MADISON — Our Lady of Hope Clinic and the Women’s Care Center are partnering in “A Celebration of Life” benefit dinner for both organizations to be held on Saturday, April 25, at the Alliant Energy Center, 1919 Alliant Energy Center Way.
Author: Chris Lee
St. Paul’s Wine Fest: Supporting hope of the future
MADISON — Even as St. Paul University Catholic Center has been a fixture of the Madison-area Catholic community for over 100 years, there’s always something new being added to offer the life of the faith and the Catholic presence to students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Easter and evangelism: learning from St. Paul
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Galatians 1:15-18 is not your basic witness-to-the-Resurrection text.
Yet St. Paul’s mini-spiritual autobiography helps us understand just how radically the experience of the Risen Lord changed the first disciples’ religious worldview, and why an evangelical imperative was built into that experience.
St. Paul’s story
Here’s the Pauline text:
Adaptation and renewal of Religious Life: Special gifts of the Holy Spirit
Editor’s note: During this Year of Consecrated Life, this is the third in a series based on the Second Vatican Council’s document, Perfectae Caritatis (Decree on the Adaptation and Renewal of Religious Life) written by Abbot Marcel Rooney, OSB, former abbot primate of the Benedictine order who now resides in Madison.
The decree of the Second Vatican Council on which these reflections are based speaks in the very first paragraph about special gifts of the Holy Spirit which have been imparted to the Church.
The purpose of these gifts is the building up of the Church in the world, and for manifesting God’s own kind of Life in the world.
Why our democracy trusts in God
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I was pleased that the United States Supreme Court dismissed a suit brought by Michael Newdow, a Sacramento man who wanted to remove the phrase “In God We Trust” from the nation’s coins and paper currency, as well as from the fronts of our public buildings.
The argument that the gentleman brought forward was that this custom somehow violates the First Amendment guarantee that the government shall make no law either establishing an official religion or prohibiting the free exercise of religion in the United States.
Taking responsibility for sins
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| Ask IPS |
Question: “How can I take responsibility for my own sinful actions, while still recognizing the mercy and love of God?”
Response: William McKenna, M.S., Clinical Extern at the IPS Center for Psychological Services
Lay movement celebrates anniversary at home and around the world
MADISON — On Saturday, March 7, Pope Francis met with more than 80,000 members of the Communion and Liberation lay movement who filled St. Peter’s Square in Rome and the boulevard leading to it.
It marked the 60th anniversary of the movement, which has the purpose of forming its members in Christianity in order to make them coworkers in the Church’s mission in all areas of society.
What ‘Whiplash’ can teach us
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Over the years, there have been numerous films that feature the character of the “monster-mentor,” by which I mean an elder who forms a young apprentice through the toughest kind of tough love.
Think of Lou Gossett, Jr.’s character in An Officer and a Gentleman who puts Richard Gere’s young Navy recruit brutally through his paces; or of the awful drill instructor in Full Metal Jacket who ruthlessly prepares one young man to be a soldier, even as he leads another to commit suicide; or of Pai-Mei in Kill Bill, Vol. 2, the Kung-Fu master who brow-beats one recruit until she is able to put her fist through a four-inch thick piece of wood.
St. John Paul II and the ‘tyranny of the possible’
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The reputations of the great often diminish over time. Ten years after his holy death on April 2, 2005, Karol Wojtyla, St. John Paul II, looms even larger than he did when the world figuratively gathered at his bedside a decade ago.
Tens of millions of men and women around the world felt impelled, and privileged, to pray with him through what he called his “Passover” — his liberation through death into a new life of freedom in the blazing glory of the Thrice-Holy God.
On this anniversary, as at his canonization last year, what seems most memorable about the man, at least at this historical moment, was that he refused to accommodate to the “tyranny of the possible:” the idea that some things just can’t be put right; that we’re stuck with the way things are, however much we may dislike them.
Easter’s eternal surprise
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In February 1991, during Operation Desert Storm, Ruth Dillow received the sad news from the Pentagon that her son Clayton had stepped on a mine in Kuwait and was killed.
Ruth said that the grief and shock she felt was almost unbearable. For three days she wept constantly. For three days family and friends tried to comfort her, but they could not. Her grief was too great! She felt some of the grief that Mary surely experienced when her son, Jesus, was crucified.
Surprising news
After the third day, the telephone rang. “It’s just another stranger trying to comfort me,” she thought. Reluctantly, she picked up the phone. The voice on the phone shouted joyfully, “Mom, it’s me. I’m still alive! It’s me!”