Friday, October 14, 2016

The Creator is "Father," Not Merely "Supreme Being"

Blogger: If God were "Supreme Being," He would be supreme as  a part of creation, and therefore neither Creator nor God. As Transcending Creator, He dreamed of you, as you. Because He transcends, He is totally immanent to the creation - and particularly to you.


Posted by ZENIT Staff on 13 October, 2016
Pope Francis celebrates morning Mass in the Domus Sanctae Marthae

Just as expectant parents dream of their child — how he will look and smile and what his name shall be — so the Father has dreamed of us, says Pope Francis. “The Father wanted you, not the mass of people, no — you, you, you. Each of us.”
The Pope said this today at Mass in the Casa Santa Marta, Vatican Radio reported. He was emphasizing that a characteristic of the Christian is that we are “chosen” and that this should give us great security.
“The Christian is blessed by the Father, who is God,” Pope Francis said in his homily, drawing from St Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians. Focusing on the “traits of this blessing,” he noted that the Christian is “chosen.” The Father chose us one by one, he loves us and gave us a name, God calls us one by one, “not as an oceanic crowd.”  The Holy Father reiterated, “we have been chosen, expected by the Father:”
“Think of a couple, when expecting a baby: ‘How will it be? And how will he or she smile? And talk? ‘But I dare say that we, each of us, has been dreamed of by the Father as a father and a mother dreams of their awaited baby. And this gives you great security. The Father wanted you, not the mass of people, no, you, you, you. Each of us. And ‘the foundation, is the basis of our relationship with God. We speak of a Father who loves us, who chose us, who gave us a name. ”
It can also be noted, the Pope continued, when a Christian “does not feel chosen by the Father.” But when they feel they belong to a community, “it is like a fan of a football club.” “The fan – Pope Francis commented – is choosing the team and belongs to the football team.”
The Christian, therefore, “is chosen, he or she is a dream from God.” And when we live like this, the Pope added, “our hearts are filled with great consolation,” we do not feel “abandoned.”
“The second part of the Christian blessing is feeling forgiven,” he said. “A man or woman who does not feel forgiven,” the Holy Father cautioned, is not fully “Christian”:
“We have all been forgiven with the price of the blood of Christ. But what have I been forgiven of? It’s a memory and a reminder of the bad things you have done — not your friend, your neighbor, you. ‘What bad things have I done in life?’ The Lord has forgiven these things. Here, I am blessed, I am a Christian. That is, the first part: I am chosen, dreamed by God, with a name that God gave me, loved by God. Second part: forgiven by God. ”

The third part, continued Pope Francis: the Christian “is a man and a woman walking towards fullness, towards an encounter with Christ who redeemed us”:
“A Christian cannot stand still. The Christian must always move forward, he must walk. The Christian who stands still is the Christian who received the talent and for fear of life, fear of losing, fear of his boss, out of fear or convenience, buried it. He is calm and spends his life going nowhere. The Christian is a man on a journey, a woman walking, who are always doing good, trying to do good and going forward.”
This, summed up the Pope, is the Christian identity: “blessed, because they are chosen because they are forgiven and forging a path.”
We, he concluded, ” are not anonymous, we are not proud”, so as not to have “need of forgiveness. “We are not still.”  “May the Lord – in his invocation – be with us through the grace of the blessing he has given us, that is the blessing of our Christian identity.”
This is a classic Robert Barron of hitting the nail on the head and shifting the hammer and nail into the right context. His title is a steal from Joseph Ratzinger at the presentation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church - when asked by the press if the CCC was a document of morality, answered: Yes! But you don't know what a man should do until you know who he is, and you don't know who he is, until you know who God is - and He tell you. Therefore, the CCC is composed of four  parts: Faith and Revelation; Sacraments; morality and --- prayer as the first act of faith. Barron transcends Fulton Sheen in communicating the most profound truth of Jesus Christ in understandable terms.


