(Photo © Scott P. Richert)

I skipped Wordless Wednesday last week, because I was too wrapped up in writing "Why Richard Dawkins Cannot Stomach the Eucharist." Therefore, I did not announce the winner of the previous week's contest.

Nancy Parode, the About.com Guide to Senior Travel, got one of the symbols found in the stained-glass window of Saint Simon the Zealot in the very first comment. Top honors, however, are split between readers Michael and Martha, who between them identified all of the symbols and offered explanations for most. You can find their answers in the comments.

There will be no contest this week but a solemn prayer on this Veterans Day for all those who have served our country.

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On November 9, 2009, Pope Benedict XVI released the Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus, which governs the creation of "personal ordinariates for Anglicans entering into full communion with the Catholic Church." The document, which was announced on October 20, is the culmination of two years of work in response to the October 2007 request of the Traditional Anglican Communion for "full, corporate, and sacramental union" with the Catholic Church. (Since the announcement, the U.K. branch of the TAC has voted to take the Holy Father up on his offer.)

If the October 20 announcement was a surprise, the contents of the Apostolic Constitution are an even greater one. Read more...

November is the Month of the Holy Souls in Purgatory. While it is our Christian duty to pray for those who have died, especially those most dear to us, the Church asks us in this month to make an even greater effort to remember the suffering souls in Purgatory. Assured of Heaven, they must still atone for their sins before they can stand before the throne of God.

And so this week, I have chosen a Prayer for Mercy on the Souls in Purgatory as our novena. This traditional prayer reminds us that not everyone who has departed this world has someone to pray for him or her. By remembering in our prayers those most forsaken, we not only help to lessen their time in Purgatory but gain powerful intercessors for ourselves once they are in Heaven.

Oh, come, all you who labor
In sorrow and in pain,
Come, eat This Bread from heaven;
Thy peace and strength regain.

In my freshman year at Michigan State University, I left the Catholic Church. This sounds much more dramatic than it would have seemed to anyone on the outside looking in. My period of wandering in the wilderness was not even 40 days and 40 nights, let alone 40 years. I left the Church for four weeks—a period so short that some surveys of religious practice would say that I was an "active Catholic" during that time.

Yet those four weeks may have been the longest of my life. I knew that I was missing something, but I did not know what it was. Read more...

"Ask, and ye shall receive." That's certainly an appropriate verse to describe your response to last week's Forum Friday post. (If you haven't read the post, please take a moment to do so.)

The discussion was very fruitful, at times heated, yet, for the most part, civil, and I'd like to thank "Fallbride1" for starting it. It will all be quite useful as I prepare my blog post on the Catholic stance toward moral and social questions in the realm of politics.

Rather than move on to a new discussion this week, however, I'd like to extend this one just a bit. Last week, I asked you to address two questions:

• While we agree [with the Church's teaching], why should Catholics try to make everyone else agree too?


• Is there a Church teaching that implies or demands that we take political action to get the general society to agree with our teachings?

Now I'd like to add a third and a fourth:

• How does/should the fact that our society increasingly rejects the moral teachings of the Church affect our political action?


• Is there a point at which individual Catholics (if not the Church Herself) should abandon the political realm and simply focus on converting a population increasingly in need of conversion?

Again, please try to confine the discussion as closely as possible to these two questions. I look forward to reading your responses in the forum.

On our Questions About Catholicism form, reader Noreen Glennon asks:

Why does the priest wash his hands before the consecration, and then go and shake everybody's hands before giving out Communion? Is this not unhygienic?

This is a question I have been asked many times, and it is likely to be asked even more frequently as concerns about swine flu grow. The question is based on two common but false assumptions: first, that the priest is washing his hands for sanitary reasons; and second, that the priest is supposed to be exchanging the Sign of Peace with the congregation. Read more...

During P.Z. Myers' extended publicity stunt last summer, many Catholics (and even quite a few non-Catholics) asked why he was so intent on desecrating a Host. If it is, as he claims, just a "frackin' cracker," then what's the big deal? How is he hurt by the Catholic belief that is something more? Don't atheists like Myers always say that one of their major problems with Christians is that they refuse to live and let live? If they don't like Christian arguments against atheism, why intentionally provoke Christians?

Many of Myers' defenders claimed that he took his action in defense of a student at the University of Central Florida, who was under fire for taking a consecrated Host from a Mass on campus. But on his blog, Myers himself stated that the student's action simply provided a convenient excuse:

I’ve been intending to do something like this for a few months now. This was actually a good opportunity for something that is already written.

And on a fellow atheist's blog, he declared:

The point of desecrating the host isn’t to make people angry—it’s to demystify and desanctify nonsense. It’s how we wake people up—by showing that their beliefs are powerless.

In other words, the Eucharist is not simply a "frackin' cracker." At the very least, Myers' own actions and stated justifications for those actions show that it is a symbol. Myers thinks that it should not be, and by his actions he hoped to destroy its symbolism, but in attempting to do so, he proved quite the opposite: It remains a powerful symbol for millions of people.

Now, in the guise of commenting on Pope Benedict's recent overtures to disaffected Anglicans, Britain's most prominent atheist, Richard Dawkins, has launched his own attack on the Eucharist. Read more...

I have remarked in the past on the seeming inability of otherwise intelligent atheists "to make basic intellectual distinctions that would help them understand what Christians believe, even if they cannot give consent to such belief." Sometimes, however, I think that I give too much credit to such atheists by assuming that they wish to understand. There are different kinds of inabilities, after all; not all can be chalked up to intellectual deficiencies.

Sometimes the inability to make intellectual distinctions consists of a lack of imagination—a particularly common problem among those who subscribe to a very limited, very modern view of reason that would have been alien not only to medieval Christians but to the greatest philosophical minds among the Greeks and Romans. And sometimes such inability is a defect of the will—a lack of desire to understand anything that might upset the apple cart of one's own beliefs (much less anything that might prevent one from scoring a rhetorical point against one's enemies).

These other inabilities seem to afflict Richard Dawkins, a man whose work in the role that genes have played in evolution proves that he is no intellectual slouch. Read more...

Each month, Pope Benedict XVI announces his special prayer intentions—particular things that he wishes all Catholics to pray for that month. (When, for instance, we pray the rosary and say the prayers at the end for the intentions of the Holy Father, these are the intentions for which we're praying.)

Pope Benedict offers two intentions every month, one general, and one for a particular Catholic missionary activity. Read more...

November 13 is the feast of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, the first American saint, who is much beloved on three continents (Europe, North America, and South America) for her dedication to the health and education of the poor (particularly Italian immigrants). Founder of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and friend of Pope Leo XIII, Mother Cabrini (as she was known) overcame her own physical weakness through the strength of her faith.

And so, as we prepare for the celebration of her feast, I have chosen a Novena to St. Frances Xavier Cabrini as our novena of the week. If you would like to complete the novena on November 12 (the eve of her feast), you should begin praying it on November 4. (You can, of course, pray the novena at any time, but it is traditional to pray a novena in preparation for a feast so that it ends on the day before the feast.)

If you have no specific intention for the novena, please consider praying it for sake of healthcare reform in the United States that will respect the life of all, from the moment of conception to natural death.