Fr. John Corapi Is Now the Black Sheepdog

Posted on June 18, 2011 by Susan Kehoe

I was never a fan of Fr. Corapi; he is just not my cuppa. But his video announcement, that he is leaving the Priesthood is just plain sad and disturbing.

He has fallen into the trap that awaits Priests who become celebrities. There is no evidence of humility or obedience. He only mentions God once, and he doesn’t ask for our prayers.  The black sheepdog forgot that he belongs to our Lord and shepherd.

Corapi also says that

I am, indeed, not ready to be extinguished. Under the name “The Black Sheep Dog,” I shall be with you through radio broadcasts and writing.

It is all about him. But gosh darn it, as a priest and as a Christian it should be about Jesus Christ. Period. Christians most certainly are called to extinguish our selves, that is our egos, so that the divine life can dwell within us.

This is the difficulty of being entrusted with a ministry for the clergy and for lay people like myself.  I know how easy it is, even as I swim in my very small puddle, to forget that it is not my mission; it is HIS.  For some reason God has chosen me, and any gift that I have for Catechesis, or anything else comes from God.

That is why I answer God’s call with fear and trembling. And I know that I am an unfinished Christian who will always fall short of the glory of God.

Please keep John Corapi in your prayers, and pray for his followers who may be tempted to follow him instead of our true shepherd.

Mark Shea has some thoughts here.  The Anchoress, as always, has some honest but charitable musings on the matter here; and Deacon Greg weighs in here.

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God The Holy Spirit is Not a Warm Fuzzy

Posted on June 17, 2011 by Susan Kehoe

H/T New Advent

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The First Baptists…

Posted on June 17, 2011 by Susan Kehoe

were Jewish. Oy Vey!

Taylor Marshshall (H/T New Advent) writes:  

Saint Justin Martyr explains in his Dialogue with Trypho that there was a first century Jewish sect known as the “Baptists.” Saint Epiphanius records that they were a strict subset of the Pharisees (Adversus Haereses 1, 17). According to the latter, these Jews baptized themselves every single day of the year and were also called “Daily Baptists.”

Cornelius a Lapide records, “There are some Jews among the Rabbis who practise the same rites even at the present day. But this is to live the life of ducks and fishes, rather than of men.” 

Well. I knew that ritual immersion was a common Jewish practice. But I didn’t realize that there was a sect that were called Baptists.

I love the internet!

 

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Where Have all the Anti War Protestors Gone?

Posted on June 17, 2011 by Susan Kehoe

Mark Shea points out that under President Obama the US is now involved in five wars. Yet the anti war protestors have disappeared.  One of the reasons that Obama was elected was due to statements such as this:

The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.” – Senator Barack Obama, 2007

So where are the anti war protestors? Long time passing.

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The Church of the Ages Will Stand

Posted on June 16, 2011 by Susan Kehoe

The Catholic Church, in the present day, is battered by the sexual abuse scandals. The Church and her faithful are accused of being homophobic, puritanical, misogynist, ignorant and unenlightened fools.

Many are predicting the fall of the Church.  But we poor dumb brainwashed Catholics, know the truth.  The Holy Spirit will not let the Church of Christ be destroyed.

She is built on a solid foundation.

She is the Church of the ages. Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson converted to  the faith in 1903 from the Anglican Church.  He wrote many books.  The Guild of Blessed Titus Brandsma, has an excerpt from “Christ in the Church”, his words remind us that the Church has always been battered from within as well as outside her walls.

Excerpt:

“I do not for one instant profess to believe that all the world is about to turn Catholic: I am quite sure that it is not; I even think it probable that we are on the verge of a Great Apostasy; but of one point I am as certain as of my own existence, that, fifty years hence there will be no considerable body in the whole of Western Christendom which will be able for one moment to compete with her; and that a thousand years hence, if the world lasts so long, we shall have once more the same situation that we have now.
On the one side will stand human society ranged against her, in ranks and companies of which hardly two members are agreed upon anything except opposition to her. There will be the New Theologians of that day, as of ours; new schools of thought, changing every instant, new discoveries, new revelations, new presentations and combinations of fragments of old truth. And on the other side will stand the Church of the ages, with the marks of her passion deeper than ever upon her. From one side will go up that all but eternal cry, ‘We have found her out at last; she is forsaken of all except a few fanatics at last; she is dead and buried at last’.
And on the other side she will stand, then, as always, wounded indeed to death, yet not dead; betrayed by her new-born Judases, judged by her Herods and her Pilates, scourged by those who pity while they strike, despised and rejected, and yet stronger in her Divine foolishness than all the wisdom of men; hung between Heaven and earth, and yet victorious over both; sealed and guarded in her living tomb, and yet always and forever passing out to new life and new victories.

