Medjugorje Apparition

As reported by Spirit Daily.

The visionary Mirjana Dragicevic-Soldo had daily apparitions from June 24th 1981 to December 25th 1982. During the last daily apparition, Our Lady gave her
the 10th secret, and told her that she would appear to her once a year, on the 18th of March. It has been this way through the years. This year several thousand pilgrims gathered to pray the Rosary at the Cenacolo Community in Medjugorje.
The apparition lasted from 13:59 to 14:04 and Our Lady gave the following message:

“Dear children!
In this Lenten time, I call you to interior renunciation. The way to this leads you through love, fasting, prayer and good works. Only with total interior renunciation will you recognize God’s love and the signs of the time in which you live. You will
be witnesses of these signs and will begin to speak about them. I desire to bring you to this.
Thank you for having responded to me.“

We are called to an inner conversion, and to speak to these events, such as the distruction in New Orleans, not as God's rightful punishment, but as God's loving warning to us.

St John of God

The story of today's saint, "St. John of God" is quite an interesting one. John was searching for God, and found Him in the preaching of blessed John of Avila. In fact he was so moved with love of God, and guilt for his sins that he took to publically mortifying himself, with the expected consequences.

While in Spain, John was profoundly moved by the preaching of Blessed John of Avila and in response spent a day publicly beating himself in repentance for his sins. John was thereupon committed to a lunatic asylum, where Blessed John visited him and advised him to be more active in caring for the needs of others, instead of enduring personal hardships.

This is in contrast to today when many confessionals are empty. Priests practically beg for people to show up.

The other interesting thing about this story that strikes home for me, is that it reminds us that St John of God lived in times not too different than we do. If any one of us had publically mortified ourselves as He did, we too would be thown into the local mental hospital, or put under "protective custody". Luckily for St John, blessed John of Avila directed him into a more productive direction.

his advice had a calming effect, and John went on to establish a house where he cared for the poor and the sick. His love and devotion touched many people, and benefactors aided his efforts with money and provisions.

And lest we think that the church in the United States is alone in being riddled with bad clergy, St John also had his issues as well.

On one occasion the Archbishop of Granada summoned John because of a complaint that his hospital was open to prostitutes and tramps. John fell on his knees and said, "The Son of Man came for sinners, and we are bound to seek their conversion. I am unfaithful to my vocation because I neglect this, but I confess that I know of no bad person in my hospital except myself alone, who am indeed unworthy to eat the bread of the poor." Profoundly moved by this, the Archbishop became one of John's strongest supporters.

I think we forget that the saints also lived in this world and were not immune from the everyday hardships that we all face. Sometimes it's important to look at these individuals, who also struggled with the very same issues we do, and to see how they overcame them

Pax Christi

God is Love

The text of Pope Benedict XVI first encyclical is really a commentary on a much bigger story, God's love for His people. What he wrote about so beautifly was missed by the press, but bears mentioning here. George Weigle wrote an interesting piece on this very subject carried by Catholic Exchange. In his piece George makes an interesting arguement that most of the press had missed the ball on this, pope Benedict's first encyclical. That most people looked at what was said concerning how good works can actually be an obstical to a closer relationship with God, and ignored the first part. Mr Weigle said it best.

The theological meat of the encyclical is in its first part, however, and here, four ideas seemed particularly striking.

First, Pope Benedict teaches that God’s relationship to the world is best understood as a love story, not as a relationship of power that expresses itself in a contest of wills. The God who comes into history in search of man does so precisely to draw men and women into a communion of love — with each other and with the Triune God. As God’s love enters ever more deeply into our lives, the pope writes, “self-abandonment to God increases and God becomes our joy.”

Second, the pope suggests that the image of God in a culture will have a profound effect on that culture’s image of man. The fundamental orientation of a culture is not derived from its family patterns, its way of doing politics, or its method of allocating goods and services. Rather, cultures take their basic direction from what they worship: from the way in which a culture imagines the divine, thinks of the divine (if it imagines that the divine can be “thought”), and relates to the divine. To believe in and worship a God who is love “all the way through” (as Thomas More puts it in A Man for All Seasons) gives Christian cultures a distinctive view of the human enterprise in all its dimensions.

Which brings us to a third point Benedict makes, if briefly: warped ideas of God lead to warped ideas of the human, warped understandings of human relationships, and, ultimately, warped politics. When Pope Benedict speaks of “a world in which the name of God is sometimes associated with vengeance or even a duty of hatred and violence,” it is not difficult to imagine at least one of the primary reference points. That the pope has jihadist Islam in mind here is also suggested by his address to the diplomatic corps at the Vatican on January 9, when he spoke of a danger that had been “rightly” described as a “clash of civilizations.”

Finally, the pope neatly links the two great commandments, reminding us that we can love our neighbor because we have been first loved by God. Love of neighbor is thus a response to the experience of love by which God has first graced us, rather than rote obedience to an order from an external authority.

A great teacher and an acute cultural analyst sits in the Chair of Peter.

Soviets Ordered John Paul II's Death

An Italian government report released on March 2 shows that the Soviet Union played an active role in planning the assasination attempt on John Paul the Greats life. The report was gathered from former soviet bloc intelligence agencies archives. The report
concludes (as reported by the Catholic Exchange that Soviet, Bulgarian, and East German agents were involved in plotting the attempt on the Pope's life.

A report prepared for the Italian parliament, due for presentation later in March, was released in Rome on March 2 by Paolo Guzzanti, the president of the investigating committee. The report concludes that Soviet leaders were "beyond any reasonable doubt" the force behind the assassination attempt.

Immediately after the shooting on May 13, 1981, Vatican officials privately voiced their suspicions of Soviet involvement. After the arrest of Mehmet Ali Agca, Italian prosecutors attempted to link the Turkish gunman to Bulgarian state officials, who were believed to be acting on orders from Moscow. But prosecutors were unable to provide sufficient evidence to prove their case.

The new Italian parliamentary report reinforces the prosecutor's original case against Sergei Antonov, who was working in the Rome office of Bulgaria's state-owned airline at the time of the assassination attempt. Antonov, who denied any involvement, had testified that he was in his office on the day of the shooting. The new Italian investigation reportedly discovered a photo taken of Antonov in the crowd in St. Peter's Square at the time of the fateful papal audience.

This information confirms what was widely believed, that the Soviets used the Bulgarians as proxies to hire a Turk (Agca in this case), to eliminate a threat to there empire. Thank God for His intervention.