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Monday, July 27, 2015

Mea culpa on religious education

I must apologize for hasty words below on Catholic education. I am tempted to delete them but that would be dishonest and cowardly. It is perhaps best to leave them as a reminder of my pride and folly.

To be clear, yes, religious education is far from ideal, but like parenting, most of us do our best with limited resources, including me. We have the best intentions but we always fall short. We also fall into pride and think we can do better than others, and while being better than ourselves is always a good goal, judging ourselves above others, as I have done, is always a doomed exercise. As the records show, my judgment was laced with poison.

I have much to learn, and perhaps these matters are best kept between my spiritual director and myself. To all whom I had offended, please accept my apologies. To any who agreed with me in any way, keep the good intentions but throw away the pride, as I should have done before I had published that post. If I could rewrite the past, I should have brought up these concerns as questions, clarifications, and at most, suggestions. I may have had good points to make, but I made them very badly.

And here is a blogging resolution: never blog or send email in an anxious state. Prayer first, always.

Wednesday, July 22, 2015

Why do we have anti-Catholic educators teaching Catholic educators?

I suppose we've had false teachers in the Church from day 1. Seems like another case of housekeeping to me: clean daily and do some more, a lot more, in Spring. And, be calm, but vigilant.

Tuesday, July 21, 2015

Caesar is in the (German) Church

Perhaps that is why it is in trouble: it cannot serve two masters, and only one of them can grant supernatural faith. Sadly, their leaders don't seem to get it.

Saturday, July 18, 2015

Quo Vadis?

Update: I deeply regret the tone and presumptuousness of the post below.

The other evening I witnessed first hand how the Church is poisoned from within, as I sat dumbfounded at times while a religious education teacher taught falsehood in preparing children for Confirmation. This explains how we got here, and a few thoughts came to mind later.

1. Teachers of Catholic religious education should have more than teaching degrees and theology courses. They must be committed to daily Liturgy of the Hours. They must be faithful in orthodoxy. Ex corde ecclesiae!

2. Our priests and nuns should pull out of politics. It is not in lobbying, but in the education of our young that they can change the world. That has been neglected, and so we are in this mess.

3. Teaching is where I should consider my ministry, because this is where the Church is bleeding, infected, and exposing its members to poison.

4. It is high time we stop being quiet and politically correct. Problems will not go away without naming and addressing them head on. We do not serve our neighbor by affirming them in or abandoning them to their poison.

Friday, July 17, 2015

We are called to be faithful, the battle is God's

Our fight is not against human foes but against cosmic powers, against the authorities and potentates of this dark world, against the superhuman forces of evil in the heavens. Stand firm, I say, and fasten onto the belt of truth. You have but to stand firm and watch the Lord coming to your aid.

That responsory from the Office of Readings seems very apt. The whole world, as they day, has gone mad. It strains the gnat and swallows the camel, nurtures beasts and murders children, and even where we least expect it, our children are taught falsehood while Godly doctrine is shunned. But our job is to stand firm, the battle is God's, and he has already won the war.

Tuesday, July 14, 2015

Marriage and Family is the Battlefield

.. in a Great Spiritual War because this is where love is first sowed and reaped, where it is first taught and practiced - Christian marriage and family, that is, for the foundation is Christ himself.

Friday, July 10, 2015

Doctrine does not fit the format of news

This post about poor news reporting on Pope Francis got me thinking on what has probably occurred to others before: at the very least, news gets it wrong because the format doesn't fit. News reporting goes in for the quick and lasting impression. They work with word count limits. They work for the scoop, so they rush. At worst, they go in with an agenda, so they simply write everything into the story they already had.

The bigger point is this: doctrine is not news. You don't go to a fast food joint for nutrition, so why inform your spirituality from the news? Why not read the encyclical itself? How about that biblical passage? How about that free forum to clarify and go deeper? How about that priest, deacon or prayer meeting group? This is the age when there is practically no excuse for being uninformed.

So don't go for sound bites or news summaries. The whole thing is out there. Just go for it!

[Update: That should teach me not to use the android phone to blog. Too many funny and not so funny mistakes like "Doctrine doors not for the.." That was the original title of this post.  I miss my Nokia n900 with the slide out keyboard! ]

Wednesday, July 01, 2015

More signs of hope

Since Christ identified Church unity as the definitive sign to the nations of his mission, then Pope Francis' priority to bring the east and west together is worth every prayer. Much of the world's ills, particularly the western disdain of their Christian heritage, comes from the lack of evangelization. May we be one indeed!

Marriage battle was lost in the culture long before it was lost on the courts

I would go further than what George Weigel wrote. Yes, the marriage battle was lost in the culture long before it was lost in the Supreme Court, but it must have been lost in the Church first. That would explain why the Christian west was entirely too quick to walk away from Christian marriage and into the arms of cheap Hollywood romance. We lost the plot a long time ago. We exchanged the true meaning of love and freedom for shiny false substitutes. So now we have the work of a few generations cut out for us: to have faith and to remain faithful to the author of true Love. It will take his mighty hand to get the world out of this one.