NCRegister: Christmas Joy is for the Suffering

Have you ever noticed how often joy is paired with suffering in the Scriptures? Abraham and Sarah long for a child into their old age before they are given the joy of a son. The Israelites only experience the joy of being freed from slavery, after having suffered for many years at the hands of the Egyptians. Job loses all his worldly goods, his children, his health, only to have it all restored back to him. Further, in the letters of St. Paul, we hear again and again the urge to rejoice in our sufferings: “Even if I am to be poured as a libation upon the sacrificial offering of your faith, I am glad and rejoice with you all. Likewise you also should be glad and rejoice with me.” (Philippians 2:17-18)

We should not be surprised, then, that when God became man, the Christmas joy of the shepherds comes after years of waiting for a Savior while suffering at the hands of oppressive governments. Or that the very reason for our joy at God become man can only be realized after this God made Man suffers and dies for us on the Cross...

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NCRegister: The Secular Christmas Season is Actually the Secular Advent

It was usually the last Sunday of Advent, and sometimes even Christmas Eve, that my parents would put up the tree. The familiar crackling sound of the antique record player and Andy Williams crooning Sleigh Ride in the background always filled me with that warm Christmassy feeling. My father was a liturgical musician, and the one thing he was strict about was not listening to or singing Christmas music in the home or even decorating until it was nearly Christmas.

So, we embraced the Advent traditions of the Advent wreath and Jesse Tree. My mother always put up an outdoor Advent wreath complete with pink and purple bows, which got switched to red on Christmas Eve. Some well-meaning neighbor would always stop by the first week of Advent and let her know that three of her candles were burnt out.

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NCRegister: The Xennial-Millennial Modern Traditionalist

When I tried to fit myself into a few of the caricatures of the Catholic Tribes in American put together by Michael Warren Davis and Damian Thompson I somehow fell flat in the middle of nowhere. However, I know that there are American Catholics that think like I do since I know many of them personally, and perhaps, if I put this out there, I will find more of them.

A few years ago I wrote about a group of people that I called “Hipster Traditionalists”—people who love the Traditional Latin Mass, also known as the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite, but don’t quite fit in with other traditionalists. These days I think that the title Modern Traditionalist is a better fit.

A Modern Traditionalist is a lover of all things traditional, not out of a nostalgia for things pre-1965, but out of a real love of the beauty preserved in it. For them it is not just a preference, but the realization that the older liturgy is more beautiful and profound...

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NCRegister: Is Your Family Vocation Active or Contempletive?

“Bless our families, bless our children. Choose from our homes those needed for your work.”

I knelt with my family at the Vigil of All Saints and prayed the Archdiocesan Prayer for Vocations of the Archdiocese of Minneapolis and St. Paul. We pray this prayer at every Mass at my parish, but that evening as my son was dressed as a priest-saint and my daughters dressed as saints who were religious sisters in preparation for the All Saints party, I hoped that God would choose all those from my home to do his work.

Perhaps it is a bold request and hope to desire my family to be like that of Sts. Louis and Zélie Martin, the parents of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, who dreamt of and gave all of their children into religious life. Yet, I only think of it because I have felt that these saints are kindred spirits to my family, especially in the importance they placed on a prayerful, God centered family life that was separate from the influences of secular society. I also feel bold in hoping for it because of the sacramental graces of marriage, which can transform all of our human efforts into something better...

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NCRegister: When Jesus Brought My Miscarried Babies Back to Me

October is National Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness month, and Oct. 15 is the Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day. This year I was painfully aware of the day as friends posted their remembrances on social media. I kept thinking about how a year ago I was pregnant with our baby who passed out of me in early November. I could not muster the emotional strength to face the day publicly, so I held onto my three miscarried babies in my heart. I thought I had made it through my grieving, but perhaps not.

When I went on a silent four day Ignatian retreat last weekend, I did not plan on praying about my miscarriages. In fact, during the four days of the retreat, I barely thought of them. I went through the Ignatian exercises facing other spiritual things. I got to the point where I though I had gotten all I needed on this retreat (i.e., cried all of my tears), and I would just rest peacefully with God.

