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KANO, Nigeria – An official with the Nigerian Red Cross says at least 16 people were killed in an attack on church services at a university campus in the country’s north.
Andronicus Adeyemo said there were also a number of people wounded, though the aid agency did not have an exact figure. He said officials canvassed local hospitals to get the figure.
The attack happened Sunday morning at Kano’s Bayero University. Police say gunmen attacked a Catholic Mass on the campus, using small explosives to draw worshippers out before shooting those who fled.
No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, though it mirrored others previously claimed by a radical Islamist sect known as Boko Haram. That group carried out a coordinated assault in Kano in January that killed at least 185 people.
CHARLESTON, W.Va. — The setting varies in Catholic churches large and small, contemporary or traditional, but the solemn springtime procession of little girls in white dresses and veils and boys in their Sunday best, hands prayerfully positioned as they make their First Communion, remains constant.
The special occasion played out May 6 at The Basilica of the Co-Cathedral of the Sacred Heart in Charleston and St. Agnes Catholic Church in Kanawha City, as it did at other area churches.
Children, usually in second grade, receive the Eucharistic sacrament for the first time at First Communion, which is an important milestone in their spiritual journey. The children won’t fully grasp all the church’s concepts, but teachers and priests who prepare them strive to help them realize that they truly receive the body and blood of Jesus Christ in the form of the consecrated host (wafer) and wine.
“We emphasize that it’s not symbolism. They more easily understand when we talk about the power of Jesus to turn water into wine where you see the change. We believe that he can change bread and wine to the body and blood, even though you cannot see the change,” said Monsignor Edward Sadie, who presided over the First Communion Mass on May 6 at Sacred Heart. “We don’t see it, but we believe. It’s what we call faith.”
Fifty-nine years ago, a young Ann Weimer made her First Communion at Sacred Heart. As a pastoral assistant at the same church today, she prepares the children for First Communion.
In Weimer’s class, the girls wore white dresses of their own — or more likely their mothers’ — choice and identical veils. The boys wore white suits. Monsignor Sadie said the attire was the same at his own First Communion in 1938.
The girls still wear white and the boys usually wear dress pants and nice shirts, jacket optional. No tennis shoes. “We tell the little girls that they do not have to wear white. White is not required, but for the past 15 years that I’ve worked with them, 100 percent of them have worn white,” Weimer said.
It isn’t about the dress.
“Remember, this is not the prom. It’s about the sacrament they’re receiving. That should be the focus of the day,” Weimer said.
“It’s been my mission to meet with parents and remind them of the significance of the Eucharist. It’s the center of Catholic faith,” Weimer said.
After a year’s instruction, the children attend a daylong workshop and make a confession in preparation. Before the big day, they’ll make the sign of the cross, know the Our Father, Hail Mary and Glory Be prayers. They’ll know the Mass is divided into two parts and be able to name the seven sacraments.
That’s a lot to learn, but they have a year to do it.
But the dress is special
Internet shopping blew open the all-white First Communion dress selection, but some families rely on old fashioned options and browse the racks of white dresses in stores together. They might wear an older sister’s or older relative’s dress. This year, Hailey Deslich, a second-grader at Holtz Elementary School, made her First Communion at Sacred Heart in a dress her grandmother Sheila Deslich sewed for her.
“Mom had made her baptismal gown. We wanted to go ahead and carry that tradition on for First Communion,” said Hailey’s mother, Stacie Deslich.
Hailey’s grandmother presented her with the choice of three dress patterns. “Of course she chose the most elaborate,” Stacie said. Sheila indulged her granddaughter’s love of sparkles and glitter with a discrete bit of glitter around the neckline.
Stacie teaches Hailey’s religious education class, so her daughter is well educated about the significance of her first-time reception of communion. A special dress commemorates the occasion.
“The dress will be a keepsake. If Hailey has a daughter someday, she can wear it,” Stacie said.
Several years ago, Sacred Heart parishioner Eldena Kincaid suggested her granddaughter Sydni, now 15, wear for First Communion the wedding dress she wore in 1972. Sydni liked the simple white dress of dotted Swiss that her grandmother kept in a cedar chest.
“We cut it shorter and tucked in the waist,” Eldena said. “She liked the idea. It’s something we could share.”
The following year, Sydni’s younger sister Amber wore her mother’s First Communion dress. Both girls wore their mother’s veil.
