Mother Teresa’s Special Law of Love

The following comes from Heather King:

In solitude on the Central Coast of California recently, I read a book called The Love That Made Mother Teresa by David Scott. Scott happens to be Vice Chancellor for Communications at the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and the book is subtitled “How Her Secret Visions and Dark Nights Can Help You Conquer the Slums of Your Heart.”

The book is simply written, accessible, and anecdotal. Scott beautifully captures the strangeness and paradox of the life of a saint. Mother Teresa lived to see the global reach of the internet and social media, yet the biographical details of her own youth and even adult life remain shrouded in mystery. She shunned the limelight but suffered the intrusions of photographers and TV cameras, offering up her discomfort for love of the poor. She kissed the leper, and she also dined with and accepted money from dictators. 

Like Christ, in other words, she resisted identifying herself with either the right or the left. Like Christ, she fed the poor and she also knew that man does not live by bread alone. “Visiting one of her missionary outposts in Nezahualcóyotl, Mexico, a slum where people lived in huts of corrugated metal and plywood and breathed the foul stench of factory waste and diesel fumes, she asked the people what their greatest need was. One man spoke for the rest. ‘La palabra de Dios,’ he said simply—the Word of God.”

Like many of us, perhaps, I struggle with the meaning of the New Evangelization. Evangelize to what? I sometimes wonder. Evangelize to whom? What does conversion even mean? I can be following the rules to a T, but when was the last time I wept at the trill of a bird, or a branch against the sky at dusk, or an unfurling leaf? When’s the last time I forgave someone? When’s the last time I apologized to someone? How intensely does my heart yearn? How willing am I to suffer? Those are things that can’t be measured or analyzed or reduced to a stat.

Read the rest here.

Balthasar on Love

"Faith means the fundamental response to the love that has offered itself up for me. It thus becomes clear that faith is ordered primarily to the inconceivability of God’s love, which surpasses us and anticipates us. Love alone is credible; nothing else can be believed, and nothing else ought to be believed. This is the achievement, the ‘work’ of faith: to recognize this absolute prius, which nothing else can surpass; to believe that there is such a thing as love, absolute love, and that there is nothing higher or greater than it." 


                                   Fr. Hans Urs Von Balthasar

Pope Francis: Love is the Christian identity card

(Vatican Radio) At the heart of Pope Francis’ message during the Jubilee Mass for Teens celebrated on Sunday was quite simply one word Love.

The Pope told the thousands of 13 to 16 year olds gathered in St Peter’s Square that “love, was the Christian’s identity card, the only valid “document” identifying us as Christians. If this card expires and is not constantly renewed,” he said, “we stop being witnesses of the Master.”

Then he asked the teenagers gathered “Do you want to experience the love of Jesus? Let us learn from him, for his words are a school of life, a school where we learn to love.”

The Holy Father noted, however, that although love is beautiful and it's the path to happiness it is not necessarily and easy path. It is, he said, demanding and it requires effort.

The Lord, Pope Francis stressed, is generous, “he offers us his faithful friendship, which he will never take back. Even if you disappoint him and walk away from him, Jesus continues to want the best for you and to remain close to you; he believes in you even more than you believe in yourself.” This is very important, the Pope noted because, “the biggest threat to growing up well comes from thinking that no one cares about us, from feeling that we are all alone.”

During his homily the Pope also warned the teens present to be on their guard against what he called “an instinctive desire to “have to have” what we find pleasing”, adding, “our consumerist culture reinforces this tendency.”

“Don’t be content with mediocrity, with “simply going with the flow”, with being comfortable and laid back,” the Holy Father said. He also told the teenagers to be sceptical about “people who want to make you believe that you are only important if you act tough like the heroes in films or if you wear the latest fashions.” Your happiness, the Pope continued, has no price. “It cannot be bought: it is not an app that you can download on your phones nor will the latest update bring you freedom and grandeur in love.”

Pope Francis invited those present in St Peter’s Square to be courageous and firm in their decisions because, he said, it is only by doing this you will realize your greatest dreams, adding, “if a person of your age can’t dream they are already in retirement, this serves nothing.”

