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The motherhood of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and of the Church, involves great struggle.
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Tag: encyclical
Exodus and Lumen Fidei
Reading the books of Moses for the first reading at Holy Mass these days… Reading our Holy Father’s encyclical…
It all comes together in paragraph 12:
The history of the people of Israel in the Book of Exodus follows in the wake of Abraham’s faith.
Faith once again is born of a primordial gift: Israel trusts in God, who promises to set his people free from their misery. Faith becomes a summons to a lengthy journey leading to worship of the Lord on Sinai and the inheritance of a promised land.
God’s love is seen to be like that of a father who carries his child along the way. Israel’s confession of faith takes shape as an account of God’s deeds in setting his people free and acting as their guide, an account passed down from one generation to the next.
God’s light shines for Israel through the remembrance of the Lord’s mighty deeds, recalled and celebrated in worship, and passed down from parents to children.
Here we see how the light of faith is linked to concrete life-stories, to the grateful remembrance of God’s mighty deeds and the progressive fulfillment of his promises.
Gothic architecture gave clear expression to this: in the great cathedrals light comes down from heaven by passing through windows depicting the history of salvation. God’s light comes to us through the account of his self-revelation, and thus becomes capable of illuminating our passage through time by recalling his gifts and demonstrating how he fulfills his promises.
March 25, 1995
Fifteen years ago, Pope John Paul II gave us his encyclical letter on the Gospel of Life. In this letter, the Pope coined the phrase, ‘the culture of death.’
Here is a short summary of the encyclical:
God gives us life. The innocent are always threatened by violence. In our day and age, the greatest threats are abortion and euthanasia. All Christians are bound to fight for the right to life. The Gospel demands that we be militantly pro-life.
In other words: We are a LAME Catholics if we do not adopt the point-of-view of the innocent unborn in all our political positions. We owe it to the innocent and defenseless unborn to stand up for them and to fight for them.
The fact that legislation in many countries, perhaps even departing from basic principles of their Constitutions, has determined not to punish abortion and euthanasia, and even to make them altogether legal, is both a disturbing symptom and a significant cause of grave moral decline.
Choices once unanimously considered criminal and rejected by the common moral sense are gradually becoming socially acceptable.
Even certain sectors of the medical profession, which by its calling is directed to the defense and care of human life, are increasingly willing to carry out these acts against the person. In this way the very nature of the medical profession is distorted and contradicted, and the dignity of those who practice it is degraded. (paragraph 4.2)
Purgatory Pain
If you feel like re-living the experience of reading the explanation I gave of I John 5:4 when we read it at Holy Mass last year, click here…
…Painful Hoya loss last night. But we will live to fight another day. Huge game against Connecticut on Saturday.
And there are other things that cheer a guy up, like:
1) It does a heart good to see the Holy Father celebrate Mass on Epiphany in an even more beautiful Roman fiddleback chasuble than the one he wore last year.
2) In Spe Salvi, the same excellent Pope gives the most exquisite one-sentence explanation of Purgatory I have ever read.
The Pope is explaining I Corinthians 3:12-13:
No one can lay a foundation other than the one that is there, namely, Jesus Christ. If anyone builds on this foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, or straw, the work of each will come to light, for the Day will disclose it. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each one’s work.
The Holy Father proposes that the fire of Purgatory may be nothing other than the gaze of Christ.
He gazes upon us with perfect justice and perfect love. His gaze discloses all truth; nothing is hidden; all falsehood is laid bare. For most of us, this will be agonizing.
But there is hope: The gaze of perfect justice is also the gaze of infinite love. He demands pure truth BECAUSE He loves us so much. As the Pope puts it:
The pain of love becomes our salvation and our joy
(Spe Salvi 47).
Wake Up Call
Expergiscere, homo! It’s time for Christmas!
…Did Chris Wright score a game-high, career-high 34 points yesterday afternoon? Yes, he did!
Rich Chvotkin had the line of the day: “Whatever your were going to give Chris Wright for Christmas, double it.”
…Pope Benedict’s encyclical on hope is really a meditation on the following dialogue, which occurs before every Baptism:
PRIEST: What do you ask of God’s Church?
CANDIDATE/PARENT: Faith.
PRIEST: What does faith offer you?
CANDIDATE/PARENT: Eternal life.
