St. John Bosco

"In all the miracles of healing performed by Our Divine Savior, we must admire the remarkable goodness which caused Him to heal first the sickness of the soul, then that of the body. He teaches us the great lesson that we must first purify our consciences before turning to God for help in our earthly needs."

The giving to God that honor, reverence, veneration and service, which we owe Him as our Creator and our last end, is called worship. It may be performed either by internal or external acts, and hence our worship may be internal or external. Yet our external worship, in order to be worthy of God, must necessarily be the outward manifestation or expression of the inward feelings of our soul; otherwise, it would be mere mummery or hypocrisy.

That we owe to God both internal and external worship, is an obvious truth. Worship consists in acts of adoration, prayer, obedience to God's will, and love for Him. Now, the duty of performing these acts flows necessarily from the relations which exist between us and God. God is our Creator and our last end.

Since He is our Creator, we are bound to acknowledge His infinite power and majesty, and His supreme dominion over us. We are therefore obliged to adore Him. We must acknowledge our entire dependence on Him; hence arises the duty of prayer, and of entire submission to His divine will. We are also bound to thank Him for all.

The human dimension of the mystery of the Redemption

Man cannot live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it.
This, as has already been said, is why Christ the Redeemer "fully reveals man to himself". If we may use the expression, this is the human dimension of the mystery of the Redemption. In this dimension man finds again the greatness, dignity and value that belong to his humanity. In the mystery of the Redemption man becomes newly "expressed" and, in a way, is newly created. He is newly created! "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus".
The man who wishes to understand himself thoroughly-and not just in accordance with immediate, partial, often superficial, and even illusory standards and measures of his being-he must with his unrest, uncertainty and even his weakness and sinfulness, with his life and death, draw near to Christ. He must, so to speak, enter into him with all his own self, he must "appropriate" and assimilate the whole of the reality of the Incarnation and Redemption in order to find himself. If this profound process takes place within him, he then bears fruit not only of adoration of God but also of deep wonder at himself.
How precious must man be in the eyes of the Creator, if he "gained so great a Redeemer", and if God "gave his only Son "in order that man "should not perish but have eternal life".

Yesterday was a good day off.
I spent the day at St. Mark's visiting with Fr. Hoisington and reading and sleeping.
In the evening I went to School of Community and then to the Anchor for beer and then to my brother's rectory.

Easter Monday

I woke up early again, but that is alright.
Thunder and rain
Bible study.
Morning Prayer.
Mass.
Fix Easter Candle.
No school today so peace and quiet prevail.

CHRIST IS RISEN!!

Good Morning and Happy Easter!
I woke up at 3:59 this morning.
My eyes are tired but I am wide awake.
My alarm won't go off until 6:00, but I know I won't go back to sleep.
CHRIST IS RISEN - HE IS RISEN INDEED!

Good Friday

In the fullness of time the Second Person of the Trinity, God the Son, the eternal Word through whom all things visible and invisible were made, by the will of the Father emptied Himself of His glory and took our human nature up into an indestructible bond with His own divinity. He came to us sinners to save us from our sins and teach us who we are (cf. Gaudium et spes 22). This saving mission began with self-emptying (in Greek kenosis).

Fathom for a moment the humility of the Savior, emptying Himself of His divine splendor, submitting Himself to His humble and hidden life before His public ministry. When the time of His years and His mission was complete He gave Himself over again, emptying Himself yet again even to giving up His very life. Every moment of Jesus earthly life, every word and deed, are conditioned by humility. This is our perfect example to follow, an example so perfect that it has the power to transform us.

As Holy Week begins and the Sacred Triduum is observed, come to the sacramental observance of the sacred and saving mysteries with humble self-emptying. Make room for Christ.

Yesterday I got to see to kid goats.
Today I went to lunch with Vickie at "dos de oros.'

Buffalo Bill Cody - William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody is one of the most iconic figures of the Wild West. His Wild West show made him one of the most famous people in the country. Cody was known as a trapper, a soldier, a Medal ofHonor recipient, bullwhacker, “Fifty-Niner” in Colorado, a Pony Express rider in 1860, wagonmaster, and a stagecoach driver. But Cody also became a Catholic the day before his death.

