"The union of a man and a woman is being put on a par with the pairing of two people of the same sex, and tacitly confirms those fallacious theories that remove from the human person all the importance of masculinity and femininity, as though it were a question of the purely biological factor.

Such theories hold that man - that is, his intellect and his desire - would decide autonomously what he is or what he is not. In this, corporeity is scorned, with the consequence that the human being, in seeking to be emancipated from his body—from the “biological sphere”—ends by destroying himself.


If we tell ourselves that the Church ought not to interfere in such matters, we cannot but answer: are we not concerned with the human being? Do not believers, by virtue of the great culture of their faith, have the right to make a pronouncement on all this? Is it not their—our—duty to raise our voices to defend the human being, that creature who, precisely in the inseparable unity of body and spirit, is the image of God?”

— Pope Benedict XVI

I'm praying for you!

:)

Anyone who seeks truth seeks God, whether or not he accepts it.

- St. Edith Stein

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:)

The Holy Family Prayer

JESUS, Son of God and Son of Mary, bless our family. Graciously inspire in us the unity, peace, and mutual love that you found in your own family in the little town of Nazareth.

MARY, Mother of Jesus and our Mother, nourish our family with your faith and your love. Keep us close to your Son, Jesus, in all our sorrows and joys.

JOSEPH, Foster-father to Jesus, guardian and spouse of Mary, keep our family safe from harm. Help us in all times of discouragement or anxiety.

HOLY FAMILY OF NAZARETH, make our family one with you. Help us to be instruments of peace. Grant that love, strengthened by grace, may prove mightier than all the weaknesses and trials through which our families sometimes pass. May we always have God at the center of our hearts and homes until we are all one family, happy and at peace in our true home with you. Amen.

I'm praying for you!

:)

“God loves us; we need only to summon up the humility to allow ourselves to be loved.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

Merry 4th day of Christmas! :D

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:)  

We must not be discouraged by our faults, for children fall frequently. - St. Therese de Lisieux

Merry 3rd day of Christmas! :D

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:)

Imagine how great His joy
when she said yes
"I will be your mother"
God the infinite Love,
longing for His creatures
to accept His Love and love
Him in return, no more,
in her received a mother
Sin had separated Love
from the beloved, us from
God, and the whole world
ached and groaned in pain
The first woman, mother of
all, abandoned Him, but
with Mary, we were restored
How great His joy to be
granted a home in the womb
of His beloved creation,
to be joined once more
to the children He'd lost
He gives her to us as
Mother; know my joy, He
calls, for her voice is the
one which soothed Love's cries,
her arms the ones that cradled
Love's most delicate form
When all the world had
fled from Love, Mary turned
back around, threw her arms
around Him; she embraced Love
How great His joy must be.

Merry 2nd day of Christmas! :D

I'm praying for you!

:)

“God is light and in him there is no darkness at all. Yet on the part of the people, there are times of both light and darkness, fidelity and infidelity, obedience and rebellion, times of being a pilgrim people, and times of being a people adrift,” the Pope said. “In our personal history, too, there are both bright and dark moments, lights and shadows. If we love God and our brothers and sisters, we walk in the light. But if our heart is closed, if we are dominated by pride, deceit, self-seeking, then darkness falls within us, and around us. Whoever hates his brother — writes the Apostle John — is in the darkness; he walks in the darkness, and does not know the way to go, because the darkness has blinded his eyes.”

I'm praying for you!

:)

“Remember that God, during your prayers, is watching for your affirmative answer to the question which He is inwardly asking you: ‘Do you believe I am able to do this?’ To which question you must from the depth of your heart reply, ‘Yes, Lord.’”

— St. John of Kronstadt

Merry Christmas Eve!

I'm praying for you!

:)

My life is a poem
He already wrote
and I’m vainly
trying to make
everything rhyme
instead of just
enjoying the beauty
of the unknown.

I'm praying for you!

:)

Our deacon gave a homily today about the importance of Christ's entire earthly life as a sacrifice and a humbling act. He gave a fictitious example of Christ coming as a warrior instead and declaring Himself openly to the Israelites after banishing Herod. Unfortunately, he didn't go any further with this line of thinking, saying it doesn't matter how the Israelites would have responded because that's not what happened.

But I think it does matter. The Jewish people were expecting a warrior, someone to free them from their earthly oppressors. They were expecting a show of force and mighty signs of not just healing and forgiveness, but of power. But if God had come as a warrior in that fashion, if Christ had actually appeared and vanquished the Romans with a wave as His hand and shown His might to all the Jewish people, of course they would have bowed down to Him. They would have bowed down to Him because they would have had no other choice. He would have proven His power and even if they doubted in their hearts, they still would have been obliged to worship Him.