Knowing Who We Are; Knowing What We Are Supposed to Do
Posted by Bishop Robert Barron on 12 October, 2016
Curtain.
This fall I am giving presentations to all of the high school teachers, staff and administrators in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. These talks take place on an annual basis, and they are dedicated to a regular cycle of topics. This year, the theme is morality. Lucky me! My guess is that disquisitions on doctrine or Church history or pastoral practice wouldn’t raise too many hackles, but ethics is practically guaranteed to rile people up, especially now when issues of same-sex marriage, transgenderism, and assisted suicide are so present to the public consciousness.
I am not sure whether I’m delighting or disappointing my audiences, but I am not ordering my talks to address these hot-button questions. Indeed, it is my conviction that a good deal of mischief and confusion is caused precisely by characterizing Catholic morality primarily as a matrix for adjudicating such matters. A purely rational or deductive approach to controversial ethical choices is largely an exercise in missing the point. For to know how to behave as a Christian is a function of knowing, first, who we are as Christians. Understanding how to act is, if I can pun a little, a function of understanding what play we are in. The great Biblical scholar, N.T. Wright, has said that most of us are like actors who are dressed up for Hamlet, who have memorized all of the right lines from Hamlet, and who thoroughly grasp the thematics of Hamlet. The only problem is that we are in Romeo and Juliet. Therefore, what I am sharing with the good teachers of the L.A. Archdiocese is largely Christian anthropology, a fancy way of saying the articulation of what play we’re in and what role we’ve been given in that production.
Like the great Shakespeare plays, the drama of salvation history consists of five acts: Creation, the Fall, the Formation of Israel, the Coming of the Messiah, and the Church. Comprehending the dynamics of all five acts is indispensable to knowing how to behave. So let’s take things one step at a time. According to the still breathtaking poetic account in the first chapter of Genesis, all created things come forth in an orderly and harmonious manner from the hand of the Creator. Sun, moon, planets, stars, the earth itself, animals, even those things that crawl upon the earth, come into existence as a sort of stately liturgical procession. What the author is showing, first, is that none of these things—all of which at one time or another in the ancient world were the object of worship—is divine. What he is demonstrating, secondly, is that all of them find their purpose in giving praise to the Creator. It is of crucial significance that the final element in the parade—like the last figure in a liturgical procession—is the human being. We are meant to see our identity and our task:  to give praise to God on behalf of all creation. Before the Fall, Adam was the first priest.
So what is the Fall? What takes place in act two is the loss of our priestly identity. Grasping at the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, we end up worshipping our own egos rather than God, and from this misdirected praise, chaos follows. Things fall apart, both inside and outside, that is to say, in our hearts and in the natural order—and the Garden becomes a desert. Throughout the Bible, the basic problem, though it manifests itself politically, culturally, psycho-dynamically, etc., is always bad praise.
But God does not abandon his people; on the contrary, he sends a rescue operation. Beginning with the covenant with Abraham, God shapes a nation according to his own mind and heart; he teaches a particular tribe to worship him aright, to be his priestly people. His ultimate intention is to use Israel for the instruction of all the nations of the world. Mt. Zion, the locale of the Temple, the place of right worship, is meant to become a magnet to the whole of humanity: “There all the tribes go up, the tribes of the Lord” (Psalm 122:4). The entire drama of Israel is the content of act three.
But we hear, over and again, that Israel does not live up to its high calling, that it falls short of its vocation to worship the Lord alone. And so the best and the brightest among the chosen people commence to dream of a Messiah, a figure who would represent the full realization of Israel’s mission and identity. The coming of this anointed one is the central drama of act four. The still startling claim of the first Christians is that Jesus, the carpenter from Nazareth, is this long-awaited Messiah, the one in whom faithful Yahweh finally meets faithful Israel. Notice, please, how Jesus is consistently presented as a priestly figure. John the Baptist declares him to be the “Lamb of God;” at the climax of his life, he comes into the holy city of Jerusalem and cleanses the Temple, declaring, “I will destroy this place andin three days rebuild it,” referring to the Temple of his own body; and on the cross, bearing the sins of the world, he offers a final priestly sacrifice, offering right praise to his Father and bringing sinful humanity back on line with him. This is precisely why, in the light of the Resurrection, St. Paul would refer to Jesus as “the new Adam,” which is to say, the one who restores the human race to correct praise.
Now, we are ready for act five and the proper context for speaking of morality. Act five is the life and work of the Church. Grafted on to Jesus, members of his mystical body, all of the baptized are meant to do what Jesus did and be who Jesus was. We are meant, as Paul put it, to “offer our bodies as living sacrifices to the Lord.” This implies that we are to turn every aspect of ourselves—our minds, our wills, our personal affairs, our jobs, our recreation, and yes, our sexuality—into acts of worship. To make it more pointed, our bodies and their desires do not belong to us; they are not intended to serve our selfish purposes. They are designed to be turned to God’s purpose, which implies that they be placed under the aegis of love. Now we can understand why the Church is so demanding in regard to sex, why it stands so staunchly athwart divorce, contraception, same-sex marriage, masturbation, etc. It is not because the Church is against sex or against pleasure or against self-determination. It is because the Church is for turning the whole of life into an act of radical love. And its dearest hope is that the very quality of its right praise will attract the whole world to Christ. I realize that it sounds strange to put it this way, but the moral lives of the baptized are not meant finally for them; they are meant to be salt and light for the rest of humanity.
What I’m telling the Catholic high school teachers of L.A. is what I want to tell all Catholics: you won’t know how to behave until you know who you are. And you won’t know who you are until you realize what play you’re in!

