The Feast of Mary, Most Holy Mother of God

 

Mary, Queen of Heaven art by Bro. Mickey McGrath

Yesterday Pope Francis gave a Homily at Vespers of the Feast of Saint Mary, Most Holy Mother of God, and Te Deum of Thanksgiving at End of Year.

The whole thing is impressive (you can read it all HERE), but this paragraph particularly jumped out at me.

This is the heart: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (Jn 1:14). We hear this repeated several times in this evening’s liturgy that begins the Solemnity of Mary, the Holy Mother of God. She is the first witness, the first and the greatest, and at the same time, the humblest – the greatest because she is the humblest. Her heart is filled with amazement without the shadow of romanticism, of sweeteners, of spiritualization. No. The Mother brings us back to reality, to the truth of Christmas contained in the few words Saint Paul uses: “born of a woman” (Gal 4:4). Christian amazement is not the result of special effects, of fantasy worlds, but from the mystery of reality: there is nothing more amazing and stupefying than reality! A flower, a clod of earth, a life story, an encounter, the wrinkled face of an elderly person, or the blooming face of a newborn baby, a mamma who nurses a baby in her arms. The mystery shines there.

"Without the shadow of romanticism, of sweeteners, of spiritualization ... "

Amen. Amen. This world. This Reality. Amazing, indeed. 

(I so love that Francis gets this.)

Laudato Si'

Pope Francis in a video message invites Catholic communities around the world to celebrate Laudato Si’ Week from 16 to 24 May 2020.

the vanity of anti-silence (Considerations for the time of Christmas)

Fr. Jorge Mario Bergoglio (Pope Francis)

From a cycle of six largely unknown meditations Jesuit Father Jorge Mario Bergoglio gave in a week-long retreat to Jesuits in the early 1980s, entitled simply ‘Considerations for the time of Christmas.’ 

With the ferocity of a desert father, his reflection on silence invited the Jesuits to consider how mass media created a seductive deluge of sweet-sounding or furious words “that seek noisily to take up space in our hearts and contribute nothing to truth.”

He contrasted the Word of God that created the universe and the words by which we are surrounded, which have been “disempowered of their creative force.”

“If there is no solitude, there is no silence,” he added sternly, “and without either there is no truth,” only “the vanity of anti-silence.” Although Jesuits were obliged to speak as part of their “apostolic mission” - they are not monks - if in their speaking they lacked “the core of silence that makes us pilgrims” they would end up, he warned, “corrupted by the spirit of the world.”

Silence was the prerequisite for the eruption of the Word in history, he said, before inviting the Jesuits to contemplate how the Word “becomes tenderness in the womb of a Mother who ‘pondered all these things in her heart’.”

https://cruxnow.com/commentary/2017/12/27/expecting-bubbly-pope-francis-christmas-meet-jesuit-past/

Angels Unaware

Following the celebration of Mass and the recitation of the Angelus, Pope Francis unveils a sculpture entitled “Angels Unawares” by Canadian artist, Timothy Schmaltz, in St Peter’s Square.

https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2019-09/pope-francis-world-day-migrants-refugees-sculpture.html?fbclid=IwAR2WJnYrWP3Y5-Z8lVI0cYo672sgz6WSLQZ7CPsYwuNk9t6xMJc6Qer_DYA

HERE is the Pope's homily for today.

"In the Message for this 105th World Day of Migrants and Refugees, the theme “It is not Just about Migrants” is repeated as a refrain. And rightly so: it is not only about foreigners; it is about all those in existential peripheries who, together with migrants and refugees, are victims of the throwaway culture. The Lord calls us to practise charity towards them. He calls us to restore their humanity, as well as our own, and to leave no one behind."

weaving the threads of the future

From Francis' homily today at the Shrine of Sumuleu-Ciuc in Romania. Read the whole thing HERE. 

To go on pilgrimage is to realize that we are in a way returning home as a people, a people whose wealth is seen its myriad faces, cultures, languages and traditions. The holy and faithful People of God who in union with Mary advance on their pilgrim way singing of the Lord’s mercy. In Cana of Galilee, Mary interceded with Jesus to perform his first miracle; in every shrine, she watches over us and makes intercession, not only with her Son but also with each of us, asking that we not let ourselves be robbed of our fraternal love by those voices and hurts that provoke division and fragmentation. Complicated and sorrow-filled situations from the past must not be forgotten or denied, yet neither must they be an obstacle or an excuse standing in the way of our desire to live together as brothers and sisters. 

