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I was ordained a priest on May 23rd. My life now is bound more intensely than ever to the central Mystery of our faith, the Presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist. I never imagined that so soon in my priestly life would I see the Eucharist attacked so publicly.
You may have seen these stories in the press. On June 29th, the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul, Webster Cook, a student and member of the student government at the University of Central Florida, took the Eucharist “hostage” in order to protest the use of University money to support religious organizations.
On July 8th Paul Zachary Myers, an assistant professor of biology at the University of Minnesota, entitled an entry on his blog: “It’s a Frackin Cracker!” Myers is upset at the outrage against the student who stole the Host. The student claimed to receive death threats. Death threats are not a Christian response. The Pastor at UCF, Fr. Gonzalez, spoke out of the Love that comes from his own celebration of the Eucharist:...READ MORE >
July 2008
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A few months ago, I traveled with eighteen other Catholic singles to Casa de Elizabeth—an orphanage in Imuris, Mexico, a region in the state of Sonora, about two hours south of Tucson. It is an area marked by small rivers that flow west from the Sierra Madre, where many of the residents sell their wares, like handmade tortillas, in the...READ MORE >
Britain’s lawmakers have voted to extend scientific research on embryos to allow the mixing of human and animal egg and sperm, to allow lesbians to create children through IVF without the need for a father, and against lowering the 24-week legal limit for abortions
The promises of brave-new-world cures for diseases swung Members of Parliament behind the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill....READ MORE >
British Members of Parliament must decide this month on a vast range of ethical issues contained in the Labour Government’s most far-reaching shake-up of fertility and embryology legislation in almost 20 years. The awesomely complex ethical issues raised by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology (HFE) Bill will be hotly contested when its...READ MORE >
G.K. Chesterton once wrote, “The whole modern world has divided itself into conservatives and progressives. The business of progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.”
The tired categories of Left and Right, which we associate with Liberal (or Progressive)...READ MORE >
“eternally scourged…” Plate 3 Miserere et Guerre—Georges Rouault (1871-1958)
One day last week I stood in front of St. Stephen Martyr Church in D.C. with a young religious sister and the pastor of the parish. The scene would have made for a typical beginning to a joke, “A priest, a nun, and a friar, were…” We were talking,...READ MORE >
Although I’d followed Pope Benedict from event to event during his visit to the U.S., one of the most moving moments for me was watching him on TV as he delivered what I believe was his most personal statement, at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York.
As pastor of the Universal Church, the Pope is most at home with the Eucharist and...READ MORE >
It’s going to take a while for all (or any) of us to absorb the significance of Benedict XIV’s first apostolic visit to the United States. Unlike his predecessor, the larger-than-life John Paul the Great, who from the first displayed an actor’s genius for what one observer described as “the symbolic gesture”, Benedict’s public demeanor is...READ MORE >
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SAINT OF THE DAY St. James the Greater
GOSPEL MEDITATION
The Gospel for Sunday, July 20, 2008
Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Matthew: 13:24-43
The Church believes that Christ, who died and was raised up for all, can through his Spirit offer man the light and the strength to measure up to his supreme destiny.
— Pope John Paul II | READ MORE >
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"Benedict directly challenged an assumption so many Americans make about religion: that it is a matter of private devotion with few public implications. Not true, said the pope. 'Any tendency to treat religion as a private matter must be resisted,' he told the country’s Catholic bishops Wednesday. 'Only when their faith permeates every aspect of their lives do Christians become truly open to the transforming power of the Gospel.' That is a demanding and unsettling standard for the right and the left alike... This is the thinking of a communitarian counseling against radical individualism... Perhaps it is the task of the leader of the Roman Catholic Church to bring discomfort to a people so thoroughly shaped by modernity, as we Americans are. If so, Benedict is succeeding." READ MORE >
"The head of the CDF has to draw lines, level punishments and basically talk tough, a role that Ratzinger seemed to relish, but one that won him epithets like God's Rottweiller and the old standby, the Panzerkardinal. But now that Cardinal Ratzinger is Pope Benedict, he knows better than anyone that he is also the chief pastor of the church. There can be no 'Panzerpope.' His job is to be the good cop, a symbol of unity who tries to encourage people to live their faith more deeply. As he told a dinner companion about his new role: 'It was easy to know the doctrine. It’s much harder to help a billion people live it.'" READ MORE >
