miniZibaldone

Baptism commits Christians to participating courageously in the spreading of the Kingdom of God, if need be cooperating with the sacrifice of life itself. Of course, not everyone is called to martyrdom by bloodshed. In fact, there is a non-bloody "martyrdom" which is equally significant...this is the silent and heroic witness of so many Christians who live the Gospel without compromise, doing their duty and dedicating themselves generously to the service of the poor.  This martyrdom of ordinary life constitutes a particularly important witness in the secularized society of our time. It is the peaceful battle of love. —Benedict XVI

From Oasis journal

The Saint is a medicine because he is an antidote. Indeed that is why the saint is often a martyr; he is mistaken for a poison because he is an antidote. He will generally be found restoring the world to sanity by exaggerating whatever the world neglects, which is by no means always the same element in every age. Yet each generation seeks its saint by instinct; and he is not what the people want, but rather what the people need. This is surely the very much mistaken meaning of those words to the first saints, “Ye are the salt of the earth,” which caused the Ex-Kaiser to remark with all solemnity that his beefy Germans were the salt of the earth; meaning thereby merely that they were the earth's beefiest and therefore best. But salt seasons and preserves beef, not because it is like beef; but because it is very unlike it. Christ did not tell his apostles that they were only the excellent people, or the only excellent people, but that they were the exceptional people; the permanent...

Semen est sanguis Christianorum . —Tertullian

I would like to say to the young men and women of nowadays who don't feel at ease – (who say) ‘But I’m not that happy with this consumerist and narcissistic culture ….’ ‘But look at the horizon! Look who’s there, look at our missionaries!’ Pray to the Holy Spirit who compels them to go far away, to consume or burn up their lives. From the homily He noted that Paul acknowledges the absolute mastery of the Spirit over his life who has always pushed him to announce the gospel despite the problems and  difficulties. I believe, the Pope said, this excerpt evokes for us the life of missionaries throughout the ages.  “They went forward compelled by the Holy Spirit: a vocation!  And when we went to the cemeteries in those places, we see their tombs: so many of them died at an  early age before they reached 40.  The reason is because they were not used to and couldn’t recover from the diseases present in those places. They gave up their  young lives: they had...

Docility to the Spirit is a source of joy. From a homily "In days past, the Church has shown us how there can be a drama of resisting the Spirit: closed, hard, foolish hearts resisting the Spirit. We’ve seen things - the healing of the lame man by Peter and John at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple; the words and the great things Stephen was doing … but they were closed off to these signs of the Spirit and resisted the Spirit. They were seeking to justify this resistance with a so-called fidelity to the law, that is, to the letter of the law."  In referring to the reading, Pope Francis said that "the Church proposes the opposite: no resistance to the Spirit, but docility to the Spirit, which is precisely the attitude of the Christian.” He continued: “Being docile to the Spirit, this docility is the yes that the Spirit may act and move forward to build up the Church.”   [link]   From an address We too are living in a time of martyrdom, and in the midst of a culture...

Persecution, I would say, is the daily bread of the Church. Jesus said so himself. From the homily Pope Francis said “there are bloody persecutions, like being torn to pieces by wild beasts to the delight of the audience in the stands or being blown up by a bomb at the end of Mass” and there are “velvet-gloved” persecutions that are “cloaked in politeness": the ones that marginalize you, take your job away if you fail to adapt to laws that "go against God the Creator."  Pope Francis pointed out that the martyrdom of Stephen sparked a cruel anti-Christian persecution in Jerusalem similar to the persecution suffered by those who are not free to profess their faith in Jesus today. “But – he noted - there is another persecution which is not much spoken about," a persecution "camouflaged by culture, by  modernity, by progress in disguise":   "It is a persecution I would 'ironically describe as polite” he said.   [link]

The Unintended Reformation by Brad Gregory Salvation at Stake by Brad Gregory A History of German Literature by J. G. Robertson Shadow in the Land by Dannemeyer The Story of American Catholicism 1 by Theodore Maynard   From Beirut to Jerusalem by Thomas Friedman 

I express my closeness to the Missionaries of Charity for the great loss they had two days ago with the killing of four Sisters in Aden, Yemen, where they were assisting the elderly... May Mother Teresa, accompany her martyr daughters of charity in Heaven, and intercede for peace and sacred respect for human life. (Pope Francis) Card. Gracias: Sisters of Mother Teresa killed in Yemen, witnesses to the love of Christ The Archbishop of Mumbai’s moving testament to the for four religious killed today along with 10 civilians in a raid "for religious reasons" by armed men from Aden. Until the end, they carried out the task the Missionaries of Charity: quench the thirst for Christ through service to the needy. In the evening, Eucharistic adoration and prayer for Fr. Tom Uzhunnalil, Salesian priest kidnapped in the attack. Mumbai (AsiaNews) - The gruesome murder of the 4 Missionaries of Charity has plunged the Church of India and Asia into deep sadness. We are grieving bec...

Our life [that] might always be a place that Christ might grow greater, and we might come down, even to the very end . From the homily “John the Baptist, ‘the greatest man born of a woman’ – so says the formula for the canonization of John. But this formula was used not of a Pope, or even of Jesus. That man is the greatest man born of a woman: The greatest saint: Thus Jesus canonized him. [...]  “To diminish, diminish, diminish.” That “was the life of John,” Pope Francis repeated. “A great man who did not seek his own glory, but the glory of God”; a man who died in such a prosaic manner, in anonymity. But with this attitude, the Pope concluded, John “prepared the way for Jesus,’ who, in a similar manner, “died in agony, alone, without the disciples’: [...]  Reading this passage, seeing how God triumphs: the style of God is not the style of man. Asking the Lord for the grace of humility that John had, and not leaning on our own merits or the glory of others. And above a...