• The Crucifix Prayer

    Blessed are you, Lord God,
    Father all-holy,
    for your boundless love
    The tree, once the source of shame
    and death for humankind,
    has become the cross
    of our redemption and life.

    When his hour had come to
    return to you in glory,
    the Lord Jesus,
    Our King, our Priest, and our Teacher,
    freely mounted the scaffold of the cross
    and made it his royal throne,
    his altar of sacrifice, his pulpit of truth.

    On the cross,
    lifted above the earth,
    he triumphed over our age-old enemy.
    Cloaked in his own blood,
    he drew all things to himself.

    On the cross,
    he opened out his arms
    and offered you his life;
    the sacrifice of the New Law
    that gives to the sacraments
    their saving power.

    On the cross,
    he proved what he had prophesied:
    the grain of wheat must die
    to bring forth an abundant harvest.

    Father,
    we honour this cross as the sign
    of our redemption.
    May we reap the harvest of salvation
    planted in pain by Christ Jesus.
    May our sins be nailed to his cross,
    the power of life released,
    pride conquered,
    and weakness turned to strength.

    May the cross be our comfort in trouble,
    our refuge in the face of danger,
    our safeguard on life’s journey
    until you welcome us to
    our heavenly home.

    Grant this through Christ our Lord. Amen.

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  • The Prayer of St. Ephrem

    {Making a prostration}

    O LORD, Master of my life,
    grant that I may not be infected with the
    spirit of slothfulness and inquisitiveness,
    with the spirit of ambition and vain talking.

    {Making a prostration}

    Grant instead to me, your servant,
    the spirit of purity and of humility,
    the spirit of patience and neighborly love.

    {Making a third prostration}

    O Lord and King,
    grant me the grace of being aware of my sins
    and of not thinking evil of those of my brethren.
    For you are blessed, now and ever, and forever.

    Amen.

    Lord Jesus Christ, King of Kings,
    You have power over life and death.
    You know what is secret and hidden,
    and neither our thoughts nor our feelings
    are concealed from You.
    Cure me of duplicity;
    I have done evil before You.
    Now my life declines from day to day
    and my sins increase.
    O Lord, God of souls and bodies,
    You know the extreme frailty of my soul and my flesh.
    Grant me strength in my weakness, O Lord,
    and sustain me in my misery.
    Give me a grateful soul that I may
    never cease to recall Your benefits,
    O Lord most bountiful.
    Be not mindful of my many sins,
    but forgive me all my misdeeds.
    O Lord, disdain not my prayer –
    the prayer of a wretched sinner;
    sustain me with Your grace until the end,
    that it may protect me as in the past.
    It is Your grace which has taught me wisdom;
    blessed are they who follow her ways,
    for they shall receive the crown of glory.
    In spite of my unworthiness,
    I praise You and I glorify You,
    O Lord, for Your mercy to me is without limit.
    You have been my help and my protection.
    May the name of Your majesty be praised forever.
    To you, our God, be glory.
    Amen.

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  • PWJ: S4E103 – Bonus – “Season Finale” (Part 2)

    David, Andrew, and Matt wrap up Season 4 with the Season Finale. This is Part 2 of that Finale. Listener Survey: https://forms.gle/X4zq7Uk69KmYo1v3A

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  • PWJ: S4E102 – Bonus – “Season Finale” (Part 1)

    David, Andrew, and Matt wrap up Season 4 with the Season Finale. This is Part 1…

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  • PWJ: S4E101 – Bonus – “Jack vs Tollers”

    After the previously-planned interview fell through at the last minute, David sat down to record a solo episode to talk about his newborn son, Sidecar Day, blue flowers in Narnia, and also to make his tongue-in-cheek case as to why C.S. Lewis is better than J.R.R. Tolkien.

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  • PWJ: S4E100 – AH – “After Hours” with The Gray Havens

    The Gray Havens are an American Christian folk pop husband and wife duo, David and Licia Radford, from Crystal Lake, Illinois. On October 8th they will be releasing their new album, Blue Flower, so David Radford came on the show to talk to Andrew and David about how C.S. Lewis inspired their recent work.

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  • PWJ: S4E99 – AH – “After Hours” with Mike “Gomer” Gormley

    As we approach the end of Season 4, David is joined on the show by Michael “Gomer” Gormley. Among other things, they discuss Ted Lasso, tea, and the Atonement. Also, find out what Gomer would do if he ever became the Pope!

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  • PWJ: S4E98 – AH – “After Hours” with Patti Callahan

    New York Times bestselling author, Patti Callahan, returns to the show to talk about her forthcoming book, “Once Upon A Wardrobe”, which will be released on October 19th.

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  • PWJ: S4E97 – AH – “After Hours” with The Tolkien Road

    A few months ago, John and Greta from The Tolkien Road podcast did a series of episodes on religion in Tolkien’s Legendarium. David invited him onto the show to talk about those episodes and to encourage the Pints With Jack listeners to listen to them.

