Couples for Christ Australia

23/10/2022

Reflection for the 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time
“Thank God I’m Better Than Others”

It is very easy for religious people to fall into a kind of self-righteousness. Their enthusiasm and generosity can plant the seeds of religious arrogance. They discover what commitment demands of them; they experience relative success in their endeavours to be faithful; they distance themselves from what they think might threaten their resolve; and then they pass judgment on those who do not share their values or experience their success. The growth of this kind of arrogance is often imperceptible, because there is enough truth in every step along the way that is difficult to recognize when one is veering off the track.

The fact is that some religious people are better than the rest of us. At issue is the reason WHY they might be better. The arrogant Pharisee clearly believed he was better because of what HE had done. He had been observant, and he was proud of it. The tax collector, on the other hand, was ashamed of what he had done. More to the point, he knew what God was able to do in the face of his sinfulness, and so he asked for mercy. Justification comes from God; it is not an equitable return for a job well done. The tax collector knew this, the Pharisee did not. The tax collector asked God for mercy, and he was granted his request. The Pharisee asked nothing of God, and so he received nothing.

There are various ways in which we show we are self-righteous, but basically, they show we have forgotten God is God and we are not. This is the attitude Jesus condemns. It presumes we are righteous in our own power, when it might be the case that we have not been thrown into a state of affairs that sorely tests the mettle of our virtue. It is one thing to be non-violent when the circumstances of life are relatively tranquil and quite another when one is immersed in brutal situations. Pregnancy means one thing to a woman who wants to bring a child into a stable and loving relationship and another to a frightened teenager. The observance of cultural mores, as important as they may be, do not justify a person. Only the goodness of God is.

When the circumstances of life support our efforts to be observant, we can easily assume a superior attitude toward those whose weaknesses are only too apparent. They may show failings in areas where we are resolute, but our disdain for them is a clear sign of both our ignorance of our human frailty and our lack of compassion for the frailty of others. Unfortunately, this attitude of arrogance can be brought to prayer by the pharisee in all of us.

- Dianne Bergant, with Richard Fragomeni
Preaching the New Lectionary-Year C
©2000, The Liturgical Press Collegeville, Minnesota

22/02/2022

The Primacy of Peter

Every single biblical logion about the primacy remains from generation to generation a signpost and a norm, to which we must ceaselessly resubmit ourselves.

When the Church adheres to these words in faith, she is not triumphalistic but humbly recognizing in wonder and thanksgiving the victory of God over and through human weaknesses. Whoever deprives these words of their force for fear of triumphalism or of human usurpation of authority does not proclaim that God is greater but diminishes him, since God demonstrates the power of his love, and thus remains faithful to the law of history of salvation, precisely in the paradox of human impotence.

For with the same realism with which we declare today the sins of the popes and their disproportion to the magnitude of their commission, we must also acknowledge that Peter has repeatedly stood as a rock against ideologies, against the dissolution of the word into the plausibilities of a given time, against subjection to the powers of this world.

When we see this in the facts of history, we are not celebrating men but praising the Lord, who does not abandon the Church and who desired to manifest that he is the rock through Peter, the little stumbling stone: “flesh and blood” do not save but the Lord saves through those who are of flesh and blood. To deny this truth is not a plus of faith, not a plus of humility, but is to shrink from the humility that recognize God as he is.

- Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI

12/01/2022

11/11/2021

As we enter the planning stage for next year, may we remember that it is the Holy Spirit that will surely light up our paths and that our ultimate goal is to do God's will and nothing else.

25/07/2021

MESSAGE OF HIS HOLINESS POPE FRANCIS
FOR THE FIRST WORLD DAY FOR GRANDPARENTS AND THE ELDERLY (25 July 2021)

“I am with you always” (Matthew 28:20)

We will not emerge from the present crisis as we were before, but either better or worse. And “God willing… this may prove not to be just another tragedy of history from which we learned nothing… If only we might keep in mind all those elderly persons who died for lack of respirators... If only this immense sorrow may not prove useless, but enable us to take a step forward towards a new style of life. If only we might discover once for all that we need one another, and that in this way our human frailty can experience a rebirth” (Fratelli Tutti, 35). No one is saved alone. We are all indebted to one another. We are all brothers and sisters. - Pope Francis
- https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/messages/nonni/documents/20210531-messaggio-nonni-anziani.html

16/05/2021

The Meaning of the Ascension
What is the meaning of Christ’s “ascension into heaven”? It expresses our belief that in Christ human nature, the humanity in which we share, has entered into the inner life of God in a new and hitherto unheard-of way. It means that man has found an everlasting place in God.

