BIG C CATHOLICS

Fr. Charles Irvin Diocese of Lansing ( Click here for Sunday’s readings ) All of us, I am sure, have read recent accounts about the decline of interest in religion among Americans. A recent survey reports that 20% of Americans have no religious affiliations at all and feel no need of God or belief in God. It seems they feel that they are self-sufficient; God is not necessary. So why are we here? Our motives are many and mixed. Some are here in their need seeking God’s help. Some are here seeking God’s forgiveness, others out of love of God, others out of thanksgiving for all that God has done for them. Some are here simply out of a sense of duty and others out of mere habit. All of us are looking forward to everlasting life with God in heaven. In the opening prayer of today’s Mass, we heard the words: “Help us to embrace the world that you have given us, that we may transform the darkness of its pain into the life and joy of Easter.” In the first reading from the prop

The penitent and the priest begin with the sign of the Cross, saying:  In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. The priest urges the penitent to have confidence in God with these or similar words:  May the Lord be in your heart and help you to confess your sins with true sorrow. The priest may recite a passage from Sacred Scripture after which the penitent then states:  Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been (however many days, weeks, months or years) since my last confession. The penitent then states his sins. For the confession to be valid, the penitent must confess all of the mortal sins he is aware of having committed since the last confession, be sorry for them, and have a firm purpose of amendment to try not to commit the same sins in the future. After this, the priest will generally give some advice to the penitent and impose a penance. Then he will ask the penitent to make an Act of Contrition. The penitent may do so in his

Fr. Charles Irvin Senior Priest Diocese of Lansing ( Click here for today’s readings ) When we go to a football game, a baseball game, or any other sports event we go to watch it being played. We watch television shows; we watch and listen to concerts. We watch so many events in our lives. But when we come to Mass, we should participate. The Church wants us to fully, actively, and consciously offer the Mass with the priest, not simply watch the priest and ministers offer Mass for us while we remain passive observers. When we hear the term “Corpus Christi” we may tend to think of its meaning only in terms of Christ’s Real Presence in the Blessed Sacrament. That is an unworthy notion. In reality, in the Eucharist we receive not only Christ in His Body and Blood but Christ in His entirety, an entirety that encompasses His activity, His project among us, His mission and purpose in engaging us and in engaging the world in which we live, move, and have our being. God our Fat

Fr. Roger J. Landry As authentic Marian apparitions go, many of the aspects of our Lady’s appearances to the three shepherd children in Fatima a century ago seem commonplace: Mary asks the seers to pray and do penance for the conversion of sinners, calls them to daily devotion to the Rosary, advocates for peace in the world, requests the children to return on specific dates, and entrusts them with secrets. What has never ceased to surprise me, on the other hand, is what she revealed to the children after she had showed them a very vivid vision of hell. The sight of “demons and souls in human form” with “shrieks and groans of pain and despair” was so terrifying that, Lucy wrote later, had Our Lady not earlier promised them that she would one day take them to heaven, they “would have died of fear and terror” on the spot. After the vision, Mary said to them, “You have seen hell where the souls of poor sinners go,” a clear indication that Hell is a real possibility of human fr

Fr. Charles Irvin Senior Priest Diocese of Lansing ( Click here for today’s readings ) All of us, I am sure, have read recent accounts about the decline of interest in religion among Americans. A recent survey reports that 20% of Americans have no religious affiliations at all and feel no need of God or belief in God. It seems they feel that they are self-sufficient; God is not necessary. So why are we here? Our motives are many and mixed. Some are here in their need seeking God’s help. Some are here seeking God’s forgiveness, others out of love of God, others out of thanksgiving for all that God has done for them. Some are here simply out of a sense of duty and others out of mere habit. All of us are looking forward to everlasting life with God in heaven. In the opening prayer of today’s Mass, we heard the words: “Help us to embrace the world that you have given us, that we may transform the darkness of its pain into the life and joy of Easter.” In the first read