EWTN Audio Series

I have listened to various EWTN audio series over the last few years, most of which are excellent. I was subscribed to EWTN in iTunes and I would get which ever series was made available.

Currently I am listening to The History of the Catholic Church in the U.S. by Fr. Charles Connor. Maryland was the center of the Catholic population in the colonial days, and the Jesuits were the priests who served them. There were other scattered Catholics throughout the colonies, but many of them rarely or never heard Mass due to no priests. The Carroll family of Maryland was prominent in our country’s formation. Charles Carroll was the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence. Sadly, as human nature often takes us, many of the Catholics of the new country got on the bandwagon of thumbing their noses at their European roots, and this even meant the Vatican. There were already rumblings of anti-Catholicism in the colonies, but they were mostly suppressed due to the patriotic nature of most of the Catholics during the time of the Revolution. But, in the first 50 or so years of the new country, many Catholics refused to be “ordered about” by Rome and the Pope. Finally, their disorderly conduct reached the Pope and he sent letters to the abusers and to the bishops, and the bishops began to take back control. One rogue priest, a Fr. Hogan, was excommunicated, and eventually he was forced from his parish. He took on a secular life, married twice and became a lawyer, and he started to bash the Catholic Church. So we have anti-Catholicism from outside the Church by those who don’t understand her, and we have anti-Catholicism from inside the Church by those who choose not to live a life according to the Church’s teachings. These people probably contributed greatly to the anti-Catholicism of the early 1900’s in the United States. (I will find out more as I continue to listen to this series.)

I finally found the location on EWTN’s website that has all of their audio series. There are over 200 of them with a wide range of Catholic topics. You can find the list of series on EWTN’s site under the Libraries – Audio Library menu. Either click on All Series or search on a keyword and listen! What a wonderful way to grow in your faith.

Here are a sampling of some of the topics

• St. Thomas Aquinas in Today’s world
• A Widow’s Walk with Christ
• Divine Mercy in Our Souls
• Does the Church Still Teach That
• Five Pillars of the Spiritual Life

Anti-Catholicism Op-Ed by Archbishop Dolan

Anti-Catholicism

October 29, 2009

The following article was submitted in a slightly shorter form to the New York Times as an op-ed article. The Times declined to publish it. I thought you might be interested in reading it.

 
FOUL BALL!
By Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan
Archbishop of New York
 
October is the month we relish the highpoint of our national pastime, especially when one of our own New York teams is in the World Series!
 
Sadly, America has another national pastime, this one not pleasant at all: anti-catholicism. 
          
It is not hyperbole to call prejudice against the Catholic Church a national pastime. Scholars such as Arthur Schlesinger Sr. referred to it as “the deepest bias in the history of the American people,” while John Higham described it as “the most luxuriant, tenacious tradition of paranoiac agitation in American history.” “The anti-semitism of the left,” is how Paul Viereck reads it, and Professor Philip Jenkins sub-titles his book on the topic “the last acceptable prejudice.”
          
If you want recent evidence of this unfairness against the Catholic Church, look no further than a few of these following examples of occurrences over the last couple weeks:
 

• On October 14, in the pages of the New York Times, reporter Paul Vitello exposed the sad extent of child sexual abuse in Brooklyn’s Orthodox Jewish community. According to the article, there were forty cases of such abuse in this tiny community last year alone. Yet the Times did not demand what it has called for incessantly when addressing the same kind of abuse by a tiny minority of priests: release of names of abusers, rollback of statute of limitations, external investigations, release of all records, and total transparency. Instead, an attorney is quoted urging law enforcement officials to recognize “religious sensitivities,” and no criticism was offered of the DA’s office for allowing Orthodox rabbis to settle these cases “internally.” Given the Catholic Church’s own recent horrible experience, I am hardly in any position to criticize our Orthodox Jewish neighbors, and have no wish to do so . . . but I can criticize this kind of “selective outrage.”

