Mother's Day cards

We picked out cards today from Hallmark.

So often we dismiss 'Hallmark' holidays as fabrications of the secular culture meant to stimulate sales. In the case of Administrative Professionals Day, I'd have to agree.

But I don't think it's by accident that the secular event of Mother's Day falls within the lovely month of May, a month dedicated to Our Lady.

How pleased she must be to see so many people honoring their mothers in the month that honors her!

Having this day out there in the secular realm, even with all its commercialism, allows moments like this one shared by Julie at Happy Catholic, who got it from Anchoress.

Show your Mom some love this weekend, and show some love to Mary.

May Crowning

Bring flow'rs of the fairest,
Bring flow'rs of the rarest,
From garden and woodland
And hillside and vale;
Our full hearts are swelling,
Our Glad voices telling
The praise of the loveliest
Rose of the vale.

O Mary! we crown thee with blossoms today,
Queen of the Angels, Queen of the May,
O Mary! we crown thee with blossoms today,
Queen of the Angels, Queen of the May.

Our voices ascending,
In harmony blending,
Oh! Thus may our hearts turn
Dear Mother, to thee;
Oh! Thus shall we prove thee
How truly we love thee,
How dark without Mary
Life's journey would be.

O Mary! we crown thee with blossoms today,
Queen of the Angels, Queen of the May,
O Mary! we crown thee with blossoms today,
Queen of the Angels, Queen of the May.

O Virgin most tender,
Our homage we render,
Thy love and protection,
Sweet Mother, to win;
In danger defend us,
In sorrow befriend us,
And shield our hearts
From contagion and sin.

O Mary! we crown thee with blossoms today,
Queen of the Angels, Queen of the May,
O Mary! we crown thee with blossoms today,
Queen of the Angels, Queen of the May.

Of Mothers the dearest,
Oh, wilt thou be nearest,
When life with temptation
Is darkly replete?
Forsake us, O never!
Our hearts be they ever
As Pure as the lilies
We lay at thy feet.

O Mary! we crown thee with blossoms today,
Queen of the Angels, Queen of the May,
O Mary! we crown thee with blossoms today,
Queen of the Angels, Queen of the May.

The way of Joy

According to Pope Francis, when the first Christians began sharing the Gospel with “the Greeks,” and not just other Jews, it was something completely new and made some of the Apostles “a bit nervous.” They sent Barnabas to Antioch to check on the situation, a kind of “apostolic visitation”.

“With a bit of a sense of humor, we can say this was the theological beginning of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,” he said. Barnabas saw that the church was growing. The church was becoming “the mother of more and more children,” a mother that not only generates sons and daughters, but gives them faith and an identity.

Christian identity is not a bureaucratic status, it is “belonging to the Church, the mother Church, because it is not possible to find Jesus outside the Church,” Pope Francis said, before adding that when Barnabas witnessed the crowds of new believers he rejoiced with “the joy of an evangeliser.”

The growth of the Church, the Pope explained, “begins with persecution, a great sadness, and ends with joy. This is how the Church moves forward, as one saint, I don’t recall which right now, said, between the persecution of the world and the consolation of the Lord. The life of the Church is this way.”

-from Mass for St. George's Day

Our Papa and Our Abba

St. Paul in his Letter to the Romans writes: you have received a spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, “Abba! Father!”(Rom 8:15). It is the Spirit that we have received in baptism that teaches us, it urges us, to say to God: “Father”, or better, “Abba!”, which means “dad”. This is our God: He is a dad for us. The Holy Spirit produces in us this new condition of being sons of God. And this is the greatest gift that we receive from the Paschal mystery of Jesus. And God treats us as children, He understands us, forgives us, embraces us and loves us even when we make mistakes. Already in the Old Testament, the prophet Isaiah said that even if a mother could forget her child, God never forgets us, ever (cf. 49:15). And this is beautiful!

However, this filial relationship with God is not like a treasure that we store in a corner of our lives, but has to grow, it must be fed every day by listening to the Word of God, praying and participating in the sacraments, especially the Eucharist and Reconciliation, and through charity. We can live as children! And this is our dignity – we have the dignity of children -. To behave as true children! This means that every day we must let Christ transform us and make us like him; it means trying to live as Christians, trying to follow him, even if we see our limitations and weaknesses. The temptation is always there to leave God aside in order put to ourselves at the center and the experience of sin wounds our Christian life, our being sons of God. For this we must have the courage of faith, and not allow ourselves to be guided by that mentality that says to us: "God is useless, he's not important for you". It is the exact opposite: it is only by acting like sons of God, without getting discouraged because of our falls, because of our sins, feeling loved by Him, that our lives will be new, animated by serenity and joy. God is our strength! God is our hope!

