THE CONCHO PADRE POST

From Cardinal Dolan’s blog

“We are part of a Church where, yes, all are welcome, but, no, not a Church of anything goes.”

http://cardinaldolan.org/index.php/all-are-welcome/

The Concho Padre

Pope Francis celebrated the Feast of St. Mark during his daily Morning Mass at the Casa Sanctae Marthae, emphasizing on the need for Christians to proclaim the Gospel as commanded by Christ.

According to Vatican Radio, members of the Secretariate of the Synod of Bishops, who were accompanied by the Secretary General, Archbishop Nikola Eterovic, were present at the liturgy. Also present were a group of police from the Vatican Gendarmerie.

Referring to the Gospel of St. Mark that describes the Ascension of Christ, Pope Francis spoke on the command given to the disciples to preach the Gospel “to the end of the world.”

“Go all over the world. The horizon … great horizon… And as you can see, this is the mission of the Church. The Church continues to preach this to everyone, all over the world. But she does not go forth alone: she goes forth with Jesus,” the Pope said.

“So they went forth and preached everywhere, while the Lord acted with them’. The Lord works with all those who preach the Gospel. This is the magnanimity that Christians should have. A pusillanimous Christian is incomprehensible: this magnanimity is part of the Christian vocation: always more and more, more and more, more and more, always onwards!”

The Holy Father also focused on the First Letter of St. Peter, which he said “defines the style of Christian preaching as one of humility.”

“The style of evangelical preaching should have this attitude: humility, service, charity, brotherly love. ‘But … Lord, we must conquer the world!’. That word, conquer, doesn’t work. We must preach in the world. The Christian must not be like soldiers who when they win the battle make a clean sweep of everything.”

The Christian, the Pope continued, “proclaims the Gospel with his witness, rather than with words. And with a dual disposition, as St. Thomas Aquinas says: a great soul that is not afraid of great things, that moves forward towards infinite horizons, and the humility to take into account the small things.”

Pope Francis said that this dual disposition between great and small things is the path proceeded by Christian missionary activity.

The Holy Father concluded his homily but encouraging those present to “go forth with this magnanimity and humility” which accompanied the disciples during their mission in preaching the Gospel.

“The triumph of the Church is the Resurrection of Jesus,” the Pope said. “But there is first the Cross. Today we ask the Lord to become missionaries in the Church, apostles in the Church but in this spirit: a great magnanimity and also a great humility.”

From zenit.org

John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Francis modeled three different ways of following Christ

From Our Sunday Visitor

http://www.osv.com/tabid/7621/itemid/10816/Three-pontiffs-in-continuity.aspx

The Concho Padre

“The Catholic Church in Ireland had for far too long felt that it was safely ensconced in a ‘Catholic country,’” Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin told a New York audience in an April 24 lecture. “The Church had become conformist and controlling, not just with its faithful, but in society in general.”

In an address at Fordham University, Archbishop Martin said that the secularization of Irish society has been a lengthy process rather than a sudden development. The problems within the Catholic Church developed decades ago, he said, although there were not immediately evident. “The demographic majority which the Church enjoyed hid many structural weaknesses and the Church became insensitive to such weakness.” In fact, he suggested, the enthusiastic embrace of changes after Vatican II “probably indicated that there was already a deep dissatisfaction,” and Church leaders had failed to recognize popular sentiments.

Old conceptions of Irish Catholicism and even Irish national identity have become outdated, the archbishop said. For example, he noted that it is no longer safe to assume that in Northern Ireland, most Catholics would favor union with the Irish republic. “A very large number of Northern Irish Catholics would favor staying in the United Kingdom,” he said. Today, the task of reviving Catholic influence is complicated by the country’s economic and social difficulties, Archbishop Martin said. After years of booming economic growth based on an uncertain social foundation, “Ireland is picking up the pieces economically and paying the price socially.”

The Church in Ireland must learn to live without the comforts of majority support and state power, the Irish prelate concluded. “Renewal in the Irish Church will not come simply from imported plans and programs. Renewal must be home-grown.”

O God,
who raised up Saint Mark, your Evangelist,
and endowed him with the grace to preach the Gospel,
grant, we pray, that we may so profit
from his teaching as to follow faithfully
in the footsteps of Christ.
Who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever.
– Amen.