Typical comments range from "There's too much emphasis about sin", "my sins put Jesus on the Cross", "I'm unworthy", "I'm a sinner" to "it's all negative".

This guilt-based old religion mentality, ties us into a God who is tough as old boots and glares down from above noting our every wrong move.

Such held over views from childhood, disrupts us from responding to a God who lavishly loves us to bits, each other and ourselves.

Can you imagine that!

The reality

Sin is real. Grace is real.

The Hebrew understanding of sin translates into khata, which means a failure to fulfil to be truly human. To ‘miss the mark' in living and loving as God's image and likeness as fully human alive men and women.

Sin is about immaturity. The consequences of sin in its various levels of seriousness causes injury to another and to our natural world.

To sin therefore, is that behaviour where we have disrespected relationships, failed to act justly and trashed the environment.

So to dismiss sin, or replace the word altogether with "wrong choices", is to ignore an innate truth of our human condition.

St Paul "gets it"

St Paul gradually realises, as we all do at some point, that we are contradictory figures.

We do live in tension between what is truth or untruth, what is healthy or unhealthy or what is life giving or life draining. He names this an inward struggle.

He says "I cannot understand my own behaviour. I fail to carry out the things I want to do, and I find myself doing the very things I hate.

"When I act against my will, then, it is not my true self doing it, but sin which lives in me". (Romans 7:19-20)

Yet St Paul isn't on his own. I can identify with what he says - and reckon some of you can to.

Hard to believe that Paul, once named Saul, was a predator killer of Christians. Yet only owning his sin could he come to recognise that his behaviour originated from the Fall.

In the beginning

This Genesis story attempts to offer an explanation in how sin entered the world impacting on our beingness as women and men.

How Eve and Adam were in the very beginning living in right relationships with each other, comfortable in full view of God and in the garden called Eden.

All was blissfully heavenly.

Then antipathy entered breaking the friendship and leaving us all vulnerable to the inclination of sin.

But evil wasn't going to have the last say. God's plan of recovery restored this friendship when Jesus became the willing reconciliatory sacrifice.

It was sin that was destroyed by the cross. Grace never entered the world because grace always was.

Life and liberty

Back to St Paul. He so rightly says in Galatians 2:20. I have been crucified with Christ, and I live now not with my own life, but with life of Christ lives in me.

Easter changed absolutely everything. The Cross becoming a symbol of liberty enabling us to become our baptismal selves and not victims to this ancestral sin.

That's St Paul's point: - that God is good and not jealous as the serpent claims.

That is why we don't have to be joyless or slaves to our false selves.

As Pope Francis suggests, we don't have to look like we've come back from a funeral or live lives that seem like Lent without Easter (Evangelii Gaudium 6,10) and he is right.

It's often when we come to that place of self-truth, in recognising where we ‘missed the mark' do we encounter simultaneously God's giftedness in Jesus.

Can we name what hampers us from being truly human as women and men of God and being created solely to be God's own image? Can we name those occasions where we have ‘come up short' in our ‘being' the Glory of God.

Becoming our true selves

Pentecost Sunday holds the power to burst with life in our lives. To get excited about who we are.

"We become fully human when we become more than human, when we let God bring us beyond ourselves in order to attain the fullest truth of our being." said Pope Francis in article 8 in Evangelii Gaudium.

The Redemption becomes the relationship to continually become a new creation converting over and over and over again to become our whole person.

That we don't have to choose sin. We can say no when critically pulling another down to boost ourselves up. We can so no to blaming another for our mistakes.

We don't have to lose our rag at another. We don't have to kill off those of little account. We can stop and attend to a need we see in front of us.

By integrating sin, by owning our ‘stuff' we are simultaneously claiming God's investment in us - God's intense hope and trust in us to be God's image.

You have stripped off your old behaviour with your old self and you have put on a new self which will progress towards true knowledge the more it is renewed in the image of its creator. (Colossians 3:9-11)

And that's worth getting excited about.

• Copy supplied
• Sue Seconi (pictured) is a writer and a parishioner from the Catholic Parish of Whanganui - te Parihi katorika ki Whanganui.

Sins against peace

Cardinal Oswald Gracias sought forgiveness "for the lack of courage, the necessary courage in the pursuit of peace between peoples and nations.

"Our sin is even graver if, to justify war and discrimination, we invoke the name of God" he said.

Sins against creation, indigenous peoples, migrants

Cardinal Michael Czerny spoke of "shame for what we, the faithful, have done to transform creation from a garden into a desert, manipulating it at will".

Exploitation damages "human dignity" he said.

He sought forgiveness for systems fostering slavery and colonialism, and for "the globalisation of indifference toward the tragedies" affecting many migrants today.

Abuse

Cardinal Sean Patrick O'Malley begged forgiveness for all forms of abuse.

He specifically sought forgiveness for the sexual abuse of minors and vulnerable people ... and "for all the times we used the status of ordained ministry and consecrated life to commit this terrible sin".

Subjugating others

Cardinal Kevin Joseph Farrell spoke "on behalf of all members of the Church, especially us men", acknowledging a certain contempt for the dignity of women, making them "silent and submissive".

He also said the Church sometimes neglects families' needs, judging and condemning rather than caring for them.

Hope and love have sometimes been "stolen from the youth" when "we failed to understand the value of love and hope" he said.

He also prayed for "those who are mistaken" and abandoned in prison or on death row.

Misusing doctrine

Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández sought forgiveness for the misuse of Church doctrine.

"We, the pastors, tasked with confirming our brothers and sisters in the faith, failed to safeguard and present the Gospel as a living source of eternal newness."

He especially begged forgiveness for times when doctrine was used to justify "inhumane treatment" or "hindered legitimate inculturations of the truth of Jesus Christ", making it difficult to achieve "authentic fraternity for all humanity".

Sins against poverty

Cardinal Cristóbal Lopez Romero denounced the "culpable indulgences that take bread from the hungry".

He spoke of "feeling ashamed of the inaction that holds us back from accepting the call to be a poor Church of the poor", acknowledging through this "trying" the difficulty of admitting guilt.

The "seduction of power", the "enticements of first places and vainglorious titles" and the "ecclesial spaces sick with self-referentiality" stifle the mission to the "peripheries" dear to Pope Francis, he said.