But on Sunday morning, the retreat director encouraged us to allow God to give us the extra graces he still had to offer us. In fact, the last short day of the retreat was often when one received more graces. I took his advice to heart and decided to be open to the movements of the Holy Spirit...

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NCRegister:A Priest is Just a Man, Imprinted with a Sacramental Character

I picked The Devil’s Advocate by Morris West off the shelf of Loome Theological Booksellers in Stillwater, Minnesota, flipping it over to look at the back. I was immediately intrigued by the fact that West was an Australian Catholic author. It took me another year to read the book, but I found that it was providential for me to have read during this time of scandal in the Church. It was helpful to read an account representing the state of the Church between World War II and pre-Vatican II where the hierarchy was detached from the day to day harsh realities of the People of God and priests had the same failings as other men. In fact it was quite familiar.

Morris West wrote the novel The Devil’s Advocate a couple of years after he spent time with a priest in the 1950s helping poor children in Sicily. He witnessed the state of the people there, and set his book in a similar setting among the poor, superstitious Italians in the hill country. He also was a witness to the politics of the Vatican under Pope Pius XII, and his novel provides for us the contrast between the bishops and cardinals striving for political power and the ill-educated clergy of the countryside. The stark, cool halls of the officials in the Vatican seem to have nothing in common with the barren, hot hills of the peasants, but somehow it is all the same Church.

It makes one think of St. Paul talking about the various parts of the Body of Christ, but it seems that in the Church the Head has lost touch with the Heart, and many of the seemingly insignificant parts are inflamed and infected.

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NCRegister: Praying to Sts. Louis and Zelie Brough Grace into my Marriage

When my husband was discerning his vocation during the semester we spent abroad taking classes in Gaming, Austria and traveling around Europe he prayed to St. Thérèse of Lisieux to be “offered red roses” if he was meant to marry me. And one afternoon in Venice outside St. Mark’s Basilica (my husband’s namesake) a flower vendor offered red roses. Mark did not purchase them, nor did he give up his discernment immediately, but I still credit the Little Flower’s intercession to him feeling what I had felt all along—that we were meant to be married. Three years later our dear St. Thérèse led us to her parents.

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NCRegister: The Desert is Where We Find God

The fertile forests of Yosemite National Park in California, which we had camped in the night before, had given way to the dry, rocky land of Nevada, and our minivan sped on in a land where cities and towns are few and far between. We were on the final week of our three-week western road trip. It had all been so beautiful, but here, in this empty, dry land a sense of dread lay heavy on my chest. The desert went on for miles before us and behind us. Rocks rose occasionally into mountains and cliffs in the distance, but their barrenness only added to the bleakness of the path we had to take. And everything seemed closer on the horizon than it actually was, making each mile seem longer.

This family road trip was the first time I had experienced the desert, and what surprised me the most was the amount of life, life adapted to the environment, that struggled on even in this most desolate of climates.

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NCRegister: John the Baptist and Your Gift of Prophecy

I was born two weeks late during a hot, humid St. Louis summer. My mother, who never complains of physical discomforts, claims that she does not remember being particularly uncomfortable during that time of waiting, but perhaps she just has forgotten. I was stubborn from the beginning. My mother had hoped for a family birth, but I waited to be born until my two older sisters were taken out of the delivery room by my grandmother for a snack.

I took my first breath on the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, and was given a name that my parents had prayed long and hard about. Because of this I have long been devoted to my “birthday buddy” relating to his call to contemplation and prophecy. When I followed my call into the married life I realized that I while I had not chosen the “better part” of Mary, even my life as a Martha made way for a closeness to and constant companionship with God with a irrepressible desire to bear witness to God.

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NCRegister Blog: NFP, God’s Faithfulness, and Family Size

“You know, “ I called to my husband in the other room, “If I had lived even a hundred years ago, I would have probably died because of childbearing by now.” We were dealing with yet another health issue of mine related to the wear and tear of pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing. It is not that I am sick very often and pregnancies are mostly comfortable for me, but I have had multiple hemorrhages, many infections, and several miscarriages, which seem to have been caused by a chronic health problem.

When we signed up for our Natural Family Planning courses and planned ahead to when we would use it, this kind of stuff was not on our radar.

