24 March 2012

No Cross, no Throne. . .

NB.  I wrote this homily three years ago while living in Rome.  Since the community Mass on Sunday in the convent was celebrated in Italian, I never got to preach it.  So, I thought I'd give it a hearing this weekend.

Fifth Sunday of Lent (2012)
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
St. Dominic Church, NOLA

Jesus is troubled. What should he say? “Father, save me from this hour” or “Father, glorify your name”? He chooses to glorify God’s name. Why? He says, “…it was for this purpose [to glorify God’s name] that I came to this hour.” By glorifying God’s name he fulfills his purpose. Does this glorification of God’s name accomplish any vital tasks other than praising the Father? Yes. Jesus says to the crowd at that time of judgment, “. . .the ruler of this world will be driven out. And when I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw everyone to myself." What Jesus says and does is the mechanism of our salvation; his word and deed makes us sons of the Father. What does he say? “Father, glorify your name.” What does he do? He dies. And then he rises from death to take us with him. So, why is Jesus troubled? To rise with him, we must die with him and our deaths must be in service to him. We cannot hope to escape the betrayal of Judas, the passion in Jerusalem, the nails and wood of the cross, and then expect to be part of a glorious Easter harvest. If we will follow Jesus up from the earth, we must follow him on the earth. This is what troubles our Lord: “. . .unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit.” To rise, we must fall; to produce much fruit, we must die.

So, are you ready to die? I mean, are you ready to follow Christ and produce the fruit he produced by dying on the cross? Most of us hope to avoid the kind of death that Christ died. And most of us will. At least in the particulars. Few of us will be scourged. Or force-marched to a burning landfill and nailed to a cross. Few of us will be subjected to public ridicule and executed to spare the nation the wrath of its foreign military governors. Few of us will be accused of blasphemy, religious sedition. If we are killed for the faith, it will be incrementally. Slowly. Almost invisibly. The proverbial frog boiled by degrees of increasing heat. The Enemy’s strategy this time around is far more subtle. More understated and restrained. This time we will be accused of hating ourselves, our neighbors, and our God; we will be accused of standing against truths the science and progress, against the beauty of Mother Earth, against the innate goodness of our human nature. This time, we will be charged with being inhumane, intolerant, uncompromising, divisive, and ignorant. And like all the other times, we will die. . .for preaching the simple truth of the gospel.

God’s will be done; therefore, we are troubled. So, what do we say: “Father, save us from this hour” or “Father, glorify your name”? We could ask our Lord to save us from this hour. We could. But why should we? Can we honestly claim we didn’t know what was in store for us? Can we look God in the eye and say, “Hey, this wasn’t in the brochure!”? “No one every said anything about suffering for the faith!” No, that would be a lie. If you know what it means to be baptized into his death, then you know what it means to be resurrected into his life. If you will rise, you will die. Why would you beg God to save you from the very thing you signed on for? Yes, we were promised a garden. . .and we will have it! Look for the path marked “Gethsemane.” Ask yourself: why do I deserve a better life and death than Christ? You might say, “Didn’t Christ die so we wouldn’t have to?” No, he didn't. No, he died so that we might have eternal life and have it most abundantly! That path—the Way to an abundant life, an eternal life—cuts straight up and through Gethsemane. And there is no escalator, no detour.

No detour, for sure. But there is hope; and here it is: “…when I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw everyone to myself." Though we may understandably fear the death we have signed up for, part and parcel of that death is the promise—the guarantee—the death is not the end; that is, death is not our end, our purpose. We were not created to die. We do not live to die. Though our bodies fail us, and we cease to live, we do not stop being exactly who God made and remade us to Be. In fact, in Christ, we are made perfectly who were first made to be. And only in Christ—perfect God, perfect Man—can we be perfectly who we are made to be for all time. When Christ dies on the cross, humanity dies with him. When Christ rises from the tomb—dead for three days, three nights—humanity rises with him. If you and I will be among those who rise with Christ, we must be among those who die with Christ. As Christ himself teaches us: “Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there also will my servant be.” If you read any detours in that sentence, you might need to get your eyes checked.

