Thursday, December 13, 2012

Nieves Garcia's Spirituality Spanish language Blog: Aprendiendo a Amar





http://aprendiendoaamar.123miweb.es

You can find it here

Lo encuentras aqui
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Monday, October 22, 2012

Conversion before Catechesis (Catholic Synod of Bishops in Rome]




This is something I have firmly believed since the start of my Theological Studies [Rome 1966!] , personal experience and pastoral life [Quintana Roo, 1971....School of Faith 1975...]

You have to convert people before you can teach them/catechize them.

This is what the Synod of Bishops is hearing

The Essentiality of the Kerygma in Preaching the Gospel (Part 1)



Marc De Leyritz of Alpha Course-France Speaks on the New Evangelization


By Junno Arocho

VATICAN CITY, OCT. 22, 2012 (Zenit.org).- Throughout the Synod of Bishops on the New Evangelization, particular emphasis has been given to the movements and ecclesial realities within the Church as a way of evangelizing within the parish community. Several of the founders and heads of these realities were given the opportunity to address the participating cardinals and bishops. Among them were the representatives of the Alpha Course-France.
Developed in the late 1970s in an Anglican parish in England by Reverend Nicky Gumbel, the Alpha Course was later brought into a Catholic context in the 90s upon the invitation of the late Cardinal Basil Hume, Archbishop of Westminster.
Since then, the Alpha Course has spread throughout the world in over 160 countries with over 20 million people who have participated in the ten week course. Archbishop Octavio Ruiz, President of the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of the New Evangelization described the course as "a tool that God has been put into our hands to do this New Evangelization." ZENIT had an opportunity to sit down with Marc de Leyritz, who along with his wife Florence addressed the Synod of Bishops last Wednesday.
Part 2 of this interview will be published on Tuesday.
ZENIT: What is Alpha?
Marc de Leyritz: Alpha is a ten week introduction to the Christian faith. It really is a parish based tool which is used for people to take time to think about the meaning of life. And this is really a nice space which is created in every community, every Christian community that wants it. It helps people, should they want, to find a living relationship with God.
It's interesting to see that today about 20 million have followed Alpha around the world. And not everybody has met Jesus as a result of it, but a very big majority of people share afterwards that they are now reading the Bible regularly, praying regularly, and many are sharing that they have had a living and life-changing encounter with Jesus.
ZENIT: Why this emphasis on the "Kerygma"? What was the inspiration that the "Kerygma" is essential to preaching the Gospel?
Marc de Leyritz: Alpha was founded in England in an Anglican parish 30 years ago. Florence and I brought it back to France and we adapted it to a Catholic setting, which is a big challenge because when you're in France, anything that comes from England is really a bad start. But, this distinction between Kerygma and catechesis is really something key, since the beginning of the Church, since the very first day. You see on the day of Pentecost, Acts 2, Peter gives a very short speech, the nucleus of the faith, which is what Kerygma means, the proclamation of the nucleus. And, he speaks probably one minute or two minutes, and the Bible says that listening to this, people's hearts were pierced and they asked, "Brother, what shall we do?" And he said, "Repent," and then they were baptized. And on that day, the first day of the Church, 3000 people were baptized. And only then, the nascent Church started to help people to grow into full disciples of Jesus Christ.
So, Pope John Paul [II], in a very foundational text called "Redemptoris Missio" which is an encyclical and in another post-Synodal exhortation called "Catechesi Tradendae", he makes this distinction. He says you cannot give catechesis before Kerygma. And he defends Kerygma as the first announcement of the Gospel which is done in an enthusiastic and vivid and burning way, through which a man or woman decides to commit their life to Jesus and recognize him as Lord. And unless this moment has happened, you cannot grow in Christian life.
So, what really was striking for Florence and I 15 years ago, is we see many people in the Catholic Church trying to learn more or less well the catechism, which means less and less to them because we are living now in a secular society. And then they go away, because people are asking, "What's in it for me?"  And the catechism, without the love of Jesus, without the friendship with God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit, the catechism doesn't mean anything; it's just a big book. Now, once people have let the Holy Spirit in their heart, they need food, spiritual food and they go into the catechism and they eat it, they drink it.
That's why we emphasize so much on the Kerygma. One of the participants of the Synod was telling, I think it was reported on ZENIT, he said it's like a football match with two parts, a first part which is the Kerygma and a second part, which is the Catechesis. And he was begging saying "Please don't play the second part before playing the first part," and even worse, "don't play the second part instead of the first part. So Alpha is really helping to play the first part fully.
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On the NET:
For more information on the Alpha Course, go to http://www.alpha.org/catholics  or contact by email at catholics@alpha.org.
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Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Crying with the Victims of Atrocities

As part of being alive it is our fate to "cry with those who cry" as well as "rejoice with those who rejoice"; in this case it makes me very sad to remember recent atrocities:

and one might think "There has to be a God to punish those who go unpunished in this world"


