So if you are anything like me, then you find God teaching you how to be more like Him at the most unlikely and unexpected times.

This past week I attended the Wake for the brother of one of our youth group teens. A son and brother was lost suddenly last weekend.. My prayers continue to be with the Croce family.

On Monday I emailed the Core Team to advise the time of the Wake and Funeral and offer to give anyone rides to either if needed. I received response from a couple of people, one being Chris Martinez.

Chris is a member of the SFA Core Team and a good friend. Chris said that he would meet us at St. Peters downtown for the Wake after work on Wednesday.

Now I didn’t think anything about it at the time, but the funny thing is that Chris has never met the teen whose brother just passed, he never met the one who passed, nor has he ever met the family. Chris came simply to support those he knew and loved, a couple of teens from our youth group and me.

Now I know that he did not just come for me. I’m not that dense and prideful. But, it felt like that was why he came. I felt supported and I was only there to support our teens and the brother who lost a brother and parents who lost a son. And here, my friend no, my brother comes to support me.

So, for all of you men out there who are striving to be a man in Christ; I suggest that today we take a note from the Chris Martinez manual for living. In supporting and showing love to each other, we can and will transform the world. Too often we think each other can handle it. We think that as “men” we should step it up and deal with the problem.

But I think that God would offer a different perspective.

This week as you go about your daily life, look for Christ in the unexpected and in the places where you normally don’t. AND.

If you find yourself thinking that someone can handle what they are going through, rather than assume they can, reach out and love one another as Christ has loved us. Miracles haven’t stopped happening, we have just stopped letting them happen to us. Open your eyes and step forward in faith and God will renew our faith and our minds in His love.

Thanks Chris for showing me a glimpse of God’s glory in my everyday life.

In Him…

WAY TO GO IDAHO!, OOPS I mean Colorado. Below is a published letter from the Archbishop of Denver, CO, rebutting the ridiculus disregard for Catholic teaching by Speaker of the House and overall liberal politician Nancy Pelosi. While I pray that she come more fully in communion with the Church and recognize the err of her beliefs, I am pumped that the Church is responding in this way. It’s about time we stand up and simply state what the Church teaches.

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Most Rev. Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap. Addresses
Archbishop of Denver

ON THE SEPARATION OF SENSE AND STATE:
A CLARIFICATION FOR THE PEOPLE OF THE CHURCH IN NORTHERN COLORADO

Denver, CO - Monday, August 25, 2008

To Catholics of the Archdiocese of Denver:

Catholic public leaders inconvenienced by the abortion debate tend to take a hard line in talking about the “separation of Church and state.” But their idea of separation often seems to work one way. In fact, some officials also seem comfortable in the role of theologian. And that warrants some interest, not as a “political” issue, but as a matter of accuracy and justice.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is a gifted public servant of strong convictions and many professional skills. Regrettably, knowledge of Catholic history and teaching does not seem to be one of them.

Interviewed on Meet the Press August 24, Speaker Pelosi was asked when human life begins. She said the following:

“I would say that as an ardent, practicing Catholic, this is an issue that I have studied for a long time. And what I know is over the centuries, the doctors of the church have not been able to make that definition . . . St. Augustine said at three months. We don’t know. The point is, is that it shouldn’t have an impact on the woman’s right to choose.”

Since Speaker Pelosi has, in her words, studied the issue “for a long time,” she must know very well one of the premier works on the subject, Jesuit John Connery’s Abortion: The Development of the Roman Catholic Perspective (Loyola, 1977). Here’s how Connery concludes his study:

“The Christian tradition from the earliest days reveals a firm antiabortion attitude . . . The condemnation of abortion did not depend on and was not limited in any way by theories regarding the time of fetal animation. Even during the many centuries when Church penal and penitential practice was based on the theory of delayed animation, the condemnation of abortion was never affected by it. Whatever one would want to hold about the time of animation, or when the fetus became a human being in the strict sense of the term, abortion from the time of conception was considered wrong, and the time of animation was never looked on as a moral dividing line between permissible and impermissible abortion.”

Or to put it in the blunter words of the great Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

“Destruction of the embryo in the mother’s womb is a violation of the right to live which God has bestowed on this nascent life. To raise the question whether we are here concerned already with a human being or not is merely to confuse the issue. The simple fact is that God certainly intended to create a human being and that this nascent human being has been deliberately deprived of his life. And that is nothing but murder.”

Ardent, practicing Catholics will quickly learn from the historical record that from apostolic times, the Christian tradition overwhelmingly held that abortion was grievously evil. In the absence of modern medical knowledge, some of the Early Fathers held that abortion was homicide; others that it was tantamount to homicide; and various scholars theorized about when and how the unborn child might be animated or “ensouled.” But none diminished the unique evil of abortion as an attack on life itself, and the early Church closely associated abortion with infanticide. In short, from the beginning, the believing Christian community held that abortion was always, gravely wrong.

Of course, we now know with biological certainty exactly when human life begins. Thus, today’s religious alibis for abortion and a so-called “right to choose” are nothing more than that -alibis that break radically with historic Christian and Catholic belief.

Abortion kills an unborn, developing human life. It is always gravely evil, and so are the evasions employed to justify it. Catholics who make excuses for it - whether they’re famous or not - fool only themselves and abuse the fidelity of those Catholics who do sincerely seek to follow the Gospel and live their Catholic faith.

The duty of the Church and other religious communities is moral witness. The duty of the state and its officials is to serve the common good, which is always rooted in moral truth. A proper understanding of the “separation of Church and state” does not imply a separation of faith from political life. But of course, it’s always important to know what our faith actually teaches.

+Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap. Archbishop of Denver
+James D. Conley Auxiliary Bishop of Denver