Sins against synodality

Cardinal Christoph Schönborn highlighted the mindset necessary for a true synodal process.

He then asked forgiveness for the "obstacles we have placed in the way of building a truly synodal, symphonic church, aware of being the holy people of God journeying together, recognising its common baptismal dignity".

He also expressed shame "for all the times we didn't listen to the Holy Spirit, preferring to listen to ourselves... for all the times we turned authority into power, stifling plurality".

Source

• La Croix

Too many people, when they grow older, give up on the God they learned about as children.

What they really need to do is think about God in a more mature way.

This can be a crisis of faith for many people, especially young people who can no longer relate to the God they learned about as children.

Too often, priests will tell them that this is a temptation.

They are told to have greater faith.

Hold on to their God and don't let go.

In truth, when someone is undergoing a crisis of faith, they may need to leave their old image of God for a new one.

We need to change our understanding of God as we mature, just as we need to change our understanding of our parents as we mature.

Psychologists, like Erik Erikson, teach us that humans go through stages of development as they mature.

The great Catholic mystics taught the same thing for centuries when they wrote of the purgative, contemplative and unitive ways. More recently, spiritual writers like James Fowler have used modern psychology to enrich our understanding of spiritual development.

My own simplified vision of spiritual development has three stages:

• turning away from sin,
• the practice of virtue and
• being embraced by God's love.

These stages are not airtight compartments but more a matter of emphasis.

All our lives involve turning away from sin and practicing virtue, but the emphasis will be different as we mature.

Many of the greatest saints were first great sinners.

They had to go through a conversion, reject sin, do penance and accept God's mercy.

Many Christian ministers put a great emphasis on this process, focusing on sin and the need for conversion in their preaching.

Their God is a lawgiver and judge and sometimes even a policeman.

God's wrath will fall on sinners, but his mercy will come to those who turn away from sin.

Pentecostals, Baptists and conservative Catholics are good at challenging sinners and calling them to repent.

This approach can be especially successful in dealing with prisoners and those with addictions.

Knowing that God is watching can also keep ordinary Christians from falling into sin.

The fear of getting caught and punished keeps many people from doing wrong. We are like children who behave because we don't want to be spanked.

The prayer life of a person at this stage of development is all about contrition, recognizing we are sinners and saying we are sorry.

If we hear the parable of the prodigal son, we identify with the prodigal and his brother, and how we are just like them.

We spend a lot of time examining our conscience and listing all the sins we have committed in confession.

At this stage, God can sometimes come across as arbitrary and vindictive.

When I was a child in the 1950s, we were taught that it was a mortal sin to eat meat on Friday or miss Mass on Sunday.

Adolescents were told that they would go to hell if they enjoyed a "dirty thought."

Wives were told to stick with their husbands, even in cases of abuse.

For many, it seemed absurd to burn in hell alongside Hitler for eating a hamburger on Friday.

This was a God who could be easily rejected.

At some point after turning away from serious sin, a Christian needs to move on from a focus on sin to a focus on the practice of virtue.

If you are no longer a great sinner, it is time to move from the negative to the positive.

We need to move from "How can I stop sinning?" to "How can I be a better Christian?" Scrupulosity is a sure sign that it is time to move on.

In this second stage of spiritual development, God is not so much a judge as a coach.

We ask him for help to be a better Christian.

He urges us on to greater and greater virtue.

When we pray and read the Gospels, we don't focus on sin, but on Jesus as the person we want to follow and imitate.

"What can I do for the Lord?"

"How can I be better?"

Most Christians spend most of their lives at this stage of spiritual development.

We are not great sinners, but neither are we saints who practice the virtues perfectly.

We try to be better but frequently fail.

We don't pray well, we don't love as much as we should, we struggle and don't seem to get better.

This can get tiresome after a while.

The coach wants us to run faster, but we know we are never going to win a gold medal.

We begin to resent the coach for asking too much of us.

At this stage of development, we are like a teenager trying to win someone's love with the perfect clothes, hairstyle, makeup, conversation and social media.

We are looking in the mirror all the time, not at the person we are with. By being good, we think we will earn God's love.

In the third stage of spiritual development, we focus not on ourselves but on God.

We look less at the prodigal son and his brother than at their father.

Many Scripture scholars call the story the parable of the prodigal father because of the love that he showers upon his sons.

When we look at Jesus in the Gospels, we see someone who will not just tell us to stop sinning and follow him.

Rather he is someone who is wonderful and who tells us about his Father, who is loving and compassionate.

In this stage of development, we are not looking for sin or ways to be better; we are looking at the Scriptures to learn how awesome and wonderful God is.

I sometimes think that the hardest act of faith is not to believe a particular dogma but to believe that God loves us unconditionally, that above, behind and in the universe is a benevolent God.

In each stage of spiritual development, our prayer life is different.

• In the first stage it is mostly contrition (I am sorry),
• in the second stage it is mostly petition (help me) and
• in the third stage it is mostly thanksgiving and adoration (you are amazing).

To truly fall in love, we must forget ourselves and focus on the person in front of us. God is amazing and we give thanks to him for all that he has done for us.

In the final stage of spiritual development, we fall in love.

We aren't good out of fear or to win God's love; we are loving and kind because God has first loved us.

• Thomas Reese SJ is a senior analyst at Religion News Service, and a former columnist at National Catholic Reporter, and a former editor-in-chief of the weekly Catholic magazine America.
• First published in RNS. Republished with permission.

Virtual discussions roam over many small things (e.g., the kerfuffle last spring over Harrison Butker's graduation address at Benedictine College), rather than one or two big things.

And there is no bigger question for Catholics today than this: Why should anyone become or remain Catholic?

Pre- Second Vatican Council

Before the Second Vatican Council, the answers commonly given to this question focused on individual well-being in the afterlife. As many Catholic characters in movies and novels attested, a basic reason to be Catholic was "so I won't go to hell."

The Catholic faith, in their view, is the best guarantee that they will not spend eternity suffering the excruciating flames of eternal torment. Instead, they will enjoy heavenly paradise.

Catholic teachings provide a roadmap of the best route to heaven, and the sacrament of penance was a sure way to correct course if you lose your way.

This position is easily caricatured in several ways.

First, heaven and hell are often depicted as destinations external to the soul, corresponding to external rewards and punishments. The soul is the same soul in heaven or hell—but it is happy in the former and miserable in the latter.