Of course, this selective outrage probably should not surprise us at all, as we have seen many other examples of the phenomenon in recent years when it comes to the issue of sexual abuse. To cite but two: In 2004, Professor Carol Shakeshaft documented the wide-spread problem of sexual abuse of minors in our nation’s public schools (the study can be found here). In 2007, the Associated Press issued a series of investigative reports that also showed the numerous examples of sexual abuse by educators against public school students. Both the Shakeshaft study and the AP reports were essentially ignored, as papers such as the New York Times only seem to have priests in their crosshairs.  

• On October 16, Laurie Goodstein of the Times offered a front page, above-the-fold story on the sad episode of a Franciscan priest who had fathered a child. Even taking into account that the relationship with the mother was consensual and between two adults, and that the Franciscans have attempted to deal justly with the errant priest’s responsibilities to his son, this action is still sinful, scandalous, and indefensible. However, one still has to wonder why a quarter-century old story of a sin by a priest is now suddenly more pressing and newsworthy than the war in Afghanistan, health care, and starvation–genocide in Sudan. No other cleric from religions other than Catholic ever seems to merit such attention.

• Five days later, October 21, the Times gave its major headline to the decision by the Vatican to welcome Anglicans who had requested union with Rome. Fair enough. Unfair, though, was the article’s observation that the Holy See lured and bid for the Anglicans. Of course, the reality is simply that for years thousands of Anglicans have been asking Rome to be accepted into the Catholic Church with a special sensitivity for their own tradition. As Cardinal Walter Kasper, the Vatican’s chief ecumenist, observed, “We are not fishing in the Anglican pond.” Not enough for the Times; for them, this was another case of the conniving Vatican luring and bidding unsuspecting, good people, greedily capitalizing on the current internal tensions in Anglicanism.

• Finally, the most combustible example of all came Sunday with an intemperate and scurrilous piece by Maureen Dowd on the opinion pages of the Times. In a diatribe that rightly never would have passed muster with the editors had it so criticized an Islamic, Jewish, or African-American religious issue, she digs deep into the nativist handbook to use every anti-Catholic caricature possible, from the Inquisition to the Holocaust, condoms, obsession with sex, pedophile priests, and oppression of women, all the while slashing Pope Benedict XVI for his shoes, his forced conscription — along with every other German teenage boy — into the German army, his outreach to former Catholics, and his recent welcome to Anglicans.

True enough, the matter that triggered her spasm — the current visitation of women religious by Vatican representatives — is well-worth discussing, and hardly exempt from legitimate questioning. But her prejudice, while maybe appropriate for the Know-Nothing newspaper of the 1850’s, the Menace, has no place in a major publication today.

I do not mean to suggest that anti-catholicism is confined to the pages New York Times. Unfortunately, abundant examples can be found in many different venues. I will not even begin to try and list the many cases of anti-catholicism in the so-called entertainment media, as they are so prevalent they sometimes seem almost routine and obligatory. Elsewhere, last week, Representative Patrick Kennedy made some incredibly inaccurate and uncalled-for remarks concerning the Catholic bishops, as mentioned in this blog on Monday.   Also, the New York State Legislature has levied a special payroll tax to help the Metropolitan Transportation Authority fund its deficit. This legislation calls for the public schools to be reimbursed the cost of the tax; Catholic schools, and other private schools, will not receive the reimbursement, costing each of the schools thousands – in some cases tens of thousands – of dollars, money that the parents and schools can hardly afford. (Nor can the archdiocese, which already underwrites the schools by $30 million annually.) Is it not an issue of basic fairness for ALL school-children and their parents to be treated equally? 
 
The Catholic Church is not above criticism. We Catholics do a fair amount of it ourselves. We welcome and expect it. All we ask is that such critique be fair, rational, and accurate, what we would expect for anybody. The suspicion and bias against the Church is a national pastime that should be “rained out” for good.
 
I guess my own background in American history should caution me not to hold my breath.

