Meditation on the Fourth Sorrowful Mystery: What It Means to Carry Our Cross

Today, December 1, is the First Saturday of the Month. The First Saturday Devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary was first mentioned by Our Lady of Fatima on July 13, 1917. After showing the three children a vision of hell she said, "You have seen hell where the souls of poor sinners go. To save them, God wishes to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart. If what I say to you is done, many souls will be saved and there will be peace... I shall come to ask for... the Communion of reparation on the first Saturdays..." The First Saturday devotion is as follows:

It consists in going to Confession, receiving Communion, reciting five decades of the Rosary and meditating for a quarter of an hour on the mysteries of the Rosary on the first Saturday of five consecutive months. The Confession may be made during the eight days preceding or following the first Saturday of each month, provided that Holy Communion be received in the state of grace. Should one forget to form the intention of making reparation to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, it may be formed at the next Confession, occasion to go to confession being taken at the first opportunity.

We are seeing the persecution of Christians around the globe today.  There is a story in recent days out of Syria of a Catholic priest, Father Fadi Haddad, who had gone out to negotiate the release of one of his parishioners.  His lifeless body was found several days later with his eyes gouged out.  There has been active persecution of Christians in Syria, as well as in Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq, and a whole host of countries in the Middle East.  We have heard of the terrible Church bombings and killings of Christians in Africa.

Now, of course, we have the beginning of active persecution of Christians, and specifically Catholics, here in the United States.  And this persecution is more than the HHS Mandate which forces Catholics to violate their religious beliefs.  We are also talking about the active war on God in the public marketplace, which we see in full force now that the Christmas season has begun as, across the nation, nativity scenes which were a part of communities for generations are being forcibly removed.  Christmas trees are now referred to as "holiday" trees.

These situations are going to worsen as Christianity is rejected by the world's elite. The re-election of Barack Obama as President has ensured that persecution of Christians, and the Catholic Church in particular, will become more acute in the United States as Christian beliefs are dismissed by the general society as intolerant and even hateful.  

All of this amounts to being handed a very heavy Cross which we must bear, just as our Lord was handed His Cross to carry to Calvary where He was crucified.   And that leads us to the Fourth of the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary:  Christ Carries His Cross.  

Why was it so important that Our Lord carry His Cross?  Why should He have to suffer such a terrible death and even carry the instrument upon which He so tortuously died?  I found a beautiful meditation on this from how-to-pray-the-rosary-everyday.com, and one particularly profound statement from this meditation:

In Carrying the cross, Jesus shows how embracing suffering is the only way to peace. . . . Jesus carrying the cross demonstrates the need to embrace suffering and carry your own cross as the only way to peace and serenity.

This statement seems, on its face, to be totally contradictory.  How can carrying our Cross - which stands for that which causes us great pain and suffering - be the "only way to peace and serenity"?  In our western culture especially we have been taught that we should avoid pain at all costs.  We have medications to take care of every pain possible.  We are told that we should relax and enjoy life as much as we can.  "You deserve a break today."  One big problem with this philosophy is that it goes completely against the command of our Lord:

I'm certainly not saying that it is wrong to alleviate pain in our life by taking painkillers once in a while.  But if we make our whole life about running away from hardship and pain, we may be running away from our salvation.

When our Lord was given His Cross to carry to Calvary, this instrument upon which He was nailed and died, He actually embraced and kissed the Cross, because this was the means by which He would save mankind from death and destruction.  If our Lord had run away from His Cross, He would have been running away from the very purpose for which He was born.  He would have gained temporary reprieve from His great suffering, but the end result would be the loss of all of mankind.  Our Lord actually did ask that this heavy price be lifted from Him, but He ended his prayer to the Father with, "Not my will, but yours be done."

If we run away from the Cross which our Lord gives us to carry, we will be running away from our own personal salvation and possibly cause the loss of salvation for many others.  Our Cross is our own personal road to Heaven, custom made by Our Lord just for us.  This personally tailored Cross is the only sure way to Heaven and eternity with the Holy Trinity.  All other roads lead to damnation.  If we decide that we don't like the Cross we have been given by Christ and try to make our own, if instead of praying that the Father's Will be done, as Christ did, and we instead choose our own way, then we are no longer on the road to salvation.  Unless we repent of our willfulness, we will pay the price with the loss of salvation.

We look at great athletes and know that the only way they achieved their success was by denying themselves and pushing their bodies beyond what they thought they could endure.  We look at great musicians, writers and artists, and we know that they achieved greatness only by giving everything they had to their craft.   No one has ever achieved success by giving in to their own wants and desires.  As the old saying goes, "No pain, no gain."  Our Lord told us that we must deny ourselves and take up the Cross He gives to us.  Just as He did, we must carry our cross, and that cross that will lead to peace and happiness beyond our imagination.

Right now Christianity as a whole has been given a very heavy cross to bear:  persecution and tribulation at the hands of our fellow man.  We can't run away from this.  We must face up to it and all of its implications.  Many Christians are literally paying the price with their lives, and in doing so, they are giving great witness to the world and glory to God.  Many others will be led to salvation because these faithful Christians did not run away from their cross.  We must pray for the grace and the strength to do the same.  Our vision and understanding is extremely limited.  As we are told in Proverbs, "There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death."  (Proverbs 14:12).  We must learn to trust the One who gives us every breath we breathe, the one who gave His Life for us on the Cross of Salvation.  It may seem like we are surrounded by darkness and despair, but Our Lord is always right alongside carrying the Cross with us.

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Faith: An Encounter With God

Faith is an encounter with God who speaks and acts in history and who converts our daily life, transforming our mentality, value judgments, choices and concrete actions. It is not an illusion, an escape from reality, a comfortable shelter, sentimentality, but is the involvement of one's whole life and is the proclamation of the Gospel, the Good News capable of liberating man in his entirety.

