13 Catholic Things on Friday the 13th

1. Why Dominicans love Jordan of Saxony so much. #OPPower

2. Jordan, Blessed Albert & the #DamnedDevil.

3. Speaking of Dominicans: There is a Martin Luther Playmobil selling like hotcakes. (More than 95 even?) How about a Thomas Aquinas?
(Actually: I bet St. Francis would totally sell.)

4. Magnificat today quotes from Pope Benedict, from a Mass in 2006 in Munich:

There is not only a physical deafness which largely cuts people off from social life; there is also a “hardness of hearing” where God is concerned, and this is something from which we particularly suffer in our own time. Put simply, we are no longer able to hear God – there are too many different frequencies filling our ears. What is said about God strikes us as pre-scientific, no longer suited to our age. Along with this hardness of hearing or outright deafness where God is concerned, we naturally lose our ability to speak with him and to him. And so we end up losing a decisive capacity for perception. We risk losing our inner senses. This weakening of our capacity for perception drastically and dangerously curtails the range of our relationship with reality in general. The horizon of our life is disturbingly foreshortened.
At our Baptism he touched each of us and said “Ephphatha” – “Be opened” -, thus enabling us to hear God’s voice and to be able to talk to him. There is nothing magical about what takes place in the Sacrament of Baptism. Baptism opens up a path before us. It makes us part of the community of those who are able to hear and speak; it brings us into fellowship with Jesus himself, who alone has seen God and is thus able to speak of him (cf. Jn 1:18): through faith, Jesus wants to share with us his seeing God, his hearing the Father and his converse with him. The path upon which we set out at Baptism is meant to be a process of increasing development, by which we grow in the life of communion with God, and acquire a different way of looking at man and creation.
The Gospel invites us to realize that we have a “deficit” in our capacity for perception – initially, we do not notice this deficiency as such, since everything else seems so urgent and logical; since everything seems to proceed normally, even when we no longer have eyes and ears for God and we live without him. But it is true that everything goes on as usual when God no longer is a part of our lives and our world?…
As we gather here, let us here ask the Lord with all our hearts to speak anew his “Ephphatha”, to heal our hardness of hearing for God’s presence, activity and word, and to give us sight and hearing. Let us ask his help in rediscovering prayer, to which he invites us in the liturgy and whose essential formula he has taught us in the Our Father.

A subscription to Magnificat would make a very cool Valentine. And no calories!

5. Fr. Steve Grunow:

Christ can deliver us from our idolatry, but we must want to be delivered, and must be willing to receive his mercy.

(Not bad for a #homilytweet)

6. Philly Archbishop Charles J. Chaput writes On the Threshold of Lent.

7. Spiritualdirection.com on preparing for Lent. (Audio.)

8.

On the Significance and Role of Cardinals as the #consistory15 is underway. Read more: http://t.co/6FmAJ7YEGX

— Thomas Rosica (@FatherRosica) February 13, 2015

9. Beautiful shades of grey.

10. Michael Novak on St. Valentine.

11. #LOVE:

How many Gothic arches can you spot in this photo of St Dominic's in Washington DC? https://t.co/m2j5TEqEhH

— Fr Lawrence Lew OP (@LawrenceOP) February 12, 2015

12.

“Since His delights are to be with you, let yours be found in Him.” –St. Alphonsus Ligouri pic.twitter.com/e4gugJD8zh

— Aquinas & More Gifts (@aquinasnmore) February 13, 2015

13. A “valentine” for you.