Five Things To Know on March 21

1. Father John Crossin head of the bishops Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs offers an important insight on criminal justice issues in his blog post on ecumenism on the margins. 

2. Pope Francis in his morning homily reminds people that prayer and humility are needed in a world that can hold out an unrealistic view of self-sufficiency.

3. The USCCB Lenten calendar today points out that destitution is not the same as poverty because destitution is poverty without faith, without support, without hope. The message comes from Pope Francis' message for Lent 12014.

4. Dioceses around the country are now preparing thousands of men and women to enter the Catholic Church on Holy Saturday through the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults.

5. God loves you.

Almsgiving: Love in a Troubled World

By Jill Rauh
Almsgiving, one of the three pillars of Lenten practice, means donating money and time to help others in need. With 46 million Americans living below the poverty line, children as victims of violence, and global conflicts that wreak havoc on families around the world, what kind of almsgiving are we called to practice this Lent?

Pope Benedict XVI’s Lenten message for 2013 emphasizes the power of God’s love to transform us. Our encounter with “God who is Love,” Pope Benedict writes, necessarily opens our eyes to our neighbors. Almsgiving becomes more than just a donation in Lent. It is transformative, an experience of solidarity with others.

The pope’s Lenten message mirrors what he said in his first encyclical Deus Caritas Est, or God is Love, and in Porta Fidei, the guiding document to the Year of Faith. The pope notes that when transformed by Christ’s love, we come to recognize the face of Christ in our brothers and sisters in need. We are compelled by faith to act for justice.

This is connected to what we do every Sunday: we gather as Christ’s body, hear the Word of God, celebrate the Eucharistic meal, are transformed, and go out as disciples—on mission in the world.

We must work both to meet immediate needs through charitable works and to work for long-term change through social justice by addressing the root causes of social ills. We are called to walk with Two Feet of Love in Action.

Here are some ideas for how we can put love in action this Lent:

· Participate in CRS Rice Bowl, the program of Catholic Relief Services that invites people to pray with families and faith communities, fast in solidarity with the hungry, learn more about the challenges of poverty overseas and give alms to those in need.

· Visit www.povertyusa.org or www.pobrezausa.org to learn about poverty in the United States and join the efforts of faith communities that are responding.

· Make a commitment to take action each week with Catholics Confront Global Poverty on behalf of vulnerable brothers and sisters around the world.

· Do a self-assessment of how you, or your parish, school or community put love into action.

There’s much need in today’s society. At the same time love in action can illuminate a world grown dim and give distressed people the courage to live and work in hope. Almsgiving helps meet physical needs and costs dollars, time and commitment. But, more important, it nurtures hope, and that is priceless.

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Jill Rauh is Outreach Coordinator with the USCCB Department of Justice, Peace and Human Development.

The Christian Portfolio

            Awake or not, many of us at baptism became ambassadors. Along with water and oil, we received a portfolio of privileges and responsibilities and a commission to spread the Gospel.

            The portfolio demands a relationship with God and we have tools to nurture the relationship. Number one is prayer. It’s easy. As Woody Allen once said of life, “90 percent is just showing up.” Prayer can be as extensive as a week’s retreat or as brief as a pause to ask “Where did I see the face of God today?” But we have to show up.

            Prayer grounds us. It can make us so grounded that, as someone once wrote on a poster, if accused of being a Christian we’d be convicted. The late Tim Russert was a man of prayer. It helped him stand for Governor Bob Casey when he was kept from speaking at the 1992 Democratic National Convention because of his pro-life stand. People criticized Russert, then the moderator of “Meet the Press,” for standing up for Casey. “They outed me, a la ‘Well, Russert’s a Catholic, you know,” said Russert. “What would you expect?’” He stood for fairness and was convicted – for standing for principle.

            The portfolio carries responsibilities. Christians belong to a community. It holds that others are holy, not things to be used or goods to be discarded. A woman who volunteered with Mother Teresa in Calcutta told how she got into the work. Her husband was a diplomat in India. Many evenings they’d go out to embassy receptions and then come home to find the poor lying in their portico. They had to step over them to get inside. “If you had any heart at all, you had to try to alleviate the suffering,” she said. She’d translated the tale of the Good Samaritan and also might be convicted of being a Christian.   

Hope stands tall in the Christian portfolio. Death is not an ending. Hope lets us say more than “he was a great guy.” It offers something to hold on to. The deceased has found a better life. Through the Communion of Saints, both living and dead, we’re still in touch with those who’ve passed on.   

Faith is for more than ourselves. A friend with teens visited a mother whose son had drowned. As they left home, her children gave her the godmother speech, as in “God, Mother! Don’t say anything.” She promised they would not be embarrassed and told the grieving mother, “You know, you will see him again.” The children were aghast but the neighbor came by later to talk about when she would see her son again.