Pope Benedict XVI

Henry David Thoreau, a philosopher (among many other accomplishments) of the 19th Century, once made a statement that has echoed down through the last couple of centuries, and which I believe applies to our time more than when Thoreau first wrote this:

Is there any other way to describe the out-of-control greed and materialism that we witnessed on Thanksgiving Day into Friday as shoppers rushed into stores shoving, pushing and fighting in order to get "stuff?"

These were the headlines from the Drudge Report:

This was the face of Black Friday mayhem, truly a picture of a dying nation:

Never in the history of mankind has a nation had such material wealth as we in the United States possess, and instead of satisfying our needs and wants, it make us even more desperate.  If we can just get the latest iPad, TV, phone, computer, shoes, clothes, etc., then we will be happy.  That will take away that terrible aching void that we carry within us and which we try so hard to drown out with all of our many amusements and distractions.  But no matter what we do, that void is still there.

The United States has been a great experiment in materialism and its complete failure to satisfy man's deepest needs.  We look at these pictures and read the stories of people reduced to a state lower than wild animals in a feeding frenzy, and we know that this cannot be what our founding fathers had in mind when they created our once great nation.  "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" just doesn't translate to people trampling over one another to get a Smartphone.

So what is it that we are truly in search of?

For the past month, a white-haired, soft spoken 85-year old man in Rome has been giving us the answers to our most profound longings.  Pope Benedict XVI proclaimed the Year of Faith in October and has been following up with a series of deeply reflective talks on this subject at his weekly Wednesday audiences.  He has explained that faith is what connects us to our Creator, who is the source of every good and perfect gift, as James 1:17 tells us.  Nothing on this earth will truly satisfy and fulfill what we long for because all earthly things are temporary and will one day be gone.  If our heart is wrapped around the temporary things of this world, we will disappear with them.

The subject of this post is the talk given by His Holiness on November 14 in St. Peter's Square.  The translation is taken from the Vatican website.

The Pope began this talk by reminding us that faith initiates with God.  It is His actions that create faith in us, not anything that we do.  It is only because of God's great love and mercy in extending Himself to us that we are able to "journey towards him."  If you feel drawn to God, it is not the result of your actions but because He is working in you and drawing you, as Pope Benedict tells us in the quote from St. Augustine:  "it is not we who possess the Truth after having sought it, but the Truth that seeks us out and possesses us":

Last Wednesday we reflected on the desire for God that human beings carry deep within them. Today I would like to continue to examine this aspect, meditating briefly with you on some of the ways to attain knowledge of God. I wish to recall, however, that God’s initiative always precedes every human initiative and on our journey towards him too it is he who first illuminates us, who directs and guides us, ever respecting our inner freedom. It is always he who admits us to intimacy with him, revealing himself and giving us the grace to be able to accept this revelation in faith. Let us never forget St Augustine’s experience: it is not we who possess the Truth after having sought it, but the Truth that seeks us out and possesses us.

His Holiness goes on to tell us that even though it is God who must give us the faith we need to come to Him, there are also things we can do that will make us more open to Him.  However, just as we can make ourselves more open to God, we can also do things that will close us off from Him.  Even then, when we have let worldliness come between us and our Creator, He always remains faithful and ready to close that gap which we ourselves have created:

Nonetheless there are ways that can open the human heart to knowledge of God, there are signs that lead to God. Of course, we often risk being dazzled by the glare of worldliness that makes us less able to follow these paths and to read these signs. Yet God never tires of seeking us, he is faithful to the human being whom he created and redeemed, he stays close to us in our life because he loves us.

Pope Benedict also reminds us here of our God-given mission in life "to lead everyone to the encounter with Jesus, the one Saviour of the world."  He also says that this is not preaching to others on a street corner but "This mission shines out above all in the holiness to which we are all called."

This is a certainty [that God is always with us] that must accompany us every day, even if a certain widespread mentality makes it harder for the Church and for Christians to communicate to every creature the joy of the Gospel and to lead everyone to the encounter with Jesus, the one Saviour of the world.

However, this is our mission. It is the mission of the Church and every believer must carry it out joyously, feeling it his own, through an existence truly enlivened by faith, marked by charity, by service to God and to others, and that can radiate hope. This mission shines out above all in the holiness to which we are all called. 

As the Holy Father now tells us, few today truly understand what faith in God means because we have separated God from our daily lives.  Western society was Christian in past generations, and people's religious beliefs were a part of their everyday lives and the motivating factor behind all their actions and decisions.  This is no longer true.  It use to be the non-believer was on the outside of society.  Now it is believers who are considered outcasts and who must defend their beliefs:

Today — as we know — faith, which is all too often not properly understood and contested or rejected, encounters no lack of difficulties and trials. St Peter said to his Christians: “Always be prepared to make a defence to any one who calls you to account for the hope that is in you, yet do it with gentleness and reverence” (1 Pt 3:15). In the past, in the West, in a society deemed Christian, faith was the context in which people acted; the reference and adherence to God were part of daily life for the majority. Rather, it was the person who did not believe who had to justify his or her own incredulity. In our world the situation has changed and, increasingly, it is believers who must be able to account for their faith.

Pope Benedict XVI now describes the persecution and belittlement that believers must endure from a society which rejects God as a "a mere projection of the human mind, an illusion and the product of a society already misled by so many alienating factors":

In his Encyclical Fides et Ratio Blessed John Paul II stressed that faith is also put to the test in our day, riddled with subtle and captious [meaning finding fault with every little thing and impossible to please] forms of atheism, both theoretical and practical (cf. nn. 46-47). Ever since the Enlightenment the criticism of religion has been gathering momentum; history has also come to be marked by the presence of atheistic systems in which God was seen as a mere projection of the human mind, an illusion and the product of a society already misled by so many alienating factors.

