I will never shop on Sunday, and have tried to cut out Sunday restaurants (once or twice in the past 5 years) - I am hoping to never do it again.
I'm not sure where these exceptions came in paragraph 2187 of the Catechism of things allowed to happen on Sundays.
I am also in favor of getting rid of CYO sports on Sunday.
So I'm not sure how either "sports or restaurants" DON'T make unnecessary demands on others.
"I don't want to make any unnecessary demands on you, but I need someone to ref my kids soccer game, and someone has to make me a sandwich"?????
I'm not debating the Catechism, I just share all this as the fruit of some research and thinking over the years on this subject, along with sharing this quote from the Catechism as well. What are your thoughts? Why do you think the Catechism includes sports and restaurants as things that are necessary? Is it the inclusion of something unique to a particular culture?
How to fix the public school system: teach philosophy. Philosophy can be taught in a completely "secular" way according to even the strictest understanding of that term.
It would also greatly help our Catholic schools as well.
Start in about 4th or 5th grade. One class a year on the history of thought and thinking. Most kids sit around asking the serious questions of life around 3rd-4th-5th grade anyways, and most of them don't know that their questions are the same questions that many great thinkers have been writing about and working on (and even "asnwering") for millennia.
When I was in the seminary learning philosophy, I regularly thought:
1) This is AMAZING!
2) These were the same questions I was thinking through and wrestling with since 3rd grade.
“If the Church was not directly instituted by Christ, then it has to be rethought ceaselessly, reorganized according to rational schemes answering the needs of the moment”
Cardinal Robert Sarah “The Day is Now Far Spent”
Given the recent situation that has made the rounds concerning Roncalli High School, I wanted to share this message from my Dad. Prayers for all involved!
Kanye West is one of the more famous music acts of the
2,000’s, selling about 40 million rap and hip hop albums in that span.
Lots of profanity and so forth
Kim Kardashian is Kanye’s wife, and she is probably more
famous than Kanye
If you don’t know who they are, I promise you’ve seen their
faces in the grocery check out lane every week for the last 15 years.
About a month ago, Kim Kardashian and her three children
were baptized in the Armenian Orthodox Church
Kanye started hosting religious revival prayer services
And this past week, Kanye released a gospel hip-hop album
titled Jesus is King
This is not a homily about the text of any of the songs –
but there is some good stuff in there – I’ve listened several times….
I would still suggest first reading Scripture, the Catechism
and about 200 saints
But the same applies to me too – I would suggest Scripture
and the Catechism and hundreds of saints vs. anything I’ve ever written as well
What I want to preach about today is not the text of a song
but the reaction Kanye’s conversion has received both inside and outside
Christianity
Some have said they think he is insincere
Some have said they think he’s doing it just to make money
Some think he may be sincere now, but he’ll backslide
HE MIGHT!HE MIGHT BE
INSINCERE…HE MIGHT BE DOING IT FOR THE MONEY…HE MIGHT be sincere now,
backslide, reconvert, backslide 80 more times…I have no idea.
But it strikes me that Kanye is very much like Zaccheus in
the Gospel today.
Worldly, wealthy, and when Jesus comes and dines with him,
it says
“The Pharisees grumbled saying, “He has gone to eat at the
house of a sinner”, but folks, he has dined with Saint Peter, Saint John,
Judas, Zaccheus, and You and I – we have no idea where our story ends, or where
Zacheus’ story ends, nor do we know where Kanye’s story ends….some people that
Jesus dines with become saints, and some are Judas’
But this also is not a “do not judge homily” – although we
shouldn’t judge a person’s conversion from afar…I should judge actions…If Kanye
makes his old music again, I can judge that act…if people who are close to me
do something wrong, I should judge that act and speak up…but armchair
authenticity judgments from 1,000’s of miles away are gross and wildly
inaccurate.
Here is the point of the homily: and it is in the first
reading: God rebukes us little by little
Rebuke might turn us off, so let’s rephrase it as “God is
patient and showing you the next little thing to work on, to change, the next
vice to remove, the next virtue or habit to work on
God is patient with you and I, God is patient with Zacheus,
God is patient with Kanye, God was patient with Saint Peter, and God was
patient with Judas.
Some respond to God’s nudges, his little by little
God doesn’t usually show us ALL the things we need to fix in
ourselves because it might crush us or get us to despair
Some might read the saints and despair – Therese or John of
the Cross is so far from who I am
Maybe….but God works with us little by little
And perhaps, for those who can’t handle Therese yet, the
words of a Kanye or even a person like me might be the way God chooses to nudge
them forward, little by little
Conclusion: I ask you to ask God today “Lord, what is the
next thing you are calling me to do…the next step to take…what is a small thing
I need to get rid…and a small thing I need to add?”
Jesus wants to dine with us too…and the Pharisees will
grumble…but God is working with us little by little.We thank God for his patience and we get to
work with a sense of urgency…because our salvation, as always, hangs in the
balance
All Saints – the feast day
for our time, because we’re not sure who we are anymore.
Thomas Howard - Who Am I? Who
Am I?
