'God made the angels to show Him splendour, as He made animals for innocence and plants for their simplicity. But Man He made to serve Him wittily, in the tangle of his mind'
- St. Thomas More, A Man for All Seasons, play by Robert Bolt.
"Sometimes faith is just showing up. Sometimes mass needs to be called an 'obligation,' because if it isn't an obligation you an I aren't going. We need Holy Mother Church looking over us going 'Alright schleppy, you're going to church whether you want to or not." - Lino Rulli
When someone asks for the ministry of deliverance or exorcism the first thing we do is ask if they are going regularly to confession, attending Mass every week, saying their prayers every day. If they aren't doing what they already know they should be doing our prayers of deliverance will fall on rocky soil. It is odd how Catholics are blamed for "priest craft" and being superstitious but when someone wants deliverance prayers they want the priest to do magic.
It would be great if we Catholics had an example of someone fasting and sacrificing worldly comforts for 40 days.
It'd be even better if it was a very important person preparing to do something really big.
@A_living_stem When my 1yo daughter first requested to bless herself at the stoup, she dipped her finger in the Holy Water, immediately sucked her wet finger, then open palm slapped her own forehead, and looked at me so proud of herself.
I need you to know that one of the little girls at the parish hasn’t quite worked out the biomechanics of genuflection yet so when she sees the tabernacle she crouches down and jumps up like a frog
Ran into a Baptist today who "was a Catholic till highschool school then got saved"
He said the Catholic Church never told him what he needed to believe to go to heaven
I asked him if he used to go to Mass when he was a Catholic
He said yes
I said, "That means you would've prayed the 'I believe' every Sunday"
He said yes
Then I asked, "So why did you lie about the Catholic Church not telling you what to believe to go to heaven?"
He kept quiet
Hired a guy to fix my roof
He was the cheapest quote
Showed up in a beat up truck
Worked 3 days straight, 12 hours a day, in the blistering sun.
On the last day, I went up to give him a Gatorade.
I saw him carefully pulling a nest of baby birds out of the gutter.
Most guys would have just shoveled it into the trash.
He had built a little shelter out of scrap shingles and was gently moving the nest into a nearby tree, making sure it was secure.
“Sorry to slow the job down,” he said, wiping sweat away from his eyes
Turns out, they were a rare protected bird species
He sold the nest for $3.7 million to an exotic animal poacher with ties to the Russian mob
Then he left his beat up truck in my driveway and drove away in a brand new Maybach
Now I understand why he was the cheapest quote
That roofer? Bill Gates�� brother, Bill Roofs
"For your penance, pray 3 Hail Mary's..."
"Father, could you give me a more appropriate penance?"
"Very well. Go be crucified, die, and go to hell."
"Oh, I can't do that."
"No? Then go pray your Hail Mary's. The work has already been done."
- Confession with a French priest
My late cousin, who I adored and miss every day, once said to me: Never make fun of someone for mispronouncing a word. It means they learned it by reading.
Your regular reminder Gaudium et spes asked us to "scrutinize the signs of the times in the light of the Gospel" - Not scrutinize the Gospel in the light of the signs of the times.
Some commentators recently objected to Pope Leo’s revival of the ancient tradition of blessing lambs on the feast of St. Agnes. During the brief ceremony, the animals were gently held, blessed, and then returned to their caretakers. Yet this peaceful and symbolic moment was criticized as a form of cruelty and even as a violation of the spirit of Laudato si, on the grounds that the lambs were momentarily confined.
Such reactions illustrate a tendency in certain quarters of contemporary Catholic commentary to impose ideological lenses on practices that are at once traditional, humane, and sacramental in character. The impulse to read malice or contradiction into ordinary, even tender, gestures reflects a deeper anxiety to police symbols rather than to understand them. When every action is treated as a political statement or a moral transgression, reverence gives way to suspicion and common sense is displaced by performative outrage.
What these episodes reveal is not a newfound moral sensitivity but a loss of proportion. The Church’s rituals and symbols, especially those rooted in centuries of tradition, deserve to be interpreted with charity and theological depth, not subjected to the reflexive judgments of the culture wars.