Catholic Church

By Jennifer Hartline, The Stream - And suddenly there it was. “…by the forgiveness of their sins.” It jumped off the page: salvation comes by the forgiveness of sins… There is a great need for the Church to return to this simple, core truth, and to sweep away everything else that obscures it… There is no salvation apart from the forgiveness of sin. That means we must first confess that we have sinned. We must first recognize that we have transgressed against God’s holy law, and against God Himself.

By Fr. Bill Peckman, ChurchPop - The first culprit is that we forgot the transcendent… Check that…we actively excoriated it from our identity. This happened in several ways… First, we tamed God. We made Him into our image. We turned him into a kindly and ineffectual therapist whose chief job is to enable our every behavior and pat us on the back for rebelling against Him.

By Msgr. Charles Pope - This Sunday’s Gospel portrays through the life of Jesus some important disciplines for disciples. Let’s look at them and see how to apply them to our lives today… I. Purposefulness – The text says, When the days for Jesus’ being taken up were fulfilled, he resolutely determined to journey to Jerusalem, and he sent messengers ahead of him… Note that Jesus was resolute. He was heading to Jerusalem to suffer, die, and rise; to undertake the great battle and the great mission entrusted to Him. Everything He did was to be oriented toward this goal.

By Suellen Brewster, The Catholic Stand - In this Gospel passage Jesus speaks to us of the Father’s omniscience, His “all knowing” quality. So, if God knows everything, including our needs and what we would pray for, why do we need to ask? As usual, the answer is that we ask because the asking itself is a gift and a grace God wants us to have. In the asking I unite my heart and soul to the One who can supply. But very often, perhaps more often than not, the asking clarifies what I am yearning for, revealing that it is not the right thing.