Saint Anastasia

Tuesday of the First Week of Lent:

Father, look on us, your children. Through the discipline of Lent help us to grow in our desire for you. We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your son, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God for ever and ever.

Do you like to be called a child?


Today's pray calls us children. It asks the Father to look on us. He does look on us in love. He wants us to be happy. He sees into our heart, and knows it better than we do. He sees what keeps us from being happy. These are our sins -- the chains I wrote about yesterday. God has sent us this Lent to examine these, and to break free from them -- with His help.



It is through Lent -- and the disciplines of Lent -- fasting, prayer, almsgiving -- that God wants to draw us to greater freedom.



He wants to arouse us to desire to see Him more. In the prayer language of the Church prayer, to see and to know mean the same thing. So as we pray today asking God to help us grow in our desire to see Him, we are asking for our desire to know Him to grow.



Here in this Church there is a rare opportunity to see and to know the Lord. This is the only parish in Rome with perpetual adoration of the Eucharist. To see the wholeness of the Lord --body and blood, soul and divinity -- and so to come to know Him and to come to know that He knows us -- for He has come to become a man. He knows our weakness, since He has flesh, and so He can call us to greater things.



North American Church Guide

Saint John Cantius Parish Guide

Saint Peter in Chains

It is Monday of the First Week of Lent:

God our Savior bring us back to you and fill our minds with your wisdom. May we be enriched by our observance of Lent. Grant this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever.

Saint Peter in Chains: It is a quiet and simple church located close to the Coliseum and the Maritime Prison (where Saint Peter was keep before being executed). Traditionally this church is thought to be on the sight of the house of Saint Balbina, the daughter of Peter's jail and who was converted by Peter while in prison.

What a great reflection for Lent. The chains of Peter -- chains in general. Peter was often chained down by hsi fear -- this lead him to deny the Lord three times -- to abandon Christ on the cross.

Can we reflect on the chains that hold us back from loving God with all our heart and loving our neighbor as ourselves? These are hard to face. But in the prayer today we asks God's help to be released from these chains, and this is what Lent is for -- to cooperate with God's loving call back. We acknowledge like Peter did, that we deny the Lord when we sin. But the Lord wants us to meet him on the sea shore, like He met Peter to ask us, "Do you love me?"

More about today's church:
North American College Guide
Saint John Cantius Parish Guide

Station Churches

It is Lent. That is not a new bit of news, but it does mean a few changes in my routine. The most significant are the station Churches. I shared this devotion with you last year. In the days of early Christianity, during the important holy days, including each day of Lent, the Pope would celebrate Mass at a different Church in Rome. Over time particular churches were associated with particular days -- these became known as station churches. While in theory this devotion was never abandoned (the Roman Missal continued to list the stational church for each day up until the Second Vatican Council), it fell into disuse. Heeding to the request of the council to return to ancient customs the North American College re-introduces the stations for English-speakers.

So now each morning, through the quiet and still dark streets of Rome it is possible to see the mysterious (but joyful) group of young men dressed like priest making there way to that days station.

While I will not be able to make it to every station, I hope to make it to more this year, and to take you along with me as we go.

Some Websites:
North American College Guide to the Station Churches
Roman Stational Churches - A Spiritual Guide through Lent (from the Canons of Saint John Cantius in Chicago)

First Catholic Lord Spiritual in the British House of Lords since the 16th Century?

It has been known that the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Mr. Gordon Brown, has talked with the Pope about the possibility of making the soon to be retired Archbisoph of Westminister, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, a Lord-Spiritual in the House of Lord (through a Life Peerage). This would be the first time a Roman Catholic bishop would sit in the British Legislature since the schismatic actions of Henry VIII and his daughter Elizabeth I in the 16th century. While the Cardinal has not made a public statement in response, perhaps we can consider this a light in the dark world of militant secularizations if we consider a brief quote from his last public discourse before retiring:

The greatest danger for us at the moment is to let ourselves believe what secular culture wants us to believe about ourselves, namely, that we are becoming less and less influential and in decline. I believe that the Church has a vigorous life, and a crucial role to play in our society – more important than at any other time in our recent history.

