Last week I mentioned that I attended a Mass on the memorial of St. John Neumann, our parish’s patron, in which a beautiful image of the saint was solemnly blessed. Here is that image:

St. John Neumann, pray for us!

Today is the start of Ordinary season, when we come off the high of Christmas and everything (liturgical) turns green and “ordinary”. So what is the Gospel reading to start off this season? Well, it is anything but ordinary:

After John had been arrested, Jesus came to Galilee proclaiming the Gospel of God:

“This is the time of fulfillment. The Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the Gospel.”

As he passed by the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting their nets into the sea; they were fishermen. Jesus said to them, “Come after me, and I will make you fishers of men.”

Then they left their nets and followed him. He walked along a little farther and saw James, the son of Zebedee, and his brother John. They too were in a boat mending their nets. Then he called them.

So they left their father Zebedee in the boat along with the hired men and followed him. (Mark 1:14-20)

Although Mark does use rather ordinary language to describe this scene, think about the extraordinary step that these four men – Peter, Andrew, James and John – just took. They left their entire livelihood to take up with an itinerant preacher who, up to this point, had done nothing really spectacular and had no real following. Yet they answered Christ’s call and followed him. We have witnessed much greater works than they had up to this point – but are we following his call?

As our days become more ordinary, let us pray that we might make the extraordinary step each day of Ordinary time of leaving everything behind to follow Christ.

In the early Church, every Christian aspired to be one thing: a martyr. This was considered the logical conclusion of following a man who himself was executed by the State. How better to imitate our Lord? The Church Father Origen was so anxious to be a martyr in his youth that his mother hid his clothes else he run out and be arrested during a persecution that claimed his father’s live.

In every century, even every year, Christianity has had men and women who have testified to the point of shedding blood. 2009 was no different as 37 Christian missionaries were killed.

This week Major League Baseball announced who would be inducted into their Hall of Fame. Here is the 2009 class of the Christian Hall of Fame:

1. Fr Joseph Bertaina
2. Fr Eduardo de la Fuente Serrano
3. Fr Juan Gonzalo Aristizabal Isaza
4. Fr Daniel Matsela Mahula
5. Fr Lionel Sham
6. Fr Révocat Gahimbare
7. Fr Gabriel Fernando Montoya Tamayo
8. Fr Jesús Ariel Jiménez
9. Fr Ramiro Luden
10. Fr Lorenzo Rosebaugh
11. Father Ernst Plöchl
12. Jorge Humberto Echeverri Garro
13. Fr Habacuc Benítez Hernández
14. Oregon Eduardo Benitez
15. Silvestre Gonzalez Cambron
16. Fr Gisley Azevedo
17. Fr Mariano Arroyo Merino
18. Ricky Sukaka Agus
19. Fr Mukalel James
20. Fr Leopoldo Cruz
21. Fr Cecilio Lucero
22. Fr Roger Ruvoletto
23. Fr Evaldo Martiol
24. Fr Danilo Oscar Cardozo
25. William Quijano
26. Fr Ed Hinds
27. Fr Louis Jousseaume
28. Sister Marguerite Bartz
29. Father Hidalberto Henrique Guimaraes
30. Fr Miguel Angel Hernandez
31. Fr Jean Gaston Buli
32. Fr Daniel Cizimya Nakamaga
33. Fr Louis Blondel
34. Sister Denise Kahambu Muhayirwa
35. Fr Jeremiah Roche
36. Fr Alvino Broering
37. Fr Emiro Jaramillo Cardenas

All you holy men and women, pray for us!

This seemingly innocuous building:

will soon become a place of great evil. Planned Parenthood is planning to open the largest abortion clinic in the country in this former bank in Houston later this year.

One day we will look upon these buildings as we now look upon Auschwitz and Dachau.

Our Lady of Guadalupe, pray for us!

The weekend before Christmas, the Washington area was hit by 20 inches of snow. When I went to Mass that weekend, attendance was down considerably, probably only about 20-30% of a usual Sunday Mass.

I’m sure that many people could not make it out of their streets that day, but I couldn’t help but think of that low attendance when I read this story:

Heavy snows do not deter China’s Christians

Despite its being a working day in China and even with the obstacles created by heavy snowfall in recent days, it was with great devotion that Chinese Catholics celebrated Epiphany on January 6. The heavy snowfalls in recent days have not yet ceased and in some areas it continues to snow. The condition of roads is still very critical, but yesterday morning, very early, churches, chapels and other places of habitual prayers were filled with faithful attending the Mass of the Epiphany.

The pastors of Beijing had recommended for older people to remain at home and pray, because of snow, but they found the church full of older people for the first Mass in the morning, at 6 am, as usual.

In the early Church, going to Mass was a subversive action – attendance could be a death sentence. Yet if those courageous first Christians had not gone, we would not have the Faith today. It appears that believers in China are continuing this tradition.

