Benedict’s Papacy

Pope Benedict believes he can no longer perform this difficult ministry, which he noted in his resignation announcement “must be carried out not only with words and deeds, but no less with prayer and suffering.”  I found this line especially striking, as few popes have been as vilified by the media, and even many within the Catholic Church, as Benedict.  He has truly been an amazing witness of how to suffer well for the Lord and the Church!  We thank him for his love for his flock and all his efforts to shepherd us and continue to pray for his health!

What happens next?

The conclave that will select a new pope is expected to begin meeting sometime in March, and we must begin praying!  Whether we’re feeling anxiety about the Pope’s health, excitement about who might be the next Pope, or any range of emotions, hopefully we can funnel all that energy into prayer.  Our cardinals will be choosing someone who will have to shepherd over 1.2 BILLION Catholics, and they need our prayers as they prepare to let the Holy Spirit guide this monumental decision!  My goal is to pray this prayer every day until we have a new pope:

Prayer for the Election of a Pope
Lord God, you are our eternal shepherd and guide.
In your mercy grant your Church a shepherd who will walk in your ways
and whose watchful care will bring us your blessing.
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.
Amen.

If it’s easier for you to pray something you know by heart, like an Our Father or Hail Mary, then go for it.  But please, pray!

Pope Benedict’s Future
It should be noted that although Pope Benedict has resigned from the papacy, he is still a validly ordained bishop and cardinal.  Though he will no longer be Bishop of Rome, his ordination still remains.  One can’t resign from Holy Orders (nor does the Pope wish to), for it is a permanent seal upon one’s soul.  Since the Pope is over 80 years old (85), he is not eligible to take part in the conclave that will elect his successor, but he surely has been and will be praying!  May we all do the same.

Did I vote for President Obama?  No.  So how is it my fault?  Very simple: because I’m not living as the saint God created me to be.

My (Lack Of) Witness

This nation has become so confused that it mistakes lies for Truth and darkness for Light.  And this happened because I who know the Truth have not fully conformed my life to it – because I have failed to effectively witness to it.  On more occasions than I would ever care to admit I’ve witnessed not to love, not to forgiveness, not to hope but to hatred or indifference, to pride, to despair.  When I claim to have and know God’s truth, every sin I commit makes it easier for those around me to believe that I can’t possibly be speaking His Truth.

Every time I fail to hate the sin but love the sinner, I make that much stronger a case for those who believe that Christians don’t really love.  It’s precisely because I have so often failed to model true love that so many people have come to believe that loving someone is letting them do whatever they want.

Many have come to believe that I want to “impose” my religion on others because I have failed to convince them by reason, by love and by my witness that it’s Truth.  Instead now our culture’s secularism is being imposed on me.  But given how many times, in so many small ways, I have acted as if my religion is reducible to Sunday worship, should I be surprised the HHS mandate now relegates religion to private worship that occurs on Sundays?

The Bottom Line

As long as I witness so poorly to the Truth, it will be far too easily mistaken for lies.  As long as the Light of Christ that I have within me is darkened by my sin as it pours out of me, it will be too easily mistaken for the darkness masquerading as the Light.

When asked to write an essay on what’s wrong with the world G.K. Chesterton gave a simple one-word answer: “Me.”  This post is a call to you, as much as it is a reprimand of myself.  Be holier!  Let us beg the Lord for more grace and to be open to more of His grace.  Let us spend more time in prayer, more time in worship.  Let us beg Jesus to take away everything that prevents us from fully conforming our lives to Him (be it fear, pride, greed, laziness, etc.).

Let us beg The Lord to turn us into the saints He created us to be, for it is saints who will convert our nation with Christ’s love, truth and light!

As you may remember, the Archbishop received the title of Servant of God when the cause for his canonization was opened in 2001.  The Congregation for the Causes of Saints reviewed the over  2500 pages worth of  testimony and historical information submitted and passed their findings to Pope Benedict. Happily, today the Pope officially acknowledged the Archbishop demonstrated “heroic virtue” during his life, bestowing on him the title of Venerable!

What happens now?
The next step in the process is beatification.  Soon the Congregation will examine the miracle proposed to have occurred through Venerable Sheen’s intercession.  If (and hopefully when!) the miracle is verified as authentic, the Pope will be able to give the Archbishop the title of Blessed.  Finally, another miracle is required at which point the Pope would be able to officially name the Archbishop a Saint.

There is great reason to hope this process will happen relatively fast since Pope Benedict worked with the Archbishop during the Second Vatican Council in the 1960.  So impressed by the Archbishop’s holiness even then, and recognizing Venerable Sheen’s sanctity continued the rest of his life, Pope Benedict requested that the Congregation put his cause on the “fast track”!