Today’s fierce political speech challenges Christians. There is nothing quite like mud wrestling to draw our lesser side. Verbal brawling degrades us, but efforts toward civil discourse can counter this. A Lenten exercise might be to write a positive response to a negative blog post. Since we’re all children of God we’re addressing family.

Life can be rough, but baptism’s commission to spread the message of Christ, equips us for the journey. The anointing with water and oil always takes hold.

Power up for Lent

               Post on Facebook. Send a tweet. Less than a month before Ash Wednesday Pope Benedict XVI has called on Catholics to get into social media. He blesses the world of Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest and Facebook. He calls social media the new “agora,” the “open public square in which people share ideas, information and opinions, and in which new relationships and forms of community can come into being.”

            The pope lauded the latest communications breakthroughs in his 47^th World Communications Day message, “Social Networks: portals of truth and faith; new spaces for evangelization.” World Communications Day is marked in the U.S. on May 12.

            For Pope Benedict social media is opportunity. A Lenten exercise for us may be to help social media be worthy of the papal endorsement. We need to sanctify the net. Here are some steps:

            Go positive to counter the negative. The Web is filled with snide and snarky comments, so offer a counter balance. When you see meanness, an untruth or bias, gently correct for the record.

            Pray for the nay-sayers and character assassins who hide behind anonymity. Writers marked by mean speech reflect inner pain.  

            Resist knee-jerk responses. Ask how someone on the receiving end will feel before flinging a verbal slice and dice.

            Lent is a time for alms-giving so seek out worthy charities to which to donate. Catholic Relief Services’ Operation Rise Bowl is one. Catholic Charities agencies are always in need.

Share where you’ve seen God during the day and use pics. God’s there in the kids who make us laugh, the beauty of a flower, the images of love that touch our hearts. God’s also there in starving children and fragile elderly begging for help.

            Research sites that help you pray. The U.S. bishops at www.usccb.org/bible offer daily readings from Scripture with a reflection. The Irish Jesuits at www.sacredspace.ie use simple music and reflections to draw one to contemplative ground. Share what you’ve found with friends.

            Remember that how you say something may be even more important than what you say.

            Converse with people with whom you do not agree and seek common ground from which both of you can move on.

            Establish you own creed for social media behavior e.g.  Don’t deal in put downs, think before you type, find something positive to contribute to the conversation, don’t text while driving and don’t text while someone is sharing real time with you.

            Have the strength to power down. If social media get in the way of your relationship with God, family or friends, let yourself power down. Don’t check the computer until you’ve said good morning to God. Let the day’s last thoughts center on thanking God for his graces rather than a news flash from the Drudge Report.

            Send a tweet to Pope Benedict at @pontifex and download his app to your cellphone or I-pad so you can easily check in with him for his wisdom.

            Social media can touch hearts, notes Pope Benedict in the 2013 World Communications Day address. “When we are present to others, in any way at all, he says, “we are called to make known the love of God to the furthest ends of the earth.”

Journey to the Foot of the Cross: Bishop Ricken Offers 10 Things to Remember For Lent

Bishop David L. Ricken of Green Bay, Wisconsin, chairman of the Committee on Evangelization and Catechesis of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), offers “10 Things to Remember for Lent” as the Church prepares to begin the season with Ash Wednesday on February 22:

1. Remember the formula. The Church does a good job capturing certain truths with easy-to-remember lists and formulas: 10 Commandments, 7 sacraments, 3 persons in the Trinity. For Lent, the Church gives us almost a slogan—Prayer, Fasting and Almsgiving—as the three things we need to work on during the season.

2. It’s a time of prayer. Lent is essentially an act of prayer spread out over 40 days. As we pray, we go on a journey, one that hopefully brings us closer to Christ and leaves us changed by the encounter with him.

3. It’s a time to fast. With the fasts of Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, meatless Fridays, and our personal disciplines interspersed, Lent is the only time many Catholics these days actually fast. And maybe that’s why it gets all the attention. “What are you giving up for Lent? Hotdogs? Beer? Jelly beans?” It’s almost a game for some of us, but fasting is actually a form of penance, which helps us turn away from sin and toward Christ.

4. It’s a time to work on discipline. The 40 days of Lent are also a good, set time to work on personal discipline in general. Instead of giving something up, it can be doing something positive. “I’m going to exercise more. I’m going to pray more. I’m going to be nicer to my family, friends and coworkers.

5. It’s about dying to yourself. The more serious side of Lenten discipline is that it’s about more than self-control – it’s about finding aspects of yourself that are less than Christ-like and letting them die. The suffering and death of Christ are foremost on our minds during Lent, and we join in these mysteries by suffering, dying with Christ and being resurrected in a purified form.

6. Don’t do too much. It’s tempting to make Lent some ambitious period of personal reinvention, but it’s best to keep it simple and focused. There’s a reason the Church works on these mysteries year after year. We spend our entire lives growing closer to God. Don’t try to cram it all in one Lent. That’s a recipe for failure.