He said if you were given
phrases like “Who Am I?” or “Identity Crisis” “my self concept” you know they
would be phrases uttered in our own day.
“all of art, movies, poetry,
painting – it all assumes that somewhere we lost ourselves and must grope for
any straw of affirmation that may float by in the dark…we send up flares
signaling “Help!What are we?”
And so we consult gurus,
sages, horoscopes, palm readers, fortune tellers, or you join a group that will
nudge you along toward an answer by getting you to sit in a circle with them,
or breathe with them, or dance with them, or work through your hangups with
them
When did this happen?When did the question “Who am I” push itself
to center stage?Probably somewhere
after the Renaissance when in the 18th-19th centuries we
exiled the gods, but we had nothing left to contemplate but ourselves.
A certain distance has to be
between the asker and the thing they are asking about, so when we ask about
ourselves, that means there has to be some unnatural divide in us
And then comes Christ to show
us salvation, but we might be offended that he just seems to give us a lot of
commandments…the beattitudes, deny yourself, love your neighbor….
After all, we might say, I
must find out who I am before I can do anything else?
But God would say “must you?”In the Bible, there is a curious lack of any
suggestion that our business is to first find out who we are.
Conclusion: but in doing the things of God, REALLY
praying, REALLY serving the poor, REALLY fasting, REALLY being humble I discover my real freedom and personhood
not in looking for it but in learning to love God and my neighbor
It is dangerous to preach
about yourself on all saints day…but let me just say that very imperfectly it
has been THROUGH doing the things I’m asked to do, imperfectly, that I have come
to settle in who I am, in a way that the long years of searching have not
Often with Saints, we are
drawn to their stories
“What would it look like if I
lived like Saint Francis?
Or Therese who died as a
teenager?
Or King Louis, or Saint John
the Baptist, or Dominic, or the Blessed Mother or St. Joseph…
And those are all good.
But what we must know, in
this age where we question our identity and think we have to find ourselves
first before we hop on the train with God, is that we won’t find ourselves
UNTIL we pick up a shovel, and get to work doing the things God is asking of us,
and when we do that, we’ll wake up one day somewhere we never planned being a
person we never planned on our own, and could never have known when we were 18 or
50 or 90 and trying to find ourselves
What any person’s life will
look like when they begin to follow God … it is anyone’s guess, but you and I
will be as varied as St. King Louis of France is from Saint Damien the leper
As different as the bookish
and brilliant Thomas Aquinas is from the warrior St. Joan of Arc
Do you want to know who you
are? In your baptism, you are a son or daughter of God…now get to work living
that…and the question “who am I” will evaporate and never be a concern again.
In learning that only 25% of Catholics under 40 believe in the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist, most of the discussion has been from the demand side ("What can we do to get people to want/believe in the Real Presence?")
We also need to be looking at it from the supply side.
1) What, as a Church, are we "supplying" around the Real Presence? (read: "How is Mass celebrated?")
2) Among the VASTLY different ways that the Eucharist is "supplied" to people, are some MORE effective in communicating to the "consumer" that Christ is "Really Present"?
3) Can bishops do anything to change the way the Eucharist is "supplied" in their diocese in order to move it towards what imparts to the "consumer" that Christ is truly present, or are they essentially powerless, and thus subjected to the whims of how any particular priest/parish chooses to "supply" the Eucharist?
4 quotes on the Amazon Synod in Cardinal Sarah's new book
"The Day is Now Far Spent"
"If, in a missionary impulse, each diocese of Latin America generously offered one priest for the Amazon region, this region would not be treated with so much disdain and humiliation through the fabrication of married priests, as though God were incapable of raising up in that part of the world generous young men willing to make the total gift of their bodies and their hearts, their whole capacity to love and all their being in consecrated celibacy.”
..........
“If because of a lack of faith in God and because of pastoral shortsightedness the Synod for the Amazon region met to decide on the ordination of [married men], on the fabrication of ministries for women, and other incongruities of this sort, the situation would be extremely serious.… The Spirit blows where He wills, certainly, but He does not contradict Himself and does not create confusion and disorder. He is the spirit of wisdom. On the question of celibacy, he has already spoken through the councils and the Roman pontiffs.”
.........
“If the Synod for the Amazon region made decisions along the above-mentioned lines, it would definitively break with the tradition of the Latin Church.”
..........
“What would I be today if missionaries had not come to live and die in my village in Guinea? Would I have had the desire to be a priest if they had been content to ordain one of the men of the village? Has the Church grown cold to the point where among her children there are not enough magnanimous souls to get up and go off to proclaim Christ in the Amazon region? I think, on the contrary, that the prospect of a total gift to God can wake up the drowsy souls of many young Christian men. It is necessary also that we bishops have the courage to call them!”
We've been so blessed at my parishes with wonderful sacred music through the years. Our wonderful director of sacred music for the past 7 years, Mr. Edward Atkinson, put this Christmas album together that I hope you'll consider downloading and sharing with others.
Thanks for helping our little parish be a light to the poorest community in Indiana!
A former parishioner is working on the ground in Syria as a researcher collecting info for global news sources. This person is in the direct line of fire, knows what is happening and what help is needed.