Whose path do you follow? Where are you on that path? Which Way do you go? You, like every man and woman ever created, will be offered, at some point, a bag of thirty silver coins. The Powers of this world want one thing for this price: a simple, easy accommodation, a compromise; an answer from one who has chosen to follow the Way of Truth and Life—“So that the many may avoid persecution or pain or inconvenience or anxiety, tell us what we want to hear; tell us that this Christ is a fraud, a myth; tell us that his good news is simply one message among many equally valuable spiritual options; tell us that we do not have to suffer the Cross and die in order to rise again; tell us that we can make our own lifestyles choices and still have eternal! Tell us, Christian, that God loves us just the way we are and doesn't want us to change.” At this moment, staring down at thirty pieces of silver, who are you? Where are you and where do you hope to end?

Before you answer. . .before you commit. . .hear again: “[Jesus] learned obedience from what he suffered; and when he was made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.” If you will learn, if we will be saved. . .we will first suffer—maybe physically, maybe emotionally, maybe socially or spiritually. But we will suffer, and when we suffer for the sake of Christ's name, we obey his commandment to love. He loved us all the way through his Passion, all the way through the garbage of Gehenna, and on to the Cross. Like Christ, to rise, we must fall; to produce much fruit, we must first die.
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The Nawlins' Rally for Religious Freedom

The thunderstorms that rolled through Nawlins' on Thursday night fled Friday morning at the sight of about 300-350 religious believers (mostly Catholics) meeting in front of the Federal Building on Camp St.  

We had our signs.

We had petitions.

We had priests, religious, seminarians, lots of Pro-Life lay folks.

We had moms with babies.  Teens, dads, grandma's and grandpa's.

We had a large group of students from a couple of Catholic schools.

We even had one of the original framers of the Constitution give us a short history lesson!

Most of the people driving by honked horns and gave us the Thumbs Up.  A few shouted obscenities.

As expected, no media.  

Yours truly flubbed his own admonition to take pics.  I'd let the battery die.  After I got home, I remembered that my fancy-pantsy phone can take pics.  Oy. Poet-theologians are not tech-savvy.

When we left the rally, the group was praying the rosary.  

How did the rally turn out in your neck of the woods?

Update:  The Anchoress has some pics from all over, including links to more pics.  Doing the job the media won't do.
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23 March 2012

Media Watch

The MSM will send two dozen reporters and cameramen to cover the adolescent antics of four OccuTards in Peoria. . .but they completely ignore 300,000 Pro-Life marchers in B.O. backyard.

I expect today's Stand Up Rally for Religious Freedom will either be ignored completely or portrayed as some sort of clergy led astroturf against the administration.  

Let's keep a watch on the MSM!  Take pics, vids during the rallies, and watch your local news and papers.  When they pull their usual deceptive nonsense, call them on it immediately.  We already know most "journalists" are little more than pipelines from the White House to the public.  Don't let them get away with any anti-religious
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22 March 2012

Get caught being Catholic in public!!!




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On being a small but brighter light

4th Week of Lent (Th)
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
St. Dominic Church, NOLA

We are all children of the Enlightenment; that is, we were all raised on a daily diet of rational skepticism, the need for scientific proof, and a general suspicion of the supernatural. Add to this mix a uniquely American pragmatism and common good sense, and you have a model for the modern person who strives in live in the real world of things. However, like most children, we've taken bits and pieces of our upbringing and incorporated our own experiences into a worldview that seems coherent to us. Since we are believers, we have rejected the idea that there is no supernatural realm. We've accepted the existence of God; the reality of angels and their fallen kin; the destructive consequences of sin and the free availability of freedom from sin. Though few of us would claim to fully understand how the supernatural world works, most, if not all, of us would agree that there is something like a world beyond the physical world. How did we come to this conclusion? Evidence? Wishful thinking? Just a gamble? Maybe a little of each? If we follow Christ, we do so by choice. We made a decision to believe, a decision to trust the promises of God and to follow His Christ. Evidence plays a supporting role and reason helps us to understand, but ultimately, we choose. We choose to believe the witness of faithful generations.