Love does not happen because we talk about it, the Pope underlined, “but when we live it”. He also said : "In the art of climbing, the important thing is not to remain on the ground when you fall.”

The Holy Father concluded his homily by saying to the teenagers “you will do amazing things if you prepare well, starting now, by living your youth and all its gifts to the fullest and without fear of hard work. Be like sporting champions, he said who attain high goals by quiet daily effort and practice.”The Lord, Pope Francis stressed, is generous, “he offers us his faithful friendship, which he will never take back. Even if you disappoint him and walk away from him, Jesus continues to want the best for you and to remain close to you; he believes in you even more than you believe in yourself.” This is very important, the Pope noted because, “the biggest threat to growing up well comes from thinking that no one cares about us, from feeling that we are all alone.”

During his homily the Pope also warned the teens present to be on their guard against what he called “an instinctive desire to “have to have” what we find pleasing”, adding, “our consumerist culture reinforces this tendency.”

“Don’t be content with mediocrity, with “simply going with the flow”, with being comfortable and laid back,” the Holy Father said. He also told the teenagers to be sceptical about “people who want to make you believe that you are only important if you act tough like the heroes in films or if you wear the latest fashions.” Your happiness, the Pope continued, has no price. “It cannot be bought: it is not an app that you can download on your phones nor will the latest update bring you freedom and grandeur in love.”

Pope Francis invited those present in St Peter’s Square to be courageous and firm in their decisions because, he said, it is only by doing this you will realize your greatest dreams, adding, “if a person of your age can’t dream they are already in retirement, this serves nothing.”

Love does not happen because we talk about it, the Pope underlined, “but when we live it”. He also said : "In the art of climbing, the important thing is not to remain on the ground when you fall.”

The Holy Father concluded his homily by saying to the teenagers “you will do amazing things if you prepare well, starting now, by living your youth and all its gifts to the fullest and without fear of hard work. Be like sporting champions, he said who attain high goals by quiet daily effort and practice.”

Bishop Robert Barron speaks about Blessed Mother Teresa

Benedict XVI: “The epidemic of the heart leads to corruption”

The following comes from the Vatican Insider:

“The truth, love and goodness that come from God, make man pure and truth, love and goodness come together in the Word which brings liberates a world that no longer thinks of God from ‘forgetfulness’.” This was at the heart of the homily which the Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI pronounced during a mass he presided over this morning in the Teutonic Cemetery church in the Vatican. The mass was attended by members of the Schuelerkreis (Ratzinger’s “student circle”) and the New Schuelerkreis, who gathered at Castel Gandolfo in recent days to reflect on the theme “How to speak to God today”. The priest and philosopher Tomas Halik also participated. The news was posted on the Ratzinger Foundation website.

Does not the evil that afflicts us come from the outside? This was the essence of the question posed by the Emeritus Pope in his German homily. We need to be cleansed of all the impurity that exists out there: “We could respond to the many illnesses and sometimes epidemics that threaten us, by maintaining an external cleanliness,” Benedict XVI said. It is important to care for our exterior in this way so that death does not prevail, the Emeritus Pope said. But this is not enough, he added, because there is also “the epidemic of the heart” to consider, that inner epidemic that “leads to corruption and other filth, the kind of filth that drives man to think only of himself and not of goodness.” So, aside from worship, ethos, “inner hygiene” in other words, also plays a decisive role: “What does a pure man do? What is the real power of purification? How does one come to have a cleansed heart?” Benedict XVI asked.

“In another passage of the Gospel,” he continued, “the Lord says to his people: ‘You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you’.” So we become pure by means of the Word: “The Word is Jesus Christ himself and we come across the Word even in those who reflect It, those who show us the face of God and reflect his meekness, his humble heart, his simplicity, his lovingness, his sincerity.”

