From a homily: ‘I command you: Awake, sleeper, I have not made you to be held a prisoner in the underworld. Arise from the dead; I am the life of the dead. Arise, O man, work of my hands, arise, you who were fashioned in my image. Rise, let us go hence; for you in me and I in you, together we are one undivided person.’ Read more
“Do not rush to the conquest,” the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus urged in his Death on a Friday Afternoon. “Stay a while with this day. Let your heart be broken by the unspeakably bad of this Friday we call good. Some scholars speculate that “Good Friday” comes from “God’s Friday,” as “good-bye” was originally “God be by you.” But it is just as odd that it should be called God’s Friday, when it is the day we say good-bye... Read more
On Good Friday, I shared, over Twitter, just a few meditations on the last words of Christ during a three-hour reflection I attended at the Saint Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, Mass. Some, in sum (in reverse Twitter order for an easier read): *Jesus not only suffered to say his last words, He suffered because he did [say those last words]. #listen #GoodFriday *Jesus asked his father to pardon those who had done HIM wrong. [Always thinking of us!]#lastwords #GoodFriday... Read more
And for every night, morning, noon, and moment: Jesus struggles with the Father. He struggles with himself. And he struggles for us. He experiences anguish before the power of death. First and foremost this is simply the dread natural to every living creature in the face of death. In Jesus, however, something more is at work. His gaze peers deeper, into the nights of evil. He sees the filthy flood of all the lies and all the disgrace which he... Read more
From B16’s Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week: Because he is God, he sees with total clarity the whole foul flood of evil, all the power of lies and pride, all the wiles and cruelty of the evil that masks itself as life yet constantly serves to destroy, debase, and crush life. Because he is the Son, he experiences deeply all the horror, filth, and baseness that he must drink from the “chalice” prepared for him: the vast power of sin... Read more
When we gaze on the Blessed Sacrament, our Lord gives us this same look he gave Peter, a look of mercy. Pope Benedict XVI said earlier this year in an installment of his catechesis on prayer: Luke the Evangelist has retained a further precious element of the events of the Last Supper that enables us to see the moving depth of Jesus’ prayer for his own on that night: his attention to each one. Starting with the prayer of thanksgiving... Read more
God bless us this Holy Thursday. And how he has! Tonight we mark the Last Supper — the first of many for us. And we mark the institution of the priesthood, such a blessed gift to bring us the Eucharist and God’s sacramental mercy. Our good and holy priests are brave men in our culture. At the Chrism Mass in Los Angeles earlier this week, Archbishop José Gomez told his brother priests: By your ordination, you have been given sacred... Read more
Fr. Victor Brown, O.P., writes: Shortly before his death, Pope Blessed John Paul II instituted another set of mysteries to be used by the Church in praying the Rosary. They are intended to help us meditate upon the public life of Our Divine Lord. The Holy Father called them “the luminous mysteries – the mysteries filled with light”. They are these: the baptism of Jesus by St. John the Baptist; his miracle of changing water into wine at the wedding... Read more
Fr. Paul Scalia writes: history tends to repeat itself. But it does not inevitably do so. If history is repeating itself in this persecution of the Church, then we must deliberately choose to imitate — to repeat — the witness of St. Thomas More. First, imitate his integrity and holiness of life. More chose not to speak out against the king but to retire as a private citizen. He remained silent. But his silence was deafening because he was —... Read more
I am a few days late to reading this, but it deserves a link, I think. Bristol Palin has a blog and wrote there about the president of the United States calling Georgetown Law activist Sandra Fluke. Addressed to President Obama, she blogged: here’s why I’m a little surprised my phone hasn’t rung. Your $1,000,000 donor Bill Maher has said reprehensible things about my family. He’s made fun of my brother because of his Down’s Syndrome. He’s said I was “f—-d... Read more
Kathryn Lopez
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