A Movie on the Miracle of Marriage – Fireproof

There is a new movie making the rounds in Christian Circles called  Fireproof.  It is about a young couple who experience that  their marriage is falling apart. There is anger, resentment, accusations, and disappointment. But God isn’t done with them, He’s just getting started.

The husband Caleb is a fire f ighter who often reminds his fellow fire fighters to enter a buring building in teams and NEVER  to leave their partner behind. Now he must learn the same thing in his marriage. Under the guidance of his earthly father Caleb receives wise help  in saving his marriage but until he meets his Heavenly Father his efforts fall short because his heart is not in it. At a critical point in the movie he receives from Jesus the new heart he needs.

I know some of you may think this sounds a little cheesy and sentimental but the movie does not present any of this in a simplistic or merely sentimental way. Caleb comes to the Lord only with difficultly and the breakthrough he experiences is both realistic and moving. His wife’s struggle too is powerfully and credibly depicted.

In the following scene you see a moment of conversion for Caleb. He is frustrated that his wife is not responding to all his efforts and that she rejects his love. How can he go on loving some one who doesn’t love him and offers no gratitude or love in return? With his earthly father’s help he comes to see that this is exactly what he does to God, who loves him anyway. He rejects God, is ungrateful, and undeserving, but God loves him still. It is a breakthrough for Caleb. I don’t think it will spoil the movie for you to see this scene which is a very powerful description of the unmerited Love of God for us and our need to experience this if we will ever be able to love others.

Make it a priority to see this movie. It is for everyone, married or not; struggling or secure. It’s about love, it’s about marriage, it’s about miracles and it’s about breakthroughs. You won’t be disappointed that you saw Fireproof.

Gospel in Mosaic

Here is Part Two of Archbishop Donald Wuerl’s series on CatholicTV.com. He meditates on the truths and mysteries of faith making use of the beautiful art and mosaics in the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception.

Here in part two Archbishop Wuerl focuses on the Redemption Dome at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. He uses the dome as the backdrop for his discussion on the death and resurrection of Christ, the temptation in the desert, the crucifixion, Jesus’ descent into hell and His resurrection and closes with the Lord’s Prayer.

Series on the Saints

Here is a three-part series on the Saints of the Catholic Church. It is visually quite beautiful and generally well done. It answers questions such as who is a saint. How does the Church come to recognize and declare certain men and women to be officially recognized saints? How has this process evolved over the Centuries? How are miracles of the saints distinguished and understood…etc.

Careful about part three. There are two problems in that segment.  Our gracious host makes a mistake, she says we worship the saints. We do not. We venerate them. To worship them would be a terrible sin. Worship belongs to God alone. A second problem is that one of the interviewed guests suggest that there is some merit to the notion that after the Second Coming of Jesus that hell will be emptied and everyone welcomed to heaven. Sorry there is no merit to this position. Scripture is clear to speak of hell as eternal. Wishful thinking may feel good but the truth is what really sets us free. That hell is eternal is an important way that God teaches us that there comes a time when who we have chosen to be is forever fixed. This is important to understand since the trajectory of our life is an important matter to which we must attend. Through our decisions we gradually form our basic character and over time it becomes more fixed. At some point, we know not when (probably at death) it is fixed forever.  Sow a thought, reap a deed. Sow a deed reap a habit. Sow a habit, reap a character. Sow a character reap a destiny.  Anyway enjoy the series with these cautions.

Finding God at the Sears Tower! (or) The Existence of God and the Second Law of Thermodynamics

The History Channel has been running a series called Life After People It depicts what would happen to our cities and landmarks if all humans suddenly disappeared. As you might imagine, things tend to fall apart pretty quickly. What the series depicts rather graphically is the Second Law of Thermodynamics which is:

The entropy of an isolated system not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium.

