I’ll be back with another post, pertaining to yesterday’s March for Life, Catholic Underground, human dignity, and politics; later, I’ll post about Warrior, a movie I saw recently. For now, here is something I threw together in response to a topic on phatmass.com, What did you hear in the Sunday homily?

Sunday’s homily was about revolution. Here’s a summary:

Father began by referring to the Greek word for good news, evangelion. We have good news: God became man to give hope to humanity, to forgive sin and cure the sick, to give purpose to the despairing, and even to rob death of its power. The apostles saw all the miracles of Jesus and rejoiced because they believed they would be able to work the same miracles as a result of following him. Eventually, the apostles were sent out to the ends of the earth as his emissaries (my word), spreading the good news of hope: restoration of life.

It should be noted, the word evangelion predates Christianity: the Roman Emperor referred to himself as a god and son of a god (Julius Caesar) and announced the “good news” of military victories and conquests of new territories. These conquests resulted in destruction and subjection unto despair. The “good news” of Caesar was news heralding death.

As the good news about the true God, the real Son of God spread throughout the Roman Empire, every facet of life was infiltrated (my word) by a Christian, a messenger of the good news of the kingdom of God. For instance, St. Sebastian was a bodyguard of the emperor himself. Each and every one of us is called to be an emissary of Christ, of his love, spreading hope everywhere we are: this is essentially the mission of the New Evangelization.

There is much to be hopeful about and nothing to fear because Christ conquered death. While it is not theologically accurate to say that “the world is going to hell in a handbasket,” the world is in the direst need of hope; announcing the good news is getting increasingly difficult. Think of the new HHS mandate requiring Catholic institutions, other than parishes, to cover contraception and sterilization under insurance plans for employees. It was the Catholic Church that essentially invented hospitals with the intention of caring for the sick and bringing them to health and now the government wants Catholics to go against conscience. Catholics must speak out against these injustices that have everything to do with the good news of Caesar and of not Christ.

We have a mission to start social revolutions with the message of good news of life and love and defeat the bad news of Caesar.

Father Robert Barron often talks about nonviolent resistance as the third option when faced  with violence. Nonviolence offers an effective alternative to both fighting violence with violence and giving in to violence. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. learned from Gandhi that nonviolence is a powerful means to affect society. Reacting in this manner causes one to become the mirror in which the violent person can see himself and be seen by others as the violent person he is. I was watching parts of a documentary on PBS on the subject of the freedom riders who rode buses in order to protest segregated buses. Seeing pictures of burnt buses and listening to accounts of violent beatings met with nonviolence give evidence to the rightness of the cause.

A few hours ago, I was listening to a very interesting interview with Dr. King on NBC’s Meet the Press in 1965.  In his response to a question of whether or not the cause was worth the cost, MLK responded by acknowledging the power of redemptive suffering: ”[W]e go on, with the faith that unmerited suffering is redemptive.” That line really caught my attention. I had never thought about nonviolent resistance as an experience of enduring unmerited suffering– but that’s exactly what it is, and therefore can be redemptive. The Gospel of Matthew, particularly the Sermon on the Mount lays the groundwork for this teaching on nonviolence. May the life of MLK in this area be a testament to the power of  nonviolent resistance to violence.

Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!

The past few days and weeks, i’ve been thinking about the meaning of Christmas and how it should change my life in this new year. Christmas, the Nativity of God as one of us, is about the universal and individual re-creation of humanity; it has to do with a Person to be lived so as to become more fully human. A line from one of my favorite Christmas carols, O Holy Night, gets right at the heart of what I want to say: “Long lay the world in sin and error pining until he appeared and the soul felt its worth.“

The brokenness and deprivation that echoes throughout the universe is not normal.  Humanity was created in a state of original holiness, meant to experience never-ending bliss. Death, disease, and sin, collectively known as Original Sin and its Effects, or corruptibility, is the “natural” outcome of the first sin, which was committed by the first man, the head of humanity, in collaboration with the first woman, the mother of all the living (more like all the dead and dying). The perfect man and woman freely and willfully chose to sin against God, the One Who is Love Itself (God in Himself is Love: Lover, Beloved, and Love between Lover and Beloved) thereby opening the door to corruptibility (including inclination to sin; not total depravity) affecting all of creation. It is only Love that can restore and make things new… which is exactly what happened.

