ONE CATHOLIC MOM'S MISSION ~
Protestant turned Catholic, wife and mother. Standing up for, and revealing truths about Catholicism and living the Catholic faith.
One of my very favorite priests, Fr. John Hollowell, recently shared a homily about serving the poor. One of his parishioners sent him a poem she wrote in response to his homily. It's terrific! I'd like to share it here:
By Sharon Sauer
I am poor.
I have food to eat but hunger
does not come.
There is no pleasure in
food.
I waste away though a full plate
lies before me.
I have clothes to wear and
jewelry for adornment
But no place to go.Nakedness and cold surround me.
I am not behind bars yet freedom
I lack.
I am chained by past sins and
guilt.
Darkness looms.
Hospitals and doctors have no
cure for my disease.
Sickness of mind destroys my
soul and body,
Slowly I am dying from the
inside out.
I am poor, a wretched
soul.
Please I beg you, Be Jesus to
me.
Day by day I walk by you yet you
see me not.
The pain that destroys me is so
well hidden no one knows.
February 2, 2014. It's Super Bowl Sunday. The Broncos vs. the Seahawks. I enjoy NFL football and usually always watch the Super Bowl. I enjoy the intensity of such a "high-stakes" game, and all the other fun things that go along with the Super Bowl... the half-time show, and the creative and entertaining commercials.
There's one commercial I'll always remember from the 2010 Super Bowl. I remember hearing a lot of buzz in the media about this commercial in the weeks leading up to the big game. This commercial was being promoted as a "Pro-Life" commercial. This was a HUGE deal for Pro-Life supporters because a Super Bowl commercial is usually seen by over 100 million people. Pro-Choice supporters were up-in-arms about this ad and fiercely objected the ad being aired.
The commercial features Tim Tebow (2007 Heisman Trophy winner) and his mom, Pam Tebow. Mrs. Tebow was advised by doctors to abort Tim because of a difficult pregnancy and potential medical concerns for her and her baby. Mrs. Tebow chose LIFE, and the commercial is a celebration of Life and Family, sponsored by the organization Focus on the Family.
Kuddos to CBS for allowing the commercial to air! A 30 second commercial isn't much time to tell an entire story. Mrs. Tebow and her husband tell more of their family's here:
Biblical scholar Dr. Scott Hahn, a once anti-Catholic protestant theologian and minister - now Catholic, explains Papal Infallibility to a protestant caller. Done in a way many biblical protestants will understand.
I love lists that help us examine our conscience, especially in preparation for the Sacrament of Reconciliation. I personally find it very helpful. The first time I saw a list like that, I was surprised to learn of things I never really thought were sins before. A good examination of conscience helps me to be a better Christian.
Two of our sons will be participating in the Sacrament of Reconciliation tomorrow at school. I wanted them to have some time tonight to reflect on their conscience and on God, but at their ages, I knew they'd need some help. I found this examination of conscience for kids online, and thought I'd share it here. In these easy to follow and easy to understand questions, I find it's a good source for anyone of any age. It's from Catholic Parents Online website and written by Fr. Edward Filardi. You can find it at this link:http://catholicparents.org/oxcart/examinationchild.html .
God bless, and may we all receive His mercy.
An Examination of Conscience for
Children by Fr. Edward Filardi, Gaithersburg,
Maryland
I. I am the Lord your God. You shall not have strange gods before
me. Do I give time every day to God in prayer? Do I put my trust
in superstitions, good luck charms, rather than God alone? Have I rejected
any Church teaching or denied that I was a Catholic?
II. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in
vain. Have I used the words "God" or "Jesus" in anger or
irreverently? Have I used foul or ugly language? Have I wished evil on
another?
III. Remember to keep holy the Lord's day. Have I missed
Mass on Sunday or any holy day of obligation? Do I arrive at church late or
leave early? Do I try to be reverent and pay attention during Mass? Do I
avoid unnecessary work on Sunday? Do I make Sunday a day of prayer or rest?
