charity – Page 2

Catholic priest at the South Pole for Christmas

Father Steve Rossetti, a priest of the Diocese of Syracuse (NY) and a professor of Theology at the Catholic University of America, is spending the Christmas holiday at the South Pole.

How many people do you know who would opt for a holiday at the South Pole where on a good day it is 24 degrees? On a bad day, you could just be stuck there…. Honestly, I dot know many people who would go on this type of adventure. Father Rossetti’s at the South Pole because of friendship, first with God, then with the workers and with himself. Friendship that says I am a part of something greater than myself.

To me, Father Rossetti is giving us an example of what it means to be self-giving, a gesture of true charity which shows Christ’s concern for others. Going to the South Pole is more than a charitable work. It is a way of being, a way of standing in awe at the Divine Majesty. Why is this important to me? Because it reminds me (the act educates me) to the fact of the Incarnation as a given to human history: we are given.

The story is here.

Pope encourages sustained inter-religious dialogue

Every 5 years a bishop is to make a visit to the Eternal City first to pray at the tombs of Saints Peter and Paul and secondly to make a report to the Pope (and his curia). The church-term for such a meeting is called the “ad limina” — to the threshold of the apostles, the Church, the heartbeat of our faith. It is not a meeting of checking-in with the CEO, CFO and the COO of the company. For a bishop is not a branch manager. This is a gesture of communion between two people who are in love with Christ and His sacrament, the Church; it is a meeting of one pastor meeting the Supreme Pastor, Christ, through the ministry of the See of Peter. It is a time to verify the good being done and to get feedback about what more needs to be done for the good of the faithful. With Benedict’s age I think the 5-year meeting is now about every 7 years.

In recent weeks, Benedict has been meeting with Indonesian bishops. Part of his concluding address to the latest group has an encouragement to advocate inter-religious dialogue. As you can tell, Pope Benedict XVI is a pope of dialogue. The relevant paragraph follows:

Continue reading Pope encourages sustained inter-religious dialogue

Fraternal love and correction essential, Pope reminds

One of the themes from Oblate retreat this past weekend was humility. And from within the Gospel and Saint Benedict’s vision of humility Brother John Mark spoke about love and fraternal relations, particularly rubbing elbows in true charity with your brother and sister in community. A stone is only polished when it meets other stones.

Pope Benedict brings up the human desire to be in community with other other people: how good it is for brothers and sisters to live in unity, St Paul says. But this unity and love have one condition: “You will love your neighbor as yourself” (Romans 13:8-10). Some take this point as an easy thing to do. I assure you, it is not. This past Sunday’s Scripture readings teach this point.

In his Rule, Saint Benedict places a strong emphasis on mutual responsibility (“a reciporcal responsibility” the Pope calls it) and charity toward the other person is lived only in a personal way. Benedict XVI argues as Saint Benedict did before him, “that there is a co-responsibility in the journey of the Christian life: everyone, conscious of his own limits and defects, is called to welcome fraternal correction and to help others with this particular service [of forgiveness and healing injuries].

Continue reading Fraternal love and correction essential, Pope reminds

Charitable work and the common fund: 2 wings of the Christian witness

I always look for evidence –that is, I am looking for light on a situation that may not be very clear for me– i.e., for the reality, the truth and beauty of a vigorous Catholic life by seeing if people are willing to live the Gospel. We do our best given the graces we’ve received and our own open hearts. I find myself in need to know that others belief that that the promises (and extraordinary claims) of Christ are true and are lived. Novel, right? Not really. We Catholics have been concerned for the welfare of others since the time Jesus and because our Christianity has its roots in Judaism, even before Jesus. Just read the Old Testament and dig into the narrative there. But it is Jesus gives a new lens by which to see life and to live differently today by the fact of the Paschal Mystery (His life, death, resurrection and ascension).

When one follows the lay ecclesial movement of Communion and Liberation (CL) you quickly find out that you belong to a group of friends larger than oneself and that we aim to care for the needs (the faith, education, culture, social assistance) of others. The idea is rooted in what we read int he Acts of the Apostles and various letters of Saint Paul. Our doing good is not just another forum of activism. It is based on the Savior’s life and example.

Here are two points made by Father Julián Carrón, President of the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation and the successor of Father Luigi Giussani, to flesh out these two wings of our companionship –either as Catholics who live their life only in the parish, and for those who belong to a group like CL.

Continue reading Charitable work and the common fund: 2 wings of the Christian witness

Boston’s Charity’s Appeal

I love this picture. Don’t you?

Charity is the only good reason to do anything

The Cistercian
monk, philosopher and theologian Isaac of Stella (1100-1169) was featured in
the Office of Readings today: Charity is the reason why anything should be done
or left undone.

