Association Of Catholic Bloggers

In the United States, we celebrate Memorial Day today; a day to remember those who died in service to the U.S., in defense of the U.S.   Unfortunately, the U.S. has seen several wars over its 240+ year history. Yet, remembering those who died, for our safety and security, is worthy of showing our appreciation. Remember Those Who Died This day never passes by me without remembering my next door neighbor, Tommy Myers, who died while serving my country, in Vietnam, back in the 1960’s. I was a pre-teen, when I saw the U.S. Army car pull up in front of Mrs. Myer’s house to give her the bad news. Tommy is the only person, who I personally knew, who died while serving his country in the armed services. Yet, there are countless others. Perhaps you know of someone, who deserves to be remembered this day. Please share your memories in the comments section, so that we can all honor his/her service. War is ugly and filled with fraught. Each day might be your last. It takes great fortitud

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Poor Paul.   He is always finding himself in a mess.   Today, in the Acts of the Apostles, Chapter 18, as he was doing what the Lord had instructed him to do, the Jews rose up against him and took him to the tribunal. Gallio, a Roman, was the one who had to make the decision as to whether Paul broke any laws, and since he didn’t care about Jewish law, he sent everyone away and didn’t hold Paul responsible for any “crime or malicious fraud.” We need to be careful when we read scripture.   We need to be careful not to just dismiss these accounts as interesting stories from long ago that have no relevance to us today. If we believe that the Bible is just an interesting read for the people of a certain time, and not actually God’s Word, we could be in danger of dismissing the fact that God’s Word is meant for all people, for all time. If we believe that God’s Word isn’t meant for just certain people, but for us as well, that will impact how we read it and what we do. Y

Something occurred to me while I was reading about the Ascension of Jesus in today’s reading at the beginning of the Acts of theApostles (Chapter 1:6) . You may recall, after Jesus died and rose from the dead, he appeared to many people in his resurrected body, before he ascended to heaven. Before his Ascension, he promised he would send the Advocate (who I talked about in my recent blog, How Embarrassing, Right ?) Anyway, before he ascended, with people gathered around him, he reminded them to “wait for ‘the promise of the Father’ about which you have heard me speak.”   Of course, he was talking about the Advocate, the Holy Spirit. Now remember, people at that time were waiting for a leader to come in military fashion and save them from Roman oppression.   Because of this, they asked Jesus, “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” Jesus answered them, telling them it was not for them to know the “times or seasons” because they were estab

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I saw a television commercial recently that used the tagline, “Science is how we get back to normal.” Ugh.     There is so much wrong with that statement I don’t even know where to begin. First, let me say, I am definitely not anti-science.   Science is wonderful.   We learn lots of things about ourselves and our world through science.   Science can provide life-saving treatments and has the uncanny ability to look at the world around us and make projections and proclamations about what we can see, feel and hear, etc. The tagline on the commercial, though, reminds me of the danger of depending on science to solve all of our problems, as one of my teachers cautioned awhile ago: “ As developments in science gives humans mastery over the natural world, some of them would believe we could solve everything, that science has the ability to fix every problem.  Some people still believe that.” He went on to say: “A way of thinking about the world -- scientism -

Compassion is different from pity. Pity merely means that we feel sorry for someone and/or their situation. Compassion, on the other hand, goes deeper. It is with compassion that we enter into the suffering with others. For example, I feel compassion for those who died alone in the hospital, due to the coronavirus. I also feel compassion for their loved ones who could not be with them as they each took their last breaths. Now, when I say enter into the suffering with the ones who suffer, it means that I, too, feel their pain. So, rather than pity, we need to show compassion to those who suffer. Show Compassion My heart breaks at the thought of dying alone in a hospital bed. No one can visit with the sick and dying. Anecdotally, I hear that priests cannot visit with the dying due to the shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE). This equipment must be reserved for the hospital workers. So, the patients die without receiving Last Rights. Compound that pain, with the loved o

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I am embarrassed to say that in addition to my online calendars, I keep a calendar on my counter that runs from June-July. That’s not the embarrassing part. The embarrassing part is that every year for the past – I don’t know, maybe 19 years – I have saved the used calendar and put it on a shelf under the counter. Now, before you get all judgy on me, let me just say in my defense, those calendars contain family history.   I mean, seriously, they are like a record of what we did every day since our kids were young. As I went through them to finally weed them out, I kept the most recent calendar, as well as the calendars for significant years, like the year we went to Bogota, Colombia to adopt our youngest daughter (which was also the year our son graduated from high school). Living in Colombia, our daughter’s first snow was a big deal here.   So big in fact, that I even marked her first snowball on that calendar.   Now you tell me, who’s going to toss that c