...Hiroshima is still here to remind us of what happened when we first unleashed our "device" and how it can never happen again—supposedly. That's what everyone says after visiting Hiroshima, the statesmen and citizens who sign the guest book at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. We will never forget. But maybe we will. The very fact that Hiroshima is thriving with its KFC and Starbucks, with the carefully manicured lawns of its 'Peace Memorial Park'—the only evidence that hell was unleashed here—may have the opposite, anodyne effect. This is not John Hersey's Hiroshima, the Hiroshima of the horrific immediate aftermath, but is to a certain extent a Hiroshima that says a nuclear detonation is a transient thing, something that's eminently recoverable from with a little time and some good landscaping." READ MORE >
“The very public conversion of high-profile Italian journalist Magdi Allam — who was baptized by Pope Benedict in Rome on Saturday — is only the tip of the iceberg. Indeed, Islamic cleric Ahmad al-Qatani stated on al-Jazeera TV a while back that some six million Muslims convert to Christianity annually, many of them persuaded by Botros’s public ministry… Many Western critics fail to appreciate that, to disempower radical Islam, something theocentric and spiritually satisfying — not secularism, democracy, capitalism, materialism, feminism, etc. — must be offered in its place. The truths of one religion can only be challenged and supplanted by the truths of another. And so Father Zakaria Botros has been fighting fire with fire.” READ MORE >
“For the people and for all our political leaders, the situation has become deadlocked, or still worse, a routine of death that the latter think they must only govern without ever giving it life. The recent events of these past few weeks, Gaza, the murder at the yeshiva in Jerusalem, the young people killed in Bethlehem, and many others, are no more than sterile repetitions of the events of all the past years. And we will not stop repeating that security cannot be achieved by inflicting insecurity on others. New means must be found…” READ MORE >
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"…for a supposed comeback attempt, R.E.M. doesn't seem desperate to be loved here. Much of Accelerate actually sounds fired-up and angry: ‘Living Well Is the Best Revenge’ is an aggressive opening salvo, the oblique narrative of ‘Mr. Richards’ finds Stipe at his most effectively political, and the gritty, double-speed ‘Horse to Water’ is the album's most self-critical song… If it isn't able to recapture the post-punk energy of Reckoning, the political fury of Life's Rich Pageant, or the epic scope of Automatic for the People, the album, at the very least, finds the band playing to its strengths rather than attempting to explore an increasingly thin artistic mythology. That alone justifies Accelerate's positive buzz, even if the album doesn't quite support the magnitude of it.” READ MORE >
“’The more he gave himself to the world,’ Iyer writes, the more Tibetans have come to feel ‘like natural children bewildered by the fact that their father has adopted three others.’ …Avidly embracing the liberating ideas of the secular metropolis, the Dalai Lama resembles the two emblematic types who have shaped the modern age, for better and for worse—the provincial fleeing ossified custom and the refugee fleeing totalitarianism. Even so, his critics may have a point: the Dalai Lama’s citizenship in the global cosmopolis seems to come at a cost to his dispossessed people… It is hard to see the Dalai Lama bringing about mutual understanding in the world at large when he has failed to bring it about between China and Tibet.” READ MORE >
“About the Lower East Side today,’ Mr. Price said, ‘This place is like Byzantium. It’s tomorrow, yesterday — anyplace but today.’ ... ‘Lush Life’ took so long to finish, he said, in part because he spent so much time researching it — talking to people, riding around with the neighborhood police and sometimes just walking around. ‘I always like to hang out,’ he said, ‘because, one, it’s a way of avoiding really writing; and, two, sometimes God is a crackerjack novelist and you can plagiarize the hell out of him.’ He particularly liked hanging out with cops, he said, ‘because I’m so not a cop myself. Being with them gets me out of my own self-consciousness.’” READ MORE >
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Latest Comments
salindger writes "For some reason, I am not surprised that this happened in Florida. I was told of a place …"
Vico writes "By Vico Metroform is rightly upset with the insulting behavior of Prof. Myers but Myes is …"
chassup writes "CARMEL, “...but McCain is not really all that different, ...they are equally as bad on the …"
carmel writes "I don’t think we can assume that a conservative president will necessarily appoint justices …"
Metroform writes "I am personally insulted by the words and proposed actions of this professor. As a retired …"
thomas a nagy writes "Clearly, Myers is a desperate man. After all, he has become intellectually isolated in that …"
Lazarus041607 writes "You could certainly pray that Prof. Myers would have a “blinding” revelation of all his sins …"
kevinmclarke writes "Thank you for writing this, Father. Where is the world’s grave concern for tolerance? Friends, …"
BishopT writes "I am liturgical but nonCatholic and we believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Most …"
electricdisk writes "He can do whatever he wants to the Eucharist and it will not diminish one iota the glory and …"