Journeys of a Catholic Poster Girl

But wait…there’s more! (As the Count on Sesame street says…)

Here are two awesome interviews with Archbishop Chaput of Denver, who is a hero of mine. If any American could be Pope, I’d pick him (well, and my cousin, naturally.). 

The first is from NRO

Some choice bits (but you really need to read the whole thing) (emphasis mine):

LOPEZ: What should it mean when someone says, “I’m Catholic.”

ARCHBISHOP CHAPUT: It should mean that we love Jesus Christ as our redeemer, love the Catholic Church as our mother, and give our hearts to what she teaches, because she teaches in Christ’s name.

LOPEZ: What should it mean when I’m “voting Catholic?”

ARCHBISHOP CHAPUT: We should see ourselves as Catholic first — not white or black, or young or old. or Democrat or Republican, or labor militant or business owner, but Catholic firstas the main way we identify ourselves. Our faith should shape our lives, including our political choices. Of course, that demands that we actually study and deepen our Catholic faith. The Catholic faith isn’t a set of clothes that we can tailor to a personal fit. We don’t “invent” our faith, and we don’t “own” it. If we really want to be Catholic, then we’ll live by Catholic teaching. Otherwise we’re just fooling ourselves and abusing the belief of other Catholics who really do try to practice what the Church teaches.

And: (emphases mine)

LOPEZ: Whenever I write about Catholics and abortion, I am immediately asked, “What about war? What about the death penalty?” What about them? Can a Catholic vote for Senator “Surge”? We have killed people in Iraq, after all.

ARCHBISHOP CHAPUT: I’ve written and spoken against the death penalty for more than 30 years. And along with most other American bishops, I opposed our intervention in Iraq. But these issues are different in kind, not merely degree, from the violence involved in abortion. Anyone rooted in Scripture and Catholic tradition will understand the distinction if he or she reasons honestly. Genocide, euthanasia, abortion, and deliberately targeting civilians in war — these things are always grievously wrong. But in Catholic thought, war and capital punishment can be morally legitimate under certain carefully defined circumstances. Abortion is never morally justified. 

Last: 

LOPEZ: If there is one single point that every Catholic reader of your book could take away from it and pray about and make their own, what would you pray it be?

ARCHBISHOP CHAPUT: Again: Don’t lie. If we say we’re Catholic, we need to back it up with proof. Our faith needs to be the North Star of our lives. Our behavior needs to match our words, including in our political choices.

Here’s the Archbishop’s interview with radio host (and Catholic) Hugh Hewitt

And, of course, here’s the book: Render Unto Caesar. 

I have finally finished St. Augustine’s Confessions. Whew. I have to say that the last four books were a bit slow going, since he switches to theology, as opposed to the story of his life, which had been in the nine preceding books. But it was much better this time around (thank you, Good OUP Translantion!) and I am glad I have read it (again).

…from the third.
I’m talking about St. Augustine and his Confessions.
Most people that are into classical/theological lit have heard of it. A few of us have read it in its entirety. I tried once, and failed miserably. I just didn’t get it. What was everyone raving about?
Now I know. It’s been two years since I last tried to read it, and now, armed with a new translation, I have discovered the incredible wisdom and richness of Augustinian prose.
Augustine is far from a ivory-tower saint. This is a guy who dabbled with women (having a child with one of them), calling himself a “slave of lust”, while being engaged to a girl (and I do mean girl; he had to wait until she was 12 to marry her. He was over 20 by this time.). He stole, caroused, got drunk, and pursued many other activities familiar to twenty-first century frat boys. His mother, St. Monica, certainly earned her “St.” with him as a son. He left Hippo to go to Rome and Milan, teaching rhetoric to support his high living lifestyle.
Yet, somehow, God found him (in no small matter due to his mother’s unceasing prayers), he became a Christian, and, eventually, Bishop of Hippo (in North Africa).