Then again, yesterday was the Feast of Saint Jude, the patron saint of impossible causes.

Shouldn’t there be more than this?

I was a catechist for today’s mass, this time for the children, but neither showed up today for various reasons. So I sat in the adult session. It went well, the other catechist handled the session well for both the readings and the Feast of All Saints.

Towards the end the RCIA director came in to see how things were going. She said I haven’t seen you guys in a few weeks. My jaw just about dropped! All this time I thought the Breaking Open the Word sessions were supplementary to the “main” RCIA classes. Not so. I’m just flabbergasted. Shouldn’t RCIA be more than just breaking open the word?

I talked with the other catechist about this some. She already knew this and she has been struggling with it. She and I are on the same page it seems. Please join us in prayer to find a way to provide the best catechesis we can for our candidates and catechumens. I need to think over this revelation for a while.

Catechesis on the Priesthood – Part 2

Well, I have my second Breaking Open the Word session under my belt. I prepared three pages for discussion and it didn’t seem like enough at first, but in the end it turned out to be just right.

Like I said in my last post, a lot of the content came directly from the catechist guidelines, but I enhanced the discussion for the first reading from Jeremiah 31:7-9, explaining why the Jewish people were in exile, and this turned out to be helpful for the catechumens and candidates. This reading focused on the prophecy of future joy of returning from exile, but what is the background of the exile? Once again the nation of Israel had been conquered by another nation, and the people had been scattered. God will go to the ends of the earth to bring his people home.

In the Letter to the Hebrews, Aaron and Melchizedek were mentioned. Again, they needed some background on who these priests were. Not that I am a Biblical scholar by any stretch, but our candidates and catechumens are coming to us with a clean slate so to speak as far as faith and religious/Christian history goes. Everything is new to them!

And finally, we discussed the three tiers of the priestly ministry, bishop, priest and deacon. They did have quite a few questions here. I brought up apostolic succession without having prepared for it and I basically fumbled through that, trying to find the right words even though I understand it for myself. But in the end they had some sense of the differences between the three layers of holy orders. One asked how many bishops are there, and while I couldn’t give her an exact count, I explained that we are in the archdiocese of Detroit with an archbishop and several auxiliary bishops, and then there are the near by dioceses of Lansing and Saginaw and Grand Rapids, and that’s just part of the state of Michigan. They also asked how does one go about becoming a priest. I gave a little explanation about the calling, and then attending seminary.

The guidelines say to prepare for an hour and a half, but based on the timing of the youth catechist joining us the last two times, just over an hour of material is more in line with what is happening in the sessions that I have been participating in. It’s probably better for the participants anyway, to get smaller bites of information. I am on the schedule for next Sunday, which is All Saints. I have a lot of information about saints so preparing should be easier, but I have the kids next week, an 11 year old and a 14 year old, so I will have to modify what I do to fit discussion for kids.

Catechesis on the Priesthood

This Sunday I will be leading the Breaking Open the Word again for our RCIA participants. The guideline that I have says to focus the discussion on the priesthood, both the ministerial priesthood and the common priesthood. This entails a lot of prep work, for me at least.

So I have read through the Letter to the Hebrews, in which Paul discusses the priesthood of the old covenant and the priesthood of the new covenant.

I did an internet search on the priesthood and I found a number of conference talks by Fr. John Hardon here.  There are 29 talks on the priesthood by Fr. Hardon collected on this site. Fr. Hardon suggests reading the Letter to the Hebrews and a document by Pope Pius XII, “Mediator Dei“, on the sacred liturgy. This I have not read yet, and probably won’t before my RCIA session tomorrow.

I am polishing up my outline for tomorrow, most of it is based directly on the guideline that the director had given me. (Sorry I don’t know the source for it.) The essence of the outline is the difference between the priesthood of the old and new testaments, some discussion on the ministerial and common priesthoods, and the three tiers of the sacrament of holy orders.