Pope Benedict XVI now shows us the danger of humans making themselves the center of their own universe, measuring everything by ourselves and cutting ourselves off from awareness of anything bigger than we are.  Atheism in our time has evolved from militant disbelief in God to dismissing God as "irrelevant." Atheists tolerate a certain belief in God as long as it remains superficial and doesn't interfere with our lives. This is actually more dangerous than outright rejection of God because we are no longer even exploring the question of God's existence and importance in our lives. Indifference completely shuts the door to God because he doesn't enter into our thoughts even in a negative way:

Moreover the past century experienced a strong process of secularization under the banner of the absolute autonomy of the human being, considered as the measure and architect of reality, but impoverished by being created “in the image and likeness of God”. A particularly dangerous phenomenon for faith has arisen in our times: indeed a form of atheism exists which we define, precisely, as “practical”, in which the truths of faith or religious rites are not denied but are merely deemed irrelevant to daily life, detached from life, pointless. So it is that people often believe in God in a superficial manner, and live “as though God did not exist” (etsi Deus non daretur). In the end, however, this way of life proves even more destructive because it leads to indifference to faith and to the question of God.

When we become this separated from God, shutting Him completely out of our existence, Pope Benedict says we "are reduced to a single dimension - the horizontal."  This means we do not have any kind of spiritual element in our lives at all.  This has been the cause of so much of the suffering we have seen in the last century under tyrannical dictators. As the Pope explains:  "By obscuring the reference to God the ethical horizon has also been obscured, to leave room for relativism and for an ambiguous conception of freedom which, instead of being liberating, ends by binding human beings to idols."  Pope Benedict XVI experienced this firsthand having grown up in Nazi Germany and having seen the ravages of Communism in Eastern Europe and throughout Russia.

In fact human beings, separated from God, are reduced to a single dimension — the horizontal — and this reductionism itself is one of the fundamental causes of the various forms of totalitarianism that have had tragic consequences in the past century, as well as of the crisis of values that we see in the current situation. By obscuring the reference to God the ethical horizon has also been obscured, to leave room for relativism and for an ambiguous conception of freedom which, instead of being liberating, ends by binding human beings to idols.

The idols that arise when we are cut off from our Creator and which destroy our freedom were symbolized by the three temptations experienced by Our Lord when He was tempted by Satan in the wilderness. The three temptations were:  for material,worldly things (changing stones into bread), willfulness and rebellion against God (Christ tempting God by throwing Himself off of a high pinnacle) and power (Satan promising Christ the world if He will worship him).  It all comes down to man making himself a god:

The temptations that Jesus faced in the wilderness before his public ministry vividly symbolize which “idols” entice human beings when they do not go beyond themselves. Were God to lose his centrality man would lose his rightful place, he would no longer fit into creation, into relations with others. What ancient wisdom evokes with the myth of Prometheus has not faded: man thinks he himself can become a “god”, master of life and death.

It is only communion with God through the Church that will give us true freedom and true dignity.  We were created by and for God.  He is the one who sustains our existence through His Love.  That is our purpose and destiny in life, and to try to substitute anything else in the place of God will destroy us:

With this picture before her, the Church, faithful to Christ’s mandate, never ceases to affirm the truth about man and about his destiny. The Second Vatican Council affirms it concisely: “The dignity of man rests above all on the fact that he is called to communion with God. The invitation to converse with God is addressed to man as soon as he comes into being. For if man exists it is because God has created him through love, and through love continues to hold him in existence. He cannot live fully according to truth unless he freely acknowledges that love and unless he entrusts himself to his Creator” (Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes, n. 19).

We must have faith - which is not from us but a gift from God -  in order to answer the  skeptics and atheists who challenge us with their indifference to God.  And we must answer our adversaries with "gentleness and reverence."  Our goal is to bring the concept of God back into their consciousness, to take them out of their indifference, which is so very dangerous to their eternal life, and lead them to the paths that will open them to God:

What answers, therefore, is faith required to give, “with gentleness and reverence” to atheism, to scepticism, to indifference to the vertical dimension, in order that the people of our time may continue to ponder on the existence of God and take paths that lead to him? I want to point out several paths that derive both from natural reflection and from the power of faith itself. I would like to sum them up very briefly in three words: the world, man, faith.

The Pope now gives us three paths that will open us to our Creator.  First, the physical world in which we live can be very powerful in leading us to God.  Pondering the physical creation around us, the beauty, complexity and perfection of it, is a very real path to God:

The first word: the world. St Augustine, who spent much of his life seeking the Truth and was grasped by the Truth, wrote a very beautiful and famous passage in which he said: “Question the beauty of the earth, question the beauty of the sea, question the beauty of the air distending and diffusing itself, question the beauty of the sky... question all these realities. All respond: ‘See, we are beautiful’. Their beauty is a profession [confessio]. These beauties are subject to change. Who made them if not the Beautiful One [Pulcher] who is not subject to change?” (Sermo 241, 2: pl 38, 1134).

I think we should recover — and enable people today to recover — our capacity for contemplating creation, its beauty and its structure. The world is not a shapeless mass of magma, but the better we know it and the better we discover its marvellous mechanisms the more clearly we can see a plan, we see that there is a creative intelligence. Albert Einstein said that in natural law is revealed “an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection” (The World As I See It, 1949). Consequently a first path that leads to the discovery of God is an attentive contemplation of creation.

In something of a paradox, the Holy Father advises us to return to ourselves, not in a manner of glorifying and setting ourselves up as our own god, but to open ourselves up to the questions and longings that are innate to all people, the need for purpose in life and the realization that there is something bigger than ourselves for which we should be living.  But to do this, we have to turn off the world and find a quiet place where we can hear ourselves:

The second word: man. Again, St Augustine was to write a famous sentence in which he says that God is more intimate to me than I am to myself (cf. Confessions III, 6, 11).

Hence he formulates the invitation, “do not go outside yourself, return to yourself: the truth is higher than my highest and more inward than my innermost self” (De Vera Religione, 39, 72). This is another aspect that we risk losing in the noisy and dispersive world in which we live: the ability to pause and look deeply into ourselves and to reinterpret the thirst for the infinite that we bear within us, that impels us to go further and to refer to the One who can quench it. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says: “with his openness to truth and beauty, his sense of moral goodness, his freedom and the voice of his conscience, with his longings for the infinite and for happiness, man questions himself about God's existence” (n. 33).

