9 days in heaven

As we race towards sunrise and the Holy Land at 611 miles per hour, my mind races between my worries about changes at work and the wondrous sites that will be seeing over the next nine days. 

9 Days later

This week everything about having been in the Holy Land is beginning to hit me. Maybe it is the jet lag finally wearing off. Maybe it is verbally sharing my story with others. I don't know for sure, but starting yesterday all of the little things keep coming to mind. In the middle of praying the rosary at the convent during lunch, I could see myself at the spot of each of the mysteries, where Jesus taught the Our Father, and at the sites of the Annunciation and the Visitation (where the Hail Mary were stated). During mass, being at the upper room and Calvary immediately come to mind. It is as if instead of just saying the words of the prayers, the meaning behind them is now much more apparent. That wasn't happening before yesterday, but now everything seems to have that much more meaning. I keep getting goose bumps as it happens. I continue to pray that I can share my experiences am that they might have a similar impact on others as they have had on me.

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8 things you won't believe can fit INSIDE St. Peter's Basilica in Rome

(by John White, CatholicVote.org)  Next Saturday (June 29) will mark the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul.

As the universal Church prepares to honor two of her greatest saints, Catholics around the world will be asking themselves the same question that they do every year around this time:

What huge things could fit inside St. Peter’s Basilica?

St. Peters interior

Everyone knows that St. Peter”s is not only beautiful, but enormous as well (realtor.com has it valued at $11 trillion – “vintage artwork, charming accents, big back yard surrounded by Italy”).  But even those who have been inside the colossal structure don’t fully appreciate how big it is.  This is because the sheer enormity of its dimensions combined with its virtually perfect architectural balance tricks the human eye and confounds our ability to appreciate its actual size.

This phenomenon is commonly known as “gargantu-opticodimensional pseudoperception.”  Actually, Wikipedia had a different name for it, but who trusts Wikipedia?

Before we start, these are the dimensions of St. Peter’s basilica relevant for our little project (via Wikipedia):

Interior length:     693.8 ft.

Interior width at transept:     451 ft.

Interior width of nave:     90.2 ft.

Interior height of dome:     393 ft.

So without further ado…the following things can fit inside St. Peter’s Basilica:

1.   The Statue of Liberty.  Yes, including the pedestal.

2.   The Space Shuttle.  Including external fuel tank, boosters, etc.

 

3.   The Cinderella Castle at Disney World.

 

4.   The Great Sphinx of Giza.  With lots of room to spare.

5.   Air Force One.  Easily – probably two or three could fit.

 

6.   The 7th Hole at Pebble Beach.  

 

7.   A Typhoon-class Russian submarine.  The largest submarine ever built.

8.   The entire population of Dubuque, Iowa.  St. Peter’s Basilica can fit 60,000 people – no joke.

Dubuque, Iowa

(Adapted by Chris W.)

If God is everywhere, why go on a pilgrimage?

(The Catholic Spirit | Liz Kelly for The Catholic Spirit | June 19, 2014)  I once read that Minnesota has one of the highest numbers of perpetual Eucharistic adoration chapels in the country. Truly, God is with us.

If that’s the case, do I really need to haul myself at great effort and expense — enduring, God forbid, other pilgrims! — to some dusty foreign land to pay him homage, to make known my needs for healing, forgiveness, grace? The answer of course is, no — and perhaps, yes.

Consider: Jesus was a regular pilgrim. The Gospel of Luke tells us he would make the journey to Jerusalem for the feast of Passover every year with his parents.

The earliest pilgrimages were very much like we might imagine this journey was for Jesus: a caravan of company walking for days together along dusty mountain roads, no doubt their minds humming with the familiar prayer of the psalmist: “‘Let us go to the house of the Lord!’ Our feet are standing within your gates, O Jerusalem. . . . To it the tribes go up, the tribes of the Lord, As was decreed for Israel, to give thanks to the name of the Lord.”

Binding our hearts

To walk where Jesus walked, and pray where he prayed, and learn more intimately the heart of that healing carpenter from Nazareth, a pilgrimage, particularly to the Holy Land, does mark us in a unique way.

When we make a pilgrimage, we are binding our hearts to every pilgrim-saint who has journeyed before us and to every longing of the human soul to seek more deeply, more authentically the face of God.

As Father Murray Bodo writes in his excellent book, “The Place We Call Home: Spiritual Pilgrimage As a Path to God,” “Pilgrimages are not about one place being more holy than another, for God is everywhere. Making pilgrimages involves a response to something inside us that longs to move toward, that seeks the holy beyond.”

And, the good news is, this can happen even on a tour bus with Wi-Fi.

The pilgrim’s credo

I am not in control.

I am not in a hurry.

I walk in faith and hope.

I greet everyone with peace.

