Heeding the call to evangelize issued by our priest on Easter Sunday has proved to be invigorating and frustrating. Many people are definitely looking for help. Many of them have simply forgotten that Jesus is waiting for them with open arms. They have become so lost and misguided that they have even forgot how to pray. So I would suggest that you simply offer to pray with and for someone if you are at a loss for how to begin to evangelize for the Church. The frustrating part comes from folks who want to personalize the Church. By that I mean they want the Church to reflect their personal views on everything. I recently read a terrific op-ed piece by Samuel Gregg on this very topic. His broader topic was on the effective work of Pope Benedict but here is part of what he had to say about folks who long to have the Church become more like them. "A similar method is at work in Benedict’s approach to internal Church issues. Take, for instance, Benedict’s recent polite but pointed critique of a group of 300 Austrian priests who issued a call for disobedience concerning the now drearily-familiar shopping-list of subjects that irk dissenting Catholics. Simply by posing questions, the pope demonstrated the obvious. Do they, he asked, seek authentic renewal? Or do we 'merely sense a desperate push to do something to change the Church in accordance with one’s own preferences and ideas?' Beyond the specifics of the Austrian case, Benedict was making a point that all Catholics, not simply dissenters, sometimes forget. The Church is not in fact 'ours.' Rather, it is Christ’s Church. It is not therefore just another human institution to be changed according to human whim. That in turn reminds us that Christianity is not actually about me, myself, and I. Rather, it is centered on Christ and our need to grow closer to Him. Certainly the Church always needs reform – but reform in the direction of holiness, not mere accommodation to secularism’s bar-lowering expectations." Amen brother.
The spiritual climax of the Gospel of John, as Father John Waiss points out, occurs at the foot of the Cross, where Jesus utters his parting words: “Woman, behold, your son!” and “Behold your mother!” (John 19:26-27). While these words were addressed to the Apostle John, the disciple whom Jesus loved, the Church has long understood this moment as a universal adoption. To truly image Christ, we must share in His parentage; if we embrace God as our spiritual Father but reject Mary as our mother, we treat Christ as a half-brother rather than our "firstborn among many brethren" (Rom. 8:29). As Origen noted as early as the third century, the profound depths of the Gospel are only accessible to those who, like John, rest their heads on Jesus’ breast and receive Mary into their own homes. This maternal role is deeply rooted in biblical typology, positioning Mary as the fulfillment of the great mothers of the Old Covenant. She is the New Eve , the mother of all the living according ...
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