This Friday, the Year of the Priest, as declared by Pope Benedict XVI, begins.

The USCCB has pages of information available here.

As was previously hinted here, in the land of ArchBalt we we stole appropriated a good idea from our neighbors in Wilmington. 

We will be offering weekly videos offered by youth, young adults, and priests themselves offering a celebration of the qualities of the good priests present in their lives.  They will be on-line for ArchBalt before on on Fridays and well be posting them here on Sundays as a weekly feature. I edited five yesterday and they look pretty good,

Thanks to Patrick Donovan for this great idea!

I don’t often lift a full post, but this one from Craig Groeschel at Swerve is worth it. He once “was talking to a guy on a plane about God. When I asked him if he went to church, he explained politely that he wasn’t interested. I asked him why he wasn’t and he said matter of factly, “Because I’ve already been and nothing happened.”

Maybe he went to a “safe” church. In a safe church:
> The message makes you feel better.
> You’re never confronted about your sin.
> No one rocks the boat.
> You don’t have to change.
> You may never truly encounter our Holy and Life-giving God.

When I read about the New Testament Church, it was filled with people with a dangerous faith. While we certainly should make our environments welcoming, our message should remain dangerous.

> We’re called to leave everything to follow Christ.
> We’re invited to believe God for the impossible.
> We’re told to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.
> We’re told that to find our life we have to lose it first.

There is nothing safe about that message. May our churches become a safe place to encounter a dangerous message. What are some of the ways you offer a welcoming environment while presenting a dangerous message?”

Last week, the Pope met with the Italian Episcopal Conference which was meeting to examine the theme: “The educational question: the urgent task of education”.

Some of the quotes pulled from that meeting:

“At a time in which relativistic and nihilistic concepts of life exercise a powerful enticement, a time in which the very legitimacy of education is placed in doubt, the principal contribution we can make is that of bearing witness to our trust in life and in man, in his reason and in his capacity to love.”

“The difficulty in forming authentic Christians interweaves and melds with the difficulty of creating responsible and mature men and women…  Alongside an appropriate curriculum that identifies the aim of education in the light of the model to be followed, there is a need for authoritative educators to whom new generations can look with trust”.

“A true educator places himself in the front line and knows how to unite authority and exemplarity in the task of educating those entrusted to his care. We ourselves are aware of this, having been given the role of guides among the People of God, guides whom the Apostle Peter invites to tend God’s sheep and to ‘be examples to the flock’”.

Read more here.

Treads and LifeWay are part of the publishing arm of the Southern Baptist convention.  But the research is real as are the implications for our ministry.

This is a spiritual temperature check of unchurched young adults in the United States.

The bad news: It seems the younger non-church-going crowd believe our churches are too critical about lifestyle issues, full of hypocrites, and unnecessary for spiritual development.

The good news: These same young adults are willing to not only listen but talk with us about Christianity and Jesus.

Last week, we held our second summit gathering; this one being the Archbishop’s Summit on Vocations.

Invitation is critical for encouraging vocations. He encouraged all Catholics to remember four letters to invite young men and women to consider the religious life – “ICNU,” short for “I see in you.” It’s something you can say to young people, I see in you the qualities that would make a good priest or religious. Look for young men and women who are generous, compassionate, kind and faithful. Read more here.

We’ll have video on-line soon.  Meanwhile, this blog’s chaplain Father Austin reports that we have something up our sleeves for the Year of the Priest. . . He’s right!

A new Gallup Poll finds 51% of Americans calling themselves “pro-life” on the issue of abortion. This is the first time a majority of U.S. adults have identified themselves as pro-life since Gallup began asking this question in 1995. Read more here.

In a related matter, last week, ArchBalt’s Archbishop Edwin O’Brien hosted the First Annual Symposium for Catholic Medical Professionals.  the conferences addressed issues sensitive to the legal, cultural, and moral pressures facing Catholic healthcare professionals. doctors, nurses, and pharmacists were encouraged to exercise their rights of conscience and providing healthcare that truly reflects a Catholic approach to the human life, the body, and fertility.  I was there and shot this video from the Symposium.  If your parish has medial professionals in it (and really, who doesn’t?) you might considering forward this stuff to them (including the lawyer video which should be posted Monday.)

Back in the day, when I was a teen, my family would pray the Rosary daily during Lent. But, it was a practice that never stuck for me. . .

In For Love of the Game, Kevin Costner plays an aging Detroit Lions pitcher who has a mental devise which he triggers with the thought “Clear the Mechanism.”

Later, at a dark time of my life, the rosary served as an invaluable mental trigger for me, clearing my head of a negative soundtrack.

The image atop this site is meant to portray a fist, but one which has the crucifix at the end of a rosary strand dropping down from the clenched fingers. It suggests that this devotion to the Blessed Mother just might have implications for the rEVOLution in youth ministry.

By the by, this video might very well be a hint of the response that we were discussing here on Monday. Anyway, so, yeah, count me in as a member of the on-going parade… Not daily or even consistently, but, yeah, I do pray the rosary.  What’s your rosary story?