This video is a few years old, but it deserves to be remembered. It is a music video for a rap song by Nick Cannon, whom I have heard is pretty popular (I’ve never heard of him other than this song).

It is a beautiful modern testimony of thanksgiving from a son to his mother for giving him life. Some of the lyrics:

Hopefully you’ll make the right decision
And dont go through with the Knife incision
But it’s hard to make the right move
When you in high school
How you have to work all day and take night school
Hopping off da bus when the rain is pouring
What you want morning sickness or the sickness of mourning

So many women find themselves in the same situation as Mr. Cannon’s mother – let us pray that they would be touched to give their children life so that they don’t have to go through the “sickness of mourning.”

Our Lady of Guadalupe, pray for us!

Last Friday, the auxiliary bishop of Denver, James Conley, addressed the National Catholic Bible Conference. Bishop Conley is the one bishop to whom I have a personal connection: in the early 90s he was the chaplain for a prolife group I worked for. I remember him as a great priest (and strongly prolife), and I’m sure he is a wonderful bishop.

Bishop Conley had some great words for us to contemplate:

“Too few of us think of God’s Word as exciting or newsworthy enough to be sought out every day. And therefore too many of us miss the most newsworthy event in life – the experience of God, the creator of the universe, speaking to us through His Word.”

“This means that we can’t approach Scripture as if it were something that needs to be interpreted by us, but rather quite the opposite — we need to let Scripture interpret us, our lives, and our world. To read the world in light of Scripture, as opposed to Scripture in light of the world, is the hallmark of a Christian reading of the Word of God.”

“The best way to evangelize is to burn, like St. Francis did, for the love of God. To sustain that kind of zeal you need constant contact with the fire of God’s Word.”

We need to pray that Catholics will burn for the love of God, and that our zeal will lead us to evangelization. Reading the Scriptures is one of primary ways in which to inflame that burning love.

St. Francis, pray for us!

The Year of St. Paul is now ended, but on today’s feast of the great apostles, I’d like to reflect a bit on St. Peter.

Often when I am at confession the priest will tell me that it is “good” that I have sinned. Of course, sins are never “good,” but the Lord can bring good out of them. Even the gravest sin – Adam’s original sin, has led to good, as the Easter Exultet proclaims:

O happy fault,
O necessary sin of Adam,
which gained for us so great a Redeemer!

Adam’s sin is a “happy fault” because without it, the Incarnation would not have been necessary.

Why, however, is my sin “good”? What the priest means is that my sin has made clear something I often try to deny: that I am helpless at being good or righteous without the Lord. My sins are proof of what happens when I depend upon my own strength: I am a complete failure. Only by depending upon the Lord can I ever hope to be holy.

Caravaggio, The Denial of St. Peter

This brings us back to Peter. It is clear from the Gospels that Peter was a headstrong, prideful man. If he had remained in his pride he could have been a horrible pope: lording his authority and status over others. But his threefold denial – which was liturgically proclaimed every year before Easter – reminded him of his weaknesses and led him to humility.

There is nothing we do that the Lord cannot turn to good, even the times we reject him and his love.

St. Peter, pray for us!

Today is the Feast of Sts. Peter and Paul. I always find it remarkable that the two great apostles don’t get their own feast day, but must share it with one another. But this is as it should be: their mission was a shared one and each was intricately bound to the other. In the early Church, the bishop of Rome was most often considered the successor to both Peter and Paul, not just Peter, as both apostles “founded” the Church in Rome by their blood. For example, St. Irenaeus wrote:

Since, however, it would be very tedious, in such a volume as this, to reckon up the successions of all the Churches, we do put to confusion all those who, in whatever manner, whether by an evil self-pleasing, by vainglory, or by blindness and perverse opinion, assemble in unauthorized meetings; [we do this, I say,] by indicating that tradition derived from the apostles, of the very great, the very ancient, and universally known Church founded and organized at Rome by the two most glorious apostles, Peter and Paul; as also [by pointing out] the faith preached to men, which comes down to our time by means of the successions of the bishops. For it is a matter of necessity that every Church should agree with this Church, on account of its pre- eminent authority that is, the faithful everywhere, inasmuch as the apostolical tradition has been preserved continuously by those [faithful men] who exist everywhere. (Against Heresies, Book III, Chapter 3)

The Pope, therefore, was to continue the work of both apostles – as both the administrative head of the Church and the one who most promoted missions to all the nations. The best popes throughout history were able to do both tasks successfully.

