Association Of Catholic Bloggers

Grace is on my mind. Why don't people notice God's grace in their lives at times? Part of it can be from sin: Imagine a stream dammed (damned) up. The water cannot flow, it pools and becomes very dirty from stagnation. This is a soul in grave sin. It is very ill and the water inside the pool is poisonous. The soul is choking on  the noxious fumes of its own sin. Hopefully, the person gets disgusted and looks to God for help. This makes a chink in the dam and water starts trickling through. Water (grace) is strong and the chink grows into a hole and the water begins to flow more steadily. As the hole grows bigger pieces of the dam (sin) start breaking off. More and more water flows with increasing strength and power until the dam collapses and water floods through it. This is grace, a free gift from God. Streams flow into rivers. As a stream grows stronger obstacles are swept away by its current. Rivers are even more powerful and not much can stop them from flowing. They flo

The connection between the Carmelite Order and the Royal House of France originated in the Middle Ages, when St. Louis IX encountered the hermits on Mt. Carmel and brought them to France. When the Discalced Reform came to France from Spain in the early seventeenth century, the royal family assisted the nuns with their patronage. The French court was shaken in 1674 when Louise de la Vallière , the former mistress of Louis XIV, publicly begged the queen's forgiveness and entered a Carmelite monastery. In his book To Quell the Terror , William Bush details the many connections of the later Bourbons with Carmel, particularly the patronage of Queen Marie Lesczynska and her daughter Madame Louise . When Louise herself chose to become a Carmelite nun in 1770, it cemented the spiritual ties between those in the worldliness of Versailles and those in the austerity of the cloister. Marie-Antoinette of Austria married the Dauphin in the same year that Madame Louise entered the mo

    By Allison Salerno   Yesterday morning my family attended the bar mitvah of a neighborhood boy we have known since he was a baby. I never had attended a Conservative Jewish Shabbat morning service, much less a bar mitvah. It was exquisite, reverent and beautiful. (The sanctuary is pictured above) I wiped tears from my eyes as I considered the overwhelming faith and courage of Jews through the centuries of persecution that enabled this boy to encounter this moment. I also meditated on the links between my Catholic faith and Judaism as I listened to the prayers of the worshipers. As the Catechism teaches us: When she delves into her own mystery, the Church, the People of God in the New Covenant, discovers her link with the Jewish People, "the first to hear the Word of God."  I always have been taught that Judaism is the root of the tree of our faith. And that without that root, our faith would not have flowered. For the most part, this insight has remai

By Allison Salerno  Morning came too early for me; I had stayed up very late at a neighborhood block party and had to rise with the rest of my family as we scattered in different directions - my husband to lector at an early Mass, and our 10-year-old son to a Little League baseball playoff game. That left G. and me at home, where I attempted to supervise his remaining homework before the 11 a.m. Mass, where he was an altar server. This was a morning of poor parenting; my frustration with his disorganization devolved into my raising my voice, speaking to him harshly, and then  dissolving into tears of regret and exhaustion. Mass and the Penitential Rite ("I confess to almighty God, and to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have sinned through my own fault...")  could not come soon enough.

By Allison Salerno During my eighth period hall-walking duty, I heard a commotion in the downstairs hallway by the high school's gym. The school nurse, who was standing with the school's security officer and a local police officer, told me a deer had given birth to two fawns in an outside alcove. Staff and students had watched while the new mom hustled into the woods with one of her newborns, leaving the other fawn in the shade of our concrete building. Worry filled the air: what would happen to the new fawn?

Here is a post from my early blog posts. I just wanted to share it with you lovely ladies and pray you are blessed. " Fear is useless; what is needed is trust ." Luke 8:50, Mark 5:36 Easy to say, right?  I have heard and read lots of good teaching about this subject. But the best teacher has been life itself.  I've found that trust comes a bit easier for the long term issues for which I pray--especially eternal salvation for my family and other loved ones. Also for people of whom I am not personally acquainted, the Pope for example. I pray for his intentions at the conclusion of each Rosary, and sincerely ask God for his protection and guidance; but I do not suffer the same pangs as when I am praying, for instance, for my two hospitalized  daughters, one here, one in Michigan. (that was quite a time!) In that state of  prayer, I awake all throughout the night. Every waking moment I have the intention in the foreground of my thoughts, often accompanied by  the phys