Charity is the only good reason to do anything, but it also
sometimes demands that we not do something we might think we want to do. There
are a lot of fine distinctions one has to make in this area to live spiritually
in common life and ministry. For example:

We are called to support one another,
but not to enable maladaptive behaviors, debilitating addictions, and sins. We
must bear with the burdens of others, and be willing to wash feet, but we
should not take responsibility for the feelings of others.
We must seek ways to
invite both individuals and institutions to benefit from our strengths, and
invite them into the success that derives from them, but–again–we should be
careful not to take interior or exterior responsibility for situations that the
Holy Spirit has not, or not yet, seen fit to put in our care.
Sometimes the
greatest charity–and often the most painful–is not giving someone what he
thinks he wants.
We must be good to ourselves, practicing good self-care, but
that doesn’t mean taking it easy and just ‘being nice’ to ourselves. On the one
hand, we must not be so hard on ourselves that our whole spiritual life becomes
a rehearsal of faults and sins, for this is one of the devil’s tricks in making
us fail to notice God, and on the other we must also be careful not be overly
forgiving of ourselves so as to effectively give up struggling with certain
selfishnesses and sins.
We must practice the sort of self-charity that
nourishes our gifts and virtues, and is ruthless in the unwillingness to put up
with sin.

Thanks to my friend Friar Charles for providing grist for the mill.

Trappist monks donate coffin to bury little Christina Green in Arizona

A beautiful of gesture of charity and hope was given to us as a witness of gospel virtue by the monks of a Trappist monastery in Iowa this week when they gave the Green family the casket in which to bury 9 year old Christina, a victim of the shootings last week. The CNN story is here.

Special thanks to Dom Brendan and the monks of New Melleray Abbey!

Saint Catherine of Genoa: a life of humility, constant prayer & mystical union, charitable service

“Since I began to love, love has never forsaken me. It has ever grown to its own fullness within my innermost heart.”

Our catechesis today deals with Saint Catherine of Genoa, a fifteenth-century saint best known for her vision of purgatory. Married at an early age, some ten years later Catherine had a powerful experience of conversion; Jesus, carrying his cross, appeared to her, revealing both her own sinfulness and God’s immense love. A woman of great humility, she combined constant prayer and mystical union with a life of charitable service to those in need, above all in her work as the director of the largest hospital in Genoa. Catherine’s writings on purgatory contain no specific revelations, but convey her understanding of purgatory as an interior fire purifying the soul in preparation for full communion with God. Conscious of God’s infinite love and justice, the soul is pained by its inadequate response, even as the divine love purifies it from the remnants of sin. To describe this purifying power of God’s love, Catherine uses the image of a golden chain which draws the soul to abandon itself to the divine will. By her life and teaching, Saint Catherine of Genoa reminds us of the importance of prayer for the faithful departed, and invites us to devote ourselves more fully to prayer and to works of practical charity.

Pope Benedict XVI
summary of Wednesday Catechesis on Saint Catherine of Genoa
Vatican City State, 12 January 2011

The essence and undivided nature of charity by John Duns Scotus

The second reading in the Office of Readings from today’s liturgical memorial [even though it is Sunday in 2009 and Sunday takes precedence over saints’ memorials] of Blessed John Duns Scotus bears posting here. What appears to be vague really is dead-on in thinking about charity and justice. Emphasis mine.

Charity is defined as the habit by which God becomes the object of our love. However, God could become the object of a kind of private love, such as that of a lover intolerant of any other lovers besides himself (as for example in the case of a jealous man in love with a woman). But a habit of this kind would be both inordinate and imperfect.

It would be inordinate because God, the good of all, does not want to be the private good of any one person, not does right reason allow one person to appropriate to himself this common good. It follows that a love that tends to regard this common good exclusively as its own property, neither to be loved nor possessed by any other, is an inordinate love.

It would also be imperfect because a person who loves perfectly wants his beloved to be loved. Therefore God, in infusing the habit of charity by which the soul tends towards Him in an orderly and perfect way, gives a habit by which He is loved as the common good to be co-loved by others as well. And thus this habit which is of God, leads an individual to want God to be held dear and to be loved also by others.

Therefore, just as this habit leads a person to love God in Himself in an orderly and perfect way, so also it leads him to want God to be loved not only by the person himself but also by anyone else whose friendship is pleasing to Him.

It is clear from this how the habit of charity must be single and undivided, because it does not concern itself in the first instance with a plurality of objects, but with God alone as the primary object and as the first good. Secondarily it then wants God to be loved and to possessed in love by everyone else to the utmost of his power, because it is in this that a perfect and orderly love of God consists. And in willing this, I love both myself and my neighbor in charity, willing, that is, for both of us the desire and the possession of God in Himself through love.

Hence it is evident that it is by one and the same act that I want God and that I want you to want God. And in this my love is a love of charity, because out this love I desire a good for you which is due to you in justice.

For this reason, my neighbor is not to be regarded as a second object of charity but rather as an object that is entirely incidental, because he is someone who is capable of co-loving the Beloved with me in a perfect and orderly way; and I love him precisely so that he can become a co-lover. In this I love him as it were incidentally, not for himself, but because of the object which I want to be co-loved by him. And in wanting that object to be co-loved by him, I implicitly want what is good for him because it is due to him in justice.