Friday, October 07, 2016


I received the following email from Fr. Martin Henehan (Ireland) concerning Donald Trump's letter to  the Catholic Leadership conference in Denver:

Read Donald Trump's letter to Catholic leaders

Oct 6, 2016 (CNA/EWTN News).- 

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump wrote a letter to Catholic leaders during a two-day conference in Denver this week, identifying himself as pro-life and vowing to support core values such as religious liberty and school choice.

“I have a message for Catholics: I will be there for you. I will stand with you. I will fight for you,” he wrote Oct. 5. “I am, and will remain, pro-life. I will defend your religious liberties and the right to fully and freely practice your religion, as individuals, business owners and academic institutions.”
Trump's letter was addressed to the 18th Annual Catholic Leadership Conference, being held Oct 4-6 in Denver.
He stated that Catholics are “a rich part of our nation's history” and that “the United States was, and is, strengthened through Catholic men, women, priests and religious Sisters.”

The GOP candidate has met a mixed reaction among Catholics. His commitment to the pro-life cause has been questioned by some advocates, due to his pro-choice statements in 1999 and 2000, as well as his comments during the campaign that his sister Maryanne Trump Barry would be an ideal Supreme Court nominee, despite her striking down New Jersey’s ban on partial-birth abortions as a judge. He has also pushed for an expansion of the death penalty.
While he later said that he is committed to appointing pro-life judges, his earlier statements have left some Catholics wary of his sincerity in being pro-life.

In his letter, Trump pointed to Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s extreme pro-abortion record and support for the HHS mandate, which requires many religious non-profits to fund and facilitate abortion and related products against their religious convictions.
“Hillary Clinton supports forcing The Little Sisters of the Poor who have taken care of the elderly poor since 1839, pay [sic] for contraceptives in their health care plan (even though they have never wanted them, never used them and never will), and having the government fine them heavily if they continue to refuse to abide by this onerous mandate,” Trump wrote.
He added that Clinton “has been hostile to the core issues and policies of greatest concern to Catholics: life, religious liberty, Supreme Court nominations, affordable and quality healthcare, educational choice and home schooling.”
The GOP candidate also noted that Tim Kaine, the Democratic vice presidential candidate, has a 100 percent voting record from the National Abortion Rights Action League and supports same-sex marriage, despite professing to be Catholic.

“On issues and policies of greatest concern to Catholics, the differences between myself and Hillary Clinton are stark. I will stand with Catholics and fight for you,” he said. “Hillary Clinton has been openly hostile to these core Catholic issues for a long time, and is only going to be worse with Tim Kaine now following her lead.”
Trump’s commitment to religious freedom has been questioned, due to his proposal for an indefinite ban on allowing Muslims into the U.S. and a potential system of monitoring those already in the country.

And while the GOP candidate says he opposes same-sex marriage, he has attracted criticism from defense-of-marriage groups who note that he has bragged in the past about having affairs with other married women. 

