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Power of Pentecost
Pentecost, which we celebrate this Sunday, explains the reason for and the setting for the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles and the Blessed Mother.
We are told in the account of the first Christian Pentecost that Jews from throughout the known world were gathered in Jerusalem. We ask, “Why?” The answer is that they were there to celebrate Pentecost, the feast of 50 days after Passover.
We celebrate the day as 50 days after Easter. Pentecost brings the celebration of Easter to a glorious conclusion, the sending of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles. The Apostles were immediately transformed on that first Pentecost.
An instruction in the Roman breviary compares the work of the Spirit to that of water, a frequently used sign of the Spirit. Just as water transforms and is essential for life without being recognized for its presence as such, the Spirit is the universal sign of Creator of life. Water nourishes the beasts of the fields as well as man.
Water makes the grass green and the flowers and trees grow without being noticed for its presence and action.
So too the Spirit activates all Christians moving some to be Apostles, missionaries, prophets, martyrs, and all that make up the variety of ministries in the Church without being noticed but always present and life giving.
We speak of Pentecost as the birthday of the Church because it gives life and birth to all of us to continue in our day the life and work of Jesus. The Spirit invigorates and gives life; the Spirit sends us forth to share our life. The Spirit is always present keeping us going. We recognize and celebrate that fact on Pentecost.
Spitzer’s Radical Agenda
We urge all our readers to write to Gov. Eliot Spitzer to register your strong opposition to his Program Bill #16 related to abortion. This bill contains extraordinarily broad language that would declare a fundamental ‘right of privacy’ in state law. The proposal opens the door to extreme results. It would:
• Force all hospitals to allow abortions, including religious hospitals and others whose mission statements oppose it;
• Force all insurance plans, including those of Catholic employers, to cover abortion;
• Legalize abortion through all nine months of pregnancy, for virtually any reason;
• Make abortion immune from any reasonable state regulation such as parental
notification or informed consent;
• Repeal current law that requires doctors to perform abortions and allow any “health care practitioner’ to provide it;
• Allow late-term abortions to be performed in clinics that do not offer the full complement of support facilities necessary to assist women and any child born alive during an abortion.
Contrary to the notion that this bill would allow “freedom of choice,” it would deny freedom of choice to individuals and institutions that prefer not to support or condone abortion.
Memorials and Decorations
Memorial Day until quite recently was known as Decoration Day, a name that more precisely recognizes its origins as the day set aside to decorate the graves of those who have given their lives for our country.
Now we speak easily of Memorial Day weekend marking the change of date from the original May 30 to one which each year accommodates retail commercial interests and lures all of us to start of “the season” of sales and special offers. All this is harmless in itself, but it can allow us to forget too easily the reason for the commemoration.
In recent years, there have been too often new graves of those fallen in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the cemetery also holds the weather-beaten graves, perhaps with tattered flags, of those who have died long ago in conflicts that are now only for the history books. But they are graves that in their time marked a young life prematurely ended.
We live in a time when those who are dying are more quietly remembered — unfortunately, too often as a statistic to many of us, except for the immediate family. War itself has become too impersonal with deaths attributed to blown-up troop carriers or ambush by faceless enemies. Flag-draped caskets are stacked neatly on super craft airliners. The military funerals are carried out with ritualistic precision and recorded music in the background. The place of burial is determined only by a map provided for the bereaved family. All is antiseptic. A life is lost and included among casualty statistics. It all seems far away from the widows and other family who after the horror of the Civil War – the statistics of which make today’s casualty losses pale – decorated the graves of all the fallen, “The Blue and the Gray.”
Memorial Day is a solemn day, a day of mourning, but on the other hand, a day of gratitude and pride. It is a day to celebrate our country and its freedoms, to realize the true reasons why we should thank God that we are Americans and have been blessed by life in this great country. We do not worship the flag, but we respect it; we respect it dearly. Our life as Americans has not come easily nor cheaply – nor does it today. People throughout the world yearn for and die for what we too easily take for granted. May we always respect that way of life. There is no way more proper than by recovering the original sense and solemnity of Decoration Day.
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