A great book that explores both Peter and Paul’s influence on the Church of Rome is Peter and Paul in the Church of Rome: The Ecumenical Potential of a Forgotten Perspective by William Farmer and Roch Kereszty (unfortunately, it is now out of print). Kereszty is a Cistercian priest and Farmer was a Methodist when the book was written, but he later became a Catholic.

Sts. Peter and Paul, pray for us!

My quixotic campaign against Twitter has taken a serious blow. I just found out that John Michael Talbot is on Twitter. John Michael freakin’ Talbot. The man who lives as a monk. The man who wrote “The Lessons of St. Francis: How to Bring Simplicity and Spirituality into your Daily Life.” The man who has albums with names like “Meditations from Solitude” and “Quiet Pathways.”

Something tells me that I’m losing this battle…

Last night Catholic blogger and author Mark Shea gave a talk at our parish on “How I Got This Way,” which included his conversion story as well as some teaching about how the Catholic Church contains the fullness of truth, and thus comes under attack from every angle by those who accept only bits and pieces of the truth.

I organized this event and talked my pastor into having Mark speak here. But I have to admit, I was a bit nervous beforehand. I knew that Mark was a great writer and that he was informative, funny and devoted to the Church on his blog. But I had never heard him speak or met him personally, so I had no idea if he would be any good speaking to a crowd. I had images in my head of some introverted geek who mumbled and said “um…” a lot. Fortunately, my fears were completely unfounded: Mark is a great speaker – even more funny in person than on his blog – and I would highly recommend him to anyone looking for a Catholic speaker. I had numerous people approach me after his talk to thank me for bringing him to the parish.

I also got to spend some time with Mark and found him to be a great, down-to-earth, guy. It appears that what you see on the blog is really who he is in “real life.”

Mark Shea and me

I wish Christians would lead the charge in returning to this type of lifestyle:

Living without the plastic cushion: Why some people cut up their credit cards and live a cash-only lifestyle

In 2005, [Brough] took drastic measures. She decided to sell her $350,000 home, pay off all the family’s debt, and move to lower-cost Cary, N.C., where she was able to buy a house for $164,000 house in cash.

Since then it’s been cash and debit cards only for Brough, 50, who has no debt of any kind.

How does she do it? She buys secondhand furniture and electronics, gets her husband’s medicines from Canada at cut rates, has a $10,000 emergency fund and thinks long and hard before she opens up her wallet.

“When you use cash you think about what your needs are because you’re paying a big chunk of money at once,” she said.

This concept is probably a foreign one to many Americans who are addicted to buying almost everything on credit. But believe it or not, it is possible to survive and thrive without depending on credit cards. In fact, Brough is part of a small but growing debt-free movement, some joining because of personal or economic hardships, and others just looking to simplify their lives.

It’s all about economic empowerment. “Times are tough and people want to take control of their finances,” says Denis Cauvier, a financial psychologist and co-author of “The ABCs of Making Money.”

“When people look at what’s happening, all the ups and down of the stock market, housing prices, people getting laid off, they get a sense they are out of control,” Cauvier says.

As a result, “we’re seeing a huge rise in the use of cash and debit cards,” he says. “It’s a positive way of gaining self control.”

The Scriptures warn repeatedly of the dangers of money – and one of the greatest dangers is that money and possessions quickly control you. This appears to be even more true of “plastic” money:

“The thing that hit me the hardest was that plastic has no emotion to it. Whip it out, use it, done,” he says. “Cash is harder to part with.”