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NCRegister Blog: A Letter to My Daughter on her First Communion Day

My dear sweet girl,

When I kneel beside you in Eucharistic Adoration, I always wonder what is going on in that sensitive heart of yours. You always ask to sit right in the front of the chapel and settle down quietly to pray. I notice how you look earnestly toward the host in the monstrance. What do you say to your Savior in the depth of your heart? Do you tell him how much you love him? Do you thank him for all he does for you? Do you ask him to help you? Do you pray for me as well? I have noticed that when you pray, God answers your prayers.

Today, May 12, your First Communion day is the feast day of Blessed Imelda Lambertini who is the patron saint of First Communicants.

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NCRegister Blog: Catholic Women Want Community (Even in a Blizzard)

Two of my friends and I set out one blustery Friday April afternoon from St. Paul, Minnesota for Sioux Falls, South Dakota. We were excited to spend a weekend together at the Catholic Diocese of Sioux Falls women’s conference despite the forecast a blizzard sweeping through the upper Midwest. We managed to make it to our hotel a couple of hours before snow began to fall, but when we woke up on Saturday morning the blizzard had arrived in full force. It took until the end of my sixth winter living in Minnesota to see my first real blizzard, and I ended up being in South Dakota for it. Perhaps the flatness of the prairie intensified the winds, but I heard that the Twin Cities looked about the same as Sioux Falls.

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NCRegister Blog: Easter Hope is for Those who Sorrow

I meditated on the Joyful mysteries to the thump of my feet on the treadmill in the early silence of Holy Saturday morning. Hail Mary, full of grace... The almost wail-like tone of the chanting of the end of the Passion of St. John echoed in my head from the liturgy of Good Friday. It brought me back to another Saturday morning run on the treadmill when my heart was full of hope after I learned I was newly pregnant last Fall. The hope only lasted a few weeks as our baby passed away too soon. While I prayed the rosary my heart ached for our Blessed Mother as I contemplated how her search for the child Jesus in the Temple was a precursor to the laying of her dead son in the Tomb. With all of her sorrow she had to trust in God’s plan and walk away from the body of her son.

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NCRegister Blog: When We Accompany We Also Need to Speak the Truth

I want to tell you a few stories of accompaniment and discernment about real people. The first is about a man who once made a great sacrifice for the sake of living the Christian faith. When he was 17 years old he had a son with a woman whom he could not or would not marry. They spent 15 years together raising this son. He had been interested in the Catholic Church from his childhood, but it took him many years to come to believe in all of the Church’s truths. His mother who was Catholic prayed and sacrificed for him everyday, and devoted her life to helping him know and accept the truths revealed by God to the Church. During these long years he learned the teachings of the Church, was drawn to the beauty of truth, grew a real love for God in his heart. He learned much from a bishop, whom this young man described as one of those “who speak the truth, and speak it well, judiciously, pointedly, and with beauty and power of expression” (Christian Doctrine IV.21). It was the truth that compelled this young man to desire to be Catholic.

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NCRegister Blog: A Simple Way to Give to the Church in India

David and Kathy Rennie of Bloomington, Minnesota had an experience of being rich with poor outside their gate when traveling to India in 1985 to adopt their sixth child (their fifth adoption). Kathy had long desired to adopt a little girl from India, and had been inspired to do so by the life and work of St. Teresa of Calcutta. Kathy’s mother, Rose Mayer, had sponsored a poor seminarian more than a decade before, and the Rennies contacted him during their visit to India.  This seminarian was now a priest working as a secretary to the bishop of his diocese, and after they made contact he helped them overcome the difficulties they were having in adopting their daughter. It was through knowing Fr. Sebastian Thekethecheril, who was consecrated as Bishop of the Diocese of Vijayapuram in Kottayam, Kerala, India, in 2006, that the Rennies saw firsthand the great poverty of the Christian people of Kerala.