Second, sacraments and other religious devotions are portrayed as external sources of energy that are used by the soul, but do not change its fundamental character.

I go to Mass on Sundays in order to fill up my spiritual gas tank, so that I can drive my soul-car to heaven. But it is still the same old me that is driving the soul-car.

Third, the system is presented as both predictable and arbitrary. Suppose I commit a mortal sin on Friday and intend to go to confession on Saturday. If I am hit by a car leaving church on Saturday, I go to heaven. If I am hit by a car walking into church, I go to hell.

The sacramental system is depicted as an elaborate set of machinery, almost a soteriological Rube Goldberg machine. The rules are clear, even if they are not always fair.

The actual theology, however, has always been far richer than the caricatures.

Catholic theologians would say that the process of moral living itself transforms you, because it is an encounter with God's grace. You adopt good habits out of fear and obedience.

Then you begin to see the holiness and beauty of God, and you continue those habits, which gradually allow you to love God and want to live in God's presence in eternity.

A famous question in The Baltimore Catechism asks "Why did God make you?" The answer is that "God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in the next."

Heaven and hell

After Vatican II, however, the more individually oriented account of the reasons to be Catholic began to be supplemented—if not supplanted—by a different view that approached questions of salvation in a somewhat different way.

One difference was the reduced emphasis on the details of eternal punishment.

With the advent of mass media creating widespread exposure to the atrocities of war, people in the 20th century understood well the horrors of torture and suffering.

Theologians and ordinary believers alike began to question the depictions of hell found in poets like Dante and lesser writers.

How anyone with a shred of compassion could subject any creature to torture or torment, much less eternally, was beyond the grasp of many both morally and existentially.

For a divine, omnipotent being to inflict such pain on any sentient creature is monstrous; such a god might reasonably be placated, but would never be worthy of worship.

Consequently, the God who became fully human in Jesus Christ could never behave in such a fashion.

Even the more sophisticated notion of hell, as a state of the soul entirely separated from God, love, truth and light for all eternity, began to seem morally and existentially problematic.

How could a good God, who sent His only begotten Son to save us, who pursued every lost sheep, allow any of his creatures to be definitively lost?

On a more terrestrial plane, it could sometimes seem that the defenders of hell were (like Dante) too inclined to populate it with their own enemies, while reserving heaven for themselves and their friends.

Pope Francis recently critiqued this danger when he wrote that heaven is for everyone ("tutti, tutti, tutti") and warns against imagining it as a gated community for self-proclaimed upright souls.

Building the kingdom

After Vatican II, however, the chasm between heaven and hell receded from both academic theology and the popular imagination. The post-Vatican II worldview did not so much bridge the chasm as sidestep it, by reframing the issue.

Drawing upon the council's "Dogmatic Constitution on the Church" ("Lumen Gentium") and the "Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World" ("Gaudium et Spes"), many Catholics envisioned their predominant duty to be helping to build the kingdom of God.

This kingdom of God is already in our midst, inaugurated by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, but it is not yet fully complete. With the grace of Christ, who is the cornerstone, our task is to cooperate with other Christians and all people of good will in bringing it to fruition.

The focus on building the kingdom of God displaces the heaven-hell chasm in two ways. Read more

• M. Cathleen Kaveny is the Darald and Juliet Libby Professor of Law and Theology at Boston College.

As the photos suggest, he loves playing in the mud.

Springers are active, love the great outdoors, and are known for having a lot of energy.

Recently, Jinky's mom took him on a walk during a loose-leash training session when he took an unexpected turn that revealed where his doggie daddy had secretly been taking him.

Loose-leash training is a method trainers use to teach dogs to walk on a leash with some slack without pulling or going after other dogs.

Here's the big reveal that got daddy in the dog house. Continue reading

Burke documents the church's history of legislating against giving Communion to persons "obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin." It begs the question of what comprises such sin.

A San Diego group, Catholic Action for Faith and Family, has reprinted, packaged and mailed the 64-page booklet, which retitles Burke's essay as "Deny Holy Communion?"

Founded by Thomas J. McKenna, who acts as Burke's scheduler and is involved with several other lay Catholic organizations, Catholic Action for Faith and Family's two episcopal advisers are Burke himself and San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone.

Determining what comprises "manifest grave sin" seems uppermost in the mind of Cordileone, who last year banned then-Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi from Communion in his archdiocese.

In an April 2022 letter, Cordileone wrote to the speaker, who professes to be a devout Catholic, "You are not to present yourself for Holy Communion … until such time as you publicly repudiate your advocacy for the legitimacy of abortion and confess and receive absolution of this grave sin."

Therein lies the rub, and the confusion. On the other side of the country, Washington Archbishop Cardinal Wilton D. Gregory has said he would not deny Communion to President Joe Biden, another Catholic politician on the wrong side of Cordileone's reading of the law.

Late last month, Bishop Thomas J.J. Paprocki of the diocese of Springfield in Illinois, a canon lawyer who has banned legislators in his state who voted to allow abortion, threw mud into the larger equation with an ungentlemanly critique of San Diego's bishop, Cardinal Robert McElroy, who had published an article in America magazine advocating a more pastoral approach to related questions.

In the middle of all this, the Vatican — in the person of Pope Francis — opposes using Communion as a political weapon.

What does double effect have to do with the fracas? Well, President Biden and the former speaker say they are "personally opposed" to abortion even as they back measures to keep it legal and accessible.

The stretch here is their argument that legalized abortion prevents a worse result. It is a stretch. Does this rise to the level of "manifest grave sin" requiring canonical penalties?

The lawyer-bishops say yes.

The pastoral bishops say no.

Which brings us to the other morality police, the Catholic Laity and Clergy for Renewal, a Denver group headed by a former employee of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which reportedly spent millions of dollars to track clerical use of Grindr, advertised as "the world's largest social-networking app for gay, bi, trans and queer people."

Despite canon law's insistence on not damaging individuals' reputations, the Catholic Laity and Clergy for Renewal does not see its spying as wrong. Founded in response to the scandal surrounding former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, they say their aim is to protect the church.

From what?

Here, the argument of Military Archbishop Timothy Broglio, president of the bishops' conference, rises: He connects priest pederasty with homosexuality.

