Community Events

Weekly Bulletin

Four parts for the week of 11 May, 2008: part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4

Homily

11 May 2008

Pentecost

What a day! The day to celebrate both Mothers’ Day and the birthday of the Church, Pentecost. A day which we have more than sufficient reason to say “Thank God”. You and I likely say that many times, but what do we really thank God for? Today, what do you “Thank God” for? As we look at the world around us, our lives, our many gifts, and the list goes on, but on this day two items each of us can and likely thank God for are our mothers and for the Church. Our mothers gave us our birth and the Holy Spirit gave us the birth of the Church. Our mom’s waited nine months before she delivered us into this world but she likely would have been more than willing to wait only 50 days like the Holy Spirit did, that is, the 50 days after Jesus rose from the dead. Our birth generated a dramatic paradigm shift, a real change in her life and the life of the whole family, and the birth of the Church made a dramatic paradigm shift in the life of all the Apostles as well the people in their time and in all people ever since.

News

Pope Benedict XVI Asserts Authority Over His "Flock"

Fr. Francis Baiocchi, MJS

“Before a crowd of nearly 60,000 people at Yankee Stadium, Pope Benedict XVI last Sunday ended his first visit to the United States as leader of the Roman Catholic Church with a reminder to the flock that obedience to the authority of the church is the foundation of their religious faith” (italics added, quoted in the Sunday MJS April 21, 2008).

Speaking Truth To Power

Anthony P. Kowalski, Corpus Reports

My Kowalski grandparents came from the Poznan area in Western Poland, a region controlled throughout the entire 19th century by Prussia. Grandfather Jan Kowalski fulfilled his prescribed military service in the Prussian army, and then at age 25 in 1890 departed for America; Grandmother Antonina Kubis joined him two years later. Their sons would serve as American doughboys in World War I, fighting against the same Prussian army. One son, Francis, was killed; another son, John, was wounded.

Meditations

Strangers In Our Own House

adapted from WEORC

Have you heard the tale of the two frogs? One fell into a pot of boiling water and in a nanosecond jumped right out again. The other fell into a pot of lukewarm water and finding it quite comfortable, fell asleep and eventually boiled to death. Something similar seems to have happened to us Catholics in these years since Vatican II. It’s how we’ve become strangers in our own house.

Catholicism & The New Atheism

Richard Gaillardetz, E-CORPUS

One of the less noted contributions of the Second Vatican Council is its brief treatment of atheism in its “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World.” In that groundbreaking document, the council avoided the shrill condemnations of atheism that were so common in preconciliar texts. Instead, the council acknowledged the diverse motives for modern atheism, from the overreaching claims of the positive sciences to modern atheism’s legitimate rejection of “a faulty notion of God” (No. 19). The bishops invited Christians to go beyond condemnation and “seek out the secret motives that lead the atheistic mind to deny God” (No. 20). By way of contrast, the so-called “new atheists”—figures like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris—engage in an aggressive and decidedly nondialogical attack on religion. They insist that religion is fundamentally toxic to human society and must be directly challenged and eradicated where possible. Consider the second part of the title of Hitchens’s volume, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.