Because Adam was the head of humanity, all of humanity receives his inheritance by transmission. “For as in Adam all die… “ The offspring of Adam is ordered to the disordered pattern of Adam like cars in a defective assembly-line. But God is Love… so he made all things new by entering into Adam’s line: “even so in Christ shall all be made alive.” The Eternal comes down to the temporal and elevates it to himself! (Obviously God did not have to do this nor did he have to do it in this way.)

A new Adam was born on Christmas: God himself took a human nature so as to reboot humanity as its new head that it could be lived according to his pattern: incorruptibility!  Even before Bethlehem and Calvary (but by virtue of in its future merits), God the Son created a new Eve, of whose virginal flesh he took conception and birth! Now, If God the Son shares in our humanity (thereby perfecting it), we can share in his Divinity, becoming sons of daughters of God the Father. The inheritance of the new Adam becomes our inheritance. In baptism, we put off Adam and are clothed in the New Adam: Jesus.

Christmas is God becoming man that man might become like God! Again, the Almighty could have restored humanity in a snap. He did not have to be conceived and born of Mary, the New Eve, but he chose to, out of love (which involves humility and selflessness.) What Divine Humility that God became a poor creature (while remaining God) for our sakes: “For your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich.” (2 Cor. 6:9.)

God changes and sanctifies everything we experience by undergoing it himself including poverty, pain, human development, and work. His humanity empowers our humanity and becomes the gateway of participation in his Divinity which can transform us from “glory to glory” until we “attain…  the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.” This brings me to what was mentioned at the beginning: living the grace of Christmas. I need Christ because i don’t know how to be myself. Jesus Christ shows us how to be fully human, and with our free-willed cooperation, makes us more fully human. In 2012, i want to better cooperate with the grace of God. In other words, I want to make the best use of the ultimate Christmas present.

*God, the One Creator of Existence: Father (Speaker), Son, (Word), and Holy Spirit (Breath). Tri-Unity..

Merry Christmas everybody!

I pray that the Great God has mercy on the soul of Christopher Hitchens; may he rest in peace. Admittedly, i didn’t know much about the man other than the fact that was notorious for his atheism: he spoke and wrote extensively against religion and belief in the supernatural and even went so far as to criticize (condemn) Mother Teresa. Many times have i heard his name and now, sadly, I hear that he passed. Prayers for the consolation of his family.

Just today, i read an article in which a Vatican Cardinal wished for chance to speak with Hitchens. If i had a chance to sit down and chat with the man, i know we would inevitably talk about suffering. What else? We would have surely discussed the theory of evolution and i should hope that i would bring up theistic evolution–as a Catholic i hold that, if evolution is true, it does not contradict my Faith. It strikes me that since God is outside of time everything he does is instantaneous; if we were to behold Creation, while remaining creatures limited to time, we could have seen a drawn out, very “slow” process—evolution. I was just given this idea and would share it Hitchens if given the opportunity.