IV. Honor your father and your mother. Do I respect and obey
my parents? Have I dishonored or mistreated them by word or deed? Am I
willing to help around the house or must I be nagged a hundred times? Do I
try to get along with my brothers and sisters? Am I a tattletale or
bully? Do I give a good example, especially to younger siblings? Do I
respect others in authority: priests, nuns, police, old people, baby-sitters?
V. You shall not kill. Do I beat up others or hurt their
bodies? Do I say cruel things, or make fun of others to hurt their
feelings? Do I say mean things about others behind their backs? Have I
stopped speaking to anyone? Do I encourage others to do bad things? Do I
try to love all people, born and unborn?
VI. You shall not commit adultery. Do I treat my body and
other people's bodies with purity and respect? Do I look at television shows,
movies, or pictures that are bad? Am I modest in my speech and the clothes I
wear?
VII. You shall not steal. Have I taken things that were not
mine from a store or another person? Have I destroyed or misused another
person's property for fun? Do I return things that I borrow? In good
condition?
VIII. You shall not commit false witness against your
neighbor. Am I honest in my school work? Do I tell lies to make
myself look good? Do I tell lies to protect myself from punishment? Do I
tell lies that make another person look bad or get them in trouble?
IX. You shall not covet your neighbor's wife. Do I allow my
parents to spend time with one another, or do I get jealous and want them to pay
attention only to me? Do I get mad when I have to share my friends? Are
there kids I will not play with or be mean to because they look different?
X. You shall not covet your neighbor's goods. Am I jealous
or envious of the things or abilities that others have? Am I thankful to God
and my parents for what they have given me? Do I share the things I have with
my family, friends and poor people?
The Act of Contrition Oh my God, I am heartily sorry for
having offended you and I detest all my sins because I dread the loss of heaven
and the pains of hell, but most of all because they offend you, my God, who are
all good and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve with the help of your
grace to sin no more, to amend my life, and to avoid whatever leads me to sin.
Amen.
Again and again the beauty of this Gospel touches our hearts: a
beauty that is the splendour of truth. Again and again it astonishes us that God
makes himself a child so that we may love him, so that we may dare to love him,
and as a child trustingly lets himself be taken into our arms. It is as if God
were saying: I know that my glory frightens you, and that you are trying to
assert yourself in the face of my grandeur. So now I am coming to you as a
child, so that you can accept me and love me.
I am also repeatedly struck by the Gospel writer’s almost casual
remark that there was no room for them at the inn. Inevitably the question
arises, what would happen if Mary and Joseph were to knock at my door. Would
there be room for them? And then it occurs to us that Saint John takes up this
seemingly chance comment about the lack of room at the inn, which drove the Holy
Family into the stable; he explores it more deeply and arrives at the heart of
the matter when he writes: “he came to his own home, and his own people received
him not” (Jn 1:11). The great moral question of our attitude towards the
homeless, towards refugees and migrants, takes on a deeper dimension: do we
really have room for God when he seeks to enter under our roof? Do we have time
and space for him? Do we not actually turn away God himself? We begin to do so
when we have no time for God. The faster we can move, the more efficient our
time-saving appliances become, the less time we have. And God? The question of
God never seems urgent. Our time is already completely full. But matters go
deeper still. Does God actually have a place in our thinking? Our process of
thinking is structured in such a way that he simply ought not to exist. Even if
he seems to knock at the door of our thinking, he has to be explained away. If
thinking is to be taken seriously, it must be structured in such a way that the
“God hypothesis” becomes superfluous. There is no room for him. Not even in our
feelings and desires is there any room for him. We want ourselves. We want what
we can seize hold of, we want happiness that is within our reach, we want our
plans and purposes to succeed. We are so “full” of ourselves that there is no
room left for God. And that means there is no room for others either, for
children, for the poor, for the stranger. By reflecting on that one simple
saying about the lack of room at the inn, we have come to see how much we need
to listen to Saint Paul’s exhortation: “Be transformed by the renewal of your
mind” (Rom 12:2). Paul speaks of renewal, the opening up of our intellect
(nous), of the whole way we view the world and ourselves. The conversion
that we need must truly reach into the depths of our relationship with reality.
