Incarnation influences all

In a Wall Street Journal op-piece, Bishop Robert  Barron of Winona-Rochester, the US, writes that the incarnation changes even nonbelievers:

“G.K. Chesterton observed that even those who don’t believe in the doctrine of the Incarnation are different for having heard it. There is something so counterintuitive about the claim that God became human that the minds of those who but entertain the notion change willy-nilly. If you have taken in the story of the baby who is God, you aren’t the same person you were before.”

On the blessing of same-sex couples

Robert Mickens commented in La Croix International about the Vatican document allowing blessing of same-sex couples:

“Given that even a number of prominent lay Catholics have also fiercely criticised Cardinal Fernandez (and the pope), often with hateful and homophobic overtones, same-sex couples who might have initially been inclined to seek a blessing from a priest will likely reconsider now.

“With the publication of Fiducia supplicans, an elderly Jesuit pope from Latin America has opened up a hornet’s nest of controversy which is buzzing most furiously among the Catholic clergy, especially in the upper echelons. He has lanced the boil of homophobia that is so evident within their ranks.”

God comes into us

During his Angelus address last Sunday, Pope Francis said:

“Baptism: it is God who comes into us, purifies, heals our heart, makes us forever his children, his people, his family, heirs to Paradise. And God becomes intimate to us and he does not leave us anymore. This is why it is important to remember the day of our baptism, and also to know the date. I ask all of you: you, each one of you, think: ‘Do I remember the date of my baptism?’. If you do not remember, when you go back home, ask what it is, so as not to forget it anymore, because it is a new birthday, because with your baptism you were born into the life of grace.”

(Compiled by Fr Joe Borg)