Regardless, he knows the Truth now…

We were never intended to experience the fallenness that envelops and penetrates us. Thanks to the disobedience original first couple that we name Adam and Eve, all of us have inherited a broken world due to a serious deprivation of life and love. Adam and Eve basically opened the door to a flowing filth of nothingness called sin and death;  Today’s the day that God stemmed off the tide and provided the possibility to reverse the auto- curse referred to in the West as original sin. When Jesus Christ died on the cross he defeated the power of sin and the devil and killed the power of death. At the moment of his death, when his side was pierced a life-giving flow of what we were lacking gushed forth. That was our liberation which we experience already but not yet. Mind-blowingly, the water that gushed forth from the heart of Jesus went forward, backward, and over the place throughout time; It went back to the conception of the mother of Jesus, rendering her free of original sin and all personal sin– like Eve when she was created. God prepared the Blessed Virgin Mary to be the mother of the Liberator by creating her free of all sin by the merits of that sanctifying flood from the cross. Holy Mary is the New Eve who chose to obey and gave birth to the New Adam through whom we have the gift of transcending the fallenness mentioned above.

And that is what the Church celebrates today in the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception. Sorry to cut it short. I hope it makes sense… if not, please leave comments.

I can’t stand when people on TV say that Santa Claus really exists. They don’t even know what they’re talking about. And then on the other side there are people who say things like “when you unscramble the letters in Santa, you get satan.” In actuality, Santa Claus is the fourth century bishop St. Nicholas of Myra and he’s so real that at this very moment he is among the Saints in glory, worshiping before the throne of God. That’s the realness for real. While on Earth, the man distributed his wealth to the needy; now that he is in heaven, the Saint intercedes and distributes spiritual wealth in Christ to all of us in need. St. Nicholas, pray for us

Sometimes i wonder how our stomachs sabotage our brains into forgetting that Thanksgiving is first and foremost a day of giving thanks for what we have. But who are we giving thanks to? Our families and friends? Sure. But who can we thank for them? Ultimately nothing is owed to us; everything is God’s gift to us especially life itself. And so, we as a Nation formally give thanks to God. All the delicious food today unites us in giving thanks to God. That is the idea behind this day.

There is a movie that should be released very soon called Cristiada. It’s about the fight for religious freedom in Mexico during the masonic government’s brutal anti-Catholic persecution in the 1920s (and lasting to the mid-30s). Cristiada stars the likes of Andy Gracia, Eva Longoria, Peter O’Toole, and Eduardo Verástegui from the movie Bella. I’ve seen the trailer and it looks pretty good.

The persecution in Mexico, which began when Mexican President Plutarco Elias enacted legislation suppressing Catholicism, was responsible for the massacre of many Catholics including priests. One of the priests was Blessed Miguel Pro, SJ. Father Miguel built up the Kingdom of God by utilizing disguises and creatively evading the authorities in order to minister to his people. It is his feast day today

As a member of the Society of Jesus, Blessed Miguel fought under the royal banner of Christ the King which is so often hidden in the guise of a Cross. He lived as a true follower of the King whose kingdom does not belong to this earth until he died with his arms stretched out and cried aloud, “Long live Christ the King!”

The Gospel reading for today is so fitting:

Gospel Lk 21:12-19

Jesus said to the crowd:
“They will seize and persecute you,
they will hand you over to the synagogues and to prisons,
and they will have you led before kings and governors
because of my name.
It will lead to your giving testimony.
Remember, you are not to prepare your defense beforehand,
for I myself shall give you a wisdom in speaking
that all your adversaries will be powerless to resist or refute.
You will even be handed over by parents,
brothers, relatives, and friends,
and they will put some of you to death.
You will be hated by all because of my name,
but not a hair on your head will be destroyed.
By your perseverance you will secure your lives.”

Back in the Middle Ages there was a scientist named Albert. Some people thought he was a magician or wizard; he was a friar and a priest.  St. Albert the Great as he is now called studied empirical sciences like botany, chemistry, biology,  and physics. He knew that the God who inspired the Bible was the same God who created everything around him. It is basically this reasoning behind the Catholic Church’s position that science is not to be feared but embraced as a a beautiful thing (doubters can read this, this, and this).  St. Albert, “teacher of everything there is to know,” was one of the first of  a long list of Catholic scientists and philosophers.  Pray for us St. Albert the Great that we may see the hand of God in all of his creation just as you did.