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  • PWJ: S4E96 – AH – “After Hours” with Rod Bennett

    Author Rod Bennett joined David to talk about a presentation on he gave at a big Christian rock festival about C.S. Lewis’ relationship to “Pulp Fiction”.

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Worldwide Adoration

Adoration

Just in case you hadn’t heard, this Sunday on the Feast of Corpus Christi (June 2nd), Pope Francis will be presiding over an hour of Eucharistic Adoration in St. Peter’s and is inviting all Catholics around the world to do the same.

A few months ago we had “Mega Adoration” in San Diego when several hundred young adults attended Adoration together in one of San Diego’s larger churches. Clearly Pope Francis heard about this and decided to take it to the next level… 😉

St. Francis will be doing this at 5pm (Rome time), which works out at 4pm in England and in the USA it’ll be 11am on the East Coast and 8am on the West Coast.

So, join the Facebook Event, find yourself a chapel or church and go pray!

The article Worldwide Adoration first appeared on RestlessPilgrim.net

Paternal Protestations

As you’ll see from the categorization of this entry, this is an apologetics post. In this article I am going to be defending the use of the writings of the Early Church Fathers in demonstrating the historicity and veracity of the Catholic Faith.

The problem with writing a defence of anything is that, even with the best will in the world, it’s still easy to come across as though you’re attacking those to whom you are responding.

So, if you’re reading this post and you feel that it comes across as Protestant-bashing then I’m truly sorry.  This is certainly not my intention.  In fact, this was one of the reasons why I penned the Ecumenical Apologist entry, to try and dispel such charges. In this post I simply want to present something of an explanation as to why one should care about the Early Church Fathers.

Forgotten Treasure

On the occasions when I’ve been engaged in apologetics with non-Catholic Christians I’ve often mentioned the Early Fathers.  I’m usually met with blank stares.  The Early who?! Unfortunately, like Catholics, our separated brethren haven’t read much of the Early Church Fathers either 🙁

One of my hopes for this blog is that it will encourage both groups to read the Fathers and learn more about our common heritage.  The Early Church Fathers are fundamentally important in ecumenical work since they were living in a time prior to the divisions of the Great East/West Schism and the Reformation.

On the odd occasion when I do encounter non-Catholics who have heard of the Fathers, they usually only have second-hand information and have actually not read any of their writings.  This is not true of all non-Catholics, of course, but in my limited experience it has at least been the larger majority. It should come as no surprise then, upon meeting Catholic or Protestant Christians unfamiliar with the Fathers, I immediately encourage them to begin by reading the letters of my favourite Early Church Father, St. Ignatius of Antioch 🙂

How You Shouldn’t Treat The Fathers

Yesterday, Joe over at Shameless Popery wrote a great post entitled Three Ways You Shouldn’t Treat The Church Fathers. Here were his three points:

Wrong Way #1: Ignoring or Fearing the Church Fathers
Reason: It Reduces Christianity to Incoherence

Wrong Way #2: Exploiting the Church Fathers
Reason: It Doesn’t Treat the Fathers Honestly

Wrong Way #3: Treating the Church Fathers as Infallible
Reason: The Fathers Occasionally Disagree

In this blog post I would like to talk a little bit about the third item. In apologetic exchanges I have often had to correct the non-Catholic assertion that we regard the Fathers as infallible. We don’t. As Joe points out, the Fathers occasionally disagree. It is on this point that I sometimes hear another objection. Here is what someone recently wrote to me:

“The fathers didn’t agree on every matter of doctrine so their opinion is no more reliable than anyone else’s. There were some heated arguments between some of them.  In what way are they different from two modern-day non-Catholic pastors disagreeing over a certain interpretation of the Bible?

I would like to take the rest of this blog entry to address this objection.

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Relationships and Theology of the Body

If you’re a Catholic Young Adult living in San Diego, chances are that you’ve been going to Theology On Tap for the last few weeks at The Old Spaghetti Factory in San Marcos.

On the 14th May, Kristine Bacich, Director of Religious Education at St. Mary Magdaleine’s, gave a talk entitled “Relationships and Theology of the Body”. The MP3s of that talk are available for download below:

Main Talk (Download)

Q&A (Download)

If you’d like to find out more information about Young Adult events in this diocese, please visit YamSd.org.

The article Relationships and Theology of the Body first appeared on RestlessPilgrim.net

Integrating Google Calendar with my Blog

Hey everyone, this is just a little post to test Google Calendar integration for something I’m working on for a parish website. Below is embedded calendar of the JP2 Group, the young adult community which I used to lead:

Screen Shot 2014-12-03 at 4.11.40 PM

Despite what all the tutorials say, it’s not exactly straight-forward embedding a Google Calendar on a WordPress blog. The calendar is shown in an IFRAME which, unfortunately, WordPress automatically removes when you try to save it. To get around this, I installed an IFRAME plugin and this seemed to do the trick. Thankfully, this issue wouldn’t exist on a regular website 🙂

The article Integrating Google Calendar with my Blog first appeared on RestlessPilgrim.net

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