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Much to the chagrin of those I work with, I don’t follow scripts. But once I figured out what I wanted to say at my dad’s service today, I wrote it down. I am Paul’s son Jeff. I feel compelled to start with a joke. If you were around my dad at all — if…
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I just recently had a birthday. I’ve always liked when my birthday fell in the calendar, but especially since Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday was made a national holiday. Now I celebrate my birthday with a long weekend! Even before the holiday, I appreciated that my birthday fell when it did. Practically, a mid-January…
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There is a grassroots movement afoot to check Pope Francis’ command that the Church be poor and for the poor, and it’s starting near the top. First, a German bishop is taken down for spending lavishly on a retirement home. Now the Atlanta archbishop feels heat for an expensive home. I don’t know about your…
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Great book celebrating the first year of Francis’ papacy: http://www.vatican.va/auguri-francesco/pont_2014/en/files/mobile/index.html#9
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I apologize to all three of this blog’s followers for writing a post that, ostensibly, is unrelated to Pope Francis and his apostolic exhortation. But I had more to say than would fit in a Facebook post and needed a place to store it. Monday’s gospel was Mark 10:17-27, known as the story of the…
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Some of the themes in Pope Francis’ exhortation are pretty obvious, but others are more subtle. Here’s one of the latter: diversity as a good thing in the Church. Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like many Catholics (and many religious believers of any stripe) aren’t so hot on diversity. There’s a tendency, if…
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Word on the street (word on the via Della Conciliazione?) is that Pope Francis is working on an encyclical about the environment. I was hoping to leisurely walk through these themes from the apostolic exhortation. Guess I better get on the stick! Incidentally, the pope says stuff that’s valuable every day, and I don’t take…
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A major theme of The Joy of the Gospel is the call to focus on God’s love and forgiveness rather than dwelling only on where we see people falling short. In other interviews and writings, and even in the Joy of the Gospel, Francis bemoans the fact that the Church is more often known for…
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I’m going to focus these posts on what I think are the major themes of The Joy of the Gospel, and many of those cut across the document, but it still might be helpful to know how it’s organized. This is a wide-ranging work; I’ve read my share of papal encyclicals, which tend to be…
Reading Francis 