The proposed miracle
The next step on this “fast track” is for the Congregation to examine the proposed miracle. The miracle is this: A baby boy in Peoria, Illinois (the Archbishop’s home diocese) was delivered stillborn, with the umbilical cord around his neck.  He was delivered at home and examined there by a nurse, who found no signs of life.  He was declared a “triple zero”: no brain waves, no heart beat, no breathing.  The paramedics examined him and found no signs of life.  In the infant emergency room of the hospital, they again found no signs of life.  In the main emergency room, they again found no signs of life.  With doctors about to declare the child dead, he took his first breath!  Though he went 61 minutes without any signs of life, he is in perfect health today, with zero medical problems!  The entire time his mother had been praying to the Archbishop.  A miracle indeed!

God willing, the Archbishop’s cause will indeed move fast as we here in America are in terrible need of his intercession.  Venerable Sheen’s beatification will enable him to touch more lives as more Americans get to know him and fall in love with him.

Venerable Archbishop Fulton Sheen, pray for us!

*The information in this article comes from Father Andrew Apostoli, vice postulator for the cause of the Archbishop*

We pray to the Virgin Mary because we want her intercession.  Whenever we pray to Our Lady we are in essence asking her to pray for us, and with us, to her Son.  Could we skip Mary and go straight to Jesus?  Yes.  But this is a mistake.  We ask our family and friends to pray for us, so why would we not ask our Heavenly Mother to pray for us?  I don’t know about you, but I need all the help I can get down here.  So there’s no way I’m going to deprive myself of the help of the most powerful intercessor in the Church!

Praying to Mary doesn’t take anything away from Jesus.  In fact it honors Him, because now instead of just one person praying to Him (us), there’s two (Mary and us).  It also honors Jesus because He gave Mary to us as our Mother.  When we pray to her, we are honoring His command to take her into our homes/hearts (Jn 19:26-27)!  But when we don’t allow her that role in our lives, it is we as her children who suffer.  Like any good mother Mary loves us and wants to help.  But she can only help as much as we allow her to.  So the more we make her a part of our lives, the more she can help lead us to Jesus.

I like to think of it this way.  Mary is seated at the right of Christ (like Queen Bathsheba seated to the right of her son King Solomon in 1 Kings 2:19).  I go to her with a request, and she and I both turn to her Son with my request.  Then, knowing His divine will perfectly, she turns back to me and dispenses the appropriate and necessary graces to do His will.  Then we both turn back to Christ in thanksgiving, since it is only because of Him that those graces are there to be given.  Could we ignore Mary and only talk to Jesus?  Yes.  But she’s right there next to Him so that would be insult to both the King and Queen.

The bottom line is that Mary loves us and wants to help.  The more we “behold our Mother” (Jn 19:27), the more she can work in our lives.  Mary’s will was, and is, in perfect conformity with the will of her Son – so therefore like her Son, she desires the good for us more than we ever could for ourselves.  Let us not deprive ourselves of so great a Mother and Advocate!

Pray for us O Holy Mother of God, that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ!  Tota tua…

See Also: Why Bother with Mary?

In His great love, Jesus is always pursuing our hearts…

• “Behold this divine Lover at the gate, He does not simply knock, but stands knocking; He calls the soul, come, arise, make haste, my love (Song 2:16), and puts his Hand into the lock to try whether He cannot open it.”

And the more we come to know His love for us, the more we desire to love Him…

• “When the soul sees her God wounded by love for her sake, she immediately receives from it a reciprocal wound…And we, seeing the Savior of our souls wounded to death by love of us, even to the death of the cross, how can we but be wounded for him, but wounded with a wound as much more dolorously amorous as his was amorously dolorous, and a wound as great as is our inability to love him as much as his love and death require?”

And Jesus always responds to our desire to love Him more by giving us the ability to do so…

• “For the measure in which our heart dilates itself, or rather lets itself be dilated and enlarged, and does not deny the void of its consent to the Divine Mercy, in the same measure the Divine Mercy always pour into it, sheds over it, and increasing and ever increasing inspiration under which we also increase, growing more and more in divine love”

Love of God and a life of prayer then help teach us to place God’s will above our own…

• “Our free will is never so free as when it is a slave to the will of God, nor ever so much a slave as when it serves our own will.  It never has so much life as when it dies to itself, nor ever so much death, as when it lives to itself”
• “The indifferent heart is as a ball of wax in the hands of its God, receiving with equal readiness all the impressions of the Divine pleasure; it is a heart without choice, equally disposed for everything, having no other object of its will than the will of its God, and placing its affections not upon the things of God but upon the will of God who wills them”

When we have died to ourselves we are then able to joyfully embrace all the Lord sends us…

• “Look at tribulations in themselves, and they are dreadful; behold them in the will of God, and they are love and delights…In truth, love either takes away the hardship of labor, or makes it dear to us while we feel it”
• ” God has given [crosses] to you with His holy hand; receive them, kiss them, love them.  My God!  They are all perfumed with the dignity of the place from which they come “

I hope you will meditate on some of these quotes because they are so rich!  We have so much to learn from St. Francis de Sales, and it’s my most fervent prayer that we will come to know him better and let him teach us to love God as he does!

For a more autobiographical post on St. Francis de Sales, check out The Patience & Perseverance of A Saint