Jesus ascended 40 days after Easter (Acts 1:3), which always falls on a Thursday. We usually transfer the celebration to the nearest Sunday. Then the Holy Spirit descended on the Apostles on Pentecost, 50 days after Easter. Before ascending, Jesus invited the Apostles to pray for the gift of the Holy Spirit (see Acts 1:8). The Church traditionally fulfills this command by spending time praying for the gift of the Holy Spirit between Ascension and Pentecost. This was the first Novena, or nine days of prayer. It begins on Friday after Ascension and ends the Saturday before Pentecost. Please join in praying for a powerful outpouring of the Holy Spirit.
Novena to the Holy Spirit
Scriptural Version
Traditionally prayed beginning the day after Ascension Thursday (18 May 2012) Continue reading »
If prayed as a family, the father should be the Leader.
The Veni Sancte Spiritus should be prayed by dividing into two groups;
one group prays the odd verses and one prays even verses.
Choose a reader to look up the scripture passage in the Bible each day for the meditation.
Or you may choose to simply read the short excerpt provided as part of the novena.
Religious fundamentalism makes a lot of people, believers and unbelievers, at least a little uncomfortable. I recently noticed that radical feminism does exactly the same thing: it makes a lot of people, men and women, at least a little uncomfortable. These two ideas have several very interesting connections.
First, let’s look at religious fundamentalism. Religious fundamentalism represents one of the greatest threats to true religion because, in the name of God, fundamentalism betrays some of the most cherished values of religion. At the risk of being extremely simplistic, I will reduce the issue to a few basic points. True religion always ought to reflect God, and not just any kind of God, but the God who made this world. Based on the slow and patient way in which nature unfolds its mysteries, it seems that the Creator God is patient and gentle. The very fact that God is not raining hailstones and lighting on all the evil-doers in the world demonstrates God’s patience and God’s respect for the creatures he has made. True religion should always value and protect life, just like God does.
Continue reading »
How to know it’s really Love (12:30)
Easter, 6th Sunday. Anyone can say, “I love you” — but how do we know it is really love?
- Loving feelings? They leave us after a while.
- They put up with us? No, they may just be making sure the money keeps coming.
- Patience? We can be patient waiting for our spouse to die!
Those are all signs of love, but they aren’t sure. The surest sign of love is Sacrifice. If someone loves you, they are willing to sacrifice for you. Previous cultures had to sacrifice daily, but our culture thinks that a happy life comes from not having to sacrifice. As we try to avoid sacrifice, we end up avoiding love. On Mother’s Day we see what love really is. Love happens when you get up in the middle of the night with your children, love happens when you sacrifice for your family, or when you struggle every day to keep a relationship working. Sacrifice is the surest sign of love.
Mother’s Day is a day to realize that too often, we take others’ sacrifices for granted. Perhaps no one is taken for granted as much as God himself. If we looked at Sacrifice, we would realize how loved we really were.
Once there was a young boy who hated how twisted and ugly his mom’s hands looked. One day she finally explained why her hands looked that way: because she loved him. Jesus loves us that much — and He has the wounds to prove it.
(13 May 2012)
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How do we prove that Jesus rose from the dead? The first way to prove that something happened is through the testimony of witnesses who saw it happen. No one saw Jesus rise from the death, but a number of trustworthy people encountered him after his resurrection, and they have left a record that they saw him, and that he had truly risen from the dead. That record is the core of the four Gospels.
The second way to prove an event is to look at the impact that event had. We know Mount Vesuvius erupted because people wrote about it, but also because it buried Pompei under a layer of ash. We can apply the same evaluation to the resurrection: 1) the tomb of Jesus was empty and his body has never been recovered 2) the Roman guard would have made it nearly impossible for the body to be removed in any normal way 3) the Shroud of Turin corresponds in every way to the Biblical accounts of the crucifixion, and the image that is on the shroud was not made by any known method 4) a band of underfunded and uneducated disciples whose leader was a failure in every possible way somehow managed to convince a good portion of the world that he rose from the dead – if Jesus did not rise, Christianity is the greatest hoax ever pulled. Continue reading »
Easter, 5th Sunday. Being a Christian is about being in union with God; God shares His divine life with us so that we can be in Communion with God. Jesus is the vine and we are the branches. We receive His life as a gift and we put out good fruits. We stay connected to Jesus so that we can receive His life (believe in Him), and then we pass it on to others (love one another).
What does this look like in practice? In the book, The Proper Care & Feeding of Husbands, Dr. Laura Schlessinger tells women her secret to how to get what you want from a man: You pay attention to his needs. It seems opposite but it is true that when we stop worrying about our happiness or joy, and start looking out for others, we discover the happiness and joy we have been missing. Receive God’s love, and pass it on!
(6 May 2012)
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The official policy of the government of the People’s Republic of China is that families are only allowed to have one child. Since passing a law does not actually change the fertility of Chinese women, the government has been known to resort to forced abortions and sterilizations to apply the law.