What? You might say! Well, consider a cup of hot coffee that is placed on the counter. Over time the coffee will lose its heat (this is entropy) until it returns to room temperature (equilibrium). It is not in the nature of a cup of coffee to keep its heat or to get even warmer unless acted upon but some outside factor such as man or strong sunlight etc. This is the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the cup of coffee must follow it. Stated in a broader way, the Second Law of Thermodynamics and in particular entropy means that complex things tend to fall apart and go back to their basic elements without  something outside them to maintain them. Lets illustrate this using an example you might see on the series “Life After People.”

We’re at the Sears tower in Chicago, one of  the tallest buildings in the world. The massive building is like a small city with lots of  complex systems that maintain it. It is January 1, 2010 and suddenly all humans disappear from the planet. In the first moments there is little difference to the building except an eerie quiet. Music still plays in the elevators and the escalators in the lobby  move along. At 2:30 pm a small alarm goes off in the basement indicating to the boiler mechanic that the boiler needs a minor adjustment. But the boiler mechanic is not there. Heat slowly builds in the boilers and other alarms go off. But no one is there to hear or respond. The heat reaches a critical point by 3:30 pm and two major pipes burst spewing steam and boiling water. By 4:30 pm the boiler room has flooded to the point that several electrical panels short out causing a major portion of the building to lose power. In the building above the temperature begins dropping. Outside it is a frigid January day. As the sun sets mid afternoon, the once well lit and warm building descends into darkness and increasing chill. By 5:00pm the next day portions of the building near the external walls have begun to drop below freezing. Outside the temperature is hovering in the lower teens. Overnight the water in some of the pipes near the external walls begins to freeze. By noon the next day there is some thawing and then refreezing as the night temperatures drop. After several days of this pattern, several large pipes begin to break and water begins to flow freely in the upper floors and starts to leak out some of the window casements. The freezing and thawing begins to loosen some of the windows and, several months after man the glass starts falling to the streets far below. The building is now increasingly open to the weather and more and more the building suffers deterioration.

Well you get the point: Entropy is at work. This are falling apart and returning to their basic elements. In the months and years ahead rust and other corrosion will take a toll and the building will deteriorate to the point that it will begin to collapse. Finally, in the decades ahead complete collapse will have occurred and steel and rubble will be strewn all over State Street. In the centuries to come even the steel and rubble will return to dust and be overgrown by trees and forest. Without an indwelling intelligence and energy to maintain equilibrium, the Sears tower cannot stand. It looses its complexity and returns to the dust from which it came. This is the Second Law of Thermodynamics and particularly the principle of entropy illustrated.

But don’t you see, as the Sears Tower in Chicago needs  Man, so the created universe needs  God. Without  God’s indwelling intelligence and maintenance, entropy would cause all kinds of disorder in the universe and ultimately failure. The complex systems of this world would fail and return to their basic elements without some outside force acting upon them. Even the atheists who so love to talk about evolution have to see that evolution, in a way, is the  opposite, of entropy. The evolution of simple things into complex things cannot take place without an outside energy (and intelligence) causing it. Otherwise the Second Law of Thermodynamics is violated. A cup of coffee does not heat up on its own. The Sears Tower would not suddenly or even gradually appear out the earth as a fully functioning little city without a lot of outside energy and intelligence. It does not pertain to sand and rocks to evolve  into steel and then take shape as a fully functioning building with plumbing, electricity and computers. For this to evolve takes energy and intelligence, some force from the outside to act upon it.  The Sears Tower or a hot cup of coffee cannot explain themselves. Something outside of them must explain them.  The atheists want you to think that all this order came it to existence by itself and organizes itself. Well if you can tell me how the Sears Tower could suddenly or even gradually come into existence all by itself as a fully functional building, I might start to believe the atheist and secularists arguments. But as it is I think it takes a lot more “faith” to believe the atheist arguments than simply to admit the obvious, that this world has order that resists entropy because it is designed and indwelt by God who sustains it. A cup of hot cannot explain itself or maintain itself something or someone from the outside does this. Our bodies are far more complex that even the Sears Tower. What caused entropy to reverse and for the complexity to evolve? It had to be something outside of and this world bound by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Maybe it’s God!

