Worthy Reads This Week

As soon as the Presidential Election results rolled in Tuesday evening, the punditry floodgates opened. Now that the dust has settled, I thought it appropriate to share my favorite articles around the web regarding the direction of our country and particularly our role as Catholic citizens.

Here's the lesson from the election, folks! by Matthew Warner @ the National Catholic Register

Guess what, regardless of who won the election, today we still have millions of babies being aborted every year. We still have 50% of marriages ending in divorce. We still have a supposedly Christian culture that has separated sex from marriage from procreation. We still have many Americans who are more likely to vote based upon peer pressure, or how nice somebody is, or their own self-interest, or by what the media told them, or by what's socially easy than they are to vote based on their own moral or religious convictions (or any economic sense). We still have lonely and suffering people in our communities who need to be loved. 

Whether marriage is redefined now or later, whether our religious freedom is trampled now or in 10 years, these are not at risk because politicians are getting bolder, they are at risk because our convictions are getting colder. 

And if you're waiting for a politician to fix that, you're wasting your time. Sadly, most politicians are not leaders. And that's because politics has become less about leadership than it is about marketing.

Keep reading...

100 Things You Can Do to the Make the Country More Pro-Life (and Catholic) No Matter Who is President @ Living Differently

1. Respond with Love.
2. In particular, keep the post-election conversations charitable.
3. Have children (and read about "The Roe Effect").
4. Support cool pro-life organizations like Save the Storks.
5. Talk to people. Keep it simple. Don't try to fix everything at once.
6. Work on your prayer life and your relationship with God.
7. Watch how you talk about other people - especially people you don't like.
8. Support the disabled.
9. Recognize what is good in others (and in our country and in our culture) and thank God.
10. Cut back on expenditures to share with others.

Keep reading...

Life in the ‘Kingdom of Whatever’ by Archbishop Charles J. Chaput @ The Public Discourse

In our own day, of course, Catholics have continued to find plenty of ways to bring the faith into disrepute. The Church took too long to articulate her own theologically-grounded doctrine of religious liberty. The sexual abuse crisis has earned many priests and bishops a millstone around the neck for wounding the innocent and causing good people a crisis of faith. And ordinary lay Catholics have let themselves be colonized by the greed, sexual anarchy, and materialism of the culture around them. In too many instances, if we look at the way American Catholics actually live, we consume, relativize, and trivialize like everyone else.

To cultivate virtue, to pursue a life of self-sacrifice, to live joyfully and infused by the sacraments is not something anyone can do alone. It’s too hard. We need grace. We need companions. We need to be taught and trained. This is why God gave us the Church. Too often flawed and all too human, she is nevertheless our Mother, and always, always a gift.  

Keep reading...

Election, What Election? by Fr. Chori Jonathin Seraiah @ Catholic Online

So here we are looking to the future and seeing the likelihood that we are going to move further down the scale into socialism, and we need to realize that communism is just around the corner. We fought it for years (and mocked those who accepted it), and now we have people saying "I'm all for it if it will help us" (exactly as people said with Lenin).

What, then, is it that I have been praying for? Mercy. I have prayed, "Lord keep this nation under thy care" and "guide us in the way of justice and truth". I believe that He will answer this prayer for mercy, but that does not mean that He will answer it in the way that we desire.

If we have been putting our hopes in a politician, then we are eventually going to be disappointed. They are not Jesus Christ, so they cannot live up to His perfection. They will always fail at one time or another.

Therefore, I ask, "election, what election?" Not meaning that I do not pay attention to who is the President of America. Rather, meaning that it is not the results of an election that determine whether I have hope in the mercy of Christ.

It is not who is in the oval office that gives me confidence that God will be merciful.

For sometimes, God's mercy comes in unexpected ways. Sometimes it comes through the ministrations of wicked men. Yes, God can even use the foolishness of a man who advocates murdering innocent babies (like Herod, or President Obama) to open an avenue for mercy.  

Keep reading...

"For those whose primary allegiance is to the City of God, every foreign country is a homeland and every homeland a foreign country. America is our homeland, and, as the prophet Jeremiah says, in its welfare is our welfare. America is also - and history testifies that this is too easily forgotten - a foreign country. Like every political configuration of the earthly City of Man, America, too, is Babylon. It is, for better and worse, the place of our pilgrimage through time towards our heavenly home.
 Until our human pilgrimage reaches that destination... we cannot help but, through our tears, sing the songs of Zion in a foreign land." 
Fr. Richard John Neuhaus