The Assurance Of Things Hoped For

Every minute of every day, through every experience and encounter that we have, God invites us into His company. In order to believe, our hearts must be ready to listen and respond to God’s invitation.

This response is faith, and it involves completely submitting our intellect and our will to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). It is a free abandonment to the truth, “by trust in the person who bears witness to it” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 177). Faith stakes everything on a relationship with this person, Jesus Christ, accepting Him as revelation of the one, all-merciful and all-powerful God.

The Youth Catechism of the Catholic Church (YOUCAT) lays out the qualities of faith in bullet points:

Faith is knowledge and trust. It has seven characteristics:

• Faith is a sheer gift of God, which we receive when we fervently ask for it.
• Faith is the supernatural power that is absolutely necessary if we are to attain salvation.
• Faith requires the free will and clear understanding of a person when he accepts the divine invitation.
• Faith is absolutely certain, because Jesus guarantees it.
• Faith is incomplete unless it leads to active love.
• Faith grows when we listen more and more carefully to God’s Word and enter a lively exchange with him in prayer.
• Faith gives us even now a foretaste of the joy of heaven (21).

Faith is an authentically human act, in which our “intellect and will cooperate with divine grace” (CCC, 155). God does give us “motives of credibility,” in the miracles of Christ, the witness of saints, true prophecies, and in the fruitfulness of the Church (CCC, 156). Still faith “seeks understanding,” calling the believer to dive deeper into “a more penetrating knowledge,” which “will in turn call forth a greater faith, increasingly set afire by love” (CCC, 158).

A Prayer For Young People

O Lord Jesus Christ, keep these young people in your love. Let them hear your voice and believe what you say, for you alone have the words of life.

Teach them how to profess their faith, bestow their love, and impart their hope to others.

Make them convincing witnesses to your Gospel in a world so much in need of your saving grace.

Make them the new people of the Beatitudes, that they may be the salt of the earth and the light of the world at the beginning of the Third Christian Millennium!

Mary, Mother of the Church, protect and guide these young men and women of the Twenty-first Century. Keep us all close to your maternal heart. Amen.

-Blessed John Paul II, Homily for 2002 World Youth Day, Toronto

Six Tips For The New Evangelization

At the Catholic Press Association's Catholic Media Conference in June, Fr. Robert Barron, Rector of Chicago’s Mundelein Seminary and founder of Word on Fire ministries, gave a presentation on “Media, Beauty and the New Evangelization.” Here he offered six suggestions for evangelizing in an effective way:

1. Lead with beauty
2. Don’t dumb down the message
3. Preach with ardor
4. Tell the great story of salvation history
5. Stress the Augustinian anthropology
6. Use Ireneaus’ doctrine of God

For more details on what these six tips mean, read the Our Sunday Visitor blog here. For more on what this New Evangelization is all about, check out the Blessed John Paul II Shrine website.

Blessed John Paul II To Be Canonized

“The goal and target of our life is He,

the Christ who awaits us—each one singly

and altogether—to lead us across the

boundaries of time to the eternal embrace

of the God who loves us.”

-Blessed John Paul II, November 26, 1995

God has blessed this day, for this morning Pope Francis approved the cause of canonization of both Blessed John Paul II and Blessed John XXIII. Let us take time to praise Our Lord this day, thanking Him for two holy men who are now in His eternal embrace.

We Want God

On June 2, 1979, the Pope arrived in Poland. What followed will never be forgotten by those who witnessed it.

He knelt and kissed the ground, the dull gray tarmac of the airport outside Warsaw. At the same moment, the silent churches of Poland began to ring their bells. The Pope traveled by motorcade from the airport to the Old City of Warsaw.

The government had feared thousands or even tens of thousands would line the streets.

They were wrong.

By the end of the day, counting the people lining the streets and highways plus those massed outside Warsaw and then inside it—all of them cheering and throwing flowers and applauding and holding signs and singing—more than a million people had come.

                 

In Victory Square in the Old City the Pope said a Mass. Communist officials watched from the windows of nearby hotels. The Pope gave what George Weigel called the greatest sermon of his life.

Why, he asked, had God lifted a Pole to the papacy? Perhaps it was because of how Poland had suffered for centuries, and through the twentieth century it had become “the land of particularly responsible witness” to God. The people of Poland, he suggested, had been chosen for a great role, to humbly but surely understand that they were the repository of a special “witness of His cross and resurrection.” He asked then if the people of Poland accepted the obligations of such a role in history. He asked if they were capable of accepting it.

The crowd responded with thunder.

Papal Intentions for July

Pope Francis’s general intention for the month is that, “World Youth Day in Brazil may encourage all young Christians to become disciples and missionaries of the Gospel.”

The Holy Father’s mission intention is that, “throughout Asia doors may open to messengers of the Gospel.”

Let us pray with Pope Francis this month, that our young people may be true disciples of the Word and that countries throughout Asia may be open to the Truth. 

Blessed Junípero Serra, Pray for Us

Today the American Church celebrates the feast of the “Father of California Missions,” Blessed Junípero Serra. This Spanish Franciscan founded a number of missions, including Santa Clara and Santa Barbara, and worked to confirm over 5,000 native peoples in the Catholic faith. Despite a number of injuries and illnesses, he evangelized with courage, always trusting in the Providence of God.

During Junípero Serra’s beatification, Blessed John Paul II said that Fr. Serra:

…sowed the seeds of Christian faith amid the mountainous changes wrought by the arrival of European settlers in the New World…In fulfilling this ministry, Fr. Serra showed himself to be a true son of St. Francis.

On this day of your feast, Blessed Junípero Serra, pray for the Church as she continues with the mission of the New Evangelization.

Information from Matthew and Margaret Bunson’s John Paul II’s Book of Saints.