I’m sure you all are thinking, “Eric isn’t blogging much anymore, so how can I get my fix of his writing?” Well, if you are a fan of delayed gratification (and who isn’t?), you can now pre-order my next book, Holiness for Everyone, and it will be shipped to you in just a few short months (i.e. March 2012). You can buy it either from me (a signed copy) or from Amazon (boring non-signed copy).

What is this book about? I’m glad you asked! From the back cover:

God intends nothing less than sainthood for you!

The early Church held that all believers could achieve holiness. Over time this conviction was largely forgotten. Sainthood seemed to be an honor only intended for a select few among the priests and religious.

Eric Sammons tells how twentieth century Spanish priest—and canonized saint—Josemaría Escrivá, the founder of Opus Dei, recovered the message of the universal call to holiness.

Declared “the saint of ordinary life” by Pope John Paul II, St. Josemaría developed a spirituality directed toward the sanctity of every man and woman. His legacy is the belief that each of us can, by God’s grace, achieve holiness through the course of our ordinary life and work.

The heart of Sammons’ practical guide to the spiritual life is a detailed examination of the steps in St. Josemaría’s thoughtful plan for building a saintly life in spite of your hectic work and home life – in a world filled with distractions and temptations.

Strive for your own personal holiness as you implement your daily plan to:

• Be a Contemplative in the Midst of a Busy World
• Live a Life of Prayer
• Recognize the Presence of God
• Make a Plan of Life
• Make Your Work a Way to Heaven

Holiness for Everyone! will inspire you as it sets your feet on the path to sainthood.

“Eric Sammons shows that St. Josemaría has recovered the most powerful truth of classic Christianity and restated it in a way that is compelling for men and women of our time.”
From the Foreword by Scott Hahn

Pre-order your copy now!

In the December 11th edition of OSV Newsweekly, I wrote an article on welcoming estranged Catholic back to the Church:

As Christmas approaches, there is one thing we can be as sure of seeing as Santa Claus and incessant ads for holiday deals: full Catholic churches. As predictable as the swallows returning to San Juan Capistrano, Catholics of all stripes return to their parish every Christmas, many visiting for the first time since the previous Easter. The Catholics in attendance at a typical Christmas Mass run the gamut from daily Mass communicants to irregularly attending families to those who are estranged from the Church but come out of familial obligation.

As practicing Catholics, what can we and our parishes do to reach out to those who are estranged from or perhaps just uninterested in the Catholic Church? While this question has many possible answers, it will be helpful to review some basic principles that should form the foundation of any outreach to lapsed Catholics.

Continue reading…

Also, be sure to read the sidebar for the article titled “The Mercy of God” – it is a great story of God’s great love for us!

In the latest issue of OSV Newsweekly, I examine the adulation given to Steve Jobs and compare his life to a true modern-day saint, St. Josemaría Escrivá:

If the secular world had a way to canonize someone, then surely the recent death of Apple founder Steve Jobs would have caused a hasty completion of that process. Jobs was one of the most revered businessmen of our time, and the ubiquity of Apple’s “i”-products — the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad — made him a cultural phenomenon, too. After his death, there was such an outpouring of grief and adulation from all corners of the world that one could not help but recall the worldwide reaction to Pope John Paul II’s death six years ago.

In many ways, the cultural status Jobs attained was unrivaled. Even Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft and his only true rival, does not stir up the passion and cult following that Jobs did. People joke about the “cult of Mac,” but in all seriousness the strong devotion that many people have to Apple’s products and even to Jobs personally is striking.

And, for better or worse, Jobs did change the world. Think about life just a dozen years ago: no iPods, touchscreen smartphones or tablet computers. In just a short time, Jobs was able to push his company to create multiple products that defined their categories and changed the way we interact with music and information. It is not surprising that the secular world recognized Jobs’ greatness.

Continue reading…

The latest issue of OSV Newsweekly includes an article I wrote titled, “How to Handle Awkward Conversations with Family Members.” As the holidays approach, it might be good to prepare ourselves for those inevitable situations in which our way of life conflicts with the way of life of our loved ones:

As my wife and I prepared to leave a family gathering, saying our goodbyes to everyone, one of our young nephews asked, “Well, we’ll see you tomorrow, right?” An awkward pause worthy of the TV show “The Office” followed.

