By: Fr. Dwight Longenecker | CruxNow
On the First Sunday of Advent, I usually wish the people of my parish “a Happy New Year!” They are nonplussed to hear this at the end of November, until I remind them that we follow a liturgical year as well as a calendrical one, and the first Sunday of Advent is the start of another annual cycle.
The second New Year’s Day for Catholics is, of course, January 1.
But it wasn’t always so.
For most of human history the New Year did not start in the mid Winter, but in Spring. The first record of a civilization celebrating the beginning of a new year was in Mesopotamia around the year 2000 BC. It seemed logical to start the year in mid-March-the time of the Spring equinox.
The early Romans began their year in March. At first their calendar only had ten months. That’s how September, October, November and December got their names.(septem is Latin for “seven,” octo is “eight,” novem is “nine,” and decem is “ten.”)
It was in the year 153 BC that the Romans added two months before March and started celebrating the new year at the beginning of January. (Which was named for the two-faced god Janus.) The start of January was chosen for civic reasons while most of the people still celebrated new year at the start of March.
Once Christianity came along, the mid-March date continued to be a good fit. March 25 was considered to be the date of Jesus’s crucifixion.
Because an ancient Jewish tradition asserted that a great man would die on the same day of the year as he was conceived, March 25 was accepted as the date of the Annunciation. Theologians liked it because the incarnation of God’s Son was also the beginning of humanity’s redemption and the start of the new creation.
As Christianity took hold, January first was considered to be a pagan celebration, and in 567 AD the Council of Tours abolished the January date.
So March 25 is the third New Year’s Day for Catholics.
In 1582, the Gregorian calendar reform restored January 1 as New Year’s Day. Although most Catholic countries adopted the Gregorian calendar almost immediately, it was only gradually adopted among Protestant countries. The British, for example, did not adopt the reformed calendar until 1752. Until then, the British Empire -and their American colonies- still celebrated the new year in March.
The irony of the Protestant countries celebrating New Year’s Day on March 25 was that it was originally chosen for the New Year because of the Feast of the Annunciation-a Marian feast day which Protestants would not dream of celebrating.
In the church calendar, January first was celebrated as the Feast of the Circumcision of Christ because according to Luke 2:21 it was on the eighth day after his birth that he was circumcised. This feast is sometimes also called the Feast of the Naming of Jesus or the Holy Name of Jesus.
However, the earliest traditions of the Roman church are that the first of January was celebrated as a Feast of Mary, Mother of God. Around the seventh century the ancient tradition faded out and January first became the day that Jesus’s naming and circumcision was commemorated.
In Pope John XXIII’s 1960 revision of the church calendar, all mention of the circumcision of Jesus was removed and January first was called simply the Octave of the Nativity. Meanwhile in Portugal in 1914 the feast of the “Maternity of the Blessed Virgin Mary” had been established in October and in 1931 Pope Pius IX extended the celebration to the entire Catholic Church.
The 1969 revision of the liturgical calendar gathered up this tradition and moved it from October to January. Thus January first was established as “the Solemnity of Mary, the Holy Mother of God, and also the commemoration of the conferral of the Most Holy Name of Jesus.”
In his Apostolic Letter, Marialis Cultus, Pope Paul VI explained: “This celebration, placed on January 1…is meant to commemorate the part played by Mary in this mystery of salvation. It is meant also to exalt the singular dignity which this mystery brings to the holy Mother…through whom we were found worthy to receive the Author of life.”
So history has come around very neatly.
The First Sunday of Advent starts the new liturgical year, while on Lady Day in mid March we give the nod to the ancient tradition of the Annunciation being the start of a new year.
Meanwhile we can join the rest of the world, have a drink, look back with thanks, and look forward with hope, set off a few fireworks and celebrate again the birth of the Lord, and the dawn of our redemption by honoring Mary the Mother of God.
https://cruxnow.com/commentary/2016/12/28/catholics-three-chances-not-one-celebrate-new-years/
Friday, December 30, 2016
Archdiocesan ministry marks 20 years of embracing diversity
Catholic News Service
In the Archdiocese of Indianapolis, Mass in Spanish is celebrated in 19 parishes, in Vietnamese in Bloomington, and in Vietnamese, French and Korean in Indianapolis. This amazing feat is the result of the inspired work of the archdiocesan Intercultural Ministry, which celebrated 20 years of service this year.
INDIANAPOLIS - Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin has mentioned frequently that the Archdiocese of Newark, New Jersey, where he is to be installed January 6, has Mass celebrated in 22 languages each weekend.
It’s a large number, yes. But it might be a surprise to some that across central and southern Indiana, and in the Archdiocese of Indianapolis, Mass is celebrated in as many five languages.
Mass in Spanish is celebrated in 19 parishes in 12 cities and towns, in Vietnamese in Bloomington, and in Vietnamese, French and Korean in Indianapolis.
The Masses are just one of the many accomplishments of archdiocesan Intercultural Ministry, which celebrated 20 years of service this year.
The story begins in 1994. A volunteer group called Archdiocesan Black Catholics Concerned existed, as did a Hispanic apostolate operated out of St. Mary Parish in Indianapolis. But there was no official archdiocesan ethnic ministry.
When St. Bridget Parish in Indianapolis - one of three predominantly black Catholic parishes in the city - closed, Archbishop Daniel M. Buechlein, then head of the archdiocese, tapped Father Kenneth Taylor, then pastor of St. Bridget and Holy Trinity parishes, to start an archdiocesan multicultural ministry.
In January 1996, Buechlein commissioned the archdiocese’s first Multicultural Ministry Office, with Taylor as director. The office focused on addressing the spiritual needs of the Hispanic and black Catholic communities, based on cultural backgrounds and customs.
According to Taylor, the Office of Multicultural Ministry, which in 2014 became the Office of Intercultural Ministry, serves two primary purposes.
“One is to develop ministries to the various ethnic groups within the archdiocese,” he told The Criterion, Indianapolis’s archdiocesan newspaper. “The other is for the archdiocese to have a conduit to what’s going on nationally. We are representatives on the national level through the office. … So we can take what’s happening here to the national groups, and whatever is happening nationally gets back into the archdiocese.”
In time, a ministry was developed for the Vietnamese Catholic community, which worships at St. Joseph Church in Indianapolis. They would later be combined with ministries for Burmese, Filipino and Korean Catholics under the archdiocesan Asian/Pacific Islanders Ministry.
The milestones over the last two decades are many, said Taylor. One was the creation of a special Mass to celebrate the Vietnamese Tet, or lunar New Year.
Another milestone was the institution of a Mass to celebrate the Filipino tradition known as Simbang Gabi, a nine-day spiritual celebration leading up to Christmas. More recently, a monthly Mass celebrated in French was instituted at the request of French-speaking African Catholic immigrants.
In 2004, the first annual Mass for the November 3 feast of St. Martin de Porres was celebrated. The saint shared Hispanic and black heritage.
“The idea was to bring particularly the African-American and Hispanic communities together around St. Martin de Porres for common worship,” said Taylor. “It was a time when there was a lot of tension in Indianapolis between the African-American and Hispanic communities. … Over the years, I found out that other communities revere (St.) Martin de Porres as well, so other communities are now involved.”
Maria Pimentel-Gannon of St. Monica Parish in Indianapolis has been involved with the archdiocesan office since its inception, and has served several terms as president of the ministry’s board. She helped start the annual St. Martin de Porres Mass.
“I think it has brought us closer as an archdiocese,” she said of the Mass. “I think it has helped us to realize the richness we have in our archdiocese in the different cultures, to see that we are very intercultural, and to see that as a good thing, an asset.”
In 2012, Taylor led the ministry in a major effort to host the National Black Catholic Congress. Then in 2013, the ministry did the planning for Indianapolis to host the National Association of African Catholics that September.
In August 2013, he was succeeded by Franciscan Brother Moises Gutierrez as full-time director of what was later renamed the Intercultural Ministry.
Under his leadership from 2013-15, among other things, a leadership certification program to form pastoral leaders in the Asian/Pacific Islander, African-American and Hispanic communities was developed - the first of its kind in the United States.
Gutierrez’s successor is Oscar Castellanos, former Hispanic Ministry coordinator, and he became director of Intercultural Ministry.
Castellanos told The Criterion he is grateful for his predecessors’ perseverance “and saying ‘yes’ to this particular ministry. You planted the seed so that others could continue the harvesting.”
His vision is to have “more communities embracing diversity, and opening their doors and hearts to other ways of thinking, organizing, celebrating and praying.”
“I see this ministry promoting intercultural competency through awareness, knowledge and skills that would allow our offices, schools and parishes to be enculturated in a church that is more diverse than ever,” he said.
“Our world and this country are changing,” Pimentel-Gannon said. “The majority will be the minority, and in some cases already is. The more readily you are open to this, the more you’re going to enjoy the journey. It’s like fighting something that we have no control over, but rather being able to appreciate that we’re all God’s creation. … It’s a richer experience for everybody.”
https://cruxnow.com/cns/2016/12/29/archdiocesan-ministry-marks-20-years-embracing-diversity/
In the Archdiocese of Indianapolis, Mass in Spanish is celebrated in 19 parishes, in Vietnamese in Bloomington, and in Vietnamese, French and Korean in Indianapolis. This amazing feat is the result of the inspired work of the archdiocesan Intercultural Ministry, which celebrated 20 years of service this year.
INDIANAPOLIS - Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin has mentioned frequently that the Archdiocese of Newark, New Jersey, where he is to be installed January 6, has Mass celebrated in 22 languages each weekend.
It’s a large number, yes. But it might be a surprise to some that across central and southern Indiana, and in the Archdiocese of Indianapolis, Mass is celebrated in as many five languages.
Mass in Spanish is celebrated in 19 parishes in 12 cities and towns, in Vietnamese in Bloomington, and in Vietnamese, French and Korean in Indianapolis.
The Masses are just one of the many accomplishments of archdiocesan Intercultural Ministry, which celebrated 20 years of service this year.
The story begins in 1994. A volunteer group called Archdiocesan Black Catholics Concerned existed, as did a Hispanic apostolate operated out of St. Mary Parish in Indianapolis. But there was no official archdiocesan ethnic ministry.
When St. Bridget Parish in Indianapolis - one of three predominantly black Catholic parishes in the city - closed, Archbishop Daniel M. Buechlein, then head of the archdiocese, tapped Father Kenneth Taylor, then pastor of St. Bridget and Holy Trinity parishes, to start an archdiocesan multicultural ministry.
In January 1996, Buechlein commissioned the archdiocese’s first Multicultural Ministry Office, with Taylor as director. The office focused on addressing the spiritual needs of the Hispanic and black Catholic communities, based on cultural backgrounds and customs.
According to Taylor, the Office of Multicultural Ministry, which in 2014 became the Office of Intercultural Ministry, serves two primary purposes.
“One is to develop ministries to the various ethnic groups within the archdiocese,” he told The Criterion, Indianapolis’s archdiocesan newspaper. “The other is for the archdiocese to have a conduit to what’s going on nationally. We are representatives on the national level through the office. … So we can take what’s happening here to the national groups, and whatever is happening nationally gets back into the archdiocese.”
In time, a ministry was developed for the Vietnamese Catholic community, which worships at St. Joseph Church in Indianapolis. They would later be combined with ministries for Burmese, Filipino and Korean Catholics under the archdiocesan Asian/Pacific Islanders Ministry.
The milestones over the last two decades are many, said Taylor. One was the creation of a special Mass to celebrate the Vietnamese Tet, or lunar New Year.
Another milestone was the institution of a Mass to celebrate the Filipino tradition known as Simbang Gabi, a nine-day spiritual celebration leading up to Christmas. More recently, a monthly Mass celebrated in French was instituted at the request of French-speaking African Catholic immigrants.
In 2004, the first annual Mass for the November 3 feast of St. Martin de Porres was celebrated. The saint shared Hispanic and black heritage.
“The idea was to bring particularly the African-American and Hispanic communities together around St. Martin de Porres for common worship,” said Taylor. “It was a time when there was a lot of tension in Indianapolis between the African-American and Hispanic communities. … Over the years, I found out that other communities revere (St.) Martin de Porres as well, so other communities are now involved.”
Maria Pimentel-Gannon of St. Monica Parish in Indianapolis has been involved with the archdiocesan office since its inception, and has served several terms as president of the ministry’s board. She helped start the annual St. Martin de Porres Mass.
“I think it has brought us closer as an archdiocese,” she said of the Mass. “I think it has helped us to realize the richness we have in our archdiocese in the different cultures, to see that we are very intercultural, and to see that as a good thing, an asset.”
In 2012, Taylor led the ministry in a major effort to host the National Black Catholic Congress. Then in 2013, the ministry did the planning for Indianapolis to host the National Association of African Catholics that September.
In August 2013, he was succeeded by Franciscan Brother Moises Gutierrez as full-time director of what was later renamed the Intercultural Ministry.
Under his leadership from 2013-15, among other things, a leadership certification program to form pastoral leaders in the Asian/Pacific Islander, African-American and Hispanic communities was developed - the first of its kind in the United States.
Gutierrez’s successor is Oscar Castellanos, former Hispanic Ministry coordinator, and he became director of Intercultural Ministry.
Castellanos told The Criterion he is grateful for his predecessors’ perseverance “and saying ‘yes’ to this particular ministry. You planted the seed so that others could continue the harvesting.”
His vision is to have “more communities embracing diversity, and opening their doors and hearts to other ways of thinking, organizing, celebrating and praying.”
“I see this ministry promoting intercultural competency through awareness, knowledge and skills that would allow our offices, schools and parishes to be enculturated in a church that is more diverse than ever,” he said.
“Our world and this country are changing,” Pimentel-Gannon said. “The majority will be the minority, and in some cases already is. The more readily you are open to this, the more you’re going to enjoy the journey. It’s like fighting something that we have no control over, but rather being able to appreciate that we’re all God’s creation. … It’s a richer experience for everybody.”
https://cruxnow.com/cns/2016/12/29/archdiocesan-ministry-marks-20-years-embracing-diversity/
Wednesday, December 28, 2016
10 Surprising Things That Happen When You Go To Adoration More Often
By: Ruth Baker | Catholic Link
The Eucharist is described in the catechism as the ‘source and summit’ of our faith. Finding the time to go to Adoration can be difficult. But if you can make it happen, committing to regular Adoration with an open heart can have some surprising results.