Heaven is not a place beyond the stars, but something much greater, something that requires far more audacity to assert: Heaven means that man now has a place in God. The basis of this assertion is the interpenetration of humanity and divinity in the crucified and exalted man Jesus Christ, the man who is in God and eternally one with God, is at the same time God’s abiding openness to all human beings.

Thus Jesus himself is what we call “heaven”; heaven is not a place but a person, the person of him in whom God and man are forever and inseparably one. And we go to heaven and enter into heaven to the extent we go to Jesus Christ and enter into him.

In this sense, “ascension into heaven” can be something that takes place in our everyday lives . . . For the disciples, the “ascension” was not what we usually misinterpret it as being: the temporary absence of Christ from the world. It meant rather his new, definitive, and irrevocable presence by participation in God’s royal power . . . God has a place for man! . . . In God there is a place for us! . . .

“Be consoled, flesh and blood, for in Christ you have taken possession of heaven and of God’s kingdom!” (Tertullian).

- Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI

16/02/2021

Forty Days of Preparation

In the forty days of the preparation for Easter, we endeavor to get away from the heathenism that weighs us down, that is, always driving us away from God, and we set off towards him once again. So too, at the beginning of the Eucharist, in the confession of sin, we are always taking this path again, to set out, to go to the mountain of God’s word and God’s presence.

We must learn that it is only in the silent, barely noticeable things that what is great takes place, that man becomes God’s image and the world once more becomes the radiance of God’s glory. Let us ask the Lord to give us the receptivity to his gentle presence; let us ask him to help us not to be deafened and desensitized by this world’s loud outcry that our receptivity fails to register him. Let us ask him that we might hear his quiet voice, go with him, and be of service together with him and his way, so that his kingdom may become present in this world.

We imitate God, we live by God, like God, by entering into Christ’s manner of life. He has climbed down from his divine being and become one of us; he has given himself and does so continually…It is by these little daily virtues, again and again, that we step out of our bitterness, our anger towards others, our refusal to accept the other’s otherness; by them, again and again, we open to each other in forgiveness.

This “littleness” is the concrete form of our being like Christ and living like God, imitating God; he has given himself to us so that we can give ourselves to him and to one another.

- from Benedictus, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI

16/12/2020

CFC National Council announces new appointments effective 1 January 2021. We give praise and thanks to our God first and foremost and to our outgoing brethren for their dedication in discharging their respective roles as pastoral leaders.

Congratulations and thanks to our new appointees for accepting their new roles. Let us continue to support and pray for one another.

07/12/2020

The Doctrine of the “Immaculata”
- Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI

The contradiction between God’s “is” and man’s “is not” is lacking in the case of Mary, and consequently God’s judgment about her is pure “Yes,” just as she herself stands before him as pure “Yes.” This correspondence of God’s “Yes” with Mary’s being as “Yes” is the freedom from original sin.

Preservation from original sin, therefore, signifies no exceptional proficiency, no exceptional achievement; on the contrary, it signifies that Mary reserves no area of being, life or will for herself as a private possession: instead, precisely in the total dispossession of self, in giving herself to God, she comes to the true possession of self.

Grace as dispossession becomes response as appropriation. Thus from another viewpoint the mystery of barren fruitfulness, the paradox of the barren mother, the mystery of virginity, becomes intelligible once more; dispossession as belonging, as the locus of new life.

Thus the doctrine of the Immaculata reflects ultimately faith’s certitude that there really is a holy Church – as a person and in a person. In this sense it expresses the Church’s certitude of salvation. Included therein is the knowledge that God’s covenant in Israel did not fail but produced a shoot out of which emerged a blossom, the Savior. The doctrine of the Immaculata testifies accordingly that God’s grace was powerful enough to awaken a response, that grace and freedom, grace and being oneself, renunciation and fulfilment are only apparent contradictories; in reality one conditions the other and grants its very existence.