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As messages pour in from all over the globe, asking for prayers and hope and wisdom, one’s role in all of it can seem quite overwhelming.
A coming together of the Synodal Fathers that seems more divisive than unifying;
The doctrines of the Faith under attack from all sides;
Education that tends toward indoctrination rather than the expansion of the mind;
Political races both in my home country and abroad that give us more of the same;
Christians being slaughtered in the name of who knows what;
Gifted Catholic artists who refuse to suffer for their craft;
And we could go on.
To all of this what can I say? Not very much.
My convictions over the state of Catholicism today and the pressures it produces on each and every Catholic are limited to three simple words that I continue to hear in my heart:
Don’t give up.
And while I wish my thoughts were more profound or witty, I know they are not.
Don’t give up.
Sounds cliche perhaps; but I imagine it is very much the same sort of sentiment that pushed Noah to finish a boat while the world was falling away.
It was a similar thought that must have entered the minds of those first missionaries to North America as they fell from the ship that carried them across an ocean.
YOU KNOW THE IMAGE
The Church is a great vessel sent to the four corners of the earth both to save and sanctify…
…but what we often forget is how bruised and battered we may become in the process.
So to the husband who declares with the utmost surety that there is no hope for his marriage;
To the pastor who is certain that his parish is dead;
To the parent who yearns for their child to come home to Christ;
And even now as I dance with my daughter and kiss her on the forehead;
My message is still the same to you all.
Don’t give up.
We are building a civilization; and you carry within you one of the most important pieces.
Jesus called it your cross.
Friend, pick it up.
In Christ, patrick
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