While they were eating, He took some bread, and after a blessing He broke it, and gave it to them, and said, “Take it; this is My body.” And when He had taken a cup and given thanks, He gave it to them, and they all drank from it. And He said to them, “This is My blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many. (Mark 14:22-24)
In today’s culture, the idea of interior progress is drastically undervalued; many times it’s considered a waste of time or something from our naive ancestors. Usually, only exterior and more palpable progress is worth anything. The main difference between the two (material and spiritual) is that material progress remains outside of you. It will offer you certain positive sensations, yet it is always colored with a fleeting and inconsistent kind of occurrence. An interior progress, on the other hand, means that it is you who are changed. The time you spend adoration may surprise you these ten ways:
1. You develop a sense of awe and wonder
There is nothing like the atmosphere of a quiet chapel or church, the smell of incense and the splendour of the monstrance to help you understand the truth of what is happening in Adoration. We are truly before Jesus Christ, His Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity. The more you sink into that silence in front of the Host, the more you’ll realize that the only response is awe and wonder at the greatness of our God.2. You experience peace in other areas of your life
Jesus said “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you.” (John 14:27) The outward peace we can experience in Adoration (the quiet and the stillness) reaches much deeper. It leads to an inner peace that affects all areas of our lives. It doesn’t mean everything in our life will be perfect and without suffering, but Christ’s peace means that we know that the storms of life can’t shake us.3. You begin to look outwardly
Jesus told us to “love one another as I have loved you”. (John 13:34) Spending time in Adoration connects us to the whole world – after all, we’re spending time with the Creator of all things! More time praising and adoring God means you can look beyond your own concerns and see the needs of others in your life and in the world that we live in.4. You get bored sometimes
There are going to be times when Adoration can feel anything but glorious. You get distracted, your mind begins to wander, you can hear someone else sniffing next to you. Maybe in the beginning Adoration was full of wonderful feelings! Regular Adoration is when daily life sets in and it can make it feel not so special. But that doesn’t devalue or take away from the truth of what Adoration is. Our faith is more than feelings and God will still be working in you. This is the beauty of the Incarnation – God made man, coming into all our stresses, fears, problems – and yes, boredom. Know that even if an hour spent in Adoration is a continual returning to Him every few minutes when your mind wanders, you are still giving God the best gift you can – your time and company.5. But you become excited going to Adoration
The more time you spend in Adoration discovering that God is a God who loves you and wants to spend time with you, the more you begin to actually want to go. If Adoration once felt like a chore, you might even find yourself becoming excited to go! Adoration is addictive, not just because of the things we can gain for ourselves, but because we were created to adore. As we say in the Mass, it is “right and just” that we should give thanks to the Lord! Adoration is imprinted on our hearts and “our hearts are restless until they find our rest in Him”! (Thanks, St Augustine!)6. Grace enters your life
It’s amazing how a simple act of committing to even a short time of regular Adoration makes such a huge difference to the rest of your life. You can carry that moment of being in His presence with you long after you’ve left the church or chapel. His grace sustains you in every moment, especially in moments of temptation. Temptation becomes easier to resist when you’re spending more time in Adoration. Sometimes, it really is that straightforward.7. You realize how fortunate you are
If it is as simple for you as getting in the car and driving to Adoration at church, or even walking to the chapel nearby, you realise how much you can take it for granted. There are those who would love to spend more time with Jesus in Adoration but who are housebound, sick or busy parents. Then there are those around the world who actually risk their lives for the Eucharist, in places where they are persecuted for their faith. When you remember those who walk for hours or days in dangerous situations in order to be present with Jesus, you realise what a gift it is to be able to pray openly, not to mention having a priest to minister the sacraments.8. You realize that God has a sense of humor
The more you are able to sit and let God speak to you (instead of spending all your time filling the silence with talking to Him), you’ll find that God has a really good sense of humor. He likes a joke or two, and sometimes these moments are funny enough to make you want to laugh out loud. Surprising, maybe, but don’t the best fathers show you their love by affectionate good humor?!?9. You want to go to Confession more
This might sound scary, but it’s not. Confession allows us to experience the mighty boundless ocean that is God’s mercy. His mercy swallows up all our sins and gives us a true kind of freedom, a freedom without fear, which allows us to make the leap into His love and goodness, complete with all His perfect plans for our life. Time and time again, going to Confession re-enforces the knowledge that we are jumping into the arms of a father who loves us very much and “never tires of forgiving us”. (Pope Francis).10. You fall in love
Ultimately, you can’t help this one! When you spend more time with an open heart in Adoration and just let Christ love you, then you’ll fall in love too. That love will define you and allow you to be yourself. “I came that they may have life, life in all its fullness.” (John 10:10)Try “The Yearly Examen”: A spiritual exercise for a better 2017
As the New Year approaches many of us will look forward with hope, convincing ourselves that “next year will be better.” The past year may not have gone exactly as we had wanted and our original “New Year’s Resolutions” may have only endured to the middle of January. Whatever may be the case, we look forward to the future and have a glimmer of hope that our current situation will improve.
While looking forward to what “could be” can keep our spirits up for the moment, a much deeper exercise that provides more nourishment to the soul consists of reviewing the entire year and being thankful for the many blessings (and crosses) that God has given us.
This process allows a person to understand where they are and where God’s actions may be leading them. In other words, it is only in looking back that one can move forward.
One way to reflect on the past year is to make a “Yearly Examen.” This practice is simply an extension of the “Daily Examen” that is a central part of Ignatian Spirituality. The Daily Examen is practice where an individual stops two times during the day (at midday and at the close of the day) to examine God’s activity and to recognize any faults or sins committed.
St. Ignatius divided the Daily Examen into five parts and is often described in this way:
Besides making a Daily Examen, one can also look bigger and make a “Yearly Examen” that looks at the major events of the past year, looking forward to what you need to change in the New Year.
Here is how it might look:
“For I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you. You will seek me and find me; when you seek me with all your heart, I will be found by you, says the Lord.” (Jeremiah 29:11-14)
- See more at: http://aleteia.org/2016/12/27/try-the-the-yearly-examen-a-spiritual-exercise-for-a-better-2017/?utm_campaign=NL_en&utm_source=daily_newsletter&utm_medium=mail&utm_content=
NL_en#sthash.k9nY6c0g.dpuf
While looking forward to what “could be” can keep our spirits up for the moment, a much deeper exercise that provides more nourishment to the soul consists of reviewing the entire year and being thankful for the many blessings (and crosses) that God has given us.
This process allows a person to understand where they are and where God’s actions may be leading them. In other words, it is only in looking back that one can move forward.
One way to reflect on the past year is to make a “Yearly Examen.” This practice is simply an extension of the “Daily Examen” that is a central part of Ignatian Spirituality. The Daily Examen is practice where an individual stops two times during the day (at midday and at the close of the day) to examine God’s activity and to recognize any faults or sins committed.
St. Ignatius divided the Daily Examen into five parts and is often described in this way:
- Place yourself in God’s presence. Give thanks for God’s great love for you.
- Pray for the grace to understand how God is acting in your life.
- Review your day — recall specific moments and your feelings at the time.
- Reflect on what you did, said, or thought in those instances. Were you drawing closer to God, or further away?
- Look toward tomorrow — think of how you might collaborate more effectively with God’s plan. Be specific, and conclude with the “Our Father.”
Besides making a Daily Examen, one can also look bigger and make a “Yearly Examen” that looks at the major events of the past year, looking forward to what you need to change in the New Year.
Here is how it might look:
- After placing yourself in God’s presence, first give thanks to God for all the many blessings received during the past year. Pass through each month, remembering the blessings that occurred.
- Pray for the grace to understand God’s divine providence.
- Next, review each month again and take notice of any feelings or movements that occur in your heart while doing this activity. Whatever you may feel (whether it was a good feeling or bad feeling), ask God to help you understand why an event happened.
- Fourth, ask pardon for any sins you committed, trusting fully in God’s mercy.
- Last of all look forward to the New Year think of ways that you can collaborate more with God’s loving plan for your life.
“For I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you. You will seek me and find me; when you seek me with all your heart, I will be found by you, says the Lord.” (Jeremiah 29:11-14)
- See more at: http://aleteia.org/2016/12/27/try-the-the-yearly-examen-a-spiritual-exercise-for-a-better-2017/?utm_campaign=NL_en&utm_source=daily_newsletter&utm_medium=mail&utm_content=
NL_en#sthash.k9nY6c0g.dpuf
Tuesday, December 27, 2016
Bishop asks Ohio Governor to end death penalty
Associated Press
As Ohio prepares to execute someone for the first time in three years, Bishop Daniel Thomas of Toledo attempts to run interference. He's sent a letter to Republican Gov. John Kasich, a Catholic, saying his faith opposes the death penalty and affirms the sacredness of all life.
TOLEDO - The head of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Toledo is calling on Ohio Gov. John Kasich to end the death penalty in the state.
The request comes as Ohio takes steps to carry out an execution in January that would be the state’s first in three years.
Bishop Daniel Thomas has sent a letter to the Republican governor saying the Catholic faith opposes the death penalty and affirms the sacredness of all life.
Thomas says there will be a candlelight prayer vigil next month for abolishing the death penalty.
The Toledo diocese serves 320,000 Catholics in 19 counties across northern Ohio.
As Ohio prepares to execute someone for the first time in three years, Bishop Daniel Thomas of Toledo attempts to run interference. He's sent a letter to Republican Gov. John Kasich, a Catholic, saying his faith opposes the death penalty and affirms the sacredness of all life.
TOLEDO - The head of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Toledo is calling on Ohio Gov. John Kasich to end the death penalty in the state.
The request comes as Ohio takes steps to carry out an execution in January that would be the state’s first in three years.
Bishop Daniel Thomas has sent a letter to the Republican governor saying the Catholic faith opposes the death penalty and affirms the sacredness of all life.
Thomas says there will be a candlelight prayer vigil next month for abolishing the death penalty.
The Toledo diocese serves 320,000 Catholics in 19 counties across northern Ohio.
Why I wear the habit – a nun's reflection on religious life
.- As Pope Francis' year dedicated to consecrated life concluded at the start of this year, one nun shared her thoughts on the how her religious garb serves as a “visible sign” that God exists and loves every person.
Though the official Year for Consecrated Life concluded earlier this year, it's actually “the beginning of helping people get reacquainted with religious life,” said Sr. Mary Christa of the Sisters of Mercy of Alma.
She said that while there are those who have a general idea about religious sisters, there's still a degree of uncertainty on the part of many about what religious life looks like.
Right now, Sr. Mary Christa added, there's “confusion” – over questions such as why some sisters wear habits and some don't – and her hope is that this year marks the start of “a fruitful understanding of religious life in the Church in its most authentic, visible witness.”
The Year for Consecrated Life, which began Nov. 30, 2014, concluded Feb. 2, 2016 on the Feast of the Presentation of Jesus.
Sr. Mary Christa, who also runs U.S. bishops' visitor's office in Rome with several other Sisters of Mercy, called the habit of a religious sister an important part of being a witness.
“The religious habit should say a number of things, both to the sister herself, and to those who see her,” she said, recounting how she is often approached by strangers asking for prayers, who automatically trust her on account of her appearance.
“The habit is a visible sign of the love of God,” she said. “But it’s also, I have found, a great responsibility and a reminder to me: the responsibility to be what I show that I am.”
“It’s a sign of the love of God and that this life is not all there is: that God exists and loves them,” she said.
One of the distinguishing aspects of their habit – a dark veil and a simple, pale blue frock in the summer, and a darker color for the winter – is a simple black cross, overlaid by a smaller white cross, which is worn around the neck.
“The black of the cross represents the misery of mankind that we find in the world, and the white represents God’s mercy, which we are called to bring into the world as Sisters of Mercy,” explained Sr. Mary Michaela, who works at the visitor's office.
“There is a long tradition in religious life of wearing a habit as a visible sign that we are consecrated to God and to the service of the Church in a special way,” she said. “It’s also part of poverty,” she added. “Our habit is simple, so we don’t buy a big wardrobe.”
Living in Rome, Sr. Mary Michaela noted how she too is approached by people asking for prayers on account of her habit.
“When they see the habit, they realize that there is something particular about our life,” she said.
“They recognize that we represent, in some way, God’s presence. We remind people of God’s presence here in the world.”
First established in Ireland in 1831 by venerable Catherine McAuley, the Sisters of Mercy centered their work on education, catechesis, healthcare. Spreading to the United States, the order was re-founded in 1973 in Alma, Michigan, where its motherhouse is currently located.
In addition to the three vows taken by all religious sisters, the Sisters of Mercy take a fourth vow of service to the poor, sick, and ignorant.
In Rome, the Sisters of Mercy offer orientation to U.S. Pilgrims – obtaining tickets for papal events, answering their questions about the city, and helping them with the pilgrimage aspect of their visit.
“This is one of the apostolic works that we do as a community,” said Sr. Regina Marie, speaking on her work at the visitor's office.
Pilgrims “can come here and learn about the faith,” she said. “We will often have a priest that will come at a certain time for a half hour and give catechesis for anyone who wants to. We have catechetical materials out for the pilgrims, (or) even just a place for them to sit down for a few minutes.”
“Our charism is the mercy of God,” she said. “Our apostolates are usually focused around the corporal and spiritual works of mercy, which can manifest themselves in many ways.”
Sr. Anna Marie, another sister at the office, adds that “the consecrated life is a sign of his presence on earth.”
“We live our vows so that when people see us, they think of God, and they think of Jesus, and they think of the Church. That’s a tremendous privilege.”
On how people will often ask her about her life as a religious, Sr. Anna Marie said she is excited to answer their questions.
“It’s a gift not only for me, but a gift for the whole Church and for the world,” she said.
Thursday, December 22, 2016
At Christmas, Jesus offers a new kind of hope, Pope Francis says
.- While hope can often be viewed as the desire for things out of our reach, Pope Francis has said that the birth of Jesus offers us a new kind hope – one which, thanks to the Incarnation, is attainable and leads to a different goal.
“When we speak of hope, we often refer to that which man is not able to do and that which is not visible. In effect, what we hope for goes beyond our strength and gaze,” the Pope said Dec. 21.
However, the birth of Christ “speaks of a different hope, a trustworthy, visible and understandable hope, because it is founded on God.”
In becoming man, Jesus enters the world and gives humanity the strength to walk with him and to live the present moment “in a new way,” even if it’s sometimes tiring, he said.
For a Christian, then, hope means the certainty “of being on a journey with Christ toward the Father who awaits us,” Francis said, adding that this hope “offers a goal, a good destiny in the present, the salvation of humanity, the beatitude of those who entrust themselves to the merciful God.”
“Hope never stops, it’s always on a journey and it makes us walk forward.”
Pope Francis spoke to pilgrims in the Vatican’s Paul VI Hall during his last general audience before Christmas, continuing his new catechesis on Christian hope.
Through Christ’s birth “hope entered the world,” he said, explaining that the true meaning of Christmas is found in the act of God fulfilling his promise of salvation in becoming man. God “doesn’t abandon his people,” but “draws near to the point of shedding his divinity.”
“In this way God demonstrates his fidelity and inaugurates a new kingdom, which gives a new hope to humanity: eternal life,” the Pope said, asking pilgrims whether they walk along the path of hope, or if instead they close their hearts and cease to move forward.
As the season of Advent comes to an end, reflecting on the Nativity scene is a key way to contemplate this hope, he said, because in its simplicity, “the nativity transmits hope; each one of the figures is immersed in this atmosphere.”
Pointing to the place where Jesus was born, Francis noted that Bethlehem was the small village where a thousand years before Jesus, David, a shepherd, was chosen to become the king of Israel.
“Bethlehem is not a capital, and because of this it is preferred by divine providence, which loves to act through the small and the humble,” he said, noting that it is in this small village where Jesus, “in whom the hope of God and the hope of man meet,” is born.
Francis then turned to Mary, “the mother of hope,” explaining that with her “yes,” she was able to open to God the door of our world, and she did it as a young girl whose heart was “full of hope, totally animated by faith” and who believed in God’s word.
