Carla Mae's Blog

  After challenging us to engender an ‘open world’ in chapter three of Fratelli tutti , Pope Francis now proposes that we have “A Heart Open to the Whole World.” (#128-153) This brings before us the whole issue of migrants and refugees. Francis is not pollyanna about this crisis. To “welcome, protect, promote and integrate” these struggling people he knows that individual governments can’t do this alone. He comes right out and writes what many are thinking: we need to “develop a form of global governance” to address this issue as well as several other pressing issues such as war and weapons of mass destruction. The US learned this long ago. The Revolutionary War had just ended. The 13 colonies were governed by The Articles of Confederation, and were suffering from huge debt from the war. Alexander Hamilton went to President Washington and told him the Articles were just not working, that the colonies needed to federate. Washington replied that the colonies would never agree...

  We have celebrated them all…all the great feasts: Easter, Ascension, Pentecost, Trinity…and now comes the capstone: Corpus Christi, or in English, The Body and Blood of Christ. It is the capstone, even though it is the final step – down. How so? Take a wide view. We have a God who is driven by love to send its own deepest Word, its identity, into the human world to fix something that is broken. A relationship is broken. So, in the virgin’s womb he mends it. The Word creates a union between divinity and humanity that can never be broken again. Then he shows us what he intends to do with that hangover we call death…his and ours. After he brings us to life, he takes our very humanness home to the very throne of God and sends us his own Spirit to remind us what wonders he has done, to fill us with joy. But bending way down to become one of us was not enough for this love. He cannot bear to leave us to struggle alone to respond to the Spirit. He found a way to take one more s...