Forgotten Truths To Set Faith Afire!

(Image Source: Wikimedia Commons )   What is our Catholic responsibility? It is painfully obvious. Our duty is to know the truth revealed by Christ and taught by His Church. Our duty is to live the truth, as Christ who is Truth Incarnate showed us by His life on earth how we are to live in this passing world of space and time. Our duty is to defend the truth, because we realize how disastrous are the consequences of error and how blessed are the fruits of possessing the truth. Our duty is to share the truth with others, because this is the highest practice of charity, on which our salvation depends. Our duty is to suffer for the truth. We are to rejoice as Christ tells us when people oppose us, criticize us, and speak all kinds of calumny against us – in a word – when we are persecuted for proclaiming the truth which God, who is Truth, became man to reveal. Our Lord, Truth Incarnate, was crucified for proclaiming in Palestine.  Servant of God Father John A. Hardon, S. J. ...

The greatest tragedy in the world, Cardinal Cushing once said, was not pain, but wasting pain.   We all suffer, everyone of us, the youngest to oldest.   We suffer loneliness, cancer, the loss of a wife, a husband, a child; we suffer misunderstandings, family conflicts, ruptured friendships, cosmetic disfigurement, mental, emotional, physical incapacities.   We suffer a sense of utter powerlessness, an empty feeling of futility.   The world is awash in pain.   How tragic if that pain is wasted; that pain can be united with the suffering of Christ on the cross to achieve enormous good.   The Cardinal knew that Christ did not make possible the salvation of the world through his teaching, his preaching, his miracles, but by his suffering and death on the cross.   When He appeared to be utterly powerless, He was radiating the greatest power unleashed in the world.   When He was crying out, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?”   ...