What should I do this year for Lent?

        Well, it is almost March and Lent has still not begun.  But in just ten days – ready or not – Ash Wednesday will be here.  The Church offers Lent as a way for us to be healed of our spiritual sicknesses, namely, our personal sins and vices.  Like the paralytics in the gospels, we often times encounter obstacles to Jesus’ healing in our lives.  These obstacles can be people, places and things.  Nevertheless, the four actions that help to liberate us from sin – to receive Jesus’ healing – are prayer, fasting, almsgiving, and our own personal sacrifice during Lent.

       Some of you may already know what you want to do for Lent, but I would like to offer for your own spiritual reflection some ideas.  If you have decided to “give up” something, there needs to be an action on your part to “do” something in its place.  For example, if you are giving up soft drinks or sweets (or alcohol!), you need to donate the money that you would have spent on these things to the church or another charitable cause. (This year, the Bishop's Annual Appeal begins right before Lent, so contributing to the ministries Bishop Strickland is promoting in the Diocese of Tyler is a wonderful way of making a sacrifice in union with our local successor of the apostles.)  If you are giving up TV and/or radio, you should take up a practice of prayer or spiritual reading to do in their place.

       If you are thinking of “doing something extra” during Lent (as opposed to “giving up” something), then it needs to be united to a pure intention.  For example, if you are going to start a new exercise routine during Lent, your intention cannot just be so that you “look good.”  Physical health (detached from vanity) is good, but perhaps you could go to daily Mass during Lent as “spiritual” exercise.  Rather than exercising with your iPod ear buds in your ears, you could pray a rosary instead.  If you are planning on giving more money to charity during Lent, you could decide to not go out to eat to restaurants during Lent as a sign of your solidarity with the poor.

       If you are still unsure of what spiritual practice you want to do during Lent, you might ask God in your prayer: "What do You want me to do?"  The important thing is that we do not take on too much, but that we persevere with our personal discipline through all 40 days as a sacrifice pleasing to God.  As we approach Jesus today in the Most Blessed Sacrament, let us ask Him what He wants us to do during Lent — that our prayer, fasting, almsgiving and our own personal sacrifices will bring us closer to Him throughout the upcoming Lenten season.

The Sermon on the Mount

Last Sunday, the readings for the Fourth Sunday of Ordinary Time were replaced by those of the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord.  Unfortunately, we missed the gospel reading of the Beatitudes (Mt 5:1-12).  This Sunday’s gospel (Mt 5:13-16) and the Sundays leading up to Lent are a continuation of what has traditionally been called the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7; Luke 6:20-49).  The Sermon is early in our Lord’s public ministry; it has a prologue of Jesus traveling around, and it begins with the Beatitudes and ends with the “Parable of the Two Foundations.” The Navarre Bible Commentary sums up the Sermon with five main themes:

1. The attitude a person must have for entering the Kingdom of heaven (the Beatitudes, the salt of the earth, the light of the world, Jesus and His teaching, the fullness of the Law).

2. Uprightness of intention in religious practices (here the Our Father would be included).

3. Trust in God’s fatherly providence.

4. How God’s children should behave towards one another (not judging one’s neighbor, respect for holy things, the effectiveness of prayer and the golden rule of charity).

5. The conditions for entering the Kingdom (the narrow gate, false prophets and building on rock).

Vital to these teachings of Jesus Christ in the Sermon is the perfection of the Mosaic Law rather than its elimination.  “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have come not to abolish but to fulfill” (Mt 5:17); “Do to others whatever you would have them do to you. This is the law and the prophets” (Mt 7:12).  Jesus Christ presents Himself as the New Moses.  Like Moses going up Mount Sinai to retrieve the Law, Jesus ascends the mountain to teach the New Law.  St. Matthew accounts the disciples following Christ up the mountain, a sign that the New Law consists of encountering Jesus Christ Himself—not just His teaching.  He begins His discourse with the Beatitudes, His plan of how each believer can obtain blessedness—true happiness—amidst the tribulations of this world.  They are promises of definite salvation, though not in this world.  I will return to the theme of the Beatitudes during Lent, and this Sunday I will treat the themes of salt and light in my homily.  It is my hope that these teachings and reflections on the Sermon in the coming Sundays will help you to find true blessedness in your work and prayer amidst the coldness of winter.

The Problem of Removing Texas Woman from Life Support Last Sunday

The last two months have been a blur for me as a parish priest.  The sheer amount of liturgical celebrations and sacramental ministry plus the preparation and leadership of the Rome Pilgrimage have kept me barely informed of current events.  I remember hearing about a pregnant woman on life support in Ft. Worth at the end of November, and I tracked some of this news on National and Texas Right to Life e-mail updates.  Unfortunately, this woman, Marlise Muñoz, and her unborn baby were disconnected from life support last Sunday, January 26.  Since I do not have space in this posting to recount all the details of what happened, I direct you to an article of The New York Times .  This case was tragic and complicated, and moral arguments were made on both sides.  However, for several reasons I believe the wrong decision was made – both by the family and by the district judge – to remove life support from this pregnant woman.

Firstly, the use of the term “brain dead” is ambiguous in medicine because it has a different definition depending on the hospital or the doctor whom you ask.  (The debate of when live organs can be harvested from “brain dead” patients has already been a long-standing bioethical issue due to the lack of a standard definition.)  According to Texas Right to Life, Ms. Muñoz was “not experiencing multi-system organ failure or cell disintegration, and her body [was] supporting the growth of the child within her – all signs to indicate that her brain, though impaired or quiescent, [was] still ordering her physiological functions at some level.”  Secondly, while it can be morally licit (and even necessary depending on the circumstances) to remove extraordinary life support from a dying patient, the fact that this was a woman whose body was nurturing an unborn child makes this choice an act of direct abortion, which is intrinsically evil.  Some have tried to make the case that “disconnecting” the mother (a shrewd way to evade the word “abortion”) was justified since the child would be badly-deformed and mentally-handicapped anyway.  How sad that we have to remind good-intentioned people that no one deserves to die simply because he or she is handicapped.  A person is still a person even in the womb — even if deformed in the womb.  Thirdly, under Texas law, this pregnant woman was supposed to be protected from medical officials cutting off life support.  This is just one more example of a radically liberal judge who legislated and executed his own ideology instead of applying the law.  If this were not exasperating enough, Dallas Morning News reported a lawyer of the family as saying, “[P]regnant women die every day. . . They die in car accidents. They die of heart attacks. They die from head injuries. . . And when they die the fetus dies with them. That is the way it has always been and that way it should be.”

The coldness of the world (and of the weather!) can be overwhelming and discouraging to us as Catholic Christians.  Today on the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord, almost two weeks since we remembered the fateful decision Roe v. Wade (and seeing the appalling repercussions of this law as in the case of Ms. Muñoz and her baby), we are mindful of how much our society – even Pro-Life Texas – needs the truth and love of Jesus Christ, a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and glory for your people Israel (Luke 2:32).