Dear brothers and sisters, we, before all others, need to have this hope firmly rooted and need to be a visible sign of it, bright and clear for everyone. The risen Lord is the hope that never diminishes, that never disappoints (cf. Rom 5:5). Hope never deludes. That hope that comes from the Lord! How often in our lives do our hopes vanish, how often do the expectations we nourish in our hearts not come about! Our hope as Christians is strong, secure, solid in this land, where God has called us to walk, and is open to eternity, because it is founded on God, who is always faithful. We must not forget: God is faithful; God is always faithful with us. Being risen with Christ through baptism, by the gift of faith, to an inheritance that does not corrupt, leads us to seek the things of God, to think of Him more often, to pray to Him more. Being a Christian isn't just following the commandments, but means being in Christ, thinking like him, acting like him, loving like him; it means letting him take possession of our lives and change them, transform them, free them from the darkness of evil and sin.

-from the Pope's General Audience

Love & Truth

"This history of the first Christian community tells us something very important, which applies to the Church in every age, and so to us: when a person truly knows Jesus Christ and believes in Him, one experiences His presence and the power of His Resurrection in one’s life, and one cannot help but communicate this experience. If it encounters misunderstanding or adversity, one behaves like Jesus in His Passion: one responds with love and with the power of truth." - from today's Regina Caeli address

Man of God

I am starting a Men's Group at my parish. There seems to be a whole spate of such groups and organizations forming across the country. Society also seems to generally concur that we face a deficit of virtuous men, though how much of that stems from feminist chauvinism remains to be seen.

Two recent blogposts speak to this topic. One from Catholic Thing makes the exact same point I made to my wife earlier today, when I admitted that I would not be the man I am today were it not for marrying her:

And yet, although there’s no doubt we could – and should – do a much better job of preparing our young men for married life, I still have this nagging concern: Maybe, as a guy, you’re never ready. That is to say, maybe it’s not until you’re married that you actually begin to grow up and become a civilized, responsible adult. Maybe that’s why wise cultures in the past tried to get their young men married off relatively early in life: not primarily because of the sex instinct, but because they wanted to turn their irresponsible, muddle-headed adolescents into worthwhile productive spouses who could, for the first time in their lives, do something really meaningful that would give them some true satisfaction.

The second points out what a caricature has been made of men in pop culture portrayals, a point my mother- who raised three sons- has been making for years now:

Watch any TV show or movie, and you will start to notice a pattern of what the “modern man” looks like. The media, except for a few notable exceptions, has embraced a destructive caricature of masculinity, and turned the modern man into a impotent bumbling fool who needs the strong leading hand of either his mother or wife to help him take care of himself...Each is dangerous in their own way, as each takes what are possibly virtuous characteristics and adds them with sinister vices which makes us associate the virtue with the vice-ful man. Furthermore, it encourages society to associate men, and masculinity, with extremely fallible men who have particular characteristics that make them extraordinarily weak. They create an association between men and their idea of masculinity that can be extremely harmful to both men and women, as men no longer know how to act, and women do not know what to expect of men. 

What we must do is promote virtue in men, something the Church has always proposed in its Saints.

Happy Divine Mercy Sunday!

"In my own life, I have so often seen God’s merciful countenance, his patience; I have also seen so many people find the courage to enter the wounds of Jesus by saying to him: Lord, I am here, accept my poverty, hide my sin in your wounds, wash it away with your blood. And I have always seen that God did just this – he accepted them, consoled them, cleansed them, loved them." -Pope Francis, from today's homily

Great minds think alike

“This is the Lord’s commandment: Surrender our hearts.   Open them and believe in the Gospel of truth; not in the Gospel we’ve concocted, not in a light Gospel, not in a distilled Gospel, but in the Gospel of truth.” - Pope Francis

Read more@ NC Register

Sounds familiar...

"We do not seek a Christ whom we have invented, for only in the real communion of the Church do we encounter the real Christ." - Pope Benedict XVI

Joy in Mercy

"What a joy it is for me to announce this message: 

Christ is risen! 

I would like it to go out to every house and every family!

Most of all, I would like it to enter every heart,
for it is there that God wants to sow this Good News: 

Jesus is risen, there is hope for you,
you are no longer in the power of sin, of evil! 

Love has triumphed, mercy has been victorious! 

The mercy of God always triumphs!