Turning to St. Joseph, Pope Francis said he was a man who also believed in the World of God that was spoken to him through the angel, and who not only stood at Mary’s side, but obeyed God in giving Jesus his name.
In the name Jesus “there is hope for every man, because through that son of a woman, God will save humanity from the death of sin,” the Pope said, noting “how much hope there is” in the scene of Christ’s birth.
He then pointed to the image of the shepherds, who represent the “humble and poor” people awaiting the salvation of the Messiah.
When they come to the Child Jesus, “they see the realization of the promise and hope that the salvation of God finally comes for each one of them,” Francis said. They not only trust in God, but “they hope in him and they rejoice when they recognize in that child the sign indicated by the angels.”
Turning to the choir of angels who appeared to the shepherds, the Pope said that their proclamation of “glory to God in the highest” is the announcement of hope, because “Christian hope is expressed in praise of God, who inaugurated his kingdom of love, justice and peace.”
Pope Francis closed his speech reiterating the importance of contemplating the Nativity scene as Christmas approaches, because in doing so, “we prepare for the birth of the Lord.”
“It will truly be a celebration if we welcome Jesus, seed of hope that God plants in the furrows of our personal and communitarian lives,” he said, adding that “each ‘yes’ to Jesus is a seed of hope.”
After his catechesis, the Pope made another appeal for a peaceful resolution to political conflicts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo by extending “a heartfelt appeal to all Congolese so that, in this delicate moment in their history, they are artesians of peace and reconciliation.”
The DRC for the past few months has been entangled in a political headlock as the country’s president, Joseph Kabila, approached the end of his final term in office Dec. 19.
However, the elections for a new leader, originally scheduled to take place in November, were never organized, and according to a deal struck between Kabila and an opposition faction in October, the president is allowed to stay in power until official polls are held.
The polls are tentatively set for April 2018, however, many parties in opposition to Kabila’s government oppose the deal, and are calling for the president to step down and schedule the elections for 2017.
As tensions mount, fears are also increasing that there will be a repeat of a Sept. 19 demonstration by one of the opposition groups turned violent, leading to the death of more than 50 people in just two days.
Catholic bishop in the country have intervened in negotiations in hopes that a crisis might be averted with Kabila’s term ends. Both the president and vice-present of the Congolese Bishops Conference had a recent meeting with Pope Francis in which they discussed the crisis.
In his appeal, the Pope asked that those who have political responsibility would “listen to the voice of their own conscience, knowing how to see the cruel sufferings of their countrymen and have the common good at heart.”
He assured of his prayer and support for the country, and invited the people to let themselves be guided “by the light of the Redeemer of the world,” praying that the birth of the Lord at Christmas “opens paths of hope.”
Catholics who actually read the Bible – one woman's online ministry
.- Jenna Guizar is a busy woman.
When she’s not spending time with her husband and three daughters or being a full time respiratory therapist at a local hospital in Tempe, Ariz., she’s the Creative Director for “Blessed is She,” an online women’s ministry for Catholic women.
Guizar was running a personal blog a few years ago, mostly for close friends and family, when she noticed that the Protestants had somewhat cornered the market on online bible studies and corresponding communities.
“I found that it was lacking in the Catholic world,” Guizar told CNA. “That idea of doing bible studies together as a group or even studying the word together, and online resources for people to study the word on their phone or on their tablets or on the Internet.”
The desire to create community based on studying scripture from a Catholic perspective was what drove Guizar to found “Blessed Is She”, a women’s ministry that has community and devotions based on the daily readings at its heart.
When Guizar set out to found “Blessed Is She”, she wasn’t sure exactly where the project would go. She reached out to dozens of blogging Catholic women, hoping some of them would be interesting in contributing their talents for writing devotions.
She was surprised by how many women were eager to jump on board with what was still an emerging concept.
“I basically started with a team of about 20 women right off the bat who were willing to say ‘Yeah, I feel a tugging on my heart for this too, so let’s do it,’” she said.
“And so I think a huge reason for the success of 'Blessed is She' is that team atmosphere of women who are promoting it and really believe it.”
The bread and butter of the “Blessed is She ministry” is the daily readings and accompanying devotions delivered each day to subscribers’ email inboxes. Besides Guizar, there’s content editor Nell O’Leary and graphic designer Erica Tighe, making sure everything gets done and looks good.
The goal: to bring the Word of God to life for the women on the other side of the screen.
“We want to be able to really dive into the word and tell women and all Catholics really that it’s important to look at these daily readings and to look at the word of God and see how it greatly impacts your life today,” she said.
“It’s not just the words that were said 2,000+ years ago, but it’s something that you can look at and be able to open your eyes to how it greatly affects you now.”
Guizar and her team also started branching out on social media - Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest - to help foster that sense of community and to impact women wherever they might be.
As a blogger, Guizar said she realized how many women - young and old, married and single - felt isolated and would turn to blogs and other online sources for community.
“I think women feel isolated a lot of the time, they feel alone, not only people in remote areas who are actually living in isolation but even in metropolitan cities where they feel like it’s hard to meet other Catholics,” she said.
“And I realized that in the online world, people would say, ‘I’m blogging and I’ve finally found this community that I’ve been searching for,’” she said.
“So I wanted it to be a space where there you could feel comfortable being yourself and you know that the person across from you or the person looking at their screen across from you on the internet thousands and thousands of miles away believes in the same things that you do and has the same goals that you do, which is ultimately to get to heaven,” she said.
Since it’s founding, the ministry has really taken off - Guizar’s team now includes 40+ writers, with more than 9,000 subscribers to the daily e-mail and tens of thousands of visitors to the website every day.
The explosion of the ministry has made possible some in-person meet-ups as well - Blessed is She now has regional facebook groups where women can connect to other women in their area, and plan get togethers or “Blessed Brunches”, a potluck brunch where women can meet in person, pray together and form a deeper community.
“If you’re a woman who likes to avoid social media then we want to meet you in real life; if you’re someone who can only be on social media because you’re in a remote part of the country then you can have that female community and that female presence in your life to be able to walk with you on your journey in faith,” Guizar said.
The Blessed is She team has also seen the impact the ministry has had on women through various testimonies that come to them through e-mail and social media.
“One of my favorite testimonies was a woman who was vacillating about coming into the Church and who had kind of started RCIA, but once she found BIS and got plugged into the community she saw that there were other people living out this faith and she wasn’t alone on the journey,” Guizar said. “She’s now baptized and a Catholic convert.”
This past Lent, Blessed is She rolled out a Lenten workbook - part journal, part Lenten checklist - that sold out again and again in print, though an online version is still available.
“It just was really amazing to see this sort of confirmation in these women saying I want this and I need this for my prayer life because it’s confirming that I’m not alone in wanting and needing that for myself,” Guizar said.
Blessed is She also hosted its first-ever retreat during Lent in Tempe, Ariz., with talks for women from all walks of life and worship led by Ike Ndolo and Rachel Lebeau.
In the future, Guizar hopes to create an app for the ministry, to create more online materials for small-group bible studies, and to possibly help launch a men’s edition.
For now, she said she’s grateful to be a part of something that is helping so many women grow in their relationship with Christ.
“I’m really grateful to be given this opportunity to serve and I try to maintain my gratitude, even when it’s tough and even when it’s a lot of work, that I am a humble servant to what BIS is doing for women and for me.”
Pope calls for peace in Congo following deadly protests
By: Junno Arocho Esteves | Crux
ROME - Pope Francis appealed for peace in the Democratic Republic of Congo following the killing of protesters demonstrating against President Joseph Kabila in several cities across the country.
After meeting recently with the heads of the Congolese Bishops’ Conference, the pope renewed his call during his weekly general audience on December 21, urging the people of Congo to “be authors of reconciliation and peace.”
“May those who have political responsibility listen to the voice of their own conscience, may they be able to see the cruel suffering of their compatriots and have at heart the common good,” the pope said.
Government security forces shot and killed 26 protesters during scattered demonstrations throughout the country against President Kabila, who has exceeded his presidential mandate, according to the Reuters news agency.
The news agency also reported that the government failed to schedule elections, citing logistical and financial issues, raising fears that the country would once again be thrown into chaos.
President Kabila and government authorities have rejected calls by local opposition leaders and the international community to respect the constitution and step down.
Pope Francis expressed his “support and affection for the beloved people of that country” and prayed that government leaders would work for the good of their people.
“I invite everyone to let themselves be guided by the light of the Redeemer of the world and I pray so that the Nativity of the Lord open paths of hope,” the pope said.
https://cruxnow.com/cns/2016/12/22/pope-calls-peace-congo-following-deadly-protests/
ROME - Pope Francis appealed for peace in the Democratic Republic of Congo following the killing of protesters demonstrating against President Joseph Kabila in several cities across the country.
After meeting recently with the heads of the Congolese Bishops’ Conference, the pope renewed his call during his weekly general audience on December 21, urging the people of Congo to “be authors of reconciliation and peace.”
“May those who have political responsibility listen to the voice of their own conscience, may they be able to see the cruel suffering of their compatriots and have at heart the common good,” the pope said.
Government security forces shot and killed 26 protesters during scattered demonstrations throughout the country against President Kabila, who has exceeded his presidential mandate, according to the Reuters news agency.
The news agency also reported that the government failed to schedule elections, citing logistical and financial issues, raising fears that the country would once again be thrown into chaos.
President Kabila and government authorities have rejected calls by local opposition leaders and the international community to respect the constitution and step down.
Pope Francis expressed his “support and affection for the beloved people of that country” and prayed that government leaders would work for the good of their people.
“I invite everyone to let themselves be guided by the light of the Redeemer of the world and I pray so that the Nativity of the Lord open paths of hope,” the pope said.
https://cruxnow.com/cns/2016/12/22/pope-calls-peace-congo-following-deadly-protests/
Wednesday, December 21, 2016
I quit social media for Advent—here’s what happened
By: Sr. Therese Aletheia Noble
“But we’re media nuns, how can we quit social media?”
A sister asked me this rhetorical question recently after she saw that I was signing off Facebook and Twitter for the Advent season.
I thought about the question a bit, but I have to be honest, not for very long. I know that I personally need to take breaks from social media to detach. Social media can so easily become something that sucks away my extra time, energy, and attention.
Sure, as a Daughter of St. Paul, I am called by God to spread the Gospel using modern means of communication, but I am not called by God to let those modern means control me. So I take breaks. And when I do, it gives me time to realize how these things are impacting me.
Here are some lessons I learned this time around:
1. Social media is a silence killer: I found myself logging onto Facebook and Twitter even after Advent started as though I were on autopilot. Before I knew it, I would find myself typing in the URL. Some might say that this is a sign of an addiction but it actually seemed more like something that I just got used to doing to kill the silence. We all try to do that you know. Killing the silence helps us avoid the things we need to face: complicated feelings, relationship difficulties, boredom, etc.
2. Social media can survive without me: I make excuses to stay on social media, or to use it more than I should. One I often tell myself is that I will miss something important. “What if someone has a baby?” I ask myself, “Or what if someone gets married?” I’ve finally come to the realization that people who don’t bother to send me a Christmas card or pick up the phone to tell me these things probably aren’t close friends anyway. Just because social networks have expanded exponentially with social media, it does not mean that we now have to keep up with every acquaintance we have ever known.
3. Social media breaks help nourish key relationships: Sometimes I spend time on social media worrying about people I don’t even know or others with whom I have lost touch long ago. I wonder, “Why did that person unfollow me?” or “Why did that person I have not spoken to in over a decade suddenly angrily comment on one of my Facebook posts?” Social media creates connections with people we don’t know or others who would have fallen away from our inner circle of relationship if it weren’t for the internet. That can be nice, but energy spent on these relationships is also energy not spent on the people right in front of us. Taking breaks helps us reprioritize, especially when it comes to the most important relationship: Jesus.
And that brings me to the biggest change I have seen over this Advent break from social media. Like all forms of penance, this break has opened up space in my life.
I have always noticed that when I choose a penance for Advent or Lent, little things creep in to fill the empty space. And they are not necessarily good things.
If I give up sugar, I start eating more carbs. If I give up coffee, I start drinking more tea. If I give up Facebook and Twitter, I spend more time on Instagram and Reddit. This is normal and human, but this Advent I asked the Lord to help me to at least give him some of the newly emptied space. And I think he did. This Advent has not been perfect. But there has been something softer and slower about it, despite the busyness in my life. I’m grateful for that.
And I’m ready for Christmas!
See more at: http://aleteia.org/2016/12/20/i-quit-social-media-for-advent-heres-what-happened/?utm_campaign=NL_en&utm_source=daily_newsletter&utm_medium=mail&utm_content=NL_en
#sthash.T1URFOEO.dpuf
“But we’re media nuns, how can we quit social media?”
A sister asked me this rhetorical question recently after she saw that I was signing off Facebook and Twitter for the Advent season.
I thought about the question a bit, but I have to be honest, not for very long. I know that I personally need to take breaks from social media to detach. Social media can so easily become something that sucks away my extra time, energy, and attention.
Sure, as a Daughter of St. Paul, I am called by God to spread the Gospel using modern means of communication, but I am not called by God to let those modern means control me. So I take breaks. And when I do, it gives me time to realize how these things are impacting me.
Here are some lessons I learned this time around:
1. Social media is a silence killer: I found myself logging onto Facebook and Twitter even after Advent started as though I were on autopilot. Before I knew it, I would find myself typing in the URL. Some might say that this is a sign of an addiction but it actually seemed more like something that I just got used to doing to kill the silence. We all try to do that you know. Killing the silence helps us avoid the things we need to face: complicated feelings, relationship difficulties, boredom, etc.
2. Social media can survive without me: I make excuses to stay on social media, or to use it more than I should. One I often tell myself is that I will miss something important. “What if someone has a baby?” I ask myself, “Or what if someone gets married?” I’ve finally come to the realization that people who don’t bother to send me a Christmas card or pick up the phone to tell me these things probably aren’t close friends anyway. Just because social networks have expanded exponentially with social media, it does not mean that we now have to keep up with every acquaintance we have ever known.
3. Social media breaks help nourish key relationships: Sometimes I spend time on social media worrying about people I don’t even know or others with whom I have lost touch long ago. I wonder, “Why did that person unfollow me?” or “Why did that person I have not spoken to in over a decade suddenly angrily comment on one of my Facebook posts?” Social media creates connections with people we don’t know or others who would have fallen away from our inner circle of relationship if it weren’t for the internet. That can be nice, but energy spent on these relationships is also energy not spent on the people right in front of us. Taking breaks helps us reprioritize, especially when it comes to the most important relationship: Jesus.
And that brings me to the biggest change I have seen over this Advent break from social media. Like all forms of penance, this break has opened up space in my life.
I have always noticed that when I choose a penance for Advent or Lent, little things creep in to fill the empty space. And they are not necessarily good things.
If I give up sugar, I start eating more carbs. If I give up coffee, I start drinking more tea. If I give up Facebook and Twitter, I spend more time on Instagram and Reddit. This is normal and human, but this Advent I asked the Lord to help me to at least give him some of the newly emptied space. And I think he did. This Advent has not been perfect. But there has been something softer and slower about it, despite the busyness in my life. I’m grateful for that.
And I’m ready for Christmas!