To go on pilgrimage is to feel called and compelled to journey together, asking the Lord for the grace to change past and present resentments and mistrust into new opportunities for fellowship. It means leaving behind our security and comfort and setting out for a new land that the Lord wants to give us. To go on pilgrimage means daring to discover and communicate the “mystique” of living together, and not being afraid to mingle, to embrace and to support one another. To go on pilgrimage is to participate in that somewhat chaotic sea of people that can give us a genuine experience of fraternity, to be part of a caravan that can together, in solidarity, create history (cf. Evangelii Gaudium, 87). 

To go on pilgrimage is to look not so much at what might have been (and wasn’t), but at everything that awaits us and cannot be put off much longer. It is to believe in the Lord who is coming and even now is in our midst, inspiring and generating solidarity, fraternity, and the desire for goodness, truth and justice (cf. Evangelii Gaudium, 71). It is to commit ourselves to ensuring that the stragglers of yesterday can become the protagonists of tomorrow, and that today’s protagonists do not become tomorrow’s stragglers. This requires a certain skill, the art of weaving the threads of the future. That is why we are here today, to say together: Mother teach us to weave the future.

the poor and rejected, the hungry, the naked, the incarcerated, the outcast

From the homily of Capuchin Father Raniero Cantalamessa, Preacher to the Pontifical Household, for the Solemn Liturgy of the Passion of the Lord, in St Peter's Basilica on Good Friday afternoon, 2019:

"The African-American writer and theologian Howard Thurman—the man Martin Luther King considered his teacher and his inspiration for the non-violent struggle for human rights—wrote a book called Jesus and the Disinherited.”[1] In it he shows what the figure of Jesus represented for the slaves in the south, of whom he himself was a direct descendant. When the slaves were deprived of every right and completely abject, the words of the Gospel that the minister would repeat in their segregated worship —the only meeting they were allowed to have— would give the slaves back a sense of their dignity as children of God.

 "The majority of Negro Spirituals that still move the world today arose in this context. At the time of public auction, slaves experienced the anguish of seeing wives separated from their husbands and children from their parents, being sold at times to different masters. It is easy to imagine the spirit with which they sang out in the sun or inside their huts, “Nobody knows the trouble I have seen. Nobody knows, but Jesus.”

The text of the entire homily is HERE.

https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2019-04/homily-of-fr-cantalamessa-for-good-friday-full-text.html 

The Peoples Pastoral

"Magisterium of the People," the latest documentary from Sebastian Gomes, was inspired by the Catholic Committee of Appalachia — nuns, priests, laypeople — who go into Appalachia to listen to the stories of the region's residents and report their findings in the form of a "People's Pastoral," playing on the church's name for an open letter from a bishop to his clergy and flock.

The group's most recent pastoral appeared in 2015, following two previous documents, in 1975 and 1995, which have been published as a book. The letters are, as the original People's Pastoral put it, a "telling of the story of 'the least among us' including Earth, our listening of that story, and the Church's response to it."

"It's always been hard for the institutional church to be prophetic," Stowe says in the film, "but I think because Francis speaks with such a prophetic voice it allows the other groups within the church who have been prophetic in their vision of things, and their way of listening to people the way CCA has done, they find a validation and an encouragement in that."

New documentary chronicles a grassroots Catholic 'magisterium'

we are sinners

From Pope Francis' homily, September 6, 2018. From Vatican News HERE.

“There are people who go through life talking about others, accusing others and never thinking of their own sins. And when I go to make my confession, how do I confess? Like a parrot? ‘Bla, bla, bla… I did this, this…’ But are you touched at heart by what you have done? Many times, no. You go there to put on make-up, to make-yourself up a little bit in order to look beautiful. But it hasn’t entered completely into your heart, because you haven’t left room, because you are not capable of accusing yourself.”

And so that first step is also a grace: the grace of learning to accuse oneself, and not others:

“A sign that a person does not know, that a Christian does not know how to accuse himself is when he is accustomed to accusing others, to talking about others, to being nosy about the lives of others. And that is an ugly sign. Do I do this? It’s a good question to get to the heart [of things]. Today let us ask the Lord for the grace, the grace to find ourselves face to face with Him with this wonder that His presence gives; and the grace to feel that we are sinners, but concretely, and to say with Peter: 'Depart from me, for I am a sinner'.”

true rest is a moment of contemplation

Francis and the Clowns

Notes from Francis' homily this morning:

There is false rest and there is true rest.

