Obama Declares 'There's Something About the Resurrection'

Imam Obama, who recites the Islamic Call to Prayer in perfect Arabic and has referred to it as "one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset," told 130 guests from various Christian churches that "there's something about the Resurrection" of that other messiah.

Hmm.  Wonder what that could be.  Maybe his prophet, Oprah, will explain.

Kmiec’s Gospel Falls Flat in Foggy Bottom

In this predictable outcome of Douglas Kmiec's relationship with the Obama Administration, we can sympathize with how one comes to hope that the obvious is not real and how one  yields to the vain belief that if given the chance to serve, one can make a difference.  We have been there -- different time, different administration -- but the same spirit of the age, politics and human nature.  Saint Thomas More, pray for us!

From Religion News Service

By Daniel Burke

The State Department has a “rigidly narrow” view of diplomacy that neglects religion’s role in foreign affairs, a prominent Catholic ambassador charged on Sunday as he announced his resignation.

Other foreign policy experts have another name for it: Religion Avoidance Syndrome. And the departure of Douglas Kmiec as ambassador to Malta, they say, is symptomatic of a longstanding God gap in American foreign policy.

Pope Benedict was Elected Six Years Ago Today

Six years ago today a quiet, gentlemanly scholar was elected to fill the enormous shoes of his predecessor as the 265th successor of Saint Peter, Vicar of Christ and "servant of the servants of God."  

The hate-filled characterizations of this humble and holy man have melted away as the world has come to know this brilliant and gentle teacher.  His accomplishments in only six years have been extraordinary: ending forty years of liturgical turmoil with clear teaching about the hermeneutic of continuity and his motu proprio Summorum Pontificum; his clarity about the dictatorship of moral relativism which he has called the "central problem of our faith today;" the extraordinarily close and collaborative relationship he has cultivated with the Orthodox, the ongoing and historic reconciliation with disaffected Anglicans, and through them mainstream Protestantism; his stream of powerful, clear and evangelical teachings through homilies, encyclicals and best-selling books about Jesus Christ and the meaning of our lives; his curial reforms;  the quality of his appointments to the Episcopacy; and the personal example and insistence on a Church cleansed of corruption and scandal that is ever more holy and worthy of its founder, make this unassuming man a giant historic figure and  a powerful, universal shepherd.

We pray that God will grant His Church many more years under the wise and loving service of Pope Benedict XVI.  Habemus Papam!

Homily of His Holiness Benedict XVI for Palm Sunday

Palm Sunday of The Lord's Passion 

St Peter's Square

26th World Youth Day

Sunday, 17 April 2011

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Dear young people!

It is a moving experience each year on Palm Sunday as we go up the mountain with Jesus, towards the Temple, accompanying him on his ascent. On this day, throughout the world and across the centuries, young people and people of every age acclaim him, crying out: “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!”

But what are we really doing when we join this procession as part of the throng which went up with Jesus to Jerusalem and hailed him as King of Israel? Is this anything more than a ritual, a quaint custom? Does it have anything to do with the reality of our life and our world? To answer this, we must first be clear about what Jesus himself wished to do and actually did. After Peter’s confession of faith in Caesarea Philippi, in the northernmost part of the Holy Land, Jesus set out as a pilgrim towards Jerusalem for the feast of Passover. He was journeying towards the Temple in the Holy City, towards that place which for Israel ensured in a particular way God’s closeness to his people. He was making his way towards the common feast of Passover, the memorial of Israel’s liberation from Egypt and the sign of its hope of definitive liberation. He knew that what awaited him was a new Passover and that he himself would take the place of the sacrificial lambs by offering himself on the cross. He knew that in the mysterious gifts of bread and wine he would give himself for ever to his own, and that he would open to them the door to a new path of liberation, to fellowship with the living God. He was making his way to the heights of the Cross, to the moment of self-giving love. The ultimate goal of his pilgrimage was the heights of God himself; to those heights he wanted to lift every human being.