Businesses have worked endlessly to make it easier and easier for a customer to part with his money. Contrary to what the commercials say, this has not been for our convenience; it has been so that we spend more. It is considerably harder to spend $100 in cash than it is to spend $100 on a credit card, yet it takes just as long to work to earn that amount of money. I think more and more people should consider the “radical” step of cutting up their credit cards, especially if they are controlled by them (and if someone has thousands of dollars of credit card debt, I think it is clear that the card, not the person, is in control).

H/t: Ad Orientem

The big news in the Anglican world is that a group of conservative Anglicans in North America have established a new communion. Called the Anglican Church in North America, they hope to be recognized by the worldwide Anglican Communion. It has already garnered some headlines:

• Rick Warren, the seemingly ubiquitous “Purpose Driven Life” pastor, has expressed his support for these Anglicans.
• More significantly, Metropolitan Jonah, primate of the Orthodox Church in America, already called for talks to establish full communion between his Church and this new communion.

Whereas I sympathize with these Anglicans (I can’t imagine how a traditional Christian could stay in today’s Episcopal church), I can’t help but feel sadness that yet another Christian body has been created, when it was Christ’s express wish that we “may be one.” For almost 500 years the solution to discord within Christianity has been schism, which, instead of modeling the unity of the Trinity, reflects a hellish discord. Do we really need yet another Christian body, or could not these Anglicans find an existing Church or communion to which they could join?

I also don’t think anything will come of Metropolitan Jonah’s offer, although I commend him for making the attempt. Even though they are much more conservative than the Episcopal church, this new body still allows some unacceptable practices and beliefs (at least from an Orthodox or Catholic standpoint), such as women priests (by diocesan choice) and Calvinism.

Let us all pray for unity within all of Christendom.

In a few hours I leave to pick up über-blogger and Catholic author Mark Shea at the airport. He will be speaking at my parish (St. John Neumann in Gaithersburg, MD) tonight at 7pm. His topic will be: “How I Got This Way: From suburban pagan to college Evangelical to adult Catholic.” If you live in the area (i.e. Montgomery County, MD & DC), please make an effort to attend!

If you can’t make it, or if you want to get in the mood for tonight, listen to an interview of Mark with Carl Olsen at Ignatius Press here.

This week we celebrate the feast days of two men who were martyred – both beheaded – for defending the sanctity of marriage.

Monday the 22nd was the feast day of St. Thomas More, who refused to support the invalid marriage between King Henry and Anne Boleyn.

Today, the 24th, is the feast day of St. John the Baptist, who denounced the invalid marriage between the ruler Herod and Herod’s sister-in-law Herodias.

Both of these saints are great examples for our times. We live in an age in which destructive forces – primarily contraception, pornography and easy divorce – have been unleashed against the institution of marriage. It is now considered an accomplishment if a married couple makes it to their 10th anniversary. Yet both St. Thomas More and St. John the Baptist realized how important marriage is to our salvation. It is not an accessory in our path to heaven – it is a vital component on that path. Even those who forsake marriage for a higher calling in their own lives are to be raised within the confines of a loving, stable marriage.

Marriage has been with us since the creation of man and woman, but Christ elevated this natural institution to supernatural levels by making marriage a sacrament. He has infused it with untold graces so that we are given divine assistance in our own marriages. Please pray for all married couples today.

St. Thomas More and St. John the Baptist, pray for us and all marriages!

One of the problems with modern Evangelicalism is the desire to make the Gospel easy to follow. So many Evangelicals wish the entire Gospel message to be reduced to a bumper sticker-level that is easy to understand, easy to accept and easy to follow. But in doing so, they jettison much of what is important in Christianity.

Christianity, however, is a total way of life: it involves a compete giving of one’s life to Christ in body, mind, and soul. This is something that cannot be done in a day and, in fact, it consumes our entire lifetimes.