I bring back only what God gives me.

The Holy Land

As Christians, we would have no other pilgrimage — to Lourdes, to Ars, to Guadalupe, to the Station Churches of Rome during the Lenten season, to walk the Camino, to climb the Holy Steps on our knees — without the birthplace of our pilgrim souls: Jerusalem.

For such a tiny bit of geography, Israel in general and Jerusalem in particular, has a history fraught with every kind of tension — religious, political, economic. This in some ways is what makes it uniquely fitting to the pilgrim heart. For you will not awake at 4 a.m. in Jerusalem to the sound of church bells, but to the Muslim call to prayer, those low and moaning tones lifted to Allah drifting out over a sleeping city.

And, at the Wailing Wall — the place according to Jewish tradition where Abraham was asked to sacrifice Isaac — you will see that men and women are separated, the women only recently granted a small portion to approach this holiest of Jewish ground with their prayers. Jerusalem is a powerful clash of orthodoxies. It heightens in fresh ways the truly radical teaching of Christ.

And so we go, not to escape the travails of everyday life, but to give them perspective.

We go, not to take a vacation or recreate, but to allow God to re-create our deepest selves.

We take our broken hearts and broken bodies across oceans and over thousands of miles, sitting for hours in cramped airplanes and airports, to distant shrines and ancient ruins, to places where the language and culture may be unfamiliar and uncomfortable — not to remind God, but to remind ourselves that we are part of an eternal narrative, a glorious true story of hope, resurrection and redemptive victory.

We endure the jostle of crowds and the chatter of tour guides even in these, the holiest places on earth, because it helps us to remember the proper horizon of our lives is not health, wealth, comfort, success, being well loved or highly regarded — but a sweeping need for healing and grace and the eternal good news, all of which Jesus wants to provide in abundance.

Preparation helps

The Church teaches that “pilgrimages evoke our earthly journey toward heaven and are . . . special occasions for renewal in prayer.” Indeed, central to any pilgrimage must be prayer — prayer that begins long before you decide which shoes to pack.

My preparation — one I highly recommend if possible — included completing the Ignatian Exercises over the nine months prior to my departure. The Exercises invite you to meditate in a very concentrated way on the life of Christ.

My spiritual director would tell me: “Look at what Jesus is doing in your meditation, dwell with him.” It is a fitting definition for any “pilgrimage” great or small: We go to dwell with him.

Kelly is the author of five books, including “Reasons I Love Being Catholic,” and recently returned from her first pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

Pope: "Excommunicated" The courage to label mobsters “adorers of evil”

(Vatican Insider, by Andrea Tornielli) Never before has a Pope said publicly, without mincing words, that “the mafia is excommunicated”. Pope Francis made the declaration from the pulpit, in the land of the mafia. Following his visit to the frontier of Lampedusa, an island inundated by refugees and immigrants, and the journey amongst the unemployed of Sardinia, Francis’ current visit has taken him to the fringes of the country, in Calabria. It is the ‘geography’ of a pope who favours the less fortunate, as yesterday he visited Cassano allo Jonio to show that he is close to those who live in a land plagued by organised crime and encourage those in attendance with signs of hope and prospects. In the prison of Castrovillari, Bergoglio embraced the father and two grandmothers of Cocò Campolongo, the three-year-old burned alive in an ‘ndrangheta ambush, and during the mass held on the plains of the village of Sibari, he deviated from the text prepared for the homily and declared that “this evil must be fought and distanced”, inviting the Church to commit itself even more in this regard. He said, with potency, that as many as there are that follow this path, “the mafia is excommunicated”.

Yet this is not the first time that Francis has spoken of the mafia. Last March he met two families, victims of the mafia, at a meeting promoted in Rome by “Libera”, with father Ciotti. On that occasion he asked the “men and women of the mafia” to convert and change their lives “so that they do not end up in hell”, “which is what awaits if they continue on this path… The power, the money you have now through illicit business, from many mafia crimes, is bloody money, it is bloody power and you cannot take it with you to the next life”. This time the appeal, clear and strong, and with reference to excommunication, was declared by the Pope from the altar in the land of the mafia. Resolved in his choice, the message echoes that famous address by John Paul II in the Valley of the Temples of Agrigento, in 1993.

For Bergoglio, speaking out against organised crime is nothing new after his years at the episcopacy in Buenos Aires. In 2009, father Pepe di Paola, one of the priests he had assigned to the parish in the shanty town of Barracas, received death threats from drug traffickers. The future Pope told the priest: “If something is to happen to one of mine, I want them to kill me”. He removed the priest to protect him and defended him publicly saying that the appeals to fight crime and narcotics came from him, the archbishop.

