Sede Vacante

The Vatican website now reflects the state of the Church - the seat is vacant.

Let us pray for the Church, the members of the College of Cardinals and the Bishop Emeritus of Rome, Benedict.

Here is a video of Benedict's departure:

The Pope App

As we count the hours to the end of Pope Benedict's pontificate and await the beginning of the Conclave, we might want an easy way to keep up with all things from the Vatican. The Pope App is the perfect way to accomplish this.

After initially opening the app to the title page, the screen opens to an image which lets you know when you can follow the pope live. For example in this image taken a few minutes ago, we can see it will be 3 hours until the pope can be seen live.

The Pope App is organized into 9 different screens. These include the ability to view LIVE feeds, check a calendar of upcoming EVENTS, read messages From the Pope, see NEWS, view IMAGES, archived VIDEOS, and WEBCAMS from the Vatican. The app even includes a page dedicated to all things VATICANO.

The LIVE feed not only shows the events that are upcoming, but also allow you to set reminder alarms to check in. This will come in handy once the Conclave begins.

The NEWS feed captures articles on the pope and his messages. They come from a variety of sources including Vatican Radio and L'Osservatore Romano.

The Vaticano page links to several media outlets from the Vatican including the Pope's twitter feed that will continue to be active assuming the new pope chooses to tweet.

The Pope App is powered by the official Vatican Media and is currently only available in iOS format (Apple products). The app is FREE.

Pope Benedict's Last Audience

Here is a video presentation of Pope Benedict's last General Audience:

Here is the complete text of his audience:

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

I offer a warm and affectionate greeting to the English-speaking pilgrims and visitors who have joined me for this, my last General Audience. Like Saint Paul, whose words we heard earlier, my heart is filled with thanksgiving to God who ever watches over his Church and her growth in faith and love, and I embrace all of you with joy and gratitude.

During this Year of Faith, we have been called to renew our joyful trust in the Lord’s presence in our lives and in the life of the Church. I am personally grateful for his unfailing love and guidance in the eight years since I accepted his call to serve as the Successor of Peter. I am also deeply grateful for the understanding, support and prayers of so many of you, not only here in Rome, but also throughout the world.

The decision I have made, after much prayer, is the fruit of a serene trust in God’s will and a deep love of Christ’s Church. I will continue to accompany the Church with my prayers, and I ask each of you to pray for me and for the new Pope. In union with Mary and all the saints, let us entrust ourselves in faith and hope to God, who continues to watch over our lives and to guide the journey of the Church and our world along the paths of history. 

I commend all of you, with great affection, to his loving care, asking him to strengthen you in the hope which opens our hearts to the fullness of life that he alone can give. To you and your families, I impart my blessing. Thank you!

I am not going to lie; I teared up. Let us pray for Pope Benedict, the College of Cardinals and Holy Mother Church.

Year of Faith & The Catechism

Universal Catechism
When Pope Benedict announced that the Church would be celebrating a Year of Faith, he suggested we read the documents of the Second Vatican Council and that we read the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC). This makes sense because this year is the 50th anniversary of Vatican II and it is also the 20th anniversary of the promulgation of the Catechism.

Norm for Teaching the Faith
The CCC is only the second universal catechism handed down by the Church. The Catechism of Trent is the other and was written in 1566 primarily written for priests. The CCC is one of the fruits of Vatican II and is intended as resource for ALL members of the Church. Blessed John Paul II called the CCC "a sure norm for teaching the faith" and he asserted that it would help "serve the renewal" of the Church.

Four Pillars of Faith
The CCC is organized into four pillars of the faith: Profession of Faith (The Creed), Celebration of the Christian Mystery (The Sacraments & Liturgy), Life in Christ (Commandments and Beatitudes) and the Universal Call to Prayer (Our Father). The CCC is written like an encyclopedia and organized by paragraph numbers. In the back of the "big green" version are a number of cross reference tools for scripture, papal documents and documents of the councils. It is written in easy to understand prose and calls upon the writings of the Church fathers, the saints and the Magisterium.

