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Changing How Our Children Do Dating…
How our young people date is problematic; and I’m not talking about the mainstream habits of a ‘hookup culture.’ I mean young people from families with traditional values, where preparing for marriage and waiting for marriage are implicit, accepted goods. It is not surprising that we have a problem. I think we have a perfect storm in the combination of three things: a legitimate desire to emphasize and pursue marriage; the extraordinarily bad societal habits and examples regarding romance; and, the fallen inclinations of human persons. Allow me to explain. In being around college aged young adults from good families, I’ve had occasion to notice and reflect on these things for some three decades; and I still have much thinking to do. But here are a few thoughts regarding romance and dating ...
May the Holy Spirit guide and strengthen our personal Pentecost to speak and live well in Jesus’ name…
As he walked the earth after his resurrection for forty days, Jesus provided the gift of his presence to everyone who encountered him. This selfless Act of faith was part of Jesus’ post-resurrection mission to reassure His Apostles and disciples that they would not be alone after his ascension to heaven. He walked, spoke, ate, taught, reassured, and prepared his disciples for the journey ahead. His conversation with the disciples on the road to Emmaus and ultimately the celebration of the Eucharistic feast healed the spiritual blindness of the Apostles due to their lack of faith. This was all part of Jesus’s plan to prepare the Apostles for his final catechetical instruction to go forth and go into the world and preach the Gospel.[1] The time Jesus spent with his Apostles and disciples was...
Servant of God Chiara Corbella’s Beatification Cause to Take a Step Forward in June…
Within the first two years of their marriage, Chiara and Enrico suffered the death of two children, both of whom died less than an hour after birth. Their first child, Maria Grazia Letizia, was diagnosed in utero with anencephaly, a serious birth defect in which a baby is born without parts of the brain or skull. Chiara chose to carry the baby to term and her daughter lived just long enough to be baptized in the hospital, dying within a half hour of her birth in June 2009. During her second pregnancy, ultrasounds revealed that her son had no legs or kidneys. Baby Davide Giovanni died in June 2010 after living for 38 minutes. The couple chose to share their testimony about the few minutes that they were able to spend with their children at pro-life events in Italy. They also underwent...
The Carrington Lights, the News, and Kendrick the Intercessor?
The Carrington lights, the news, and Kendrick the intercessor? Skip to content Pillar subscribers can listen to this Pillar Post here: The Pillar TL;DR Hey everybody, I hope a lot of you enjoyed seeing the aurora borealis over the weekend, if the phenomenon could be seen where you live. Aurora borealis, May 10, 2024, Burrard Inlet, Vancouver, Canada. Credit: Brunoresende29/wikimedia CC BY SA 4.0 Here in Colorado, we’ve had a lot of cloud cover for the past few nights, and despite the solar storm that put them in reach for much of the country, the Northern Lights were never going to be especially visible from here anyhow. But while much of the U.S. has enjoyed the experience of dazzling celestial displays, I did a little bit of reading about the Northern Lights. When I went down...
‘Be grateful’ might sound like an overblown slogan. But it’s a simple truth: Gratitude leads to joy…
View of Delft, Johannes Vermeer, c. 1660 – 1661. Gratitude makes us happier and healthier. That said, I have some difficulty expressing gratitude, especially as a person who tends toward the melancholic and the critical. This trait can be useful when writing academic papers, but it is often less helpful in close relationships. And so, while scientific studies on gratitude often impress me, they do not always move me to practice gratitude more. Of course, none of those feelings changes the fact that researchers do think that practicing gratitude is associated with happier and healthier lives (adding the caveat that correlation does not prove causation). Gratitude can improve our emotional life, our relationships, and even our productivity at work. The Science of Gratitude: Increasing ...
Which ‘spirituality’ is for you? Here’s a good place to start…..
By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio – articles – email ) | May 14, 2024 One of the confusing things about spiritual growth is how to figure out exactly what particular approaches or procedures we ought to follow to foster that growth. We may come across various particular devotions or spiritual exercises, some of which may (or may not) have a particular appeal. The Holy Spirit, and presumably our guardian angel, know how we can best focus our spiritual energies, so we should certainly ask our angels for help and spend some time in silent prayer and reflection to try to discern the promptings of the Spirit. But getting the balance right is typically an ongoing process, especially since our personal circumstances change based not only on the realities of age, family life, health, work and ot...
