Category: Matthew

Saint Maximilian Kolbe is a tremendous example of how God’s grace can move us to acts of love for our brothers.  With all the extraordinary things Fr. Kolbe did during his life – his extraordinary leadership, the extraordinary impact he had on the Catholic world in a terrible moment of persecution, spreading the devotion to the Immaculata, etc – he was still able to see the true value of his life.  He did not consider himself more important or more deserving to remain alive than any of the other prisoners in Auschwitz.  With all the wonderful things he had accomplished, and all the wonderful works he could still do for the Lord, God’s grace permitted him to see that the ultimate value of his life was only to be found in laying it down for someone else. read more

Saint Clare is this lesser known companion of Saint Francis whose life in some ways surpasses that Seraphic Doctor.  Saint Francis’ life was love turned outward towards the world through the blessed prism of Lady Poverty.  Saint Clare’s life was the intimate love of the soul alone with its God lived out in a cloistered community of like-minded consecrated women.  Love, by the action of grace, is stretched beyond its human limits both outwardly and inwardly.  And love, if it remains poor without claiming any dues, can be fully transformed by the divine motion of the Holy Spirit.  Saints Francis and Clare were driven to choose lives of radical poverty because the taste of divine love reshaped their entire understanding of what they needed in this world.  They came to understand poverty as the way in which their hearts could drink deeply from the fountain of Love.  “Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.” read more

The new covenant is foretold by the prophet Jeremiah.  We must regularly examine our hearts to see if we are living according to the new covenant, or if we are still stuck in the old.  Make no mistake!  All Christian religiosity and practice is not “new testament” simply because it has the label Christian or is practiced by the Baptised.  The Old Covenant remains a sort of religious default that we fall back on, even as Christians, when we stop living according to the Spirit.  The Old Covenant provides a set of standards, clarity on right and wrong, consequences and punishments reserved for sinners.  If you want to avoid suffering – especially the eternal kind – the Old Covenant tells you what to do and how to behave.  The New Covenant does not cancel any of that truth, but addresses the much more fundamental problem of our existence: we are incapable, on our own, of any real goodness.  The New Covenant addresses the root of our problem, we need to be healed, forgiven, and supported by God’s help.  It is our heart that needs God’s touch because it is wayward and susceptible to all manner of evil suggestion.  If evil gets into our heart, our mind will be unable to straighten things out – even if it perceives the evil as evil.  To pretend or presume that there is no evil in our hearts, or that the evil present there isn’t so bad is precisely the lack of humility and poverty that will keep God’s new covenant of grace from acting. read more