"Knowing" Is Not Enough!

We “know” that God made us to be with Him eternally. We “know” that He will give us all the graces we need to get to our heavenly home. We "know" that we are free to accept or ignore those graces.  We “know” that we must ever be prepared to meet Him when He calls. We also “know” that He will come like a thief in the night.

Yet how often do we act like we have all the time in the world to reorient our lives and to make them one with His? How foolish can we be?

What Can I Give My Pastor?

You can start here. Then you might consider giving him this, or this, and even this!


I have no financial interest in any of these books or companies. I just have a heart and love for our priests. Let's treasure and encourage them as we ought!

Crosses or Toothpicks?

Let me repeat some obvious truths. God is more powerful than any of us. He draws each of us to Himself. He wants to excite our hearts. He longs to fill our minds and souls with the Truth. He desires that we yield ourselves totally to His will. We are often reluctant to do so because we know we may be mocked, laughed at and persecuted. In truth, our fidelity to God and His Word may bring us pain and suffering. It is so difficult to follow Him. At times we don’t want to do as He asks. What He wants from us sometimes seems too painful, too difficult, and too burdensome. We want to flee and hide from Him.  But we can’t. He is everywhere. He has given us Himself.  Our salvation and that of others hinges on our sharing and living this Truth. So we must go on - imperfectly and inconstantly no doubt - but we must go on, trusting that God will be at our side.

One of the reasons we don’t always trust Him is our failure to understand the necessity and value of the suffering He asks of us.  In our current world, many of us do everything we can to avoid suffering. We see little meaning in it. Like Peter’s initial reaction, we often scold or mock those who talk of it or seek it. We look at suffering as men do not as God does. What reluctant and unwilling cross bearers many of us have been! But Jesus lets us know in today’s Gospel that we can not be His followers if we do not take up our crosses and follow Him.

So what are we reluctant cross bearers to do? Perhaps these words of St. Francis de Sales will help:

“The Everlasting God has in His wisdom foreseen from eternity the cross that He now presents to you as a gift from His innermost heart. This cross He now sends you is considered with His all-knowing eyes, understood with His divine mind, tested with His wise justice, warmed with loving arms and weighed with His own hands, to see that it be not one inch too large and not one ounce too heavy for you. He has blessed it with His Holy Name, anointed it with His grace, perfumed it with His consolation, taken one last look at you and your courage, and then sent it to you from heaven, a special greeting from God to you, an alms of the all-merciful love of God. ”

By taking these words to heart, we might recognize some of the crosses we most dread to carry are no more than toothpicks and, by God’s grace, no cross He sends will ever be too heavy.

The Rose of Peru

Today we remember St. Rose of Lima, the first canonized Saint of the Western hemisphere. She was born in Peru in 1586 and died there at the age of thirty-one. Like many who have felt a call to the Dominican Order over the centuries, Rose initially faced opposition from her family. They refused to let her enter a convent. Rose’s response was to become a Lay Dominican and to live a life of solitude and penance within the confines of her family’s home. She had a great attraction to St. Catherine of Siena, a great love for the Blessed Sacrament, and limitless compassion for the elderly, homeless and the sick, whom she would eventually care for in one of the rooms in her parents’ residence. “When we serve the poor and the sick,” she tells us, “we serve Jesus. We must not fail to help our neighbors, because in them we serve Jesus.”

Rose enthusiastically embraced a life of penance and physical suffering since she also understood that “Apart from the cross, there is no other ladder by which we may get to heaven.”

While most of us today are not willing to voluntarily subject ourselves to the penitential sufferings which Rose sought and welcomed in her short life, all of us will suffer in some fashion during our earthly life. Rather than run away from such challenges, we too should embrace them and transform them into acts of reparation for our own failings and those of others.

I suspect our Peruvian Saint was given a glimpse of the extent to which twenty-first century Catholics would avoid the gift of sacrificial suffering when she wrote the following:

“Would that mortal men might know how wonderful is divine grace, how beautiful, how precious; what riches are hidden therein, what treasures, what joys, what delights. If they but knew, surely they would direct their energy with all care and diligence to procuring sufferings and afflictions for themselves. Instead of good fortune all men everywhere would seek out troubles, illness and suffering that they might obtain the inestimable treasure of grace. This is the final profit to be gained from patient endurance. No one would complain about the cross or about hardships coming seemingly by chance upon him, if he realized in what balance they are weighed before being distributed to men.”

What a shame it is that we too often ignore our predecessors in the faith, mistakenly believing they have little or nothing of spiritual value to offer contemporary Catholics! Hopefully, this brief glimpse at the life of this simple woman along with the following prayer, which will be recited by Dominicans throughout the world today, should dispel such nonsense:

“Almighty God, giver of all good gifts, you poured out the dew of heavenly grace on Saint Rose and made her radiant with humility, patience and zeal for the good of her people. May we follow in her footsteps and so become the sweet fragrance of Christ in this world. We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.”

St. Rose of Lima pray for us!