The mass was followed by a ceremony for the inauguration of the “Pope Benedict-Joseph Ratzinger Hall”, which the Pope Emeritus blessed. The ceremony took place in the buildings adjacent to the Teutonic Cemetery. In his introductory speech, Mgr. Hans Peter Fischer, Rector of the Teutonic College, announced that a ceremony will be held on 18 November to mark the opening of the Joseph Ratzinger-Benedict XVI Roman Library. The library is entirely dedicated to the works and life of Joseph Ratzinger as a scholar and a Pope and is housed inside the Library of the Teutonic College and of the Roman Institute of the Gorres Society in the Vatican.

Present at today’s ceremony – amongst others – were cardinals Christoph Schönborn, Archbishop of Vienna and Kurt Koch, President of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity and Archbishop Georg Gänswein, Prefect of the Papal Household and personal secretary to Benedict XVI.

The Big Picture by Chris Stefanick

St. John Paul II on Man's Capacity for Love

“Man’s capacity for love depends on his willingness consciously to seek a good together with others, and to subordinate himself to that good for the sake of others, or to others for the sake of that good… Love in human relationships is not something ready-made. It begins as a principle or idea which people must somehow live up to in their behavior, which they must desire if they want—as they should—to free themselves from the utilitarian, the ‘consumer’ attitude (Latin ‘consumere’ = ‘use’) toward other persons.”

—Karol Wojtyla (St. John Paul II)

Fr. Robert Barron comments on Hell

He'd take a bullet for her!

Archbishop Chaput: Modern heart must be won by radical love

(CNA) Archbishop Charles J. Chaput of Philadelphia said the Holy Father’s recent lengthy interview calls attention to the modern world as a “missionary field” that needs witnesses to Christ’s saving power.

“Among the many vital things the Pope reminds us of in his interview is the new and drastically different condition of the modern world that God seeks to save,” the archbishop said in a Sept. 25 column.

What Catholics need to realize is that the world we live is “morally fractured,” the archbishop explained, meaning that many people “no longer have that common vocabulary” that would allow for a fruitful discussion about issues such as abortion and sexuality.

“The modern heart can only be won back by a radical witness of Christian discipleship – a renewed kind of shared community life obedient to God’s Commandments, but also on fire with the Beatitudes lived more personally and joyfully by all of us,” he said.

When the Pope’s 12,000-word interview published in English last week, Archbishop Chaput said he was unable to read it immediately due to travel, but he was greeted by an inbox full of emails – ranging from concerned to gloating to grateful – when he returned to Philadelphia.

While some people “grasped at the interview like a lifeline – or a vindication,” the majority of emails were from concerned Catholics who “felt confused by the media headlines suggesting that the Church had somehow changed her teaching on a variety of moral issues.”

Archbishop Chaput rejected the idea that Pope Francis was somehow turning away from Catholic teaching and said that his flock’s response can be a “useful lesson” for Catholics.

“The Holy Father asks none of us to abandon the task of bringing the world to Jesus Christ. Our witness matters. Every unborn child saved, every marriage strengthened, every immigrant helped, every poor person served, matters,” he said.

He said that when a priest in his archdiocese asked the congregation at Sunday Mass how many had “heard about” the Pope’s interview, nearly everyone raised their hands. However, when the priest asked how many had “actually read” the interview only five people raised their hands. 

Rather than “taking the mass media coverage of the Catholic Church at face value,” Archbishop Chaput wrote, Catholics need to “actually read the Holy Father’s interview for ourselves, and pray over it, and then read it again, especially in light of the Year of Faith.”

If the Church is, as the Holy Father said in his interview, “a field hospital,” then the goal of evangelization should be “to create a space of beauty and mercy; to accompany those who suffer; to understand the nature of their lives; to care for and heal even those who reject us,” the archbishop said.

Nothing we do, he added, will be fruitful “unless we give ourselves to the whole Gospel with our whole heart.”

The full text of Archbishop Chaput’s column may be read here. The interview with Pope Francis can be found here.

Smile

Fr. Robert Barron on Faith, Hope and Love

Fr. Robert Barron: Additional Commentary on Faith, Hope and Love