He didn't do that, though. He came as a helpless infant. He wandered through the streets healing lepers and forgiving sinners and teaching. His mightiest miracles were worked for people who already had great faith in Him. They were not used to prove His power. They were used to demonstrate His love.

God gave us free will, and He refuses to take that away from us. No matter how much it breaks His heart to see us stray from Him, He will never force us to love us. Love, by its very definition, cannot be forced. And He wants our love, not just our allegiance. He doesn't want us to simply follow a list of rules. He wants us to love Him and to know Him. That choice must be made freely, and coming as a mighty warrior who vanquished foes with a wave of His hand, although of course possible for God, would not have left us free to choose whether to love Him, to choose whether to follow Him.

He came as an infant so that we might love Him. We must choose whether to kneel before the helpless babe in the manger, the child who comes to us from the very beginning as a humble servant. He sleeps in a place reserved for food. The Great Shepherd comes to feed His sheep, and He reveals Himself immediately as their nourishment. He will feed us with Himself. Mary and Joseph have the privilege of clothing Him, feeding Him, providing for Him. He who is so mighty He requires nothing, He who no man could ever look upon and survive, He who could have anything He desired simply by willing it, makes Himself completely dependent on others. He allows them to love Him, to care for Him.

And He continues to do so. He is constantly present on Earth in the form of, once again, food. Just as He was in His infancy, in the Eucharist, He once again humbles Himself, this time to assuming the accidents of bread and wine. Once again, He appears as helpless. We keep Him enthroned in gold boxes. We sit watch with Him through the night, just as Mary and Joseph did the night He was born. We guard Him against people who would desecrate the Eucharist. We reverently adore Him. We welcome Him into our very selves, to take up residence in our hearts. Just as Mary and Joseph were granted the ability to love Him on Earth as a child, we are granted the opportunity to love Him in the Eucharist, and when we choose to love Him, a choice that we must make freely, we receive the greatest love in all of existence in return.

I'm praying for you!

:)

The readings for tomorrow (today, I'm up pretty late tonight) include a reading from Isaiah that foretells the birth of Jesus.

I just read that passage and what stuck out to me was this:

Is it not enough for you to weary people,
must you also weary my God?

Isaiah is exasperated. You annoy, hurt, anger, test, etc. humans. But that's not enough. It's not enough to sin against humans. You want to do all these things to God as well. 

And the response to this is not, "Stop complaining and listen to the commandments. See? Ahaz wouldn't test God and neither shall you."

The response is one of mercy and love. You shall receive a sign. The virgin shall conceive and bear a son. 

At first glance, that passage above sounds like Isaiah throwing up his hands in disgust, and I don't know, maybe he was. 

But God doesn't just throw up his hands in disgust and despair over us. He sees all of our sinful desires. He sees us railing against him. But he also sees us. He recognizes our enslavement and he has pity on us. Must you also hurt me? he asks. And the answer is yes. Our salvation requires his sacrifice, so he hands himself over to us. 

I had an idea just now about sin and justice and the role of the crucifixion in all that, but it doesn't make much sense anymore so I'll just leave off here. Sorry this is so disjointed. 

I'm praying for you!

:)

To love Mary is my constant wish. I have promised her “Your servant am I”. My, heart, O Mary, burns forever with love and joy, for you, ornament of heaven.

- From “Maria zu Lieben”, a German devotional hymn.

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:)

“Keep your soul at peace, in order to be able to be attentive and very faithful to the inner movement of the Holy Spirit.”

— St. Peter Julian Eymard

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:)

I wrote this 6-word poem and a lot of people liked it, so I thought I'd share.

Death choked

when it tasted

Love.

I'm praying for you!

:)

Death choked

when it tasted

Love.

“If we but paused for a moment to consider attentively what takes place in this Sacrament, I am sure that the thought of Christ’s love for us would transform the coldness of our hearts into a fire of love and gratitude.”

— St. Angela of Foligno

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:)

“Sometimes the Catholic Church is criticized, “She honors Mary too much.” But the Catholic Church will never honor Mary as much as Jesus honored her, as much as God the Father honored her, by making her the mother of His Eternal Son, as much as the Holy Spirit, who was responsible by His power for her conception.”

— Cardinal Justin Rigali

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“Hasten, O Lord, enlighten my darkness. Speak to my soul. Show me the way in which I should walk and give me the grace to follow it. In delay there is danger but in haste is likewise peril. Therefore, Lord, give ear to my petition and show me the path that is safe. Amen.”

— St. Bridget’s prayer for direction.