The next day one of our relatives was getting married outside the Church, and we were the only family members not attending. Our extended family had come to an unspoken agreement that there would be no public debates on this topic, deciding that no discussion was better than a heated argument, but, of course, our innocent young relative had no idea of the enactment of this familial policy. We quietly mumbled something to satisfy our nephew and then beat a hasty retreat to our car.

This scene is anything but atypical in Catholic families today. Not uncommon are brothers who proudly announce their vasectomies, cousins who are practicing homosexuals, and adult children who cohabitate before marriage; almost every Catholic has some family member openly defying Church teaching in some area of his life — with no trace of shame or guilt.

Continue reading…

Today is the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, and October is the month of the Rosary. This is a great time to restart our devotion to the Rosary if it has been lax, or to strengthen our resolve if we have been faithfully using this powerful weapon. I wrote an article for my diocesan paper about the Rosary, so I wanted to share it here:

The rosary: its history, use and power

There is perhaps no object more distinctively Catholic than the rosary. Yet many Catholics are no longer personally familiar with this form of prayer. As such, Bishop Frank J. Dewane has called upon our Diocese to rediscover this beautiful heritage and reawaken our love for it. As we celebrate the Month of the Rosary in October, we should take this opportunity to deepen our understanding and appreciation of one of the most common prayers of the Church. Where did we get the rosary? Why do we pray it? Why do some object to the praying of the rosary, claiming that it is unbiblical or antiquated?

Continue reading…

Also, the Rosary had a powerful impact on my own conversion to the Catholic Faith, which you can read about here.

I’ll be moving to Florida next week, and the next few weeks are going to be crazy, so I don’t think I’ll be posting much here (if at all) during that time. And after I begin my new position as the Director of Evangelization for the Diocese of Venice, FL, I’m not sure what my blogging status will be – I hope to blog for the diocese, but it might be a while until I’m settled in. But whatever happens, I’ll let everyone here know.

A couple of links for your perusal in my absence:

• I often reflect on the dangers of getting consumed by today’s technology. Here is a good article about the importance of time alone, away from such technology.
• Two weeks ago I was on Radio Maria discussing my book Who is Jesus Christ? Unlocking the Mystery in the Gospel of Matthew. Here is a podcast of the interview.

Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput has a hard-hitting, insightful column this week on the Archdiocese of Denver website. In it, he challenges us to consider how we spend our free time: do we vegetate in front of the boob tube, or do we meditate on the divine Word of God? Our choice determines who we are:

In Muslim countries like Pakistan, many of the young men begin studying the Koran as soon as they can read. In fact, many of them learn to read using the Koran. They read and discuss the Koran every day, for hours each day, every day of the week until they know it by heart. Many of them can recite whole sections of the Koran without thinking. Little by little, like water dripping on a stone, it shapes their whole view of the world—what’s right and what’s wrong; what’s important and what’s not.

Here in America, we have a similar kind of training. It’s called television.  The typical American spends between three and seven hours a day watching TV and sees well over 2 million commercials in the course of a lifetime.

That’s a form of education. And most of what we see on TV teaches us that buying a lot of products makes us happy; that young is good and old is bad; that we should eat whatever we want but that we also need to be thin; that suffering doesn’t have any meaning; that relationships never last; that most families are dysfunctional; that authority is dangerous; and that religious people are hypocritical.

None of us lives forever. Or rather, all of us live forever, but only for a very short time in this world.  If we lose our money, we can often earn it back.  But if we misuse our time, we can never get it back.  Where we put our time shows the world what we really value and believe. What we really believe shapes our choices.  And our choices shape our eternity.

Muslims didn’t develop their admirable piety in a vacuum.  They borrowed their reverence from Jews and early Christians, who had a profound love for the written Word of God in the Old and New Testaments.  The lesson for us today is simple.  American Catholics have the one true Word of God in the Bible.  If we took just one hour of the time we waste on television every day and used it to study and pray over the Gospels, we’d be fundamentally different people, and our country and our world would be transformed.