I haven’t finished this re-through yet, but I am enthralled. This should be required reading. (Nerdy book note: PLEASE get the translation I linked to above, if you’re going to read this. It is readable, elegant and VASTLY superior to the other one I tried, which I believe was published by Signet.)

Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new; late have I loved you. And see, you were within and I was in the external world and sought you there, and in my unlovely state I plunged into those lovely created things which you made. You were with me, and I was not with you. The lovely things kept me far from you, though if they did not have their existence in you, they had no existence at all. You called out and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent, you put flight to by blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after you. I tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours. (Book X, 38)

So Lent is upon us. What are you doing?

Here’s my plan:

–Daily Bible reading (apart from the Magnificat). I have the CAtholic Women’s Devotional Bible, and I use their daily meditations.

–Lenten Reading plan: The Confessions; On The Passion of the Christ (Thomas a Kempis), and Lent and Easter with John Paul II (meditations and Lenten actions).

–Attend my parish’s Wednesday soup suppers (which are really yummy!) and Stations of the Cross (new this year–I’m excited!).

–Daily rosary (I hope I hope I hope)

–Attend at least one week day Mass per week

–Confession (at this point, it’s just getting there again. I’m not going to set a grand goal of once a week–yet. We’re working on it!)

–And the fast and abstinence requirements.

For a great Lenten primer, go here and download the guide to Lent. It is great!

I’ve been reading Chesteron’s Orthodoxy, and I thought I’d share some of my favorite passages (thus far):

The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.

The lunatic’s theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way.

How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller!

A Christian is only restricted in the same sense that an atheist is restricted. He cannot think Christianity false and continue to be a Christian; and the atheist cannot think atheism false and continue to be an atheist.

The Christian is quite free to believe that there is a considerable amount of settled order and inevitable development in the universe. But the materialist is not allowed to admit into his spotless machine the slightest spec of spirtualism or miracle.

Materialists and madmen never have doubts.

Mysticism keeps one sane.

But the cross, though it has at its heart a collision and a contradiction, can extend its four arms for ever without altering its shape. Because it has a paradox in its center it can grow without changing. The cross opens its arms to the four winds; it is a signpost for free travellers.

What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. …a man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth.

We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication tables. We are in danger of seeing philosophers who doubt the law of gravity as being a mere fancy of their own.

Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.

In the act of destroying the idea of Divine authority we have largely destroyed the idea of that human authority by which we do a long-division sum. With a long and sustained tug we have attempted to pull the mitre off pontifical man; and his head has come off with it.

I am still as much concerned as ever about the Battle of Armagedoon; but I am not so much concerned about the General Election [E note: well, not me, so much...]

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.

One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.

Remember..that to be breakable is not the same as to be perishable.

It may be that our tragedy has touched the gods, that they admire it from their starry galaxies, and that at the end of every human drama man is called again and again before the curtain.

[T]he materialist, like the madman, is in prison; in the prison of one thought.

This cosmos is indeed without peer and without price; for there cannot be another one.

[T]he proper form of thanks to it is some fore of humility and retraint.

We ow[e]…an obedience to whatever made us.

For this month’s selection, In This House of Brede, go over to the bucket.

Book I’m reading: Salt of the Earth

Books upcoming:

• Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton
• Confessions, St. Augustine (yes, again, in a better translation!)

Nutmeg’s online book club is meeting again in January, and I am hosting over at the Bucket! Hop over there for my pick (it’s a Catholic novel!), and join us!

Quick Take: A New addition to my book Hall of Fame, and the first installment of Nutmeg’s online book club! This amazing story of a young Rwandan woman’s faith-filled survival of the 1994 April genocide will blow your mind and deepen your faith all at the same time.

Left to Tell: Finding God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust, by Immaculee Ilibagiza (with Steve Irwin)

“I heard the killers call my name.”

