Fortnight for Freedom

Stand Up for Religious Liberty 

BE THERE TONIGHT!!!

7:00PM

Marist High School

3790 Ashford Dunwoody Rd

Atlanta, GA 30319

Detox Week 3 Breakfast

Breakfast during week three of the detox includes oatmeal, cold water, fruit smoothie and decaffeinated green tea.

15 pounds less of me so far.

Leviticus 3:16 - "All fat belongs to the LORD."

Detox dinner, week 2

Week 2 requires me to cut out all meat. So, jasmine rice, mixed steamed veggies, and a side of green beans. Tasty, I must admit.

Strongly unified and intensely focused

The US Bishops are "strongly unified and intensely focused" on defending the Church and all Americans from the attacks against religious freedom launched by President Obama.  Rocco Palmo has an old post over at Whispers that gives the full text of the statement released.

Are you intensely focused?  Do you recognize how truly important this discussion is?  Do you realize what is at stake here?

Dive into the . . . (drum roll, please) . . . 

Will you be part of this epic event?

This two-week event kicks off on the vigil of the memorial of two outstanding bastions of faith in the face of political oppression, St. John Fisher and St. Thomas Moore, and ends on Independence Day.

If you're in the ATL, you can kick off the fortnight on Friday, June 22 @ 7:00PM at Marist Catholic School, 3790 Ashford Dunwoody Road, Atlanta, GA 30319.

Let's fill the stadium and show the president how serious we are about these issues.

Speakers to include Archbishop Wilton Daniel Gregory, Alan Hunt, Congressman Tom Price, and more.  This will be a family-friendly, non-partisan, ecumenical gathering.  

Check out www.usccb.org to find out what your diocese is doing.

If nothing is started at your parish . . . get on it!

Ideas:

• 12 things everyone should know about HHS mandate
• Presentation on St. John Fisher and St. Thomas Moore
• Theology of the Body presentation on the truth of contraception, abortifacients, and sterilization
• Holy Hour for Freedom, Patriotic Rosary
• Daily reflections for the entirety of the Fortnight

Elijah and the Ba'als

Oh, the joys of today's first reading!

Elijah puts the prophets of the Ba'als (read: pagan gods) to shame as he proves that their idols are insignificant figments of folklore and imagination.

After much self-mortification, dancing, and begging, their sacrifice remains a chunk of meat upon unlit timbers.  Elijah taunts them:

"Call louder, for he is a god and may be meditating,
or may have retired, or may be on a journey.
Perhaps he is asleep and must be awakened."

Then the narrator lays the smack down:

But there was not a sound;
no one answered, and no one was listening.

BOOM!  That just happened.  No one answered because no one was listening.

Elijah, full of confidence, has the pagans douse his sacrifice in water...not once, not twice, but thrice, as if to say, "Even despite your best efforts to prevent my God from showing up, he's gonna show up, in a big way."

Fire comes down upon the dripping wet sacrifice and consumes the whole thing, even lapping up the extra water that spilled over the sides.

God Almighty, Elohim, Adonai, YHWH, answered.  He answered in a big way.  He was in fact listening.  He always does.

And, as this awesome video reflection from the USCCB points out, perhaps the greatest theme from this reading is that relativism is not OK.  There is a God, and he is the only God.  Inclusivity is not the greatest of all virtues...a critical distinction must always be made between respect for diversity and syncretism.  They are not the same thing, and one is detrimental to the life of the soul.

Diversity is a properly Catholic theme ("Catholic," after all, literally means "universal").  "We, though many, are one body in Christ," St. Paul asserts in Romans 12:5.  The Church, with its one faith, one Lord, one baptism, one mission, is a body that includes peoples from every corner of the earth.  Peoples are different.  Cultures are different, but our faith unites us.  Diversity in this regard builds up and enriches each community.

Syncretism, on the other hand, is the dangerous idea that everyone's ideas are equally valid, so we can simply mash all world religions together and say "we're all serving the same God".  Not true.  While each religion is a particular culture's expression of their search for truth and meaning (and therefore should be respected for what it is), it cannot be held that each is equally as valid as another.

This was not my idea.  This was not the concoction of a whole bunch of Medieval theologians locked up in ivory towers.  This is a philosophical axiom, a first, indisputable principle--the principle of non-contradiction--which, in its simplest form would state: a thing cannot simultaneously be both right and wrong.

So when Jesus says "I am the way, the truth, and the life.  No one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6), we have to take him at his word.  He cannot be both lying and telling the truth at the same time.

C.S. Lewis classically summed up this conundrum in his book Mere Christianity:

"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. ... Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God" (Lewis, Mere Christianity, London: Collins, 1952, p54f).

Jesus is either a liar, a lunatic, or Lord.  Get to know him.  Make your choice.  Will you follow the bouncing Ba'als, the empty idols this world sets forth as the supreme values, or will you surrender to the God who listens, who cares, who sees your sacrifice and will light you on fire with the power of true love?

Your choice.

Major Happenings

Coming up on a week here with the detox.  All is fine save the daily headaches from what I assume to be my body crying out for a caffeine fix.   I WILL NOT surrender!  And if my scale can be trusted, I've lost 10 pounds over the last 6 days.

Here's a pic of (part of) last night's epic detox dinner, co-prepared by a best friend of mine from minor seminary:

Who knew chicken and asparagus could be so awesome with only olive oil, salt, and pepper?