Jesus confronts his accusers with a radical assertion: I am the Son of God. He shocks the Jews to their religious core by claiming to have the authority to pass judgment on sins, to forgive those sins, and heal the sinner. In effect, he is claiming to be God Himself. So why does he say, “If I testify on my own behalf, my testimony is not true”? First, let's understand what he is saying. He means, “When I testify for myself, you do not believe me.” He's not saying that his self-witness is false, only that his testimony is not heard as the truth by those who will not to believe. Augustine says it perfectly, “For He knew well that His Own witness of Himself was true; but for the sake of the weak, and hard of belief, and [those] without understanding, the Sun looked out for lamps. For their weakness of sight could not bear the dazzling brightness of the Sun.” The sun, our brightest star, looked for lamps. The Son of God looked for smaller lights to reflect his brightness so that those blinded by the brilliance of his witness could see him for who he really is. 

The Church—for 2,000 yrs—has been and continues to be a global collection of those smaller lights, each reflecting a sliver of Christ's light, each shining out a glimpse of his true glory. The accumulated light of 50 generations, 20 centuries, with each new generation adding to the brightness of our corporate witness, this gathered light tells the true but as yet imperfect story of our collective labors toward bearing a final witness to Christ's triumph over death. Evidence supports our claim that the Church is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic, even if individual lights in the Church fail at being one or all of the above. Reason—as a divine gift oriented toward the Gift-giver—supports our incomplete understanding of God's complete Self-revelation. But evidence and reason alone do not constitute faith. Reason and evidence do not suffice as truthful testimony. We choose to trust; we choose to love; we choose to hope. And when we choose to trust, love, and hope, our smaller light is added to the global witness, making the Church's testimony to the glory of God's mercy all the brighter. We can choose to brighten the light of our witness, or we can choose to darken it. Join the faithful generations in bearing witness to the saving power of Christ!
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Coffee Cup Browsing

His frustration with the bishops is understandable. . .but his rhetoric and understanding of canon law are deeply flawed.  

Boys castrated in Dutch Catholic psych wards in the '50's.  This sounds like the sort of thing that trendy scientific "thinkers" of the progressive-wing would do.  Orthodox Catholics know better.

Update:  Yup.  Turns out that those castrating shrinks in the Netherlands were just "following orders" from the All Benevolent State, specifically a mandate to castrate sex offenders.  

Occu-Idiots:  No Chores Strike on May 1st.  Looking at the recent pics of Occupy herding, I'd say not one of them as ever done a chore.  Much less held a real job.

Wow. . .yet another 9-0 Supreme Court Smackdown for B.O.  Maybe appointing all those political hacks to the ranks of the DOJ is turning out to be a really bad idea, uh?

Only the minds of a public service union could come up with something this twisted.

Decades of socialist dreaming and cradle to grave welfare have destroyed Italy's future.

Outrageous salaries for archdiocesan bureaucrats. 

What is going on in China?  Tanks in the street, a reported military coup in Shanghai, ousters of Party officials. 
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21 March 2012

Jesus is not equal to God

4th Week of Lent (W)
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
St. Dominic Church, NOLA

Jesus heals a crippled man at the Pool of Bethesda, ordering him, “Rise, take up your mat, and walk.” The Jews who persecute the Lord accuse him of breaking the Sabbath Law. When Jesus hears these accusations, he answers them, “Amen, amen, I say to you, the Son cannot do anything on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing; for what he does, the Son will do also.” This is Jesus' answer to persecutors' question, but what is the question? What do the accusing Jews ask of Jesus? Implied in the accusation is the question: just who do you think you are. . .healing on the Sabbath, forgiving sins, and ordering others to break the Law?” Jesus answers, “My Father is at work until now, so I am at work.” This answer only adds to the fury of his accusers “because he not only broke the sabbath but he also called God his own father, making himself equal to God.” The sheer audacity of Jesus' claim to be the Son of God is breathtaking b/c no creature can ever be divine, no mere mortal can embody the glory of the Creator. Breaking the Sabbath Law is crime enough to warrant severe punishment, but to claim divine sonship is beyond the pale, beyond anything these religious folk have ever heard. It violates the First Commandment of the Ten. Of course, as Jesus makes abundantly clear, he is no creature; he is no mere mortal.