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NCRegister Blog: How to Pray Your Children to Heaven

As the Minnesota winter lingered on in full force in February we found ourselves a second weekend in a row in the nearby conservatory. We wandered through the beautifully landscaped greenhouses breathing in the humid, oxygen-rich air, remembering what it is like to be surrounded by green things. As my children dangled over the edge of a fountain, reaching for the tricking water, a conservatory volunteer handed them each a penny, instructing each to make a wish and throw the penny in. My 2-year-old son flung his in with gusto, but the girls pondered over their wishes for a moment and tossed theirs in as well. As we were walking away from the fountain through the greenery, one of my daughters clasped my hand and said, “Do you know what I wished for, Mom? I wished that I would go to Heaven someday.”

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NCRegister Blog:The Humility of True Obedience

I hesitated for a moment in my reading aloud to my daughters as I came across Laura Ingalls Wilder’s discussion about wifely obedience with her fiancé Almanzo Wilder:

Almanzo, I must ask you something. Do you want me to promise to obey you? [...] I cannot make a promise that I will not keep, and, Almanzo, even if I tried, I do not think I could obey anybody against my better judgment. (These Happy Golden Years, “Wedding Plans”)

It is interesting how Wilder’s understanding of obedience was right and wrong at the same time. She was right to acknowledge that we owe our obedience to certain persons who have authority over us, but wrong to think it involved obeying against her better judgment. I went ahead and read the passage to my girls, and then we talked about how we are never to obey those who have authority over us if it means that we violate God’s law and our own conscience. But nonetheless obedience is a virtue that we are all called to have a Christians; disobedience to God was part of the first sin of the human race. God wants us to obey him and his commandments, but also obey him through our acquiescence to the wills of other people who have authority over us.

Obedience is a part of the Cardinal Virtue of Justice with which we give other people what is due to them...

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NCRegister Blog: Death, Septuagesima and the Hillbilly Thomists

When my feeble life is o'er
And time for me will be no more
Guide me gently, safely o'er
To Thy kingdom dear Lord, to Thy shore. (Just a Closer Walk With Thee, Anonymous)

One of the things I love about going to an Extraordinary Form (of the Roman Rite) Mass every Sunday is the great depth of the old liturgical calendar. We recently entered the season of Septuagesima, which begins three Sundays before Ash Wednesday. Since in the old calendar the Christmas season extends to Feb. 2, the Feast of the Presentation of Our Lord and the Purification of Our Lady, it is helpful to have this time to transition from Christmas cookies and music to the austerities of Lent. Septuagesima reminds me that I want to have a good, holy Lent in which I acknowledge my own sinfulness, seek to make reparation, and renew my dependence on God...

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NCRegister Blog:6 Pro-Life Things You Can Do Every Day

The anniversary of Roe v. Wade has passed us by, the March for Life is over, but the work is not done.

There are still the crisis pregnancies. There are still the mothers not sure if they can take care of the babies in their wombs. There are still the couples using abortifacient contraceptives. There are still the women not willing to make the physical sacrifices of being pregnant, but choosing to act in a way that will bring new human life into existence nonetheless. There are still lonely mothers in need of support from others. The fear and worry surrounding pregnancy that has led to legalized abortion is still rampant in our nation, even though deep down inside we all know that abortion ends a human life.

The March for Life is a beautiful thing. It reminds our nation of the tragedy of millions of lives lost through abortion. It reminds our political leaders that our nation needs to stop the legal murder of the unborn. And in some cases it might change peoples’ hearts or give them the courage to speak up for a cause they have never been able to before. But the real work of the pro-life movement happens during the rest of the year...

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NCRegister Blog: What I Learned From Victorian Literature about Priestly Celibacy

As I recently reread Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers I commented to my husband that one could use the events of the novel to argue for why the Catholic Church should not have married priesthood be the norm. The novel tells of the conflicts within the Anglican hierarchy of the fictional cathedral town of Barchester set in the fictional English county of Barsetshire in the mid-19th century. It shows what a hierarchical church looks like after nearly 300 years of mostly married clergy running the church from the curates to the bishops. I know that a church where the Queen is the head and the politicians appoint bishops does not perfectly show truths about the modern Catholic Church, but we can still learn lessons from their experience, even those expressed in novels. (I must confess from the get-go that most of my knowledge of the Church of England comes from my extensive reading of Victorian literature, so bear with me.)...

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