For Catholic Laity and Clergy for Renewal, then, tracking and sharing clerics' use of hook-up apps has a good intent.

In July 2021, after the group shared its findings with various bishops and others about clerics' use of Grindr and its findings were published by the online newsletter The Pillar, Msgr Jeffrey Burrill was forced to resign as general secretary of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

It did not affect his future ministry, however. He is now the administrator of a Wisconsin parish.

The result of all this?

Are Catholics any better evangelized on the problem of abortion as a moral and political issue?

Are the people of God better served when errant clerics are publicly excoriated?

Catholicism does not allow abortion or same-sex relations.

That is well known.

But is this evangelization?

Is anyone even paying attention?

Or have the church and Catholicism in general become ignored footnotes to the news?

• Phyllis Zagano is an internationally acclaimed Catholic scholar and lecturer on contemporary spirituality and women's issues in the church.
• Republished with permission from the author.

"We rarely hear about sin, but it's rampant, it's rampant.

"We see it in the promotion of abortion. .. in this lunatic approach of transgenderism,... in the promotion of sex between two men or two women. That is sinful. That is mortal sin. And people don't seem to realise it. But it's a fact, it's a reality," said Fr Seán Sheehy.

"What I'm saying is not what I invented, it is not what I came up with, [it] is what God is saying. And the day you die, you will find out that is the truth.

Sheeny says when he was talking to a woman recently, who told him her daughter handed her a condom.

"She said an HSE van was handing these things out in Tralee. And I said my gracious me, that is promoting promiscuity."

A number of people walked out.

Undeterred, Sheehy said: "And to those of you who happen to be leaving today, God help you, and that is all I have to say to you."

Apologising for the priest, Bishop Ray Browne of Kerry said Sheehy's comments had caused "deep upset and hurt".

"The views expressed do not represent the Christian position.

"The homily at a regular weekend parish mass is not appropriate for such issues to be spoken of in such terms," said Browne.

Undeterred, during the week, Sheehy was a guest on Ireland radio station, where he repeated his claims that the bishop was "muzzling the truth in order to appease people".

He also pointed the finger at some of Ireland's politicians.

Not everyone is appalled, though.

In Crisis Magazine, Cole Kinder asks how Ireland can be considered Catholic if these traditional teachings are not upheld.

Sheehy's homily is very inclusive— it is calling all people to repent, wrote Kinder.

"How can you say Ireland is Catholic if those following its core tenets are considered controversial?

"And it gets worse.

"Not only is Ireland barely a Catholic nation anymore in its laws and actions, but the freedom to be Catholic is under attack, with many bishops completely complicit in the persecution.

"It feels like a story out of the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Church.

"A bishop, yes, the person who is actually an apostolic successor, has apologised for the homily not being Christian!

Kinder's perspective was not endorsed by the Association of Catholic Priests who have called on Sheehy to be banned from celebrating the sacraments.

Cork parish priest Fr Tim Hazelwood says "the majority of priests are absolutely appalled" by what Sheehy said in his homily, as well as his subsequent comments about politicians going to hell.

"He puts himself in the position of God to make judgments," said Hazelwood.

He thinks Sheehy's s celebret should be removed, saying that if he didn't have a celebret he wouldn't be able to repeat the performance.

A celebret is a letter of permission from his bishop allowing a priest to celebrate the sacraments and preach.

• Source
  Independent.ie
• CAN
• Crisis Magazine

In Catholicism, the situation was more complex.

Suicide was thought to be a mortal sin, of course.

But as a pastoral matter, in many places, Catholics who had committed suicide were denied funeral rites and burial in consecrated graveyards for concern of "public scandal of the faithful."

In recent decades, as America has become more secular, it has also become more determined to address the rising rates of suicide.

In the United States, National Suicide Prevention Week engages mental-health professionals and the general public about suicide and culminates in World Suicide Prevention Day, sponsored annually on Sept. 10 by the World Health Organization.

Moving away from engrained assumptions about individuals' selfishness and moral failings, both private associations and government agencies have portrayed suicide as a public-health problem to address through prevention strategies.

Accordingly, religious people and institutions today operate with a more sensitive and compassionate approach to suicide.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church now recognizes that "grave psychological disturbances" can reduce the moral culpability of suicide and no longer teaches that people who commit suicide necessarily go to hell: "We should not despair of the eternal salvation of persons who have taken their own lives. By ways known to him alone, God can provide the opportunity for salutary repentance."

Even so, survey data shows that, in addition to demographic considerations, religion and proximity to suicide shape Americans' attitudes on the subject.

A new study by Lifeway Research, an evangelical firm specializing in surveys about faith and culture, shows that more than three-quarters agree that suicide has become an epidemic.

Less than a quarter believe people who die from suicide automatically face eternal judgment, with Protestants now more likely than Catholics to believe suicide victims are damned.

People with evangelical beliefs are twice as likely (39%) than those without evangelical beliefs (18%) to think suicide leads to hell.

Still, 38% of those surveyed say people who commit suicide are selfish, with more religiously devout respondents likelier to agree.

The Lifeway data suggests Americans consider suicide a serious social problem, with 4 in 10 saying it has claimed the lives of a friend or family member.

It's good for all involved that religious traditions, aided both by pastoral experience and insights from psychology and psychiatry, have adopted more compassionate beliefs about suicide.

But many faithful still do not understand that suicidality is not a sign of rejection by or of God, but rather a complex result of trauma, deep emotional disturbances and brain-chemistry anomalies.

And even fewer have the spiritual tools to grapple with the reality that suicidal ideation, as with all forms of self-harm, is a spectrum.

It may be as benign as passive, low-grade self-sabotage instincts or a one-off passing urge in a moment of distress. Or it can be as profound and intrusive as active wishes to die, whether compelled by delusions and psychoses or simply inescapable emotional torment.

Suicidal people need help, not condemnation. Yet even when faith traditions offer compassion in Scripture, doctrine or policy, it matters little to a suffering soul who experiences religiously fueled rejection by family members or friends.

I have experienced suicidal people who, in part due to active or latent faith commitments, summoned determination to keep themselves alive.

Likewise, I have heard stories of crushing pain from people whose own families essentially punished their openness about suicidal ideations with threats that God, the church and their family would abandon them.

Suicide is a near-universal phenomenon throughout history and around the world.