Sweet and Profound – God and Dog

Through the never ending sharing of information on the internet, here is a beautiful little video about the love we receive from God and from dogs. How will we ever learn to love that completely?

Call to Holiness Conference – Detroit

I went to the Detroit area Call to Holiness Conference at the National Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak last Saturday. They had a great lineup of speakers who gave awesome talks on the Treasures of the Mass while in the setting of a beautiful Art Deco church.

The first speaker of the day was Michael P Foley, Ph.D., speaking on How the Mass Shaped the Western World. It was a very interesting talk explaining how, among other things, the layout of the court room has many parallels to the layout of a church, such as the jury box is likened to the choir stalls. He had his book, Why Do Catholics Eat Fish on Friday?, for sale in the vendor area. It is now in my library.

Next up was Father Eduard Perrone, pastor of Assumption Grotto Church in Detroit. His talk was The Treasures of the Mass Explored. Father started his day with some technical difficulties. The laptop that contained his presentation for his talk crashed that morning so he and his assistant had to scurry to put a new slide show together. Father apologized for the crudeness of the second effort. The first must have been truly dazzling because the one we saw was very good. This talk walked us through the Mass explaining the vestments and ritual gestures and the ceremony and prayers. He also explained the translation updates that are coming soon for the English Mass.

Then we had lunch. The Shrine docent was giving tours during the lunch break. He gave us an overview of the Shrine’s interesting history. The parish was established on the heels of St. Therese’s canonization. The first pastor, Fr. Charles Coughlin, started a radio program to help pay for the Shrine. They even had troubles with the KKK (which isn’t in the on-line history). That is why the Shrine has the huge tower with the Crucifix, so that no one could ever burn it down again.

After lunch the auxiliary bishop of Karaganda, Kazakhstan, Bishop Athanasius Schneider, spoke on The Sacredness of the Holy Eucharist and the Fathers of the Church. The bishop is calling for an end to receiving communion in the hand. While it is claimed that the early Church also received communion in the hand, Bishop Schneider said those same hands that received the Eucharist also needed to be purified. The Eucharist is sacred and we must treat it as such.

Following the bishop was Fr. John Zuhlsdorf, aka the blogging Fr. Z. His address was Mystery Both Fearsome and Alluring: Holy Mass and True Active Participation. Active participation does not mean having everyone run around the church during Mass with some little job. Active participation means being prayerfully in tune with the Mass.

The final speaker was Ronald Prowse, Ph.D. He spoke on sacred music. His talk was cut short due to overruns earlier and the need for Mass to start at 4:30. Dr. Prowse discussed the evolution of chant and showed us how to read and sing sacred music.

The conference ended with Mass, the main celebrant being Bishop Schneider.

Pictures of the conference can be seen here.

RCIA Catechist

I signed up to be an RCIA catechist last year at my parish, but we didn’t have any catechumens. And so the year passed. In the summer the director had a few of us attend some RCIA formation classes down at the seminary. They were very informative even though they were intended for experienced catechists.

This season we have four catechumens and three candidates seeking entry in to the Catholic Church. Two weeks ago we catechists met with the director for our introductory meeting to get a little biography on each of our seekers, and today I had my first Breaking Open the Word session.

I had been going over this Sunday’s readings and the catechist guidelines for handling a session most of the week, but I wasn’t really sure what I needed to prepare if anything. I put together a number of 3×5 cards to keep my thoughts together as the session progressed. At the last minute I decided to put together the catechumen/candidate questions on a sheet and I made copies of them at the rectory just before mass.

What amazes me is that I wasn’t as nervous as I thought I would be. I’m not sure why, but it worked out well for me. I met two of the catechumens just before mass, and then the rest at the dismissal after the homily. We exited the church in procession and then went to a classroom in the school.

I said to the seekers, when we sat at the table, I’m new at this and hopefully I’ll not mess up too much. One of them said, it’s okay, we’re new at this too. That was a huge relief for me. None of our seekers has much in the way of previous faith formation, most have none at all.