We were made for better things than silver and gold.  We’re more than what we own or think we want.  We’re children of God bought back from slavery by the blood of God’s son.  Somebody infinitely good, willingly died to make us free.  That’s how precious we are in the eyes of God.  God loves us infinitely.  That’s the source of our faith and hope.

God’s love is not something anyone can buy.  It’s a free gift.  But it comes with consequences.  If we really believe that God raised his son from the dead in order to raise us along with him, then we need to act like it.  We need to submit our time and our actions to what we claim to believe.  A meaningful life is a life conformed to imperishable things.  And a futile life is a life that puts its time in the wrong places—into things that perish; things that lead us away from conforming our lives to Jesus Christ.

Those are the two options.  We get to choose.

TV is such an accepted part of our culture that such an article appears radical. But the truth is that we have become so enslaved to television that it is difficult to see the wisdom in Archbishop Chaput’s words. What is especially true about his article is when he says that what we do shapes who we are. Almost four years ago I got rid of my television, and it was only after that act that I realized what an impact TV had on me. It shaped me and formed me in ways I would never have imagined.

For example, recently I went to a movie at the theater and saw the inevitable commercials before the main feature. Of course some were offensive, but what struck me was how inane and devoid of any value they all were. They presented the world in a way completely at odds with reality, yet everyone simply imbibes them with little or no thought – and I would never had noticed this myself if not for the fact that I almost never see commercials anymore. This is what Archbishop Chaput means when he says that TV is a form of education – it forms how we look at the world, even when we don’t realize it.

So what do we want forming us – TV or the Word of God?

Today we celebrate the feast of St. Benedict, the founder of Western monasticism. St. Benedict is most famous for organizing monks into a community, thus establishing the basic form in which all Western monks have lived ever since then. But St. Benedict originally wanted to be a solitary monk – i.e. a hermit – not someone who lived in community. It was only after other men followed him that he begin to establish an order for them to live in community.

That got me thinking about the difference between solitude and community, and which is the calling which leads us closer to God.

• On the one hand, many saints, such as St. Benedict and St. John of the Cross, craved solitude so that they could be alone with God – with no distractions and nothing to keep them from intimacy in prayer. Compare that to today’s culture which inundates us with noise and constant chatter, thus preventing us from entering into real meditation and contemplation.

• On the other hand, we are to be the one Body of Christ, a community which works and prays together in order to glorify God and be with him in heaven. Catholicism does not value the “lone ranger” who pulls himself up by his own bootstraps – it sees us as a united people who pray to “Our Father”, not “My Father”. Compare that with today’s culture which glorifies individualism and preaches the doctrine of self-sufficiency.

So which is it? Are we to strive for solitude or community? Each seem to have both their strengths and their dangers. I think the solution is found in communion, which is the proper integration and ordering of solitude and communion.

Communion always begins with our union with God. No human gathering can be a true union unless it is first based in union with God. This is why the saints craved solitude, because they wanted to strengthen their communion with God. This is also why the world screams so loudly today, to distract us from this communion with a flurry of the irrelevant.

From this union with God flows communion with our fellow men. A merely human group – such as the Elks club or a political party – might have a certain value, but ultimately it is meaningless without being based in our one common Father. Those who think that they can make it to heaven on their own are just kidding themselves. We need each other, but we can only help ourselves in proportion to our own communion with God.

This need for communion is universal across all vocations. The contemplative nun might spend eight hours in personal prayer a day, and a stay-at-home mom might only get in 30 minutes in a day, but they both need to base all their work on a deep and personal union – a communion – with God. Likewise, all of their dealings with others – whether it be other nuns, their children, or those in their parish – will only be fruitful and unitive if it is based on this communion with God.

God, in His great mercy, has given us a beautiful way to strengthen both types of communion – the Eucharist, which of course we call “communion.” In the Eucharist, we are personally and directly united to our Lord in the deepest way possible in this life. And in the Eucharist, we are also mystically united with our fellow brothers and sisters who receive this great sacrament. What a great gift God has given us!

