A Lenten journey through death into life →

During Lent, in the Eastern Church (both Catholic and Orthodox), priests consecrate the Eucharist only on Sundays and feast days. Throughout the year, daily liturgies are less common in the Eastern Church than they are in the Western Church, but in Lent, any daily liturgies (again, outside of feast days) take the form of the Liturgy of the Presanctified.

“Presanctified” refers to the previously consecrated bread, reserved from the Sunday liturgy. The faithful gather for a liturgy that is similar to a standard one, but without a consecration, and when the time comes for the distribution of holy Communion, the reserved body of Christ is distributed to the faithful.

In the distant past, the Roman rite practiced something similar during Lent, but today, the last remaining vestige of this practice in the Western Church is the Good Friday liturgy.

The coronavirus and a stark reminder that wellness was not always a given →

One of the most popular books for Lenten reading in the Eastern Catholic and Orthodox churches is “The Ladder of Divine Ascent” by St. John Climacus. St. John, a seventh-century monk and abbot of a monastery on Mount Sinai, wrote “The Ladder” for his fellow monks. Divided into 30 “steps,” the book uses the image of Jacob’s ladder (cf. Gn 28:10-19) as a metaphor for the monk’s advancement in the Christian life. . . .

I’ve read a chapter of “The Ladder of Divine Ascent” every day during Lent a few times over the past 25 or so years, each time finding deeper meaning in different steps, depending on my state in life. As I work my way through it again for the first time in probably seven years, I have been more aware than ever of St. John’s emphasis, step after step, on the need to keep our own mortality ever before our eyes.

The Amazon exhortation is a ‘Humanae Vitae’ moment for the Church →

In the weeks leading up to the release of Querida Amazonia (“The Beloved Amazon”), Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation on the October 2019 Amazon synod, all of the public voices in the entire Catholic Church seemed to be united on one point: Pope Francis was going to write something that would call into question the future of the celibate priesthood in the Roman rite of the Catholic Church.

Both those who supported a revision of the Church’s discipline on priestly celibacy and those who were opposed to it seemed to agree that the only question remaining was whether Pope Francis would suggest an exception to the ban on ordaining married men limited to the Amazon region, or whether he would open the door to much broader exceptions (or even a complete rethinking of the discipline) worldwide.

In the end, everyone got it wrong.

Understanding the ‘front porch of Lent’ →

The “front porch of Lent,” as Father Brian A.T. Bovee, our pastor at St. Mary Oratory in Rockford called the three weeks before Ash Wednesday, was meant to help ease Christians into the Lenten fast. It was a recognition that a change in heart rarely happens overnight, that we need time to set aside sinful habits so that we can embrace the spiritual discipline of Lent. And it was a reminder, too, that the fasting, abstinence, prayer and almsgiving of Lent should not be confined to those 40 days but should spill out into the rest of the liturgical year.

A teachable moment for Catholic leaders →

The politicization of every aspect of human life, a process that has been under way since the Renaissance, has had some unexpected consequences.

It’s not surprising to find governments and politicians encroaching on the rights of churches and attempting to redefine freedom of religion (which threatens the supremacy of politics) as freedom to worship (which keeps religion confined within church walls). What is surprising, though, is the extent to which Christian leaders voluntarily accept these limits and shy away from opportunities to reveal the transformative power of the Gospel.