Appearance and reality
However angelic they appear for the big moment, the children behave like, well, children, before and after. They squirm and wiggle as they receive final instructions and line up. The boys at Sacred Heart folded their name cards into airplanes to sail across the parish hall.
Immediately after Mass at St. Agnes in Kanawha City, Nicholas Ihnat shed his blazer, pulled out his shirttails and climbed a tree in the church courtyard. Julia Preservati hiked up her fancy skirt and followed, until her mother called her down.
They’d each listened attentively as the Rev. Chris Turner took a light approach in his message to them during Mass. He asked them complicated theological questions that stumped most adults in the congregation as well as the children, who were glad they weren’t taking a test.
“The point is that you can’t know everything about the church. The real test is living and loving each other as Christ taught us,” he told them.
Dr. Carol Frail prepared the St. Agnes children for First Communion. She hopes the children grasp who Jesus was and the sacrifice he made for them.
“Today is important because it’s pretty much the first time God enters into your body,” said 8-year-old Julia Preservati.
Monsignor Sadie told the children that First Communion is so important, they will likely remember the day for the rest of their lives. He vividly recalled his own First Communion in 1938 at St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church in Parkersburg.
“I had a dark suit and a tie. I remember they assembled us in the little yard next to the church and we filed into church. The nuns lined us up. They had prepared us,” he said. As to the day’s theological importance, “I knew it was something special and that it wasn’t ordinary bread and wine.
“Not much has really changed,” he said.
Reach Julie Robinson at jul…@wvgazette.com or 304-348-1230.
In his latest address to American bishops visiting Rome, Pope Benedict XVI stressed that Catholic educators should remain true to the faith — a reminder issued just in time for another tense season of commencement addresses.
No, the pope did not mention Georgetown University by name when discussing the Catholic campus culture wars.
Yes, he did mention the law requiring professors who teach Catholic theology to obtain a Canon 812 “mandatum” (“mandate”) document from their bishops to certify that they are truly Catholic theologians.
Many American bishops have cited a “growing recognition on the part of Catholic colleges and universities of the need to reaffirm their distinctive identity in fidelity to their founding ideals and the church’s mission. … Much remains to be done, especially in such basic areas as compliance with the mandate laid down in Canon 812 for those who teach theological disciplines,” said Benedict, who taught theology at the university level in Germany.
“The importance of this canonical norm as a tangible expression of ecclesial communion and solidarity in the church’s educational apostolate becomes all the more evident when we consider the confusion created by instances of apparent dissidence between some representatives of Catholic institutions and the church’s pastoral leadership: such discord harms the church’s witness and, as experience has shown, can easily be exploited to compromise her authority and her freedom.”
Benedict’s remarks to the bishops of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming came during the fourth of five Vatican visits by Americans reporting on life in their dioceses. His January address, to the bishops of Washington, D.C., Baltimore and the U.S. Armed Services, made news with its focus on threats to religious liberty. It came shortly before Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said the Obama administration would not withdraw its rules requiring the majority of religious institutions to cover all Food and Drug Administration-approved forms of contraception in health-insurance plans offered to employees, as well as to students.
Now, the pope has emphasized the need for Catholic educators to remain faithful in the same time frame as Georgetown University’s announcement that one featured speaker during its commencement rites will be none other than Sebelius — a liberal Catholic who last year warned abortion-rights activists that “we are in a war” to protect women from conservatives.
Conservative Catholics protested — see GeorgetownScandal.com — claiming that the Jesuit school’s invitation represented yet another violation of the 2004 U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops policy stating: “Catholic institutions should not honor those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles. They should not be given awards, honors or platforms which would suggest support for their actions.” The University of Notre Dame ignited a 2009 firestorm by granting President Barack Obama an honorary doctor of laws degree.
While it’s easy to focus on this new commencement controversy, Benedict’s address represents another skirmish in more than two decades of conflict between Rome and liberal Catholics entrenched on many college and university campuses. At the heart of the conflict is a 1990 “apostolic constitution” on education issued by Pope John Paul II titled “Ex Corde Ecclesiae” (“From the Heart of the Church”).
That document contains numerous statements that trouble American academics, including this one: “Catholic teaching and discipline are to influence all university activities, while the freedom of conscience of each person is to be fully respected. Any official action or commitment of the university is to be in accord with its Catholic identity.”
“That captures pretty much everything,” noted Patrick J. Reilly, president of the conservative Cardinal Newman Society.