No matter our vocation, let us pray for a deep communion with God which will then lead to a deep communion with others.

St. Benedict, pray for us!

I am very excited to announce my next book:

Holiness for Everyone
The Practical Spirituality of St. Josemaría Escrivá
Foreword by Scott Hahn
Spring 2012, Our Sunday Visitor

Holiness for Everyone is a guidebook which gives practical advice on how anyone can become a saint. Since I am not a saint, however, I cannot write such a guidebook on my own, so I instead use the teachings of an actual saint – St. Josemaría Escrivá – as the basis for the book.

St. Josemaría

When Catholics hear mention of St. Josemaría, too many think, “Oh, he’s the Opus Dei saint,” and then relegate his life and teachings as applicable only to Opus Dei members. What a shame. As you will see in Holiness for Everyone, St. Josemaría developed over many years of work and prayer among laypeople a spirituality whose goal is the sanctity of every man and woman. He insisted that every person could, with the grace of God, achieve holiness through ordinary life and work. In other words, he did not intend his spirituality only for an elite group, or for those separate from the world, or for a select subset of laypeople. He intended it for all people, no matter their state in life.

The spirituality of St. Josemaría is for everyone – laborer, executive, mother, teacher – regardless of your state in life, the teachings of St. Josemaría can help you draw closer to God in ordinary life and grow in holiness. In this book I hope to make St. Josemaría’s teachings accessible to non-Opus Dei members so that they can benefit from them just as so many members of the apostolate he founded have for decades. St. Josemaría is a canonized saint of the entire Catholic Church, not just one segment of it.

I was honored to have Scott Hahn, a member of Opus Dei, write the foreword to the book. Here is an excerpt of his foreword:

My family within the family is called Opus Dei (Latin for “The Work of God), which was founded by St. Josemaria Escriva in 1928. The teachings of that saint are the subject of this wonderful book by Eric Sammons. I myself have written a book about “The Work.” It’s titled Ordinary Work, Extraordinary Grace: My Journey in Opus Dei, and it’s a personal account, an insider’s view, though addressed to anyone who might be interested or curious.

I could not have written a book like Eric’s. Perhaps I could not have written a book as useful as Eric’s, for he sees my family inheritance from a different perspective. He is not a member of Opus Dei — though he has studied its spirit and learned from it — and so he sees it from the outside. Sometimes that means he sees it more clearly and more attentively and more appreciatively. He has helped me to gain a better appreciation for the family life to which God has called me.

Eric knows that the heart of family life is the parent-child bond. In natural families, that heart is not always healthy. In no natural family is it perfect. But the heart of Opus Dei is something greater. Opus Dei draws its life from the fact of divine filiation — the fact that all Christians become children of God through baptism. That doctrine took hold of St. Josemaria Escriva as God inspired him to spell out what it means for children of God to live in a material world…

Eric Sammons shows that St. Josemaria has recovered the most powerful truth of classic Christianity and restated it in a way that is compelling for men and women (and children) of our time.

And to give a taste for the book, here is a detailed Table of Contents:

• Introduction
• Called to Be Saints
• A Modern-Day Saint
• Laying the Foundations
  • Abba! Father!
    • Our Father God
    • Heirs to a King
    • Sons in the Son
  • Free to Love
    • Created Free
    • Limits Lead to Freedom
    • Many Paths to Holiness
    • “The Truth Will Make You Free”
    • Free to Surrender
    • Free to Start Anew
  • Ambitious for Holiness
    • “Zeal for Your House Consumes Me”
    • Excellence in All Things
    • Fighting Lukewarmness
    • Hating Sin
• Building a Saintly Life
  • Be a Contemplative in the Midst of the World
    • Live a Life of Prayer
    • Recognize the Presence of God
    • Make a Plan of Life
  • Make Your Work A Way to Heaven
    • Offer Your Work to God
    • Make the Secular Sacred
    • Take Flight from Fantasy
    • Work Out Your Salvation
  • Live in the Family of God
    • Follow the Pope
    • Love Mary
    • Honor St. Joseph
  • Proclaim Christ to the World
    • Be a Faithful Friend
    • Be an Apostle Not an Activist
    • Be Transformed
• Conclusion: “This is God’s Will for You, Your Sanctification”

I hope and pray that this book will help many people to grow in holiness and become what we are all meant to be: saints.

