Worshiping God for His Own Sake

Thomas Aquinas College Alumni Fuel
"Vocations Boom" at Clear Creek Monastery

"Truth is not the only transcendental," Fr. Morey explains. "Like in the College's motto (verum, bonum, pulchrum), there's also the good and the beautiful in addition to the truth.… Yes, it's the experience in the classroom setting and learning, but it's also the smell of the orange blossoms on campus as it floats up the canyon in the spring, or playing beach volleyball in Ventura, or smoking cigars at Dr. Nieto's, or eating burgers and shakes at In-N-Out, orange milkshakes at The Summit. These aren't the noblest of all reasons, but the multifaceted reflections that you see all around you, and they are good, beautiful, and true."

Worshiping God for His Own Sake
http://www.thomasaquinas.edu/news/newsletter/2010/Winter/09%20Worshiping%20God%20for%20His%20Own%20Sake.html

Second Confession

. . . At some point it was announced that confession would be available for those who desired it. No pressure was made to go. It was simply an invitation, an opportunity.

To my own surprise, I went. It was face to face, which I didn’t relish in the least. I was nervous, but once I got in the door, I couldn’t leave. Father sat on a chair and I kneeled.

“How long has it been since your last confession,” he asked.

“A long time,” I said.

“Two months?”
“More like ten years.”

With such a novice, Father figured he’d better go through the ten commandments to help me recognize my sins. I stopped him and told him, defiantly, that I knew what my sins were. They had been in my conscience, bothering me all my waking hours.

After a few minutes, as I was rattling them off, Father began to cry silently.

He gave my absolution and I left feeling no particular emotion.

A while later I went on a hike by myself and thought over the whole experience. I began to cry, which I don’t remember ever doing. It was a cry of elation. I knew from all my Catholic upbringing that God had forgiven me. I was able to start having a relationship with Him. . . . (more)

Second Confession, By Jack Smith
http://catholickey.blogspot.com/2009/03/second-confession.html

Stafford on the Freedom of Indifference

Here's an interesting piece from an interview with Cardinal Francis Stafford of Denver, who just celebrated his golden jubilee.

Q: What's the most significant change in the Catholic Church in the last 50 years?

A: On the positive side, lay people are actively in search of holiness; not a cheap holiness, not a holiness that comes from an inexpensive grace. Wallace Stevens, one of the great poets of the 20th century and a convert to Catholicism on his death bed, wrote, and I paraphrase: Sanctity is produced out of the condition of winter, that is a wintry cold climate. He describes a holiness produced out of a mind of winter....

On the negative side, what has changed is the self-inflicted and mortal wound of many Catholic universities and colleges that have attempted to live in two diametrically opposed cultural worlds; one, a culture based upon freedom as the pursuit of excellence and the other, freedom of indifference. The first is from the tradition of St. Augustine and St. Thomas and the other is from the period of the Enlightenment beginning with Kant.

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