Thus, in his address to the visiting American bishops, the pope stressed that Catholic universities are supposed to be helping the church defend its teachings, in an age in which they are constantly under attack.
The goal, said Benedict, is for Catholic schools to provide a “bulwark against the alienation and fragmentation which occurs when the use of reason is detached from the pursuit of truth and virtue. …”
Reading most press accounts of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s doctrinal assessment of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, one would think that the Vatican is attacking all of the world’s nuns.
A more correct read of the situation, however, is that the Vatican hasn’t attacked all of the Church’s nuns, but rather it has disciplined a select group of them in the U.S., and it has done so out of love for the Truth. For the past 40 years, some leaders within certain female religious communities – such as some Benedictines, Dominicans, and Franciscans – have wandered increasingly further away from Christ’s Church and her teachings.
The assessment revealed what it described as “serious doctrinal problems which affect many in Consecrated Life. … On the doctrinal level, this crisis is characterized by a diminution of the fundamental Christological center and focus of religious consecration which leads, in turn, to a loss of a ‘constant and lively sense of the Church’ among some Religious.”
Recently, Washington Post writer Lisa Miller brought the Virgin Mary into the discussion. While that is a correct approach, Miller did so in a peculiar way. Miller paints Mary as a kind of primal radical feminist.
Miller compares the imagined fury of the men of Galilee with a young, unmarried, pregnant Mary to that of the ordained men of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith issuing the doctrinal assessment and calling for reform.
“Mary was a poor girl from nowhere, living in a culture in which men made all the rules and owned all the property and women had nothing,” writes Miller. “For more than a thousand years, women like Mary have entered religious life hoping to find a safe place where they might receive an education and protection from the oppression of marriage and the dangers of child-bearing.”
Miller demonstrates an utter lack of understanding about the role of religious women and Marian femininity. Most religious women enter religious life not out of some fear of marriage or child-bearing. Rather, they sacrifice physical marriage to become the spouse of Christ. They forgo natural children to become spiritual mothers to many.
Miller further says that the Church’s contemporary view of women is that “they are equal, but inferior.”
Let’s examine how the Church views, esteems, and even exalts women, particularly through the example of the woman par excellence — Mary.
Marian Femininity vs. Radical Feminism
For all of the rhetoric about the Church being against women, in reality, the Church is the only institution that truly advances the dogma that there is no “glass ceiling” for women.
In 1854, Blessed Pope Pius IX defined the Immaculate Conception, the doctrine that Mary alone among all men and women was conceived without original sin. Nearly 100 years later, Pope Pius XII defined the doctrine of the Assumption, that Mary was assumed, body and soul, into Heaven.
The Church is the only institution that recognizes, teaches, and advances these truths about Mary’s place among humanity. These doctrines emphasize what God did for Mary. One safeguards her from the corruption of original sin; the other preserves her from the corruption of death.
Is there any human being whom the Church esteems more than Mary? She, as a woman, is the pinnacle of humanity. She is “blessed among women.” She is “full of grace.” She is the prototypical Christian, a model for us all.
What is it that Mary models through her actions?
She models perfect humility, perfect obedience, receptivity, and a profound “Yes” to the will of God.
What of Marian femininity is found in nuns who do not abide the Church’s teachings, but advance other doctrines?
Where radical feminism reigns, Mary is degraded and dethroned.
Some female religious orders proudly proclaim that they’ve been founded in “rebellion.” What in Mary’s actions speaks rebellion?
Hearing female demands to be ordained, one is reminded of the story of Korah’s rebellion in the Book of Numbers. Korah and his men grumble against Moses because only select Levites are chosen from the 12 tribes to be priests. Korah and his men could not serve in the Tabernacle as priests. In response to their rebellion, God opens the earth to swallow them and all of their possessions.
Would Mary, like Dominican Sister Laurie Brink, say that she was “moving beyond the Church, even beyond Jesus?”
Would Mary, like billionaire foundation co-chair Melinda Gates, suggest as so many religious sisters apparently did to her, that she should question “received teaching?”
Unlike Zechariah, when Gabriel tells Mary that she will bear a Son, she answers with belief.
Mary is the daughter of the Father, the Mother of the Son, and the spouse of the Holy Spirit. How is it that Mary has the three highest positions achievable in the faith? Mary did so through her complete submission to God and what He asked of her. It is for this reason that she is both hated and opposed by Satan and radical feminists.
“Let it be done unto me according to your word,” she responds, not “Let it be done unto me according to my word.”