So here is my Argument for the Existence of God Based on the Second Law of Thermodynamics:

  1. The entropy of an isolated system not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time until it returns to equilibrium. (i.e. things tend to fall apart and return to their basic elements without someone or something to cause their evolution into more complex things or to halt their tendency to entropy)
  2. But this world does manifest substantial complexity that manifests an evolution from the simple to the complex, a kind of reverse entropy.
  3. Therefore this world must be acted upon by someone or something outside itself that orders it and pushes back entropy.
  4. This someone or something we call God.

Jesus and the Sacraments are More than a Flu Shot!

It is tragic to me as a Catholic priest that many parents bring their children to baptism but nothing else and think all the while that they have done all that they should. Almost as though Baptism was no more than a flu shot: Take it and forget it.

But let me ask you, is it enough to give birth to a child and think your work is over?  Hah!…It has just begun!  We cannot simply bring children to birth, we have to feed, cloth, teach and care for them for years. It is the same with baptism, we cannot simply think that bringing  them to new life in baptism is all that is required. These children need to be taught about God and prayer, nourished on the Eucharist, bathed in confession, strengthened in confirmation, fed every Sunday at God’s altar, brought to maturity in Christ. Real faith is  not about a half-hour ritual many years ago. It begins there but it does not end there. The work for a Catholic parent has just begun. It is a work that is costly and cannot simply be reduced to a half-hour baptismal ceremony.

And if you’re a baptized Catholic don’t tell me that just getting baptized is all it took. If you get born and never eat your life is doomed. If you get born and never grow, learn to walk and talk, never reach maturity, something is terribly wrong.  Likewise, if you get baptized and never grow, never feed on the Eucharist, never learn of Jesus Christ and begin to speak of him, something is seriously wrong. You can’t reduce your faith to a simple half-hour ceremony, as though it were simply a flu shot. Real faith costs something, it demands change and effort from us. We have to die, so that Christ can live in us. This is costly.

Many of the Protestants have a strange and quite unbiblical notion called “Once saved, always saved.” That is, once you get saved, you can never lose that salvation no matter what. Well, I don’t have time to tell you all the biblical texts that such a notion violates but really, tell me if that makes any sense at all. We all know that we can make commitments and sadly walk away from them. But here too, on display is the nation that faith costs nothing more than walking up in a service and saying the “sinners prayer” or some little ritual. No indeed, faith is more costly than that, we are called to give our life to Jesus.

We do not get our faith “on sale.” The kind of work Jesus has to do in our life is not inexpensive or minor. It cost Jesus his life, and, I’ve got news for you, it will cost you your life too. It’s not some simple ritual, not like a simple flu shot. The Catholic Theology of baptism is that we die with Christ and rise with him to new life. Did you hear that? We die. Truth be told, we all have a lot of things to die to: sin, ego, possessions, popularity, greed, resentments, hatred, sensuality and on and on. Give your heart to Jesus but realize, it’s not just some sort of inexpensive, harmless ritual. To embrace our baptism is to die to this world and all its pomp and glory, to die to our ego and all its exaggerated needs.

Watch this video, it isn’t long. The speaker is a Southern Baptist, Paul Washer. He is rebuking his fellow Baptists some of whom think God’s grace is cheap and can be reduced to a simple altar call or to a “Once saved always saved” notion. But we Catholics do it to. Some of us think all we need are a few rituals and an occasional prayer. But the sacraments are more than this, they are not mere rituals, they are meant to be transformative realities. Sacraments cost Jesus everything, and, if you are serious about them, they will cost you too, and effect a radical transformation that isn’t always easy and costs us something. Faith and the sacraments  are more than a flu shot.