It is deeply related to religious themes, including meaning, hope, honour and suffering. But religious groups alone rarely have the capacity, competence or inclination to reduce suicide on a societal scale.

Millions of people contemplate suicide every year.

Religion at its worst sees them as sinners deserving of condemnation.

At their best, faithful people and institutions compassionately accompany people contemplating suicide toward connection, openness and treatment.

And when that fails, clergy and congregations must point to a God gracious and loving enough to hold not only the souls of people who take their own lives, but also to comfort and heal all who love and miss them.

• Jacob Lupfer is a writer in Jacksonville, Florida.
• First published in RNS. Republished with permission. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of RNS.

Where to get help

Need to Talk? Free call or text 1737 any time to speak to a trained counsellor, for any reason.

Lifeline: 0800 543 354 or text HELP to 4357

Suicide Crisis Helpline: 0508 828 865 / 0508 TAUTOKO (24/7). This is a service for people who may be thinking about suicide, or those who are concerned about family or friends.

Depression Helpline: 0800 111 757 (24/7) or text 4202

Samaritans: 0800 726 666 (24/7)

Youthline: 0800 376 633 (24/7) or free text 234 (8am-12am), or email talk@youthline.co.nz

What's Up: online chat (3pm-10pm) or 0800 WHATSUP / 0800 9428 787 helpline (12pm-10pm weekdays, 3pm-11pm weekends)

Kidsline (ages 5-18): 0800 543 754 (24/7)

Rural Support Trust Helpline: 0800 787 254

Healthline: 0800 611 116

Rainbow Youth: (09) 376 4155

If it is an emergency and you feel like you or someone else is at risk, call 111.

Those words fed me in many ways: as music for the ear, wisdom for the mind and food for the soul.

There was only one problem. The words went too fast for this new convert.

I wanted our priest would slow down so that I could better savour the breadth and depth of meaning.

I started making notes during Mass, for my own prayer times.

Lord, you are Holy indeed, the fountain of all holiness…

Lent: …help us to understand the meaning of your Son's death and resurrection and teach us to reflect it in our lives…

Pentecost: God our Father, you have given us new birth. Strengthen us with your Holy Spirit and fill us with your light…

After a while the prayers were internalised and the note-taking ceased.

I also liked most of our responses but did wonder why the female majority had to say, "for us men and our salvation…"

It was explained that the word "men" was inclusive, but I doubted that because it didn't apply to other areas in the Church.

Why didn't we simply say, "for us and our salvation."?

Occasionally, a cradle Catholic would ask jokingly, what I thought of all the talk about sin.

Well yes, there was emphasis on sin, but my response was that for me, it didn't go far enough.

Why

Because sin is our teacher.

Let's put it this way: if we were perfect we would have no room for growth.

Today we know that each of our strengths has a shadow side.

A person with high energy who is a natural leader, may at times be quick-tempered and a bully.

The peaceful, gentle person may also be lazy.

A maternal person like myself, can sometimes insist on "chicken-souping" vegetarians. We confuse mothering and smothering.

A Jungian psychologist will work with the shadow; but Jung did not discover anything new.

In the third century Church, a Desert Father ( whose name I have forgotten) used these metaphors to describe the human condition: We are part angel and part animal.

As one who has shared her life with animals, I recognise that the evil we project on a mythic being, is in other species.

It is the "me-first" impulse that comes from the primal instinct for survival. When it gets out of order, it can be very destructive.

Yet, dealing with it, brings new growth.

If I project my animal self on someone or something else. I know I am stunting my spiritual growth.

So I don't think the Church goes too far with its understanding of sin.

It doesn't go far enough.

At present, teaching about evil belongs in the era when we believed the earth was flat.

I need to recognise that t is the tension between my angelic and animal states, that brings about growth.

My sins can be messy, embarrassing, painful, but they are also my teachers.

I need to listen to what they are saying.

I'm afraid that the words of contrition in the Mass don't have much meaning for me.

The accusation is huge as is the remedy, and I am not that important.

I replace them with my own prayer which I am happy to share with others who may also feel at a distance from the set language.

Lord Jesus Christ,
I bring my sins to you.
Show me how to learn from them,
turning the darkness into light.
Amen.

• Joy Cowley is a wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and retreat facilitator.

Francis told a crowd at the Vatican on Sunday that the Lord would prefer us "to seek him, to call on him or even, like Thomas, to protest, bringing him our needs and our unbelief."

Thomas "represents all of us," Francis says.

"We too struggle at times like that disciple: How can we believe that Jesus is risen, that he accompanies us and is the Lord of our life without having seen him, without having touched him?

"How can one believe in this? Why does the Lord not give us some clearer sign of his presence and love? Some sign that I can see better.

"Here, we too are like Thomas, with the same doubts, the same reasoning.

"But we do not need to be ashamed of this. By telling us the story of Thomas, in fact, the Gospel tells us that the Lord is not looking for perfect Christians. The Lord is not looking for perfect Christians."

Attitudes of righteousness and self-assurance aren't the way to go either, Francis warns.

"I tell you: I am afraid when I see a Christian, some associations of Christians who believe themselves to be perfect.

"The Lord is not looking for perfect Christians; the Lord is not looking for Christians who never doubt and always flaunt a steadfast faith. When a Christian is like that, something isn't right," he says.

"No, the adventure of faith, as for Thomas, consists of lights and shadows. Otherwise, what kind of faith would that be? It knows times of comfort, zeal and enthusiasm, but also of weariness, confusion, doubt and darkness.

Crises are not sins, they are part of the journey, we should not fear them, Francis explains.

He says in many cases they make us humble because they strip us of the idea that we are better than others.

"Crises help us to recognise that we are needy: they rekindle the need for God and thus enable us to return to the Lord, to touch his wounds, to experience his love anew as if it were the first time."

Source

• CNA

After Japan adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1873, the country abandoned the lunar calendar altogether by 1910. So, though the rest of Asia welcomed this year of the tiger on Feb. 1, in Japan the tiger crept in on Jan. 1.

In addition to inaugurating a new zodiac sign each year on Jan. 1, the Japanese moved all the traditional customs of the lunar new year to January.

One of those customs is the sounding of temple bells as the new year enters. The bells are struck 108 times because in Buddhist teaching there are 108 earthly desires or temptations and each strike of the bell drives out one of them.

