God willing, after all this, we will think no longer in terms of ‘them’ and ‘those’, but only ‘us’” (No. 35).
For this reason, I have wished to devote the Message for this year’s World Day of Migrants and Refugees to the theme, Towards An Ever Wider “We”.
Catechetical ministry is more than prepping students for the “Regents Review” of concepts they learned. It means prepping people to think and act like Christ.
Pope Francis calls us to “build a better kind of politics”. The USCCB suggest almost a “12 step program” for building community as envisaged when we truly commit to what we pray for in the “Our Father”.
In Mark’s there are many ordinary we tend to skip over. But they are there for a reason. Mark subtly proposes them as signs of encouragement to the ordinary Christians under attack in Rome.
Mark, as any good pastor would, uses Jesus stories circulating in oral tradition to help a community understand how the gospel is “good news” … even in the face of catastrophe and persecution.
Nuns built America’s largest private school system , created America’s nonprofit hospital systems building over 800 hospitals, were some of America’s first feminists, are not strangers to dangerous situations.
Contrary to some common assumptions, Jesus is not the ultimate Answer Man, but more like the Great Questioner. We know that Jesus asked over 300 questions. He is asked 183. He only answers 3.
G.K. Chesterton wrote “original sin is a fact, an observable fact one can “see in the street.”
Are we friends with the Jesus who comes to us today in so many different bodies?
How many of them so we know and include among our friends?
Can we recognize our own blindness to the “hard sayings” that challenge us today?
There are all kinds of orthodoxy tests. We might even pass an orthodoxy oral exam. But how many can claim to actually lead lives reflecting this belief in crisis situations.
The Jesus Movement is rooted in Jesus’ experience of the love of God urging the neglected to become aware of their dignity! The Vincentian Embodiment of that movement is rooted in doing what Jesus did.
Not everyone has caught up to this yet… Pope Francis (and some national hierarchies) changed the phrase “lead us not into temptation” to “do not let us fall into temptation The reaction is somewhat predictable.
Being “wole’ means different things for different for people on th eleft and the right. For Catholics being “woke ” can mean being awake to the implications of living in the Kingdom even here and now.