Our procession today is meant, then, to be an image of something deeper, to reflect the fact that, together with Jesus, we are setting out on pilgrimage along the high road that leads to the living God. This is the ascent that matters. This is the journey which Jesus invites us to make. But how can we keep pace with this ascent? Isn’t it beyond our ability? Certainly, it is beyond our own possibilities. From the beginning men and women have been filled – and this is as true today as ever – with a desire to “be like God”, to attain the heights of God by their own powers. All the inventions of the human spirit are ultimately an effort to gain wings so as to rise to the heights of Being and to become independent, completely free, as God is free. Mankind has managed to accomplish so many things: we can fly! We can see, hear and speak to one another from the farthest ends of the earth. And yet the force of gravity which draws us down is powerful. With the increase of our abilities there has been an increase not only of good. Our possibilities for evil have increased and appear like menacing storms above history. Our limitations have also remained: we need but think of the disasters which have caused so much suffering for humanity in recent months.

The Fathers of the Church maintained that human beings stand at the point of intersection between two gravitational fields. First, there is the force of gravity which pulls us down – towards selfishness, falsehood and evil; the gravity which diminishes us and distances us from the heights of God. On the other hand there is the gravitational force of God’s love: the fact that we are loved by God and respond in love attracts us upwards. Man finds himself betwixt this twofold gravitational force; everything depends on our escaping the gravitational field of evil and becoming free to be attracted completely by the gravitational force of God, which makes us authentic, elevates us and grants us true freedom.

Following the Liturgy of the Word, at the beginning of the Eucharistic Prayer where the Lord comes into our midst, the Church invites us to lift up our hearts: “Sursum corda!” In the language of the Bible and the thinking of the Fathers, the heart is the centre of man, where understanding, will and feeling, body and soul, all come together. The centre where spirit becomes body and body becomes spirit, where will, feeling and understanding become one in the knowledge and love of God. This is the “heart” which must be lifted up. But to repeat: of ourselves, we are too weak to lift up our hearts to the heights of God. We cannot do it. The very pride of thinking that we are able to do it on our own drags us down and estranges us from God. God himself must draw us up, and this is what Christ began to do on the cross. He descended to the depths of our human existence in order to draw us up to himself, to the living God. He humbled himself, as today’s second reading says. Only in this way could our pride be vanquished: God’s humility is the extreme form of his love, and this humble love draws us upwards.

Psalm 24, which the Church proposes as the “song of ascent” to accompany our procession in today’s liturgy, indicates some concrete elements which are part of our ascent and without which we cannot be lifted upwards: clean hands, a pure heart, the rejection of falsehood, the quest for God’s face. The great achievements of technology are liberating and contribute to the progress of mankind only if they are joined to these attitudes – if our hands become clean and our hearts pure, if we seek truth, if we seek God and let ourselves be touched and challenged by his love. All these means of “ascent” are effective only if we humbly acknowledge that we need to be lifted up; if we abandon the pride of wanting to become God. We need God: he draws us upwards; letting ourselves be upheld by his hands – by faith, in other words – sets us aright and gives us the inner strength that raises us on high. We need the humility of a faith which seeks the face of God and trusts in the truth of his love.

The question of how man can attain the heights, becoming completely himself and completely like God, has always engaged mankind. It was passionately disputed by the Platonic philosophers of the third and fourth centuries. For them, the central issue was finding the means of purification which could free man from the heavy load weighing him down and thus enable him to ascend to the heights of his true being, to the heights of divinity. Saint Augustine, in his search for the right path, long sought guidance from those philosophies. But in the end he had to acknowledge that their answers were insufficient, their methods would not truly lead him to God. To those philosophers he said: recognize that human power and all these purifications are not enough to bring man in truth to the heights of the divine, to his own heights. And he added that he should have despaired of himself and human existence had he not found the One who accomplishes what we of ourselves cannot accomplish; the One who raises us up to the heights of God in spite of our wretchedness: Jesus Christ who from God came down to us and, in his crucified love, takes us by the hand and lifts us on high.