This weekend the men of Joe Catholic will be breaking open the CCC and reviewing how to implement it into our daily lives. Please enjoy this video from Father John Riccardo of Our Lady of Good Counsel. The first 5 minutes are dedicated to talking about the CCC and the Year of Faith.

Additional Resources on CCC:

• Joe Catholic Toolbox - introduction to CCC and links to free copies of CCC and documents about the CCC; includes video from the New Evangelizers
• Read the Catechism in a Year
• USCCB's Online CCC as eBook 
• Catholic Cross Reference - online tool that allows you to cross reference the CCC with scripture, papal documents and the documents of Vatican II

Call No Man Father?

St. Josemaria Escriva celebrating Mass.

In today's Gospel reading, Jesus admonishes his followers not to call any man on Earth father (Matt 23:9). How can this be?

Catholic Answers poses the question this way:

Many Protestants claim that when Catholics address priests as "father," they are engaging in an unbiblical practice that Jesus forbade: "Call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven" (Matt. 23:9).

In his tract 10 Reasons Why I Am Not a Roman Catholic, Fundamentalist anti-Catholic writer Donald Maconaghie quotes this passage as support for his charge that "the papacy is a hoax."

Bill Jackson, another Fundamentalist who runs a full-time anti-Catholic organization, says in his book Christian’s Guide To Roman Catholicism that a "study of Matthew 23:9 reveals that Jesus was talking about being called father as a title of religious superiority . . . [which is] the basis for the [Catholic] hierarchy" (53).
How should Catholics respond to such objections?

 Catholic Answers addresses this common question in this answer.

Here's Tim Staples answer:

10 Apps for Lent

(Note: These are NOT the apps in the video)

Normally I would save this type of post for Tuesday Tech Talk, but since we are already in the second week of Lent, I thought I would post it today. Technology, properly ordered, can be a useful tool that can help you enhance your Lenten season. Here is a video from Catholic@pps highlighting 10 apps that can aid you this Lenten season. (They review each of these apps in greater detail on their site.) Maybe you just haven't been able to find a way to get into the swing of things this Lent. Here is my list of resources from last year.

Here is a listing of the apps as they appear in the video:

• My Year of Faith
• Catholic Sermon
• The Pope App
• Steubenville
• Fighter Verse
• Mea Culpa
• Catholic Meditations for Lent by Thomas Aquinas
• John Paul II (eVotions)
• Lighthouse Catholic Media Bible (Promo Code: 102318)
• Magnificat Lent Companion

St. Josemaria: "Love the Pope."

St. Josemaria Esciva with Pope John XXII & Alvaro del Portillo
Source JoseMariaEscrivaInfo

As we rapidly approach the end of Pope Benedict's tenure, I have been reflecting more and more on the role of the papacy and how blessed I have been to be formed in my faith by the teachings of Blessed John Paul II and now Pope Benedict XVI.

St. Josemaria had a tremendous amount of affection and respect for the papacy. Here are few of his thoughts on the Pope.

The Way, 520

Catholic, apostolic, Roman! I want you to be very Roman. And to be anxious to make your 'path to Rome', videre Petrum — to see Peter.

The Forge, 134

You must love, venerate, pray and mortify yourself for the Pope, and do so with greater affection each day. He is the foundation stone of the Church and, throughout the centuries, right to the end of time, he carries out among men that task of sanctifying and governing which Jesus entrusted to Peter.

The Forge, 135:

Your deepest love, your greatest esteem, your most heartfelt veneration, your most complete obedience and your warmest affection have also to be shown towards the Vicar of Christ on earth, towards the Pope. 

We Catholics should consider that after God and the most Blessed Virgin, our Mother, the Holy Father comes next in the hierarchy of love and authority.

The Way, 573:

Thank you, my God, for placing in my heart such love for the Pope.

Here's a video of St. Josemaria speaking to a group in Venezuela in which he answers a question about the pope.