So, too, then as now, and as at the beginning, there will be secret gardens where she is known and loved, where she will console the penitent as the sun rises on Easter Day; there will be upper rooms where her weeping friends are gathered for fear of the Jews, when, the doors being shut, she will come and stand in the midst and give them Peace; on mountains, and roads, and by the sea, she will walk then, as she has walked always, in the secret splendour of her Resurrection. So once more the wheel will turn; there will be ten thousand Bethlehems where she is born again and again; the kings of earth will bring their glory and honour to lay at her feet, side by side with the shepherds who have no gifts but themselves to offer. Again and again that old and eternal story will be told and re-told as each new civilisation comes into being and passes away – that old drama re-enacted wherever the Love of God confronts the needs of men”.

If you are wondering who Blessed Titus Brandsma is, you can read about him here.

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The Exorcist Commerical

Posted on June 16, 2011 by Susan Kehoe

Marcel, over at Aggie Catholics, wonders if this commercial is witty or offensive:

Although it took too long to get to the “punch line”, I thought that the end was very funny. What do you think?

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Fainting on the Altar

Posted on June 14, 2011 by Susan Kehoe

I knew that my favorite deacon was in trouble.  As he began to read the prayers of the faithful, I noticed that he had a tight grip on the sides of the ambo, and his face was whiter than Dan Brown’s albino Opus Dei assassin monk.

But he did avoid fainting on the altar by making a quick and desperate exit.

He was quite embarrassed, and he gave me a real fright.  But according to Monsignor Pope, his misery has lots of company.  Monsignor gives five reasons for the fainting on the altar phenomenon.

My favorite deacon claims that his near fainting was due to number five. I hope so. He did get something to eat, and he was able to help me teach the RCIA. Oh and he did deacon at the last Mass without incident.

Monsignor Pope has some comforting words for the sometimes vertically challenged H/T New Advent:

We are wonderfully, fearfully made to be sure. And yet we are earthen vessels, fragile and in need of delicate balance. We are contingent beings, depending on God for every beat of our heart, and His sustaining of every function of every cell of our body. Maybe fainting in Church isn’t so bad since it helps keep us humble and that is always a good “posture” before God. Maybe before the immensity of God it is good to be reminded of our fragility and dependence upon Him for all things, even the most hidden processes of our body.

Monsignor found a very funny video. Here it is:

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The Hell There Is

Posted on June 10, 2011 by Susan Kehoe

I really intended to blog every day. Really. Well you know what they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

While we are on the subject of hell, Carl Olson, H/T New Advent, refutes One bad of a hell argument:

Excerpt:

Another reason it is incorrect is that it’s impossible to reject “the New Testament concept of hell” and claim affection for “the tolerance and love taught by Jesus Christ” since the New Testament concepts of hell and judgment come directly from the lips, person, and teachings of Jesus Christ! And they are clearly rooted in an Old Testament understanding of the role of the prophet: to foretell the judgment of God on those who reject his commandments and break his covenant. The main lines of these truths are presented quite nicely in these two paragraphs from the Catechism:

We cannot be united with God unless we freely choose to love him. But we cannot love God if we sin gravely against him, against our neighbor or against ourselves: “He who does not love remains in death. Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him.”  Our Lord warns us that we shall be separated from him if we fail to meet the serious needs of the poor and the little ones who are his brethren.  To die in mortal sin without repenting and accepting God’s merciful love means remaining separated from him for ever by our own free choice. This state of definitive self- exclusion from communion with God and the blessed is called “hell.”

