This Makes Me Think…

This makes me think…

And now my final point: be yourself. If you are going to have a personal Twitter account or a FaceBook page that is listed as yours, make it yours. Don’t have others post for you. Don’t just post aphorisms, quotes from Scripture, Church teaching or the lives of the saints. While they are good to…

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This makes me think… about being joyful.

If so mighty and excellent a Lord, then, came into the Virgin’s womb and chose to appear scorned, needy, and poor in this world so that anyone utterly poor and in absolute need heavenly nourishment might become rich in Him, then you should rejoice. Smile! Be joyful! ~ St Clare of Assisi, Letters

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This makes me think… and it makes me slow down and concentrate on the consecration…

It is by the conversion of the bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood that Christ becomes present in this sacrament. The Church Fathers strongly affirmed the faith of the Church in the efficacy of the Word of Christ and of the action of the Holy Spirit to bring about this conversion. Thus St….

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This makes me think… about how evangelizers are evangelized.

The New Evangelization reminds us that the very agents of evangelization – you and me  –will never achieve that abundant harvest Blessed John XXIII described unless we are willing and eager to first be evangelized themselves. Only those themselves first evangelized can then evangelize. As St. Bernard put it so well, “If you want to…

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This makes me think… about finding hope in the desert of pessimism…

Recent decades have seen the advance of a spiritual “desertification”. In the [Second Vatican] Council’s time it was already possible from a few tragic pages of history to know what a life or a world without God looked like, but now we see it every day around us. This void has spread. But it is…

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This makes me think… about how full my joy tank is…

Bartimaeus, on regaining his sight from Jesus, joined the crowd of disciples, which must certainly have included others like him, who had been healed by the Master.  New evangelizers are like that: people who have had the experience of being healed by God, through Jesus Christ.  And characteristic of them all is a joyful heart…

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This makes me think… it’s time to re-read the Documents of Vatican II…

[D]uring the [Second Vatican] Council there was an emotional tension as we faced the common task of making the truth and beauty of the faith shine out in our time, without sacrificing it to the demands of the present or leaving it tied to the past: the eternal presence of God resounds in the faith,…

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This makes me think… about the new evangelization…

A few days before being elected as Pope, Benedict XVI had delivered a lecture at Subiaco on the condition of Europe. In his lucid analysis of the present time, he expressed himself, amongst other things, in these far-sighted words, which constitute a program for the new evangelizers: “What we need at this time of history…

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This makes me think… about keeping Jesus at the center of the Year of Faith

[T]he new evangelization requires the capacity to know how to give an explanation of our own faith, showing Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the sole savior of humanity. To the extent that we are capable of this, we will be able to offer our contemporaries the response they are awaiting. The new evangelization begins…

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