The third path given to us by the Holy Father is simply a life of faith, the way in which believers "preach" to non-believers.  The Holy Father describes those who are living a life of faith:  "Those who believe are united to God and open to his grace, to the power of his love."  Again, Pope Benedict is showing that it is God who does the work in us.  Our part is to be open to God's grace.  By being open to God, we become strong witnesses for Him to the unbelieving world.

The third word: faith. We must not forget, especially in the situation of our time, that the life of faith is a path which leads to the knowledge of and encounter with God. Those who believe are united to God and open to his grace, to the power of his love. Thus their existence becomes a witness, not of themselves but of the Risen One, and their faith does not hesitate to shine out in daily life, open to dialogue that expresses deep friendship for the journey of every human being and can bring hope to people in need of redemption, happiness, a future.

The Holy Father now describes the transformative effects of faith, and that faith, "an encounter with God who speaks and works in history and converts our daily life", is more real than anything else we can ever experience in our earthly existence.  This is what we are called to share with the rest of humanity: 

Faith, in fact, is an encounter with God who speaks and works in history and converts our daily life, transforming within us mentalities, value judgments  decisions and practical actions. Faith is not an illusion, a flight of fancy, a refuge or sentimentalism; rather it is total involvement in the whole of life and is the proclamation of the Gospel, the Good News that can set the whole of the person free. A Christian and a community that are active and faithful to the plan of God who loved us first, are privileged paths for those immersed in indifference or in doubt about their life and action. However, this asks each and every one to make their testimony of faith ever more transparent, purifying their life so that it may be in conformity with Christ.

The Pope declares that Christian faith is much more than an intellectual belief system.  It is about a personal relationship with the Great God and Creator of the Universe whom, as the Holy Father tells us, is actually "anxious to communicate with human beings in a tête-à-tête, in a relationship of love with them."  As Pope Benedict XVI tells us, "at the root of every doctrine or value is the event of the encounter between man and God in Jesus Christ. Christianity, before being a moral or an ethic, is the event of love, it is the acceptance of the Person of Jesus.

Many people today have a limited idea of the Christian faith, because they identify it with a mere system of beliefs and values rather than with the truth of a God who revealed himself in history, anxious to communicate with human beings in a tête-à-tête, in a relationship of love with them. In fact, at the root of every doctrine or value is the event of the encounter between man and God in Jesus Christ. Christianity, before being a moral or an ethic, is the event of love, it is the acceptance of the Person of Jesus. For this reason the Christian and Christian communities must first look and make others look to Christ, the true Way that leads to God.

I felt tremendous sadness when I saw the pictures over the Thanksgiving weekend of people trampling over each other just to get perishable "stuff".  Our Lord stands at our side at all times holding out his hands in mercy and love, offering us true life, the only life that will fill the tremendous void in our hearts.  But we ignore our Creator and Redeemer and are instead taken in by the things of this world which seem so alluring, so attractive.  They give us momentary thrills, but the joy and satisfaction never last, and then we are on the next thing, only to again find disappointment and emptiness.

We can accept the momentary pleasures of this world which will eventually lead to our spiritual death, or we can answer the loving and merciful call of our Creator who wishes to share Himself with us for all eternity.  That is our choice, that is what faith, God reaching out to us, is all about.

“The dignity of man rests above all on the fact that he is called to communion with God. The invitation to converse with God is addressed to man as soon as he comes into being. For if man exists it is because God has created him through love, and through love continues to hold him in existence. He cannot live fully according to truth unless he freely acknowledges that love and unless he entrusts himself to his Creator” (Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes, n. 19).

A Catholic's Gratitude for Barack Obama

Yesterday, November 22, was Thanksgiving Day in America.  This a day that has been set aside for all Americans to pause and give thanks for the blessings in our lives.  Originally it was to give thanks to our Creator, but since it is now basically against the law to mention Divinity in public, I guess we're suppose to just sort of thank each other.  But in recent years even giving thanks on this day has become moot.  Thanksgiving has become a time to watch football and/or go to to the mall and stand in line for Black Friday so we can get an iPad or flat screen TV really cheap.

Shoppers camping out at mall on Thanksgiving Day

The point of this post is not to lament the loss of the meaning of Thanksgiving and what that says about the sad state of our culture. That's for another time.  Notwithstanding what much of the rest of the nation does, I still like to use this day as originally intended and thank my Creator for all the many, many blessings I have received.  I thank Him for my faith, for my family and friends, for the fact that I still have a job in this economy, for the fact that we did not suffer the ravages of Hurricane Sandy as so many did here in the Northeast.  And I also thank God for the re-election of Barack Obama as President of the United States.

Oh yes, you read that correctly.  I, a serious Catholic who loves my faith above all else in my life, am grateful for President Barack Obama, an avowed enemy of the Catholic Church and everything that is holy and sacred.   I am saying that the re-election of Barack Obama, while not a good thing for Catholics, was absolutely necessary if any part of our Church is going to survive in this once great nation.

Before you decide that I have completely lost my mind and move to something else, read on a bit.  Up until the election of Barack Obama, most Catholics, and specifically our bishops and priests, sort of sat back and let things happen.  Our nation legalized the killing of our babies in 1973.  There has been outrage here and there, and admittedly many good Catholic groups were raised up to fight this terrible evil such as the Priests for Life and the Sisters of Life, but for the most part we rarely heard about this holocaust from our pulpits.  The vast, vast majority of Catholics (well over 90%) used birth control, yet next to nothing was said about this.  Millions of Catholics were living together without benefit of marriage, but silence pretty much reigned supreme on this subject as well.  

Militant homosexuals were gaining ground and making themselves accepted by general society, and not only was little being said, but to the contrary, a fair number of Catholic Churches were proudly proclaiming themselves "inclusive" and welcoming sexually active homosexuals into their parishes.  The Church did get what should have been a wake-up call when the sexual abuse crisis hit.  She was forced to admit that there were renegade clergy in her ranks, but nothing much changed in her message to the faithful and the rest of the world.  The vast majority in the Church quietly continued along on what seemed to be a path of self destruction.

