Corpus Christi Blog

Later this week, we will celebrate Ash Wednesday and begin our Lenten journey, leading to the most important holiday of our Christian faith – Easter. Lent is a sacred season of the liturgical year, lasting forty days, from Ash Wednesday to Holy Thursday (excluding Sundays), designed to prepare the faithful for the Paschal Mystery of Christ’s Passion, Death, and Resurrection at Easter. Its purpose is to foster interior conversion, intensify our prayer lives, and encourage our practice of penance, primarily through fasting and almsgiving. During Lent, we imitate Christ’s forty days of fasting in the desert.

I listen to The Patrick Madrid Show on Relevant Radio several times a week. Every so often, a person calls in with questions about Freemasonry and its compatibility, or incompatibility, rather, with the Catholic Church. Because it continues to come up, it has been on my mind for a while to research and provide some catechesis on Freemasonry.

Have you ever opened a Protestant Bible and wondered why it only has 66 books instead of the 73 you find in your Catholic Bible? These seven books — 1 and 2 Maccabees, Sirach, Wisdom, Baruch, Tobit, and Judith — are woven into the standard canon of the Old Testament in the Catholic Bible, while in the Protestant Bible they are separated out and viewed as historically valuable and spiritually edifying, but not divinely inspired Scripture. To get to the root of the differences, you have to take a trip through Church history, beginning with the earliest Christians and progressing through the Protestant Reformation. Let’s look at the Catholic defense of these seven books as divinely inspired Scripture and a fuller revelation of God’s wisdom.

The Catholic Church normally celebrates the Solemnity of the Conversion of St. Paul on January 25, but since it lands on a Sunday this year, it is superseded by the Liturgical Sunday. A reformed persecutor of Christians, St. Paul became one of the most significant evangelists of the early Church and the most prolific author in the New Testament. He took Jesus’ final command, “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations,” literally and seriously, traveling extensively throughout the known world, as well as sending letters and appointing representatives to places when he could not be there in person. St. Paul’s zeal for converting hearts to Jesus and to Christianity earned him the title, Patron Saint of Missionaries and Evangelists.

As Christians, we are called to be "perfect just as [our] heavenly Father is perfect" and to always strive for a life of holiness (Mt. 5:48). Yet, due to our fallen human nature, living out that call is often fraught with pitfalls and setbacks in the form of sin. Whether our sins are mortal or venial, persistent in one area or spanning across many, we are all sinners with imperfections to overcome on our personal journeys to sainthood. Fortunately, in his infinite mercy, God has given us the gift of the Sacrament of Reconciliation so we can confess our sin, have it forgiven, make reparation, and begin anew. But then, we have to go back to the same world to face the same challenges we faced before. Rather than thinking about how we are going to avoid that sin again, perhaps there is another way to think about it. Every sin begins with a seed - the seed of temptation. The following are practical insights from a little handbook titled How to Resist Temptation, by Fr. Francis J. Remler, C.M.

The Feast of the Baptism of the Lord highlights Baptism’s foundational role in the Christian life as the Sacrament of Initiation into the Church and a sign of new birth in Christ. “The Lord himself affirms that Baptism is necessary for salvation. He also commands his disciples to proclaim the Gospel to all nations and to baptize them” (CCC 1257). The purpose of Jesus’ own baptism in the Jordan River, administered by his cousin, John, was to mark the beginning of his public ministry, to reveal the Blessed Trinity, to show solidarity with us sinners by providing an example of baptism, and to sanctify the waters of baptism. By entering the waters, Jesus consecrates them as a sacramental sign, making the water capable of conferring grace and thus enabling the person to be born into new life. God could have chosen the Sacrament of Baptism to be conferred in any number of ways, but his choice of water is most fitting in light of the context of all of salvation history.

The Solemnity of the Epiphany of the Lord is the day the Church recognizes the universality of Jesus’ mission of redemption and salvation. The word “epiphany” comes from the Greek epiphaneia, which means “manifestation” or “appearance.” The Magi who followed the star to find the newborn King of the Jews were not Jews themselves, but came from other lands. At the end of their journey, when the Magi encountered Jesus in the arms of His mother, Mary, it signified his manifestation to all the world. Epiphany celebrates that the messiah, who came as the King of the Jews, is accessible and King to us all.