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The heartbreaking photo of the little Syrian refugee boy washed up dead on the shore of Bodrum, Turkey (see the picture at bit.ly/1PZHvDV) strikingly illustrates the tragic plight of desperate refugees — mostly Syrian — fleeing for their lives from the Islamic State and other violent groups in the Middle East and Africa.
The three-year-old boy, named Aylan, along with his five-year-old brother, Galip, and their mother, Rehan, drowned after the raft carrying them capsized near the Turkish coast.
I love attending ball games. A beautiful summer day at the park; the smell of freshly cut grass and grilled hot dogs; and the competition playing to a cheering crowd.
But, this was no ordinary ball game that I was going to. I had looked forward to this afternoon for some time and couldn’t wait to see “North Rock” take on their arch rivals from “South Rock” in the eighth year of their annual kickball showdown.
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We are a people of new beginnings! In our faith, this is manifest most directly in the sacraments.
In Baptism, we are reborn in Christ, washed clean of the stain of original sin, beginning anew in him. When we confess our sins in Reconciliation, we are forgiven, washed clean of sin, and begin anew in Christ. When we present ourselves humbly before the Lord and receive his body in Holy Eucharist, He enters our very being and creates us anew in him (2 Cor 5:17, Rev. 21:5). We are a people of new beginnings!
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Every third summer, the Catholic lectionary provides a series of readings for Sunday Mass from the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John. This is the magnificently crafted chapter in which the evangelist’s Eucharistic theology is most fully presented.
It is a curiosity of John’s Gospel that the Last Supper scene includes no “institution narrative,” which is to say, the account of what Jesus did with the bread and cup the night before he died.
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| Ask IPS |
QUESTION: “I had an abortion some years ago. While I’ve been to therapy and looked to Project Rachel* for help, with all of the media hype about Planned Parenthood I’ve been having nightmares, flashbacks, and I’m just angry all the time. Will I ever find healing?”
RESPONSE: William McKenna, M.S., Clinical Extern at the IPS Center for Psychological Services
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Bill Droel, a Labor Day historian, wrote that Labor Day began in 1882 when machinist Matthew Maguire and carpenter Peter Maguire organized a worker’s parade in New York City.
Both were Catholic laymen who were active in the Knights of Labor, the first successful national union in our country. In 1894, Congress voted that Labor Day be a national holiday.
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Recently, Stephen Colbert gave an interview in which the depth of his Catholic faith was on pretty clear display.
Discussing the trauma that he experienced as a young man — the deaths of his father and two of his brothers in a plane crash — he told the interviewer how, through the ministrations of his mother, he had learned not only to accept what had happened but actually to rejoice in it: “Boy, did I have a bomb when I was 10; that was quite an explosion . . . It’s that I love the thing that I wish most had not happened.”
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| Veronica Arntz |
To prepare for the upcoming World Meeting of Families in Philadelphia this September, the Office of Evangelization and Catechesis of the Diocese of Madison is providing a monthly series on a particular theme on marriage and family. Each theme is a chapter in the preparatory catechesis developed for the event entitled Love Is Our Mission: The Family Fully Alive, available in paperback from www.osvparish.com or for free online at www.worldmeeting2015.org
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Conservation International has sponsored a series of videos that have become YouTube sensations, garnering millions of views.
They feature famous actors — Harrison Ford, Kevin Spacey, Robert Redford, and others — voicing different aspects of the natural world, from the ocean, to the rain forest, to redwood trees. The most striking is the one that presents Mother Nature herself, given voice by Julia Roberts.
They all have more or less the same message, namely, that nature finally doesn’t give a fig for human beings, that it is far greater than we, and will outlast us. Here are some highlights from the Mother’s speech:
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Many of you have seen the appalling hidden-camera videos of two Planned Parenthood physicians bantering cheerfully with interlocutors posing as prospective buyers of the body parts of aborted infants.
While they slurp wine in elegant restaurants, the good doctors — both women — blandly talk about what price they would expect for providing valuable inner organs and how the skillful abortionists of Planned Parenthood know just how to murder babies so as not to damage the goods.
