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In the years preceding the Great Jubilee of 2000, John Paul II held a series of continental synods to help the Church in different locales reflect on its distinctive situation at the end of the second millennium and to plan for a future of evangelical vigor in the third.
These special assemblies were easily named in the case of the Synods for Africa, Asia, and Europe. But when it came to the synod for the western hemisphere, John Paul threw a linguistic curve ball that made an important point.
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Second in a series of reflections by Fr. Robert Barron on the life of Cardinal Francis George.
The one who would proclaim the Gospel in the contemporary American setting must appreciate that the American culture is sown liberally with semina verbi (seeds of the Word).
The first of these, in Cardinal Francis George’s judgment, is the modern sense of freedom and its accompanying rights.
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First in a series of reflections by Fr. Robert Barron on the life of Cardinal Francis George.
Cardinal Francis George, who died April 17 at the age of 78, was obviously a man of enormous accomplishment and influence.
He was a cardinal of the Roman Church, a past president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the archbishop of one of the largest and most complicated archdioceses in the world, and the intellectual leader of the American Church.
A number of American bishops have told me that when Cardinal George spoke at the bishops’ meetings, the entire room would fall silent and everyone would listen.
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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.
Here’s the Pauline text:
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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.
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60 Minutes, the CBS News “magazine” that helped redefine television journalism, prides itself on challenging conventional wisdom, discomfiting the comfortable, kicking shibboleths in the shins, and opening new arguments.
No such challenge, alas, was evident in the program’s recent segment on Pope Francis.
One of the principal interviewees in that piece was Robert Mickens, formerly of the London-based Tablet and currently of the National Catholic Reporter. Here’s a part of what Mickens had to say about the “Francis effect”:
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It might seem that everything that could be said, has been said, about the shepherds, the wise men, and the Christ Child.
But that’s one of the marvels of Scripture: the unfolding history of the Church draws out of the inspired Word of God allegories and images previously unrecognized.
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According to Vatican-speak, a specially scheduled session of the Synod of Bishops is an “Extraordinary Synod,” meaning Not-an-Ordinary Synod, held every three years or so.
In the case of the recently-completed Extraordinary Synod of 2014, extraordinary things did happen, in the “Oh, wow!” sense of the word. And if this year’s Extraordinary Synod was a preview of the synod for which it was to set the agenda, i.e., the Ordinary Synod of 2015, that synod, too, promises to be, well, extraordinary.
How was the Extraordinary Synod of 2014 extraordinary? With apologies to the Bard, let me count the ways:
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This coming August 3 will mark the golden anniversary of Flannery O’Connor’s “Passover,” to adopt the biblical image John Paul II used to describe the Christian journey through death to eternal life.
In the 50 years since lupus erythematosus claimed her at age 39, O’Connor’s literary genius has been widely celebrated.
MADISON — The Diocese of Madison Catholic Committee on Scouting (DMCCS) is now in the process of selecting Scouts to represent the diocese on the 2015 St. George Trek.
DMCCS has sent five Scouts on the St. George Trek annually since 2009 and is looking for two candidates to be a part of the Trek, which will take place between July 8 and 23 of 2015.