Let us ask the Lord that we may become vigilant for his presence, that we may
hear how softly yet insistently he knocks at the door of our being and willing.
Let us ask that we may make room for him within ourselves, that we may recognize
him also in those through whom he speaks to us: children, the suffering, the
abandoned, those who are excluded and the poor of this world.
There is another verse from the Christmas story on which I should
like to reflect with you – the angels’ hymn of praise, which they sing out
following the announcement of the new-born Saviour: “Glory to God in the highest
and on earth peace among men with whom he is pleased.” God is glorious. God is
pure light, the radiance of truth and love. He is good. He is true goodness,
goodness par excellence. The angels surrounding him begin by simply
proclaiming the joy of seeing God’s glory. Their song radiates the joy that
fills them. In their words, it is as if we were hearing the sounds of heaven.
There is no question of attempting to understand the meaning of it all, but
simply the overflowing happiness of seeing the pure splendour of God’s truth and
love. We want to let this joy reach out and touch us: truth exists, pure
goodness exists, pure light exists. God is good, and he is the supreme power
above all powers. All this should simply make us joyful tonight, together with
the angels and the shepherds.
Linked to God’s glory on high is peace on earth among men. Where
God is not glorified, where he is forgotten or even denied, there is no peace
either. Nowadays, though, widespread currents of thought assert the exact
opposite: they say that religions, especially monotheism, are the cause of the
violence and the wars in the world. If there is to be peace, humanity must first
be liberated from them. Monotheism, belief in one God, is said to be arrogance,
a cause of intolerance, because by its nature, with its claim to possess the
sole truth, it seeks to impose itself on everyone. Now it is true that in the
course of history, monotheism has served as a pretext for intolerance and
violence. It is true that religion can become corrupted and hence opposed to its
deepest essence, when people think they have to take God’s cause into their own
hands, making God into their private property. We must be on the lookout for
these distortions of the sacred. While there is no denying a certain misuse of
religion in history, yet it is not true that denial of God would lead to peace.
If God’s light is extinguished, man’s divine dignity is also extinguished. Then
the human creature would cease to be God’s image, to which we must pay honour in
every person, in the weak, in the stranger, in the poor. Then we would no longer
all be brothers and sisters, children of the one Father, who belong to one
another on account of that one Father. The kind of arrogant violence that then
arises, the way man then despises and tramples upon man: we saw this in all its
cruelty in the last century. Only if God’s light shines over man and within him,
only if every single person is desired, known and loved by God is his dignity
inviolable, however wretched his situation may be. On this Holy Night, God
himself became man; as Isaiah prophesied, the child born here is “Emmanuel”, God
with us (Is 7:14). And down the centuries, while there has been misuse of
religion, it is also true that forces of reconciliation and goodness have
constantly sprung up from faith in the God who became man. Into the darkness of
sin and violence, this faith has shone a bright ray of peace and goodness, which
continues to shine.
So Christ is our peace, and he proclaimed peace to those far away
and to those near at hand (cf. Eph 2:14, 17). How could we now do other
than pray to him: Yes, Lord, proclaim peace today to us too, whether we are far
away or near at hand. Grant also to us today that swords may be turned into
ploughshares (Is 2:4), that instead of weapons for warfare, practical aid
may be given to the suffering. Enlighten those who think they have to practise
violence in your name, so that they may see the senselessness of violence and
learn to recognize your true face. Help us to become people “with whom you are
pleased” – people according to your image and thus people of peace.
Once the angels departed, the shepherds said to one another: Let
us go over to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened for us (cf.
Lk 2:15). The shepherds went with haste to Bethlehem, the Evangelist
tells us (cf. 2:16). A holy curiosity impelled them to see this child in a
manger, who the angel had said was the Saviour, Christ the Lord. The great joy
of which the angel spoke had touched their hearts and given them wings.