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:)

“In one of his Advent homilies, Bernard of Clairvaux offers a stirring presentation of the drama of this [Annunciation to Mary] event. After the error of our first parents, the whole world was shrouded in darkness, under the dominion of death. Now God seeks to enter the world anew. He knocks at Mary’s door. He needs human freedom. The only way he can redeem man, who was created free, is by the means of a free ‘yes’ to his will….So Bernard portrays heaven and earth as it were holding its breath at this moment of question addressed to Mary. Will she say yes? She hesitates…will her humility hold her back? Just this once—-Bernard tells her—-do not be humble but daring! Give us your ‘yes’! This is the crucial moment when, from her lips, from her heart, the answer comes: ‘Let it be to me according to your word.’ It is the moment of free, humble yet magnanimous obedience in which the loftiest choice of human freedom is made.”

— Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives (Pg. 36)

Although, I don't think being humble and daring are mutually exclusive. God is both humble and brave and there are no contradictions in Him.

I'm praying for you!

:)

In case you didn't notice, I'm currently reading through Exodus, and there are some things that just seem random. I know they're not, but they really seem like it.
In Exodus 23, God is talking about the importance of truthfulness and of justice. Then He's talking about the three high feasts of the Jewish feasts.
Then He says, "You shall not boil a young goat in its mother's milk." - Exodus 23:19b.
It doesn't even seem connected to the first half of the verse.
The note on it in my Bible says, "this command, repeated in 34:26 and Dt 14:21, is difficult to understand. It may originate from a taboo that forbade killing the young that were still nursing from the mother, or that forbade the mixing of life and death: the slaughtered young goat with the milk that had nourished its life. The Jewish dietary custom of keeping meat and dairy products separate is based on this command."
So, I still don't know exactly why it's in Exodus 23, but at least I know why devout Jews don't eat cheeseburgers.

I'm praying for you!

:)

I'm praying for you!

:)

“We have to state, without mincing words, that there is an inseparable bond between our faith and the poor. May we never abandon them.”

— Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium

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:)

"In the case of the family, the weakening of these bonds is particularly serious because the family is the fundamental cell of society, where we learn to live with others despite our differences and to belong to one another; it is also the place where parents pass on the faith to their children. Marriage now tends to be viewed as a form of mere emotional satisfaction that can be constructed in any way or modified at will. But the indispensible contribution of marriage to society transcends the feelings and momentary needs of the couple. As the French bishops have taught, it is not born 'of loving sentiment, ephemeral by definition, but from the depth of the obligation assumed by the spouses who accept to enter a total communion of life'." - Pope Francis

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:)

"Here I repeat for the entire Church what I have often said to the priests and laity of Buenos Aires: I prefer a Church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a Church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security. I do not want a Church concerned with being at the centre and which then ends by being caught up in a web of obsessions and procedures. If something should rightly disturb us and trouble our consciences, it is the fact that so many of our brothers and sisters are living without the strength, light and consolation born of friendship with Jesus Christ, without a community of faith to support them, without meaning and a goal in life." - Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium

I'm praying for you!

:)

In Exodus 18, Moses is sitting in judgment over all the people all day - he's solving absolutely everyone's disputes. Then his father-in-law advises him to appoint other men to solve lesser cases.

"What you are doing is not wise...You will surely wear yourself out, both you and these people with you. The task is too heavy for you; you cannot do it alone." - Exodus 18:17-18

"Lighten your burden by letting them bear it with you!" - Exodus 18:22b

It's good advice to Moses at the time, and it obviously foreshadows the hierarchies within Judaism and within the Catholic Church.

But it's also important advice for our everyday lives. We can't do everything alone, and we just hurt everyone when we try.

Not only can we not do everything alone; we can't do anything alone. We are completely powerless without God, and true humility recognizes that we can accomplish all things but only through Him and according to His Will.

The task is too heavy for you; you cannot do it alone. Lighten your burden by letting Him bear it with you.

I'm praying for you!

:)

Happy Feast of St. Nicholas!

Do not celebrate it by punching heretics.

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:)

Is sooo cute.

I'm praying for you!

:)

I'm praying for you!

:)

“I began to realize how important it was to be an enthusiast in life. If you are interested in something, no matter what it is, go at it full speed ahead. Embrace it with both arms, hug it, love it and above all become passionate about it. Lukewarm is no good. Hot is no good, either. White hot and passionate is the only thing to be.”

— Roald Dahl

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:)

O Blessed Joseph, happy man, to whom it was given not only to see and to hear that God Whom many kings longed to see, and saw not, to hear, and heard not; but also to carry Him in your arms, to embrace Him, to clothe Him, and guard and defend Him. 
V Pray for us, O Blessed Joseph. R That we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.

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:)

“We pray to obey God, not to “play God”. We pray, not to change God’s mind, but to change our own; not to command God, but to let God command us. We pray to “let God be God”. Prayer is our obedience to God even when it asks God for things, for God has commanded us to ask.”

—	Peter Kreeft I'm praying for you! :)