the old blog

Why should we guard our Heart? “The heart is deceitful above all things, And desperately wicked; Who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9) The prophet Jeremiah laments the human condition, that our heart along with all of our being is fallen. In fact, it is so wholly corrupted, that he asks, who could know it? Who could love it? This is the echo of all mankind that has longed for God through the ages. How could anything so thoroughly... [ Read more ]
"There is nothing more worthwhile than to pray to God and to converse with him, for prayer unites us with God as his companions,” says Saint John Chrysostom. Prayer is the center of the Christian life. In fact, without it, we cannot be saved. It is only through prayer that we open ourselves to the Holy Spirit, whose indwelling within us, raises us out of our fallen past and into the light; a relationship with Christ. So often... [ Read more ]
I believe the decline in numbers of priestly ordinations over the last fifty years is due in part to blurring the distinction between the ordained priesthood and the priesthood of all believers. To put it another way, we Catholics have been clericalizing the laity and laicizing the clergy. Anything and everything done in the Church today is now called a ministry. My personal favorite - I am not making this up - is calling the janitors "... [ Read more ]
Today the Church celebrates the feast of St. Gregory the Great, the last pope to be officially remembered as Magnus. 1,409 years after Pope Gregory's death, we are on the cusp of Blessed John Paul II's canonization and the organic proclimation of the Church is resounding: "John Paul the Great." Considering this will only be the third time in Catholic history that this is happened, we should pay attention. What makes Leo,... [ Read more ]
I don't have the exact quote handy, but the eponymous Uncle Screwtape from C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters told his nephew Wormwood that demons find it great sport to have human beings knee deep in one sin while putting them on guard against the opposite sin. "The trick," he said, "is to get them running around with fire extinguishers when the ship is already halfway sunk." The devil is conspicuous by his absence from contemporary Catholic... [ Read more ]

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