Buddhists clearly have much more creative imagination than Catholics.

Catholic kids generally admit to two sins: disobeying their parents and fighting with their siblings. I suppose an orphaned only child is either sinless or must invent one or two transgressions.

But adults do not seem to find much more than that wrong in their lives. Using the word "morality" or some variant or it around them elicits squirming and crossed legs.

Apart from sex-related matters, "sin" is often "churchy" — such as failing to say prayers or go to church.

Someone may admit to not being an ideal spouse or parent, but for the most part we limit our guilty consciences to individual private matters rather than social or communal ones.

Of course, the reason we limit our consciousness of sin to the private realm is that we place our faith there as well. There are Christians who are upset by the fact that there are other people at the liturgy when they go to be with Jesus.

They refuse to join the community in song, prayer or posture as they conduct their private tete-a-tete with their Lord. They forget, if they ever knew or cared, that the very word liturgy means "the activity of the people."

Christianity is always plural. It is a matter of "we and God," not "me and God." Even the One with the best right to pray "My Father" when teaching us to pray in his way said, "Pray then in this way: Our Father ..."

The most basic fact about all that exists is that it is all one gift of God

Even if we look at faith as a matter of the Church (the People of God, not the management), our individualism still makes us prone to view faith from the wrong angle.

Faith is not about me or even us. Faith is about God. My faith, our faith, the faith are responses to God and if we hope to understand them, we must begin our reflection with God.

If we do that, we take a different view of life, faith, sin and self.

In the first place, we realize that it is thanks to God that we live at all. But if I exist because God in some un-understandable way that we call love chooses to give me existence, then the same must be true of every other existing thing.

The most basic fact about all that exists is that it is all one gift of God. And if that be true of everything, then it is all the more true of our fellow human beings.

Other people, no matter who they are in earthly terms are, just as I, sons and daughters of God. Ultimately, we are not such because of a shared evolutionary history that really carries no implications, but because God has made us so.

We are one, and our relationship with God is one.

Abstracting myself from the rest in order to have a relationship with God whether in prayer or repentance is abstracting myself from the only kind of relationship I can actually have with God.

My only possible relationship with God is as a member of the family of which God is the life-giver.

When I reflect upon my sins and failings, I must take into account the entire family, not just the one member I see in the mirror.

That means that my examination of conscience must include my personal as well as communal involvement in political, economic and social sin.

Do I question myself about racism, bigotry, whether my political choices are really for the common good, failure to protect the environment, my response to the climate crisis, how I make my living, refusal to follow the guidance of experts in the present pandemic, and other such sins that affect or afflict my sisters and brothers, the other children of God?

Besides sins of commission (what I have done) there are sins of omission (what I have failed to do). Especially once we get past the "I disobeyed my parents" phase, they are probably our most common.

So, my Lenten reflection must look beyond myself to see if and how my sin affects others. A good tool for that is the traditional Works of Mercy.

If we approach our examination of conscience in that way, we may find that Buddhists are not all that different from us after all.

• William Grimm is a missioner and presbyter in Tokyo and is the publisher of the Union of Catholic Asian News (UCA News).
• First published in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.

Many moral theologians in the country agree with that assessment.

One of them said that re-formulating Church teaching on human sexuality is one of the most "urgent" and one of the most "difficult" challenges facing contemporary Catholicism.

The Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Church (CIASE), which recently published a shocking report on abuse cases in France over the past 70 years, agrees.

One of the recommendations it made in that report is to carefully examine "how the paradoxical excess of Catholic morality's fixation on sexual matters may have a counter-productive value in the fight against sexual abuse".

The CIASE report notes that the Church's persistent strictness on sexual issues has led to a paradoxical situation by which some Catholics, especially priests, have committed serious transgressions according to the idea that "if you don't respect all the law, then you don't respect anything at all".

Not all sins are equally serious

Added to this is confusion about the various "sins against the flesh", which Catholic tradition has grouped together under the umbrella of the sixth commandment: "Thou shall not commit adultery."

"The enumeration of acts without gradation of their seriousness is highly problematic because, for example, one cannot put masturbation and rape on the same level," deplored Marie-Jo Thiel, an award-winning Catholic ethicist who teaches theology at the University of Strasbourg.

Like others, she considers rape to be "a crime that kills another", which is actually a violation of the fifth commandment, rather than the fifth.

"Even today, anything that goes outside the framework promoted by the Church would be 'wrong'," says Dominican Sister Véronique Margron, president of the Conference of Men and Women Religious of France (Corref).

"We thus maintain confusion between wrong and failure, which all human beings encounter at one time or another in their emotional and sexual life. As a result, we don't know how to recognize what is really wrong, such as sexual violence, or perceiving the other person as an object," she said.

"Catholic sexual ethics remain very normative"

Catholicism's focus on sexuality and procreation has intensified since the 19th Century in proportion to its loss of socio-political influence. But that focus actually goes back to the beginnings of Christianity.

The contribution of Saint Augustine of Hippo is particularly "weighty" in this matter, according to Alain Thomasset SJ, professor at the Centre Sèvres, the Jesuit school of theology in Paris.

"For Saint Augustine, sexual desire remained an effect of original sin. It is only saved by the act of procreation within marriage," he said.

The Second Vatican Council certainly opened up sexuality to purposes other than procreation, such as communion between spouses.

But Thomasset believes there is still much work to be done to transcend the culture of merely "what's allowed and what's forbidden" and to broaden our view.

"Catholic sexual ethics remain very normative," the Jesuit pointed out.

"It is much more normative than the Church's social doctrine, which takes into account relationships, circumstances, intentions, the complexity of reality, etc. Relational anthropology, already present in social doctrine, would be welcome in sexual ethics," he argued.

A Church people are no longer listening to?

The 1968 encyclical Humanae vitae, with its prohibition of artificial contraception, did much to discredit the Church's discourse on sexuality.

Then the 2019 book, In the Closet of the Vatican, which alleged the widespread existence of homosexuality (and pedocriminality) among priests and bishops in Rome, seemed to further weaken the Church's voice on this issue.

Some Catholics regret this. They believe the Church is right to insist that our bodies are a gift of God that should not to abused or that sexual intimacy should not be trivialised at a time when pornography has never been so easily accessible.