“The Gospel contains answers for us all, even against the ‘ndrangheta” said the bishop of Cassano and secretary of the CEI, Nunzio Galantino. Today Francis reiterated this not only to those fighting for change, but also to those “sleeping consciences”, which are complicit.

Hundreds of Catholic employers win exemption from HHS mandate

 

(CNA/EWTN News).- A federal court has ruled that the Catholic Benefits Association and its hundreds of employer members are exempt from a federal mandate requiring coverage of contraceptives and abortifacient drugs.

“We are grateful for the ruling, but continue to pray that our leaders recognize that Catholics, whether bishops or businessmen, cannot in good conscience provide insurance that covers drugs and procedures that undermine the dignity of the human person and the sanctity of human life,” Archbishop Paul Coakley of Oklahoma City, the benefit association’s vice-president, said June 5.

“Religious freedom entails more than the right to worship and any contrary legislation must be opposed,” he added.

Archbishop William Lori of Baltimore, the association’s president, also welcomed the decision.

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Video: "Jesus: A Pilgrimage" a conversation with Fr. James Martin, SJ

This video is so down-to-earth, transparent, humble and honest.  

We highly recommend you watch this video and read Fr. James Martin's, SJ book "Jesus: A Pilgrimage".

Pilgrimage: music and memories

by Allison D'Ambrosia; March 20, 2014 (Sophomore; St. Mary's College)

Over spring break, 55 of my closest friends and I went to France. I’m part of the Notre Dame Liturgical Choir, and every other year, the choir goes on an international tour. This year: France. We went to many cities including Beyeux, Chartres, Le Mons and Paris. I don’t know how to pare down all the stories, laughs, walks, metro rides, singing and breath-taking moments that happened in just one week — but I shall try.

We began as five moms, one dad, two directors, three grad student conductors, one priest and 55 college students all sitting at O’Hare airport, equipped with our four blue things: passport, plane ticket, choir robe and tour binder, filled with the music that will ring in my head for many weeks to come. This was the very beginning of our adventures and the snapping of pictures that never seemed to end over the next week.

I only have time (and room) to name just a few of my favorite memories from the trip.

A tradition of the choir is to have a community “Tour Journal,” which is passed around during the week for people to write down stories, quotes, experiences, etc. they want to share and remember. As we were riding from site to site, I loved sitting on the bus reading people’s thoughts and stories.

One entry in particular struck me as this entry was alike my own feelings. We sang at a Carmelite convent church in a town that was very affected by the air raids of World War II. After we sang for mass, we gave a brief concert. One of the pieces we sang is Mendelsohn’s  “Richte Mich, Gott.” I was shocked by how overcome I became while singing this piece, which we had rehearsed 100 times and had already performed eight. But singing in German in a place that had experience so much suffering and trauma at the hands of the Germans, I felt incredibly uncomfortable. Some of the audience members seemed a tad taken aback by our song choice as well, yet we kept on singing.

In a sense, the beauty of the piece and the emotion with which we sang it overcame the awkwardness of the location. I feel like we were able to portray the hurt and devastation — even if it was only by a minuscule amount — by our performance, which somehow ironically removed the gap between audience and performer. The lyrics, from Psalm 43, made sense in the context. We sang: “Rescue me from those who are deceitful and wicked. You are God my stronghold.” This, for me, was one of the most moving performances during our entire tour.

The views expressed in this Inside Column are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Observer.

The views expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Observer.

Mother, daughter find faith despite unexpected pregnancy

(CNA/EWTN News, By Katy Senour).- Waking up to her bedroom light one late night in October, Linda Padgett was flooded with fear. Standing there, her 20-year-old daughter Sarah revealed that she was pregnant.

Raising a Catholic family of nine, Padgett was initially worried about judgment in the community, her daughter’s future, and the possibility that her daughter’s pregnancy may have been the result of bad parenting.

Over time, however, she was able to overcome the fears and difficulties, and the pregnancy became a source of faith and trust for both herself and Sarah.

Padgett, who lives in Steubenville, Ohio, explained to CNA that she quickly learned to push her own “selfish fears” aside to offer her daughter love and support.

“I needed to let her just talk and share,” she reflected. “I needed to hug her and love her and tell her that we are there for her.”

Noting that she had her husband Chris “have always been open to life” and “never doubted the blessing that a baby is,” Padgett noted that what was at first a “painful and frightening” reality eventually became transformed into abundant grace and countless blessings.

“It’s like God shined a bright light into a darkened, secret area in Sarah’s life,” she said. “That light dispels the darkness and brings grace and healing.”

“It didn’t take long to realize that God was going to use this major twist in Sarah’s life to help her focus and grow.”

Padgett is now joyfully anticipating the arrival of her granddaughter, who will be named Audrey.

“There is a new, little baby coming into our home and I don’t have to be the one doing all the work!” she laughed.