See more at: http://aleteia.org/2016/12/20/i-quit-social-media-for-advent-heres-what-happened/?utm_campaign=NL_en&utm_source=daily_newsletter&utm_medium=mail&utm_content=NL_en
#sthash.T1URFOEO.dpuf
Combating racism, one institution at a time
By: Mary Ann McGivern
For 29 years I was a member of the St. Louis Catholic Worker community. From the beginning, we were conscious that we were white women (plus a few white men) who ran, without pay, an emergency shelter for 25 to 50 homeless women and children, mostly black.
The women who came to the Worker as guests were without resources. To stay with us meant a family crowded into a single room, communal meals, shared housework, curfew, no television in the house and insistence that children must be very closely supervised by their moms and could not be spanked.
Some of the women were mentally ill. All were traumatized by illness, job loss, fire, eviction, crime, rejection by relatives, rejection by a boyfriend or husband. Some were alcoholics or drug addicts. Most had been abused by fathers or uncles or neighbors or boyfriends. As I said, most were black.
About 20 years into this project, the Worker community initiated a kind of "co-housing" where community members, former community members and former guests rented a block of apartments in the neighborhood. Everybody paid the rent into a common fund and the bookkeeper paid the landlord. We all met once a month to do business and we gathered for Sunday breakfasts, Saturday barbecues, birthdays and graduations. Those of us without children took on doing homework with children in the community, attending school functions, going with the moms to parent-teacher conferences and an occasional court hearing.
Some of us from our co-housing community have stayed in touch over the years, some more closely than others. A white daughter and black son married and their bond continues to link us all.
But the St. Louis Catholic Worker continued to be operated by white volunteers serving a mostly black homeless population.
Then Mike Brown, an unarmed teenager, was killed by a police officer in 2014. I was no longer a member of the Worker community but I responded when they issued a call for a community examination of white privilege in the Peter Maurin tradition of Clarification of Thought.
Afterwards, The Round Table, the journal published by the St. Louis Catholic Worker, produced an issue filled with reflections about Ferguson from activists on the ground there. It includes a page of comments from the guests on being host to black, strong, savvy community organizers who were willing to drive a thousand miles and stay in an emergency shelter.
Shauntel wrote:
Karen House is a big emergency shelter and the lynchpin of the St. Louis community. It has weekly meetings and makes decisions by consensus. The new community members brought a new sensibility to these meetings. I don't think they were any more compassionate or skilled than the white members at dealing with traumatized homeless women and children, but they asked different questions about who makes decisions and how responsibility is shared. And the white members welcomed these questions because they understood that their whiteness somehow got in the way of creating community.
The conversation and real change had been going on for years and then, last May Day, 2016, at Karen House's 39th birthday party, members of Karen House made a presentation to the rest of us, summing up changes we'd seen happening and changes we didn't know about.
The guests have keys. There is no curfew. Some of the guests "take house" — a huge responsibility that entails answering the door and phone, ensuring that food gets on the table, chores are completed, visitors are welcomed, money and medicines are accessed, and arguments and fights are dealt with.
The Karen House community is made up now of middle-class blacks and whites and formerly homeless blacks and whites. They recognize that, while they are healing themselves and building community, they do not have the capacity to accept a new person for every empty bed in the house the day that bed empties. In fact, they've given some of the rooms to the children instead of packing families into single rooms. They have limited the days and times when they answer the phone and door.
House members and members of the extended community do the food runs to collect donations, operate a clothing room and other tasks necessary to keep things going.
Karen House continues to be run on donations, which pays for heat, water, electricity, phone, operation of an automobile, and food to stretch out food donations. Nobody gets a salary, but according to Jenny they do provide stipends for community members, "recognizing that it is class privilege, and, to a certain extent, white savior complex that expects community members to be actively downwardly mobile and economically unstable."
Not everyone who lives at Karen House meets in consensus decision-making every week. They haven't all signed up for intentional community living.
All the participants in this extraordinary experiment in community life are a little scared by the boldness of their choice. They are grateful for the weekly meetings, difficult as consensus decision-making can be. Most of all, they are grateful, as Jenny stated, "for one another, our supporters, and those that go before us in doing anti-racism work and go before us in the Catholic Worker!"
I marvel at this account of the growth of the Catholic Worker community. They used to be white and well-meaning. Now the white members are passionate in their commitment to help build a new white culture that thinks and acts against white privilege. Their passion rubs off on me and I hope, in reading this, that it rubs off on you too.
For 29 years I was a member of the St. Louis Catholic Worker community. From the beginning, we were conscious that we were white women (plus a few white men) who ran, without pay, an emergency shelter for 25 to 50 homeless women and children, mostly black.
The women who came to the Worker as guests were without resources. To stay with us meant a family crowded into a single room, communal meals, shared housework, curfew, no television in the house and insistence that children must be very closely supervised by their moms and could not be spanked.
Some of the women were mentally ill. All were traumatized by illness, job loss, fire, eviction, crime, rejection by relatives, rejection by a boyfriend or husband. Some were alcoholics or drug addicts. Most had been abused by fathers or uncles or neighbors or boyfriends. As I said, most were black.
About 20 years into this project, the Worker community initiated a kind of "co-housing" where community members, former community members and former guests rented a block of apartments in the neighborhood. Everybody paid the rent into a common fund and the bookkeeper paid the landlord. We all met once a month to do business and we gathered for Sunday breakfasts, Saturday barbecues, birthdays and graduations. Those of us without children took on doing homework with children in the community, attending school functions, going with the moms to parent-teacher conferences and an occasional court hearing.
The inspiration for co-housing was in part the community's recognition that our relationships between black and white, guest and community, were not equal. White community members had keys, set the house rules, determined the menus for common meals. At the same time we saw that the single moms who had stayed with us continued to need community support. We created a village, not just to raise our children, but more to live our lives together.
Our bookkeeper, a white man, was murdered in our neighborhood one Saturday in 2007, and I would say, in retrospect, that in the ensuing, traumatic grief our co-housing experiment crumbled. It had been weakening but now some white community members moved away. No one stepped in to manage the experiment of shared financial resources so those who were temporarily short of cash were on their own. The systems of school pickup and homework support collapsed.Some of us from our co-housing community have stayed in touch over the years, some more closely than others. A white daughter and black son married and their bond continues to link us all.
But the St. Louis Catholic Worker continued to be operated by white volunteers serving a mostly black homeless population.
Then Mike Brown, an unarmed teenager, was killed by a police officer in 2014. I was no longer a member of the Worker community but I responded when they issued a call for a community examination of white privilege in the Peter Maurin tradition of Clarification of Thought.
Mike was killed in August. The black community called for a national conference and march in St. Louis in October. We all went to peacekeeper training and nonviolent resistance practice. Members of the Worker community helped in different ways — participating in organizing and planning meetings, continuing to host Clarification of Thought on racism for white people, doing art, showing up and helping with logistics like finding housing for those coming from around the country.
It was a challenge to get people to open their homes to black activist carpetbaggers, coming into St. Louis to help raise Cain, no matter how well-trained they might be in nonviolent direct action. So the Catholic Worker Community members at Karen House asked the guests if everybody could double up and make room for some of these outsiders. The guests said, "Sure!" and began helping to plan meals and laundry — but they didn't picture that these activists coming from across the country would be black.Afterwards, The Round Table, the journal published by the St. Louis Catholic Worker, produced an issue filled with reflections about Ferguson from activists on the ground there. It includes a page of comments from the guests on being host to black, strong, savvy community organizers who were willing to drive a thousand miles and stay in an emergency shelter.
Shauntel wrote:
As the events unfolded in the Mike Brown case, I encountered a group of young black students from New York. I was more than excited to see them and was outdone by their actions. It was funny because one of the Karen House guests stated that they were probably going to be white. When they walked in for the first time, they introduced themselves as 'BLACK' (which is the name of their group) and I said, 'And you're black!' They went out immediately after arriving in St. Louis to join in the protest for Vonderrit Meyers and Mike Brown. They told me too about how they were arrested, how they were pepper sprayed, and the different things that the police were shouting at them. All of the ladies in the house went above and beyond to make sure that their stay was a great stay. I would like to extend many thanks to the group BLACK and for their support in the Mike Brown case. When they were set to leave, they presented myself and my children with a couple of gifts as well as the other kids in the house. It was awesome to have them here, and I would host them anytime.The Worker community has continued to host sessions about dismantling racism, publish reading lists, and speak and write about next steps. But they have also done much more. They took an unflinching look at their own community practice and began to make changes in their daily lives.
That's what I saw from a distance, but one of the community members, Jenny Truax, wrote this about her experience:
Since 2012, the community had been doing reading and work around different anti-oppression topics. We hosted a Round Table at the Midwest Catholic Worker gathering in 2013 on sexism and heterosexism in Catholic Worker communities. We were doing a lot of work on sexism and homophobia at Karen House (the big emergency shelter), including opening Karen House to transgender people. Certain members were participating in a local anti-racism group called the Anti Racism Collective, and others had been reading and writing about the impact of racism in our communities. As time went on in 2014 and 2015, we moved forward in putting more anti-racist structures into place. This included looking where power is located in decision making, who our supporters are, where we gather volunteers from.So the community was ready when a couple of the black organizers joined the community for a time.
Karen House is a big emergency shelter and the lynchpin of the St. Louis community. It has weekly meetings and makes decisions by consensus. The new community members brought a new sensibility to these meetings. I don't think they were any more compassionate or skilled than the white members at dealing with traumatized homeless women and children, but they asked different questions about who makes decisions and how responsibility is shared. And the white members welcomed these questions because they understood that their whiteness somehow got in the way of creating community.
The conversation and real change had been going on for years and then, last May Day, 2016, at Karen House's 39th birthday party, members of Karen House made a presentation to the rest of us, summing up changes we'd seen happening and changes we didn't know about.
The guests have keys. There is no curfew. Some of the guests "take house" — a huge responsibility that entails answering the door and phone, ensuring that food gets on the table, chores are completed, visitors are welcomed, money and medicines are accessed, and arguments and fights are dealt with.
Jenny reflected, "We have made the process to become a 'core community member' from a 'house community member' more transparent. (Racism influences the 'who you know' method of entering groups.) We now have a specific set of expectations, a value statement that people can look at and decide if the core community is for them. Also, we have narrowed the number of guests to folks who can live independently."
This is a trade-off because it has meant that mentally-ill women who are not able to make these decisions have not been accepted into the house.The Karen House community is made up now of middle-class blacks and whites and formerly homeless blacks and whites. They recognize that, while they are healing themselves and building community, they do not have the capacity to accept a new person for every empty bed in the house the day that bed empties. In fact, they've given some of the rooms to the children instead of packing families into single rooms. They have limited the days and times when they answer the phone and door.
House members and members of the extended community do the food runs to collect donations, operate a clothing room and other tasks necessary to keep things going.
Karen House continues to be run on donations, which pays for heat, water, electricity, phone, operation of an automobile, and food to stretch out food donations. Nobody gets a salary, but according to Jenny they do provide stipends for community members, "recognizing that it is class privilege, and, to a certain extent, white savior complex that expects community members to be actively downwardly mobile and economically unstable."
Not everyone who lives at Karen House meets in consensus decision-making every week. They haven't all signed up for intentional community living.
All the participants in this extraordinary experiment in community life are a little scared by the boldness of their choice. They are grateful for the weekly meetings, difficult as consensus decision-making can be. Most of all, they are grateful, as Jenny stated, "for one another, our supporters, and those that go before us in doing anti-racism work and go before us in the Catholic Worker!"
I marvel at this account of the growth of the Catholic Worker community. They used to be white and well-meaning. Now the white members are passionate in their commitment to help build a new white culture that thinks and acts against white privilege. Their passion rubs off on me and I hope, in reading this, that it rubs off on you too.
Tuesday, December 20, 2016
A lesson for Catholic preachers in the power of brevity
By: John L. Allen Jr.
Flannery O’Connor, probably the greatest Southern Catholic novelist of the 20th century, liked to tell a story about a relative who converted to Catholicism, which was a highly counter-cultural move to make in the “Baptist belt” of the American South in the 1950s.
Pressed to explain the choice, the relative allegedly said, “Well, the preaching was so bad I figured there must be something else to keep folks coming back.”
That’s a bit of a caricature, but it captures something real about how Catholics and Protestants have been seen, at least at the level of stereotypes, in the United States over the years: Catholics are great at liturgy, at art, at “smells and bells,” but when it comes to preaching, Protestants, especially Evangelicals and Pentecostals, usually run the table.
Those perceptions are, of course, over-generalized. Still, there’s at least a grain of truth captured in this stereotype, which is the idea that on the scale of priorities for Catholic clergy over the years, preaching sometimes just hasn’t rated that high.
All this comes to mind in light of an experience I had this week in Key West, Florida, while attending a couple of morning daily Masses at the Basilica of St. Mary Star of the Sea celebrated by Father Arthur Dennison. Several members of the Crux team were gathered in Key West for meetings.
Although Key West in reality is a culture all to itself, it is technically part of the American South too - indeed, literally as far south in the United States as the public can go, with only roughly 90 miles separating its southern tip from Cuba.
Thursday’s Gospel was drawn from Luke 7, in which Jesus speaks of John the Baptist, the key line from which is the following: “Among those born of women, no one is greater than John; yet the least in the Kingdom of God is greater than he.”
In all, the Gospel reading that morning ran to 171 words, featuring the typically crisp language for which the public utterances of Christ are justifiably renowned.
After the Gospel, Dennison paused to deliver his homily. There were the usual signs of people settling in, getting comfortable, perhaps trying to sneak in a quick check of messages or a peek at the bulletin, that usually precede an experience people expect will stretch on for a least a few minutes.
Here’s Dennison’s entire homily, word-for-word, which was immediately burned into my memory.
“To be entirely clear, Jesus said that among those born of women, John was the greatest. To be equally clear, we should listen to him and respond.”
Frankly, the brevity was so stunning my colleagues and I did a double-take, unable to process at first that Dennison was actually finished and was moving to the altar to begin the liturgy of the Eucharist.
The next day, the reading was from John 5 about how John the Baptist brought a lamp to light the way to Christ, a robust 85 words in total. Once again Dennison summarized the reading, and then added this: “John brought light, but there are those who still refuse to see.” Twelve words, start to finish.
After I heard him do it so succinctly again, I said: “He’s my new candidate for the greatest homilist I’ve ever heard!”
To some extent, I was being facetious - breakfast and a day in Key West awaited, and two 10-second homilies in a row were an unexpected bonus. Plus, this was daily Mass in front of a small congregation.
On the other hand, I wasn’t entirely kidding. If you look at Dennison’s utterances, the heart of the matter in each case was all there. As one of my colleagues put it, it was the “kerygma” itself, entirely unadorned.
As anyone who’s sat through a random sample of Catholic homilies recently could confirm, that’s often not the typical experience. Too often, it’s hard to detect the evangelical forest for the verbal trees.
On Friday, I went up to compliment Dennison on his economy of expression. He told me it’s deliberate, something he’s been doing at daily Mass for years, ever since he arrived in Key West.
“Anybody can talk for five minutes and maybe have a vague idea of their opening point,” he said. “To do it all in one sentence, you really have to think about it.”