Had Jesus' persecutors fully understood what he is claiming about himself, they would've been really, really upset. According to John's Gospel, the accusers charge Jesus with the heresy of proclaiming himself “equal to God.” Jesus does no such thing. He never claims to be equal to God. He claims to be God Himself. Does this seem like a distinction w/o a difference to you? Well, let me ask you: two nickels equal a dime, right? But would you say that those two nickels are the same as one dime? How many of you would say, “I am equal to myself”? Americans claim that men and women are equal, but we do not claim that they are the same. Being equal to someone is not the same as being identical. We can be “equal under the law” while being very different in every other way. The claim that Jesus is making about his person, his mission, and his ultimate destination are all bound together in who he is as the Son of God made flesh. When he acts, speaks, and thinks, we witness the acts, speech, and thoughts of God. It took us a few centuries to wrestle this insight out of revelation, and it matters a great deal that we guard it well. 

Why does it matter how we think about the identity of Christ? We need to get this bit of theology right b/c we place so much of the weight of the faith on the person on Christ. We claim to follow Christ. To do and say all that he did and said. This means following him all the way to the Cross, into death, and on to the resurrection. Imagine how different our understanding of salvation would be if we had concluded (wrongly) some 1,800 yrs. ago that Jesus was just a man with a really deep insight into the divine. He died a criminal and so would we. He didn't rise from the tomb and neither will we. Our whole faith would be limited to being nice to one another, doing a few good works, and sharing a communal meal once a week. Is that worth dying for? Would you give your life to imitate an executed 1st century Jewish heretic? Instead we have this, “. . .whoever hears my word and believes in the one who sent me has eternal life and will not come to condemnation, but has passed from death to life.” That, brothers and sisters, is why any of this matters.
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It's not about your feelings. . .it's about the Truth!

The Soft Tyranny of Sentimentalism
Elizabeth Scalia

If 20th-century atheism rode in on the backs of totalitarian regimes, the 21st-century has delivered unto the world an anti-God, anti-Church movement that fits seamlessly into shallow, postmodern popular culture. Having no need for uprisings and the hardware of destruction, the new fog of faith has crept in on the little cat feet of Sentimentalism and it now sits on its haunches, surveying its splendidly wrought sanctimony.

Sentimentalism is the force of feel-goodism, the means by which we may cast off the conventions of faith and casually dismiss those institutions that refuse to submit to the trending times and morals. The Sentimentalist trusts his feelings over hallowed authority or the urgings of his reason, frequently answering hard religious questions with some noble-sounding phrase like "The God I believe in wouldn't . . . " (fill in the blank). What fits in that blank is typically some tenet of traditional faith that isn't currently fashionable, some moral demand that pop culture considers impossible—and hence, not worth even trying. Thus the Sentimentalist, while believing he follows the inviolate voice of his conscience, is really sniffing after trends, forming his heart according to the sensus fidelium of middlebrow magazines and public radio.

A Sentimentalist cannot reconcile religious convictions—whether rooted in scripture, tradition, or cultural practice—that do not correspond with his own considered feelings, which for him are both weighty and principled. Convinced that the people he loves cannot possibly be denied anything they want by a just God, or that the same just God would not permit deformities, illness, war, childhood abuse, or any of the human sufferings common to us all, he will not participate in a Church so fault-riddled and out-of-step with a generous and enlightened generation as . . . his own.

[. . .]

Sentimentalism nearly reigned supreme in the priestly formation programs of the 70's and 80's, thus producing a generation of pastors who casually dismiss Church teaching in favor of "following one's heart."  This Disneyesque approach to caring for God's children has inevitably bequeathed to us a generation or two of Catholics so sensitive, so imperiled by reason, authority, and tradition that the merest suggestion that Behavior X might be a sin or self-destructive is met with poo-poo's and derisive giggles.  

How often have you heard/read the phrases "out of step with the culture" or "throwback to pre-Vatican Two" or "turning back the clock on reform"?  All of these should be a loud, glaring warning that the speaker/writer is shoveling postmodern dung and calling it Something New.  The whole "Spirit of Vatican Two" project has been a long, disastrous experiment in global sentimentalism and, thankfully, the biological clock tracking this failed agenda is winding down. 

Unfortunately, it will take two generations to completely purge the ectoplasm of the "Spirit" and re-catechize Catholics in the truth of the faith.

Read the whole thing. . .it is WELL worth your time.
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19 March 2012

NPR calls BXVI "a famous gay icon"


Your tax dollars at work, folks!  Read the transcript and then contact NPR and let them know what you think. 