Last Sunday, one of my friends, Dr. Nathan Schmiedicke, was a guest on Fr. Benedict Groeschel’s TV show and they discussed a topic dear to my heart: how Catholics read the Bible. Nathan took as his starting point a question asked by one of his former professors: When did we stop reading the Scriptures like the Fathers read them?

When you have time, watch the entire show – it is well worth it.

In honor of the 4th of July, I want to share with you an interview with a top American history scholar, Dr. Raymond Fitzmyer:

Divine Life: Happy 4th of July! What are you doing to celebrate the birthday of our country?

Raymond Fitzmyer: Well, of course nothing really happened on July 4th, 1776 – it is just a date the early American community later chose to represent their feelings of tolerance towards others.

DL: So I guess you are not doing fireworks?

RF: No, I’ll just be listening to NPR as I usually do most evenings.

DL: So you are an expert on the Declaration of Independence. What do you think is the greatest strength of Jefferson’s famous work?

RF: First of all, Thomas Jefferson didn’t write the Declaration of Independence. It was written by the Jeffersonian community over the span of about 50 years and didn’t take its final form until about 1830 CE. In fact, some of the latest critical scholarship is even questioning if there ever was such a person as “Thomas Jefferson”. Most likely, the figure of Jefferson simply represented the early American community’s desire to be tolerant of England.

DL: Well, what do you think is the greatest strength of the “Jeffersonian community’s” famous work?

RF: The Declaration of Independence was formed in an ancient culture, so of course it contains all the biases and antiquated notions of that ancient culture. For example, it talks about “truths” being “self-evident”, which we all today know is simply not true. Truths are based on our perceptions, and what is true for you might not be true for me, except of course the truth of the statement I just made, which is always true. We now understand that nothing is “self-evident” to anyone, except for the self-evidence that there is nothing self-evident. Furthermore, the Declaration speaks about a reliance on “Divine Providence”, which reflects the superstitious culture in which the early Americans lived. We know today that our only reliance is on government, not some figure in the sky looking out for us.

DL: So, is there anything you actually like about the Declaration of Independence?

RF: Of course, of course! After all, I’ve spent my whole academic career studying it! I think the Declaration of Independence is a fine example of pre-modern American literature.

DL: That’s it?

RF: Well, we must remember that humankind has advanced greatly since the time of the first Americans, and there is very little we can learn from those primitive peoples. But their writings do make for fine symposium topics as well as good subjects for journal publications.

DL: Thank you for your time, Dr. Fitzmyer. Is there anything else you’d like to add?

RF: Yes, I’d like to tell everyone that I have a new book coming out about the Constitution. In this book, I prove that the Constitution actually wasn’t completed in its final redacted form until after the Civil War and was the result of the Northern community’s desire to justify their actions towards the South. It’s sure to get me on TV…I mean, it’s sure to advance American scholarship greatly.

A few items that might be of interest:

• Last week was the Orientale Lumen conference, which I was unfortunately not able to attend. However, many of the talks are now available online over at Ancient Faith Radio. I particularly recommend the talk by Sr. Vassa Larin.
• Fellow blogger Brandon Vogt has been giving away books, and this week’s giveways are personal favorites of mine: St. Josemaría Escrivá’s The Way, The Forge, and Furrow. Go there to get a chance to get some great books for free!
• This week’s OSV Newsweekly includes an article I wrote called Liturgical Attitude Adjustment. It is intended to help Catholics get the most out of their participation in the Mass.
• Finally, Jennifer Fulwiler over at Conversion Diary has been running a series of posts by guest bloggers on each word of the Our Father. I contributed today’s post on the word “us”.

Also, happy Feast of Sts. Peter and Paul!