It seems to be a truism that the more one must suffer for his faith, the more sacrifices he will willingly make for it. Let us pray that we in America recognize what a great gift the Mass is and will be willing to make sacrifices to participate in the Holy Sacrifice.

I’ve moved my website to another server, so if you notice any problems – dropped comments, missing posts, etc. – let me know. Hopefully there will be no issues and the server will be faster as well.

In the 1970′s and 1980′s many seminaries in the United States were lax about teaching orthodox doctrine and imparting traditional spiritual practices to our future priests. In the 1990′s the tide seemed to turn, and now it appears that our seminaries are in good hands:

In my household a great debate is raging: is the current year pronounced “twenty-ten” or “two-thousand-ten”?

The men in my family (that being me and my 6-year-old son) vote “twenty-ten”.

The women (my wife, three oldest daughters and probably my 6-month-old daughter too) vote “two-thousand-ten”.

They claim that “twenty-ten” sounds “weird”. I say that “two-thousand-ten” sounds like a number, not a year.

Is this a gender issue? Or perhaps my son just joined with me because I was all alone in my defense and he felt sorry for me.

Feel free to weigh in on this vital issue. If the consensus is that it should be “twenty-ten”, I’ll know my wife is crazy. If the consensus is that it should be “two-thousand-ten”, I’ll know that my readers are.

Any Catholic who has been involved with Internet discussions knows that they can often become quite heated. Topics both serious and mundane are debated ad nauseum, and often personal attacks flare up even in supposed “Catholic” circles. This confrontational aspect of Internet discussions is often lamented, but I do not think such debates are completely irredeemable. It is only through debate that ideas are properly formed and developed; I know that my own views and opinions have been largely formed over the years by engaging with others who do not agree with me.

However, I too often see a line that is crossed that I believe moves from profitable debate to dangerous sin. It is the practice of disparaging someone’s intentions instead of just challenging his viewpoint.

For example, a while back a bishop decided to suppress the Latin Mass in his diocese due to fears of the spread of the swine flu (via communion on the tongue). One can strongly disagree with this action (as I did) and can argue why such an action is both unnecessary and against the traditions of the Church. However, I actually saw the following statement made at another forum:

“I think he was looking for a way of suppressing a liturgy he finds obnoxious, over the objections (indeed, the specific directions) of the Holy See.”

This clearly crosses the line from legitimate disagreement to what I would call “spiritual murder”. Why do I use such a strong term? Because such a statement accuses the person in question of not just making a bad decision, but of willfully rejecting legitimate traditions and authority in the Church. This is tantamount to accusing him of rejecting the Church, which is the same as rejecting Christ. And rejecting Christ is spiritual death.

Unfortunately, this reading of people’s intentions happens all too often, and it is especially common in religious and political debates. If one disagrees with us, we assume the worst intentions on their part; after all, if they don’t agree with us, they obviously have bad intentions, right? Yet the truth is that often other people simply see things differently with the best of intentions or that they are just plain ignorant of all the facts.

Now, does this mean that no one has bad intentions? Of course not. Due to our fallen natures, all of us have bad intentions at times (and yet we always want people to assume the best of intentions from us). I would argue that it is much better to assume good intentions and be wrong than to assume bad intentions and be right. What does it hurt if we assume someone has good intentions for their misguided actions? We still can oppose their actions vigorously, and our arguments will actually be stronger for focusing on the ideas being promoted, not the people who promote them.

We are supposed to judge ideas, not persons. It is God who will judge a person’s intentions, for only He can truly read their hearts.

Today the results of Baseball’s Hall of Fame voting will be announced, and if there is any justice in the world, this man will be voted in.

Update: Larkin was not voted in, but he received enough votes that it looks likely that he will be inducted within a few years.

Last night I attended a beautiful Mass in honor of my parish’s patron, St. John Neumann. Our pastor blessed a stunning painting of the saint that was given to our parish last fall, and after Mass we were able to venerate a first-class relic of the first (and still only) canonized American bishop.

In honor of the day, Fr. Dwight Longenecker posted a helpful video podcast speaking of St. John Neumann and the virtue of obedience in all our lives. Take some time to watch it today.

St. John Neumann, pray for us!

The general rule in Internet writing is “short is sweet”. Because most people are reading these articles on their computer screen (or even their cell phone screen) it is a good idea to keep articles relatively brief or else you will lose most readers.

I’ve mentioned before that when I started blogging I decided to try to keep my blogs to less than 400 words if possible. I often break that barrier, but I still try to keep all posts under 1,000 words unless I just really can’t shut up. The Internet, generally, isn’t a very conducive medium for long, drawn-out arguments; most people aren’t going to stay that long at one site. Conventional wisdom says that the longer an article is, the less likely it is to be read or commented on.