7. Lent reminds us of our weakness. Of course, even when we set simple goals for ourselves during Lent, we still have trouble keeping them. When we fast, we realize we’re all just one meal away from hunger. In both cases, Lent shows us our weakness. This can be painful, but recognizing how helpless we are makes us seek God’s help with renewed urgency and sincerity.

8. Be patient with yourself. When we’re confronted with our own weakness during Lent, the temptation is to get angry and frustrated. “What a bad person I am!” But that’s the wrong lesson. God is calling us to be patient and to see ourselves as he does, with unconditional love.

9. Reach out in charity. As we experience weakness and suffering during Lent, we should be renewed in our compassion for those who are hungry, suffering or otherwise in need. The third part of the Lenten formula is almsgiving. It’s about more than throwing a few extra dollars in the collection plate; it’s about reaching out to others and helping them without question as a way of sharing the experience of God’s unconditional love.

10. Learn to love like Christ. Giving of ourselves in the midst of our suffering and self-denial brings us closer to loving like Christ, who suffered and poured himself out unconditionally on cross for all of us. Lent is a journey through the desert to the foot of the cross on Good Friday, as we seek him out, ask his help, join in his suffering, and learn to love like him.

For more resources for Lent from USCCB, visit: www.usccb.org/prayer-and-worship/liturgical-resources/lent/.

Lenten Disciplines: One Reporter's Journey

A few Lents back, I was still working as a reporter at the diocesan level. One of the challenges of diocesan reporting is to continually find new angles to stories that come up on a pretty cyclical basis, and Lent is no exception. That year, I decided to talk to a handful of everyday Catholics and get their personal take on what the season of Lent -- and its disciplines -- mean for them and how it plays out in their daily lives.

My hope was that I wouldn't just have a series of articles cataloguing what half a dozen people had given up that year -- chocolate, TV, foul language, interrupting. But what I ended up getting from my interview subjects was far better than I'd hoped for; it was an impressively diverse cluster of reflections that are still providing spiritual encouragement years after the fact.

There was Joyce, a parish RCIA instructor whose job was to guide people into the Church year after year, culminating in Lent and Easter. Against this backdrop, she encouraged candidates and catechumens not to look at the Lenten discipline of fasting as simply giving something up, but of discarding something about oneself that causes separation from God.

On some level, this is just a minor change in perspective. "I'm giving up excessive Internet browsing because it makes me fat and lazy" vs. "I'm giving up excessive Internet browsing because it detracts from time that could be spent in prayer, etc." Both acknowledge a form of gluttony. One is more focused on how the relationship with God fits into it.

Another take on this perspective is that an ungodly part of a person dies during Lent so that the person may be resurrected anew.

Of course, along with death and resurrection as recurring Lenten themes come sacrifice and suffering. These elements came to the fore when I interviewed Justin, a recent college graduate who'd majored in religious studies.

Justin's thinking on Lent was closely tied to his admiration of the writings of Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI. He cited an essay that describes the love of Christ as a love that went all the way because it refused to return violence and instead poured itself out completely. In the sacrifices of Lent, we learn to show God a love that weathers sacrifice. And again, we die and rise again. In short, Lent is learning to love like Christ.

By this point, Lent sounds like a great opportunity to completely reinvent oneself ... "I'm going to take all those petty, indulgent, sinful things about me, and I'm going to purify myself by casting them off! Sure it will hurt, but the suffering unites me with Christ and allows me to love more perfectly!"

And that lasts about two days.

When I spoke to Father Joe, a local pastor, he raised the point that Lent is also about coming to terms with one's own weakness and dependence on God. So often Catholics head into Lent with great intentions of penance and self improvement, but they get discouraged by their inability to adhere to their own commitments.

Father Joe said he urges patience with oneself as part of the Lenten discipline. Just as the very act of fasting weakens us and reminds us of our need for nourishment, the challenges of Lent remind us that only by the grace of God can we do anything.

The frustrations of Lent came to light in an interview with Charity, a high school senior and aspiring photographer. She catalogued her own Lenten complications of years past, such as woefully underestimating her addiction to coffee or the question of what a vegetarian is supposed to do on a Lenten Friday. In spite of these troubles, the themes of Lent still loomed in her life. Several of her friends had met early deaths, and this suffering had prompted her to make her own deaths and rebirths.

Charity's approach to Lent itself was novel. She took it upon herself to reach out to her fellow students, the marginalized and friendless. They would look back on high school and remember that at least one person was nice to them, she insisted.

At first, this seemed to fall outside the realm of typical Lenten disciplines. She wasn't exactly fasting from something. But then I realized that Charity had somehow managed to leapfrog to a different level of Lenten observance. After all, if the sacrifice of Lenten disciplines are supposed to unite us with Christ and help us love more fully, then it follows that we would act on that love by reaching out to other people with charity.