2. “5 guard dogs and armed escort: this is the life of the bishop of the world’s most dangerous diocese“:
Archbishop Matthew Ndagoso of Kaduna, in northern Nigeria, gave Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) a glimpse into life in his diocese in northern Nigeria.
He said that eight of his priests had been kidnapped in just three years – three were killed, one is still missing and the others were freed.
He added that one of the murdered priests in particular had shown tremendous courage.
The archbishop said: “While they were pointing an AK-47 at him, he told his attackers that they should repent of their evil, so they killed him.”
3. “Mexican priest murdered, archbishop attacked”
4. “A TikTok ban doesn’t limit speech — it frees it from China’s poison”
5. “New California bill would mandate ‘trans-affirming’ foster families”
State Bill 407, sponsored by Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), would also require foster family applicants to sign a document demonstrating their understanding “that sexual orientation, gender identity and expression can evolve over time.”
The bill, introduced in March, claims that “LGBTQ foster youth are currently being placed in nonaffirming families that have been approved by counties and the state, causing additional harm and trauma.”
SB 407, whose supporters include advocacy groups Equality California and Family Builders, “helps ensure LGBTQ foster youth are not placed in hostile foster homes,” according to Wiener’s office.
Opponents of the bill say that it would bar Christians and others who hold traditional views on gender and sexuality from welcoming foster children.
“Loving families may question the appropriateness of certain services — whether from conscience, faith, or from concern with the medical soundness of gender affirming care,” California Catholic Conference Executive Director Kathleen Buckley Domingo wrote in a letter to the Senate judiciary committee last month.
6. “Massachusetts panel says child abuse laws should protect transgender kids from parents”
7. Cardinal Timothy Dolan: “A Catholic Cardinal’s Appreciation of Pastor Tim Keller”
“So many of his words moved me,” Tim Keller, the Evangelical Presbyterian pastor who died last week at seventy-two, told me when he thoughtfully called with condolences on the passing of Pope Benedict XVI, on New Year’s Eve. “But none as much as his last ones: ‘Jesus, I love you.’”
I now return the tribute. So many of Tim’s words moved me and many others—especially here in New York City—and many Catholics as well. None moved us as much as those he expressed before he died, reported by his son, Michael: “I want to go home to be with Jesus.”
Two theological giants—Benedict XVI and Tim Keller—whispering like little children as the end of their journey nears, “Jesus, I love you. . . . Jesus, I want to go home to be with you.”
While the Evangelical community especially mourns his passing, many Catholics do as well. As a Presbyterian pastor who identified as “Evangelical” at his renowned Redeemer Church here in Manhattan, Tim was intrigued by Catholicism, especially by Pope Saint John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI.
In my conversations with him, which I now recall with emotion and gratitude, he was especially eager to discuss what he termed the “restoration of confidence” he detected in John Paul’s twenty-six years as successor of St. Peter, and the “celebration of the wedding of faith and reason” he lauded in the teaching of Benedict XVI.
“Tell me that quote one more time,” he would ask me, so enchanted was he by the words of John Paul: “Jesus Christ is the answer to the question posed by every human life.” That, he would remind me, said it all, and was really a version of St. Augustine’s dictum, “We come from you, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they return to you for all eternity.”
8. Marvin Olasky: “Tim Keller Lives”
[My wife and I] enjoyed and learned to wait for Keller’s “gospel turn” two-thirds or three-fourths of the way in. Wait for it . . . wait for it . . . now. The sermons always show how Christ’s sacrifice proves God’s love: “He is so committed to our ultimate happiness that he was willing to plunge into the greatest depths of suffering himself.” They also show the unity of truth and liberty. Nietzsche libeled Christianity, calling it an enslaving religion. Listeners to Keller learn: You may think you’re free, but you’re not. You’ve made yourself a slave to money or sex or a particular body image.
I first tried to box in Keller, like one of the blind men feeling an elephant. I felt a tusk and thought “spear,” a side and thought “wall,” a tail and thought “rope.” Finally, I realized that Keller’s preaching combines all those aspects. His sermons are a spear against complacency: he criticizes those who react to Jesus tepidly, since anyone who understands Christ’s challenge and has intellectual integrity should go all out in following Him. He thrusts against those who look to Christ as an add-on: spruce up the cottage, clean out the gutters, slap on some paint. He asks why we don’t realize that God plans to make the cottage a palace.
Keller’s sermons are also a wall against idolatry. He doesn’t just harp on the easy stuff like statutes of Baal or Asherah pole dances. He talks about good things like work and beauty that we make ultimate. He gives himself as an example of falling victim to idolatry when he tried to become the perfect pastor bearing all burdens and turning down help: “It wasn’t until I began to search my heart with the biblical category of idolatry that I made the horrendous discovery that … I was using people in order to forge my own self-appreciation.”