Some good olde-fashioned patriotism

Just a link, but I thought it was a good reflection on the Gettysburg Address.

Off to Belgium for a few days.

Much noted and Long Remembered

And the answer from yesterday's quiz!

(a) Mr. Blair is a trick answer. I have no clue what he said when taking office, but he probably did not have too many plans for America.
(b) CORRECT ANSWER: Mr. Regan
(c) Mr. Obama in a meeting with members of both parties on the economic stimulus in a great act of bipartisanship (it truly was, he told this to both parts), "I win, you loss."

Obama: Passive-Aggressive President

New Attack on Apostolic Nunciature in Venezuela; Head Synagogue Also Vandalized

from Zenit:

New Attack on Apostolic Nunciature in Venezuela; Head Synagogue Also Vandalized

CARACAS, Venezuela, FEB. 5, 2009 (Zenit.org).- Three teargas bombs were thrown at the apostolic nunciature in Caracas, in the seventh attack against this diplomatic see, and the second in less than 15 days.

According to a communiqué from the nunciature, on Wednesday several unidentified men on motorcycles threw "three devices, of which two fell and exploded in the exterior area of the property, and the third fell and exploded in the interior patio of the diplomatic see."

The nunciature described the act as one of vandalism and irresponsibility, and authorities were called on to "take the needed measures so as to guarantee the security and safety of the diplomatic mission and its personnel, as is established by the Vienna Convention."

Several attacks by pro-government groups have taken place since a student leader Nixon Moreno, who opposes President Hugo Chávez, was given asylum at the nunciature. The most recent attack, with five teargas bombs, happened last Jan. 19.

Wednesday's incident comes just a few days after the Venezuelan bishops' conference released a statement denouncing an attack against the principal synagogue of Caracas.
On Jan. 31, 15 unidentified people broke into the synagogue, destroyed objects for worship, and left anti-Israel graffiti.

The statement of the bishops, published Wednesday, expressed their "consternation and sorrow at the violation of the sacred space and the profanation of the religious symbols most dear to the Jewish religion."

It asserted that this event "is far from the spirit of tolerance and welcome that is traditional for the Venezuelan people."

Quick Quiz: Who said?

In a democratic society, what is political power? What do you value in a leader? Something like this:

The election was not a bestowal of political power, but a stewardship opportunity for us to reconsider and restructure the political agenda for the next two decades. The public has sanctioned the search for a new public philosophy to govern America.

So I simply ask, who said it?
(a) Tony Charles Lynton Blair, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
(b) Ronald Wilson Regan, president of the United States from 1981-1989
(c) Barack Hussein Obama, current president of the United States

Answer will follow tomorrow.

signed: William Jerome Brunner

I must give credit to where credit is due...

I few days ago I posted asking if the moral consideration of the economy were being considered in the response the government is making to the crisis. Hardly an original thought, I direct you to: Risky Business: Keynes, Moral Hazard, and the Economic Crisis, by Samuel Gregg. He writes,

If governments do not take moral hazard seriously, their response to the present recession may sow the seeds of a future economic crisis.

We must remember that any decision that a person freely makes is a moral decision. Any legislation that refuses to acknowledge this, does not acknowledge a basic fact about our humanity, and those risks failure. Men will act like men; and women will act like women -- this is what is beautiful about us. This is also what must be taken into account in the art of politics.

Why are you becoming a priest?

This is a question I am often asked. More often am asked this by children, but I think adults wander about this. Perhaps they think it is not polite to ask. I wish they would ask. This is how I would answer:

One name:

Christ

We must not project our own needs on to the young. I am demographically part of the "youth" of America. Looking at the United States through the lenses of history the the time before 1968, the great cultural "tipping point," I could see how there was a real hunger for freedom and liberation. The outlet to allow for expression.

This is forty years later, and the time that separates the moment of the moment from then grows with (well) each moment. The needs of the young, of whom I am one, are different. We do not hunger for freedom. This is something we should be grateful to our parents for.