A Trust Betrayed
As the doctrinal assessment noted, the Church is grateful and thankful for the myriad contributions of thousands of religious sisters. Many have profoundly given of themselves sacrificially, laying down their lives for their students, the sick and those in need. Many people have been touched by many faithful sisters.
Still, others have gone astray in their teaching, their service, and their way of life.
Pope Paul VI said following the Second Vatican Council, “from some fissure the smoke of Satan has entered the temple of God.”
That smoke has been manifested in a variety of ways, including: bishops and priests who not only publicly dissented from the Church’s teachings, but also abandoned their vows and abused others; formerly Catholic powerhouse institutions of learning, higher education, hospitals, and charitable organizations caving into secularism; lay men and women who neither know the faith, nor teach it and pass it along to their children; and men’s and women’s religious orders that have lost their charism and ceased to be life-giving.
Witnessing the damage done to the Church and religious orders over the past 40 years, one cannot help but wonder if radical feminism wasn’t part of that “smoke.”
The CDF’s call for reform is the kind of correction that is most needed at this time.
Too many good religious women have been betrayed.
I recall a now-deceased older nun — a friend of our family — who belonged to an order that had discarded the habit. She, however, continued to wear it. I cannot forget the time she lovingly shared with us how she felt exiled, bullied even, by others in her community for her decision to live out her vows of poverty, chastity, and yes … obedience.
Or another older sister who was dismayed that her order’s religious shop was selling “holy” cards depicting secular “saints,” “sacred snakes,” sorcery, and New Age imagery.
A Benedictine order in Wisconsin reconstituted itself as an ecumenical community outside of the Church, while retaining the property and institution they had acquired over the years as members of the Church.
There has been a generational hijacking. How many dying religious orders continue to hang on to the property and money obtained through previous social capital while betraying the charism of their founders?
While fomenting dissent, many continue to hang on to the property and institutions paid for by previous generations, and they are provided prominent platforms from which to speak.
Many female orders have lost their charism. They are neither motherly, nor fruitful. They do not attract novices. They are not attracting young women because they do not offer something significantly different from what the secular world offers.
Clearly, corrective discipline, performed in love, is in order. That is the purpose of the doctrinal assessment and the call for reform.
Pope Benedict XVI, in Light of the World recalls that after the mid-1960s ecclesiastical penal law was no longer applied.
“The prevailing mentality was that the Church must not be a Church of laws but, rather, a Church of love; she must not punish. Thus the awareness that punishment can be an act of love ceased to exist,” said the Pope in his 2010 interview.
“Today we have to learn all over again that love for the sinner and love for the person who has been harmed are correctly balanced if I punish the sinner in the form that is possible and appropriate. In this respect there was in the past a change of mentality, in which the law and the need for punishment were obscured. Ultimately this also narrowed the concept of love, which in fact is not just being nice or courteous, but is found in the truth. And another component of truth is that I must punish the one who has sinned against real love.”
The world is in search of the Truth. Christ said, “I am the way, the Truth, and the Life. No one can come to Father except through me.” Instead of being a bride of Christ, those individuals that divorce themselves from Christ, “moving beyond Jesus” himself, cannot possibly lead His people to the Truth.
A George Weigel recent commencement address.
Defending Religious Freedom in Full: A Generation’s Challenge
“[A] special word of thanks, today, to the parents of today’s graduates — and the grandparents, and the other family members — who have helped bring you, the Class of 2012, to this pivotal moment in your lives.
Today is, by its nature — and I think at Benedictine College we can still speak of the “nature” of things! — a day of celebration, a day of remembrance, and a day of thanksgiving.
We share, today, a unique and critical moment in the history of the Catholic Church in the United States. At the time of the American Revolution, Catholics accounted for less than one per cent of the population of the thirteen colonies — a tiny population clustered primarily in my native Maryland and a few Pennsylvania counties. Yet within a few decades of the Founding, the great tides of European immigration that began to wash onto the shores of the new nation – those “huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” as they are memorialized on the Statue of Liberty — brought millions of Catholics to the New World: at first, Irish and Germans; later, Italians, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Ruthenians, and the many others who wove their lives, their traditions, and their aspirations into the rich tapestry of American democracy. Those 19th century immigrants felt the sting of anti-Catholic prejudice, even anti-Catholic violence. But notwithstanding that bigotry, Catholics have, I believe, almost always felt at home in these United States.
