The faith Christ taught us is what we see in Saint Joseph. He did not look for shortcuts, but confronted reality with open eyes and accepted personal responsibility for it. Joseph’s attitude encourages us to accept and welcome others as they are, without exception, and to show special concern for the weak, for God chooses what is weak.
Catholic
Love the Ones Who Don’t Love You
Father Maxym Lysack
“What is the Lord asking us to do? He’s asking us to love those who don’t love us at all. This is not the natural level. This is Christianity.”
“And lo, I am with you always…”
Pope John Paul II
“We know how history flows on earth, how far we can go [in understanding that history] with the help of our cognitive methods. …We know a lot. We know ever more. At times even that which we know can hinder us in perceiving that which is most important. We know too how history has flowed in our fatherland within the limits of one millennium of history, already after Christ. Already within the limits of what St. Paul called “the fullness of time” (Galatians 4:4). We know that in our century resistance and opposition against Him who “so loved the world” has risen—opposition and resistance that extends to a negation of God. To programmatic atheism. But none of this can change the fact of Christ. The fact of the Eucharist. No matter how much God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit is rejected by people. No matter if people and societies govern their lives by ignoring God, as if God did not exist. No matter how far negation and sin goes. None of this changes the basic fact: there was and there continues to be in the history of mankind—and in the history of the universe—a Man, a true Son of Man, who “loved to the end.” He loved God with a love that is worthy of God, like a Son for a Father. Love above everything, with all His heart and all His soul, with all His strength, all the way to its ultimate depletion in the agony of Golgotha. . . . That man, Jesus Christ, is a “sign of opposition.” But no matter how far that opposition towers over human heart in history, in the history of societies and world-views, His love “to the end” remains human. And that is the love of redemption. That is the love of salvation. . . .”
On Forgiveness
Fr. Cristino Bouvette
The hardest and most painful of our Lord’s teachings is his demand that we forgive. A demand that leads to freedom.
The Lord’s Descent into Hell
In a kind of political Holy Saturday as this week has been, it’s worth returning to the office of readings for the real one each year. “Today there is a great silence over the earth, a great silence, and stillness, a great silence because the King sleeps; the earth was in terror and was still, because God slept in the flesh and raised up those who were sleeping from the ages. God has died in the flesh, and the underworld has trembled.”
Between Indifferentism and Tribalism
Bishop Robert Barron
There is a happy medium the Bible wants us to find between a bland religious relativism and a dangerous religious tribalism.