We are a Dodge Caravan family and have five kids, not two, but other than that, this is how the Sammons family rolls:

H/t: Marcel

The Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church has strong words regarding the relationship between a country’s population growth and its overall health as a nation:

Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia stresses the importance of solving Russia’s demographical problems and improving nation’s health.

“What’s the good of having economy, if our nation is sick? How will we reclaim these boundless spaces, vast lands, not only in European part of Russia, but in Siberia as well?” the Primate said at organizational meeting of the Belgorod branch of the World Russian People’s Council.

He reminded that birth rates had recently grown in Russia.

“We hope this tendency will be stable and our people rather than strangers with alien culture and alien faith will inhabit our vast lands inherited from God and our hardworking forefathers and this greatest treasure – our land – will be cultivated by descendants of those who merged it to the great Russian state,” Patriarch Kirill said.

Would that all religious and political leaders realize that a nation’s best resource is its people, and the more children we are having, the better. For those who believe that overpopulation is a problem, check out these videos:

One of my favorite blogs, Sacramentum Vitae, maintained by Michael Liccione, has returned after a long hiatus. This is great news – Michael is one of the best Catholic bloggers around, and he was sorely missed while he was away from blogging. If you haven’t been to his blog before, be sure to check it out.

Every year we Catholics get a welcome jolt in the thousands upon thousands of new converts that enter the Church during Easter Vigil. In recent years approximately 100,000-150,000 people have become Catholic each year in this country. This is cause for great rejoicing and as one of those people I am very appreciative of my fellow converts. I can’t think of anything more joyous than being received into the fullness of the Catholic Church.

But there is a lesser-known and less-joyous aspect of all these conversions. I have heard from a variety of sources that almost half of all new converts are no longer regularly attending Mass just a year after their reception into the Church. Many who swim the Tiber are making a return trip out of Rome. For example, the former Episcopal bishop of Albany, who became Catholic in 2007 to much fanfare, has recently returned to the Episcopal church. This is a serious issue and I would even say a crisis.

Most Catholic parishes pray for those to be received into the Church at every Mass leading up to the Easter vigil. But after the vigil, those prayers mostly dry up. We need to continue to pray for new converts that they maintain their relationship with Christ through the Church. We also need to work hard to make new converts feel welcome and do all we can to help them live their Catholic faith.

Next Sunday, if you see a recently-received Catholic at your parish, go up to them and strike up a conversion with them. You may very well be helping to stem a tide of swimmers going the wrong way across the Tiber.

No New Testament figures cause more confusion than today’s two saints, the apostles Philip and James. There are two prominent men named Philip and possibly three named James in the early Church and they have been confused with each other for almost 2,000 years. It can be helpful to try to sort them all out.

Philip the apostle was from Bethsaida (John 1:44) and was one of Christ’s first apostles. He was the one who brought Nathanial to Jesus (John 1:45), who was asked by Jesus how they could feed the multitude (John 6:5), who the Greeks came to inquire about Christ (John 12:21), and who asked Christ to show them the Father (John 14:8). After Christ’s ascension, however, there is very little we know about his life, other than that he was a martyr. His feast day is today, May 3rd.

But there is another Philip in the New Testament: Philip the deacon. He was one of the seven chosen to help in the daily distribution of the food (Acts 6:5). Like his fellow deacon Stephen, however, he also had a powerful preaching ministry. After Stephen’s martyrdom, he went to Samaria and preached the Gospel (Acts 8:4-8), and he also was responsible for the baptism of Simon Magus (Acts 8:9-13) and the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8:26-40). Many people confuse this Philip with the apostle but they are different men. Philip the deacon’s feast day is June 6th.

The situation gets even more confusing with James. In fact, there is no agreement whether there are two or three men named James who were leaders in the early Church.

The first James is James the Greater, the brother of John the Apostle. Fortunately, there is no confusion about his identity. He was a member of the “inner circle” of apostles along with Peter and John, and he was the first apostle to be martyred (Acts 12:2). His feast day is July 25th.

James the Less, who is celebrated today along with Philip the apostle, is called the “son of Alphaeus,” and was one of the original 12 apostles. There is also James the Just, the “brother of the Lord” who was the well-respected bishop of Jerusalem and one of the “pillars” of the early Church along with Peter and John (Galatians 2:9). This James is also considered the author of the epistle which bears his name.

But the question that has been debated for centuries is: are these two men named James – the son of Alphaeus and the “brother of the Lord” – the same person? For centuries many people have believed so, but today most scholars would say that they are different men. I tend to go against the conventional Catholic theory that they are the same man and believe that they are actually two different people. But of course in the end it does not matter. We know that two men named James were made apostles, and that a man named James who was related to Christ was a major leader in the early Church. Whether this describes two or three men does not change the witness of their lives for us today.

Sts. Philip and James (all of them), pray for us!