Luis Palau, a popular Evangelical preacher, falls into the trap of over-simplifying the Gospel:

“Only Christ can give you eternal life. Religion cannot do it. Charitable work will not do it. Good behavior will not do it. Doing communion won’t do it. Reading the Bible won’t do it. Saying your prayers won’t do it. Only Jesus Christ will take you to Heaven if he lives in your heart,” he said.

Let’s look at this more closely:

“Only Christ can give you eternal life.”

A good start, as this is only too true. Christ said that “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” (John 14:6). Yet it is after this that Palau gets off the tracks:

Religion cannot do it.

The Evangelical bug-a-boo: “religion.” Religion, of course, can be used in many ways – it can be an attempt by man to reach God (not a bad thing to attempt, but one fruitless without God’s help) or it can be simply a man-made way to follow other men (never a good thing). But religion at its most fundamental is the way in which man interacts with God, and the Christian religion is one revealed by God as the means to follow Him. As such, religion CAN bring eternal life.

Charitable work will not do it.

Read Matthew 25:31-46 about the sheep and the goats, which Christ concludes by saying, “Then they [the goats] will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.” Clearly feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and welcoming the stranger will impact our attainment of eternal life, or else why would Christ have given us this parable?

Good behavior will not do it.

The story of the Rich Young Man in Matthew 19:16-22 is a bit more nuanced than Palua’s statement. When the young man asks Jesus how he can obtain eternal life, Christ’s first response is “If you want to enter life, obey the commandments.” If being good were unrelated to eternal life, why could Christ have said this?

Doing communion won’t do it.

Jesus would disagree: “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world…I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.” (John 6:51,53).

Reading the Bible won’t do it.

Well, as a Catholic I’m a bit surprised that a Prostant would admit this one, so I’ll concede this point to him. (Although reading the Bible is a primary means in which we know how to obtain eternal life).

Saying your prayers won’t do it.

How can we “receive Jesus” except by praying? How can we know Christ except by conversing with him? I know that he means mindlessly repeating our dinnertime and bedtime prayers, but I think it is never a good idea to denigrate the most important activity we can engage in – prayer.

Only Jesus Christ will take you to Heaven if he lives in your heart

Again, this is true – it is only Christ who can take you to heaven.

Palau’s problem is one that most who do not have the fullness of the Faith fall into: they separate and divide what should not – and cannot – be separated. Palau is right to believe that it is only by following Christ that we can be saved, but following Christ involves our whole being, including: “religion,” charitable work, good behavior, communion, reading the Bible and saying your prayers. Without doing those things, we are not really following Christ and eternal life can elude us.

Let us follow the words of Christ himself when he was asked this question:

And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the law? How do you read?” And he answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have answered right; do this, and you will live.”
(Luke 10:25-27)

Blogging has been a bit light as I have been fighting off a virus. But a few thoughts to ponder:

• Interleague play in baseball is from the devil. What man has kept asunder, Major League Baseball should not join.
• Boromir is my favorite character in all of literature.
• If the Year of the Priest started last Friday, but the Year of St. Paul doesn’t end until next Monday, does that mean we age two years this week? Will this cause some type of Star Trek space-time continuum problem?
• iPhone users can vote for their favorite Bible verses. What is next? Simon Cowell insulting the Book of Numbers?

Also: don’t forget to vote in the Catholic New Media Awards! Voting closes next week!

It is always sad when a Catholic parish closes. Whatever the reasons, it shows that a community can no longer support a vibrant Catholic church in its midst. However, there is no question that changing demographics demands that sometimes a bishop must close parishes. And note who I said must close the parish: a bishop, the only person in Catholic ecclesiology who has the power to do so.

Yet too often we hear of protests against such actions by those who still belong to the closing parish:

Parishioners from churches ordered closed will protest outside Bishop Richard Lennon’s office

Parishioners from at least 10 Catholic churches ordered closed by Bishop Richard Lennon have scheduled a protest march today outside the bishop’s office in downtown Cleveland.

The group, known as “Endangered Catholics,” plans to hand out copies of a statement claiming Lennon’s closing of 50 parishes in the eight-county diocese was an “injustice” to all Catholics.

