A most blessed and happy 2012 to everyone. It is most amazing to look at 2012 and realize how much life each of have have already lived and what an era children and newborns are heading into. An amazing world and God is in charge . . . It's just us foolish humans that keep side tracking the good stuff to be done or be had in the universe.
We celebrated by early to bed in order to early to rise for New Year's Day Mass which also was Sunday Mass. We got the sad news that our newly-ordained priest was being transferred after only three months with us as a priest. He had matured and grown so much as he came into his duties as a priest. We are wistful that our parish will not be able to watch him continue his growth as a priest and person. From what we understand, there were either some death or retirements among the priests and the bishop had to restructure things a bit as we are pretty short of priests in our diocese.
It is interesting that priests and bishops preach to us that families need to provide the future of the Church. Families drastically curtail their families these days and when you only return one or two children to the world, most parents don't want to see them head for the celibate life. While the priests and bishops do preach from the altar that we need vocations, I have yet to hear too much about 'going forth and multiplying'. The limited families of this generation are damaging to society in other ways, too. We've gone from a world where each and every birth is a blessing to one that has only enough children to afford the better things in life . . . like new cars, pools, bigger homes, etc.
And, while the priests and bishops are preaching about vocations, they neglect the orthodoxy of the calling and water down the vocation to the point that it just doesn't sound that great to offer your life in service for lukewarm agendas. A friend related to me that a priest at her parish was chastising the sermon of another priest because he had made a remark about working towards bringing the Protestants back to the fold. The complaining priest said there were Protestants in the congregation that day and the priest should have taken that into consideration. Uh, are Protestants that kindly about speaking about Catholics . . . in their own churches? Why do we have to temper the truth? I knew of a parish that took down the crucifix with the corpus in the church because it offended other faiths.
It would be nice to see 2012 find a regrowth of ferver and devotion to our Faith. We need to bring back the joy and value of sacrifice. We need to offer back to God a deep prayer life in order to find His direction for us. Too many dioceses are more interested in agendas, in feel-good justice messages, and making life easy in the Church in hopes of attracting more to the Church. It just doesn't work. Discipline strengthens and stalwart defense of what we believe, attracts and develops us as Catholics.
No comments:
Post a Comment