Discover
Become a Novelty By Extending Your Christmas Celebration…
When, through our words and actions, we show that there’s more to Christmas than a single day, we make a statement about the Catholic faith. We are a novelty in our neighborhood and perhaps among our friends and acquaintances as well. Long after Christmas, New Year’s Day and Epiphany, our Christmas decorations — both inside and outside — remain up and lighted. We leave them up until the Presentation of the Lord, celebrated Feb. 2 each year. What’s more, we continue to celebrate Christmas and all its related feasts until then. When we look back on Church history, celebrating Christmas this way isn’t novel at all. Before the Second Vatican Council, the Christmas season lasted for 40 days, echoing the 40 days of Lent. It was customary at the time to extend Christmas until Feb. 2, carefully ob...
Extend your Christmas celebration by singing carols and reading aloud…
Our celebration of Christmas is ongoing. This is not about ‘making a point’ or offering a corrective to others. It is a matter of taking the opportunity to express our joy and gratitude, as well as our resolve that the birth of Christ make a real difference in our life. We hope that our celebration comes naturally as a sort of spontaneous expression. At the same time, it is something we work on. There is no surprise here. The most important ‘things’ we want to cultivate in life—namely, the virtues—are just so: they become increasingly spontaneous precisely by our intentional efforts. Among the ways we can choose to celebrate around the hearth in our home, two especially come to mind: singing (in this case called caroling) and reading aloud. The most important things in life call for song! ...
Pope’s General Audience on Feast of St. John the Apostle: ‘Never Dialogue With the Devil — He Is Smarter Than You and Will Make You Pay’…
In the biblical account of Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden, and the fall of man, the progenitors thought the serpent to be benign. But, the pope warned, the devil is a master tactician and shapeshifter who was able to instill doubt, which was veiled as “wicked gossip.” At the same time Pope Francis noted that we ought to think of the tree of knowledge not as a “prohibition” imposed by God on “the use of reason” but rather as his way of introducing a “measure of wisdom.” In this way God is signaling to us to be cognizant of our limits so we do not falsely believe that we “are the master[s] of everything, because pride is the beginning of all evil.” The pope noted that in the biblical account, the prohibition imposed on Adam and Eve of eating from that tree was God’s way of “preserv[i...
Beyond the usual suspects, a growing chorus is questioning papal power…
ROME – A great deal of commentary has been unleashed by the recent denouement of the Vatican’s “Trial of the Century,” which ended with convictions for nine of ten defendants, including five years and six months in prison for Italian Cardinal Angelo Becciu. Amid the torrent of reaction, one of the more interesting voices belongs to Cataldo Intrieri, the lawyer who represented Fabrizio Tirabassi, a former official of the Vatican’s Secretariat of State who was sentenced to seven years and six months in jail for his role in the complex, and controversial, $400 million purchase of a London property. In a Dec. 19 essay for Linkiesta, an online Italian daily, Intrieri asserted that despite the good will of the three judges who presided over the trial, “the standard of the investigation and of th...
Dissenting Priests in Syro-Malabar Church Protest Pope Francis’ Christmas Deadline…
Tensions are rising within the Syro-Malabar Church in the Indian state of Kerala as the Vatican’s Dec. 25 deadline for priests to implement a “universal” liturgy or face possible excommunication fast approaches. Ahead of the deadline, a number of priests have publicly protested a mandate to institute a uniform Mass and have urged the Vatican to take into account the way they have celebrated the liturgy for the past 60 years. “We are not against the pope or the Synod [of Bishops] but our request is only to do justice to our archdiocese with 650,000 faithful, 464 priests, and thousands of religious,” Father Kuriakose Mundadan of the Ernakulam Archdiocese told CNA. Facing the People vs. Facing East The Syro-Malabar Church is one of the 23 autonomous Eastern Catholic Churches in full com...
There is no blessing, public or private, for sinful living conditions that objectively contradict God’s holy will…..
Müller – ‘Fiducia supplicans’ is ‘self-contradictory’ Skip to content The Vatican this week prompted widespread debate among bishops and other Church leaders, after Monday’s publication of Fiducia supplicans, which offers a framework for clerical blessings of same-sex couples. Cardinal Gerhard Müller. public domain. While some have praised the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith’s text, others have raised serious concerns, and some bishops’ conferences have pushed back on the implementation of the document in their countries. Fiducia supplicans was authored by Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernandez, who was appointed to lead the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith earlier this year. But Cardinal Gerhard Müller, who led the Vatican’s doctrinal office from 2012 until 2017, said in an...