“It is our bedrock belief that no parish should be closed, suppressed or merged without consent of the parishioners,” the statement reads in part…

“If the bishop can do something this big regardless of what the faithful say, then he can do anything,” said Bob Kloos, a parishioner at St. Peter in downtown Cleveland, one of the churches to be closed.

“We need to challenge this whole thing,” Kloos said. “He’s no more baptized than we are.”

I understand the emotional attachments that one can have for his local parish, but these protesters do not show the slightest understanding of Catholic theology or ecclesiology (and remember, their parish is where they should have learned it). The Church is not a democracy and a bishop has complete authority in his diocese. He does not need consent from anyone – including parishioners – to close a parish or school under his control. This is something a Catholic should know from their earliest catechism.

I cannot also help but note that the reason parishes close is due to declining attendance, declining vocations, and declining contributions: all things that are directly under the responsibility of the laity. If the laity were evangelizing the neighborhood, encouraging religious vocations within each home, and tithing at a responsible rate, I would think that the bishop would be more concerned with opening new parishes rather than closing them. We must first look to ourselves when we see such problems and ask what we can do to resolve them – instead of blaming the bishop for making official what was already evident for years: these neighborhoods cannot support Catholic parishes anymore.

It is possible that Bishop Lennon handled these closings poorly, but no excuse can be given for challenging a bishop’s authority in his diocese. We need to pray for these protestors and the bishop in Cleveland that they might be reconciled and work to build faithful parishes in the future.

Due to the diversity of the participants at the Orientale Lumen conference, one of the first questions asked when you meet another participant is “What Church do you belong to?” I decided this year to ask a follow-up question: “In what tradition did you grow up?” Amazingly, I found only one person (a Roman Catholic) who has remained in the same tradition since birth. Here are some samples of those I met:

• A baptist who became Orthodox last year
• A Roman Catholic who became a Romanian Catholic priest-monk
• Someone who say she grew up “everything” who is now Orthodox
• A Roman Catholic who is now a Ruthenian Catholic seminarian

And of course, Metropolitan Jonah himself was baptized and raised Episcopal before becoming Orthodox in college (and I myself am a convert from Methodism to Roman Catholicism).

This anecdotal evidence is in keeping with larger statistical trends: a recent Pew Study showed that about half of all adult Americans are no longer in the same religious tradition in which they grew up. So the questions arises: Why all the converts?

Obviously, there are many factors, not least of which is the weakening of bonds of family and tradition within our culture. A hundred years ago, it was quite common for someone to live within a 10 mile radius their whole life, and to have contact with few people outside their own religious tradition. This fostered deep bonds in which it was unthinkable to leave the faith of one’s birth.

There is much to lament in regard to the loss of these bonds within our culture, but it is also an opportunity. Many who have not grown up Catholic are more than ever willing to consider Catholicism. Yes, we live in a “consumer” culture in which we pick and choose everything, including our religion. This can lead to a trivialization of sacred things, but it does not have to. As Catholics, we need to work to engage those around us and show them, in our words and deeds, the love that Christ has for them and how they can live and experience that divine love in the Church.

Scripture says that “in all things God works for the good of those who love him” (Romans 8:28). The weakened bonds of our culture do not just have to mean people leaving the Catholic Church – through our efforts, fostered by grace, it can also mean a great influx of new members into the Church.

St. Paul, pray for us!

Just a few weeks after I started this blog back in January, I had visitors from every state in the union except North Dakota. Since that time, I have had thousands of visitors from over 100 countries, yet still no one from North Dakota even accidentaly landed at my blog. I started to wonder: was North Dakota anti-Catholic? Did they not have the Internet yet? What could explain their apparent lack of Catholic taste? I stayed up late every night contemplating such mysteries.

Finally, my mind can be at rest: last week I had not one, but two, visitors from North Dakota!

Welcome to all from the Flickertail State – I hope you enjoy your stay!