The Stations of the Cross

Any Catholic is familiar with the Stations of the Cross.  Every church we've ever been to has had them, the art work as varied as the churches themselves.

But this set I keep coming back to over and over - Mary Button's "Stations of the Cross - The struggle for LGBT equality"  I find the art work remarkable, and they can reduce me to tears over and over.

Before you judge them - look at them.  Read the commentary.

The artist herself says it best when she says:

"I believe that we can only begin to understand the meaning of the crucifixion when we take away our polished and shiny crosses and look for the cross in our own time, in our own landscape.

When we look for the crucified body of Christ in the stories of people on the margins of our societies, then we are able to live the Gospel and not simply read it."

You will find the whole series here at :

https://www.flickr.com/photos/believeoutloud/sets/72157632873157887/with/8513333475/

Archbishop Oscar Romero formally recognised as a martyr. Long, long overdue.

Vatican News reported today:

After decades of debate within the church, Pope Francis formally recognized that Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero was killed "in hatred of the faith" and not for purely political reasons.
Pope Francis signed the decree Feb. 3, recognizing as martyrdom the March 24, 1980, assassination of Archbishop Romero in a San Salvador hospital chapel as he celebrated Mass. The decree clears the way for the beatification of Archbishop Romero. 
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/1500492.htm

For those who want to know more about this amazing man, this is a good starting point

http://www.uscatholic.org/culture/social-justice/2009/02/oscar-romero-bishop-poor

And this a good link to the man in his own words, speaking truth to power

http://onlineministries.creighton.edu/CollaborativeMinistry/romero.html

And many Catholics, including myself, think it a great source of scandal that it has taken thirty-five years for him to be recognised - his cause was ignored by Rome many times for political reasons.

Fr James Martin speaks for many of us when he says:

Now that Archbishop Oscar Romero has been declared a martyr, and his beatification ceremony will soon be announced, we can rejoice. We can that the church is finally recognizing someone who died "in odium fidei," that is, out of hatred for the faith.

At the same time, the church needs to do an examination of conscience, and admit that the delay in declaring him a martyr is close to scandalous, held up apparently, as CNS reported, because some groups tried to "co-opt" him. Such a defense seems weak: There have always been, and there always will be people who try to co-opt the saints for their own purposes: this is not new, and this was hardly the case just for Archbishop Romero. (There are currently worries, for example, that Dorothy Day will be "co-opted" by some groups.) Mainly the cause was delayed because Archbishop Romero was seen as too closely aligned with liberation theology, which had fallen out of favor in Rome.

Yet Monsenor Romero's martyrdom should have trumped those concerns. When a person makes the ultimate sacrifice, shows the "greater love," as Jesus called it, and gives their life for God, for the People of God, for the church, other considerations should be put in their proper place, and seen for what they are: distractions. The delay in his case is close to a scandal.

So we have to admit that in this case the church was misled. Archbishop Romero could have been declared a martyr much earlier: the day after he was murdered while celebrating Mass.

Blessed Oscar Romero, pray for us

Because tyrants are never defeated by appeasement

Petition to news outlets to publish the Charlie Hebdo Mohammed cartoons

#JeSuisCharlie

Mourning with France, praying with the world

#jesuischarlie

Happy New Year

First post of the year - I don't know who wrote this but I love it.

Brothers

"And I ask of you a favour: bless me and the Church of Rome"

Patriarch Bartholomew of the Eastern Orthodox Church and Pope Francis - the apostle Andrew holds his long separated brother Peter in his arms, and the world changes, just a little.

I was going to write a long piece about this, and I deleted it.  It doesn't need it.  The photograph says more than I could ever do.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

Remembering the Jesuit martyrs of El Salvador

The text below was written by John D. Whitney S.J. and can be found in its entirity at

https://www.facebook.com/notes/john-d-whitney-sj/standing-with-the-resurrected/10154859340170389?pnref=story

"The murder of these Jesuits and their companions 25 years ago this week is only one small instance of all the unjust deaths that cry out from our world. It is but one moment in a vast history of cruelty and fear, of murder and oppression that stretches from Zimbabwe to Algeria, from the Ukraine to Guantanamo, from the beheadings of ISIS to the unmarked graves of the Mexican teachers. All the victims of oppression and terror, of fear and savagery, of hatred and despair—all who languish in prisons for believing in justice, or who watch their children die in refugee camps because justice will not come, all who suffer under the indifference of their oppressors or by the oppression of those who remain indifferent—all of these call to us today and challenge our professed faith in God and in the resurrection promised through Christ.

The promise of the resurrection is not a promise of life after death, but a promise of life that transcends death. It is a promise, written in the blood of Jesus Christ, that everything we are in faith now, we will be in fullness then. Everything for which we look in hope now, we will see with clarity then. Everything we hold onto now in love, we will possess in fullness then.

In their death, the Jesuits and companions of El Salvador received not resuscitation of their bodies, not life after death, but resurrection. All that had opened to Christ through their work and their teaching, through their manner of life and their witness, became Christ; all in them that had hungered for Christ was filled with Christ; all that had—through the work of their hands—begun to be Christ in the world, returned to them in their witnessing of Christ with their own lives as men and women of the resurrection. "