Keller’s sermons are a rope for people like me who sometimes feel stuck on the ground unless we have a theoretical theodicy, a way of explaining the presence of evil in the world. His sermons point out the problems of good theories, like those based in natural law, that plausibly explain some evil but fall short of explaining all suffering. Keller then proposes that, instead of pretending we know God’s mind, acknowledge we don’t know all of God’s reasons, and throw onto skeptics the burden of proving “God could not possibly have” any reasons for allowing suffering and evil.
9. “Pope: May we hear the voice of the unborn through science”
10.
30 May 1926 | A Czech Jewish boy, Valtr Hirsch, was born in Prague.
He was deported to #Auschwitz from #Theresienstadt Ghetto on 30 September 1944. He was murdered in a gas chamber after the selection. pic.twitter.com/rUlN7zpS7z
— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) May 30, 2023
11. Stephen Eide: “The Encampment State”
Public concern has intensified in response to the gruesome details that give twenty-first- century homelessness such a menacing character and that give California such a dystopian reputation in connection with it. In San Diego from 2016 to 2018, a homeless-encampment-related outbreak of hepatitis A infected hundreds, 20 fatally. In the early months of Covid-19, Los Angeles contracted with a portable restroom company to facilitate better hygiene among the street population. One employee of that firm was impaled in the hand by a syringe when cleaning out a handwashing station near a needle exchange. In April 2021, a dog was burned alive in Venice by a fire likely set by a member of that community’s unsheltered population. In January 2022, a dog attacked a security guard at the San Francisco Public Library when the guard tried to use Narcan to revive the dog’s owner, who had overdosed. This past December, a San Francisco toddler overdosed on fentanyl, after coming into contact with it while playing in a park. A June 2018 column in the San Francisco Chronicle titled “Homeless Camp Pushes SF Neighborhood to the Edge” related how a two-and-a-half-year-old had “invented a game called ‘jumping over the poop’” and that “[a]nother kid across the street collected syringe caps and floated them down the stream of dirty gutter water for fun.”
12. Bishop John P. Dolan: “A ministry of human fragility: Why I established a mental health office in the Diocese of Phoenix”
God chose to become one with us in our fragility. And through his own human fragility as Jesus Christ, he accompanies us. Sharing in Jesus’ divine mission, we accompany others with the knowledge that we are set apart but never above, because we are all fragile.
As a survivor of suicide loss, I have come face to face with this reality. As a bishop, I am not above anyone. Before anything else, I am a fragile accompanier; and by God’s grace, I am ministering to those who, like me, suffer.
Imagine a mother of three struggling with depression and feeling guilty that she cannot do more for her children. Our mental health ministry’s method of accompaniment would involve inviting this mother to a parish gathering facilitated by a trained volunteer. Not only would the mother have a place to express her struggles and receive a referral to a professional, but, depending on the parish, she could also find accompaniment in the form of wraparound services: parish members bringing her meals, homework help for her children and additional community support to help lighten her burden in practical ways. This ministry is about the body of Christ coming together to support each of its beloved members.
When we ourselves have not personally suffered from mental illness, it can be difficult to understand how someone could struggle so significantly or even consider taking their life, let alone go through with this act. Thus, our natural reaction is often one of misunderstanding and judgment. But I would like to propose another response, one that seeks to accompany, to understand and to uphold our brothers and sisters who are struggling with mental illness.
13. Andrew T. Walker: “The Glory of Weakness”
The Michael J. Fox documentary is good, if only because it strikes upon what I’ve heard moral theologians refer to as the “openness to the unbidden,” the idea that part of being human is understanding that not everything that makes us human is chosen, voluntary, or under our control. It partly explains why individuals who have a physical infirmity tend to demonstrate an authenticity, meekness, and humility that those with full physical vigor believe would be weaknesses—but aren’t weaknesses at all, in fact. Limitations are capacities to see how frailty and dependence are deeply embodied aspects of human personhood.
Fox must rely on his family. At 16, I learned the same fact. In the present tense, these are hard lessons to process. In retrospect, I look back at my infirmity as a moment where my weakness evoked love from others. I had my sense of immortality that we associate with youthfulness taken from me early. I saw humanity at its best in response to my broken human body. My mom selflessly cared for me and did everything in her power to help me regain weight. She spent hours driving me to appointments and she prayed her heart out for my recovery. My girlfriend, instead of spending the summer jaunting around town with her friends, came to my home each day and just watched movies so that I would have a friend with me as I recovered. It’s a good thing I married that girl.