Jesus often speaks of “Gehenna” of “the unquenchable fire” reserved for those who to the end of their lives refuse to believe and be converted, where both soul and body can be lost.  Jesus solemnly proclaims that he “will send his angels, and they will gather . . . all evil doers, and throw them into the furnace of fire,”  and that he will pronounce the condemnation: “Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire!” (par. 1033-34)

When an agnostic or atheist claims that the Christian belief in hell is “intolerant” or “mean-spirited” or “hateful”, he is making a perfect case for Fr. Thomas Dubay’s statement, “The atheist’s vision is often so narrow that he does not see how necessarily assumes a metaphysics in order to deny metaphysics” (Faith and Certitude, p. 214). In other words, they claim to have an objective basis—belief in “justice”—for making a judgment against the only ground for such an objective basis. If “justice” is a human creation, it can mean whatever humans want it to mean. Nothing more. So the real issue is not that atheists reject belief in God but that they reject the truth of the moral order that flows from the very nature of God, which is why the supposed “injustices” of Christian morality always align with the latest immoral fads. In the end, as Fr. Dubay writes, “The only logical, consistent alternative to theism is nihilism”, for this “doctrine declares that reality is empty, worthless, meaningless, valueless, absurd. … Even moral values are decadence for they are turned against our instincts and have behind them nothing but nothingness.”

It is often said—and rightly so—that there is hell here on earth for innocent people; there is murder and genocide and rape and molestation. But denying the existence of a loving God and the reality of an afterlife does not solve or soften these horrible injustices, but only marks them as gross, pathetic jokes that emerge as vile laughter from the dark underbelly of a mechanistic universe and drown us in a sea of meaninglessness. Yet we know there is meaning; we know that justice and injustice are real things. Which means, ultimately, that hell is not a marketing tool, but an instrument of cosmic justice and of divine love, allowed by the true God who gives us life, free will, and the ability to know, to choose, and to act as a moral creature.

Read more here.

What I really don’t understand is how so many Christians deny the existence of hell. Or at least they don’t think that it is populated. But not only does it go against what Jesus himself said, to deny the possibility that people can go to hell is to deny free will.  God respects our free will, and he will not force salvation on us.

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Smacking You Into Sainthood

Posted on June 8, 2011 by Susan Kehoe

I still remember being terrified as the day of my Confirmation approached.  Back then part of  the rite was being slapped on the face as a sign that Confirmation made us soldiers of Christ. It turns out the slap was more of a velvet touch, but it did make me take the Sacrament seriously.

I knew that I was being inserted into the Church, and into the very life of God who is completely other.

Deacon Greg thinks that the omission of the Confirmation slap might have something to do with our loss of awe. I think that he is on to something. Too many Confirmands and their parents see Confirmation as a graduation from the Church and not an insertion into the Body of Christ.  Oh and never mind joining up as a soldier for Christ!

Excerpt:

I once jokingly said to my pastor, “Once they stopped slapping us, that was when things slid downhill.” It sounded funny at the time. But as I think of it now—like that symbolic slap from long ago—that crack carries the sting of truth.

Somewhere along the way, the church lost a sense of severity, of seriousness. Of, well, sin. Our pulpits became lecterns, our pews became chairs, and a slap evolved into a handshake. We replaced “Come Holy Ghost” with “Whatsoever You Do,” and decided to stand instead of kneel. The ominous chords of organs were replaced by the plucking strings of guitars. We designed our churches to have round corners and low altars. We scrapped the habits and unbuttoned the collars and made everything endearingly approachable and utterly bland.

What happened? I’m sure it seemed healthy and constructive at the time. But I can’t escape the feeling that, in the midst of it all we surrendered something vital and valuable: we lost a sense of sacred awe.

We lost that sense of being a part of something greater than ourselves, something with weight and volume, something with shadow as well as light. Something that entailed suffering and hardship and the occasional stinging slap. As a result, we tend to take nothing as seriously anymore. Our sacraments have become sideshows. (Been to a baptism lately? A wedding? A First Communion or Confirmation? It ain’t pretty. Tellingly, the priest who facilitated the confirmation in my parish ordered altar servers to stand watch. They blocked each of the four the aisles and kept parents with cameras from running up to take pictures during the ceremony. It kept some modicum of order. But the fact that it was even necessary is a sad commentary of the state of our sacraments.)

I realize I’m sounding (once again) like the insufferable old fart that I vowed never to become. But attention must be paid. Something is missing in our liturgies—and in our hearts. If we are to experience a renewal in our church, we need to renew, as well, our appreciation of wonder. We need to reclaim a sense of mystery. That includes, I think, a certain seriousness and austerity in our liturgy, in our sacraments, in our lives. We need to know that what we are undertaking is not just a thing of joy, but something more vast and more intimidating than anything we’ve ever encountered.

To be in church, to receive the sacraments, is to stand before the presence of God.

We need to be awestruck.

And maybe that includes, quite frankly, just being struck.

Do get thee over to Pathos and read the good deacon’s post.

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