So what if I told you someone wrote an Internet article that was over 18,000 words and included almost 100 footnotes? And that it had generated, at last count, almost 700 comments? Sounds interesting, even if a bit insane, does it not?

Bryan Cross over at Called to Communion is the author of such audacity and the topic of the article is Solo Scriptura vs. Sola Scriptura. Over the past decade or so, Catholic apologists have been very successful showing the weaknesses of a “Bible Alone” approach to authority as it is practiced by Protestants today; common sense alone shows that having the Bible as the only authority is simply illogical. In response, Keith Mathison has crafted a Protestant reply: he has distinguished between Solo Scriptura and Sola Scriptura. The former, which is practiced by most Protestants over the past 150 years, takes the Bible as the only authority. The latter, on the other hand, accepts the Bible as the only infallible authority. True followers of Sola Scriptura, according to Mathison, accept other authorities, such as church councils and creeds, but they accept only Scripture as infallible. Mathison’s argument is a strong one, and it is good to see Protestants recognizing the faults in how their conferees have practiced their faith in the past two centuries.

However, Cross in his article details (in great detail!) why ultimately both Solo Scriptura and Sola Scriptura end up with the same interpretive authority: oneself. It is only through apostolic succession, argues Cross, that one can escape this conundrum and have a truly independent authority.

I recommend the article highly. I printed it out (25 pages in 10-point type!) and read it at my leisure rather than burn out my eyeballs staring at the computer screen. This article and the ensuing discussion gives me hope that the Internet hasn’t completely made us stupid yet!

If you asked someone, “how many churches make up the Catholic Church?”, more than likely you would get a blank stare or a confused look. The answer, however, is 23: there are actually almost two dozen particular churches that are united in the Catholic Church. Twenty-two of those twenty-three churches are Eastern churches; in other words, they have their origin in the Eastern part of the Roman Empire. Even though they make up almost all the churches of the Catholic Church, their members are only 2% of the total membership of the Church: Latin, or Roman, Catholics make up the other 98%.

These churches have been mostly unknown in the West for centuries, but fortunately that has started to change over the past few decades. With the rise of ecumenism as well as the technological means of greater communications, the barriers between East and West have begun to crumble. This has especially accelerated since Pope John Paul II’s encyclical, Orientale Lumen, or “Light of the East”, which extolled the beauty of the Eastern tradition and called on Western Christians to understand and appreciate it better.

A great example of following this call is this video produced by Salt and Light TV which focuses on the Eastern Catholic churches:

It is well worth the investment in time to watch the whole thing.

Recently, Pope Benedict in his World Day of Peace message stated the following: “Technologically advanced societies must be prepared to encourage more sober lifestyles, while reducing their energy consumption and improving its efficiency” (emphasis added). Instead of actually contemplating the Pope’s words, many Americans immediately tried to push the Pope into our political categories, with the following results:

- Those who are politically conservative either ignored the Pope’s words completely or wrote it off as an European eccentricity of Pope Benedict, despite the fact that Pope Benedict has clearly shown he is not beholden to any European “conventional wisdom”.

- Those who are politically liberal hailed this prophetic statement of the Pope as a defense of any and every government response intended to protect the environment.

However, both responses are faulty, as it tries to put the Pope into categories which he resolutely refuses to fall into. B16′s advice is not primarily political, but instead spiritual, as he understands that every political problem has underlying spiritual roots. The pope desires true solutions; in other words, he desires to see everyone strive to live as saints. Living a “more sober lifestyle” is another way of saying that our modern consumerist lifestyle, which is lived equally by both conservatives or liberals, is antithetical to Gospel living.

What people often don’t realize is that striving to live as a saint will actually make you more environmentally-friendly as well. Just look at the three traditional practices of piety and their impact on the environment:

Prayer: Do you pray more than you watch TV every day? How about more than you play video games or mindlessly surf the Internet? Those other activities all require electrical power, whereas prayer’s power source is the Holy Spirit, which is an infinite, renewable source of (spiritual) energy. And you don’t even need electrical lights when you pray – candles are much more conducive to a contemplative mood.

Fasting: We Americans are anything but sober when it comes to eating. To put it simply, we are McFlabby. And all that food – most of it processed and shipped in from far-off lands – not only harms our waistline, but its production doesn’t do the planet much good either. Adding regular fasting to our spiritual lives will do wonders for our spiritual life, but it will also help the environment.

Almsgiving: How many of us have perfectly good clothes in our closets and dressers we never wear? Why not give them away to those less fortunate? Or how about not buying any new clothes this year and making do with the ones we have? Either way we reduce consumption. We could also look to cut deeper: by giving away more money to help the poor, we have less to spend (frivolously) on ourselves which will help our souls and our planet.

Our primary concern in life should be to be holy, but it is nice to know that by doing so, we also become better stewards of creation.