So, is it conceivable that there can be an evolution Church teaching on human sexuality?

"First of all, we must keep in mind that a good part of the French episcopate remains marked by the heritage of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, who defended a sexual morality with clear norms, in the name of human nature," emphasized Francine Charoy, a moral theologian who taught for twenty years at the Institut Catholique in Paris.

Moving beyond a "confrontation between two blocks"

Pope Francis has taken a different approach by encouraging more discernment in complex situations. But he has not changed Church doctrine on the substance of the matter.

This has left some theologians "disappointed".

They believe that the pope could make changes to the Catechism of the Catholic Church (which, among other things, calls homosexual acts "intrinsically disordered"), as he did in 2018 concerning the death penalty.

Charoy, meanwhile, wants to see the Church move beyond a "confrontation between two blocs", progressive and conservative.

"We need to work in synodality among different theologians, to analyze together the denial regarding pedocriminality in which the institution has remained for so long," she argued.

The theologian said it would be a way to start dismantling the "culture of silence" highlighted by the CIASE report.

• Mélinée le Priol is a journalist for LA CROIX France. She has a particular interest in topics related to the Middle-East but also more widely religious news.
• First published in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.

While I waffled on about the spiritual experience, he smiled kindly and said. "I'm a bread and butter man, myself."

He showed by example that contents need a container, that spirituality thrives on discipline, and the sacraments were shovels that dug a deep well and kept it clear of rubbish.

Only once did I disagree with him.

In one of his homilies, he said. "Why does God allow sin in the world? It is a mystery. We don't know."

For me, the answer was obvious. No sin. No growth.

Is it as simple as that?

I reflect on how we grow. The spark of God within us creates a yearning for unity with God, but also there is a shadow that we call "original sin."

For me, this has nothing to do with the Adam and Eve parable. It is about being part of the animal kingdom and having that primal instinct for survival.

All our sins of selfishness are shared by the animal kingdom.

In the early church, the Desert Father who said we are a part angel and part animal had it right as far as I'm concerned.

My memory spans 80 years of walking with Jesus on The Way of spiritual growth. The blessings f Light were there, and also the dark weight of the shadow.

It was the tension between light and dark that was my teacher.

I learned that there were sins bigger than the seven deadly sins which were all concerned with personal integrity.

In effect, my biggest sin was Ignorance - judging people I did not know and situations I had never been in. That brought me to the second biggest sin, Self-righteousness, and the third, Unkindness.

All of these separated me from others and made me a prisoner to the loneliness of the ego.

The journey out of that prison took years and is ongoing. That is so for most of us. But there comes a time when we see the shadow as light unborn, and we value it's teaching.

So often that teaching was regret. Regret is a gift that can give birth to new light.

This growth process brings a personal understanding of Jesus' parable of the wheat and the weeds, how they had to grow together until harvest time.

The same lesson is in the Garden of Eden story. The knowledge of good and the knowledge of evil are in one fruit. They belong together. And when they are fully digested, they bring wisdom.

Parables with similar meaning exist in other religions.

In India, there is the parable of the lotus.

The lotus plant has a beautiful fragrant flower. It blooms in the light because its roots are in the dark mud.

Remove the roots from the mud and the plant will die.

When I was a small child, I was told that someone called Satan made me sin, and someone called Jesus died to fix that.

Where was my responsibility?

So yes, it has been a long journey. I have enjoyed the green pastures and still waters, but am most grateful for the rocks, the mud, the steep mountains and dark valleys. I know what a poet meant when he wrote: "O God, give me desolation! "

For God is in everything - and especially the hard places.

• Joy Cowley is a wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and retreat facilitator.

In an interview after his first decade as an exorcist, Gallego admitted in the beginning he "had a lot of fear".

"All I had to do was look over my shoulder and I saw demons… the other day I was doing an exorcism, ‘I command you! I order you!'…and the Evil One, with a loud voice fires back at me: ‘Galleeeego, you're over-doooing it.' That shook me." Read more

He says the current pontificate is marked by "chronic confusion". He warns Francis his teaching with a "seemingly intentional lack of clarity risks sinning against the Holy Spirit." Read more

Many women do this, because feminine spirituality tends to be different and complementary to the masculine model.

Our gender differences are shaped by our biological roles. For a man, sin usually affects personal integrity. For women, sin is almost always relational.

That list of seven deadly sins - pride, anger, lust, etc. - is masculine, and women recognise it as such. We too, could form a list and it would be about unkind thoughts, words and deeds.

It would look something like this: spite, jealousy, betrayal, gossip, manipulation, irrational emotion, lies. When I read this list to a group of women, there is much laughter. We all identify with it.

In scripture, there is a lot of emphasis on sin. The Jews believed that every bit of misfortune, be it illness, accident, sterility, attack, famine, flood, etc., was the result of sin.

Moreover, the effect of sin was passed down the generations - as outlined in the ten commandments, Exodus 20. Remember the man who was blind from birth? The disciples asked Jesus, "Did this man sin? Or did his parents?"

People with mental illness were said to be possessed by demons. In one of the non-canonical writings, a man excreting a tape-worm was said to have a demon coming out of his body.

With more understanding of how we are made, we tend to read all this in a historical, cultural context that belongs on a shelf with early Biblical descriptions of a flat earth.

But sin is a reality, and I pick up on that statement by one of the old church fathers, that we are part animal and part angel. Good description.

If you have worked with animals, you will know they are capable of cruelty and most of the other behaviours we call sins. Look at a cat with a mouse. It may not want to eat the mouse; it just wants to kill it very slowly.

We all have that animal potential in us, however, there is also the light of God in us. Somehow, working with the tension between the instinct for survival and the presence of God, makes our souls grow.

Growth is the message the church wants to get across. Vatican 11 makes us aware that pilgrimage is about movement and change, leaving burdens at the foot of Jesus' cross and moving in freedom, to the spaciousness of God.

These days, most of us would see sin as error that can become a teacher, pointing towards the light, and we recognise that if we were perfect, we would have no room for growth. The shadow is our growing place.

We may not understand all of the process, but God does, and we can be sure that what may occasionally seem like chaos to us, is a small part of a perfect plan of love.

• Joy Cowley is a wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and retreat facilitator.

Many women do this because feminine spirituality tends to be a little different, although complementary to the male model.