Father Frank Pavone

Then came Barack Obama, put into office by the Catholic vote in 2008.  There were most definitely voices from the Church warning us of the danger in doing so.  I remember a Youtube video from Father Frank Pavone of Priests for Life the day after the 2008 election in which he gave us a very dire warning:

Barack Obama has been elected the new president of the United States, and this is one of the biggest mistakes that the American people have made in the entire history of our nation.

And the many reasons why that's true, will come to light as the months go on. But the biggest reason why that's true, is that here, we have a president elect who cannot tell the difference between serving the public and killing the public.

He is, as you know, the most ardent supporter of the so called 'Right to Abortion', in an unrestricted way, throughout all nine months of pregnancy for any reason, or no reason at all. This is the man who said, 'I don't know when human rights are attached to a baby.' Well if you don't know when human rights begin, you're in no position to govern a country that was founded on the principle of human rights.

We saw how prophetic Father Pavone was when newly sworn-in President Obama's first executive order was to overturn the Mexico City policy put into effect by President Ronald Reagan, and allow funding for overseas abortion.  This was only the first of hundreds of actions on the part of the Obama administration in promoting abortion and other intrinsic evils.  The crowning achievement of the Obama administration is Obamacare, which allows, nay enforces federal funding of contraception, sterilization and abortion.  Of course this bill also requires all employers to provide, via insurance coverage, free contraception and morning after pills to their employees regardless of the employer's personal beliefs.  We must not forget that Obama is also our first president to openly support homosexual rights and same sex marriage.

We have seen the bishops come fully awake under President Barack Obama.  They have had no choice but to acknowledge to the world that the Catholic Church is under siege from the government.  Unlike the 2008 election, bishop after bishop has been announcing from the pulpit that Catholics cannot vote for politicians who openly support abortion and other intrinsically evil practices.  Because of the HHS Mandate, the bishops have been forced to talk about birth control, some for the first time in their ministries.  They have to tell the faithful and the rest of the world that the Catholic church views birth control as evil and that use of it endangers the salvation of souls.

Here is a screenshot from pewsitter.com from just before the election, showing several headlines about bishops warning of voting for Barack Obama:

Bishop John Paprocki of Springfield, Illinois

Our bishops are now talking about salvation and sin and even hell, subjects that seemed to have been taboo and forgotten by large portions of the Church for the last decades.  We are hearing about the need to make our faith and our Savior the central point of our lives.  Bishops are taking responsibility for the grave crisis we have seen in the Church in the last decades.  In a response to the HHS Mandate back in April 2012, Timothy Cardinal Dolan made a huge admission:

In a frank interview with the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who heads the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and is increasingly being billed as America’s leading Catholic cleric, says the Church has failed to communicate its moral teachings in the area of sexuality. He says further that the fault lies with Church leaders.

“I’m not afraid to admit that we have an internal catechetical challenge—a towering one—in convincing our own people of the moral beauty and coherence of what we teach. That’s a biggie,” said Dolan.

“We have gotten gun-shy . . . in speaking with any amount of cogency on chastity and sexual morality,” he added.

The Church’s own failure to communicate its teachings on contraception has been one of the leading tools used against it in its fight against Obama’s mandate, with critics repeatedly pointing out that the majority of Catholic women are using some form of contraception.

Cardinal Dolan

There is the recent speech given at the Bishops' Conference by Cardinal Dolan in which he did not specifically mention the war being waged by President Obama against the church, but Cardinal Dolan did say that in response to these times in which there are so many lapsed Catholics, we need to once again emphasize the Sacrament of Penance, starting with the Bishops themselves, as a pathway to reconversion. As he said at the end of his speech:

With this as my presidential address, I know I risk the criticism. I can hear it now: "With all the controversies and urgent matters for the Church, Dolan spoke of conversion of heart through the Sacrament of Penance. Can you believe it?"

To which I reply, "You better believe it!"

First things first!

This theme was very much echoed by Cardinal Charles Chaput of Philadelphia in which he said that "Being a Saint is the Only Thing that Matters".  As the Cardinal stated:

“More than 70 million Americans describe themselves as Catholics. But for all practical purposes, they’re no different from everybody else in their views, their appetites and their behaviors.”

Cardinal Chaput went on to say that Catholics need to get back to basics:

“So we need to ask ourselves: What do I want my life to mean? If I claim to be a Catholic, can I prove it with the patterns of my life? When do I pray? How often do I seek out the Sacrament of Penance? What am I doing for the poor? How am I serving the needy? Do I really know Jesus Christ?”

“Who am I leading to the Church? How many young people have I asked to consider a vocation? How much time do I spend sharing about God with my spouse, my children and my friends? How well and how often do I listen for God’s will in my own life?”

One of the most important results of Barack Obama's re-election as president is that more and more Catholics are realizing that our salvation, both physical and spiritual, is not in politics, as shown in this editorial from catholicculture.org entitled "The End of Pro Life Politics.  As Dr. Jeff Mirus writes:

Have we as pro-life Catholics been wrong to invest the lion’s share of our time, talent and energy in the political battle against abortion over the past forty years? Or even if we have not been wrong the whole time, are we wrong now? Perhaps it is obvious that I believe the answer is yes. It ought to be clear by now that Western culture is insufficiently healthy to sustain a political solution to abortion. Therefore, it is counter-productive to pour our resources into the effort to achieve such a solution. We must use our resources far more wisely than that.

Dr. Mirus writes:

The time has come to admit the obvious and, in consequence, to speak the unspeakable. Is it not clear now that the social order as we know it in the West is utterly incapable of sustaining successful pro-life politics? The evidence is overwhelming. First, there is again the remarkable lack of success over the past forty years despite the staggering resources expended in the cause. Second, in the United States at least, this lack of success seems to conflict with polls that repeatedly show a majority of voters to prefer restrictions on abortion—which proves that such voters do not regard abortion as significant enough to influence their votes. Third, as indicated at the outset, the number of other serious social and political challenges which have so rapidly emerged in recent years are clear signs that our mainstream culture has problems far deeper than a disagreement about how to handle the question of legal abortion.