The Pope explains:
The human being needs unconditional love. He needs certainty…Man’s great true hope, which holds firm in spite of all disappointments, can only be God–God who has loved us and who continues to love us “to the end,” (John 13:1) until all “is accomplished” (John 19:30).
…Washington is unlike other American cities. One of the ways it is different is this:
Back in the 1960’s, the big thing was to build super-highways THROUGH cities. The plan was to build big highways through Washington, just like there are big highways through Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, etc.
But people rebelled. One of them was Peter Craig, who died last month. There was a nice editorial about him yesterday.
Because of the resistance of local Washingtonians, we DO NOT have the big highways running through town that we were slated to have. This is an ENORMOUS blessing.
I am not familiar with all the projects which the editorial mentions. Nothing interests me more than things like this, so I am going to have to do some heavy-duty research to get a firm grip on all the details of what was to have been built, but thankfully was not.
If the Lord allows me the leisure and resources, you will read a nice, long description of it all here someday.
I acknowledge that this will be interesting only to Washington-geography nerds like myself, but I make no apologies. We will see what I can come up with.
In the meantime, merry Christmas, dear readers!
Providential Conclaves
The Holy Spirit guides the ultimate outcome of all papal conclaves.
Many of us exulted with inexpressible joy at the speedy conclusion of the Conclave of 2005.
The Conclave of 1903 was likewise an occasion to glorify the Provident Hand of God.
The “Sage of Baltimore,” H.L. Mencken, anticipated that Conclave in this way:
…We had another Methodist in the office, a reporter named Stockbridge, but he was so pleasant a fellow that no one held it against him…When, in July 1903, Pope Leo XIII died, and the cardinals began hustling to Rome to elect his successor, an office wag put the following notice on the city-room bulletin-board:
FOR POPE:
The Right Rev. Jason Stockbridge, D.D.,
Bishop of Sodom and Gomorrah in partibus infidelium
Subject to Democratic primaries
The good Lord, however, chose differently. Pope St. Pius X was elected.
Pius died eleven years later, on August 20, 1914. We keep his Memorial at Holy Mass today.
Pope St. Pius X defined and refuted the heresy of which H. L. Mencken was certainly guilty, the heresy of Modernism. The Pope explained the problem in his encyclical Pascendi.
Not long ago, we celebrated the 100th anniversary of Pascendi. It seemed like a good occasion to contrast the truth of the Holy Faith with the dictatorship of relativism. I gave the following homily:
Mystical Body, Incorporated
Speaking of 65th anniversaries…Here is a summary I prepared for the 65th anniversary of Pope Pius XII’s encyclical on the Mystical Body of Christ.
John Paul II on Pharaoh’s Cruelty
Exodus is a good book of the Bible for spiritual reading during Lent.
The Religion of Jesus
Three hundred eighteen years ago tomorrow, a French Visitation nun named Margaret Mary Alacoque drew her last breath in the world. She had lived a painful and difficult life. But the Lord had given her a special gift: He appeared to her and showed her His Sacred Heart.
The Heart of Christ had never before been visible to the human eye. Even when He walked on the earth, the Lord’s human heart could not be seen. It was pierced by the soldier’s lance when He hung on the Cross. When He came back to life, His heart began to beat again in His breast. Now the Sacred Heart of Christ is in heaven, along with the rest of His glorified body. His heart is the fitting symbol of His infinite love, the divine love united with the love of a man.
When the Lord appeared to her, St. Margaret Mary saw how the Heart of Christ burns with love for the heavenly Father and for His children on earth. She wrote: “The Sacred Heart is an inexhaustible fountain, and its sole desire is to pour itself out into the hearts of the humble. The divine heart is an abyss of all blessings.”
The revelations which St. Margaret Mary received were a gift for the whole Church of God. The vision of the Sacred Heart is a reminder of the fundamental truths of the Christian religion. Pope Pius XII wrote an encyclical about the revelations given to St. Margaret Mary. He wrote:
“Their significance is that Christ–showing His Sacred Heart–willed in a special way to call the minds of men to the contemplation and veneration of God’s most merciful love for the human race. Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus is so important that it may be considered the perfect profession of the Christian religion, for this is the religion of Jesus, and no man can come to the heart of God except through the heart of Christ.”
Pope Benedict XVI also wrote a letter two years ago about the Sacred Heart.
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