None of this, of course, is foreign to Christianity. Christianity gives us the interpretive grid to experience the onset of age and the frailties of the human experience. It allows us to age gracefully even while accepting the inevitability of our looming dependence. Ours is a narrative in which the Savior suffers and dies. The whole of the Apostle Paul’s ministry is one defined by suffering and despair. Even then, Paul insists that hardship produces refined faith. But then comes the promise of resurrection.
Michael J. Fox is not a Christian, to my knowledge. But if he by chance reads this, let me say to him: Mr. Fox, your weakness does not have to be the end of your story. There is a Savior, Jesus Christ, who promises to raise all who believe in him, in glory. Our bodies, as the Apostle Paul says, are “sown in weakness; it is raised in power” (1 Corinthians 15:43). That can be true for you, too.
14. “‘We did it’: 17 young mothers beat the odds and graduate high school”
“It’s been challenging. Especially waking up at five in the morning,” Wilson said. “I had to get myself ready and my baby and get on the bus by a certain time. But I made it work.”
The teens said their support systems, the TAPP program and each other helped along the way while they put in the work.
“I had to do extra credit. I had to do 10 extra classes in a semester so I could graduate early,” said graduate Claudia Aguilar Venegas.
TAPP is an alternative school serving pregnant and parenting students from surrounding middle and high schools.
The program includes child care plus medical and family services specifically designed to prevent teen pregnancy dropouts.
And it was an emotional milestone to complete for the young mothers.
“It was happy tears. Not for me, but for my kids. They couldn’t be here, sadly, but I did this for them,” Venegas said.
The young moms said the school’s resources and the teachers’ support were crucial to their success.
15. “Super mom gives birth and walks at doctorate graduation within 24 hours” — Good Morning America
16.
17. Emma Waters: “Let’s Change How We Talk About Motherhood and Pregnancy”
It’s time to reframe motherhood as the providential, pleasurable, and life-giving experience that it is. This is not to dismiss the legitimate difficulty it may bring. Rather, it is to suggest seeing motherhood through the lens of what children bring to a woman’s life.
18. Mary Lenaburg: “The spectacular joy and challenge of motherhood”
Marriage and family life are not for the faint of heart. It’s an uphill fight to stay the course that has been set before you. God chose Jerry for me and me for him, two flawed humans who had much to learn from one another. When we removed God from our marriage, there was someone else ready and waiting to take his place, one whose one job is to destroy — and boy did he. Once we allowed God full access to every dark corner of our hearts, things changed, and once we fully surrendered our marriage to him, life became more joy filled and peaceful.
19. “‘I’m just so grateful’: Abandoned at hospital chapel as a baby, woman’s life now comes full circle”
21.
Friday 26th May 2023 Thought Of The Day From Morden Underground Station pic.twitter.com/iiDxYdtls5
— Morden Station (@MordenStation) May 26, 2023
22.
Friends, it’s hard to imagine anything more offensive than some of the behavior of the “Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence,” which I think can only be described as an anti-Catholic hate group. pic.twitter.com/VLZP28Soab
— Bishop Robert Barron (@BishopBarron) May 25, 2023
23. Matthew Hennessey: “These Aren’t Tommy Lasorda’s Dodgers”
Most Americans are happy to live and let live. The Sisters of the Perpetual Indulgence have their agenda and in a free country that’s all fine and good. But why do the Dodgers need to let Sister T’aint a Virgin prance around the bases looking like a flabby Kirk Gibson in habit and cornette? Everyone is already welcome at the ballpark. It feels un-American to force-feed culture-war politics alongside the peanuts and Cracker Jack.
24. “‘Anti-Catholicism cannot go unanswered’ — Cordileone challenges charges on Serra vandalism case”
Forgiveness and reconciliation are always possible and always our first option. We must pray for those who do us wrong. We must be willing to forgive. We must also defend the right of all Americans to worship in safety and dignity. Justice and mercy are not opposed; they complement each other.
25. “A miracle in Missouri? Body of Benedictine Sisters’ foundress thought to be incorrupt”
26. “Morticians Mystified by Sister Wilhelmina’s Body: ‘Something Special Going on There’”
27. Samuel Sweeney: “Our Lady of Azakh”
The story of the Syriac Christians of Derik reflects the turmoil lived by Syria’s Christian community over the past century. It would be hard to find a more faithful community, and their faith survives in the face of war, persecution, and the emigration of their brothers, sisters, children, and friends. The Syriac Christians of Derik firmly believe that Our Lady of Azakh has not forgotten them. Equally clear, on any Saturday night at the church bearing her icon, is that they have not forgotten her.
28. Rod Serling’s enduring appeal
29. Father Peter John Cameron, O.P.: “These drunk bears will make you grasp the Spirit as never before”