Pope Francis's Unexpected Encounter with an Ulsterman

The Telegraph's John Bingham, an Ulster protestant, was in the Vatican City on Sunday when, suddenly, he found himself face to face with the new Pope. He describes what happened next.

From The Telegraph

By John Bingham, Vatican City

Mr Paisley, I hope you are sitting down if you read this. 

In an unwitting ecumenical gesture, Pope Francis shook hands with the first Ulster protestant of his reign today: me.

I had turned up outside the small parish church of Saint Anna in the Vatican to cover the scene as he attended mass before his first Angelus address in St Peter's square. 

Saint Patrick's Breastplate

Dr. Benjamin Carson: Obama Trying to Destroy Country

Pope Francis — Against the West?

By Patrick J. Buchanan 

“The Faith is Europe. And Europe is the Faith,” wrote Hilaire Belloc after that bloodbath we call World War I. “Either Europe will return to the Faith or she will perish.”

By 1938, Belloc concluded Christian Europe was done:

“The bad work begun at the Reformation is bearing its final fruit in the dissolution of our ancient doctrines — the very structure of society is dissolving.” He was right. Europe is the dying continent.

And looking back at the history of the Old Continent, we see the truth of G.K. Chesterton’s insight: When men cease to believe in God, they do not then believe in nothing, they will believe in anything. 

Father Rutler: "The Source of All Prodigy"

A weekly column by Father George Rutler.

The rabbis talking with the twelve-year-old Jesus about the Torah must have thought that he was a child prodigy. There have been such, and as a proud pastor I delight in the extraordinary skills of so many of the children in our parish, so adept at piano and violin and so forth. “Prodigy” means a sign or a gift. Betraying a prejudice, I’d propose that in addition to the five ways St. Thomas Aquinas proved the existence of God from natural evidence, prodigious Mozart would be a sixth. You cannot compose a symphony at the age of eight and ascribe it just to chemistry or biology.

A nice thing about Mozart is that he was nice. People liked him, and he liked them, and he did not storm about like the self-styled geniuses of the romantic period a couple of generations later. He thought of himself as a craftsman who enjoyed his craft. Simple as that. But he never produced anything second rate, which is why I propose him as proof that there exists a God who does great things through his creatures. Mozart said that music is not in the notes but in the silence between the notes. That might sound like a nice throwaway line, but he meant it, and his music is proof. So it is with our daily lives: God is to be heard in the silent spaces between all that we say and do.

Jesus cannot be filed away in the category of child prodigies. He is the source of all prodigy. At the age of twelve in the Temple, he called it his “Father’s house.” In him was more than genius. It is true that great artists, like Jesus himself, give the impression that what they do is effortless. The Latin phrase ars est celare artem means that the essence of art is to give the impression that it is easy. Great opera singers would have you think that their sounds are effortless. Compare that with the rock singers who affect an air of pain when they scream into sound amplifiers, as though they (and not their listeners) were enduring some form of torture. It is their attempt to make you think that their artlessness is art.

In the sixteenth century, Baldassare Castiglione coined the term sprezzatura for affected nonchalance, or deliberate casualness. But there was more than that in the miracles of Christ. There were times when the disciples saw the anguish his purity endured in a broken world, as when he groaned before he raised Lazarus from the dead. Prodigies receive their talent from God. Christ is God himself. Mozart understood that and said: “It is a great consolation for me to remember that the Lord to whom I had drawn near in humble and childlike faith, has suffered and died for me, and that He will look on me in love and compassion.”

Atheist Group Sues US Gov't to Remove 'In God We Trust' From Currency

The Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF), is suing the United States Treasury Department to remove the words "In God We Trust" from all U.S. currency, because they claim the motto is offensive to nonreligious citizens.

Nineteen plaintiffs and the FFRF filed the lawsuit, Newdow v. Congress in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on Feb. 1. The civil action claims the motto In God We Trust violates the First and Fifth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993.

The plaintiffs' claim that the motto is offensive and forces atheists, agnostics, secular humanists, freethinkers and skeptics to bear a religious message they don't agree with, and are thus forced, when using U.S. currency, to make a false declaration regarding their religious views.

Read more at the Christian Post >>

Pope Francis’s First Homily in the Sistine Chapel with the Cardinal Electors

HOMILY OF THE HOLY FATHER POPE FRANCIS

 

Sistine Chapel
Thursday, 14 March 2013

 

[Video]
Photo Gallery

 

In these three readings, I see a common element: that of movement. In the first reading, it is the movement of a journey; in the second reading, the movement of building the Church; in the third, in the Gospel, the movement involved in professing the faith. Journeying, building, professing.

Journeying. "O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the Lord" (Is 2:5). This is the first thing that God said to Abraham: Walk in my presence and live blamelessly. Journeying: our life is a journey, and when we stop moving, things go wrong. Always journeying, in the presence of the Lord, in the light of the Lord, seeking to live with the blamelessness that God asked of Abraham in his promise.

Building. Building the Church. We speak of stones: stones are solid; but living stones, stones anointed by the Holy Spirit. Building the Church, the Bride of Christ, on the cornerstone that is the Lord himself. This is another kind of movement in our lives: building.

Thirdly, professing. We can walk as much as we want, we can build many things, but if we do not profess Jesus Christ, things go wrong. We may become a charitable NGO, but not the Church, the Bride of the Lord. When we are not walking, we stop moving. When we are not building on the stones, what happens? The same thing that happens to children on the beach when they build sandcastles: everything is swept away, there is no solidity. When we do not profess Jesus Christ, the saying of Léon Bloy comes to mind: "Anyone who does not pray to the Lord prays to the devil." When we do not profess Jesus Christ, we profess the worldliness of the devil, a demonic worldliness.

Journeying, building, professing. But things are not so straightforward, because in journeying, building, professing, there can sometimes be jolts, movements that are not properly part of the journey: movements that pull us back.

This Gospel continues with a situation of a particular kind. The same Peter who professed Jesus Christ, now says to him: You are the Christ, the Son of the living God. I will follow you, but let us not speak of the Cross. That has nothing to do with it. I will follow you on other terms, but without the Cross. When we journey without the Cross, when we build without the Cross, when we profess Christ without the Cross, we are not disciples of the Lord, we are worldly: we may be bishops, priests, cardinals, popes, but not disciples of the Lord.

My wish is that all of us, after these days of grace, will have the courage, yes, the courage, to walk in the presence of the Lord, with the Lord’s Cross; to build the Church on the Lord’s blood which was poured out on the Cross; and to profess the one glory: Christ crucified. And in this way, the Church will go forward.

  

My prayer for all of us is that the Holy Spirit, through the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary, our Mother, will grant us this grace: to walk, to build, to profess Jesus Christ crucified. Amen.