God’s mercy can make even the driest land become a garden,
can restore life to dry bones.
Let us be renewed by God’s mercy, let us be loved by Jesus,
 let us enable the power of his love to transform our lives too;
and let us become agents of this mercy,
channels through which God can water the earth,
protect all creation and make justice and peace flourish.

Dear Brothers and Sisters,
to you who have come from all over the world
 to this Square at the heart of Christianity,
and to you linked by modern technology,
I repeat my greeting:

Happy Easter!

Bear in your families and in your countries
the message of joy, hope and peace
which every year, on this day, is powerfully renewed.
-from the Urbi et Orbi

Jen Fulwiler

at her best:

When we rail against God for human pain, too often we’re picturing a distant God who sits aloof in his throne upon the clouds. But to see the crucifix is to see the God who allows suffering, but does not exempt himself from it. To ponder the crucifix is to ponder the fact that that man, naked in bleeding on the cross, is the incarnate form of the One who created each molecule on each star and planet in all the billions of galaxies in the universe. To gaze at a crucifix is to learn the story of the creatures who introduced misery into their world through their own disobedience, which they chose through their own free will, and then to hear the tale of the Creator who did not abandon them to wallow in the mess they had made for themselves, but who jumped down into it with them instead. It is to behold a God who used his own pain to transform suffering into a love-generating act, opening the door for his children to be reunited with him in an eternity of peace.

Each time I am tempted to scream, Where is our God when we suffer?!, the crucifix provides its own, wordless response: He is right here, suffering with us.

Will someone please think of the children?

Actually, Dr. Popcak has:

Regardless of the side you fall on, we all owe it to children to commit ourselves to asking the hard question, what is genuinely BEST for children. Not, “what can they get by with?” or “what’s good enough?” The question must be, “What is best?” That is what must define the terms of the conversation because children deserve our best. We can make exceptions from there, but the exceptions prove the rule, not the other way around.

We can say, for example, “breast is best” because we know the research supports that. At the same time, we make allowances for bottle feeding,because some kind of nutrition is better than nothing, but we do not say that bottle is best or even as good as breast milk because we know it is not true. In the same way, we ought to be able to say that a two-parent, heterosexual, married family is best for children because all the data shows that is true. We can make exceptions for other family forms because life requires it of us, but we should not be pressured to say or forced to pretend that alternative family forms are as good as traditional, heterosexual married households. It is simply not true and to say otherwise is politics, sentiment and folly, not fact. Our children deserve better than that.

He is joined by the citizens of Paris.

Lest anyone should think this is just about same-sex couples, there is also the general failure on the part of everyone to comprehend what marriage is all about, according to William May:

“Children are not being protected through marriages. Instead, society has come to regard marriage as the public recognition of a relationship rather than it’s original intent: to unite a man and women with each other and to any children born from them. The couple becomes irreplaceable to each other and irreplaceable to their children just as their children are irreplaceable to them,” he says.

FirstThings brings home what's at stake:

But it is not so. Just as the mystery of marital union overcomes the male/female difference, so does the mystery of Christ’s love of his Church overcome the difference between God and creature. The Righteous Judge is judged in our place. As we die in his death by way of baptism, we participate in his resurrection, the fullness of life toward which the natural fertility of sexual intercourse between a man and a woman points. And though we may stumble again and again, though we may deny him, opening up a chasm infinitely greater than the differences between men and women, Christ’s love is strong enough to secure our union with him. Though we may be unable to cleave to him, he cleaves to us.

Our society seems determined to redefine marriage. To a great degree that’s already completed. Contraception has largely removed fertility from the sexual unions of men and women. No-fault divorce has allowed the vagaries of our affective unions to control the meaning of marriage rather than love’s desire to achieve a union from which we cannot withdraw ourselves. Now we’re poised to jettison the male/female difference that makes marriage a natural sign of a supernatural grace: the miracle of human fertility and its power of new life, and the miracle of a lasting peace in the war between the sexes.

These developments bode ill. Our society will have greater difficulty seeing flashes of eternity in sexual desire and in emotional unions between lovers—a disenchantment very much to be regretted. And the natural sign of God’s love will lose some of its power. Without the male/female difference, there’s no natural mystery to illuminate the supernatural mystery of God’s offer of matrimony to us in Christ.

on the Tyranny of Moral Relativism

“There cannot be true peace if everyone is his own criterion, if everyone can always claim exclusively his own rights, without at the same time caring for the good of others, of everyone, on the basis of the nature that unites every human being on this earth.”-Pope Francis, to the diplomats

If you are near DC

go March on my behalf please.