Trump concluded his letter by saying that he “offers a much brighter future for our beloved country” than does Clinton.

The presidential candidate's letter comes amid a tumultuous election season.
“One candidate, in the view of a lot of people, is a belligerent demagogue with an impulse control problem. And the other, also in the view of a lot of people, is a criminal liar, uniquely rich in stale ideas and bad priorities,” the archbishop added.

Donald Trump's Letter


October 5, 2016 Gail Buckley, President Catholic Leadership Conference 9409 Pendennis Lane Charlotte, NC 28210

 Dear Friends: Unfortunately, my schedule precludes me from meeting and talking with you at the Catholic Leadership Conference today in Denver. First, I would like to send my warm greetings to the Denver Archbishop Samuel Aquila. In discussions with my Catholic Advisory Group, it is clear Archbishop Aqulia’s leadership in the Denver Archdiocese has been exemplary, as was the leadership of his predecessor, Archbishop Charles Chaput. Second, should I be elected President, I look forward to working with these two respected leaders of the Catholic Church in America, their brother bishops, and Congress, on issues of critical importance to the Catholic Church and Catholics. Catholics in the United States of America are a rich part of our nation’s history. The United States was, and is, strengthened through Catholic men, women, priests and religious Sisters, ministering to people, marching in the Civil Rights movement, educating millions of children in Catholic schools, creating respected health care institutions, and in their founding and helping the ongoing growth of the pro-life cause.

 I have a message for Catholics: I will be there for you. I will stand with you. I will fight for you. As First Lady, US Senator, Secretary of State, and two-time presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton has been hostile to the core issues and policies of greatest concern to Catholics: life, religious liberty, Supreme Court nominations, affordable and quality healthcare, educational choice and home schooling. For instance, Hillary Clinton supports forcing The Little Sisters of the Poor who have taken care of the elderly poor since 1839, pay for contraceptives in their health care plan (even though they have never wanted them, never used them and never will), and having the government fine them heavily if they continue to refuse to abide by this onerous mandate. That is a hostility to religious liberty you will never see in a Trump Administration. 

 Hillary Clinton’s hostility to the issues of greatest importance to Catholics is made worse by her running mate Senator Tim Kaine. Once pro-life and against partial birth abortion, Kaine now has a 100% voting record from the National Abortion Rights Action League. Kaine once was for traditional marriage, even saying "it is a uniquely valuable institution that must be preserved", but as of 2013, Kaine no longer supported traditional marriage. And on religious liberty? Shockingly, even Kaine supports forcing the Little Sisters of the Poor to pay for contraceptives in their health care plan, and to have the government fine them heavily if they refuse. On issues and policies of greatest concern to Catholics, the differences between myself and Hillary Clinton are stark. I will stand with Catholics and fight for you. Hillary Clinton has been openly hostile to these core Catholic issues for a long time, and is only going to be worse with Tim Kaine now following her lead. On life, I am, and will remain, pro-life. I will defend your religious liberties and the right to fully and freely practice your religion, as individuals, business owners and academic institutions. I will make absolutely certain religious orders like The Little Sisters of Poor are not bullied by the federal government because of their religious beliefs. I will protect and work to expand educational choice, the rights of homeschooling families, and end Common Core. I will repeal and replace Obamacare so you can have better and more affordable health care. I will keep our country and communities safe while respecting the dignity of each human being. I will help Catholic families and workers, and all families and workers, by bringing jobs back to our country where they belong. And I will appoint Justices to the Supreme Court who will strictly interpret the Constitution and not legislate from the bench, like Justice Clarence Thomas and the late and beloved great Catholic thinker and jurist, Justice Antonin Scalia. We are at a crossroads in our country. Much like 1980. But the stakes are higher now - the highest they have ever been. We have two candidates representing entirely different agendas for our country that will take it in two completely different directions for generations to come. And our direction offers a much brighter future for our beloved country. Thank you for giving me the time to share my thoughts with you on some of the critical issues facing us today. Please keep me and my family in your prayers. God bless you and may God bless the United States of America. 

Sincerely Yours,

Donald J. Trump