Let us go over to Bethlehem, says the Church’s liturgy to us
today. Trans-eamus is what the Latin Bible says: let us go “across”,
daring to step beyond, to make the “transition” by which we step outside our
habits of thought and habits of life, across the purely material world into the
real one, across to the God who in his turn has come across to us. Let us ask
the Lord to grant that we may overcome our limits, our world, to help us to
encounter him, especially at the moment when he places himself into our hands
and into our heart in the Holy Eucharist.
Let us go over to Bethlehem: as we say these words to one another,
along with the shepherds, we should not only think of the great “crossing over”
to the living God, but also of the actual town of Bethlehem and all those places
where the Lord lived, ministered and suffered. Let us pray at this time for the
people who live and suffer there today. Let us pray that there may be peace in
that land. Let us pray that Israelis and Palestinians may be able to live their
lives in the peace of the one God and in freedom. Let us also pray for the
countries of the region, for Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and their neighbours: that
there may be peace there, that Christians in those lands where our faith was
born may be able to continue living there, that Christians and Muslims may build
up their countries side by side in God’s peace.
The shepherds made haste. Holy curiosity and holy joy impelled
them. In our case, it is probably not very often that we make haste for the
things of God. God does not feature among the things that require haste. The
things of God can wait, we think and we say. And yet he is the most important
thing, ultimately the one truly important thing. Why should we not also be moved
by curiosity to see more closely and to know what God has said to us? At this
hour, let us ask him to touch our hearts with the holy curiosity and the holy
joy of the shepherds, and thus let us go over joyfully to Bethlehem, to the Lord
who today once more comes to meet us. Amen.
On the eve of the presidential election, I'm not going to change any minds at this point, but I'd be mad at myself if I didn't say something.
Our kids attend a Catholic grade school and recently the school held a mock presidential election. Sitting down for dinner with our kids last night, I found out that Obama won the third grade vote. Our twins are in third grade but they voted for Romney because they know my husband and I are voting for Romney. So does this mean the majority of third graders voted for Obama because they know their parents are voting for Obama? If so, do they not know or care that the Catholic church and our Religious Liberty are at stake?
If this is the case, I'm really worried. Not so much worried about the outcome of the real election, but for the outcome of future Catholic generations. I'm worried that as my children grow up around these other kids and their families, that our jobs are going to be even harder to instill Catholic social teachings if the majority of the families they grow up around aren't on the same page as we are... standing WITH the Catholic Church on all things.
I know kids will generally follow what they're first taught at home, but there will come a time when they'll hear and wonder about other values and views, and question theirs (or rather, "ours"). It takes a village to raise a family, so it's important for us to have our children surrounded by like-minded Catholic families and individuals because they will be influence by EVERYTHING around them. I'm sorry, but it's very disheartening to me to think that many Catholic children my children know may not be taught and shown the truth of our Faith from their own families, which could then be a tragic epidemic of ignorance or apathy towards Church teachings for generations to come.
This is a very touchy subject, and not one you can force upon people to change their minds or views. I feel all I can do at this point is to continue to pray for all the families of our parish and school, and I want to add this eve, my continued prayers for our country and future leaders of America.
May God bless our country, and Holy Mother, please pray for us.
It's Homecoming season, and the perfect time to re-post about "grinding" at school dances. A friend of mine just posted this on Facebook: "Had some football players over tonight for a bonfire. They chose not to be a part of the homecoming dance that is now called "the grindfest". Makes me so sad that school dances are no longer a place I want my child to be." This blog post (titled "How Do We Help Our Young People Get Beyond 'Grinding'?") from my favorite priest, Fr. John Hollowell, is a must-read for parents and educators! Until his recent re-assignment, Fr. Hollowell was the Chaplin and a teacher at Cardinal Ritter High School. Read his post HERE. Parents, I'd like to encourage you to talk to your teens about this, and like my friend did, offer a better alternative for your kids and their friends on Homecoming night if "grinding" is an issue at their school dances. And if it is an issue at their school, parents and teachers MUST go to the school administrators and speak-out against it. EVERY school dance, regardless of whether it's a public school or private school, should have policies against "grinding" at school dances and enforce them. Don't be naive in thinking that this kind of dancing is harmless.