So we proceeded to read and discuss the Wisdom readings for the 28th Sunday in Ordinary Time. As a catechist we are supposed to present the questions and just wait for the comments, so there is a lot of silence. I think I may have waited too long some of the time. But then other times you can see them trying to formulate something in their mind and so it is good to just be silent for a while. What I thought was really nice was seeing how soon into their formation that they are already thinking about life with the gift of God’s Wisdom.

By the end of the session my 3×5 cards were a mess and I couldn’t find the one I needed, so next time I’ll just do my outline on standard paper. The catechist who did the children’s session came in for the closing prayer. She asked all of the candidates and catechumens what they had learned this week. They all had a pretty quick response. So, all in all, today’s session was a good learning experience both for me and the seekers.

Hopefully for my next session, I will receive a little more of God’s Wisdom in order to do a little better job.

Adult Faith Formation – Continued

A while back I reviewed and outlined the adult faith formation pastoral plan from the USCCB (see tab above). It is a great plan, it covers every aspect of faith formation, but it involves a very dedicated parish and staff. And, well, everybody seems to be too busy with other things, at least in my neck of the woods.

But, on a happy note, we can do our own Faith Formation! It’ll take time and effort, but we would need to do that anyways if our church had an adult faith formation program. And no matter how good the church’s program is the bottom line still goes back to how much we put into learning our faith. Faith is a relationship with God, and just like any earthly relationship we have to work at it. And the earthly relationships don’t just happen overnight either. We need to spend time with God, and we do that with prayer and reading Scripture.

I read my monthly Magnificat magazine. To me, that is where I spend my time with God. It is scripture and prayer and some meditations and insights that help me to comprehend the day’s scripture. The Magnificat is a little expensive, but I really like it. Basically what I am saying is we need to find a way (a tool, of sorts) to spend time with God each and every day. Listen to Him in the Word. As our relationship with God grows so does our faith formation. God will direct us if we are open to His direction, to His Will. So start slow, pray and spend a little time with Scripture each day. Gradually increase that time with God to at least an hour a day. It may seem like a lot, but the reward is great.

This coming Sunday’s readings are from the Book of Wisdom, the Letter to the Hebrews and the Gospel according to Mark. The focus is the gift of Wisdom. Spending time with the Word of God allows us to see what is really important in life, it shows us the way. Pray that God gives us His gift of Wisdom. It is the key to our personal faith formation.

What is a sacrament?

What is a sacrament? What isn’t a sacrament in the Catholic Church?

There are seven sacraments in the Church, baptism, confirmation, the Eucharist, penance or reconciliation, extreme unction or the anointing of the sick, holy orders, and matrimony. The sacraments are aids to our salvation; they are necessary for our salvation; they point us to what is sacred. They are earthly signs that Christ has given us that allow us to receive His grace. While the sacraments have to be administered properly and be well intended, the grace they bestow on us is purely reliant on the power of Christ.

For example, we must be in a state of grace in order to properly receive Holy Communion on Sunday. If we didn’t go to Mass the Sunday prior, just because we were busy with other things, then we are not in a state of grace the following week. We disobeyed the third commandment, keep holy the Sabbath. How do we get ourselves back to that state of grace in order to receive the Eucharist then? We must go to Confession and confess our sins (guide for examination of conscience), explicitly stating that we didn’t go to Mass. The priest, in persona Christi, will then absolve us of our sins and we are back in a state of grace.

I have seen the question posted, is the Shroud of Turin a sacrament? No. The Shroud is a relic, an artifact. There are many people that believe it is the burial shroud of Jesus Christ, the clean linen cloth provided by Joseph of Arimathea (Matthew 27:59-60), but the Catholic Church cannot and will not make an official ruling on the Shroud’s authenticity. It is leaving that determination to science, and there is some very convincing science that says it is indeed the Shroud of Jesus Christ. It may help some individuals strengthen their faith, which is a very good thing, but it is not a sacrament, it is not an aid to salvation.