Double Standards Continue as Anti-Catholicsm Remains and”Acceptable”Prejudice

The New Yorker Magazine recently published a hateful essay by playwright Paul Rudnick. I will not reproduce the venom here. However I would like to post excerpts from the Untied States Conference of Bishops Website. You can view the whole article Here: USCCB Full Article

Here are excerpts of that article followed  by a few of my own comments:

The New Yorker, the magazine of urbane Americans, proves once again that anti-Catholicism still lurks in U.S. society. This time it’s in an article by the playwright Paul Rudnick, who seems to get his kicks by bashing religion. It is bizarre that someone who uses his literary skills to decry prejudice and stereotyping of gays opts to indulge his own prejudice against another group, Catholics….Rudnick’s recent rap on Catholics comes in snide remarks about religious sisters in “Fun With Nuns,” in the July 20 issue of the New Yorker. …Apparently the editors, who even are heralding the essay on the New Yorker Web site, don’t find any problem with Rudnick’s gratuitous slam: “Nuns can be dictatorial, sexually repressed, and scary—and therefore entertaining.” Nor did they bother to edit out a remark about which nuns should be “f…able.” ….

Historian Arthur Schlesinger Sr. once noted that anti-Catholicism is  “the deepest-held bias in the history of the American people.” Anti-Catholicism also has been called the “anti-Semitism of the liberal.” It seems on the rise now….
Last week, the USA Today Faith & Reason blog was rampant with anti-Catholic comments in response to Pope Benedict XVI’s ground-breaking encyclical on the economy “Caritas in Veritate” (“Charity in truth”). Because the blog has a “Report Abuse” button…. some of the initial offensive remarks are gone. Yet more than a week later, [comments] can still be read asking if you spell pope with “one or two ‘o’s,” advising the pope to do something that’s unprintable here and ought to be unprintable in a family newspaper’s blog, remarking that “someone needs to give the pope his meds” and opining that “the pope is disgusting and sickening,” adding for good measure, “Catholic is DISGUSTING.” Even more slurs and canards to be found on the Website, including “I guess the Vatican is finally going public with its plot to control the world.”At least USA Today can be blamed only for not keeping up with its obligation to watch what bloggers post. The New Yorker, on the other hand, despite its history of fine literary criticism, intentionally runs Rudnick’s comments and even boasts of them on its Web site.


So there it is, the ugly face of bigotry. But I ask you, would anyone dare to speak this way about a Jews, Muslims, African Americans, Latinos, et. al.? Do you see the double standard?  Most of this ugly and hateful speech gets a pass in the media and entertainment world. Part of it is that we Catholics aren’t the type to take to the streets in protest.
But in an odd sort of way I want to say that I am glad to belong to a Church that is so hated by the world. It means we stand for something and are not simply going to compromise and be silent as the world chooses to go morally insane. And the world hates us for this. Did not Jesus promise hatred and persecution: If the world hates you know that it hated me before you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own, but I have called you out of the world and so the world hates you.   No pupil is greater than his teacher, If they have hated me they will hate you too. (John 15:18-20) And Jesus also warns us, “Woe to you if all people speak well of you, for it was in this way that they treated the false prophets. (Luke 6:26).  So in a way I am glad to be in good company, with Jesus. If we were a compromising, equivocating Church the world would welcome us. As it is they hate us and I suspect they are so angry because deep down inside they know we are right.

Despite my paradoxical peace in the face this hatred I DO want to finish by what I consider to be a necessary rebuke: Shame on you Paul Rudnick for speaking  of our religious sisters as you did. Shame on you for your scurrilous and hypocritical attack.  And shame on all those who wrote hate-filled things about our Holy Father and our Holy Faith at USA Today Blog. Shame on all of you and remember, God is watching.

Here is a video that gives the full context of John 15 and the Scripture quotes I listed above.



