Author: Kevin Wondrash

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Kevin Wondrash

Pray, examine conscience, guide others

This column is the bishop’s communication with the faithful of the Diocese of Madison. Any wider circulation reaches beyond the intention of the bishop.

Dear Friends,

This week we’ll have come upon Lent and in that regard I’d like to ask a few things:

1) Let’s keep one another in prayer. Please know that you can count on my prayers, just as I renew them for every person in the diocese, every blessed day, and I’d ask that you try to remember me as well.

2) If you would, please go back and read my columns from the past two weeks — on conscience and fraternal correction (they’re available at the Madison Catholic Herald website — www.madisoncatholicherald.org — if you’ve already discarded your previous issues).

Take some time to reflect upon them, to examine your own conscience. Spend some real time doing so this Lent, and think about what changes you can make in your own life — in accord with a conscience well-formed by the Church and oriented toward Truth.

3) Think of two people with whom you might engage personally and directly in the ways I mention in that second column. Really try to purify your intentions as you consider approaching them (do not fall into sin in carrying out this exercise!) and do so in love and with joy.

Our Holy Father, in his message for Lent, speaks of the types of poverty affecting our world. He speaks, of course, of material destitution, and he challenges us to help our brothers and sisters in that regard — and so we must!

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Kevin Wondrash

Facing difficult moral decisions

Making Sense out of Bioethics column by Fr. Tad Pacholczyk

CNN recently profiled the case of a woman named Marlise Munoz, who was both pregnant and brain dead.

Its report noted that Mrs. Munoz was “33 years old and 14 weeks pregnant with the couple’s second child when her husband found her unconscious on their kitchen floor November 26. Though doctors had pronounced her brain dead and her family had said she did not want to have machines keep her body alive, officials at John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth, Texas, argued state law required them to maintain life-sustaining treatment for a pregnant patient.”

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Kevin Wondrash

Faith is alive during Lent on UW-Madison campus

MADISON — College students are known for “pulling an all-nighter” to stay up through the night writing a paper or studying for an exam.

For Audrey Hilts, a sophomore at UW-Madison and student leader at St. Paul Catholic Center, her first all-nighter last year was a little different.

“The night before Ash Wednesday, St. Paul’s offered all-night perpetual Eucharistic Adoration — praying with the Blessed Sacrament in the middle of the night was such a powerful way to begin Lent!”

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Kevin Wondrash

Church needs ‘dynamic’ fraternal correction

This column is the bishop’s communication with the faithful of the Diocese of Madison. Any wider circulation reaches beyond the intention of the bishop.

Dear Friends,

Last week in my column I talked a lot about conscience, and I’d like to pick the theme back up, as our Gospel from this past Sunday touches on that very same message.

Conscience should always drive us toward perfection. “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect (Mt 5:48),” is the parting exhortation from our Lord in this past Sunday’s Gospel. A correctly formed conscience never says to you, “How little can I do and still call myself a Catholic?”

Conscience doesn’t make us minimalistic

Conscience does not open the door to be a minimalist. It is not a tool for our saying, “How can I give myself permission to do the minimum?”

Conscience opens the door to perfection, to the heroic, to the maximum, because the well-formed conscience serves as that truth-seeking radar, by which we choose to follow the law of the Lord.

As I said, we very much need to spread the word about conscience, and the readings of this past Sunday really help us with one detail of how to do that.

If we’re going to spread the good word about conscience, that means we’re going to have to correct others, especially our brothers and sisters who are Catholic. We know that this is not easy.

What is easy, when we seek to inform the consciences of others, is to seem as if we are judging the person themselves. We have to avoid that judgment of the individual, but we must not hesitate to help them, by offering the truth about their actions.

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Kevin Wondrash

St. Thomas More Society focuses on Abraham Lincoln

MADISON — Abraham Lincoln is more a legend than a real person to many people. His famous speeches, his efforts to hold the Union together, and his untimely death overshadow the man who honed his skills as a circuit-riding attorney in Illinois.

At the next meeting of the St. Thomas More Society in the Diocese of Madison, attorney John Skilton will present highlights from “Abraham Lincoln: A Lawyer for the Ages.”

Skilton is an author, lecturer, and leader in the legal community. He has practiced law for 43 years and has given back to the community by serving on the Board of Governors of the American Bar Association as well as serving as president of the State Bar of Wisconsin.

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Kevin Wondrash

Conscience must be a ‘Truth-seeking radar’

This column is the bishop’s communication with the faithful of the Diocese of Madison. Any wider circulation reaches beyond the intention of the bishop.

Dear Friends,

There is a great service to humanity that is being lost. It is being lost in society and it is being treated with kid gloves even in the Church. This service is to help another person form and follow their conscience.

So lost is this service that it is very quickly becoming illegal. I wish I were speaking in exaggerated hyperbole here, but sadly I am not. To help others form their conscience means to say that this or that is wrong. And to say certain things are wrong has become very dangerous and indeed — close to illegal in our country, and already illegal in Canada.

However, it is, always and everywhere, the right and responsibility of the Church, and of parents, and of good neighbors, to witness to the law of the Lord, to speak the Truth as it is written on our hearts, and to help others to form their conscience.

In fact there is little that is more important because, as we’ll see, it is the path by which we must follow to seek and to attain the blessedness in this life and in the life to come.

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