Got to Love Blunt Questions!

What Is Hell and How Do I Get There?

True Freedom Comes From Obedience

That all of us would have such faith and trust in the God who loves us!

Eucharistic Reflection For The Day

"But I hear You complain, O my Sacramental Jesus:  I was a stranger, and you took Me not in (Matt. xxv. 43); that You came on earth to be our guest for our good, and that we have not welcomed You. You are right, Lord, You are right; and I am one of these ungrateful creatures who have left You alone, without even visiting You. Chastise me as You please; but not by depriving me of Your presence, which is the chastisement I deserve. No, I will repair my fault, and the indignities which I have heaped upon You. From this day forward I will not only visit You often, but will remain with You for as long a time as I can."

(St. Alphonsus Liguori)

Open our ears Lord that we might hear and our hearts that we might respond!

Where Have They Taken Him?

When I travel and enter unfamiliar Catholic Churches, I don’t really ask for much: an atmosphere of reverent silence and a tabernacle in front of which I may momentarily kneel and worship my Eucharistic Lord.

One would expect our Lord to be in "a distinguished place ... conspicuous, suitably adorned and conducive to prayer". But often His whereabouts are unknown. Far too often, instead of kneeling before the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, I have to assemble a search team to scour the Church building to find out where they have taken Him! This should never be! But it occurs far too frequently.

My daughter and her family recently moved to a new town in a new State. We went to visit them. We also went to visit our Lord in the two Catholic Churches located in this town. He was no where to be seen! After searching for Him in the larger of the two Churches, I found Him in a chapel set apart from the area where the congregation gathers and celebrates Mass. I never did find where they had taken Him in the other Church!

A few days before this upsetting experience, I was blessed to attend the annual conference of the Catholic Marketing Network and the Catholic Writers’ Guild. These groups had no difficulty placing a tabernacle prominently behind the altar that had been set up in one of the hotel’s banquet rooms.

They also had no problem processing with our Eucharistic Lord from the hallways of one hotel to repose the Sacred Monstrance in an Adoration Chapel set up in an adjoining hotel. This all took place in a secular setting with hundreds of committed Catholics unabashedly and publicly singing “Holy God, We Praise They Name”.

Our Church buildings must be sacred places in which the tabernacle where Our Lord resides is prominently and conspicuously placed and readily visible to everyone upon entry. No one should ever have to search for Him after entering His Church.

How blessed I was to give witness to my belief in His Eucharistic Presence by processing with Him through the halls of two secular buildings. How tragic that I could not readily find Him in two of His Churches.

Worth Passing On!

A must read from Fr. Brian Mulcahy, O.P. Prior Provinical of the Province of Saint Joseph, for those who are tired of having their ears tickled.

It's great to be a Lay Dominican!

Read and pass this on if its Truth  resonates in your heart and soul!

I Know This Is Late, But...

We hit the trifecta of Eucharistic saints last week: St. Alphonus Liguori on Monday, St. Peter Eymard on Tuesday and St. John Marie Vianney, the model for all priests, on Friday. I wrote about the first two Saints, but my computer got zapped at the Catholic Writers' Guild Conference. My son-in-law just removed the bugs. What follows is what I had intended to share last week.

Like Alphonsus and Peter, St. John Vianney gets to the heart of what it should mean to be a Catholic. Here is a sample of his wisdom on the Eucharist.

"There is nothing, so great as the Eucharist. If God had something more precious, He would have given it to us."

"We ought to visit him [Jesus in the Holy Eucharist] often.  How dear to Him is a quarter of an hour spared from our occupations or from some useless employment, to come and pray to Him, visit Him, and console Him for all the ingratitude He receives!  When He sees poor souls hurrying to Him, He smiles at them.  They come with that simplicity which pleases Him so much, to ask pardon for all sinners, and for the insults of so many who are ungrateful."

Do we have sufficient faith, "to see God hidden in the priest like a light behind the glass, like wine mixed with water"? Have we taken our precious priests for granted? The Cure of Ars suggests we have.

"Were we to fully realize what a priest is on earth, we would die: not of fright but of love…Without the priest, the passion and death of our Lord would be of no avail. It is the priest who continues the work of redemption on earth…What use would be a house filled with gold, were there no one to open its door? The priest holds the key to the treasures of heaven: it is he who opens the door; he is the steward of the good Lord; the administrator of His goods."

Our Holy Father held St. John Vianney up to all our priests during the Year for the Priest, affirming what this humble man had said: "A good shepherd, a priest after God’s Heart, is the greatest treasure which the good Lord can grant to a parish, and one of the most precious gifts of divine mercy."

How well our priests and our Church would be served if all of our priests strove to follow this saint's priestly example, treasured the priesthood as he did, and heeded his advice: "O, how great is the priest!...If he realized what he is, he would die…God obeys him: he utters a few words and the Lord descends from heaven at his voice, to be contained within a small host." It is for these reasons he suggested that "we ought to pity a priest who celebrates Mass as if he were engaged in something routine."

