Category: Bishop Morlino’s Columns

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Bishop Robert C. Morlino, Bishop of Madison

Finding hope and light in the darkness

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,

“Night is coming, when no one can work,” we heard in the Gospel reading of this past Sunday (Jn 9:4).

Jesus told his disciples: do the works of God while it is still day, “night is coming when no one can work.”

No one can work and, I might add, no-thing can work. And I would suggest that night has come.

Even as we’ve just marked the Sunday that we call “Rejoice Sunday,” we acknowledge that we have to rejoice in the truth. God gives us the grace to rejoice in the truth. And the truth is that the night has come and so no one and nothing can work — but the splendid Light of the Resurrection will make that night as bright as day!

The story of the man born blind, which we encountered in the Gospel reading, is in many ways an allegory for our very own culture and our very own society. It is a culture and a society of death. A culture upon which night has descended, so nothing works.

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Bishop Robert C. Morlino, Bishop of Madison

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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Bishop Robert C. Morlino, Bishop of Madison

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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Bishop Robert C. Morlino, Bishop of Madison

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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Bishop Robert C. Morlino, Bishop of Madison

Christ calls laity to be ‘salt and light’

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 I happened to be in Jackson, Mississippi (for about 36 hours). Now, why would I go there? Was it because I had never been to Mississippi, and I had never tried their particular brand of Southern cooking?

Well . . . I’ll admit that was at the back of my mind . . . but I would never had made a special trip just for that reason. I went to Jackson for the ordination of their new bishop, Bishop Joseph Kopacz.

Bishop from same home parish

Bishop Kopacz is a great priest, about four years younger than I, who grew up with me in the same home parish near Scranton, Pennsylvania — St. Anthony’s in Dunmore.

Just imagine — two bishops from the same generation from the same home parish. If you would, I’d ask your prayers for him as he begins his new ministry in Jackson.

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Bishop Robert C. Morlino, Bishop of Madison

Our suffering brings us closer to Christ

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,

You’ve been right at the heart of my prayers in the recent days and weeks. In addition to my usual prayers for your growth in the virtues of faith, hope, and love have been prayers for your warmth and safety, as well as for your joy in these frigid days!

I have been very fortunate to take some time for rest and renewal in warmer climes, as I’m blessed most always to do in January. (There are a number of things for which I am grateful to my predecessor, Bishop Bullock, but on a personal level, I’ll always remain grateful for his wise advice — and precedent — that I take my time for vacation in January, and not in the summer!)

I don’t take for granted for a moment the blessings that I’ve received. I’m grateful and I’m hopeful that such moments of leisure can prepare me all the more for my service.

And so it is with only the slightest sense of irony that the Lord has drawn to my mind the following three words and phrases from our readings this past Sunday: purification, suffering, and a sign of contradiction. And each of those words accompanies the readings, in order. Purification is spoken of in the first reading — Mal 3:1-4; suffering in the second reading — Heb 2:14-18, and a “sign of contradiction” in the Gospel reading — Lk 2:22-40.

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Bishop Robert C. Morlino, Bishop of Madison

Encountering Christ through life changes

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,

The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light;

upon those who dwelt in the land of gloom a light has shone.

You have brought them abundant joy and great rejoicing!

(IS 9:1-2)

The Lord our God has truly brought us abundant joy and great rejoicing in the person of Jesus Christ. It is a joy and a light which dispels all darkness, and it is a joy and a light which must be shared. It is the joy and light which is our Gospel!

Most of you have surely heard of the apostolic exhortation of Pope Francis, released at the end of our Year of Faith, which was just about month ago.

The Exhortation is titled Evangelii Gaudium — the Joy of the Gospel, and it begins like this, “The joy of the gospel fills the hearts and lives of all who encounter Jesus. Those who accept his offer of salvation are set free from sin, sorrow, inner emptiness, and loneliness. With Christ joy is constantly born anew (EG, 1).”

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Bishop Robert C. Morlino, Bishop of Madison

Let the joy of the Lord be our strength

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,

In these last days of Advent, before our joy-filled celebration of Christ’s Incarnation and the Christmas Season, we are offered a taste of that joy (during this penitential season) on Gaudete Sunday.

In the book of Nehemiah, but also in the book of Chronicles, there is a prayer which goes simply: “Let the joy of the Lord be our strength” (Neh 8:10).

As a matter of fact, in many of the translations of the Mass (in both Spanish and Italian, for instance) that phrase is inserted at the time of the final dismissal. “The Mass is ended, let the joy of the Lord be our strength, and let us go in peace.”

Before the new English translation came out, I myself was known to use that dismissal. Blessed Pope John Paul II never left it out when he was celebrating Mass privately. “Let the joy of the Lord be our strength, and let us go in peace” — that is the perfect attitude with which we should leave Mass.

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Bishop Robert C. Morlino, Bishop of Madison

Be more than ‘nice’ during Advent

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,

Already Advent is upon us. We have concluded our Year of Faith with gusto, and now we are called to undertake, once again, the journey of a liturgical year.

This journey begins, as always, with our preparation for entering into the most pivotal moment of human history — the moment that God became man.

That the eternal Creator of the universe should have come amongst us, not only to dwell, but to call us to a life with and like Him, means a complete reordering of everything — every single thing.

The profound reality of the Incarnation and its implications for our lives is why we have a season of Advent each year; we take the time to consider how each of us responds to the presence of God in our lives, and what that means for us.

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