Society is thirsty for entertainment and holiday. We think that a "successful" person is one who can afford different kinds of pleasure. But this mentality slips towards the dissatisfaction of an anesthetized existence of entertainment that is not rest, but alienation and escape from reality.  Man has never rested as much as today, yet man has never experienced as much emptiness as today.

True rest is a moment of contemplation, of praise.

It is a time to look at reality and say: how beautiful life is. to say to God: thank you for your life, for your mercy, for all your gifts.

Make peace with life because life is precious.

Peace is chosen, it cannot be imposed and cannot be found by chance.

In the end, “all is grace”. For, as the Psalmist assures us, in God alone do our souls find rest.

- Pope Francis, homily at Casa Santa Marta, September 5, 2018

From Vatican News HERE. 

two spirits

Daily Mass at Casa Santa Marta  (Vatican Media)

"There are two spirits, two ways of thinking, of feeling, of acting: that which leads me to the Spirit of God, and that which leads me to the spirit of the world. And this happens in our life: We all have these two ‘spirits,’ we might say. The Spirit of God, which leads us to good works, to charity, to fraternity, to adore God, to know Jesus, to do many good works of charity, to pray: this one. And [there is] the other spirit, of the world, which leads us to vanity, pride, sufficiency, gossip – a completely different path. Our heart, a saint once said, is like a battlefield, a field of war where these two spirits struggle."

- Pope Francis, September 4, 2018 

from Vatican News HERE

The truth is meek. The truth is silent. The truth is not noisy.

Pope Francis last week at the Vatican.CreditCreditGiulio Origlia/Getty Images

In his homily at this morning's Casa Santa Marta Mass, September 3, 2018, Pope Francis said,

“The truth is meek. The truth is silent. The truth is not noisy."

Even in a family, Pope Francis said, there are times when a discussion of politics or sports or money escalates into a truly destructive argument; 

"in these discussions in which you see the devil is there and wants to destroy—silence. Have your say, then keep quiet.” 

Francis was commenting on the Gospel story of the day from Luke that describes how Jesus reacted when he returned to Nazareth and met with opposition from his former neighbors after commenting on a passage from the prophet Isaiah.

He said the Gospel story helps us “to reflect how to act in daily life, when there are misunderstandings” and “to understand how the father of lies, the accuser, the devil, acts to destroy the unity of a family, of a people.”

He recalled Jesus’ silent composure on that occasion, when people wanted him to do miracles as he had done elsewhere, but when he chose instead to comment on the prophet’s words and they got furious and the atmosphere quickly changed “from peace to war.” Jesus adopted “silence” when confronted with the devil.

Pope Francis said that those who attacked Jesus “were not persons, they were a pack of wild dogs that threw him out of the city. They did not reason. They shouted. Jesus stayed silent. They took him to the top of the mountain to throw him down, but he passed through their midst and went away.”

“With his silence,” he said, Jesus wins against “the wild dogs”; he wins against “the devil” that “sowed lies in the heart.”

Pope Francis said that Jesus’ dignity shines through “this silence that triumphs” over his attackers, as it would also on Good Friday when they shouted “crucify him!” after praising him on Palm Sunday.

He acknowledged that what Jesus did is not easy, but “silence wins, through the Cross.” He emphasized that 

“the dignity of the Christian is anchored in the power of God.” 

“May the Lord give us the grace to discern when we should speak and when we should stay silent. This applies to every part of life: to work, at home, in society.”

 Excerpted from reporting by Vatican correspondent, Gerard O'Connell for America Magazine HERE.

Also at the Vatican News site HERE.

The Nonviolence of Francis

Some accuse Pope Francis of being confusing when he does not aggressively defend the righteous and condemn the sinners, imposing rules, defining with papal infallibility the lines we cannot cross, etc. But they do not understand that, in reality, what he is confusing is the evil spirit that motivates them.

In a world where politicians and religious leaders debate and insult each other through tweets, Francis, with his way of resisting aggression through dialogue, “stands firm (Ephesians 6:13) but with the same attitude of Jesus,”^[26] and opens around him a different political space, that of the Kingdom of God, in which the Lord is the real champion of the battle, not us.