The Feast of the Chair of St. Peter

Today's Feast of the Chair of St. Peter takes on a whole new meaning in light of the fact the Chair of Peter will literally be vacant in less than a week. Perhaps some of us have taken the news of Pope Benedict's renunciation of the papal office with more than just sadness. Perhaps some of us are worried about the future of the Church during this period of uncertainty. We find our answers and solace in today's scriptures.

From Psalm 23:

The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.
In verdant pastures he gives me repose;
Beside restful waters he leads me;
he refreshes my soul.

And from the Gospel of St. Matthew:

And so I say to you, you are Peter,
and upon this rock I will build my Church,
and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it.
I will give you the keys to the Kingdom of heaven.
Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven;
and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. [Emphasis added]

 In honor of Pope Benedict, I have added this video when he met with the priests from the Diocese of Rome in which, given the special circumstances, the invocation "Tu es Petrus" was sung.

EWTN & the Internet

EWTN is consistently on the cutting edge of technology, making use of online video streaming and even archiving their major programing onto Mp3 downloads and podcasts. Their website contains a bountiful collection of print and audio resources in their libraries. They even allow you to stream their shows on mobile devices and have recently been added to iHeart Radio.

Today they released a video that gives great insight into the use of the Internet.

Lent Has Begun

Lent seems to have gotten here a bit quicker this year. In case you forgot (because you were so focused on Valentine's Day right?) today is Ash Wednesday. For most of us this means today is a day of fast and abstinence. The Church defines fasting as partaking in one reasonably sized meal. If necessary you can also have a couple of light snacks that do NOT equal another meal.

Lent is a penitential period of prayer, fasting (mortification) and almsgiving. For the last several years, I like to begin Lent with a reflection from St. Josemaria that I'd like to share:

We are at the beginning of Lent: a time of penance, purification and conversion. It is not an easy program, but then Christianity is not an easy way of life. It is not enough just to be in the Church, letting the years roll by. In our life, in the life of Christians, our first conversion — that unique moment which each of us remembers, when we clearly understood everything the Lord was asking of us — is certainly very significant.

But the later conversions are even more important, and they are increasingly demanding. To facilitate the work of grace in these conversions, we need to keep our soul young; we have to call upon our Lord, know how to listen to him and, having found out what has gone wrong, know how to ask his pardon.

If you call upon me, I will listen to you," we read in this Sunday's liturgy. Isn't it wonderful how God cares for us and is always ready to listen to us — waiting for man to speak? He hears us at all times, but particularly now. Our heart is ready and we have made up our minds to purify ourselves. He hears us and will not disregard the petition of a "humble and contrite heart.

The Lord listens to us. He wants to intervene and enter our lives to free us from evil and fill us with good. "I will rescue him and honor him," he says of man. So we must hope for glory. Here again we have the beginning of the interior movement that makes up our spiritual life. Hope of glory increases our faith and fosters our charity; the three theological virtues, godly virtues which make us like our Father God, have been set in motion.

What better way to begin Lent? Let's renew our faith, hope and love. The spirit of penance and the desire for purification come from these virtues. Lent is not only an opportunity for increasing our external practices of self-denial. If we thought it were only that, we would miss the deep meaning it has in Christian living, for these external practices are — as I have said — the result of faith, hope and charity.
St. Josemaria Escriva, Christ is Passing By, 57

Pope's Resignation & the Media

If you are like me, you are probably still a bit numb from the news that Pope Benedict XVI has announced his resignation as pope effective February 28th. Over the coming weeks we are going to hear all sorts of news stories in the secular press. I recommend we stay abreast of this historic moment in the Church by following ongoing developments on reliable Catholic news feeds. Here are some recommendations:

• National Catholic Register - written news feed
• Catholic News Agency - written and video news feeds
• EWTN - links to news and live streaming of programming

Here's a sample of video from Catholic News Agency:

Pope Benedict XVI Announces His Retirement

Pope Benedict XVI has announced that he will retire at the end of the month.

For more details including a copy of the Pope's statement read the report at Catholic News.

UPDATE: Here's a nice video from Rome Reports recalling Pope Benedict's announcement as the new pope in 2005.