On the surface things are very different in the United States of America, where women are free to have all the children they want. Women are also free to have access to sterilizations and abortions to avoid having children if they don’t want to give birth. The American government and Federal laws guarantee women access to abortion on demand, but not one is forced into clinics to have abortions.
While these policies are different, one thing is very similar: American society protects and defends the “right to an abortion”, which means that both societies are committed to the idea that abortion is acceptable in some circumstances, or that abortion is acceptable for some people.
The American policy is actually another version of the Chinese policy, the main difference being that in the United States, women self-select for abortions, while in China they might be chosen by the government for an abortion. China applies real power towards abortion – fines and force. In America only soft power is applied towards abortion – the government and society helps to create a space in which women feel comfortable with the choice of an abortion and are inclined to choose it for themselves, thus freely cooperating in the efforts of the government to reduce the number of births to teenage mothers and to eliminate “unplanned pregnancy.” The American approach is a carrot, the Chinese approach is a stick, but they are both moving the donkey in the same direction. The donkey, by the way, is the human population of their countries.
As long as the US government is content with the results of this voluntary cooperation, the American people can keep their freedom not to choose abortion, but this is a very precarious position. At any moment, the Federal government could decide that voluntary cooperation is not achieving the desired goals, and pass a law defining in which circumstances or for which people abortion is to be considered the appropriate response to a pregnancy. Immediately the government of the United States would place itself it the same situation as that of China.
For anyone who thinks this will never happen in America, it’s time to wake up. Until a few short months ago, the Federal Government of the United States was content with the voluntary cooperation of private insurance and private employers in its goal of distributing contraception to everyone. With the passage of the HHS MANDATE, the Federal government declared that voluntary cooperation in this project was not sufficient: it will now be obligatory for private insurance and private employers to assist the government in distributing contraception to everyone. This is the reason the Catholic bishops have declared that the only solution which respects the freedom of the American people is the complete repeal of the mandate; as long as it stands, the American government has placed itself in the positition of defining absolute good for all its citizens.
The sad truth is that, as long as individual Americans insist on the freedom to define for themselves what the meaning of their life is going to be, they leave the door open for anyone, even the government, to impose a meaning on their life. Only when we are willing to embrace the truth that our life was not invented by us, but was given a meaning but God, are we able to have a meaning that no one, not even the government, has the power to redefine. +
Back in October, I posted this image of a statue of Mary in the Villa Doria-Pamfili in Rome. I complained that the poor situation of the statue was a sign of people’s difficulty in accepting love, and I thought to myself that this was also a sign of how few people cared about God these days.
In the last few months, someone must have taken pity on the poor statue, and the result was this amazing transformation:
It only took a little time and effort! I have a tendency to be a too cynical, and to look at a situation and think “That’s too bad, now it’s ruined”, and forget how easily so many things can be made new again if only we take the time and effort. +
Easter, 4th Sunday. The image of the Good Shepherd still inspires and consoles us. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…” Jesus tells us that he doesn’t just take good care of the sheep, He lays down His life for them. Only Jesus, the Good Shepherd, would love his sheep so much that he would die for us.
“…We shall be like Him…” says our 2nd reading. If our Good Shepherd lays down His life for us, we have to do the same. So many marriages fail precisely because we misunderstand this point. If his #1 is himself, and her #1 is herself, they eventually get tired of living with a selfish person. The recipe for a successful marriage is for him to put his wife first, and for her to put her husband first. It’s easy to say but it’s hard to do, because we do not realize how selfish we really are.
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Those who read this blog regularly know that I avoid commenting on news stories. This is because things come and go quickly and we can rarely understand what these stories mean until after they are gone. However, I could not pass up the opportunity to comment on the Vatican’s recent announcement regarding the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR). To be specific, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which is responsible to make sure that the Catholic faith is being taught in the Catholic Church, published an eight page document, indicating a number of doctrinal errors promoted by speakers and papers sponsored by the LCWR. It had also found consistent themes of radical feminism, and pointed out that members of the LCWR and even officers of the conference have expressed dissent against Church teaching, especially promoting the ordination of women and protesting the Church’s position on homosexuality. The CDF has appointed an Archbishop to oversee the LCWR and, among other things, to rewrite the statutes of the organization to better reflect its mission.
The Holy See has the authority to do this because the Conference was founded with its support and approval. In fact, the LCWR was founded to be the official representative body between the Vatican and religious institutes of women in the United States. At the moment, there is a second organization, the Conference of Major Superiors of Women Religious, founded in 1992 as an alternative to the LCWR for institutes that did not like its doctrinal issues and feminists themes.
The popular media tends to see the Church in political categories, and the main narrative on this story is that courageous nuns who serve the poor are being unfairly treated by the men. Even in political terms, it is very hard to paint these nuns as simply innocent victims: certain nuns connected to the LCWR very publicly opposed the American bishops who were articulating the Church’s position and trying to shape public policy. Whether this can be called courageous or not depends on your point of view, but it was certainly a public challenge to bishops who were just doing their job. Continue reading »
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