In ATL news, we just hosted our annual Eucharistic Congress at the Georgia International Convention Center.  Yours truly was MC for the young adult event on Friday evening, hosting greats such as Bishop Luis Rafael Zarama, Fr. Leo Patalinghug ("The Cooking Priest" from public TV), Mother Mary Assumpta (a Dominican nun of Oprah fame), "Pip" Arnold from "The Voice", and Fr. Liam Cummings, an Irish missionary to Kenya with the Josephite Fathers.  

I admit that that the night went WAY TOO LATE, but it was, overall, an excellent evening.  +Zarama gave a great introduction to the evening, stressing that young adults need to grow up, owning their mature adulthood, built solidly on the foundation of the dignity that is theirs in Jesus Christ. He speaks from the heart, like a father to his kids.  We are blessed to have him here in ArchATL.  Mother Assumpta shared a few anecdotal re-tellings of scripture and brought (as her picture will testify) a great sense of joy to the evening.  Fr. Leo stole the show and drove home the message that to be a missionary, you must be holy yourself.  To be Christian is to be a missionary, proclaiming a God whose nature is love to a world so caught up in itself.  To be a good young adult, a faithful Christian, you must submit your freedom to the awesome power of God.  Pip was amazing--he covered Switchfoot's "On Fire" and stunned the crowd with his vocal clarity and expressiveness.  I personally appreciate that he rocks the bow tie.

I wasn't able to attend any of the main event on Saturday, but I did get to pop in and punch Satan in the face through the Sacrament of Reconciliation.  The lines were humongous!  About 20-30 priests were on hand to extend the powerful mercy of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ to the (my estimate) 200 people waiting for confession--and that's just the estimate for the hour that I was in the box.  Sin got a beat-down this weekend, thanks to Jesus Christ in the Holy Eucharist.

Onward we go.

A good representation of the US Bishops are gathering in the ATL right now for their spring meeting.  Religious Freedom is at the top of their priority list, as is a 10-year update on the charter for the protection of children and vulnerable individuals.  Perhaps I can sneak down there in my sharpest clerical suit and pick up on the Whispers in the Marriott . . . 

Detox

Today is the day, and now is the proper hour!  Well, tomorrow is the day, technically.

The day for what?  The day this fat priest goes on a three week intense regimen.  One of the young adults here at my parish has sung me the praises of this diet called "detox" for a while now.  It sounds a lot like the Paleo diet sworn to by many hard-core workout enthusiasts; it's heavy on the veggies, light on the meats, and quasi-friendly to fruits and legumes.

This is no quick-fix attempt at weight management.  My doctor told me about a month ago that I needed to cut my calorie intake in half and double my physical output.  As a busy priest at 29, I want to still be able to be a busy priest at 92!

I've hemmed and hawed long enough.  It will be hard.  It will be awkward (anyone ever notice how awkward a word "awkward" is?  I always have to look down at my fingers when I type it.  Awkward.) It's time to commit, for God's sake!

There's a huge spiritual side to this whole detox as well.  As each day for three weeks I cast out the toxins accumulated over nearly 30 years of poor eating habits passes, I'll be offering prayers and intentions for situations and people.  The hope is that this keeps me honest and faithful.  If your suffering has a purpose, you can do great things with it.  Makes me think of the Cross...

I particularly will be praying for:
*An end to abortion
*Religious freedom
*Those addicted to pornography
*Young adults discerning their vocations

I'll post updates here, maybe some pictures of the unique meals as well.  Please pray for me!

Ordination!

Mark Star and Tri Nguyen are at this moment beginning their ordination Mass at the Cathedral of Christ the King here in Atlanta!

You don't get much more "Atlanta Catholic" than that!

NB-I'm able to mobile update because I'm MCing. Have no fear.

New App

So I just got the Blogger app so that I can do mobile blogging. The reviews online were not so favorable, but I figure for my intents and purposes it should be fine.

Today is the feast of St. Justin the martyr. If you get the chance, check out his dialogue with Rusticus just prior to his execution. What a witness to Truth he gives! You can find it in the Office of Readings for today.

Christians make a pretty radical claim. We hold that truth is bigger than any one person or their feelings, it is greater than any legislative body, it is more binding than all the tribunals of the whole world combined. Truth belongs to no political party nor any institution on the face of the Earth. Truth is found as it is revealed and learned, as it is experienced.

Christians profess that Truth has a name: Jesus Christ.

"I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except trough me," Jesus boldly asserts in John 14:6.

Truth does not bow to anyone. Truth is not a matter of the most recent opinion poll or the result of a congressional vote. In fact, governments are only ever faithful to their duty of upholding the common good when they are first faithful to the fact that truth is found outside of their own desires and agendas.

This is why Catholics are so dang pesky when it comes to "the big issues" like birth control, abortion, euthanasia, gendercide, and the like. We are bound, obligated, and honored to be faithful to the truth.

Some argue that times change and moral values change, and both of these statements are true. But must one definitively conclude therefore that Truth changes? Just because a majority of society has lost its way does not mean that an essential truth has changed.

Truth is a person, and that person has put out there his definition-of-self as a pattern for all people, no matter their color, social standing, political persuasion, sexual orientation, state in life, or place on the body mass index. Jesus Christ invites you, yes YOU, into his truth.

And as an added bonus, Truth sets you free.

St. Justin, the Martyr, pray for us!