1. From a New York Times article on the damage ISIS genocide has wrought on the Assyrian Christians:
In…Tel Shamiran, only Samira Nikola, 65, remains with her adult son.
She, too, was kidnapped by the Islamic State with her husband and four other relatives, three of them children. After her release, she returned to find her home looted and her family’s truck and two milk cows gone, stolen by the jihadists.
She put the house back together and works with her son to raise chickens and grow cucumbers, grapes and olives in the garden around their mud farmhouse.
Her other children are in Australia or Germany, but she does not want to leave.
“Just keep the evil people away from us,” she said. “We don’t ask anything else of God.”
2. From the pope’s letter today: “we did not act in a timely manner, realizing the magnitude and the gravity of the damage done to so many lives. We showed no care for the little ones; we abandoned them”
And learning of the evil that has happened and seeing slow action, people are feeling orphaned.
“My Lord and My God!,” an elderly man exclaimed with all his might yesterday at the Sunday Mass I went to in New York. You could hear the struggle in His voice and also a certainty. Why would you ever go to Church in the first place, especially with all the evil that has been seen and will continue to be? His exclamation/proclamation/continuing act of faith would be the reason.
Where Eucharistic faith is real and ever-growing, good will be done, for grace will be resplendent. Or so we have said we believe…
As many have and will commented, words are necessarily but they are insufficient. There’s no time to be wasted living the Beatitudes. People need to be overwhelmed by our love if they are ever going to see Jesus.
I can’t get out of my mind one of the people who was abused by a priest as a child in Pennsylvania talking about how the very word God can be unbearable for her. What we need most was made into torture for her.
Someone suggested for every minute spent reading about scandal in the Church (I believe it was Fr. Scalia; see below), give equal time to prayer. Would it be crazy to do a work of mercy, too? Reach out to someone in love. “Blazing charity,” like Catherine of Siena would put it.
3. “American bishops should ditch the lawyers.”
4. An Exorcist’s Perspective on the Sex Abuse Scandal
5. Alan Jacobs writes about penance:
One could argue that the really key thing about the historical, now almost lost, understanding of penance is this: it’s not something you feel, it’s something you do. There’s an excellent moral realism in this emphasis. Feelings come and go; feelings can be manufactured or pretended-to. But actions — you either do those or you don’t. You say your paternosters or you don’t say them. You wear sackcloth and pour ashes on your head, or not. You take the road to Canossa or you stay home.
Now, to be sure, these actions can be taken for impure reasons. Maybe you wear the sackcloth because you want people to see how holy you are; maybe you kneel before the Pope because you want to keep your crown. But you’re putting yourself to trouble, maybe to some really significant trouble. Moreover, as Bertolt Brecht noted, “weeping arises from sorrow, but sorrow also arises from weeping.” There are costs to acts of penance, some known, some unknown and unanticipated.
6. The bishop of Madison, Wisconsin: “There is a certain comfort level with sin that has come to pervade our teaching, our preaching, our decision making, and our very way of living.”
7. Robert P. George on First Things‘s website:
what the Church (and by “the Church” I am referring to the lay faithful as well as to the Church’s hierarchical officials) should demand—that is, absolutely insist upon without exception—of its clergy is what the clergy should preach to the people, namely, fidelity. Fidelity, fidelity, fidelity. Priests must believe and preach what the Church holds as true about God and man—and must practice what they preach. Am I advocating a zero-tolerance policy toward grave sexual sins, such as fornication, adultery, and sodomy (even when committed by consenting adults)? Yes, I am. It is not because I think these sins are unforgivable, or even that they are the worst sins. (In fact, they are forgivable and, though grave, they are not the worst sins.) It is because the infidelity expressed by and embodied in these sins, and because the scandal—undermining of the faith (including the faith of the sinning priest and the faith of the person with whom he sins)—they occasion, is simply intolerable. These sins are toxic to the priestly ministry. Priests who cannot or will not avoid them cannot effectively carry out their mission.
8. Be angry and sad and ashamed in union with Jesus; we can redeem the time. Fr. Paul Scalia’s Sunday homily.
9. Keep our friend Terry Teachout and his wife in your prayers.
http://www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight/2018/08/wait-hope-and-live.html
10. https://twitter.com/Adoption_Option/status/1031533375268564994
PLUS: This seemed providentially timed in my Magnificat (monthly missal with daily Scripture readings and prayers and meditations) today (on St. Bernard’s memorial day):
Whatever must be done, whatever must be refused, whatever must be borne, whatever must be chosen, you, O Lord, are my hope. — Saint Bernard of Clairvaux #TweetingWithTheSaints pic.twitter.com/5klJdEypIK
— Kathryn Jean Lopez (@kathrynlopez) August 20, 2018
(Relatedly.)
My syndicated column today tries to learn from birth mothers.
Q&A with Leah Libresco about Building the Benedict Option.