This “passive resistance of evil” – the same that Bergoglio has always emphasized as the grace which belongs to the people, and upon which they build patiently and wisely their culture^[27] – amends, among other things, three attitudes that are typical of a “politics of aggression” and are at the basis of all partisan politics. Bergoglio describes these behaviors as they present themselves in the Passion of our Lord. The first one is the behavior of the people who “persecute those who they believe to be weaker.”^[28] The powerful did not dare to oppose Jesus when the people followed him, but they were brave enough to do so when, after having been betrayed by one of his own, they saw him weakened. The second attitude is characterized this way: “At the root of all cruelty there is a need to unload one’s own faults and limits […] the mechanism of the scapegoat is repeated.”^[29] The third attitude belongs to those who, like Pilate, in the face of such ferocity decide to wash their hands of it and walk away.^[30]

 <sup>From an article in La Civilta Catolica, "The Spirit of Fierceness" by Diego Farrs SJ, September 1, 2018

https://laciviltacattolica.com/against-the-spirit-of-fierceness/</sup>

Silence and Word

"In moments of darkness and great tribulation, when the knots and the tangles cannot be untangled or straightened out, nor things be clarified, then we have to be silent. The meekness of silence will show us to be even weaker, and so it will be the devil who, emboldened, comes into the light, and shows us his true intentions, no longer disguised as an angel but unmasked." - Jorge Bergoglio 1990 essay, ‘Silencio y Palabra’ (‘Silence and Word’ (Pope Francis)

There is so much wisdom in this.

On Sunday 26 August during a 45-minute press conference in flight to Rome from Dublin, Pope Francis told journalists that he would not "say a single word" about the incendiary statement made by Archbishop Vigano asking for him to resign in disgrace because of his complicity with sex-abuse coverup.

Francis had faced ferocious accusations of complicity with evil before. He faced it with silence.

Austen Ivereigh, Catholic author and biographer of Pope Francis, describes this time in the life of Jorge Bergoglio and how he worked his way through it, in an excellent essay (HERE).

Dr. Ivereigh says:

Bergoglio’s 1990 essay, ‘Silence and Word’, suggests a deeper spiritual purpose to his silence, one drawn from a meditation on the Passion in the Third Week of the Spiritual Exercises. There St Ignatius describes how in the Passion, God ‘goes into hiding’, concealing, as it were, his divinity.

This is a very different kind of silence from, say, the silence of complicity or the silence of inaction faced with evidence of evil, as we have seen too often in the case of sexual abuse of minors.

The purpose of Christ’s self-emptying silence — his meekness faced with ferocious hostility — is to create space for God to act. This kind of silence involves a deliberate choice not to respond with an intellectual or reasoned self-defence, which in a context of confusion, of claims and counter-claims and half-truths, simply fuels the cycle of hysterical accusation and counter-accusation. It is a spiritual strategy to force the spirits behind the attack to reveal themselves.

To ‘make space for God’ can only be done in the way that Jesus himself taught: through the kenosis (self-emptying) described in St Ignatius’s ‘third kind of humility’ (Spiritual Exercises §167): ‘I want and choose poverty with Christ poor rather than wealth, and humiliations with Christ humiliated rather than fame …’

The effect of this humility, Bergoglio notes in ‘Silence and Word’, is to provoke an increase in the ferocity, because people are attacked more when they are weak. (Thus, he points out, Jesus wasn’t ferociously attacked while he was seen as strong — when people followed him, and believed in him — but only after he had been ‘weakened’ in the sight of others by betrayal.)

Gradually, the rage will begin to focus on a single person. ‘At the root of all ferocious attack is the need for people to offload their own guilt and limitations’, notes Bergoglio, adding that Jesus, as a living reproach, is scapegoated: ‘all the evils are offloaded onto the person we are ferociously attacking’.

As Jesus is steadily weakened — the disciples flee, Peter denies him, and he is left alone on the Cross — the devil reveals himself, believing that he has won. Christ’s weakness is the bait he swallows.

 Read all of it HERE.

Camus, Catholicism and the Death Penalty

John the Baptist, drawing by Thomas Merton

Last week, Pope Francis declared that the death penalty “is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.”

In late July of 1967, Merton made a recording for the Sisters of Loretto. He said the following regarding the death penalty, its connection to violence and war, and a need to reform Church teaching and education:

"That the Church should support social order in this particular way, established order – many Catholics would fully agree with this. They would not perhaps go so far as to say the death penalty is a means of salvation, but they would say that this is a practical, reasonable way of looking at things. This kind of thinking, let us face it, underlies so much of the teaching, so much of the indoctrination, so much of the preparation for life that we give in our Catholic schools. This is the sort of thinking that is taken for granted, is inculcated and accepted in Catholic education to a great extent. That is a very shocking thing because it means that we are committed to this sort of inhuman, self-righteous support of society at any cost. This comes out, for example, in Cardinal Spellman’s defense of the Vietnam War. Cardinal Spellman can defend the Vietnam War and can even say 'my country right or wrong' because he thinks in these terms – he has grown up thinking in these terms, has always thought in these terms; [it] is natural for him to think in these terms. For real renewal to take place in the Church, in religious life and in education, this kind of thinking has to be changed." [Follow the link to a longer transcript of this recording.]

http://merton.org/ITMS/Seasonal/38/38-3MertonCamus.pdf

HT: International Merton Society

Pope Francis- Holy Mass Salus Populi Romani 2018-01-28

From the Basilica of Saint Mary Major -Holy Mass presided by Pope Francis on the Feast of the Translation of the miraculous image of Our Lady Salus Populi Romani.