That is the first line of a harrowing, uplifting and painful autobiography of Immaculee, a young woman who was a college student home for Easter break when the horrific genocide of April 1994 began in Rwanda. She had grown up the third of four children, and the only girl, with two devoutly Catholic parents who passed their faith onto their children, as well as the belief that all people all God’s children, and worthy of respect and love. She paints vivid pictures of her brothers Aimable, Damascene (the brother she was closest to), and her younger brother Vianney. Immaculee had a happy childhood, and she excelled in her schoolwork.
She did not, initially, understand the differences between Tutsi and Hutu that would so change her life. Her first encounter with ethnicity was at the age of 10, when she attended school with older children. Her teacher had a “tribal roll call ” (16), and Immculee was dismissed from school for not knowing her ethnicity. The next day, her teacher told her stand up when he called “Tutsi.” So she did–and she sawe the horrible impact this emphasis on ethnicity would have first-hand.

As the genocide began in April of ‘94, she tries to stay at home with her family; hundreds of Tutsis came to the family’s property to ask Immaculee’s father for help. A few days later, Immaculee was sent to the home of Pastor Murinzi (57), who was friends with Immaculee’s father. While Vianney and Damascene eventually joined her, they were only permitted to stay one day. Immaculee, however, would wait out the genocide with five other women for 91 days.

How did she survive?

“I realized that my battle to survive this war would have to be fought inside of me. Everything strong and good in me–my faith, hope and courage–was vuleranble to the dark energy. If I lost my faith, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to survive. I could rely only on God to help me fight.” (80)

Taking the rosary her father had given her before she left the house, Immaculee immersed herself in prayer all day. When the Hutu killing squads surrounded the house, she prayed even harder. And she learned to pray for forgiveness for the killers.

Her profound faith left a deep impact on me. In fact, as soon as I finished the book, I began it again, but slower this timer, in order to fully absorb the profound insights she had about the nature of prayer, faith and total surrender to God. She knew that only God and His will would help her survive, and that He would give her the strength to handle whatever obstacles she would face during her incredible trials.

I was also moved to tears by the example of her brother, Damascene. (WARNING: HEre be spoilers!) Aimable was in another country, at school, during the genocide, but the rest of Immaculee’s family was separated throughout Rwanda as they struggled to survive. Immaculee writes about how Damascene was always her defender, protector, and best friend. Their bond was almost more than brother and sister–it was deeply spiritual.

When Immaculee finds out her brother was killed, she is bereft. But he had written her one last letter:

May 6, 1994
Dear [Dad, Mo, Vianney, and] Immaculee,
It has been nearly a month since we were separated, and we are all living a nightmare. Besides what the circumstances suggest, I believe that a tribe can exterminate another tribe only if it’s God’s will; maybe out lives are the price that must be paid for Rwanda’s salvation. I am only certain about one things: we will meet again–there is no doubt in my mind.
I’m going to try to get out of the country, but I don’t know if I’ll make it. If they kill me along the way, you shouldn’t worry about me; I have prayed enough…I am prepared for death. If I do manage to make it out of Rwanda, I will contact you as soon as the peace returns. Bonn will tell you everything that has happened to me…
Immaculee, I beg you to be strong> I’ve just heard that Mom, Dad, and Vianney have been killed. I will be in contact with you.
Big hugs and kisses!
Your brother, who loves you very much!

(152)

The chapter continues with the account of Damascene’s death. After reading it, my first thought was–this young man was a Saint. His life and death should be up for Canonization in Rome. For men like him are certainly in Heaven.

Immaculee’s strength, faith and determination are astounding. This book deepened my faith and demonstrates how we can surrender to God’s will in even the most difficult circumstances. Immaculee and her family are an inspiration to all of us.

I seriously need to do a books/movies update, so here’s what you have to look forward to:

BOOKS

–Rediscovering Catholicsm

–Left to Tell

–The Choice

–The Gift

MOVIES

–Evening

–Knocked Up (Yes, it does belong on CPG–trust me!)

Excited yet?