’s kindness and compassion so sui generis and startling?  We shouldn’t have to rely on the witness of the Pope to communicate the beauty and love of Christianity, but it seems like for many people, Catholic and not, he sounds like a voice crying out in the wilderness.

As an abstract, systematizing thinker, I’m more likely to talk about Catholicism in the context of epistemology or theology.  I like to poke at abstruse corners of the faith and get excited about small connections between ideas.  But academic, theoretical joy isn’t what people are responding to when they turn their eyes to Pope Francis.  Although his remarks are erudite, he keeps bringing his conversations back to the small-scale, urgent level of human lives.

When I sometimes do good or struggle to mend the evil I’ve done, I’m less likely to talk about how it relates to my religion.  Maybe because I’m in the middle of comforting a friend and I don’t want to interrupt his troubles to explain the undercurrents of why and how I’m trying to help or maybe I’ve only barely got a grip on my anger and pride, and it seems too risky to try to talk about my faith while I’m in such a mood.

I’m not sure what the solution is, but, in the coming year, I want to be able to respond the hunger that Pope Francis has exposed and to make my Christianity a little less private and picayune in my day to day life.  I’d like for people to be able to look at my life and think, “If that’s what Christianity does, I’d like to know more.”  Or, at least, to think, “If Christianity is what makes Leah acknowledge those acts as faults and try (with middling success) to mend them, I’d like to know more.”

It’s awfully sobering to know that the basic decency of Pope Francis is a shock to the people I ostensibly love.

Dr. Peter Kreeft: How to Win the Culture War

Bishop Paprocki: ‘Rupture’ Between Church and Modern Culture

The following comes from the NCR:

Bishop Thomas Paprocki of Springfield, Ill., said that Catholics should be aware of an “unconscious hatred for the faith” as they seek to interact with the modern culture.

In an interview with The Washington Times, published Sept. 3, the bishop reflected that, in past generations, “many of the values in our secular world mirrored the values of the religious world.”

“And I think what’s happening now is that relationship — that symbiosis between our culture and the Church — has been ruptured,” Bishop Paprocki said.

He noted that he and many others grew up at a time when secular culture was more friendly to religion, as shown in the production of biblical movies like The Ten Commandments. Now, however, the culture is moving towards the “outright rejection” of Judeo-Christian values.

He pointed to an “anti-Catholic bigotry” in the culture, seen in a Late Night with David Letterman segment where the host joked about the sexual abuse of altar boys.

He said the joke showed a “profound ignorance” in identifying the Catholic Church and the priesthood with sex abuse.

“Certainly, we have had our unfortunate share of scandals and sin, and the Church is dealing with that,” the bishop said.

However, he added that the Catholic Church is now one of the most responsible institutions in dealing with sexual abuse, implementing rigorous abuse-prevention measures, training requirements and safe-environment programs.

Public figures like Letterman “continue to point their finger at the Catholic Church and say, 'You have a problem with sexual abuse,' and people are ignoring where most sexual abuse is taking place. It’s occurring in families. It’s occurring in schools,” Bishop Paprocki said.

“This lets people too easily off the hook to say that, ‘Oh, that’s a Catholic problem.’ … If people are really serious about sexual abuse, I think they need to be looking at some other places as well.”

He said comics like Letterman “think they are being funny” and think their jokes are “where our culture is.”

“I don’t know if it is overt hatred for the Church, but it is probably an unconscious hatred for the faith,” he observed.

“It’s a pagan kind of culture,” he said, adding that Christians have to “mentally adjust.”

Bishop Paprocki warned that the situation of the Catholic Church in the U.S. is becoming more like that of the Church in Poland under communism, where Christians lived in “a very hostile environment.”

The bishop has been a vocal critic of the Obama administration’s HHS mandate requiring employers to provide health-insurance coverage for employees’ sterilizations and contraceptive drugs, including some that cause abortions.

In addition, he has voiced concerns over a 2011 decision by the Illinois state government to ban Catholic adoption and foster-care agencies from receiving state funding on the grounds that they will not place children with same-sex and unmarried couples.

“We still have the First Amendment of our Constitution, but that is being sorely tested,” Bishop Paprocki told the Times.

He said that in response to controversies like the debate over “gay marriage,” Catholics should continue to have “a very articulate, reasoned approach.” They should not let others paint them as “bigots.”

The bishop explained that Catholics’ care and compassion for everyone is “ultimately about their salvation and eternal life.”

“To be compassionate and loving does not simply mean, ‘Oh, you can do whatever you want,’” he said. “That wasn’t Christ’s approach to us. He calls us out of our sinfulness. He died for us. He opens the gates of heaven for us.”