Company Fires Florida Catholic for Marking His Pronouns ‘Assigned by God’…
CV NEWS FEED // When a password management company asked its employees to share their preferred “gender” pronouns, software engineer Chad Scharf responded with “Assigned by God.” He was later fired. Scharf was vice president of software engineering at Bitwarden, a password management company with a location in Jacksonville, Florida. He oversaw over 50 employees—until the company asked him for his “preferred pronouns” on Slack, a business messaging app. “Preferred pronouns” indicate a person’s preferred “gender identity” and can vary from the standard “he/him” or “she/her” to “gender neutral” pronouns such as “they/them” or invented, new words such as “ze/zir.” Unwilling to speak against his Catholic beliefs, Scharf opted out of the LGBTQ schema of “gender identities.” “Le...
How Catholics Should Approach Media Heading Into Next Election…
The following is excerpted from the chapter “Fake News: How to Navigate the Media” of the new book “For God, Country, & Sanity: How Catholics Can Save America.” Mary Margaret Olohan, one of the book’s contributors, wrote the chapter. It is a truth universally acknowledged that pretty much no one trusts “the news” anymore. You can’t really blame the American public for not believing the stories that fill their news feeds when so many legacy newsrooms are filled with activist reporters masquerading as unbiased journalists. We live in a time when men claim to be women and get away with it, when the innocence of our children is flaunted, when the lives of our unborn children are thrown away, and when government institutions are comfortable attempting to dictate our every move. And mainstre...
‘Never Be Afraid to Profess the Catholic Church’: KC Chiefs’ Harrison Butker Triggers Media Frenzy with Benedictine College Speech…
Kansas City Chiefs’ placekicker Harrison Butker offered some pointed criticism of Catholic bishops and priests along with advice to college graduates in his commencement address at Benedictine College on Saturday. Catholic bishops should be more like St. Damien of Molokai and less concerned about what civil and cultural leaders think about them, the three-time Super Bowl winner and outspoken Catholic said. St. Damien (1840-1889), a missionary priest from Belgium, spent nearly 16 years ministering to lepers in Hawaii before dying of their disease. “His heroism is looked at today as something set apart and unique when ideally it should not be unique at all,” Butker told the graduates at the Catholic liberal arts college in Atchison, Kansas, on May 11, the day after St. Damien’s f...
A moveable feast, Twitter bishops, and too many whales…
A moveable feast, Twitter bishops, and too many whales Skip to content Happy Friday friends, Depending on where you are, or were yesterday, you’ve either celebrated the Feast of the Ascension of the Lord or will do so this Sunday. There are three tiers of canon law at play here, and people often ask us what the deal is, what exactly their obligations are, and even how fast and loose you can play pilgrim across diocesan lines to celebrate it according to your day of preference. The presumption of universal law is that the Feast of the Ascension is to be celebrated on its proper day, Thursday, the 40th day of Easter and 10 days before Pentecost, as a day of precept — a holy day of obligation. But, the universal law also allows episcopal conferences to suppress or transfer the feast to ...
Germany Now a ‘Mission Country,’ Bishop Bätzing Says Amid Declining Catholic Numbers…
“We should get in touch with these people, talk to them without being intrusive. These times of a mission with a negative tone are over, but speaking and answering questions about the hope that fills us, as the letter to the Hebrews says, is part of Christianity.” Bätzing has led the Diocese of Limburg since 2016 and the German Bishops’ Conference since 2020. In 2016, more than 630,000 Catholics resided in Limburg. By 2022, this number had dropped to fewer than 540,000. The Catholic population in Germany, a nation of about 83 million people, has significantly decreased. In 2020, there were approximately 22.19 million Catholics. However, by 2022, this number had dropped to about 20.94 million. Researchers paint a stark picture of the future: In 2019, a project of scientists at the Uni...
Pro-Life Activist Lauren Handy Sentenced to 57 Months in Federal Prison Under FACE Act…
The sentences were ordered by U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who chided Handy for prioritizing her activism above the “needs” of women, according to local news outlet WUSA9. “Neither you nor any of the other co-conspirators showed any compassion, empathy, toward those two women needing medical care,” Kollar-Kotelly said. “Your views took precedence over, frankly, their human needs.” According to a previous DOJ statement, the activists involved in the rescue used “physical obstruction to injure, intimidate, and interfere with the clinic’s employees and a patient because they were providing or obtaining reproductive health services.” The DOJ also said the activists “forcefully entered the clinic and set about blockading two clinic doors using their bodies, furniture, chain...