During the French Revolution, most of the country did not speak French…..
In the early years of the French Revolution, a revolutionary named Henri Grégoire conducted a survey of language throughout the fledgling republic and discovered a concerning truth: Most people living in France at the time didn’t actually speak French. On June 4, 1794, Grégoire reported the results of his survey to the revolutionary assembly, stating that there were no more than 3 million French speakers (11% of the population), and even fewer who were able to write it. In fact, the language was spoken more in the Netherlands and German states than it was in some parts of France. Subscribe to History Facts Confirm your email to receive history’s most fascinating happenings in your inbox each day. By clicking “Subscribe” you agree to History Fact’s Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Ins...
The storm of grief eventually hits every person. Jesus Christ alone can dispel the darkness…..
I will never forget driving home from work for months as tears would fall on my steering wheel. For the first time in my life, I was upset with God. I was angry at my situation, because as a father I dreamed of having ten children. And that dream was fading quickly. Thanks to God’s grace, I never turned my back on Him. I never stopped praying. I never stopped attending Holy Mass. But deep down inside, I sometimes doubted whether God was truly generous with me and whether my desires for a large family would ever come to fruition. I thought to myself, Why is it Lord that so many people can have as many babies as they want (and sadly abort them) or some large Catholic families do not seem excited for another child—yet we are unable to have another baby? My wife called it her two years of wint...
A prayer, an observation, and a list…
A prayer, an observation, and a list Skip to content Happy Friday friends, We made it. It’s been a week seemingly without end, and much of it has been consumed by the two big Vatican stories which blew up on Saturday, and then Monday. Sky over the Negev desert, Israel. Credit: Tourist Israel We have tried to cover those from every angle we can, and we’ll get to that in a moment. But before we do, our inboxes and DMs have been full — but FULL — of people, including priests and even bishops, expressing a great deal of anxiety about the state of the Church right now. It is, by anyone’s measure, a time of turbulence. And there is a lot being said and done which is disturbing for many. It’s taken many of us out of the seasonal joy and anticipation which we’ve all been carefully husbanding, or t...
Nowhere has ‘Fiducia Supplicans’ generated less enthusiasm than in Africa…..
African bishops v. ‘Fiducia supplicans’ Skip to content Nowhere has this week’s Vatican declaration on “the possibility of blessing couples in irregular situations and same-sex couples” generated less enthusiasm than in Africa. Archbishop George Desmond Tambala, president of the Episcopal Conference of Malawi. Screenshot from @lilongwearchdiocese YouTube channel. There have, of course, been negative responses to the document Fiducia supplicans in other continents. Bishops in Kazakhstan have rejected it, while prelates in Ukraine have made pointed criticisms of the text. But these Church leaders seem, so far at least, to be outliers in their respective regions. The opposition that is starting to be expressed toward the declaration in Africa appears to be on a different scale — and a letter ...
What if the ‘false narrative’ narrative is a false narrative?
Is the ‘false narrative’ narrative a false narrative? Skip to content It took fewer than 48 hours after the publication of Fiducia supplicans for a Vatican declaration on blessings to become probably the most controversial text in 10 years of a controversial papacy. The text, which offers a framework and guidelines for clerical blessings of same-sex couples, has prompted sharp division among the world’s bishops, and widespread disagreement among Catholics — not about what the text says, exactly, but about what it means. Palazzo del Sant’Uffizio. Credit: Jim McIntosh/wikimedia. CC BY SA 2.0 By Wednesday morning, bishops’ conferences in Africa had told priests not to observe the provisions of Fiducia supplicans, while an Austrian bishop had told his priests they...
Christmas 2023: ‘May Christmas Bring Peace to Our World and Turn Sorrow Into Joy’…
In his Christmas message at the midday “Urbi et Orbi” blessing on Christmas Day, Pope Francis speaks of how the Child Jesus reveals God’s tender love for each one of us, which brings about “the joy that consoles hearts, renews hope and bestows peace.” He prays for world peace and calls for every effort to stop violence and help those who are suffering. By Thaddeus Jones Greeting the crowds gathered in Saint Peter’s Square from the central loggia of Saint Peter’s Basilica, Pope Francis offered his traditional good wishes on this Christmas Day with a message followed by his solemn “Urbi et Orbi” blessing, to the city and the world. The Pope said we look to the birthplace of Jesus in Bethlehem during these times, sadly marked by “sor...