We have our ways of expressing ourselves. If anything we are "hyper-expressed." We have tried everything. We have found everything wanting. We look to the past, and it is something more than nostalgia. We have grown up, and in the process we have been told that mean and purpose and significance have been de-constructed. We do not seek to return to a period of person repression, enforced by unjust laws and outdated cultural mores, but rather we seek to return to the world that has meaning, purpose and significance. We ask the question:

If the world has no meaning, purpose or significance; does it not necessarily follow that I do not have any meaning, purpose or significance?

In some of this hunger has taken explicit form, and we start on our pilgrimage toward the horizon of meaning. All of us, if even only in implicit and unexamined form, share in this hunger. We know in the depth of our very beings, we are not mistakes of chemistry and biology, but that we do have purpose (to use the Greek word: telos, we seek an ultimate end).

In a world that has (thus far) told us that an autonomous will to power, ultimate freedom and a shallows stagnant form of false-tolerance are the ultimate values, we have experienced a type of existential vertigo. We search for the stability, for the lines, from which to stabilize ourselves in a dizzy culture. Our need for stability is not neurotic, but legitimate.

So from this general milieu I emerge. I ask:

Where should I go?

No direction was offered. Upon discovering Christ, or more accurately, upon knowing that he had discovered me, I ask:

Where should I go Lord? You have the words of eternal life.

The current Pope and the previous Pope have both drawn us in over and over with this simple phrase: Come to know the face of Christ, and he will change everything.

This is true. So I say to you: Come to know the face of Christ, and he will change everything.

To stand for Peace, Unity, Freedom, Rights and Hope

Without the natural law to inform our eloquent phrases, they don’t mean anything:

• “Peace” isn’t built on violence against the weak, whether they be poor, Christian, or not-yet-born.
• “Unity” isn’t achieved without objective truth (if it is unity that is based on anything but objective truth, then it is based and opinions. There are always many opinions).
• “Freedom” can’t survive the slavery of sin. Is a person that is addicted sex, drugs, pornography, shopping, or any of the other many addictions out there free? Common sense would say, "no." A truly free society helps people make choices that allow them to live freely, it does not stimulate people into making choices that will further entrap the.
• “Rights” aren’t coherent if they cancel each other out. Right to exercise a free conscience in moral decisions? A right to exercise religious beliefs?
• And true “hope” doesn’t exist in a country unless a person can be born into it without an attempt on his life.

(I parapharse this from the following article: A cultural earthquake)

What type of failure?

When we look at the economic "collapse" of the previous year, and its continuing effects into this year, we need to ask: Was it only an economic failure?

A perspective that does not seem to be taken by anyone (not even those pesky conservative Catholic bloggers) is the moral failure that preceded the economic failure.

As one commenter on a recent Facebook (c) has indicated, this collapse was caused by greed. Greed is a vice. As such the economic failure can be rooted as a failure of virtue.

In this sense if we want to provide a long term resolution to this economic collapse, it will not be throwing good tax-payers money after a partisan "wish-list" of an economic "stimulus," but rather a return to teaching the virtues necessary for people to participate in a democracy and a free-market economy.

The Church is committed to these political and economic forms, as made clear by the teaching of John Paul II in Centesimus Annus. This saintly Pope also recognized the inherent danger of these systems when they are divorced from the truth of man and society. When either a democracy or a free-market economy no longer serve the common good, but individual special interest they respectively become the dictators of an arbitrary relativism and spend themselves into destruction.

John Paul II teaches in the same letter that the participants in democracy and free-market economies must develop certain virtues. The virtues he lists are not religious in nature, but have clear rational connections to a properly functioning democracy and free-market economy. These virtues can be taught in a religiously pluralistic society like the United States. History testifies to this, since these virtues have been taught in the United States up until 1968 (what was the point of all those high school civics classes, but this?). Why we have chosen not to teach them after that is a complicated issue.