We have felt at home because we have thrived here; with the exception of immigrant Jews, no religious group has prospered more in America than the Catholic community. Yet Catholic “at-homeness” in the United States has had a deeper philosophical and moral texture. One of the great Catholic students of American democracy, Father John Courtney Murray, described that side of the Catholic experience of America in these terms, in We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition, a book published fifty-two years ago:
In this second decade of the third millennium, there are many grave questions be debated in America: the question of the legal protection of innocent human life from conception until natural death; the question of long-term strategy and morally worthy tactics in the war against Islamist jihadism; the question of how we attend to the sick and how we manage immigration; the question of fitting public policy ends to fiscal means; the question of building an appropriate regulatory structure around the biotech revolution so that the new genetic knowledge leads to genuine human flourishing rather than to a stunted and manufactured humanity; the question of the health of American civil society and of the American national character; the list goes on and on. The very question of what should be on “the public policy agenda,” and what ought to be left to the private and independent sectors, is being as vigorously contested in our country today as at any time since the Great Depression and the New Deal. Yet amidst all this churning, the gravest question for our public culture is whether what Father Murray called the “American consensus” — that ensemble of “ethical and political principles drawn from the tradition of natural law” — still holds.
There are reasons to be concerned.
In October 2009, the nation’s political newspaper of record, the Washington Post, ran an editorial condemning what it termed the “extremist views” of a candidate for attorney general of Virginia who had suggested that the natural moral law was still a useful guide to public policy. The Post, determined to nail down the claim that homosexual orientation is the equivalent of race for purposes of U.S. civil rights law, deplored this as “a retrofit [of] the old language of racism, bias, and intolerance in a new context.” Yet the Post’s own claim was, to adopt its language, “extremist.” For it suggested that the label “bigot” ought to be applied to notable historical personalities who had appealed to the natural moral law in causes the Post would presumably regard as admirable: figures such as Thomas Jefferson, staking America’s claim to independent nationhood on “self-evident” moral truths derived from “the laws of nature”; or Martin Luther King, Jr., arguing in his Letter from Birmingham Jail that “an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law”; or Pope John Paul II, who, at the United Nations in 1995, suggested that the truths of the natural moral law — “the moral logic which is built into human life,” as he put it — could serve as a universal “grammar” enabling cross-cultural dialogue.
Appeals to the natural moral law we can know by reason underwrote the American civil rights revolution. Appeals to that same natural moral law underwrite the pro-life movement, the successor to the civil rights movement. And appeals to the natural moral law have underwritten U.S. international human rights policy for the past thirty years. Until, that is, December 2009, when the Secretary of State of the United States, in a speech at Georgetown University, emptied the concept of religious freedom of everything save the “freedom to worship” while asserting, in a catalogue of what she claimed were fundamental international human rights, that people “must be free…to love in the way they choose” — which “choice” must, presumably, be protected by international human rights covenants and national and local civil rights laws.
This speech, as things turned out, was one harbinger of an assault on religious freedom that continues to this day — an assault that imagines “religious freedom” to be a kind of “privacy right” to certain leisure-time activities, but nothing more than that. This dramatic misconception of religious freedom was evident in the present administration’s attempt to re-write federal employment law by dissolving the “ministerial exemption” that had long protected the integrity of religious institutions. It was evident in the administration’s refusal to continue funding the U.S. bishops’ efforts to help women who had been victims of sex-trafficking (because the Church refused to provide abortion as part of that work). And it has been most dramatically evident in the January HHS mandate that requires all employers (including religious institutions with moral objections and private-sector employers with religiously-informed moral objections) to facilitate the provision of contraceptives, sterilizations, and abortifacient drugs like Plan B and Ella to their employees.
All of this suggests that one of the great challenges of your generation, my fellow-members of the Class of 2012 of Benedictine College, will be to rise to the defense of religious freedom in full. And, indeed, what could be a more apt challenge for the graduates of a college named in honor of the saint whose inspired vision and evangelical vision saved the civilization of the classical world when it was in danger of being lost? What better challenge for the graduates of Benedictine College, named for one of the patrons of Europe, whose life-work saved the West as a civilizational enterprise built from the fruitful interaction of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome?
For the defense of religious freedom in full which you must mount must be both cultural — in the sense of arguments winsomely and persuasively made — and political, in that you must drive the sharp edge of truth into the sometimes hard soil of public policy.
What is this “religious freedom in full” that you must defend and advance?