It is no longer satisfactory—in fact I would say it is disingenuous—to stress (for example, in response to the Obama juggernaut) that we simply need to go back to the trenches and mobilize more people and more resources in the same political effort next time around. Twenty-five years ago this seemed to make sense. Ten years ago people were reluctant to suggest that it did not. Today, anybody who thinks this is a reasonable response to the problems we face either has his head in the sand or possesses a vested interest in the economic viability of one or more of the many pro-life organizations which—almost certainly through no great fault of their own—simply cannot succeed.

What does Dr. Mirus see as the proper response to the evil surrounding us and the persecution of the Catholic Church?

Personally, I do not see this as cause for alarm, just as I do not see it as anything new. I think, rather, that we are just beginning to see our situation as it really is, after a generation and more of intense confusion over the signs of the times. This misreading of the signs has unfortunately caused us to waste enormous amounts of energy fighting not so much for Christ as for political outcomes which cannot be sustained without Christ. This does not mean that we must despair, though we are very likely in for a rough time. Nor does it mean, obviously, that we are absolved from voting morally. But it does mean that we ought to expend our greatest energies elsewhere, in widespread efforts to strengthen the Church, to develop our own Christian subculture complete with vibrant intermediary institutions, to evangelize our neighbors, and to offer practical service to any and all who, increasingly ill-served by a bureaucratic pagan State, may turn to us in their need.

This is, in fact, exactly what Christians had to do in the early centuries of the Church (and what they must never fail to do at any time, even when things happen to be going better politically). In other words, the answer to the disturbing question with which I opened this essay is clear. This is not the time to place the emphasis on politics, any more than it was time for politics when Karol Wojtyla was growing up in Poland. This is the time for Faith and family, evangelization and the formation of Christian culture.

This is not the time to waste immense resources and energies on political efforts which our larger Western culture cannot possibly sustain. It is rather a time to grow in Faith, evangelize those around us, and form vibrant local cultures which draw our neighbors into the light of Christ.

The re-election of Barack Obama has forced the Catholic Church to face reality with no place to hide.  Our enemy is firmly in control.  The GOP has made it it quite clear that they are no longer going to fight, if they ever did. The war started by Barack Obama against the Catholic Church will continue unabated and for all intents and purposes, unopposed by the Republicans.  As Politico told us two days after the election:

House Speaker John Boehner made it official Thursday: Obamacare isn’t going anywhere.

In an interview with ABC News, Boehner seemed to suggest the election ended any efforts to wipe out the whole law. When “World News” anchor Diane Sawyer asked if there would be any more votes to repeal the law, Boehner said “the election changes that” and “Obamacare is the law of the land.”

If Mitt Romney had defeated Barack Obama, many Catholics would have heaved a sigh of relief with the belief that we will live to see another day.  We would have comforted ourselves with the thought that Romney would appoint the right judges to the Supreme Court who would make everything right.  God would come back into the public square.  The HHS Mandate would be lifted, and the Catholic Church could once again go about her business unimpeded.  In other words, we could put the blinders back on as to the real condition of the nation and our Church.

An Obama administration leave us with nowhere to hide and forces us to face our own spiritual nakedness.  We need to acknowledge and repent of the fact that the problems we as a Church face in 2012 are largely the result of both our own actions and inactions of the last 50 years   Catholics are realizing that while Barack Obama is the face of our enemy, our real fight is not against him.  Our fight is against our own disbelief and rejection of Church teachings, our lack of dependence upon and faith in our Savior, Jesus Christ, and our indifference to the sin in our lives and our lack of repentance for it.  The solutions to our problems are spiritual, not political.

The message we are getting from our bishops and other leading voices in the Church is that the answer to the spiritual crisis in which we find ourselves is to rediscover our Catholic roots. We need to become Catholics again.

The best days of the United States are behind us.  We are headed for very dark and troubling times. The Culture of Death is firmly ensconced in our nation and our entire world, and all those who oppose it will be persecuted.  The Obama administration is not the cause of the great evil that we face but the symbol of it. As the Apostle Paul told us 2000 years ago:

For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood; but against principalities and power, against the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in the high places.  (Ephesians 6:12)

Barack Obama has galvanized the Church in a way no one and nothing else has been able to do and made us realize that we are in the fight of our lives, both physically and spiritually.  And that is why I as a Catholic am thankful for Barack Obama.

Pray for our bishops and priests that they will have the courage and fortitude to stand up to the evil that we all face, and pray for your own soul as well.  St. Paul gave us our marching orders in Ephesians 6:13-18:

Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the saints.

¡Viva Cristo Rey! ¡Viva la Virgen de Guadalupe!

Pope Benedict XVI: We Are Restless Until We Rest In God

“The desire for God is written in the human heart, because man is created by God and for God; and God never ceases to draw man to himself. Only in God will he find the truth and happiness he never stops searching for” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 27).

We have seen many stories of celebrities and other well known people who seem to have it all - talent, beauty, fame, money, the adulation of millions.  Yet so often they have terrible tragic endings, and we find out they were deeply addicted to drugs or alcohol, going from one failed relationship to another with little or no happiness or contentment in their lives.  We think of people like Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston.  All great talents, "loved" by millions, at the very top of their game and yet, desperately lonely and unhappy people who died as total failures in their personal lives.

Blessed Mother Teresa and Princess Diana

We were given a prime example of this in 1997 when we witnessed the untimely and tragic death of Princess Diana, a terribly frustrated and unhappy individual who knew little peace or happiness in her short life.  Less than one week later Blessed Mother Teresa died, having lived a life of love and service to others and completely at peace.  Mother Angelica described this event perfectly:

One who had everything died with nothing; one who had nothing died with everything.

