There are not over a 100 people in the U.S. that hate the Catholic Church, there are millions however, who hate what they wrongly believe to be the Catholic Church, which is, of course, quite a different thing.- Archbishop Fulton Sheen

Friday, December 31, 2010

It's our book... we should probably read it at some point.

The beginning of this story is I've been listening to EWTN radio... and pretty much nothing else. So, of course I learned about Marcus Grodi and the work he is doing to "bring people home" to the Catholic Church. One of the things suggested was reading the Bible and the Catechism in a year. And that sounded like a good idea. A new year's resolution idea. They even split everything up into 365 days. And I like to share it with everyone I know... to form a support group... to discuss the passages... and to keep each other actually continuing with it.

The link for the pdf is here .

As I will probably read these at night, I will begin tonight, and think over the passages (and maybe blog about them... is blog even a verb?) tomorrow. Because it's hard to spend a day thinking on passages that you are going to read at the end of the day. Please join me!

Tuesday, December 7, 2010

If You Don't Think Our Culture is Prejudiced Against Catholics, Read This.

So my roommate put these quotes (in a sea of other more innocuous witty quotes) on our whiteboard and I was silently offended. I found a lot more offensive quotes in searching for them again.

The first one was "If I had been the Virgin Mary, I would have said "No."  ~Margaret "Stevie" Smith." First off, I didn't have any idea who this person is... she is a British poet who has sunk into historical obscurity. This really is an arrogant position... it is not her decision to make. Jesus didn't pick you, Jesus, when He picked Mary knew of all the women that wouldn't accept Him. Jesus picked His mother and gave her gifts before she picked him. This doesn't deny her free choice, it just shows that God is not bound by time. Also, we should all imitate the servitude of Mary and the acceptance of Jesus into our lives... even if not in the same way Mary did. It is an insult to the Catholic Church (and all Christians) to say that Jesus's conception was undesirable! 

The other quote is by Annie Dillard, who I had to read in High School:
"Eskimo: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" Priest: "No, not if you did not know." Eskimo: "Then why did you tell me?""
I don't know in what context this is, but it has a disordered view of Christian evangelization. Because the priest's answer is wrong: the correct answer is "I don't know". And that bothered me enough to share. If we all can be saved and go to Heaven (perpetual connection with God) by not knowing anything about God (see where this doesn't make much sense, yet?) then we should all do our best to forget about God and sin. Which our culture is currently doing. And look where it has gotten us: Communism, abortion, euthanasia, embryonic stem cell and vaccine research... I would begin to agree with Flannery O'Connor who said In the absence of faith, we govern by tenderness, and tenderness leads to the gas chamber."

Also my entire response to this website is "The Catholic novelist in the South will see many distorted images of Christ, but he will certainly feel that a distorted image of Christ is better than no image at all. I think he will feel a good deal more kinship with backwoods prophets and shouting fundamentalists than he will with those politer elements for whom the supernatural is an embarrassment and for whom religion has become a department of sociology or culture or personality development."
— Flannery O'Connor