The Fruits of War - World Day of Prayer for Peace

An image by American photographer Joseph Roger O’Donnell that Pope Francis is circulating during the 2017 holidays, under the heading "The fruits of war." (Credit: Vatican Press Office.)

Francis, on the eve of the World Day of Prayer for Peace, has asked that a small card be printed and distributed, which on its reverse side carries the inscription, “The fruit of war,” running above the pope’s signature.

The front side of the card displays a picture taken by American photographer Joseph Roger O’Donnell, a Marine who worked for four years after the atomic blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki documenting their impact. The shot shows a young Japanese boy standing in line at a crematorium with his dead younger brother on his back.

“The young boy’s sadness is expressed only in his gesture of biting his lips, which are oozing blood,” the inscription on the pope’s card says.

The gesture is consistent with Francis’s effort since his election to speak out against what he describes as a “Third World War” today, being fought in piecemeal fashion in various parts of the world. The pontiff has also spoken about the disproportionate suffering children often experience in conflicts, including the risk of being enrolled as child soldiers.

Though release of the photo in the run-up to New Year’s does not add anything substantive to the pontiff’s positions, it’s nevertheless the first time Francis has asked that a specific image be circulated in the holiday season, suggesting he believes its message is especially relevant at the moment.

https://cruxnow.com/vatican/2017/12/30/pope-circulates-nagasaki-image-heading-fruits-war/

the vanity of anti-silence (Considerations for the time of Christmas)

Fr. Jorge Mario Bergoglio (Pope Francis)

From a cycle of six largely unknown meditations Jesuit Father Jorge Mario Bergoglio gave in a week-long retreat to Jesuits in the early 1980s, entitled simply ‘Considerations for the time of Christmas.’

With the ferocity of a desert father, his reflection on silence invited the Jesuits to consider how mass media created a seductive deluge of sweet-sounding or furious words “that seek noisily to take up space in our hearts and contribute nothing to truth.”

He contrasted the Word of God that created the universe and the words by which we are surrounded, which have been “disempowered of their creative force.”

“If there is no solitude, there is no silence,” he added sternly, “and without either there is no truth,” only “the vanity of anti-silence.” Although Jesuits were obliged to speak as part of their “apostolic mission” - they are not monks - if in their speaking they lacked “the core of silence that makes us pilgrims” they would end up, he warned, “corrupted by the spirit of the world.”

Silence was the prerequisite for the eruption of the Word in history, he said, before inviting the Jesuits to contemplate how the Word “becomes tenderness in the womb of a Mother who ‘pondered all these things in her heart’.”

https://cruxnow.com/commentary/2017/12/27/expecting-bubbly-pope-francis-christmas-meet-jesuit-past/

Pope Francis on Thomas Merton

 Photo by Thomas Merton

"A century ago, at the beginning of the Great War, which Pope Benedict XV termed a "pointless slaughter", another notable American was born: the Cistercian monk Thomas Merton. He remains a source of spiritual inspiration and a guide for many people. In his autobiography he wrote: 'I came into the world. Free by nature, in the image of God, I was nevertheless the prisoner of my own violence and my own selfishness, in the image of the world into which I was born. That world was the picture of Hell, full of men like myself, loving God, and yet hating him; born to love him, living instead in fear of hopeless self-contradictory hungers.' Merton was above all a man of prayer, a thinker who challenged the certitudes of his time and opened new horizons for souls and for the Church. He was also a man of dialogue, a promoter of peace between peoples and religions." 

Pope Francis on Thomas Merton (quote from The Seven Storey Mountain), address to United States Congress, September 24, 2015

Pope: silence guards one's relationship with God

2013-12-20 Vatican Radio

(Vatican Radio) Only silence guards the mystery of the journey that a person walks with God, said Pope Francis in his homily at Mass on Friday morning at the Casa Santa Marta. May the Lord, the Pope added, give us “the grace to love the silence”, which needs to be guarded from all publicity.

Read the rest HERE.