What was Blessed Mother Teresa's secret?  No secret at all - she loved Our Lord above everything else.  She found what she was looking for:

“To me - Jesus is my God. Jesus is my Spouse. Jesus is my Life. Jesus is my only Love. Jesus is my All in all. Jesus is my everything. Jesus, I love with my whole heart, with my whole being. I have given Him all, even my sins, and He has espoused me to Himself in all tenderness and love. Now and for life I am the Spouse of my crucified Spouse.”

Our Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, has continued his talks in regard to the Year of Faith.  On November 7, he gave a talk in St. Peter's Square about man's innate desire for God, that desire which was completely fulfilled in Blessed Mother Teresa's life.  I have copied a translation of our Holy Father's talk from the Vatican website and given my understanding of the Holy Father's talk:

Pope Benedict starts his talk by reminding us that we all have an innate desire for God.  

The journey of reflection that we are making together during this Year of Faith leads us to meditate today on a fascinating aspect of the human and the Christian experience: man carries within himself a mysterious desire for God. In a very significant way, the Catechism of the Catholic Church opens precisely with the following consideration: “The desire for God is written in the human heart, because man is created by God and for God; and God never ceases to draw man to himself. Only in God will he find the truth and happiness he never stops searching for” (n. 27).

A statement like this, that even today in many cultural contexts seems quite acceptable, even obvious, might, however, be taken as a provocation in the West’s secularized culture. 

Our secular world is trying very hard to push God out, telling us that He is a figment of our imagination and that belief and obedience to Him will only enslave us and make us unhappy.  But that doesn't lessen our need for God in any way.  We often try to fill this desire for God by using the things of this world, especially all the distractions we have in our contemporary world such as movies, TV, video games, etc.  Some people use their work, some people use food.  Some people try to use other people in their lives - a spouse, children, etc.  And of course millions get involved in false pagan religions in which the real God is nowhere to be found  All of these are substitutes.  Pope Benedict XVI explains that try as we might, nothing will satisfy our desire for God but God Himself.

The Holy Father then states that despite our natural desire for God, many in our world today deny this vehemently.  They dismiss belief and faith in God almost as some sort of neurosis:

Many of our contemporaries might actually object that they have no such desire for God. For large sectors of society he is no longer the one longed for or desired but rather a reality that leaves them indifferent, one on which there is no need even to comment. In reality, what we have defined as “the desire for God” has not entirely disappeared and it still appears today, in many ways, in the heart of man. Human desire always tends to certain concrete goods, often anything but spiritual, and yet it has to face the question of what is truly “the” good, and thus is confronted with something other than itself, something man cannot build but he is called to recognize. What can really satisfy man’s desire?

Many of us think the answer to our desires is "romantic" love.  If we can just find our soul mate, that person who can complete us, we will have everything we need.  Pope Benedict directs us to his  first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est ("God Is Love") in which he discussed the meaning and significance of romantic love:

In my first Encyclical Deus Caritas Est, I sought to analyze how such dynamism can be found in the experience of human love, an experience that in our age is more easily perceived as a moment of ecstasy, of leaving oneself, like a place in which man feels overcome by a desire that surpasses him. Through love, a man and a woman experience in a new way, thanks to each other, the greatness and beauty of life and of what is real. If what is experienced is not a mere illusion, if I truly want the good of the other as a means for my own good, then I must be willing not to be self-centred, to place myself at the other’s service, even to the point of self-denial. The answer to the question on the meaning of the experience of love then passes through the purification and healing of the will, required in loving the other. We must cultivate, encourage, and also correct ourselves, so that this good can truly be loved.

The Holy Father, quoting from his own encyclical, tells us that truly loving another takes us out of ourselves and can actually start us on the journey "towards authentic self-discovery and indeed discovery of God."  The more authentic the love, "the more it reveals the question of its origin [that origin being God, who is Love Personified] and its destiny [the destiny of love is union with God], of the possibility that it may endure for ever."  Notice that Pope Benedict says that this reveals the question of love's origin and destiny.  Loving another opens us up to go beyond ourselves, but that is only the beginning.

Thus the initial ecstasy becomes a pilgrimage, “an ongoing exodus out of the closed inward-looking self towards its liberation through self-giving, and thus towards authentic self-discovery and indeed the discovery of God” (Encyclical Deus Caritas Est, n. 6). Through this journey one will be able to deepen gradually one’s knowledge of that love, initially experienced. And the mystery that it represents will become more and more defined: in fact, not even the beloved is capable of satisfying the desire that dwells in the human heart. In fact, the more authentic one’s love for the other is, the more it reveals the question of its origin and its destiny, of the possibility that it may endure for ever. Therefore, the human experience of love has in itself a dynamism that refers beyond the self, it is the experience of a good that leads to being drawn out and finding oneself before the mystery that encompasses the whole of existence.

The Holy Father explains that the more we experience true, genuine love in our lives, the more restless we become because "every good experienced by man projects him toward the mystery that surrounds the human being; every desire that springs up in the human heart echoes a fundamental desire that is never fully satisfied."   To truly love projects us towards God, making us realize that there is something bigger than we are  But these desires cannot be fulfilled solely by human effort, and thus the act of loving another make us even more restless in looking for the answers.  As Pope Benedict explains, "Undoubtedly by such a deep desire, hidden, even enigmatic, one cannot arrive directly at faith".  The Pope tells us we know what does not satisfy us, but apart from God, we are unable to put a name on exactly what it is that we do desire and need.  "One cannot know God based on human desire alone."  As St. Augustine said, we are still restless. "Man is, deep down, a religious being, a beggar of God":  Experiencing true love and true beauty creates in us "a desire to know the light itself, what makes the things of the world shine and with them ignites the sense of beauty."