It surely includes freedom of worship, but it must include more than that; the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is content with freedom of worship, so long as the Christian worship in question takes place behind closed doors in the American embassy compound in Riyadh. Religious conviction is community-forming, and communities formed by religious conviction must be free, as communities and not simply as individuals, to make arguments and bring influence to bear in public life. If religiously informed moral argument is banned from the American public square, then the public square has become, not only naked, but undemocratic and intolerant. If, on the other hand, religiously informed moral argument is welcome in public life, then we have the possibility of rebuilding, not a sacred public square (a goal the Catholic Church rejected at the Second Vatican Council), but a civil public square, in which tolerance is rightly understood as differences engaged within a bond of civility formed by a mutual commitment to reason.
It is a matter of both political common sense and democratic etiquette that Catholics in public life should make our arguments in ways that our fellow-citizens, who may not share our theological premises, can engage and understand — which is to say, in our particular case, that Catholics should bring to bear in public life the moral truths we hold through arguments framed by the grammar and vocabulary of the natural moral law. That is what John Paul II did at the United Nations in 1979 and 1995. That is what Benedict XVI did at the in 2008 and in the German Bundestag in 2011. That is what the bishops of the United States, and lay Catholics in their millions, have done over the past four decades in defense of life. And if there are some who consider such appeals to the natural moral law a form of tarted-up bigotry, well, we shall simply have to inform them, politely but firmly, that they are mistaken, and then demonstrate why.
Religious freedom in full also means that communities of religious conviction and conscience must be free to conduct the works of charity in ways that reflect their conscientious convictions. This is neither the time nor the place to discuss the problems that have been posed by tying so much of Catholic social service work and Catholic health care to government funding — save, perhaps, to note that these problems did not exist before the Supreme Court erected a spurious “right to abortion” as the right-that-trumps-all-other-rights, and before courts and legislatures decided that it was within the state’s competence to redefine marriage and to compel others to accept that redefinition through the use of coercive state power. What can be said in this context, and what must be said, is that the rights of Catholic physicians, nurses, and other health care professionals are not second-class rights that can be trumped by other rights-claims; and any state that fails to acknowledge those rights of conscience has done grave damage to religious freedom rightly understood. The same can and must be said about any state that drives the Catholic Church out of certain forms of social service because the Church refuses to concede that the state has the competence to declare as “marriage” relationships that are manifestly not marriages.
My fellow-graduates, your defense of religious freedom is going to require the skills of reasoning and argument that you acquired here at Benedictine College. It is going to require that some of you accept the risk and challenge of public service in elective office. And it going to require all of you to support those who take, as their vocation, the defense and promotion of religious freedom in full.
This will be the work of a lifetime. But it must begin sooner rather than later, for the threats to religious freedom among us are great, and many of them are deeply embedded in postmodern American culture. This work will not be without cost. Some of you may suffer various forms of martyrdom in taking up this cause: the martyrdom of ridicule, of being labeled “intolerant” and “bigoted”; the martyrdom of career paths blocked and promotions denied because of your adherence to the moral truth of things; the martyrdom of political defeat, or a judicial case well-argued but lost. Fidelity to the truth can have its costs. Yet as Blessed John Paul II taught young people all over the world, those costs are worth paying because the truth sets us free in the deepest sense of human liberation. Thomas More, patron saint of Catholics in public life, was never more a free man than when he bent his neck to the executioner’s axe in free adherence to the truth.
Let us pray that it does not come to that for any of you, or indeed for any of us. But let us also be clear on the stakes for which your generation is playing, which are nothing less than the long-term integrity of American democracy. So: be the culture-forming heirs of St. Benedict that your education here has prepared you to be. Be the champions of religious freedom in full. In doing that, you will give America a new birth of freedom — freedom tethered to truth and ordered to goodness, freedom that sets us free in the noblest sense of human liberation.
Godspeed on your journey.
Delivered May 12, 2012 at Benedictine College, Atchison, Kansas.
Tagged as:
natural law,
religious freedom,
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Pelosi says her faith ‘compels’ support for same-sex marriage
CWN – May 11, 2012
From Our Store: Essays in Apologetics, Volume II (eBook)
US House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi says that her Catholic faith “compels me” to favor same-sex marriage.
“My religion has, compels me–and I love it for it–to be against discrimination of any kind in our country, and I consider this a form of discrimination,” Pelosi told reporters on May 10.