You might also consider contacting your Senators and Congressman to suggest that there are better ways to spend your taxes than paying some smug lefty to offend the Pope on public radio.
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Flaming clowning and a little dog too. . .

I'm a big fan of smelling good!  My cologne collection is very modest but stocked with reasonably high quality scents.  Below is a commercial for AXE Body Spray.  Never smelled the stuff. . .and don't plan to.  But the ad is pretty funny.



Got a laugh out of the flaming clown and the little dog.  :-)
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By the numbers: Fat Report and Page Views

Hmmmmm. . .looks like I gained four pounds.  This doesn't sound right.  I've gone down a notch on my habit belt.  Maybe the last weigh-in was a fluke.  Oh well.

Happier number:   1,003,833.   That's the number of page views for HancAquam since Feb. of 2006.  HA averages 557 page views a day. 

Thanks for reading!

Fr. Philip
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The original cell of social life

Solemnity of St. Joseph
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
St. Dominic Church, NOLA

If you ask a Catholic pastor how many members he has in his parish, he will say something like, “Oh, about 800 families.” Or 1,000 families, or 2,000 families. The number isn't as important here as the unit of measurement: families. Not individuals but families. Even if a household consists of one individual, it's counted as a family. This may seem odd until you read what the Catechism says about the family, “The family is the original cell of social life”(no. 2207). The most basic unit of our lives together as Christians is not the individual Christian but the Christian embedded in his/her family life. Given this, we can say that the parish then is a family of local families. The diocese is the family of all parochial families, and the Universal Church is the family of all the diocesan families. What is the Universal Church? The Church is the heir to God's promise made to “Abraham and his descendants that he would inherit the world, [not through the law] but through the righteousness that comes from faith.” When we believe on the name of Jesus, we are adopted into the family of God, becoming brothers and sisters to Christ, and co-heirs to the Kingdom. This means that Joseph, husband to Mary and adopted father of Jesus, is the our father in the Church. He is the Pillar of the Family, the Christian model for honoring God as our heavenly Father.

What little we know about Joseph comes from the gospel accounts of his betrothal to the virgin, Mary. Matthew tells us that he was “a righteous man,” a man consistent in his duties to God, following the Law, and keeping closely to the covenant. His personal integrity is demonstrated by the fact that he was unwilling to expose his wife to shame when she became pregnant before their period of betrothal had ended. Having decided to divorce her quietly, an angel came to him in a dream and told him that Mary's child was a gift from the Holy Spirit and that he (Joseph) should take them in and name the child, Emmanuel, “God is with us.” Matthew reports, “. . .[Joseph] did as the angel of the Lord had commanded him. . .” It is precisely Joseph's obedience to the Lord, his unwavering faith in the promises of God that forms the foundation of the Christian family, the original living cell of the Church. Had Joseph stubbornly followed the letter of the Law, Mary might have been a single mother raising a son without a father in the home.*

A recent study in England revealed that 2/3 of failed families there were fatherless. Most households below the poverty line in the U.S. are headed by single mothers and most of the young men serving prison terms in the U.S. were raised w/o a father in their lives. Now, there's nothing magical about having a man living with the family. Fathers can be abusive; a drain on the family finances rather than a help; and a bad example of fidelity to the vows of marriage. But a father who is faithful to God, faithful to his vows, and faithful to his children is a blessing beyond measure. The Catechism notes that “authority, stability, and a life of relationships within the family constitute the foundations for freedom, security, and fraternity within society” (no. 2207). If the original cell of social life, the family, is infected with selfishness, infidelity, uncontrolled addictions, and violence, then society at large is in danger of dying. The cure for these infections is to be found in the holy example of St. Joseph. A selfless life lived with sacrificial love in the service of one's family motivated by an unwavering faith in God. Joseph obeyed the Lord and his family flourishes still 2,000 years later!

* It has become expedient in recent years for Catholics of a particular political bent to claim that Mary was an "unwed mother."  This is patently false.  Mary was betrothed to Joseph.  If this were not so, how could he consider divorcing her?  Another politically expedient myth about Joseph and Mary is that the members of the Holy Family were "illegal immigrants."  This is also patently false.  If they were "illegals," why were they traveling to Jerusalem to participate in the Roman census? 
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