As such the Pope and our founding fathers of this great nation (John Adams and Thomas Jefferson especially) are of great agreement. What was true back in 1776 when we threw off the yoke of the monarch, is true today: The democractic form of government -- "government for the people, of the people and by the people" and free-market economics depend upong a "virtuous citizenary."

May God bless for being attentive to these words.

Do we want to be more like Europe?

With a proposed stimulus package of nearly $816 billion package (which is no small chunk of change, even for the United States), I thought Jim Manzi, a reputable economist had an interesting point:

The net effect of this bill is to shift the distribution of U.S. government spending as a whole away from defense and public safety and toward social programs: for good or ill, to make the U.S. into more of a European-style social welfare state. Because the amount of spending is so huge, this will be a material, not notional, shift. Eventually, we will emerge from this recession/depression/whatever it’s going to be. When that happens, is this really the kind of government we’re going to want?

Now he does not say that social spending is a good or bad thing, but does indicate that this would most like be a permanent shift in the role of how government acts in our daily life. In other words he is asking do we want to see a larger government that has her fingers in even more pies?

Whether this will be a long recession or a short recession, there are few economist that are willing to declare either way. But either way, it is a basic axiom of economics that it goes through cycles of recession and growth. We will come out of this recession. So the question really is not what do we want the government to do now? but what do we want to government to look like in 5 years, 10 years, and for our children?

Link to the article: European Social Welfare State Bill

Thoughts on the Conversion of Paul:

Conversion of Saint Paul by Michaelangelo

In celebration of the year of Saint Paul, yesterday we celebrated the Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul, instead of the Third Sunday of Ordinary Time. We know the story from the Acts of the Apostles: Paul was hostil to the Church, he persecuted Her. On the road to Damascus he was surronded by a great light (Christ says: I am the way, the truth and the light), and in that light he met Christ. Later in his life, after spreading Christianity throughout the then known world, from Syria to Spain (quite a journey in those days!), he reflected on how at that moment he was called to be an apostle by Christ.

Let us reflect on our own calling by Christ. I am often asked, "When did you know you wanted to be a priest?" I always want to ask, "When did you know you wanted to be a husband, a father, a wife, a mother, a teacher, etc.?" Each of us is called by Christ. When our ancestors came to these shores of Lake Michigan, they were called by Christ to establish the Church here. We can read how they cleared plots of land, and working with priest and religious sisters, established and built with their own hands our parishes, schools, hospitals, etc. (lay involvment is not something new from the last fifty years!). We are also called to continue building up the Church in our own time as a great treasure. We must always remember that that we do not own this treasure, since the Church is not our body, but the body of Christ, but we are caretakers of it.

In view of this, we have to ask: "How is Christ asking us to take care of His Body here on earth?" He has called me to be married to the Church and to be the father of a parish. He is also calling you. What have we been doing to build up the Body of Christ?

We do not face the same challenges that our ancestors faced. We do not need to literally carve out space for the Church from the forest-wilderness, but we need to carve a space for the Church in the public-sphere. The Church is by and far one of the greatest advocates of human dignity. For the past two thousand years She has been building hospitals and schools, raising up religious orders to take of the poor, and advocating for the down trodden. To continue to be this great advocate, to literally "call it out" when human dignity is trampled, is the greatest challenge that the Church faces today.

In the center of Paul's conversion and what he held as the center of his life was the encounter with Christ. This has been the center of my calling, I cannot be a priest, in fact I cannot even call myself Christian, if Christ is not in the center of my life. Christ is the point on which all calling pivot. As members of His Body, we are called to encounter him, and from that encounter to be called by Him.

God bless you, and may the name of Jesus Christ be Praised!

Saint Paul, Apostle to the Gentiles...

...Pray for Us!

Thought of the day by Thomas Jefferson:

To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.

--Thomas Jefferson

In my previous post of the letter from Francis Cardinal George to then Citizen Obama (now President Obama), it is interesting to note that the good and holy Cardinal did not ask for prohibitions to embryonic stem-cell research, but that the sizalbe portion of the American population that firmly believes that this research is unethical, not be coerced to subsidize this practice through taxes. This thinking is consisted with the thought of the founding fathers.