Putting hands, hearts to work
Local youth serve mission at Navajo reservation
By TIM WENZL
Southwest Kansas Register
Four high school students and two adult leaders from the Cathedral of Our Lady of Guadalupe Parish in Dodge City spent a week in July working with other youth groups from throughout the country at the Window Rock Navajo Reservation near Fort Defiance, Arizona.
Jordan Olivarez, Shannon Wenzl, and Megan and Laura Wright, were accompanied by Jodi Lix and Dennis Scheck. They joined mission groups from Peoria, Ill., Phoenix, Ariz., Jensen Beach, Florida, and Meridian, Idaho. The mission trip was part of the YouthWorks network.
Mary’s canticle: Helping us to receive with a grateful heart
By H. Richard McCord
Catholic News Service
Like many families, we have happy Christmas memories saved in photos. There is one of our sons at age 6 seated on his first bicycle under the Christmas tree. His head is thrown back with an exuberant smile. We were pleased to be able to give him this “best gift ever” and he was equally delighted to receive it. Such a memory reminds us that Christmas is as much about receiving gratefully as it is about giving generously.
A gift requires a giver and a receiver to be a complete experience. This truth can get lost in the Christmas frenzy of acquiring and checking off items on our list. The commercial message of Christmas focuses attention on what we’re going to give when really it’s asking the bottom-line question: How much are you going to spend? The successful Christmas season always seems to be measured in dollars and cents.
Giving generously, especially to the needy, is a truly blessed act. St. Paul even tells us that “God loves a cheerful giver” (2 Cor 9:7). Giving is more than just a good human action. For a Christian, it’s a participation in the divine activity by which God the Father gives us his son whose unconditional love brings us salvation.
World Youth Day memories
By DAVID MYERS
Southwest Kansas Register
A sea of humanity poured out onto the horizon, creating inlets along the streets of Rio de Janeiro and on Copacabana beach, a flood of human life seeking to get closer to God, and, if chance dictated, to the newest pontiff to grace the Catholic Church.
Among the thousands and thousands of people in Brazil for the 13th World Youth Day was Hector Rivera, Director of Religious Education for St. Mary Parish in Garden City, two other adult volunteers, and six local youth.
“The day Pope Francis arrived in Copacabana,” Rivera said, “we were within five feet of him. He waved and smiled and was giving blessings.”
It was an unexpected, face-to-face moment, after which Rivera said the youth “were very silent. I think this is a memory they will cherish for the rest of their lives.”
What a cultural event can teach us about welcoming the stranger
By Rhina Guidos
Catholic News Service
Prior to Christmas each year, enclaves of Latin American communities in the United States continue a practice in which strangers are welcomed into private homes, where they sit down to music, food and prayer.
The intention of these cultural practices called “posadas” is to recall the journey of the Holy Family as they received shelter from danger in their homeland. Shelter is one of the closest translations of the word “posada.”
When you ask, in Spanish, if someone can put you up, colloquially, you ask if they can “give” you “posada.” You, as the pilgrim, or traveler, or foreigner, ask for shelter from the elements, nothing else. As the host, it has a different meaning.
Having attended dozens of posadas over the years, I’ve noticed that when someone asks another person to host a religious posada, the host feels honored.
What we can learn from our biblical ancestors as migrants
By Father Lawrence Mick
Catholic News Service
The first three definitions my dictionary lists to describe an immigrant are: foreigner, outsider, alien.
Israel, as a people, had experience as foreigners, outsiders and aliens. The Book of Deuteronomy (26:5) commands the Israelites to offer the sacrifice of the first fruits and to “declare in the presence of the Lord, your God, ‘My father was a refugee Aramean who went down to Egypt with a small household and lived there as a resident alien.’”
‘It was a great feeling ... to be the hands and feet of Jesus’
St. Dominic Parish youth spend week serving poor of Cairo, Ill.
Special to the Register
Editor’s Note: This article was provided by Joel McClure, a new seminarian for the Catholic Diocese of Dodge City.