However, the growing baby is not the only new life in the family, she said. “New life is what is happening to both my daughter and to me.”

She explained that she has had the opportunity to exemplify Christ’s unconditional love to Sarah, part of her calling as a parent to model Jesus to her children and help them reach heaven one day.

At the same time, Sarah has been living a renewed life, spiritually focusing on the future and experiencing a lot of physical “firsts” with her pregnancy, Padgett said. “She has started living for someone other than herself.”

In addition, having her mother’s support has given Sarah “the benefit of living with another person who has experienced and felt everything she is feeling.”

Padgett said that the pregnancy has been a “very bonding experience” for herself and Sarah, as well as a time of growth.

She wants young women going through similar situations as Sarah to understand that “pregnancy is not the end of their life.”

“There are lots of stories of girls overcoming their situations and becoming something great, despite the difficulties they encounter,” she said.

Padgett said she has found a new trust and faith in God through seeing the work he has done in her daughter’s life. She believes that God will continue guiding her daughter and has beautiful plans for her future.

“I can’t even image what that will be like, but I am certain it will be amazing,” she said.

Pope Francis: the joy of priesthood and the beauty of fraternity

(Vatican Radio) “I have very much desired this meeting with you who bear the daily burden of parish work” Pope Francis said on Saturday, greeting the priests of the Diocese of Cassano all’Jonio.

In his address, the Holy Father spoke to the assembled clerics about “the joy of being a priest.” There is nothing more beautiful for a man than to be called to the priesthood, he said… called to follow Jesus, to be with Him, to bring Jesus to others, to bring them His Word and His forgiveness. Although the work of a priest is not always easy, drawing near to Jesus in the tabernacle can renew and re-animate priestly zeal. Stopping for a moment before the tabernacle can also lead priests to examine their consciences: “In the silence of prayer Jesus make us see if we are working as good workers, or if we have become a little like ‘employees;’ if we are open, generous ‘channels,’ through which His love, His grace can flow abundantly; or if instead we place ourselves at the center, and so instead of being channels we become screens that do not help the encounter with God, with the light and the strength of the Gospel.”

Pope Francis also spoke about “the beauty of fraternity.” Priests especially do not follow the Lord just as individuals, but as members of a community, with “a great variety of gifts and personalities” which enrich the priesthood when they are lived “in communion and fraternity.” Even priests, however, “are immersed in a subjective culture that exalts the ‘I’ even to the point of idolizing it.” Pope Francis warned of “a certain pastoral individualism that unfortunately is diffused in our dioceses.” Priestly fraternity, then, is a conscious choice that must be cultivated, sought “in communion in Christ in the presbyterate gathered around the Bishop.”

Finally, the Holy Father encouraged the priests in their work “with families and for the family.” It is a difficult time, he said, both for the family as an institution and for individual families that struggle in the crises they face. Priests, he said, “are called to be witnesses and mediators” of God’s “nearness to families, and of the prophetic force” of God’s Word “for the family.”

Video: Pope Francis stops motorcade to bless disabled woman

Hate group's presence shocks attendees at priest funeral

(CNA).- Faithful who attended the funeral for Father Kenneth Walker were dismayed at the presence of picketers from the Westboro Baptist Church on June 20 near Paxico, Kansas.

As mourners filed into Sacred Heart Catholic Church, members of the hate group stood nearby holding signs and singing songs in order to broadcast their message.

A priest with the Fraternity of St. Peter, Fr. Walker, 28, was shot and killed while coming to the aid of Fr. Joseph Terra at their parish, Mater Misercordiae Mission, in Phoenix on June 11. Fr. Terra, 56, suffered several injuries but was released from the hospital June 16.

Those in attendance at Fr. Walker's funeral were disheartened that a group would want to protest at such a difficult time for family and friends.

“I thought it was very inappropriate timing, very inconsiderate for what people are going through right now,” funeral attendee Bridget Bogowith said of the protestors. “It's really uncaring. I was just quite shocked to see them here.”

Funeral attendee Michael Drake said the Catholic response to such protests is a peaceful one.

“We pray for them,” he told CNA. And while he wished the group no ill will, Drake said he was confounded as to why people who believe in God would want to protest the funeral of a priest.

“It seems really unusual that folks would picket the funeral of a man who gave up so many things, including the possibility of a wife and family, in order to serve God,” he said.

Members of the Westboro Baptist Church are known for picketing funerals, particularly those of soldiers. According to their website, group member believe God is punishing America through war due to the country's immoral society.

Drake's mother Claire said she felt sad for the protestors and didn't understand why they would want to picket funerals.

“I know that if one of their ministers died, I would be very sad for his family, I would be concerned, I certainly wouldn't be protesting in front of their church,” she said. “I just think it's a sad and not terribly Christian thing.”