We are on pilgrimage with the Lord to the heights. We are striving for pure hearts and clean hands, we are seeking truth, we are seeking the face of God. Let us show the Lord that we desire to be righteous, and let us ask him: Draw us upwards! Make us pure! Grant that the words which we sang in the processional psalm may also hold true for us; grant that we may be part of the generation which seeks God, “which seeks your face, O God of Jacob” (cf. Ps 24:6).   Amen.

Christ's Continuing Passion: 50,000 Christians Imprisoned in North Korea

As Christians relive the passion and death of our Lord during this Holy Week, it is good to remember that those who walk with Christ also walk the road to Calvary, and that the sufferings of Christ continue through time for His Mystical Body, the Church.  

In addition to torture and martyrdom occurring in most Islamic countries, the FIDES news agency reported this week that more than 50,000 of North Korea's 400,000 Christians are being held in prison camps.  During these solemn, holy days, let us remember all of our Korean Christian brothers and sisters in prayer, and thank God that the enemy can never extinguish from their hearts "the burning flame of faith."

Palm Sunday of the Lord's Passion

Choir of King's College, Cambridge - 'Ride On, Ride On In Majesty!'

J. S. Bach - St. John's Passion: Chorus 'Herr, unser Herrscher'

From the Pastor - 'Christ Enters the City'

A weekly column by Father George Rutler.

This Lent has seen in play the adage – almost a law – that the amount of time required to complete a task is equal to the amount of time available. Last year, Easter was almost as early as it can ever be, and all was accomplished on time; this year Easter is almost as late as it can ever be, and there still is a bit of a rush to get ready. But every year the Lord is in charge, while He entrusts His creation to human creatures as His cooperators in making the world anew. By the Incarnation, Christ, who is the “Word made Flesh,” led mankind, as true man, to divine glory, as true God. “God did not appoint angels to be rulers of the world to come, and that world is what we are talking about. . . . As it was His purpose to bring a great many of His sons into glory, it was appropriate that God, for whom everything exists and through whom everything exists, should make perfect, through suffering, the leader who would take them to their salvation” (Hebrews 2:5, 10).

When the Saviour announced that He would go to Jerusalem to “awaken” His friend Lazarus, Thomas volunteered himself and his fellow apostles to accompany Jesus on what they thought was a suicide mission: “Let us also go, that we may die with Him” (John 11:16). When Jesus came to the outskirts of Bethany, He was met by St. Martha, who on an earlier occasion had kept to herself in the kitchen: “Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died” (John 11:21). In each instance is seen the transforming power of Christ’s love, a potency over human hearts that would come into full play in the Passion.

Today Jesus enters Manhattan as once He entered Jerusalem, and the characters in the city are the same, for cities may change but human nature does not. Whether He enters by the Royal Gates or the Brooklyn Bridge, the avenues have their cheering crowds, sullen bystanders, cynics, traitors and worshipers. The mass media may try to make sense of it, or ignore it, but the procession goes on, with its innocent children, anxious apostles and curious onlookers: “[I]f these were silent, the very stones would cry out” (Luke 19:40). There, too, with an air of condescension and irritation are the governors and judges and savants who resent this intrusion into their establishment. As Christ enters the city, He judges every personality, and this He does simply by a glance of His eye and the look on His face: His merciful presence is more wonderfully salvific and frightfully damning than any word.

Rise up, Lord, let men not be complacent:
let the nations come before you to be judged.
Put fear into them, Lord:
let them know that they are only men.
(Psalm 9:19-20) 

Father George W. Rutler is the pastor of the Church of our Saviour in New York City. His latest book, Cloud of Witnesses: Dead People I Knew When They Were Alive, is available from Crossroads Publishing.