The Light is On for You, Community Catechesis, & Catholic Reading Wednesday

Do you need a new start?  The Light is On for You!

Go to confession TONIGHT, or any Wednesday this Lent from 6:30-8:00 pm in our own church,

or any parish or chapel in the Boston Diocese.

All people are welcome to come to the Heavenly Feast, so start with a good confession to our Lord.

An introduction on how to make a good confession can be found here.  

What to do in Lent? How can we make this a holy season, growing spiritually and in our relationship with our Lord? Here's are five quick thoughts:

1. Sacrifice something - give it up. Not for yourself (aka. dieting), but as an offering to the Lord. Put this thing out of your life for a time, and allow God to fill that void with His grace.
   
2. Give alms - give from your need, not just your excess. Give money saved by making sacrifices to the poor, lonely, forgotten, and mistreated.  Unite yourself to those who suffer, and give with a sincere and generous heart.
   
3. Give time - start a habit of caring for someone that God has put in your life. This may mean beginning a commitment to volunteer, visiting a neighbor in need, or giving more dedicated time to your family.
   
4. Go to Confession - recognize your sins, faults, failings, and struggles. Confess them to the Lord sincerely, and ask for His help. God is faithful! Then go out and make amends with those whom you have hurt. Generously forgive those who have hurt you. Offer others the same new beginning which Christ has offered to each of us.
   
5. Make a habit of Prayer - start spending time with God, habitually. For some this means going to Daily Mass. For others, it means praying the Rosary, the Daily Readings, or other set devotions. For others this means cracking open the Scriptures. For others it means sitting quietly and listening to God. Whatever way you pray, just do it.

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With many thanks to our wonderful and insightful curator, Karen Celano, you can delve into a faith-related news article each Wednesday! Karen writes:

As Pope Francis celebrates his papacy’s first anniversary, several articles have appeared to review his time in office so far. In a thoughtful piece in Slate, Paul Baumann reflects on why the public’s fascination with Pope Francis may actually detract from his message: focusing on the celebrity of one man, Baumann argues, may create the false impression that “what ails the church can be cured by one man.” He surmises that such intense fixation and reliance on the charisma of one person may prevent Catholics from doing the hard work of turning “toward one another” to reclaim the Church’s “density and richness of worship and mission” and renewing its “public presence.”

Baumann argues that the “fixation on the papacy trivializes the faith of Catholics, the vast majority of whom throughout history have had little knowledge of, and no contact with, any pope.” Historically speaking, Baumann has a point: in the early years of the Church, the papacy of necessity took a hands-off approach to matters of faith and doctrine, functioning more like a "Supreme Court" and allowing diversity of theological opinion to flourish, intervening only when such diversity threatened church unity. The solidification of Catholic identity around the figure of the Pope stems from the Counter-Reformation’s efforts at Council of Trent, where loyalty to the Pope was singled out as a necessary element of Catholic orthodoxy. But the past century of culture and media wars, with the concomitant hardening of ideological and theological lines, has further narrowed popular understandings about the Church, so that “what the Church teaches” has been equated with “what the Pope says.”

Baumann believes that “in any heavily top-down organization, local initiatives fail to gain a foothold. . . and apathy prevails.” I believe, however, that this is precisely the outcome Francis wants to avoid. As John Thavis, author of The Vatican Diaries, says in this interview with the Christian Science Monitor, Francis has been working hard to decentralize the Vatican, curtail the power of the Curia, and strip the papacy of its more monarchical trappings. His more “grassroots” approach seems to be geared towards the very Catholics Baumann refers to: those who are interested in a lived faith of genuine worship and devotion and who seek to find in their Church concrete solutions to problems of suffering and injustice in the world. Perhaps Pope Francis will paradoxically be able to use his celebrity to turn the focus back on the Church as the people of God – that is, you, me, and our parish communities.

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In doing so, of course, the Pope still has to deal with the powerfully negative impressions popular culture has of the Church and its history. Fr. Robert Barron, in his review of the Seth McFarlane-produced science program Cosmos, argues that this remake erroneously emphasizes “modern ideology’s great foundation myth” – that “the physical sciences and liberal political arrangements emerged only after a long twilight struggle against the reactionary forces of religion, especially the Catholic religion.” Pushing back against this notion, Fr. Barron points out that the whole concept of modern science rests on “two fundamentally theological assumptions”: first, that “the world is not divine – and hence can be experimented upon,” and second, “that the world is imbued with intelligibility – and hence can be understood.” He then goes on to list the many famous scientists and scientific theories that emerged out of the great Catholic universities throughout the centuries. It would perhaps be more responsible to see the debates surrounding Bruno and Galileo as not a conflict of science and religion, but rather as debates between conflicting sets of scientific assumptions.

In the realm of biblical interpretation, too, the Church must face its share of scrutiny in the public sphere. Pope Francis’ reported “refusal” to meet Russell Crowe, who stars as Noah in the new Darren Aronofsky film about the Genesis flood, was rumored to reflect the Pope’s disapproval with the artistic license the film takes with the biblical story. But this refusal was non-existent, and both Crowe and Aronofsky, who attended the Pope's weekly Wednesday audience, expressed their admiration for the Pope. The National Catholic Reporter’s movie reviewer Steven D. Graydanus writes a thoughtful interpretation of the film, and argues that Christians should look forward  to a “retelling that defamiliarizes the story, that makes us rethink what we thought we knew.”

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On a different note (though along the same lines of challenging our assumptions about what we think we know), last week a heart-warming, tear-jerking film produced for World Down Syndrome Day was released, featuring fifteen young adults with Down Syndrome urging pregnant women whose babies have been diagnosed with Down Syndrome “not to worry.” Your child will be able to walk, talk, hug you, go to school, write, read, and love, they say. And they end by saying: “Your child can be happy. Just like I am. And you’ll be happy too.” Given the fact that in 2009 an estimated 92% of women who receive a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome opted for abortion, this video is a particularly poignant reminder of the value of all life – even and especially lives that don’t conform to our expectations of what constitutes “normal” or “happy.”

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