He conceded that he isn’t quite so crisp on Sundays, a point we confirmed over the weekend. Yet even then, the discipline of carefully measuring every word throughout the week obviously had an effect, as Dennison on Sunday was able to weave Scriptural erudition, humor, and keen pastoral insight with no wasted time or prolix constructions.
Flannery O’Connor, probably the greatest Southern Catholic novelist of the 20th century, liked to tell a story about a relative who converted to Catholicism, which was a highly counter-cultural move to make in the “Baptist belt” of the American South in the 1950s.
Pressed to explain the choice, the relative allegedly said, “Well, the preaching was so bad I figured there must be something else to keep folks coming back.”
That’s a bit of a caricature, but it captures something real about how Catholics and Protestants have been seen, at least at the level of stereotypes, in the United States over the years: Catholics are great at liturgy, at art, at “smells and bells,” but when it comes to preaching, Protestants, especially Evangelicals and Pentecostals, usually run the table.
Those perceptions are, of course, over-generalized. Still, there’s at least a grain of truth captured in this stereotype, which is the idea that on the scale of priorities for Catholic clergy over the years, preaching sometimes just hasn’t rated that high.
All this comes to mind in light of an experience I had this week in Key West, Florida, while attending a couple of morning daily Masses at the Basilica of St. Mary Star of the Sea celebrated by Father Arthur Dennison. Several members of the Crux team were gathered in Key West for meetings.
Although Key West in reality is a culture all to itself, it is technically part of the American South too - indeed, literally as far south in the United States as the public can go, with only roughly 90 miles separating its southern tip from Cuba.
Thursday’s Gospel was drawn from Luke 7, in which Jesus speaks of John the Baptist, the key line from which is the following: “Among those born of women, no one is greater than John; yet the least in the Kingdom of God is greater than he.”
In all, the Gospel reading that morning ran to 171 words, featuring the typically crisp language for which the public utterances of Christ are justifiably renowned.
After the Gospel, Dennison paused to deliver his homily. There were the usual signs of people settling in, getting comfortable, perhaps trying to sneak in a quick check of messages or a peek at the bulletin, that usually precede an experience people expect will stretch on for a least a few minutes.
Here’s Dennison’s entire homily, word-for-word, which was immediately burned into my memory.
“To be entirely clear, Jesus said that among those born of women, John was the greatest. To be equally clear, we should listen to him and respond.”
Frankly, the brevity was so stunning my colleagues and I did a double-take, unable to process at first that Dennison was actually finished and was moving to the altar to begin the liturgy of the Eucharist.
The next day, the reading was from John 5 about how John the Baptist brought a lamp to light the way to Christ, a robust 85 words in total. Once again Dennison summarized the reading, and then added this: “John brought light, but there are those who still refuse to see.” Twelve words, start to finish.
After I heard him do it so succinctly again, I said: “He’s my new candidate for the greatest homilist I’ve ever heard!”
To some extent, I was being facetious - breakfast and a day in Key West awaited, and two 10-second homilies in a row were an unexpected bonus. Plus, this was daily Mass in front of a small congregation.
On the other hand, I wasn’t entirely kidding. If you look at Dennison’s utterances, the heart of the matter in each case was all there. As one of my colleagues put it, it was the “kerygma” itself, entirely unadorned.
As anyone who’s sat through a random sample of Catholic homilies recently could confirm, that’s often not the typical experience. Too often, it’s hard to detect the evangelical forest for the verbal trees.
On Friday, I went up to compliment Dennison on his economy of expression. He told me it’s deliberate, something he’s been doing at daily Mass for years, ever since he arrived in Key West.
“Anybody can talk for five minutes and maybe have a vague idea of their opening point,” he said. “To do it all in one sentence, you really have to think about it.”
He conceded that he isn’t quite so crisp on Sundays, a point we confirmed over the weekend. Yet even then, the discipline of carefully measuring every word throughout the week obviously had an effect, as Dennison on Sunday was able to weave Scriptural erudition, humor, and keen pastoral insight with no wasted time or prolix constructions.
Pope Francis pleads for end to 'homicidal madness' of terrorism
.- Two major acts of terrorism in just the past 24 hours have prompted Pope Francis to again beg for an even stronger commitment to putting such bloody attacks, which have marred many parts of the world over the past 18 months, to an end.
“Pope Francis unites to all men and women of good will who commit so that the homicidal madness of terrorism no longer finds space in our world,” a Dec. 20 telegram from the Vatican read.
“In this sense, His Holiness implores God the merciful Father for consolation, protection and his comforting blessing.”
The note, signed by Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin, was addressed to Berlin Archbishop Heiner Koch after an apparent terrorist attack yesterday left 12 dead and 48 wounded.
According to CNN, a large truck barreled into crowds of shoppers at a Christmas market near the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin’s western Breitscheidplatz neighborhood around 8p.m. local time Dec. 19, going roughly 40 mph.
The driver of the truck fled the scene on foot, but is believed to have been arrested about a mile and a half from the crash site. However, the man apprehended by police, a Pakistani who had sought asylum, denies the act.
A passenger was found dead inside the truck, and a tweet by the Berlin police confirm that the man was a Polish citizen.
Berlin police have said they are confident the truck was driven into the crowd intentionally, and are treating the incident as a terrorist attack.
In the telegram, Pope Francis said he learned of the attack with “deep emotion,” and expressed his own participation “in the mourning of their relatives expressing his compassion and assuring of his closeness to their pain.”
“In prayer he entrusts the deceased to the mercy of God beseeching him for the healing of the wounded,” the telegram read, expressing gratitude to emergency security services for their “active commitment” in the situation.
The Berlin attack came on the heels of another act of terrorism, when the Russian ambassador to Turkey was assassinated Dec. 19 by an off-duty policeman, who shouted “allahu akbar,” meaning “God is great,” after firing eight rounds at the diplomat.
The ambassador, Mr. Andrei Karlov, 62, had been giving a speech at an art gallery in Ankawa at the time of his death.
According to statements the gunman made before being shot dead, such as “don’t forget Aleppo,” the attack is believed to have been in retaliation for Russian involvement in Syria.
In a separate Vatican telegram, also signed by Cardinal Parolin and addressed to Russian president Vladimir Putin, Pope Francis said he was “saddened” to learn of the ambassador’s assassination.
He offered his condolences to Karlov’s family, and entrusted his soul to God. The Pope assured Putin that he and all members of the Russian Federation of his “prayers and spiritual solidarity” at this time.
In addition, earlier this morning Archbishop Paul Gallagher, the Vatican’s Secretary for Relations with the States, called the Russian ambassador to the Holy See, Alexander Avdeev, to offer his condolences for Karlov’s murder.
“Pope Francis unites to all men and women of good will who commit so that the homicidal madness of terrorism no longer finds space in our world,” a Dec. 20 telegram from the Vatican read.
“In this sense, His Holiness implores God the merciful Father for consolation, protection and his comforting blessing.”
The note, signed by Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin, was addressed to Berlin Archbishop Heiner Koch after an apparent terrorist attack yesterday left 12 dead and 48 wounded.
According to CNN, a large truck barreled into crowds of shoppers at a Christmas market near the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin’s western Breitscheidplatz neighborhood around 8p.m. local time Dec. 19, going roughly 40 mph.
The driver of the truck fled the scene on foot, but is believed to have been arrested about a mile and a half from the crash site. However, the man apprehended by police, a Pakistani who had sought asylum, denies the act.
A passenger was found dead inside the truck, and a tweet by the Berlin police confirm that the man was a Polish citizen.
Berlin police have said they are confident the truck was driven into the crowd intentionally, and are treating the incident as a terrorist attack.
In the telegram, Pope Francis said he learned of the attack with “deep emotion,” and expressed his own participation “in the mourning of their relatives expressing his compassion and assuring of his closeness to their pain.”
“In prayer he entrusts the deceased to the mercy of God beseeching him for the healing of the wounded,” the telegram read, expressing gratitude to emergency security services for their “active commitment” in the situation.
The Berlin attack came on the heels of another act of terrorism, when the Russian ambassador to Turkey was assassinated Dec. 19 by an off-duty policeman, who shouted “allahu akbar,” meaning “God is great,” after firing eight rounds at the diplomat.
The ambassador, Mr. Andrei Karlov, 62, had been giving a speech at an art gallery in Ankawa at the time of his death.
According to statements the gunman made before being shot dead, such as “don’t forget Aleppo,” the attack is believed to have been in retaliation for Russian involvement in Syria.
In a separate Vatican telegram, also signed by Cardinal Parolin and addressed to Russian president Vladimir Putin, Pope Francis said he was “saddened” to learn of the ambassador’s assassination.
He offered his condolences to Karlov’s family, and entrusted his soul to God. The Pope assured Putin that he and all members of the Russian Federation of his “prayers and spiritual solidarity” at this time.
In addition, earlier this morning Archbishop Paul Gallagher, the Vatican’s Secretary for Relations with the States, called the Russian ambassador to the Holy See, Alexander Avdeev, to offer his condolences for Karlov’s murder.
Monday, December 19, 2016
Why Catholics are leaving the faith by age 10 – and what parents can do about it
.- Young Catholics are leaving the faith at an early age – sometimes before the age of 10 – and their reasons are deeper than being “bored at Mass,” the author of a recent report claims.
“Those that are leaving for no religion – and a pretty big component of them saying they are atheist or agnostic – it turns out that when you probe a bit more deeply and you allow them to talk in their own words, that they are bringing up things that are related to science and a need for evidence and a need for proof,” said Dr. Mark Gray, a senior research associate at the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University.
“It’s almost a crisis in faith,” he told CNA. “In the whole concept of faith, this is a generation that is struggling with faith in ways that we haven’t seen in previous generations.”
Gray recently published the results of two national studies by CARA – which conducts social science research about the Church – in the publication Our Sunday Visitor. One of the surveys was of those who were raised Catholic but no longer identified as Catholic, ages 15 to 25. The second survey was of self-identified Catholics age 18 and over.
In exploring why young Catholics were choosing to leave the faith, he noted “an emerging profile” of youth who say they find the faith “incompatible with what they are learning in high school or at the university level.” In a perceived battle between the Catholic Church and science, the Church is losing.
And it is losing Catholics at a young age. “The interviews with youth and young adults who had left the Catholic Faith revealed that the typical age for this decision to leave was made at 13,” Gray wrote. “Nearly two-thirds of those surveyed, 63 percent, said they stopped being Catholic between the ages of 10 and 17. Another 23 percent say they left the Faith before the age of 10.”
Of those who had left the faith, “only 13 percent said they were ever likely to return to the Catholic Church,” Gray wrote. And “absent any big changes in their life,” he said to CNA, they “are probably not coming back.”
The most common reason given for leaving the Catholic faith, by one in five respondents, was they stopped believing in God or religion. This was evidence of a “desire among some of them for proof, for evidence of what they’re learning about their religion and about God,” Gray said.
It’s a trend in the popular culture to see atheism as “smart” and the faith as “a fairy tale,” he said.
“And I think the Church needs to come to terms with this as an issue of popular culture,” he continued. “I think the Church perhaps needs to better address its history and its relationship to science.”
One reason for this might be the compartmentalization of faith and education, where youth may go to Mass once a week but spend the rest of their week learning how the faith is “dumb,” he noted.
In contrast, if students are taught evolution and the Big Bang theory at the same school where they learn religion, and they are taught by people with religious convictions, then “you’re kind of shown that there’s not conflicts between those, and you understand the Church and Church history and its relationship to science,” he said.
With previous generations who learned about both faith and science as part of a curriculum, that education “helped them a lot in dealing with these bigger questions,” he explained, “and not seeing conflict between religion and science.”
Fr. Matthew Schneider, LC, who worked in youth ministry for four years, emphasized that faith and science must be presented to young people in harmony with each other.
A challenge, he explained, is teaching how “faith and science relate” through philosophy and theology. While science deals only with “what is observable and measurable,” he said, “the world needs something non-physical as its origin, and that’s how to understand God along with science.”
“It was the Christian faith that was the birthplace of science,” he continued. “There’s not a contradiction” between faith and science, “but it’s understanding each one in their own realms.”
How can parents raise their children to stay in the faith? Fr. Schneider cited research by Christian Smith, a professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame, who concluded that a combination of three factors produces an 80 percent retention rate among young Catholics.
If they have a “weekly activity” like catechesis, Bible study or youth group; if they have adults at the parish who are not their parents and who they can talk to about the faith; and if they have “deep spiritual experiences,” they have a much higher likelihood of remaining Catholic, Fr. Schneider said.
More parents need to be aware of their children’s’ beliefs, Dr. Gray noted, as many parents don’t even know that their children may not profess to be Catholic.
The Church is “very open” to science, he emphasized, noting the affiliation of non-Catholic scientists with the Pontifical Academy of Science, including physicist Stephen Hawking.
There is “no real conflict” between faith and science, Gray said.
“The Church has been steadily balancing matters of faith and reason since St. Augustine’s work in the fifth century,” he wrote.
“Yet, the Church has a chance to keep more of the young Catholics being baptized now if it can do more to correct the historical myths about the Church in regards to science,” he added, “and continue to highlight its support for the sciences, which were, for the most part, an initial product of the work done in Catholic universities hundreds of years ago.”
Friday, December 16, 2016
How to turn ‘garbage’ into food for the hungry (and there’s an app for that)
By: John Burger | Aleteia.org
400lbs of food per person is wasted annually, and 1 in 7 Americans goes hungry each day, but creative people are making a difference
You’re in the supermarket buying tomatoes, and one accidentally rolls onto the floor, rendering it soft on one side. Do you put it back on the pile, thinking it’s the store’s problem now, or do you throw it in with your other picks, figuring it will be fine in a soup or a salsa?
Do you pour milk down the drain if it’s a day or two after the marked “sell by” date?
Do you ever wonder if something can be done with the leftover dinner that you don’t have “wrapped” at the restaurant?
Do you cringe when you’re cleaning up after the holiday party, as you dump plates of half-eaten food into the trash?
Most of us see examples of food loss or food waste regularly. Worldwide, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization says up to a third of all food is “spoiled or squandered before it is consumed by people.” In the United States, one organization estimates that about 400 pounds of food per person is wasted annually, yet one in seven Americans goes hungry each day.
More and more, however, individuals and charitable organizations are finding ways to salvage food and get it to those who need it most.
“More than enough food is getting thrown away to feed all these people,” said Rachel Novick, director of the Minor in Sustainability at the University of Notre Dame.
Food insecurity is the obvious reason to try to salvage agricultural products, but there are environmental reasons as well. A Harvard University report says that approximately 21% of the United States’ fresh water supply and 300 million barrels of oil are used to produce food that goes to waste.
Food loss and waste are found everywhere, from farms to homes. Low market prices and high labor costs often make it uneconomical for farmers to harvest all that they produce, says ReFED, a collaboration of over 30 business, nonprofit, foundation, and government leaders committed to reducing food waste in the U.S. “Strict cosmetic standards result in insufficient demand for imperfect-looking produce (i.e. oversized zucchinis or bent carrots),” ReFED says in the report “Rethinking Food Waste through Economics and Data: A Roadmap to Reduce Food Waste. “Despite gleaning and farm-to-food-bank efforts to recover this unharvested food, the vast majority is left in the fields.”