Today is the feast of St. Irenaeus, the 2nd century bishop of Lyons and the first great Western theologian of the Church. St. Irenaeus had to defend and explain the Faith in the face of many attacks, both internally and externally.

One of the greatest issues facing the 2nd century Church was how to unify the various apostolic traditions within the Church. There were some who felt that one or another particular apostle was the “true” apostle who was most faithful to Christ’s teachings and that only he should be followed. For example, the heretic Marcion in the middle of the 2nd century taught that only St. Paul was to be trusted, and that the other apostles had diverged from the deposit of faith. Marcion even went so far as to create a biblical canon that only included Paul’s letters and the Gospel of Luke, which of course was written by Paul’s faithful companion.

But the tension between the followers of the various apostles occurred within the Church as well. We see it in St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, when the apostle scolds the Corinthian Christians for claiming to be followers of Apollos or of Paul (1 Cor. 3:4). This continued in the 2nd century with the Quartodeciman controversy. This was the debate between the Church of Rome and the Churches in Asia Minor over the dating of Easter. The Church of Rome, following the Petrine example, always celebrated Easter on a Sunday. But in Asia Minor, Easter was celebrated according to the date of Passover on the Jewish calendar, even if it was not a Sunday, and this was a practice they inherited from John the Apostle. Each was an apostolic practice, and the debate threatened to throw the Church into its first schism.

It is in this environment that St. Irenaeus served as bishop. The saint was a firm defender of apostolic diversity – that the Church should assimilate and accept all legitimate apostolic practices and teachings. He convinced the Pope not to excommunicate the Christians in Asia Minor over the dating of Easter, arguing that it was not a matter over which the Church should be split. He also advocated the acceptance of the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, rather than only accepting one Gospel or attempting to harmonize the four into one single writing. As he writes in his great work, Against the Heresies,

For, after our Lord rose from the dead, [the apostles] were invested with power from on high when the Holy Spirit came down [upon them], were filled from all [His gifts], and had perfect knowledge: they departed to the ends of the earth, preaching the glad tidings of the good things [sent] from God to us, and proclaiming the peace of heaven to men, who indeed do all equally and individually possess the Gospel of God. Matthew also issued a written Gospel among the Hebrews in their own dialect, while Peter and Paul were preaching at Rome, and laying the foundations of the Church. After their departure, Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, did also hand down to us in writing what had been preached by Peter. Luke also, the companion of Paul, recorded in a book the Gospel preached by him. Afterwards, John, the disciple of the Lord, who also had leaned upon His breast, did himself publish a Gospel during his residence at Ephesus in Asia. (Against Heresies, Book III, Chapter 1)

As you can see, St. Irenaeus accepted each Gospel as apostolic and each one as a legitimate retelling of the story of Jesus. In many ways, it would be easier to only accept one apostolic strain or to harmonize them into a single composition. But this would not be faithful to the fullness of the Gospel message. Each written Gospel – and each apostolic witness – tells us something different about God’s plan of salvation in Christ, and the Church would be much poorer if not for the work of men like St. Irenaeus to preserve the totality of the apostolic preaching.

St. Irenaeus, pray for us!

A reverent and inspiring flash mob, proclaiming Jesus’ presence throughout the Bible and in the Eucharist:

Donatello's St. John the Baptist

Today is the Solemnity of the Birth of St. John the Baptist – one of only three birthdays we celebrate on the liturgical calendar. John is the voice which proclaims the Word. The great Scripture scholar Origen once wrote about the deep unity between John and his cousin Jesus:

[A]s the Saviour is speech, John is voice. John himself invites me to take this view of him, for to those who asked who he was, he answered, “I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare the way of the Lord! make His paths straight!” . . . A voice must be perceived with the ears if the mind is afterwards to receive the speech which the voice indicates. Hence, John is, in point of his birth, a little older than Christ, for our voice comes to us before our speech. But John also points to Christ; for speech is brought forward by the voice. . . . In a word, when John points out Christ, it is man pointing out God, the Saviour incorporeal, the voice pointing out the Word. (Commentary on John 26)

Today we are called to be the “voice” which proclaims the Word and prepares others to receive him. St. John the Baptist, pray for us!