Love Draws Us Forward

 

Richard Rohr's Daily Meditations

 

From the Center for Action and Contemplation

 

 

Week Three: Healers and Changemakers

 

Love Draws Us Forward

 

 

 

Father Richard points to the transformative power of St. Francis and other more recent mystics and prophets.  

Francis of Assisi (1182–1226) was a living exemplar of where we are all being attracted and led. Just as the Cosmic Christ serves as the Omega Point (Teilhard de Chardin’s term) for all of history, Francis is also a prime attractor, or what medieval theologians called a “final cause.” Christ and Francis draw humanity forward just by walking the full journey themselves. Transformed people quite simply transform people and set the bar of history higher for all of us. That is one of the ways we fundamentally “help” other people.  

 

FaithNews

Vatican approves document allowing openly gay men to become priests in Italy

Claire Giangravé - Religion News ServiceJanuary 13, 2025

The Vatican City flag, left, and a pride flag. (Images courtesy Wikimedia/Creative Commons)

VATICAN CITY (RNS) — A provisional document published by the Italian Bishops’ Conference on Friday (Jan. 10) and approved by the Vatican cautiously opens the door for the ordination of openly gay men to the priesthood, while maintaining the normal requirement of chastity.

“In the formative process, when referring to homosexual tendencies, it’s also appropriate not to reduce discernment only to this aspect, but, as for every candidate, to grasp its meaning in the global framework of the young person’s personality,” the document reads, adding that the goal is for the candidate to know himself and find harmony between his human and priestly vocation.

 

How Catholic is the new Congress?

Robert David SullivanJanuary 13, 2025

The dome of U.S. Capitol is pictured in Washington Nov. 24, 2024. The House Judiciary subcommittee heard testimony on the FACE Act Dec. 18, 2024. (OSV News photo/Benoit Tessier, Reuters)

To paraphrase E.J. Dionne’s dictum about the Catholic vote, there is no Catholic bloc in Congress, and yet, the Catholic members of the House and Senate matter a great deal.

According to a report released earlier this month by the Pew Research Center, 28.2 percent of the members in the newly elected Congress identify as Catholic, compared with about 20 percent of the U.S. population who do so. Though Republicans have narrow majorities in both chambers, 55 percent of the Catholics in Congress are Democratic—far less lopsided, and closer to the total U.S. population, when compared with the six-to-one advantage Democrats enjoyed among Catholics in Congress in the mid-1960s.

 

FaithFeatures

Soccer vs. Sunday Mass: How youth sports are undermining religion—and hurting our kids

Joshua J. WhitfieldJanuary 13, 2025

Pope Francis holds an autographed football he received from the Bayern Munich soccer team on Oct. 22, 2014. (CNS photo/Alexander Hassenstein, Reuters)

This essay is a Cover Story selection, a weekly feature highlighting the top picks from the editors of America Media.

“Man, that sounds nice,” he said. I was talking about nothing, how my kids did nothing. Talking to another dad around a campfire in Oklahoma as a pack of third-grade girls loudly roamed through the woods scaring bears as far away as Arkansas, it was an instance of honesty, staring at the fire. A moment of truth, it was a confession of exhaustion, each admitting to the other how he really felt.

Talking about what our kids did—the sports they were in, the teams they were on, all the games they played, I told him about our family’s annual off-season, how during the winter our kids get bored, fight over the remote and spend sometimes entire Saturdays doing nothing at all. You’d think my kid had been accepted to Notre Dame or Harvard the way I bragged about it. That’s what sounded nice, this fellow dad admitted with a laugh, and a little resignation too—doing nothing.

The case against Opus Dei

 

Guest Voices

Opinion

The case against Opus Dei

Gareth Gore  ncr

Pope appoints three US experts, two of them women, as dicastery members

January 13, 2025

Pope appoints three US experts, two of them women, as dicastery members

Carol Glatz, OSV News  ncr

 

Christmas cards tell a story of the deeper dimensions of life

 

January 14, 2025

Christmas cards tell a story of the deeper dimensions of life

Joan Chittister  ncr

WHAT IS THE MEANING OF JESUS’ BAPTISM? THE FEAST ENDING CHRISTMAS

 

WHAT IS THE MEANING OF JESUS’ BAPTISM? THE FEAST ENDING CHRISTMAS

We Christians reflect upon and celebrate the baptism of Jesus in significant ways: liturgically, at the conclusion of the Christmas season; devotionally, as the First Luminous Mystery of the Rosary; and theologically, as the scriptural prism for the meaning of Christian baptism.