Things We Can Learn From Dogs

I grew up with dogs. Dogs, generally speaking, have a great outlook on life. This list is an oldie on the internet but, if you haven’t read it, it is really rather instructive. Dogs DO have a lot to teach us. God teaches us not only out of the Bible but in creation. In that spirit here are

Fifteen Things We can Learn from Dogs:

  • 1. Never pass up the opportunity to go for a joy ride.
  • 2. Allow the experience of fresh air and the wind in your face to be pure ecstasy.
  • 3. When loved ones come home, always run to greet them.
  • 4. Let others know when they’ve invaded your territory.
  • 5. Take naps and stretch before rising.
  • 6. Run, romp, and play daily.
  • 7. Eat with gusto and enthusiasm.
  • 8. Be loyal.
  • 9. If what you want lies buried, dig until you find it.
  • 10. When someone is having a bad day, be silent. Sit close by and nuzzle them gently.
  • 11. Thrive on attention and let people touch you.
  • 12. Avoid biting when a simple growl will do.
  • 13. When you’re happy, dance around and wag your entire body.
  • 14. No matter how often you’re scolded, don’t buy into the guilt thing and pout…. run right back and make friends
  • 15. Delight in the simple joys of a long walk.

And here is one of the most amazing videos I have ever seen. It’s about “Faith the two legged dog”:

Catholic Preaching – What do you Think?

47b6cc20b3127cce9854864ffc0300000027100abuw7rs2zswjgWhen I talk with Catholics who have left the Church, the number one reason I get that they left was poor preaching.This is especially true of those who left for the Evangelical Churches. Catholic priests as a group have the reputation of being poor preachers. I think there are several reasons for this.

  1. The expected length of a Catholic sermon is 7-10 minutes. This is far too brief a time to really develop well a biblical or doctrinal theme. It results in a  slogan based and brief exhortation. In this matter the people of God have to work with us. Most Catholics are upset if the liturgy goes more than 50 minutes. We all need to agree to take more time to be with the Lord. Longer sermons are necessary to really develop and break open most passages. Most Protestant sermons are about a half and hour. True, I don’t want a preacher to go longer unless he really has something to say but it is also true that most priests have to wrap up when they’ve barely gotten started. It’s not a good context for preaching.
  2. This leads to the second point. I think many of us priests confuse exhortation for preaching. Most of the sermons I grew up with could be summarized in two sentences:  “1. Jesus is challenging us to do better today.” And 2. “Let us try to do better and now please stand for the creed.”  This is exhortation but true preaching takes the Word of God and does four things: Analyzes, organizes, illustrates, and applies it. It doesn’t just exhort us to do better it shows how, and sets for the why and wisdom of God’s Word. This as you might guess takes a little more than 7 minutes.
  3. Good preaching is edgy. It comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable. But too many priests are afraid of offending or upsetting. Despite the fact that we serve a Lord who got killed  for what he said, too many of us are not willing to suffer even the raised eyebrows of our congregation. We have to be will to talk forthrightly about serious issues today, about sin, about injustice, about promiscuity and so forth. We have to speak the truth in love but the “Jesus loves you sermons”  are not enough. Jesus loved us enough to speak the truth to us even when we killed him for it.  We priests have to get a spine, and a heart and be willing to preach  even the difficult stuff. It has been my experience that Catholics respond well to tough sermons. They don’t want angry priests but they do want priests who are zealous for the truth.
  4. How about a little enthusiasm? If you really care about what you are saying shouldn’t it be reflected in your mannerisms and tone of voice? Too many priests have a kind of lecture like discursive approach instead of a fiery Charismatic approach. True enough there are different personalities but a fiery enthusiasm is hard to hide. But being on fire can’t be faked. It comes only from prayer and a deep love for God and His people.

Now I raise all this because this blog isn’t just supposed to be a cheer leading section. One of the purposes of this blog is to reach out to Catholics who have drifted or outright left. And I KNOW this is one of the big issues.

So alright readers I know you can add to the list  above. Perhaps your feed back will help some of us priests improve. So have at it. Be kind and constructive but speak the truth. We priests can use it. And pray, pray, pray. You get the priests and the sermons you pray for.  Also encourage Father when he does well and gently admonish him if he needs improvement.

Before you write take five minutes and listen to this sermon by Fr. Bill Casey, a great preacher, for his take on this! It’s powerful and talk about edgy! He tells us priests to stand up like men with a backbone. He also thinks that help is on the way. There is hope since the Holy Spirit has not given up on us!

By the way the goofy looking preacher with the big mouth in the picture at the top is yours truly. 🙂