Anger, drama at Ratko Mladic's genocide trial

By MIKE CORDER | Associated Press – 1 hr 22 mins ago
THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — He's no longer the swaggering general who held Sarajevo "in the palm of his hand" during Bosnia's 1992-95 war. Yet as his long-awaited genocide trial began Wednesday, Ratko Mladic still managed to reopen old wounds with the flick of his hand.
Hobbled by strokes and wearing a business suit instead of combat fatigues, the frail, 70-year-old defendant had an angry exchange of hand gestures with the families of massacre victims in the public gallery, separated by the bulletproof glass in the courtroom.
"Vulture!" said one woman in the gallery.
Watching the war crimes trial on television in Bosnia, Mevlija Malic added: "Not even an animal would behave like that."
Mladic is accused of commanding Bosnian Serb troops who waged a campaign of murder and persecution to drive Muslims and Croats out of territory they considered part of Serbia. His troops rained shells and snipers' bullets down on civilians in the 44-month-long siege of the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, and killed 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in July 1995, Europe's worst massacre since World War II.
"The world watched in disbelief that in neighborhoods and villages within Europe a genocide appeared to be in progress," prosecutor Dermot Groome said at the U.N. court in The Hague.
Twenty years after the war that left 100,000 dead, Bosnia remains divided into two ministates — one for Serbs, the other shared by Bosnian Muslims and Croats — linked by a central government.
Mladic fled into hiding after the war and spent 15 years as a fugitive before international pressure on Serbia led to his arrest last year. Now he is held in a one-man cell in a special international wing of a Dutch jail and receives food and medical care that would likely be the envy of many in Bosnia.
But the fact that he is jailed and on trial is seen as another victory for international justice and hailed by observers as evidence that — more often than not — war crimes tribunals get their indicted suspects, even if years later. In another court Wednesday in The Hague, former Liberian President Charles Taylor faced a sentencing hearing after being convicted last month of aiding rebels in neighboring Sierra Leone's civil war.
That is heartening news for the International Criminal Court, which has indicted the likes of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir for genocide but appears nowhere close to having him arrested.
In a demonstration of Bosnia's continuing ethnic divide, Mladic's entrance in court was applauded by people who gathered in the Serb stronghold of Pale to watch the trial on TV.
"Mladic is our hero. It's sad that we see him there," said Milan Ivanovic, a 20-year-old law student.
Groome told the three-judge panel that Mladic was hand-picked by Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic because of his skills as a military commander, but also "because Karadzic believed he was willing to commit the crimes needed to achieve the strategic goals of the Bosnian Serb leadership."
He signaled that prosecutors would use Mladic's own words against him in the trial, drawing on the former general's wartime diaries, radio intercepts and appearances on television during the war.
In one such TV appearance, Mladic showed a news team around the Serb artillery dug into hills overlooking Sarajevo and denied any involvement in war crimes — foreshadowing his defense now that his actions were intended only to protect Serbs.
"I did not take part in any crimes. I have only defended my people," Mladic said. He denies wrongdoing but has refused to enter pleas to the 11 charges against him in The Hague.
In another video, however, he is heard boasting: "Whenever I come by Sarajevo, I kill someone in passing. ... I go kick the hell out of the Turks" — a denigrating reference to Bosnian Muslims.
Groome said Mladic "held Sarajevo in the palm of his hand," playing an intercepted radio communication of the former commander ordering the shelling of part of the city and a video of civilians scurrying across devastated streets to avoid sniper fire.
The attacks were part of an "overarching" plan by Karadzic and former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to drive non-Serbs from large parts of Bosnia and to carve out a "Greater Serbia" from the ruins of the former Yugoslavia, Groome said.
Karadzic is also on trial at the tribunal following his 2008 arrest. Milosevic was put on trial here, too, for fomenting wars across the Balkans, but he died of a heart attack in 2006 before judges could deliver their verdict.
Prosecutors say they will use evidence against Mladic from more than 400 witnesses, although very few of them will testify in court. Much of their evidence already has been heard in other cases and will be admitted as written statements.
The first witness is to start testifying May 29, but Presiding Judge Alphons Orie of the Netherlands hinted that he may postpone the case because prosecutors have not disclosed all the evidence to Mladic's defense.
Bosnia's president hailed the trial's opening as a historic day in the still-bitterly divided country's recovery from its war wounds.
"First of all, we are expecting from this trial the truth," said Bakir Izetbegovic. "The truth and then justice for the victims, for the families of the victims. It is the worst period of our history."
Mladic gave a thumbs-up and clapped toward the gallery as the trial got under way. He occasionally wrote notes and showed no emotion as prosecutors outlined his alleged crimes.
After the brief exchange between Mladic and the gallery, Orie rebuked both about "inappropriate interactions" and said he might shield the defendant behind a screen if the outbursts continued.
Munira Subasic, who lost 22 relatives in the Srebrenica massacre, claimed Mladic made a throat-slitting gesture toward her after she had held up both her hands, wrists crossed to indicate Mladic was in captivity. Mladic's lawyer, Branko Lukic, did not confirm her version of events, but claimed that somebody in the audience raised their middle finger at Mladic.
"He is very easily provoked and we had that gallery full of people very ready to provoke," Lukic said.
In Srebrenica, widows and mothers of the massacre victims gathered to watch the trial together and were outraged at Mladic's apparent lack of emotion.
Suhreta Malic, who had more than 30 relatives killed in the massacre, cried as she sat in front of the TV with photos of her dead children in her hands.
"This is so painful for us. It really hurts," she said. "We did not lose some chicken. We lost our sons."
___
Sabina Niksic in Srebrenica and Aida Cerkez and Amer Cohadzic in Sarajevo contributed to this report.
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Wednesday, April 25, 2012

