Brother Priests is the new Blog

Thank you for visiting our blog over the past 3 years. We are amazed at how our readership is grown. When we originally conceived this blog, we thought it would provide people with a unique inside view of what it is like to be a priest, but that never quite happened. Many of the most powerful moments of priesthood happen in quiet conversations -- moments in Confession, encounters on the street, times when people open up in powerful ways, small Masses that celebrate God's joy with a particular community. These things often cannot be explained in a blog post and can hardly be shared even with close friends, because they touch the intimacy of a person's relationship with God. We chose never to post these personal encounters.

We thought we could share the adventures of parish life, but life in a parish is also a sensitive topic. We thought of this as a forum for social and political commentary, but much of that commentary is our own opinions. People are not particularly interested in the opinions and speculations of a priest - they expect priests to post from the center of the Church's teaching and the truth of the Gospel.

Along the way we learned a lot. We learned that the web is a powerful forum for speaking, and consequently it must never be used as a place to air frustration or float half-baked opinions. The words of St. Paul are all the more important in today's world, "Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for edifying, as fits the occasion, that it may import grace to those who hear". (Ephesians 4:29).

However, this does not mean there is no room for a blog from the perspective of a priest. In a world of fast-food sound bytes and quick answers, people want something they can savor and enjoy. In a world of constant change, people are looking for truth that can anchor their lives. We may not be able to share each conversation, but behind each day's work is a constant dialogue with Jesus Christ. His Gospel message again and again challenges us to look beyond the limits of our vision and see the world with bigger eyes and most of all a bigger heart.

We plan to share a lot more of how Christ challenges the life we live, and what following Christ looks like in the world today. This will happen at BrotherPriests.com. Blogspot has been a great home but we feel we have outgrown it, and the WordPress system gives us a lot more possibilities to include graphics and pictures, to integrate players with our audio posts, and to include documents and PDFs. You will continue to be able to offer feedback, subscribe, and enjoy.

This is our last post on Holy Priesthood, but the beginning of something new.

- The Priests

Trojan horse in marriage

A recent article in the newspaper caught my eye with the intriguing headline, “Catholic Church updates fight as pill marks 50th anniversary.” I am too young to remember the original controversy over the pill, which seems to have happened only in the Catholic Church. The pill was promoted as a great advancement for women and for families. The pill would give women control over their own fertility and over their own bodies, allowing them to choose a pregnancy rather than being surprised by a child. Families would be free from the financial and emotional worries of leaving family size to chance, they said, and couples who could not afford to have another child could continue to be intimate without the worry of a possible pregnancy. Everyone said the pill was a great gift to women and marriage, and it would make marriages stronger and less stressful.

In all the world, the only people who stood against this new freedom and opportunity was the Catholic Church. The popular media tried to say that it was only the Pope and a few old celibate Bishops who really rejected the pill. The truth was a little more complicated, as it usually is, but the whole incident created a separation between laity and clergy, and between doctrine and practice, that has not yet healed. Behind the media story was the simple fact that, rather than inventing some new prohibition, the Church simply upheld the same teaching which Protestant churches has also taught until the 20th Century. Morally, the Church said that the meaning of intimacy lies in two purposes, both a loving union of a husband and wife, and the gift of new life which that union tends to create. Taking fertility out of the picture deprives the intimacy of an essential element, and not only undermines the meaning and purpose of that intimacy but ultimately undermines the meaning and purpose of marriage.

(Continue reading at BrotherPriests.com)

Fr. Joel's homily for June 27

Surrender Everything to God (13:30)

Ordinary Time, 13th Sunday. What is the difference between Elisha in the first reading and the other three in the Gospel? Elisha wants to give God everything, it will just take him some time. The other three plan on holding something back from God. What amazing things God can do if we are willing to surrender everything! We see this in the life of Sr. Francis Xavier. We could see it in you life too. (27 Jun 2010)

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Oil - another sign of the Apocalypse

My brother pointed out that the oil spill should keep us humble, and remind us how limited our capabilities really are. In this sense, the disaster is a natural consequence of pushing too far. It is exactly the same to say that the oil spill is God’s wrath for our arrogance, and His warning to repent. After all, it is God Himself who established the limits of nature and the consequences of violating them.

The fact that this is “God’s wrath,” is supported by the fact that nearly everything you can imagine went wrong with the efforts. First, the blowout preventer failed to prevent a blowout. Then, efforts to dam the well with drilling mud and to clog the blowout preventer with junk both failed.

One news brief said, “BP’s ill-fated relief efforts to stop the damaged well hit yet another snag, underscoring once again the fragility of the containment effort: lightning struck the vessel that had been collecting the oil from the well, suspending operations for nearly five hours” NYT

Ill-fated is a mild way to put it, the whole effort seems cursed in a way that is beyond our capacity to cope. It was a newspaper article that pointed me in this direction of thinking:
“The oil has now reached four gulf states…turning its marshlands into death zones for wildlife and staining its beaches rust and crimson in an affliction that some said brought to mind the plagues and punishments of the Bible. ‘In Relvelations it says the water will turn to blood,’ says P.J. Hahn, director of coastal zone management for Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish. ‘That’s what it looks like out there- like the Gulf is bleeding. This is going to choke the life out of everything.’”
[read the full article at BrotherPriests.com]

Fr. Joel's homily for June 20

Ord12 - Dying to be a Man (6:30)

Ordinary Time, 12th Sunday. Learning to play an instrument involves suffering, but it’s worth it. Sin mostly happens when we try to avoid suffering, with the result that we cause ourselves more suffering. Jesus offers a better solution – take up our cross and embrace our suffering. It causes us to grow as human beings and to grow in love. It is also what it means to be a father. Happy Fathers Day! (20 Jun 2010)

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Homily for the Sacred Heart - Benedict XVI

Excerpt:

It was to be expected that this new radiance of the priesthood would not be pleasing to the ‘enemy’; he would have rather preferred to see it disappear, so that God would ultimately be driven out of the world. And so it happened that, in this very year of joy for the Sacrament of the priesthood, the sins of priests came to light ... Had the Year for Priests been a glorification of our individual human performance, it would have been ruined by these events. But for us what happened was precisely the opposite...