The former Speaker of the House welcomed the announcement by President Barack Obama that he would support legal recognition of same-sex marriages. She said that the presidential announcement showed a recognition that the time is right for the move, adding, “what is inevitable to some of us is inconceivable to others.”
Last year Pelosi identified herself as a “devout Catholic” in a speech in which she opposed “conscience clause” protection for health-care workers who are morally opposed to participation in abortion procedures.
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POWAY, CA (Catholic Online) – The thing you need to know about California brushfires is how fast they can move and how high they can reach.
Whenever we smell smoke here in the southwest corner of the country, we’re on high alert.
So my husband, Dick, and I were vigilant on that warm October Tuesday back in 2007 when the wind suddenly picked up. We kept smelling smoke and looking outside and then – wham! – there it was, billowing smoke scaling our mountaintop.
Time to pack the cars.
We unplugged the computer and pulled paintings off the wall. We gathered my jewelry and filled suitcases with clothes.
We didn’t take as much as we would have liked – we planned to come back for more – but the electricity was out and the threat of suffocation loomed so we drove away from the brick, Mission-style home where we’d raised our three kids.
Once we unloaded our stuff at my daughter’s house and rested a bit we decided to return for another batch of belongings. By then our neighborhood in Poway had been blocked off and the sky was dark. A law enforcement officer wearing a gas mask stopped us. “High Valley is on fire,” he said. “We won’t let you in.”
It was Friday when the mayor called. We were hanging out at the pizza house, the only place still open in town, when he gave us the news: Our house had burned.
The sight was horrifying. The house had burned to the ground. A shell of the southern wall remained, but beyond that, everything had been reduced to piles of ashes and clumps of bricks. Our refrigerator stood six inches tall, a mangled hunk of black. The rest was unrecognizable. I couldn’t tell whether I was in the living room or a bedroom. The fire had been relentless.
Our land was destroyed, 40 acres of oaks, palms and eucalyptus stripped and singed. It was almost like we were on the moon – flat, ash, black. Eerie and alien.
Tallying our losses
I was overcome by all we had lost. The love letters Dick and I had written at 19 and 17, when we first imagined a future together.
The sword and cap he wore when he graduated from the Naval Academy. My white silk dress from the captain’s ball, our first attempt with a new Singer sewing machine.
Tokens from every milestone of family life that followed: baby books with locks of hair, grade-school report cards, Cabbage Patch dolls, homemade Mother’s Day cards, First Communion dresses, college diplomas, wedding pictures.
Christmas ornaments and the ornate Nativity set I had displayed each December. The china doll from my mother’s childhood, the envy of all my sisters. The ivory tablecloth my grandma crocheted. Out-of-print copies of the management books Dick had written, published in Chinese and Korean and Vietnamese.
In the midst of this sucker punch came mind-numbing insurance forms. We were asked to list every belonging we had lost. Half way through, I could not continue. I felt sick to my stomach.
Even the formal proof of our identity was gone; we had to apply for new birth certificates and social security cards.
But there was one thing the fire spared: our Marian shrine.
Down in the canyon, we’d placed a two-foot statue of the Blessed Mother inside a stone grotto. The year before my brother James, who is a priest, had come to bless it, sprinkling holy water on the grotto and the oak beside it. Everywhere that holy water had landed was untouched. Not even a smudge of smoke.
I looked at Mary’s serene face and upturned palms, and peace filled my lungs. It was as though she was saying, “Here I am, and everything is going to be OK.”
She was right.
The blessings began pouring in, a hundred little kindnesses. Dick and I had never realized the depth of the human heart until the fire stripped us bare.
There are absolutes in life – eternal truths, divine gifts – that no flames can sear. In the fire’s wake, these lifted into sharp relief. We held fast to the saints and the sacraments. My love for the Blessed Mother deepened. She is my queen!
‘Never left unaided’
It feels fitting to dedicate the month of May to Mary. Every year at this time I re-consecrate myself to her, as St. Louis de Montfort taught. It is a Mother’s Day gift to myself.
The rosary is a perfect prayer, and its mysteries form a cradle of comfort. What an enduring gift from Blessed John Paul II one decade ago: the Mysteries of Light that completed the story.
Mary has never failed me. When my rebellious middle child headed off to college, I knew whom to call on. “OK, Mary, she’s out of my hands; I am turning her over to you now!” And sure enough, my daughter found herself at college.
“Never was it known,” goes the Memorare prayer to Mary, “that anyone who fled to thy protection, implored thy help or sought thine intercession was ever left unaided.”
