If wealth is your God, then the Lord isn’t. Are you free from the bondage of wealth or do you suffer from “affluenza” (the “disease” of affluence)? Write a check to a charitable organization today. Trust that God will return it a hundredfold.
MOTHER ANGELICA'S LITTLE BOOK
of Life Lessons and Everyday Spirituality. Raymond Arroyo presents an inspiring collection of Mother's powerful spiritual insights and no-nonsense advice. The book includes a wide-range of Mother's thoughts and practical teachings on subjects such as: the purpose of life, pain and suffering, seeking God's Will in everyday life and much more. This devotional treasure was created in cooperation with Our Lady of the Angels Monastery. Hardcover edition. 220 pages.
ROME, FEB. 22, 2007 (Zenit.org).- Works of charity, prayer and fastingZE07022220
are spiritual weapons to combat evil, Benedict XVI said during Mass on
Ash Wednesday.
In his homily, delivered in the Basilica of St. Sabina on Rome's Aventine Hill, the Holy Father presented these "useful instruments" as the condition "to live authentic community renewal."
"They are the three fundamental practices, also appreciated by the Jewish tradition, because they contribute to purify man before God," the Pope said. "These external gestures, which should be done to please God and not to win the approval and praise of people, are pleasing to him if they express the heartfelt determination to serve him alone, with simplicity and generosity.
"Fasting, to which the Church invites us during this time, is not born from motivations of a physical or aesthetic order, but springs from the need the person feels for interior purification, to be detoxified from the contamination
of sin and evil."
Benedict XVI said that fasting educates in "those healthy self-denials that free the believer from his 'I,' and make him more attentive and ready to listen to God and to serve his brothers."
"For this reason, fasting and the Lenten practices" of prayer and works of charity, in particular almsgiving, "are considered by the Christian
tradition spiritual 'weapons' to combat evil, evil passions and vices," the Pope
said...
"Late scholastic voluntarism and post-scholastic legalism took moral theology down just such a blind alley. Magisterium became the satellite navigator and the role of conscience was to hear, interpret and obey. Many contemporary theologians and pastors are heirs to this. For some the solution to the crisis of moral authority is to keep calling for submission to the navigator."
"... By the 1960s it meant something like strong feeling, intuition or sincere opinion. To appeal to conscience was to foreclose all further discussion and to claim immunity to reasoned argument or the moral law. 'Follow your conscience' came to be code for pursuing personal preferences over and against Church teaching, especially in sexuality, bioethics, remarriage and communion. Conscience was now the highest court of appeal: it had 'primacy' or infallibility... Conscience became, as the then-Cardinal Ratzinger put it, 'a cloak thrown over human subjectivity, allowing man to … hide from reality.'"
"The teaching authority of the Church, restating or unfolding the implications of Christ's teaching is called "magisterium." ... Interestingly Jesus' departing promise to be with his Church to the end of time was attached to a charge not to teach the nations Christology or Soteriology or even Fundamental Moral Theology, but to teach them his commandments! By the time of Vatican II the Church could assert that Christ's faithful ought to give the unconditional obedience of faith (obsequium fidei) to all that it proposes as certainly true and could express several ways in which this magisterium is operationalized infallibly."
"Sometime draw a line down through a piece of paper and on the left side write the caption: 'I gave these things to myself.' One the right side: 'God gave these things to me.' Then thoughtfully examine yourself and fill in the two columns. If you are truthful, if you are humble, you will discover that your faults and failings and sins are all that you can boast of as being truly your own. All your gifts are from God. Saint Paul was so right when he said, 'What have you that you have not received? And, if you have received it, why do you boast as if you had not received it?' Briefly, humility consists in figuring out what is yours and what belongs to God."
The Christian life includes self-sacrifice. Without him or her knowing it, do someone’s house chore or similar kind of task today.