Read the full article on BrotherPriests.com

holypriesthood >> BrotherPriests.com

On September 21, 2007, this blog was born, out of a desire to share the adventures of priesthood with the world. Now, 3 years and 400+ posts later, we have decided to expand to a new web site. Our new place on the world wide web will be http://brotherpriests.com

We have already begun publishing new content on BrotherPriests.com but we will continue to update this site periodically until the end of June. Please bookmark our new site.

We are grateful to Blogspot for hosting us for these three years but we wanted more flexibility to customize the page. We hope you like the new site, but feel free to leave a comment about it on this page.

- The priests

Fr. Joel's homily for June 13

Ord11 - Greatest Love (7:30)

Ordinary Time, 11th Sunday. We judge other people by what they do and by what they own. We judge ourselves the same way. But King David learns that God’s love for him is a more important standard. The woman in today’s Gospel responds by loving Jesus with all her heart. We have heard that God loves us, but do we really believe it? (13 Jun 2010)

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Humbling Scum

Since the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded  and burned and sunk to the sea floor on 20 April 2010, the world has been watching a terrible tragedy unfold. Oil continues to leak from an unstoppable deep-sea gusher.  The big question that seems to be on people's minds is, "What went wrong?" A congressional investigation is ongoing into the causes of the explosion. President Obama has placed a moratorium on new drilling and new laws are sure to follow to make sure that drilling is safe for all. Sadly, this spill doesn't even rank on the top-10 list, as the BBC reports in How big is the Deepwater Horizon oil spill? The biggest on the list is the Ixtoc 1 well, also in the Gulf of Mexico, which suffered a blowout in 1979 and leaked for nine months, spilling 476,000 metric tons of oil. So it could be worse, much worse. And maybe it will be.
(Actually, using the upper estimate of 45 million gallons, that would be approximately 144,000 metric tons, tying for 7th place right now in oil spills).

Getting too Confident

Our insatiable demand for oil has led us to more and more exotic places in order to extract it. You can see from the image above some of the stages in this development. The Deepwater Horizon was a "dynamically positioned" oil rig, which means that it wasn't tethered to anything, and it used propellers to stay in one place. The fact that they managed to start a well in 5,000 feet of water boggles the mind. They drilled through about 13,000 feet of rock to strike oil. And this is not the deepest well that has been drilled in deep water. Think of the manpower, knowledge, and years of engineering marvels that led us to this level.

I remember reading an article several years ago about engineering disasters (I can't seem to find the article now; not everything is on the internet). It looked at things like the Challenger explosion, the Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse and the Hartford Civic Center roof. The author concluded that engineers trying new technologies were very aware of the risks and took many precautions. Their successors took past achievements for granted and became more and more careless. Witness this recent newspaper article:

A decade ago, U.S. Government regulators warned that a major deepwater oil spill could start with a fire on a drilling rig, prove hard to stop and cause extensive damage to fish eggs and wetlands because there were few good ways to capture oil underwater.... Yet over the past decade, the risks faded into the background as America thirsted for new oil sources, the energy industry mastered new drilling technologies, and the number of deepwater wells swelled into the thousands. ("Document: Feds knew of Gulf spill risks in 2000," Green Bay Press-Gazette, 9 June 2010, A-11)

The Root of the Problem
As we mop up messy scum and clean coated birds, everyone wants to blame BP, George Bush, the Federal Government, contractors or engineers. But none of these is the real problem, I believe. The root of the problem is our belief that, with the right combination of technology and laws, we can always be in control. We examine the technology and the laws to try to regain control. But this idea is false. We cannot control everything, and we are capable of releasing effects far beyond our ability to control them. The right attitude is one of humble caution. Aware of our own limitations, we need to chose carefully and live within our means.

The problem is, our belief that we are in control leads us to take risks and suffer terrible consequences. Bankers who thought they could control all the effects of their actions gambled wildly and the whole economy lost big. Homeowners gambled on mortgages to buy homes they couldn't afford and lost them to bankruptcy. Engineers who believed they could control everything pushed to drain wetlands and reshape rivers, and faced the consequences with loss of life and massive flooding. Ordinary people think they can stay in control when they march blindly into bad relationships. Abuse, stalking, and emotionally scarred children are the floating scum left by our false sense of control. Why is it, with evidence all around us, that we continue to build carelessly, live carelessly, genetically modify our foods and alter our bodies, expecting the consequences to always be manageable?  Stark pictures of the massive cleanup show the results of choices made without humble regard for our limits. If only we would see the oil fowling our beaches for what it really is: Humbling Scum

Fr. Joel's homily for June 6

Corpus Christi - God's Life in Our Hands (10 min)

Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Jesus Christ (Corpus Christi). Ordination and Marriage involving placing one’s life in the hands of another. God invites us to place our life in His hands, but we hesitate. So, even though we are unworthy of it, God places His life in our hands. What are you going to do with it? (6 Jun 2010)

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