If you truly turn something over to the Blessed Mother, she will always take care of it. That’s why Dick and I are entrusting her with the most important endeavor of our careers: the Catholic Renewal Campaign.
We are calling on Catholics across the country – young and old, active and lapsed – to renew our troubled culture with the healing truths of our faith. It’s time to stand together and bring our most deeply held values back to the forefront, to create a culture where life wins and hope reigns. Where you can take your kids to the movie theater and find features that won’t require a stop at the confessional on the way home.
Every fire refines, and the one that claimed our house was no exception. We are stronger and wiser now, more grateful, less materialistic. I no longer go on shopping sprees. There’s more space in my closet and in my heart.
I still miss the fire’s loot. Just the other day, when company arrived, I went to retrieve my serving pieces and – oh my gosh, that tray is gone! It has never been the same.
But I would feel ungrateful to God if I complained, so I focus on the many ways He has guarded and sustained us.
In a way I feel lighter without my silk dress and leather pumps. But I also feel more grounded, tethered to the things that matter most.
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Martha Lyles is a longtime religious educator and co-founder of the Catholic Renewal Campaign. Learn more at CatholicRenewal.org. This article first appeared in The Huffington Post.
CORAL SPRINGS, Fla., May 11, 2012 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ –
VSCHOOLZ, Inc. announced today that they are partnering with the Peter Li Education Group’s Pflaum, to be able to provide students with stimulating and engaging religion programs.
“All of us at Pflaum are excited and enthusiastic about our partnership with VSCHOOLZ. We see this digital delivery and use of the Pflaum Gospel Weeklies Faith Formation Program as a giant step into the future. The platform provided by VSCHOOLZ and the content developed by the authors of the Weeklies will give tens of thousands of Catholic children a chance to experience a complete, child-friendly, dynamic, and affordable catechesis in the same interactive ways they experience other subjects,” said Cullen Schippe, President of the Pflaum Publishing Division of Peter Li Education Group.
“The VSCHOOLZ team is proud to partner with the Peter Li Education Group to bring this customizable and engaging educational material to Catholic children around the world,” said Trina Trimm, Chief Operating Officer at VSCHOOLZ. “In this digital age, it is exciting to have a publisher embrace and incorporate blended classroom learning management technologies into the delivery of their curriculum. The message and lessons to be learned from a study of church and faith are timeless, but are made so much more relevant to today’s digital students when delivered in an interactive, engaging manner. The ability for schools and churches to reach families through web-based and online communities is powerful.”
About PflaumPublished by Pflaum Publishing, the Pflaum Gospel Weeklies offer a complete, affordable, and easy-to-teach Catholic faith-formation program organized around the Sundays, feast days, and religious seasons celebrated by the Church. This “liturgical catechesis” approach actually encourages Mass attendance by synchronizing the liturgy and worship of the church community with the student instruction plan – providing a unique and popular alternative to creed-based programs. The Weeklies provide both a timely and current 32-week lesson program coupled with a timeless, non-changing and doctrinally complete faith-formation handbook “What the Church Believes and Teaches”, which has been found to be in conformity with the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Further enrichment is provided through age-appropriate activities, musical accompaniment and proven teaching strategies and other tools, which reinforce the lessons. This comprehensive approach allows the Weeklies to be used as the basic religious education program, or if desired, to augment another program.
About VSCHOOLZ, Inc.VSCHOOLZ was founded by a team of educators to provide e-learning solutions for schools or districts that want to support a blended digital learning environment in traditional schools or that want to launch their own virtual programs. As a member of the H. Education family, a H. Wayne Huizenga Holdings company, VSCHOOLZ is able to provide strong levels of support in the depth and breadth of site implementation for schools and districts. Powered by VSCHOOLZ gives schools or districts a fully integrated, customizable classroom management platform that allows teachers to edit, change, remove or adapt high quality content provided to fit their individualized classroom and school needs. All courses come complete with fully customizable interactive and engaging student activities, as well as, supplemental online resources. The lessons are delivered in a safe and user-friendly online environment, which incorporates collaborative tools, message boards, digital drop boxes, chat rooms and teacher-to-teacher file sharing. This new approach to education caters to the digital learner of all ages.
Contact: Angelina O’Brienaobrien@vschoolz.com Office: (954) 688-3438 Cell: (772) 985-4332
SOURCE VSCHOOLZ, Inc.
Copyright (C) 2012 PR Newswire. All rights reserved