In July, 18 high school students and five adults from St. Dominic Parish in Garden City traveled to Cairo, Illinois on a wonderful week-long journey together to serve the poor by living out the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
“It was a significant experience and the people of Cairo stole our hearts,” said Lea Ann Scott, trip leader for the last 15 years. “We were able to share the love of Christ with others. It is a life-changing experience and an unforgettable journey for all.”
Cairo lies at the southernmost tip of Illinois where the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers converge. This town, which was once a main river port, was – in its day - widely known to many Americans as a prominent commercial town with big-city attractions and a robust economy that would rival Las Vegas. But due to the decline of the river industry and escalating racial tensions in the 1960s, many jobs were lost and poverty became rampant in the city. Today the population numbers barely 3,000 people with an estimated median household income of just more than $21,000.
Lea Ann Scott has worked in Cairo three different summers and saw some progress in the community for the first time. New businesses and town clean-up was a welcomed surprise. The two-story hospital that sat empty for years is being torn down along with other dangerously crumbling buildings.
Porn: In your home and available 24-7
By DAVID MYERS
Southwest Kansas Register
The speaker started out with a warning: “Today we’re going to get into some really dark stuff.”
She wasn’t kidding. Mary Anne Layden, PhD, one of two keynote presenters at the annual Stewardship Conference at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Guadalupe Aug. 24, gave a no-holds-barred talk on the prevalence of pornography and its ease of availability to anyone of any age.
“Pornography used to be found in a shady store on a corner somewhere,” she said. “Now porn is mostly on the internet. It’s free and available 24-7.”
Dr. Layden is a psychotherapist and Director of the Sexual Trauma and Psychopathology Program at the University of Pennsylvania. She termed pornography as the new “crack cocaine”. Like any addiction, pornography can create in an addict a desire to find more, and more sexually diverse, activities to meet his growing appetite (While women view porn, it’s far more prevalent among men.).
New kinds of Christmas traditions
By Louise McNulty
Catholic News Service
Some people decorate their Christmas trees with shiny garlands, bright lights and family heirlooms. In Dover, Del., Carrie Doane, a young mother of three, says she plans to decorate her family’s tree with something better.
To teach her children a special way to celebrate the earthly birthday of Christ, she plans to decorate the tree with pieces of paper that each child will fill out with a good deed he or she has done. Then she’ll punch a hole and hang the “good deed” ornament on the tree.
“I’d give examples of things they can do without being asked. Or I’d describe someone else’s chore that they can offer to do,” she said. Doane also wants adults in her household to participate. They can contribute with a deed, such as not arguing back with someone who’s angry (even if they’re not right), do a chore the other spouse usually does or bring a latte to a friend who’s having a hard day.
Mary’s gifts to Jesus and what we can learn from them
By Effie Caldarola
Catholic News Service
Few things are as popular today as genealogy. Everyone seeks to know more about their ancestry, and websites and television shows pique our interest and help us find that great-grandfather we never knew.
Despite the recent fad, genealogy has been important since ancient times, and it’s clear from Scripture that knowledge of ancestry was considered essential by the Hebrew people and by the Gospel writers who gave us a picture of Christ.
Matthew and Luke thought it important to take us through a long line of Jesus’ ancestors to place him within the context of human history. Although both writers give us Joseph’s lineage, we know that the person who gave Jesus his human makeup, of her body and blood, was Mary.
Mary is near and familiar to us as Catholics, and yet mysterious. Sometimes we yearn for her comfort and other times we puzzle about who she really was. Little is told of her in Scripture, and much of our beliefs about her come to us through tradition.
Seeing the true Church means
looking beyond our borders
By DAVID MYERS
Southwest Kansas Register
Only six percent of the world’s Catholics live in the United States, therefore to “try to understand the global Catholic Church through the U.S. prism, doesn’t do justice to who we are.”
According to Senior CNN Vatican Analyst John Allen, Jr., who spoke at the recent Stewardship Conference, it’s important to peer through the fog that obscures our vision of the global Church. We can do this, in part, by taking a closer look at our new pope.
Allen, who was reared in Hays, spoke on “Pope Francis and Trends in the Global Catholic Church” at the Aug. 24 gathering at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Allen has travelled with a succession of popes, and has been termed (by the London Tablet) as “the most authoritative writer on Vatican affairs….”