The problem has been on the radar of several charitable organizations for years. The New Hampshire Food Bank, a program of Catholic Charities of New Hampshire, provides more than 12 million pounds of food each year to food pantries, homeless shelters, food banks, soup kitchens and about 400 other registered non profits throughout the state, according to Kathryn Marchocki, spokeswoman for Catholic Charities New Hampshire. The agency sponsors several innovative programs to make sure good food doesn’t go to waste, collaborating with grocery chains and retailers that “have high quality food that is nearing its shelf life, to make sure that it doesn’t get thrown away,” Marchocki said. “They’ll pull this food—mostly meat—freeze it and provide it to us.”
Donated food is also used in a Food Bank program called Recipe for Success, an umbrella program for a variety of outreach efforts including nutrition education, addressing child hunger, and job training. The Culinary Job Training Program teaches people who are unemployed or underemployed or suffering hardships the skills needed to get jobs in the food industry, Marchocki said. “They have a warehouse with a kitchen where they teach these trainees and prepare scores of meals a day,” she explained.
Helen Costello, program manager of the New Hampshire Food Bank, said the program facilitates the distribution of donated produce that may be hard for individuals to process.
“If a farmer donates 1500 pounds of blue Hubbard squash, which has a very hard coating on it, it’s hard to distribute because families might not know what to do with it or even have something to crack it open,” Costello said. “So in our kitchen they’ll be able to prepare that and freeze it, so often it cuts down on my need to purchase frozen vegetables.”
In addition, chefs in the program have gone to farmers markets, gleaned “ugly veggies” and cooked up vegetable dishes on the spot in a mobile kitchen, she said. On-site demos give customers ideas for using more fresh fruits and vegetables in sustainable ways, and discouraging food waste.
Catholic Charities of Central Colorado runs a soup kitchen that serves over 215,000 meals annually. Its food budget is $50,000, but 95% of what they use is donated, according to Catholic Charities spokeswoman Rochelle Blaschke Schlortt.
But whatever is left over still has a life.
“Our community is very aware of food waste,” Schlortt said. “Here at Catholic Charities, we try not to waste anything and have partners who take food product that we cannot use. … Sometimes we’ll get an enormous load of bananas and can’t use them quickly enough. We’ll make a banana pudding, or the zoo will come and pick up the excess, or the pig farmer takes dented cans.” Leftovers from the daily meal are packaged and sent home with clients for dinner.
“We regularly get food from Whole Foods or Starbucks who have food left over at the end of the day that they can’t use the next day,” Schlortt continued. “Our volunteers go around with a truck to pick up from them. The people who run our soup kitchen have experience in the grocery business and hospitality. They understand that if a carton of milk has a sell-by date of Dec. 5, if it’s handled properly in the grocery store they know that that sell-by date means it’s probably still good until Dec. 10.”
Catholic Charities has been running the soup kitchen since 1994 and has been following these practices from the beginning. It serves between 600-800 meals a day, and has never had a case of food poisoning, Schlortt said.
Unfortunately, the concern over liability keeps many entities from donating food in this litigious society. But there are “Good Samaritan” laws on the books that protect from liability, Notre Dame’s Novick said. “The important thing is to educate individuals and organizations about the protections and make sure they understand what kinds of things they can donate.”
A “best by” date on a product is not the same thing as an expiration date, for example.
One thing that has helped push forward efforts to redirect about-to-be-wasted food to the hungry is federal tax exemptions. “That’s helped organizations offset the cost of food and shipping it to where it’s needed,” Novick said, “especially with farms donating imperfect produce.”
Novick said that there are a lot of initiatives on college campuses, such as the Food Recovery Network and the Campus Kitchen Project. At Notre Dame, she said, “We’ve been sending food to some local shelters and rescue missions in South Bend for years. We want to expand beyond dining hall food. There are also little cafes, catering events, campus restaurants.”
The ReFed report says that several social enterprises have emerged recently to sell value-added products from food waste at a profit. These include Barnana (banana snack bites from rejected products), Misfit Juicery (repurposing wasted food into juice), and MM Local Foods (value-added products from seconds from farms).
Technology is also coming to the rescue. A new app that made its debut in San Francisco locates places with unused food so that it can be driven to shelters and churches. Another, in the European Union, alerts consumers to deals on items nearing their expiration dates.
Europe, in fact, seems to be just as concerned about wasted food. A company in Germany picks up “odd-looking” edibles and cooks them for catered events. And many French supermarkets, such as Intermarche, below, offer discounts on “ugly” fruits and vegetables — sometimes as much as 30 percent.
At a time when food insecurity shows little sign of abatement, some people are being just as creative as the best chefs in the industry to keep food out of landfills and fill the stomachs of the hungry.
http://aleteia.org/2016/12/16/how-to-turn-garbage-into-food-for-the-hungry-and-theres-an-app-for-that/?utm_campaign=NL_en&utm_source=daily_newsletter&utm_medium=mail&utm_content=NL_en
400lbs of food per person is wasted annually, and 1 in 7 Americans goes hungry each day, but creative people are making a difference
You’re in the supermarket buying tomatoes, and one accidentally rolls onto the floor, rendering it soft on one side. Do you put it back on the pile, thinking it’s the store’s problem now, or do you throw it in with your other picks, figuring it will be fine in a soup or a salsa?
Do you pour milk down the drain if it’s a day or two after the marked “sell by” date?
Do you ever wonder if something can be done with the leftover dinner that you don’t have “wrapped” at the restaurant?
Do you cringe when you’re cleaning up after the holiday party, as you dump plates of half-eaten food into the trash?
Most of us see examples of food loss or food waste regularly. Worldwide, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization says up to a third of all food is “spoiled or squandered before it is consumed by people.” In the United States, one organization estimates that about 400 pounds of food per person is wasted annually, yet one in seven Americans goes hungry each day.
More and more, however, individuals and charitable organizations are finding ways to salvage food and get it to those who need it most.
“More than enough food is getting thrown away to feed all these people,” said Rachel Novick, director of the Minor in Sustainability at the University of Notre Dame.
Food insecurity is the obvious reason to try to salvage agricultural products, but there are environmental reasons as well. A Harvard University report says that approximately 21% of the United States’ fresh water supply and 300 million barrels of oil are used to produce food that goes to waste.
Food loss and waste are found everywhere, from farms to homes. Low market prices and high labor costs often make it uneconomical for farmers to harvest all that they produce, says ReFED, a collaboration of over 30 business, nonprofit, foundation, and government leaders committed to reducing food waste in the U.S. “Strict cosmetic standards result in insufficient demand for imperfect-looking produce (i.e. oversized zucchinis or bent carrots),” ReFED says in the report “Rethinking Food Waste through Economics and Data: A Roadmap to Reduce Food Waste. “Despite gleaning and farm-to-food-bank efforts to recover this unharvested food, the vast majority is left in the fields.”
The problem has been on the radar of several charitable organizations for years. The New Hampshire Food Bank, a program of Catholic Charities of New Hampshire, provides more than 12 million pounds of food each year to food pantries, homeless shelters, food banks, soup kitchens and about 400 other registered non profits throughout the state, according to Kathryn Marchocki, spokeswoman for Catholic Charities New Hampshire. The agency sponsors several innovative programs to make sure good food doesn’t go to waste, collaborating with grocery chains and retailers that “have high quality food that is nearing its shelf life, to make sure that it doesn’t get thrown away,” Marchocki said. “They’ll pull this food—mostly meat—freeze it and provide it to us.”
Donated food is also used in a Food Bank program called Recipe for Success, an umbrella program for a variety of outreach efforts including nutrition education, addressing child hunger, and job training. The Culinary Job Training Program teaches people who are unemployed or underemployed or suffering hardships the skills needed to get jobs in the food industry, Marchocki said. “They have a warehouse with a kitchen where they teach these trainees and prepare scores of meals a day,” she explained.
Helen Costello, program manager of the New Hampshire Food Bank, said the program facilitates the distribution of donated produce that may be hard for individuals to process.
“If a farmer donates 1500 pounds of blue Hubbard squash, which has a very hard coating on it, it’s hard to distribute because families might not know what to do with it or even have something to crack it open,” Costello said. “So in our kitchen they’ll be able to prepare that and freeze it, so often it cuts down on my need to purchase frozen vegetables.”
In addition, chefs in the program have gone to farmers markets, gleaned “ugly veggies” and cooked up vegetable dishes on the spot in a mobile kitchen, she said. On-site demos give customers ideas for using more fresh fruits and vegetables in sustainable ways, and discouraging food waste.
Catholic Charities of Central Colorado runs a soup kitchen that serves over 215,000 meals annually. Its food budget is $50,000, but 95% of what they use is donated, according to Catholic Charities spokeswoman Rochelle Blaschke Schlortt.
But whatever is left over still has a life.
“Our community is very aware of food waste,” Schlortt said. “Here at Catholic Charities, we try not to waste anything and have partners who take food product that we cannot use. … Sometimes we’ll get an enormous load of bananas and can’t use them quickly enough. We’ll make a banana pudding, or the zoo will come and pick up the excess, or the pig farmer takes dented cans.” Leftovers from the daily meal are packaged and sent home with clients for dinner.
“We regularly get food from Whole Foods or Starbucks who have food left over at the end of the day that they can’t use the next day,” Schlortt continued. “Our volunteers go around with a truck to pick up from them. The people who run our soup kitchen have experience in the grocery business and hospitality. They understand that if a carton of milk has a sell-by date of Dec. 5, if it’s handled properly in the grocery store they know that that sell-by date means it’s probably still good until Dec. 10.”
Catholic Charities has been running the soup kitchen since 1994 and has been following these practices from the beginning. It serves between 600-800 meals a day, and has never had a case of food poisoning, Schlortt said.
Unfortunately, the concern over liability keeps many entities from donating food in this litigious society. But there are “Good Samaritan” laws on the books that protect from liability, Notre Dame’s Novick said. “The important thing is to educate individuals and organizations about the protections and make sure they understand what kinds of things they can donate.”
A “best by” date on a product is not the same thing as an expiration date, for example.
One thing that has helped push forward efforts to redirect about-to-be-wasted food to the hungry is federal tax exemptions. “That’s helped organizations offset the cost of food and shipping it to where it’s needed,” Novick said, “especially with farms donating imperfect produce.”
Novick said that there are a lot of initiatives on college campuses, such as the Food Recovery Network and the Campus Kitchen Project. At Notre Dame, she said, “We’ve been sending food to some local shelters and rescue missions in South Bend for years. We want to expand beyond dining hall food. There are also little cafes, catering events, campus restaurants.”
The ReFed report says that several social enterprises have emerged recently to sell value-added products from food waste at a profit. These include Barnana (banana snack bites from rejected products), Misfit Juicery (repurposing wasted food into juice), and MM Local Foods (value-added products from seconds from farms).
Technology is also coming to the rescue. A new app that made its debut in San Francisco locates places with unused food so that it can be driven to shelters and churches. Another, in the European Union, alerts consumers to deals on items nearing their expiration dates.
Europe, in fact, seems to be just as concerned about wasted food. A company in Germany picks up “odd-looking” edibles and cooks them for catered events. And many French supermarkets, such as Intermarche, below, offer discounts on “ugly” fruits and vegetables — sometimes as much as 30 percent.
At a time when food insecurity shows little sign of abatement, some people are being just as creative as the best chefs in the industry to keep food out of landfills and fill the stomachs of the hungry.
http://aleteia.org/2016/12/16/how-to-turn-garbage-into-food-for-the-hungry-and-theres-an-app-for-that/?utm_campaign=NL_en&utm_source=daily_newsletter&utm_medium=mail&utm_content=NL_en
Thursday, December 15, 2016
Deepening Your Prayer Life: Seven ways to grow closer to God
By: Victor M. Parachin The Priest
“For the past 15 years, I’ve been attempting to figure out how to pray. I’ve searched for every Praying For Dummies book published, but many aren’t much help. Everyone, from the great spiritual writers to my grandmother, has suggestions on how to pray. Ultimately, it’s up to each of us to determine which prayer style works best.”
That honest assessment about prayer was recently offered by a pastor. He is correct in saying that we are responsible for strengthening our prayer life; no one can do this for us. Prayer is never a one-size-fits-all approach. It’s up to us to shape it, structure it and sustain it. Rightly done, prayer is a highly personal approach resulting in a richer and more vibrant spirituality.
British clergyman William Law (1686-1761) noted: “He who has learned to pray has learned the greatest secret of a holy and happy life.” Here are seven ways to deepen your prayer life.
1) Pray in a way that feels natural for you. In her book, God Alone Is Enough, spiritual writer Claudia Mair Burney offers this worthy reminder: “People don’t all pray in the same way, just as not every plant in the garden needs the same amount of moisture. What works for one doesn’t necessarily work for another. We need to try on a few prayer styles to see what fits.” Customize your prayer life. If you like to write, keep a prayer journal. If you’re a person who enjoys reading, read from a prayer book.
If you’re a person who enjoys walking, pray while you walk. If you have a long commute to work, use that time for prayer. That is what Toronto resident David, does. “It takes me an hour to get to work using the bus and subway. I used to bring books and magazines to read for the trip downtown every day. Then I realized that this was an ideal prayer time, so five days a week for nearly an hour at a time, I make use of those 60 minutes for prayer.”
2) Pray like Jesus. In The Lord’s Prayer, Jesus included this sentence: “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (Mt 6:10). Also, during Jesus’ time of deep distress, He asked that His time of trouble be removed, but added these important words: “Yet not my will but yours be done” (Lk 22:42). Pray like Jesus did by placing your life in God’s hands with the confidence that “God works for the good of those who love him” (Rom 8:28).
The fact is that we cannot always know what is best for us and that what appears to be a burden can become a blessing. A fascinating example comes from a man who was asked to put together a list of things he was grateful for. Though he was a person with many admirable achievements and accomplishments, his gratitude list was as remarkable as it was unusual. This was his “gratitude” list:
• His first job as a high school janitor upon graduating from college.
• Being laid off from a job due to a bad economy.
• A diagnosis of melanoma.
• All the people who did not believe in him.
While that list does not appear in any way to qualify as a “gratitude list,” he explained that each one of those “burdens” were actually blessings in disguise. Here’s why:
• Working as a janitor led him to his future wife, the daughter of a fellow janitor.
• Being laid off forced him to jump-start his career as a book illustrator.
• His cancer diagnosis prompted him to organize events promoting melanoma awareness.
• All those negative, cynical and critical people fueled his determination to succeed.
The lesson in that man’s approach is a powerful example of “your will be done.”
3) Pray without words. This is called meditation, and it is highly recommended by the Psalm writers. Some examples include: Psalm 46:10 — Be still and know that I am God; Psalm 4:4 — Search your hearts and be silent. Psalm 143:5 — I meditate on all your works and consider what your hands have done.
Meditation was also recommended by St. John of the Cross: “Learn to abide with attention in loving waiting upon God in the state of quiet.” In his book, The Jesuit Guide To Almost Everything: A Spirituality For Real Life, James Martin, S.J., says “being silent is one of the best ways to listen to God, not because God is not speaking to you during our noisy day, but because silence makes it easier to listen to your heart and listen very carefully when your friend (God) is trying to make a point. . . . If your environment (inside and outside) is too noisy, it might be hard to hear what God, your friend, is trying to say.”
