The Saddleback interviews of Senators McCain and Obama. Barbara Curtis has all of them in order and linked!
Tony at Catholic Pillow Fight takes a look at Catholic Funerals and a news story of a Funeral Home Director suing a Catholic Church for interfering with his business practices!
Father V. gives delightful posts about the symbolic richness in our church. Here is a great example!
A great explanation of indulgences here.
Looking for some First Grade Lesson Plans – here are some good ones!
Teaching Writing- starting late.
Why I Homeschool One woman’s extraordinary effort to find out why her dyslexic son is not succeeding in public school and to care for his educational needs at home.
A young child struggles to wrap his mind around today, tomorrow, next week, and next year. To a 5th grader “when I grow up” is as far away as his birth. It equals a lifetime. It is not uncommon for the elementary child to confuse Grandma’s youth with George Washington’s era or wonder if there were castles and knights when Jesus was born. The actual dates are essentially meaningless to them. He is still wrestling with numbers as well, trying to make sense of math facts and times tables. Those tools are still unwieldy in his hands.
The younger the child the more he thinks in images. Your best bet is to work that to your advantage and share with him epochs. Help him to get a good picture of what bible days looked like, what Vikings were like, how a knight lived, who the pilgrims were, who built American log cabins, and who were the Indians they met. These things DO stick in their minds. They will not be able to sort them all out til much later but that isn’t our goal in the beginning. Initially you want to tell fascinating stories complete with vivid images and light a fire for all the vastly different ways people have lived through time. Children will marvel over folks who thought and felt so much like they do and yet who dressed and worked so differently. This is our goal. Impart the wonder.
Ruth Beechick. HT Starry Sky Ranch.
Above All Salvation of the Person:
Rome, Aug 19, 2008 / 10:00 am (CNA).- The prefect of the Apostolic Signature, Archbishop Raymond Burke, said this week that Catholics, especially politicians who publically defend abortion, should not receive Communion, and that ministers of Communion should be responsibly charitable in denying it to them if they ask for it, “until they have reformed their lives.”In an interview with the magazine, Radici Christiane, Archbishop Burke pointed out that there is often a lack of reverence at Mass when receiving Communion. “Receiving the Body and Blood of Christ unworthily is a sacrilege,”
he warned. “If it is done deliberately in mortal sin it is a sacrilege.”To illustrate his point, he referred to “public officials who, with knowledge and consent, uphold actions that are against the Divine and Eternal moral law. For example, if they support abortion, which entails the taking of innocent and defenseless human lives. A person who commits sin in this way should be publicly admonished in such a way as to not receive Communion until he or she has reformed his life,” the archbishop said.
“If a person who has been admonished persists in public mortal sin and attempts to receive Communion, the minister of the Eucharist has the obligation to deny it to him. Why? Above all, for the salvation of that person, preventing him from committing a sacrilege,” he added.
“We must avoid giving people the impression that one can be in a state of mortal sin and receive the Eucharist,” the archbishop continued. “Secondly, there could be another form of scandal, consisting of leading people to think
that the public act that this person is doing, which until now everyone believed was a serious sin, is really not that serious – if the Church allows him or her to receive Communion.”“If we have a public figure who is openly and deliberately upholding abortion rights and receiving the Eucharist, what will the average person think? He or she could come to believe that it up to a certain point it is okay to do away with an innocent life in the mother’s womb,” he warned.
Archbishop Burke also noted that when a bishop or a Church leader prevents an abortion supporter from receiving Communion, “it is not with the intention of interfering in public life but rather in the spiritual state of the politician
or public official who, if Catholic, should follow the divine law in the public sphere as well.”“Therefore, it is simply ridiculous and wrong to try to silence a pastor, accusing him of interfering in politics so that he cannot do good to the soul of a member of his flock,” he stated.
It is “simply wrong” to think that the faith must be reduced to the private sphere and eliminated from public life, Archbishop Burke said, encouraging Catholics “to bear witness to our faith not only in private in our homes but
also in our public lives with others in order to bear strong witness to Christ.
The Nine Week Novena before the election – follow it here at Priests for Life! HT Mary G for the link.
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