The Subversion of Vatican II


The Subversion of Vatican II

Posted: 04/25/2012 11:44 am
AmazingInspiringFunnyScaryHotCrazyImportantWeird

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In more than 30 years serving in Catholic education, both on the secondary and university levels, I have seen the Catholic Church lose many generous and spiritual young people because the institutional leaders do not give them the "spiritual space" to question, to dialogue, to doubt, to challenge. In fact, some of these institutional leaders contend (often behind closed doors) that the church is better off without these querulous youth and instead shower their attention on young people who accept the church with docility and are supposedly "flocking" into the church. It is not the young people (and many of their parents) who are leaving the church that are the supposed "cafeteria Catholics." It is those who are picking and choosing from the teachings of Vatican II, which first convened exactly 50 years ago this October, as if it were not as "legitimate" a Council of the entire church as, say, Vatican I or even the Council of Trent.
When anyone reviews the litany of recent church scandals, missteps, mistakes and public relation blunders, must that person -- the faithful, the not-so-faithful or the unfaithful -- not stop a moment and ask, "Is the Holy Spirit really guiding the church today?"
My answer is: Of course! Probably never before in the history of the church has there been greater de facto evidence of the grace-filled presence of the Holy Spirit. Go to almost any Catholic parish that is following the spirit of Vatican II and you will experience what I am talking about. But (and this is a big but) surely the amateurish solutions proffered by the institutional church in response to the current crises of confidence in the church on everything from the cover-ups of sexual abuse to the refusal to even allow a discussion of the ordination of women could lead anyone with a modicum of common sense to question the presence of the Holy Spirit in Rome or in most chancery offices today.
Yet the Holy Spirit dwells, as always, in the hearts and minds of the faithful -- the lay people, the vowed religious, the priests and deacons, the prelates and popes. We Catholics know that when we all come together as church in a collegial and faith-filled spirit that God -- in the Person of the Holy Spirit -- is there in our midst. This is actually a key teaching of the church, part of its much misunderstood and often misused "magisterium."
Change is hard for an individual to accomplish and even more traumatic for an institution that has many individuals within its structures with vested interests in the status quo to protect. Yet the reason we have a theology of metanoia (change of heart) in the Catholic Church is that many of our church fathers and mothers and holy prophets knew it would take the Holy Spirit to transform us, not only as individuals but also as the institutional church. Transforming man-made, fallible structures and organizations is a meaningful task, but it takes the Holy Spirit to pour grace, zeal and wisdom into the hearts of individuals like you and me so that we will speak up -- yes, with insistent, faith-filled force but also with sensitive, caring and loving actions toward the institutional church itself.
What is so very strange and inconsistent is that the institutional church, which defends its role as protector of the faith and as conveyor of the truth, seems to be doing all that it can to negate the results of its own most recent ecumenical council, Vatican II.
Have they forgotten that Pope John XXIII -- as much the Vicar of Christ on Earth as Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI -- convened bishops from all over the world half a century ago to join with the bishop of Rome to exercise its teaching authority with the assurance that such collegiality is imbued with the presence of the Holy Spirit? Or, as Catholic Bishop Kevin Dowling of South Africa recently said of Vatican II, "its vision, its principles and the direction it gave are to be followed and implemented by all, from the pope to the peasant farmer in the fields of Honduras."
Even the casual observer sees the growing tensions that arise between the various factions in the church today. One sees antagonistic camps of "liberals" vs. "conservatives," "orthodox" vs. "revisionists," and "the faithful" vs. "the heretics." Mean-spiritedness, hostility and acrimony flourish in a church that should be all about the peace and love that Jesus brought to our world. Certainly, all sides are to blame as we permit these differences to obfuscate the "Good News" of the faith.
Yet now, more than ever, those of us who believe in the vision of Vatican II cannot back down from speaking the truth as we see it. The institutional church needs to respond in a vitally new and more effective way to Vatican II that will allow the church to once more "teach as Jesus did."
De LaSalle Brother Louis DeThomasis is a former president of St. Mary's University of Minnesota and the author of 'Flying in the Face of Tradition: Listening to the Lived Experience of the Faithful,' published by ACTA Publications.
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