The Forgotten Power of Suffering
221. Which are the chief means by which we satisfy God for the temporal punishment due to sin? The chief means by which we satisfy God for the temporal punishment due to sin are: Prayer, Fasting, Almsgiving, all spiritual and corporal works of mercy, and the patient suffering of the ills of life. - Rev. Thomas J. O’Brien, Advanced Catechism of Catholic Faith and Practice (1902) The other day I wrote about the propensity in our modern society to avoid anything that might limit or impede our ability to “have it all.” While there are many causes for this shift, at least some...
Read MoreDivine Butler? Don’t Bet On It
I recently finished reading Peter Kreeft’s book Back to Virtue. In this book, Kreeft claims that our current civilization may well be the weakest ever to grace the face of the planet. This is due, he says because we have lost the knowledge of virtue. This is not to say that we are less virtuous as a people than those that came before us. It is, rather, that We know more about what is less than ourselves but less about what is more than ourselves. When we act morally, we are better than our philosophy. Our ancestors were worse than theirs. Their problem was not living up to their principles....
Read More“I just don’t want to be limited by anything.”
This may well be the mantra of our age. It describes our attitude towards everything from food to television, children to transportation. (In fact, the direct quote above came from a recent episode of This Week in Tech during a conversation about bandwidth caps.) It is a message reinforced by the television we watch, the magazines we read and the ads that appear in both: get more, eat more, exercise more, have more fun. More. More. What this attitude fails to realize, of course, is that we are finite beings. Despite what we are told in ads, we cannot “have it all” — and even...
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