Unearned Luck

  A friend and I were talking today about events around the world and in our own country and how very little of it seems to affect the lives, thoughts, or actions of those we know and observe in our daily travels. It struck us that the Holy Father's view of all of this must be fairly distressing. To wit, in one half of the world Catholics are being slaughtered physically by the hundreds or even the thousands every day. Just a daily reading of the news blurbs coming across the Missio app makes clear the sheer horror these people are facing as they are being identified, culled, and killed. The Catholics in the other half of the world are being slaughtered spiritually. Consumerism, cynicism, self-hatred, incredibly poor catechesis, complacency, and countless other evils either have pushed Catholics out of the Church or have left them in the Church as cultural Catholics with no real attachment to the faith. While not as dramatic, so not the fodder of news editors, this slaught...

One of the most admirable aspects of the relationship between St. Ambrose and St. Augustine during the time that St. Augustine was taking instruction from St. Ambrose was the willingness of St. Ambrose to let St. Augustine leave and return to North Africa without being received into the Church. St. Augustine understood everything that St. Ambrose had taught him and thought all of it made perfect sense. He just couldn't believe it. Instead of telling St. Augustine that he didn't have to believe all of it or that he could decide for himself what he believed, St. Ambrose respected the truth of the Catholic faith and St. Augustine's dignity and did not receive St. Augustine on a kind of "conditional" basis. For both St. Ambrose and St. Augustine, everything the Church taught was vital to and necessary for salvation and, therefore, had to be believed. The reason St. Augustine had not become a devoted follower of any other religion or philosophy at the time was this v...