4) Prioritize prayer. Set aside time, preferably daily, when you will sit quietly and pray. This can be a battle. The battle of prayer, according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, is inseparable from the necessary “spiritual battle” to act habitually according to the Spirit of Christ: we pray as we live, because we live as we pray.
The principal difficulty is: “I don’t have the time.” Prayer is considered an occupation incompatible with all the other things we have to do. The remedy: make the time for personal prayer.
5) Pray spontaneously. Whenever you see a need, offer a prayer. Don’t hesitate, because prayer delayed is almost always prayer denied. According to St. Augustine, such spontaneous prayer characterized early Christian communities. He noted: “We are told how the monks of Egypt prayed very frequently but very briefly. Their prayer was sudden and ejaculatory so that the intense application so necessary in prayer should not vanish or lose it’s keenness by a slow performance.”
One who seized an opportunity to pray spontaneously is a woman named Carol who was working as a waitress all Thanksgiving Day at a 24-hour truck stop. That day one of her customers was a solo driver. When she brought his plate of food to the table, she noticed that the man was weeping quietly. “I wanted to be helpful so I returned to his table and asked, ‘Is there anything I can do to help?’ ” The man responded with an “I don’t think so,” explaining that his wife was asking for a divorce. “I wish I could talk to her about it in person, but I’m on the road for three more whole days.”
Knowing that those three days would be excruciating for the man, Carol said, “I want you to write your name and your wife’s name on this piece of paper.” Placing her order pad and pen down on the table in front of him, she said, “I am going to pray for the two of you.” He wrote the names down and Carol reassured him of her prayers. She didn’t see him again for an entire year but, 12 months later, on Thanksgiving Day again, he was back sitting in her station. “Thank you for your prayers. My wife and I worked things out. In fact, we recently had our first baby,” he said with a smile.
6) Pray briefly. Jesus teaches that one model for prayer is brevity. In His parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector (Lk 18:9-17), it’s clear that the Pharisee’s prayer is far too long-winded and pompous. It’s also clear that the other individual in the story — the reviled tax collector — is the one whose prayer is effective by both its sincerity and its brevity — God, be merciful to me, a sinner. Commenting on that seven-word prayer Jesus said: “I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God.”
And, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus specifically taught: “And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words” (Mt 6:7-8). Recalling these teachings of Jesus about prayer, St. Augustine later wrote: “It was our Lord who put an end to long-windedness, that you would not approach God in too many words, as though you wanted to teach God by your many words. Piety, not verbosity, is in order when you pray.” Simple, brief prayers such as these are appropriate to offer throughout the day: God, help me. God, strengthen me. God, guide me. God, grant me wisdom, patience, love, insight, etc.
7) Pray when you don’t feel like it. Thomas Merton observed: “True love and prayer are learned in the moment when prayer has become impossible and the heart has turned to stone.” Don’t permit discouragement, despair or dismay to keep you from prayer. When you just don’t feel like praying tell yourself, “I will do it anyway!” and then proceed to do so. Writing on his blog, one man said:
“Sometimes even I don’t feel like praying — and I’m a pastor. It’s normal. Human beings are very fickle. One day you feel like you can take on the world; the next day you feel like you don’t want to be in the world. When I don’t feel like praying, here’s what I do: I pray anyway. And I find that, just like a lot of things in life, once you start doing something, the feeling will follow. First motion; then emotion. The main thing is to settle in your head that you absolutely need to pray. It’s not an option.”
Finally, let your whole life be a living prayer. St. Frances de Sales advised: “Aspire to God with short but frequent outpourings of the heart; admire his bounty; invoke his aid … give Him your whole soul a thousand times a day.”
“For the past 15 years, I’ve been attempting to figure out how to pray. I’ve searched for every Praying For Dummies book published, but many aren’t much help. Everyone, from the great spiritual writers to my grandmother, has suggestions on how to pray. Ultimately, it’s up to each of us to determine which prayer style works best.”
That honest assessment about prayer was recently offered by a pastor. He is correct in saying that we are responsible for strengthening our prayer life; no one can do this for us. Prayer is never a one-size-fits-all approach. It’s up to us to shape it, structure it and sustain it. Rightly done, prayer is a highly personal approach resulting in a richer and more vibrant spirituality.
British clergyman William Law (1686-1761) noted: “He who has learned to pray has learned the greatest secret of a holy and happy life.” Here are seven ways to deepen your prayer life.
1) Pray in a way that feels natural for you. In her book, God Alone Is Enough, spiritual writer Claudia Mair Burney offers this worthy reminder: “People don’t all pray in the same way, just as not every plant in the garden needs the same amount of moisture. What works for one doesn’t necessarily work for another. We need to try on a few prayer styles to see what fits.” Customize your prayer life. If you like to write, keep a prayer journal. If you’re a person who enjoys reading, read from a prayer book.
If you’re a person who enjoys walking, pray while you walk. If you have a long commute to work, use that time for prayer. That is what Toronto resident David, does. “It takes me an hour to get to work using the bus and subway. I used to bring books and magazines to read for the trip downtown every day. Then I realized that this was an ideal prayer time, so five days a week for nearly an hour at a time, I make use of those 60 minutes for prayer.”
2) Pray like Jesus. In The Lord’s Prayer, Jesus included this sentence: “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (Mt 6:10). Also, during Jesus’ time of deep distress, He asked that His time of trouble be removed, but added these important words: “Yet not my will but yours be done” (Lk 22:42). Pray like Jesus did by placing your life in God’s hands with the confidence that “God works for the good of those who love him” (Rom 8:28).
The fact is that we cannot always know what is best for us and that what appears to be a burden can become a blessing. A fascinating example comes from a man who was asked to put together a list of things he was grateful for. Though he was a person with many admirable achievements and accomplishments, his gratitude list was as remarkable as it was unusual. This was his “gratitude” list:
• His first job as a high school janitor upon graduating from college.
• Being laid off from a job due to a bad economy.
• A diagnosis of melanoma.
• All the people who did not believe in him.
While that list does not appear in any way to qualify as a “gratitude list,” he explained that each one of those “burdens” were actually blessings in disguise. Here’s why:
• Working as a janitor led him to his future wife, the daughter of a fellow janitor.
• Being laid off forced him to jump-start his career as a book illustrator.
• His cancer diagnosis prompted him to organize events promoting melanoma awareness.
• All those negative, cynical and critical people fueled his determination to succeed.
The lesson in that man’s approach is a powerful example of “your will be done.”
3) Pray without words. This is called meditation, and it is highly recommended by the Psalm writers. Some examples include: Psalm 46:10 — Be still and know that I am God; Psalm 4:4 — Search your hearts and be silent. Psalm 143:5 — I meditate on all your works and consider what your hands have done.
Meditation was also recommended by St. John of the Cross: “Learn to abide with attention in loving waiting upon God in the state of quiet.” In his book, The Jesuit Guide To Almost Everything: A Spirituality For Real Life, James Martin, S.J., says “being silent is one of the best ways to listen to God, not because God is not speaking to you during our noisy day, but because silence makes it easier to listen to your heart and listen very carefully when your friend (God) is trying to make a point. . . . If your environment (inside and outside) is too noisy, it might be hard to hear what God, your friend, is trying to say.”
4) Prioritize prayer. Set aside time, preferably daily, when you will sit quietly and pray. This can be a battle. The battle of prayer, according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, is inseparable from the necessary “spiritual battle” to act habitually according to the Spirit of Christ: we pray as we live, because we live as we pray.
The principal difficulty is: “I don’t have the time.” Prayer is considered an occupation incompatible with all the other things we have to do. The remedy: make the time for personal prayer.
5) Pray spontaneously. Whenever you see a need, offer a prayer. Don’t hesitate, because prayer delayed is almost always prayer denied. According to St. Augustine, such spontaneous prayer characterized early Christian communities. He noted: “We are told how the monks of Egypt prayed very frequently but very briefly. Their prayer was sudden and ejaculatory so that the intense application so necessary in prayer should not vanish or lose it’s keenness by a slow performance.”
One who seized an opportunity to pray spontaneously is a woman named Carol who was working as a waitress all Thanksgiving Day at a 24-hour truck stop. That day one of her customers was a solo driver. When she brought his plate of food to the table, she noticed that the man was weeping quietly. “I wanted to be helpful so I returned to his table and asked, ‘Is there anything I can do to help?’ ” The man responded with an “I don’t think so,” explaining that his wife was asking for a divorce. “I wish I could talk to her about it in person, but I’m on the road for three more whole days.”
Knowing that those three days would be excruciating for the man, Carol said, “I want you to write your name and your wife’s name on this piece of paper.” Placing her order pad and pen down on the table in front of him, she said, “I am going to pray for the two of you.” He wrote the names down and Carol reassured him of her prayers. She didn’t see him again for an entire year but, 12 months later, on Thanksgiving Day again, he was back sitting in her station. “Thank you for your prayers. My wife and I worked things out. In fact, we recently had our first baby,” he said with a smile.
6) Pray briefly. Jesus teaches that one model for prayer is brevity. In His parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector (Lk 18:9-17), it’s clear that the Pharisee’s prayer is far too long-winded and pompous. It’s also clear that the other individual in the story — the reviled tax collector — is the one whose prayer is effective by both its sincerity and its brevity — God, be merciful to me, a sinner. Commenting on that seven-word prayer Jesus said: “I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God.”
And, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus specifically taught: “And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words” (Mt 6:7-8). Recalling these teachings of Jesus about prayer, St. Augustine later wrote: “It was our Lord who put an end to long-windedness, that you would not approach God in too many words, as though you wanted to teach God by your many words. Piety, not verbosity, is in order when you pray.” Simple, brief prayers such as these are appropriate to offer throughout the day: God, help me. God, strengthen me. God, guide me. God, grant me wisdom, patience, love, insight, etc.
7) Pray when you don’t feel like it. Thomas Merton observed: “True love and prayer are learned in the moment when prayer has become impossible and the heart has turned to stone.” Don’t permit discouragement, despair or dismay to keep you from prayer. When you just don’t feel like praying tell yourself, “I will do it anyway!” and then proceed to do so. Writing on his blog, one man said:
“Sometimes even I don’t feel like praying — and I’m a pastor. It’s normal. Human beings are very fickle. One day you feel like you can take on the world; the next day you feel like you don’t want to be in the world. When I don’t feel like praying, here’s what I do: I pray anyway. And I find that, just like a lot of things in life, once you start doing something, the feeling will follow. First motion; then emotion. The main thing is to settle in your head that you absolutely need to pray. It’s not an option.”
Finally, let your whole life be a living prayer. St. Frances de Sales advised: “Aspire to God with short but frequent outpourings of the heart; admire his bounty; invoke his aid … give Him your whole soul a thousand times a day.”
Pope tells ambassadors to make 'courageous' choice for nonviolence
.- On Thursday Pope Francis accepted the credentials of six new ambassadors to the Holy See, urging them to work toward promoting the common good in their respective countries by adopting tactics of nonviolence at a political level.
“In a particular way, those who hold public office on the national and international levels are called to cultivate a nonviolent style in their consciences and in the exercise of their duties,” the Pope said in the Dec. 15 audience.
“This is not the same as weakness or passivity; rather it presupposes firmness, courage and the ability to face issues and conflicts with intellectual honesty, truly seeking the common good over and above all partisan interest, be it ideological, economic or political.”
The six new ambassadors met with Pope Francis in the Clementine Hall in the Vatican. They are from Sweden, Fiji, Moldova, Mauritius, Tunisia and Burundi.
His audience with the diplomats took place as violence and instability plague many areas of the world, including Burundi, which has maintained only a precarious peace in the 10 years since the country underwent an incredibly violent 12-year long civil war.
It also fell just three days after the release of his massage for the next World Day of Peace, celebrated Jan. 1 of every year, and which in 2017 will focus on the theme of nonviolence. Instituted by Bl. Paul VI in 1968, the message is sent to all foreign ministers around the world, and indicates the Holy See’s diplomatic tone during the coming year.
Speaking to the ambassadors, Francis stressed that despite the various conflicts raging throughout the world, peace is achievable, as seen in the examples and efforts of some national and international leaders in the world.
“In the course of the past century, marred by wars and genocides of unheard-of proportions, we have nonetheless seen outstanding examples of how nonviolence, embraced with conviction and practiced consistently, can yield significant results, also on the social and political plane,” he said.
Specific figures cited by the Pope in his message for peace included St. Teresa of Calcutta, Mahatma Ghandi, Pashtun independence activist Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Martin Luther King Jr. and Liberian peace activist Leymah Gbowee.
“Some peoples, and indeed entire nations, thanks to the efforts of nonviolent leaders, peacefully achieved the goals of freedom and justice,” he said.
Francis then explained that peace can’t be achieved merely through words alone, but must be pursued through the refusal to participate in a politics of domination and in arms trafficking. This is especially true, he said, when many people in the country may be lacking in the basic necessities for life, such as the case in Venezuela.
“This is the path to pursue now and in the future. This is the way of peace,” he said.
The fact that the new ambassadors come from very different parts of the world, “is always a source of satisfaction” in Rome, the Pope said, “since the horizon of the Holy See is intrinsically universal.”
“This is due to the vocation and mission entrusted by God to the Successor of the Apostle Peter, a mission that is essentially religious, yet in the course of history has also involved relations with states and those who govern them.”
Although the Holy See governs the Vatican City State, the Pope explained that its primary values are spiritual and moral, not temporal, as is usually the case for Sovereign States.
In the Holy See is found the “center of unity and direction of the Catholic Church,” he said.
Because of this, it is called “to pass on and bear witness to those spiritual and moral values grounded in the very nature of human beings and society, and which, as such, can be shared by all those committed to the pursuit of the common good.”
“In a particular way, those who hold public office on the national and international levels are called to cultivate a nonviolent style in their consciences and in the exercise of their duties,” the Pope said in the Dec. 15 audience.
“This is not the same as weakness or passivity; rather it presupposes firmness, courage and the ability to face issues and conflicts with intellectual honesty, truly seeking the common good over and above all partisan interest, be it ideological, economic or political.”
The six new ambassadors met with Pope Francis in the Clementine Hall in the Vatican. They are from Sweden, Fiji, Moldova, Mauritius, Tunisia and Burundi.
His audience with the diplomats took place as violence and instability plague many areas of the world, including Burundi, which has maintained only a precarious peace in the 10 years since the country underwent an incredibly violent 12-year long civil war.
It also fell just three days after the release of his massage for the next World Day of Peace, celebrated Jan. 1 of every year, and which in 2017 will focus on the theme of nonviolence. Instituted by Bl. Paul VI in 1968, the message is sent to all foreign ministers around the world, and indicates the Holy See’s diplomatic tone during the coming year.
Speaking to the ambassadors, Francis stressed that despite the various conflicts raging throughout the world, peace is achievable, as seen in the examples and efforts of some national and international leaders in the world.
“In the course of the past century, marred by wars and genocides of unheard-of proportions, we have nonetheless seen outstanding examples of how nonviolence, embraced with conviction and practiced consistently, can yield significant results, also on the social and political plane,” he said.