Our spiritual paths are shaped by our biological roles.

Most men achieve spiritual growth through information and structure.

Women have lateral outreach and find God in relationship, intuition and love. Each path is gift for the other.

What about sin? For a man, sin usually attacks personal integrity. For a woman, the effects of sin are almost always relational.

That list of seven deadly sins - pride, anger, lust, etc - is masculine, and women recognize it as such.

If we formed our own list, it would be all about unkind thoughts, words and deeds. It could probably look something like this: spite, jealousy, manipulation, betrayal, irrational emotion, gossip, lies.

When I read that list to a group of women, there is much laughter. We all identify with it.

We recognize that the masculine understanding of sin has its roots in scripture, and yes, there is a lot about sin in the Bible.

In Judaism, it was believed that all misfortune came from sin, be it illness, disability, poverty, famine, flood, war, sterility. In an oral tradition about Joachim, father of Mary, it is said that Joachim was ostracized as a sinner by men in the temple because he had no children. Poor Joachim!

Remember the man who was blind from birth? The disciples asked Jesus if the man had sinned, or was it his parents?

The last part of that question comes from the ten commandments (Exodus 20) in which God is said to visit the sins of the parents on the children of the third and fourth generations.

To have mental illness in those times, would have meant being cast out of your village because you were possessed by demons. There was also a layer cake view of the earth - heaven above, earth below and hell beneath the earth.

Times and understanding have changed.

Sin is still a reality, although now we view it in the context of our understanding of the human psyche. It is a negative manifestation of our ego, that me-first instinct that can lock us in a little prison of self.

Where does that selfish instinct come from? The obvious answer is that it's a part of our primal instinct for self-preservation.

But on spiritual journey sin has a much bigger role.

Our sinfulness is what God has given us to work with. It is the raw material of growth.

Pilgrimage is all about movement and change, leaving burdens with Jesus at the foot of cross and moving with him to resurrection.

In this we become aware that our errors are valuable teachers.

We know if we were perfect, we would have no room for growth.

We may not fully understand the process, but sometimes we are blessed with a glimpse of how the darkness serves the light.

What we perceived as chaos in our lives, turns out to be a part of a perfect plan of love.

• Joy Cowley is a wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and retreat facilitator.

The simple notion was that neither God, nor anyone else, can save you if you simply give up, despair, make yourself impossible to reach.

Most often in the popular mind this was applied to suicide. To die by your own hand was seen as despair, as putting yourself outside of God's mercy.

But understanding despair in this way is wrong and misguided, however sincere our intent. What's despair? How might it be understood?

The common dictionary definition invariably runs something like this: Despair means to no longer have any hope or belief that a situation will improve or change.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church, which sees despair as a sin against the First Commandment, defines it this way: "By despair, man ceases to hope for his personal salvation from God, for help in attaining it or for the forgiveness of his sins. Despair is contrary to God's goodness, to his justice - for the Lord is faithful to his promises - and to his mercy."

But there's something absolutely critical to be distinguished here: There are two reasons why someone might cease to hope for personal salvation from God and give up hope in having his or sins forgiven.

It can be that the person doubts the goodness and mercy of God or, and I believe that this is normally the case, the person is too crushed, too weak, too broken inside, to believe that he or she is lovable and redeemable.

But being so beaten and crushed in spirit so as to believe that nothing further can exist for you except pain and darkness is normally not an indication of sin but more a symptom of having been fatally victimized by circumstance, of having to undergo, in the poignant words of Fantine in Les Miserables, storms that you cannot weather. Continue reading

• Ron Rolheiser OMI is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio Texas.

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Greed can distort reality, manipulate truth, coerce sinful actions, and compromise virtue and a desire to follow the ways of God.

This weekend, the Lenten journey continues but lightens up with "Rejoice Sunday," often called by its Latin name Laetare Sunday. The observance gives Christian believers a reminder of the glory of the Easter celebration that awaits them at the end of Lent.

Rejoice Sunday is a consolation, but also a call to perseverance through the soul-searching and self-accusation of the Lenten season.

It's a summons to keep our focus on the ways of God and to keep pride, vanity, and greed at bay.

These three ‘bad spirits' were identified by St. Ignatius of Loyola in his monumental seventeenth century work The Spiritual Exercises. In the Exercises, which have drastically shaped the spiritual worldview of Pope Francis, believers are called to a sober examination of their consciences.

Among the dark spirits, they are to search for greed. Where has greed distorted reality, manipulated truth, coerced sinful actions, or compromised virtue and a desire to follow the ways of God?

As we desire the joys of Easter, we have to explore and dig out greed. Greed can pertain to our faith, love, forgiveness, time, abilities, and our finances.

While each area needs to be examined, we must especially assess our finances since they reveal so much about us. If we want to know what we love, we just have to look at what we spend our money on.

And so, the review begins. Where do we spend our money and why? In our spending, do we tithe to our faith community, to the poor, and to others in need? Does our spending seem to revolve only around us, our interests, and our well-being? Continue reading

• Father Jeffrey F Kirby is a Catholic priest of the Diocese of Charleston, South Carolina.

This is perhaps the first time a leader of an Abrahamic religion has spoken so much about environmental issues.

The supreme leader of the Catholic Church has issued a letter for the World Day of Prayer for The Care of Creation in which he has urged all Christians to redouble their efforts towards environment protection.

While traditional notions of charity and mercy translate as feeding the hungry, visiting the sick or sheltering the homeless, the Pope has surprised the world again by adding an all new dimension to these good works- nature.

The Pope points out the environment is one of the most troubled and distressed aspects of the world which needs to be taken care of by all people, as it is the common home for all.

The Pope even went to the extent of proposing that caring for the environment should be added to the traditional seven acts of mercy that Christians are enjoined by the Church to perform, which happens to be one of the most unconventional and unusual proposals to have been made by a religious leader.

However, this proposal only emphasizes the importance that the Bishop of Rome places on environment protection.

This also happens to echo his last year's ecologically themed encyclical, in which he observes that the world has been turned into a pile of filth due to a corrupt system where the wealthy exploit the poor.

The Pope has earlier described the earth of today as "a polluted wasteland full of debris, desolation and filth" caused by the sinful destruction of nature by man.

Source

• World Religion News
• Image: Blogspot.com