The last couple days

I went to Topeka last Friday for the Daughters of Isabella Convention. I had a good time with the ladies from around the state. Archbishop Naumann gave the address on Saturday evening. It was a very good reminder on the need for confession. St. Joseph Church in Topeka is beautiful if you ever get a chance to visit.
When we were finished on Sunday I went to Table Rock Lake in southern Missouri. A family in my parish owns a house on the lake. It was nice to be alone for a couple of days to read and pray and jump in the very cold water.

I began reading the pope's latest book. it has a many good insights on Holy Week. It really gets down to the essence of the mission of Jesus and how we can encounter him. Good Stuff!!

on Joy

Go here for a brief article on joy by GK Chesterton

How Cohabitation Is a Sin Against Social Justice

As everyone knows, marriage is an outdated, fossilized, oppressive institution that is constantly changing under our feet, evolving into a freer and higher and better form. And if it isn’t morphing into one of its alternatives, we would be better off without it.

As everyone doesn’t know, social science can now show that the “alternatives to marriage” don’t work. A recent news story brought this home in a particularly vivid fashion for that most fashionable of alternatives to marriage: cohabitation.

In Dallas, a mother and her boyfriend were arrested after three of her children were found in a hotel room, starved and abused. The facts of the case fit in with the general pattern of knowledge about the hazards of cohabitation. This story puts a human face on the statistics.

First, we know that a cohabiting boyfriend is the person most likely to abuse a child. From British child-abuse registries, we learn that a child living with his or her mother and a live-in boyfriend is 33 times more likely to be abused than a child living with his or her biological married parents. From a study of inflicted injury deaths in Missouri, we learn that children living in households with unrelated adults were 50 times more likely to die of inflicted injuries than households with both biological parents present. In 82% of the cases, the “unrelated adult” was the mother’s cohabiting boyfriend.

So it was in this case. The boyfriend was the perpetrator. While the mother was out working, he sexually abused her daughter. And although the mother was certainly complicit in locking the kids in the bathroom, the boyfriend was the one beating them.

Speaking of her working, this boyfriend stayed “home” in the hotel room, while the woman went out to work each day. This, too, fits the statistical pattern. Cohabiting men have half the income of married men and work fewer hours.

Each one of the four children had different fathers. The boyfriend’s child, needless to say, was not locked in the bathroom with the other kids. This case illustrates the new phenomenon that demographers have identified. They call it “multiple-partner fertility.” One of the problems associated with multiple-partner fertility is the relationship of each new boyfriend to the children of the previous boyfriends. To not put too fine a point on it: He is interested in the woman, not in her children from past relationships. The children are leftovers from a previous relationship.

You may object that some of these problems are associated with poverty. And that is partly true. But the deeper truth is that channeling sexual behavior and childbearing into marriage creates wealth rather than dissipates it. Men behave differently when they marry, especially when they become married fathers.

When I give campus talks on the risks of cohabitation, I can always count on some smarty to challenge me saying that the risks are not really so great to people like himself. What he usually means (and it is almost always a “he”) is that the statistics are skewed by a large number of poor, uneducated cohabiting couples who are at higher risk for all sorts of problems anyway. Unspoken, but implied, is that he is cohabiting himself and plans not to change based on anything I say.

So, he might argue, this particular boyfriend was just a loser, while the cohabiting men of his own social circle are not. Women of higher income and education will not face such serious problems as this woman living in a hotel room with a creep. But studies that control for education and income still find that cohabitation is risky.

We have created a culture that says sex, marriage and childbearing have no necessary relationship to each other. This culture, like any culture, is made up of the decisions of all of us: the things we choose to do and not do, the justifications we offer for our actions, the things we celebrate and the things we condemn. We have an indirect impact on the culture and therefore on the people around us. Every problem of the poor is exacerbated by the failure of marriage. The “alternatives to marriage” are destroying the culture of the poor.

So I present this challenge to my young friends on campus: “You might get away with participating in social practices that become much more destructive as they trickle down into the lower classes. It is not social justice to claim for yourself the rights to behaviors that you can manage but are a disaster for the less fortunate. Do you want to be part of the solution or part of the problem?”

Jennifer Roback Morse is founder and president of the Ruth Institute,

a project of the National Organization for Marriage.

It’s online at RuthInstitute.org.