One could make similar observation about other human experiences as well, such as friendship, encountering beauty, loving knowledge: every good experienced by man projects him toward the mystery that surrounds the human being; every desire that springs up in the human heart echoes a fundamental desire that is never fully satisfied. Undoubtedly by such a deep desire, hidden, even enigmatic, one cannot arrive directly at faith. Men and women, after all, know well what does not satisfy them, but they cannot imagine or define what the happiness they long for in their hearts would be like. One cannot know God based on human desire alone. From this point of view he remains a mystery: man is the seeker of the Absolute, seeking with small and hesitant steps. And yet, already the experience of desire, of a “restless heart” as St Augustine called it, is very meaningful. It tells us that man is, deep down, a religious being (cf. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 28), a “beggar of God”. We can say with the words of Pascal: “Man infinitely surpasses man” (Pensées, ed. Chevalier 438; ed. Brunschvicg 434). Eyes recognize things when they are illuminated. From this comes a desire to know the light itself, what makes the things of the world shine and with them ignites the sense of beauty.

The Holy Father next gives us hope that despite the fact that everything in our contemporary world is so completely focused on the material, at blocking out what he calls the "transcendent dimension", we can still find the "true religious meaning of life, that shows how the gift of faith is not senseless, is not irrational."  The Holy Father tells us that in order to find this "transcendent dimension,"  we need to  "to discover or rediscover the taste of the authentic joy of life."  He defines the taste for true joy as "family, friendship, solidarity with those who suffer, self-renunciation for the sake of the other, love of knowledge, art, the beauty of nature."  He says this needs to be instilled in children from a young age. Developing a taste for the true joys of life produces "antibodies that can fight the trivialization and the dulling widespread today."  He does not exclude adults, who "need to rediscover this joy, to desire authenticity, to purify themselves of the mediocrity that might infest them."

Pope Benedict XVI tell us that it is only these authentic joys that will "bring out the desire for God." This is very important to note for us who live in such immoral times in which everything around us seems designed to take us as far away from God as possible.  We must be very careful of the entertainment we allow ourselves and our family to watch, the books we read, the places we frequent, even the people with whom we socialize.  We have a mighty adversary who is doing everything he can to snatch away the spark of God that is in each person.

We must therefore maintain that it is possible also in this age, seemingly so blocked to the transcendent dimension, to begin a journey toward the true religious meaning of life, that shows how the gift of faith is not senseless, is not irrational. It would be very useful, to that end, to foster a kind of pedagogy of desire, both for the journey of one who does not yet believe and for the one who has already received the gift of faith. It should be a pedagogy that covers at least two aspects. In the first place, to discover or rediscover the taste of the authentic joy of life. Not all satisfactions have the same effect on us: some leave a positive after-taste, able to calm the soul and make us more active and generous. Others, however, after the initial delight, seem to disappoint the expectations that they had awakened and sometimes leave behind them a sense of bitterness, dissatisfaction or emptiness. Instilling in someone from a young age the taste for true joy, in every area of life – family, friendship, solidarity with those who suffer, self-renunciation for the sake of the other, love of knowledge, art, the beauty of nature — all this means exercising the inner taste and producing antibodies that can fight the trivialization and the dulling widespread today. Adults too need to rediscover this joy, to desire authenticity, to purify themselves of the mediocrity that might infest them. It will then become easier to drop or reject everything that although attractive proves to be, in fact, insipid, a source of indifference and not of freedom. And this will bring out that desire for God of which we are speaking.

Pope Benedict also warns us never to be content with our status in life, with what we have achieved.  We must be constantly moving forward, or we will begin to go backward in the wrong direction.  That is our only choice.  He calls this discontent a "healthy restlessness that leads us to be more demanding — to want a higher good, a deeper good — and at the same time to perceive ever more clearly that no finite thing can fill our heart."

A second aspect that goes hand in hand with the preceding one is never to be content with what you have achieved. It is precisely the truest joy that unleashes in us the healthy restlessness that leads us to be more demanding — to want a higher good, a deeper good — and at the same time to perceive ever more clearly that no finite thing can fill our heart. In this way we will learn to strive, unarmed, for the good that we cannot build or attain by our own power; and we will learn to not be discouraged by the difficulty or the obstacles that come from our sin.

Pope Benedict tell us that even when our desire become disordered and "follows artificial paradises and seems to lose the capacity of yearning for the true good", we can still be redeemed by God.  "Even in the abyss of sin, that ember [the yearning for the true good] is never fully extinguished in man. . . .God, by the gift of his grace, never denies man his help."  The Holy Father tell us "When in desire one opens the window to God, this is already a sign of the presence of faith in the soul, faith that is a grace of God."  This is what Divine Mercy is all about, this is what faith is all about - God reaching out to man:

In this regard, we must not forget that the dynamism of desire is always open to redemption. Even when it strays from the path, when it follows artificial paradises and seems to lose the capacity of yearning for the true good. Even in the abyss of sin, that ember is never fully extinguished in man. It allows him to recognize the true good, to savour it, and thus to start out again on a path of ascent; God, by the gift of his grace, never denies man his help. We all, moreover, need to set out on the path of purification and healing of desire. We are pilgrims, heading for the heavenly homeland, toward that full and eternal good that nothing will be able to take away from us. This is not, then, about suffocating the longing that dwells in the heart of man, but about freeing it, so that it can reach its true height. When in desire one opens the window to God, this is already a sign of the presence of faith in the soul, faith that is a grace of God. St Augustine always says: “so God, by deferring our hope, stretched our desire; by the desiring, stretches the mind; by stretching, makes it more capacious” (Commentary on the First Letter of John, 4,6: PL 35, 2009).

Because of God's great mercy and love for us and His desire to reach down to us even in the midst of great sin, we can feel like brothers and sisters to all men, even of those who do not believe.  As the Catechism tells us "God never ceases to draw man to Himself."  This is the reason why we must be praying for all who are truly seeking God:

On this pilgrimage, let us feel like brothers and sisters of all men, travelling companions even of those who do not believe, of those who are seeking, of those who are sincerely wondering about the dynamism of their own aspiration for the true and the good. Let us pray, in this Year of Faith, that God may show his face to all those who seek him with a sincere heart. Thank you.