Specific figures cited by the Pope in his message for peace included St. Teresa of Calcutta, Mahatma Ghandi, Pashtun independence activist Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Martin Luther King Jr. and Liberian peace activist Leymah Gbowee.
“Some peoples, and indeed entire nations, thanks to the efforts of nonviolent leaders, peacefully achieved the goals of freedom and justice,” he said.
Francis then explained that peace can’t be achieved merely through words alone, but must be pursued through the refusal to participate in a politics of domination and in arms trafficking. This is especially true, he said, when many people in the country may be lacking in the basic necessities for life, such as the case in Venezuela.
“This is the path to pursue now and in the future. This is the way of peace,” he said.
The fact that the new ambassadors come from very different parts of the world, “is always a source of satisfaction” in Rome, the Pope said, “since the horizon of the Holy See is intrinsically universal.”
“This is due to the vocation and mission entrusted by God to the Successor of the Apostle Peter, a mission that is essentially religious, yet in the course of history has also involved relations with states and those who govern them.”
Although the Holy See governs the Vatican City State, the Pope explained that its primary values are spiritual and moral, not temporal, as is usually the case for Sovereign States.
In the Holy See is found the “center of unity and direction of the Catholic Church,” he said.
Because of this, it is called “to pass on and bear witness to those spiritual and moral values grounded in the very nature of human beings and society, and which, as such, can be shared by all those committed to the pursuit of the common good.”
Wednesday, December 14, 2016
Bishop Edward Braxton to Black Catholics: Charleston 'in unique position to lead' after tragedies
Bishop Edward Braxton of the Diocese of Belleville, Illinois. Provided.
Bishop Edward Braxton knew he couldn’t visit Charleston and speak about the country’s racial divide without visiting Emanuel AME Church.
And so before his talks during the Black Catholics Heritage Celebration this weekend, Braxton, of the Diocese of Belleville, Illinois, reflected at the historic sanctuary where nine black worshipers were gunned down by a self-avowed white supremacist. He prayed for the victims and visited the fellowship hall where a barrage of bullets rang out last year. He wondered how a city with so many churches could become the site of such horror.
Braxton drew upon the response of the victims’ family members – which he praised as remarkable expressions of resilience and forgiveness – as he addressed a group of black Catholics from throughout the state who gathered Saturday at Embassy Suites Charleston Convention Center in North Charleston.
“Charleston is in a unique position to lead and guide other communities and other cities, both who have endured peril and conflict in the past, and sadly, communities that probably will endure it in the future,” he said.
Braxton’s comments came during a speech centered on forgiveness, reconciliation and racial harmony, which opened with a prayer for Walter Scott and the victims of the church shooting. The timing of his talk - days after a mistrial was declared for Michael Slager, the former officer who shot and killed Scott, and also in the midst of the federal hate crimes trial for Dylann Roof - was not lost on Braxton. Much of his speech addressed the Black Lives Matter movement and the country's responses to killings of black men at the hands of white police officers.
Braxton said he believes that "all lives matter," but if Americans ignore the circumstances that put some populations in more danger than others, "we fool ourselves."
“The point of Black Lives Matter is that many in the African American community face existential threats," Braxton said, adding that those among the movement should not be silent about lives lost to black-on-black crime or abortions.
"We all know that the lives of these police officers mattered to their family, to their friends, to the community and to God," he said.
In times of pain and anxiety over such slayings, Braxton offered five imperatives for those in the audience: listen, learn, think, pray and act.
To those in Charleston, where tragedies have brought racial divide to the forefront of conversation, Braxton encouraged vigilance.
"In my own life, the healing only comes from doing something. You can’t undo what has been done, but do something to make the present and the future better," he said.
Tuesday, December 13, 2016
The irrationality of faith shaming Catholics can improve our country’s discourse by modeling charitable dialogue with all people
Timothy P. O'Malley OSV Newsweekly
Like many Americans (at least those who tend to avoid HGTV), I had no idea who Chip and Joanna Gaines were. But Buzzfeed’s Kate Aurthur did.
On Nov. 29, she published the sort of blog-like post that appears often in the digital age. The gossipy piece suggested that because the Gaineses belong to an evangelical church that does not support same-sex marriage that they may be intolerant toward gay and lesbian couples wanting to appear on their show, “Fixer Upper.”
This article was a specimen of poor journalism. Aurthur didn’t talk to the Gaineses. She didn’t conduct an investigation into whether HGTV has policies that exclude gay and lesbian couples from certain shows.
But composing an excellent piece of journalism was never her intention. She wanted to write an article that generated hits for Buzzfeed. And she, like many journalists of a particular generation, sought to advance a cause.
She wanted to expose what she saw as bigotry among a mildly famous couple. The Gaineses would either have to admit that they did not support same-sex marriage, potentially losing their jobs in the process. Or, they would be forced to join the side of same-sex marriage advocates, distancing themselves from their evangelical church.
This kind of public shaming doesn’t even need to involve religion. In 2014, the CEO of the Mozilla software company, Brendan Eich, stepped down after it was revealed that he had donated money to support Proposition 8, the ballot initiative and constitutional amendment that formerly banned same-sex marriage in California. Strictly speaking, Eich never revealed the reason that he had supported this proposition to ban gay marriage in the state. But his departure was precipitated by activists who demanded his resignation, a forced parting that the cultural blogger Andrew Sullivan (himself a gay man) would call “absolutely McCarthyism.”
And it is here that Sullivan properly diagnoses the problems with faith shaming, although he does not use this precise term. Shaming of this sort should not exist within the United States because it is fundamentally a mob mentality rather than the use of persuasion to convince one’s interlocutor of a position.
Catholics should by now be aware that their religious perspective is not fundamentally held by American society. No-fault divorce is the law of the land. Contraception is available wherever one purchases shampoo. Abortion, although increasingly viewed negatively by young adults, remains the law of the land. The death penalty is still practiced in many states with evangelical fervor, and immigrants often are treated as political footballs rather than human beings in need of care. There may be countries where Catholic teaching is applied across the political spectrum, but the United States has never been one of them.
To be a Catholic who supports the Church’s social doctrine in the early 21st-century in the United States is to recognize that one’s arguments, even those based from reason rather than divine revelation, may have little effect upon the public sphere. But this does not mean that a Catholic should be wary of living out a minority position in the world.
But what is a Catholic to do in an era in which such shaming becomes the prominent way that public disagreement is conducted? Here are three strategies that a Catholic might employ in this context:
1) Reason and revelation: The United States is not a nation that places religious knowing at the heart of its political life. Thus, if a Catholic wants to engage in public discourse against abortion or same-sex marriage, the argument cannot begin from claims of divine revelation. For example, the Catholic argument against abortion is often dismissed by opponents as “forcing Catholic faith” upon the country. But such an argument does not emerge solely out of revelation as the doctrine of the Trinity does. A Catholic who contemplates the creation of the human being in the image and likeness of God will see the dignity of every person. But this human dignity should be recognizable by all people of good will. It becomes harder to dismiss a position in the public sphere as “simply one’s faith” if a Catholic develops a reasonable account for why this position is held. Revelation itself can in fact purify our reason so that we can begin to see the rationality of creation anew.
2) Charity and disagreement: Public shaming, including faith shaming, seems to presume that those who hold a minority position are intellectually inferior, angry people, who seek to get their way no matter the cost. Catholics can solidify this assumption in the public’s minds by presenting Catholic teaching in a militant way. But this is a fundamentally non-Catholic approach to public engagement. One’s interlocutor is never an enemy. He or she must be treated with charity, with love. One must strive to understand the point of the person who disagrees with you, even recognizing where he or she is coming from. This is not relativism. Nor is it simply a practical strategy for a minority religious community to survive. Instead, it is the heart of evangelization, where every human encounter should be filled with the love of Jesus himself.
3) Prudence and martyrdom: We’ve all met people who have never backed away from a fight of any sort. But this is a bad strategy for evangelization. The patron saint of Catholics in modern American public life should be St. Thomas More. St. Thomas, as chancellor to the king of England, did not enter the court and castigate the king for his separation from Rome. He remained Catholic but sought to conduct his position in a way that was honorable to his own love of England, together with his commitment to the Church. He resigned from the court when the Church of England separated from Rome, but again, he kept to himself. Only when he was asked to take an oath of loyalty to the recently crowned Queen Anne Boleyn and to King Henry VIII as head of the Church of England did he publicly reveal his position, a decision that resulted in his martyrdom.
At the same time, there may be an occasion when Catholics must recognize that losing is actually winning. Martyrdom need not be sought after lustily, especially for those of us with families to care for. But, at times, we will be forced to express our minority position in a public way that could result in the loss of friends, of jobs, and of public standing in the world.
If a Trump administration, for example, requires that every one of us refuse to house the immigrant, we may need to step forward and offer our no. If the Church is required to marry same-sex couples or risk losing their tax exempt status, then the status must be given up.
But until then, we must fight a culture of public shaming, faith or otherwise, by living in solidarity even with those with whom we disagree. In the end, that will be more evangelizing than anything else we could do. To re-introduce rational discourse and friendship to the public sphere, making such shaming the McCarthyism of our time.
Like many Americans (at least those who tend to avoid HGTV), I had no idea who Chip and Joanna Gaines were. But Buzzfeed’s Kate Aurthur did.
On Nov. 29, she published the sort of blog-like post that appears often in the digital age. The gossipy piece suggested that because the Gaineses belong to an evangelical church that does not support same-sex marriage that they may be intolerant toward gay and lesbian couples wanting to appear on their show, “Fixer Upper.”
This article was a specimen of poor journalism. Aurthur didn’t talk to the Gaineses. She didn’t conduct an investigation into whether HGTV has policies that exclude gay and lesbian couples from certain shows.
But composing an excellent piece of journalism was never her intention. She wanted to write an article that generated hits for Buzzfeed. And she, like many journalists of a particular generation, sought to advance a cause.
She wanted to expose what she saw as bigotry among a mildly famous couple. The Gaineses would either have to admit that they did not support same-sex marriage, potentially losing their jobs in the process. Or, they would be forced to join the side of same-sex marriage advocates, distancing themselves from their evangelical church.
Bringing shame
This cycle of “faith shaming” has been performed a number of times in recent years. In Indiana, an interview by a local news station about a pizza place’s refusal, out of religious principles, to cater a gay wedding resulted in threats to the owners. They shut down the family business because of the coercion they were encountering.This kind of public shaming doesn’t even need to involve religion. In 2014, the CEO of the Mozilla software company, Brendan Eich, stepped down after it was revealed that he had donated money to support Proposition 8, the ballot initiative and constitutional amendment that formerly banned same-sex marriage in California. Strictly speaking, Eich never revealed the reason that he had supported this proposition to ban gay marriage in the state. But his departure was precipitated by activists who demanded his resignation, a forced parting that the cultural blogger Andrew Sullivan (himself a gay man) would call “absolutely McCarthyism.”
And it is here that Sullivan properly diagnoses the problems with faith shaming, although he does not use this precise term. Shaming of this sort should not exist within the United States because it is fundamentally a mob mentality rather than the use of persuasion to convince one’s interlocutor of a position.
Catholics should by now be aware that their religious perspective is not fundamentally held by American society. No-fault divorce is the law of the land. Contraception is available wherever one purchases shampoo. Abortion, although increasingly viewed negatively by young adults, remains the law of the land. The death penalty is still practiced in many states with evangelical fervor, and immigrants often are treated as political footballs rather than human beings in need of care. There may be countries where Catholic teaching is applied across the political spectrum, but the United States has never been one of them.
To be a Catholic who supports the Church’s social doctrine in the early 21st-century in the United States is to recognize that one’s arguments, even those based from reason rather than divine revelation, may have little effect upon the public sphere. But this does not mean that a Catholic should be wary of living out a minority position in the world.
Force vs. reason
And here is the crucial problem with faith shaming. It seeks to either eliminate those with a minority position from any kind of public role in society or to force them to change their position. It is a fundamentally irrational approach that does not seek to martial arguments. Faith-shaming forces the minority view (even if it’s a large minority) to bend its knee before the majority’s position of power. Faith shaming is simply an ideological use of force and not reason.But what is a Catholic to do in an era in which such shaming becomes the prominent way that public disagreement is conducted? Here are three strategies that a Catholic might employ in this context:
1) Reason and revelation: The United States is not a nation that places religious knowing at the heart of its political life. Thus, if a Catholic wants to engage in public discourse against abortion or same-sex marriage, the argument cannot begin from claims of divine revelation. For example, the Catholic argument against abortion is often dismissed by opponents as “forcing Catholic faith” upon the country. But such an argument does not emerge solely out of revelation as the doctrine of the Trinity does. A Catholic who contemplates the creation of the human being in the image and likeness of God will see the dignity of every person. But this human dignity should be recognizable by all people of good will. It becomes harder to dismiss a position in the public sphere as “simply one’s faith” if a Catholic develops a reasonable account for why this position is held. Revelation itself can in fact purify our reason so that we can begin to see the rationality of creation anew.
2) Charity and disagreement: Public shaming, including faith shaming, seems to presume that those who hold a minority position are intellectually inferior, angry people, who seek to get their way no matter the cost. Catholics can solidify this assumption in the public’s minds by presenting Catholic teaching in a militant way. But this is a fundamentally non-Catholic approach to public engagement. One’s interlocutor is never an enemy. He or she must be treated with charity, with love. One must strive to understand the point of the person who disagrees with you, even recognizing where he or she is coming from. This is not relativism. Nor is it simply a practical strategy for a minority religious community to survive. Instead, it is the heart of evangelization, where every human encounter should be filled with the love of Jesus himself.
3) Prudence and martyrdom: We’ve all met people who have never backed away from a fight of any sort. But this is a bad strategy for evangelization. The patron saint of Catholics in modern American public life should be St. Thomas More. St. Thomas, as chancellor to the king of England, did not enter the court and castigate the king for his separation from Rome. He remained Catholic but sought to conduct his position in a way that was honorable to his own love of England, together with his commitment to the Church. He resigned from the court when the Church of England separated from Rome, but again, he kept to himself. Only when he was asked to take an oath of loyalty to the recently crowned Queen Anne Boleyn and to King Henry VIII as head of the Church of England did he publicly reveal his position, a decision that resulted in his martyrdom.
Prudent engagement
Catholics should follow the prudence of St. Thomas More in their own public life. Not every political position that one has should be expressed on Facebook. Not every social teaching that one upholds should be blasted out on Twitter. No one has an obligation to put one’s conscience upon display for all to see.At the same time, there may be an occasion when Catholics must recognize that losing is actually winning. Martyrdom need not be sought after lustily, especially for those of us with families to care for. But, at times, we will be forced to express our minority position in a public way that could result in the loss of friends, of jobs, and of public standing in the world.
If a Trump administration, for example, requires that every one of us refuse to house the immigrant, we may need to step forward and offer our no. If the Church is required to marry same-sex couples or risk losing their tax exempt status, then the status must be given up.
But until then, we must fight a culture of public shaming, faith or otherwise, by living in solidarity even with those with whom we disagree. In the end, that will be more evangelizing than anything else we could do. To re-introduce rational discourse and friendship to the public sphere, making such shaming the McCarthyism of our time.
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