Friday January 27, 2012
Good Friday 2012 is only ten weeks away.
Wait—only? Ten weeks may seem like a lot of time, but come Good Friday, many of us will be looking back at Lent and wondering where the time has gone.
We enter Lent each year with good intentions. We make our Lenten sacrifices; we plan to pray more often and to make daily Lenten readings from Scripture; we intend to work on bad habits that undermine our spiritual life. Yet after a couple of weeks, we're struggling to hold on to just one or two of our Lenten resolutions. The best laid plans of mice and men . . .
That is why it is so important to take some time before Lent begins to think our goals through thoroughly. There's no harm in starting out smaller and, as Lent progresses, adding to our Lenten discipline. We can set priorities: These are the things I intend to do every day during Lent (for example, say the Rosary or read from Scripture); these are the things I will try to do at least once per week (perhaps spend a few minutes in front of the Blessed Sacrament, or go to Mass on another day in addition to Sunday); these are the things I will do at least once (go to Confession).
Making such a plan allows us to seize the moment as opportunities present themselves. My luncheon meeting was canceled, but there's a noon Mass at the church five minutes away. I had to work late this evening, but my route home takes me past the cathedral, where they hold Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament every Tuesday night. Oh, and a priest is offering Confession during Exposition, too.
With a little forethought now, before Lent begins, we may find that, come Good Friday, this Lent was more spiritually fruitful than usual.
(The Cross in the Woods in Indian River, Michigan, is the world's largest crucifix. The bronze Corpus is 28 feet tall and weighs seven tons. Completed in August 1959, it was declared a national shrine by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops on September 15, 2006. Photo © Scott P. Richert)
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Thursday January 26, 2012
For several months in mid-2011, the biggest and most divisive story on the Catholic side of the World Wide Web involved the strange case of Fr. John Corapi, a charismatic preacher who announced on Ash Wednesday 2011 that he had been accused of sexual impropriety and drug abuse. Ordered by his superiors in the Society of Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity (SOLT) to remain silent while the charges were investigated, Father Corapi complied for a few months before bringing the investigation to a halt by announcing that he intended to leave the priesthood.
But, Father Corapi promised, he would not be "silenced." Unable to continue to speak and teach as a Catholic priest, Father Corapi announced a new persona: Under the guise of the "Black Sheep Dog," he would continue to speak on many of the topics he had previously discussed, but with more of a political emphasis. He hinted broadly at plans surrounding the 2012 presidential election.
Yet here we are in 2012, and the primary season is well under way. Of the remaining four Republican candidates, two (Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum) are Catholics, and Barack Obama's administration has just launched a frontal attack on Catholic religious freedom in the United States, under the guise of advancing "healthcare reform." This would seem the perfect time for the Black Sheep Dog to charge into the fray.
But Father Corapi is nowhere in sight.
Readers have been asking for a few months if I knew of any developments in the strange case of Fr. John Corapi, and the truth is, I'm as clueless as they are. After an initial flurry of activity, updates to Father Corapi's new website, theblacksheepdog.us, became few and far between, and sometime around the first of the year (as Patrick Madrid, I believe, was the first to notice) all of the content was removed from the site. In its place, a single white page remains, with just three lines of text:
Inquiries regarding TheBlackSheepDog.US can be made to:
450 Corporate Dr. Suite 107
Kalispell, MT 59901
Father Corapi's/The Black Sheep Dog's official accounts on Twitter and on Facebook have disappeared as well. And here we are, over three weeks after Patrick noted that Father Corapi had "vanishe[d] off the radar screen," and there's still no word to be found anywhere about what has happened.
My initial thought on reading Patrick's post was that perhaps Father Corapi had finally decided to submit in obedience to the direct orders of his superiors in SOLT, and had returned to live with them in community while they completed the investigation that had been abruptly cut short. I still hope that my initial thought was true. But I'm beginning to have doubts, since it seems to me that, because of the unfortunately public nature of the Father Corapi controversy, SOLT would be bound, if for no other reason than by the dictates of charity, to release at least a brief statement acknowledging Father Corapi's return. The fact that they haven't leads me to believe that something else is going on, and it's hard to imagine that something else being something good.
Of course, time will tell (though I am surprised that it hasn't told already). Father Corapi was too prominent of a figure, and last year's scandal was too widely discussed, for him to disappear like Amelia Earhart. But whatever has happened, I'll make one prediction right now: We have seen the end of the Black Sheep Dog.
Let us hope and pray that we haven't seen the end of Fr. John Corapi as well.
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Tuesday January 24, 2012
When I first decided to sponsor the About.com Catholicism Readers' Choice Awards, I began thinking about how readers would discover Catholic blogs to nominate for Best Catholic Blog. I link out to other blogs fairly frequently, and I have a small (and much neglected) blogroll, but there hundreds, if not thousands, of worthwhile Catholic blogs on the web.
To make it easier for the readers of the About.com Catholicism GuideSite to discover Catholic blogs to read, I've created a form that blog authors can use to share their Catholic blogs. If you have a Catholic blog, please take a few minutes to fill out the form, and your blog will be listed in our blogroll, where (hint, hint) it might come to the attention of readers making nominations for the About.com Catholicism Readers' Choice Awards.
If you don't have a Catholic blog, encourage the authors of the Catholic blogs that you read to submit their blogs. And be sure to check back often to find the newest listings--your new favorite Catholic blog may be the one you discover tomorrow!
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Tuesday January 24, 2012
Most Catholics have heard the name of Saint Blaise, and probably even have had their throats blessed on or near his feast day (February 3). They might even know that we turn to Saint Blaise (sometimes spelled Blase) to protect us from ailments of the throat because he is said to have healed a boy who was choking on a fish bone.
But did you know that, according to legend (which, alas, is all we know of him), Saint Blaise was a fourth-century bishop of Sebaste, in Armenia, and that he was martyred for the Faith?
As his feast day approaches, I have chosen this Prayer to Saint Blaise as our novena of the week. (Begin praying it on January 25, to finish it on the eve of Saint Blaise's feast day.) In this prayer, we are reminded of Saint Blaise as the patron saint of those with throat troubles, but we also recall his witness to the truth of Christianity and his faithfulness in observing the precepts of the Church, and we ask him to intercede for us, so that we too may defend the Faith against those who attack it.
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