God doesn't make mistakes. He chose each and everyone of our priests. He has called each of them to be "another Christ". He calls each of them, as well as each of us, to holiness. None of us can ever achieve that goal on our own. We can and will if we make the Eucharist, the source, center and summit of our daily lives.

Our priests are under an unrelenting attack. We must appreciate, love and support each of them. We must pray for them. We must fast on their behalf. We must thank them for standing up for the Truth and for making the Eucharist the center of their priestly lives. We must stand by them when they are attacked for defending the Faith.

We must let them know that we want to accompany them on the journey to holiness and eternal life.

We must!

Apostle of the Eucharist

Saint Peter Julian Eymard (1811-1868) founded the Society of the Blessed Sacrament, and the Servants of the Blessed Sacrament. He is often referred to as the Apostle of the Eucharist. His writings, including those on the Eucharist, are extensive and have been compiled into a 17 volume work. Even a cursory review of quotations attributable to him should set any heart afire. Let me share a few of them:

             “Receive Communion often, and Jesus will change you into himself."

 "Be the apostle of the Divine Eucharist, like a flame which enlightens and warms, like the Angel of His heart who will go to proclaim Him to those who don’t know Him and will encourage those who love Him and are suffering."

“…we cannot consider the Most Blessed Sacrament attentively without concluding: ‘I must love Him and come to visit Him. I must not leave Him alone; He loves me too much’…” 

“Unless we have a passionate love for our Lord in the Most Blessed Sacrament, we shall accomplish nothing. Certainly, our Lord loves us passionately in the Eucharist; He loves us blindly without a thought for Himself, devoting Himself entirely for our good. We should love Him as he loves us."   

Oh, but there are some ears desperate to hear these truths and some eyes anxious to see such love. Why don’t they?

St. John Eudes (1601-1680), whose feast day is August 19 not today as I erroneously stated yesterday, offered an explanation - one which was not well received by those to whom it was directed at the time and which is not likely to be well-received today by anyone to whom his observations may apply: "The most evident mark of God's anger and the most terrible castigation He can inflict upon the world are manifested when He permits His people to fall into the hands of clergy who are priests more in name than in deed…”

This frank but good Saint was quick, however, to point out that: “The greatest blessing that God bestows upon a church, the most single manifestation of divine grace, is to have a saintly shepherd, be he bishop or priest. This is indeed a grace of graces and the most priceless of all gifts for it includes within itself every other blessing and grace…The [holy] priest is a sun cheering the world by his presence and bearing. He brings heavenly blessings into every heart. He dispels the ignorance and darkness of error and radiates on every side bright beams of celestial light. He extinguishes sin and gives life and grace to the multitudes. He imparts new life to the weak, inflames the lukewarm, fires most ardently those who are aglow with the sacred flame of divine love…”

The late Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen echoed similar sentiments: "If only all priests realized how their holiness makes the Church holy, and how the Church begins to decline as the level of holiness among priests falls below that of the people!"

We can not have the abundant life God promises us, or the love, reverence, and belief in the Eucharist we ought to have and to which God is entitled, without the example of holy priests. Priests who passionately love the Eucharist and who, by their words and actions, call their flock to passionately love the Eucharist are holy priests! 

Thank God for the many holy priests already in our midst, but let us pray for more.

Saints of the Eucharist

Today we commemorate St. Alphonsus Liguori (1698-1787). Tomorrow we will remember St. Peter Julian Eymard (1811-1868), not St. John Eudes (1601-1680) as I originally posted. These were two men who loved and centered their lives around the Living Christ, present in the Blessed Sacrament.

St. Alphonsus was a Bishop, theologian, and founder of the Redemptorists. He encouraged daily visits to the Blessed Sacrament, especially where it was exposed. He was a prolific writer who left us a treasure trove of spiritual nourishment. Among these gems are: The Holy Eucharist, Visits to the Most Holy Sacrament, Etc., For Every Day in the Month: Aspirations of Love to Jesus In the Holy Eucharist, and (in more abbreviated form) Visits to the Blessed Sacrament and the Blessed Virgin Mary. What fruit for contemplation lies within these works! You can get a flavor for the feast that awaits you by sampling some quotations from his many works. Let me share one.

“Suppose that our Lord, Jesus Christ, would be present in only one church in the whole world . . . . What a beautiful tabernacle would be built! What lighting would be placed there! With what immense respect would respond all who succeeded to get close! Well, Jesus is now in every Catholic Church where there are consecrated hosts!”

Yes, He is in every Catholic Church where the Blessed Sacrament is reserved. But He is generally left there alone and abandoned. Even the few inclined to visit Him, often find the Church doors locked. 

On His behalf, we must ask over and over: Where are they who profess to love Him?

Come before the tabernacle every day, if even for just a moment. If you find the Church doors locked, pause by them, and tell our imprisoned Lord of your love for Him. Ask your pastor to unlock those doors for some period of time each day.

Pray that the Eucharist will become the source, center and summit of your life and the lives of all our priests.