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On this episode, Deacon Steve Greco welcomes singer/ songwriter/ recording artist Donna Lee to our studios on the campus of Christ Cathedral. Donna really digs deep in this candid interview, showing a refreshing transparency that few are willing to share. It’s a journey of triumph over tragedy, and joy overcoming heartache..
Once you give this a listen, you will surely want to share this podcast with others!
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VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Exploiting women or treating them like objects is a sin against God, Pope Francis said.
“There is a rage against women, terrible rage,” the pope said in his homily June 15 during morning Mass at Domus Sanctae Marthae.
It will do people good — especially those who enjoy freedom — to reflect on how many women have become “slaves of this throwaway mentality,” he said.
The pope’s homily focused on the day’s Gospel reading in which Jesus tells his disciples that anyone “who looks at women with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” Jesus also admonishes those who divorce their wife, saying it “causes her to commit adultery and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.”
Jesus “changed history,” Pope Francis said, with the way he respected women and recognized they have equal dignity as men.
At the time, women were second-class citizens and slaves in that they did not enjoy full freedom, he said.
Jesus recognized the dignity of women and “put them at the same level as men” because he understood what God meant when he created male and female in his image.
“Both are in God’s image, both. Not man first and then woman a little bit below,” he said.
“A man without a woman nearby — be it a mother, a sister, a wife, a co-worker, a friend — that man is not in the image of God” without her.
So many women, instead, are exploited and put on sale “like in a market,” he said. Men “go up to them not to say, ‘Good evening,’ but ‘How much do you cost?'”
People try to clear their consciences by labeling these women as prostitutes, but they must remember that Jesus said those who reject women expose them to adultery.
“Women end up like this, exploited, enslaved, because you do not treat women well,” Pope Francis said.
Women are also used as objects in the media and advertising, displayed “like an object of desire” or to be used, he said.
A woman may be “humiliated, naked” in an ad for a certain product brand, he said, or they may be “objects of that disposable philosophy” at home, at work, in different businesses where it seems they are not even a person.
“This is a sin against God the creator — to reject women — because without them, we men cannot be in the image and likeness of God,” he said.
“We have to reflect better,” he said, and recognize how doing or saying certain things against women in essence shows contempt for the image of God.
VATICAN CITY (CNS) — If Catholic morality in the past seemed so obsessed with preventing sexual sin that it ignored sins of injustice, today “we have gone to the opposite extreme,” seemingly concerned only with how people treat others, not with how they treat the gift of their bodies, the papal preacher said.
“In the past, morality emphasized the sins of the flesh so unilaterally that it led to real neuroses at times, to the detriment of concern for the duties toward our neighbor and to the detriment of the virtue of purity itself,” Capuchin Father Raniero Cantalamessa told Pope Francis and members of the Roman Curia.
On the Fridays of Lent and Advent, Father Cantalamessa leads reflections for the pope and his aides in the Redemptoris Mater Chapel of the Apostolic Palace. For the final Lenten meditation of 2018, he spoke March 23 about the virtue of purity.
“Every day, people tend to contrast sins against purity with sins against a neighbor and to consider just the sin against a neighbor a real sin,” he said.
But the two go together, the Capuchin insisted. “Purity and love of neighbor represent dominion over self and the gift of self to others. How can I give myself if I do not possess myself but am a slave to my passions?
“It is an illusion to think that we can combine genuine service to brothers and sisters, which always calls for sacrifice, altruism, forgetting ourselves and generosity, with a life that is personally disordered, all aimed at pleasing oneself and satisfying one’s passions,” Father Cantalamessa said. “It inevitably ends in using brothers and sisters, just as one uses one’s body. Those who cannot say ‘no’ to themselves cannot say ‘yes’ to brothers and sisters.”
The virtue of purity involves self-control, including in eating, speaking, looking and in sexuality, he said. But the Christian motivation that makes it a virtue does not lie in strength alone, rather, as the First Letter to the Corinthians explains that “it is not permitted to sell oneself or to use oneself just for one’s own pleasure for the simple reason that we no longer belong to ourselves; we are not our own but Christ’s. We cannot decide how to use something that does not belong to us.”
But today, “we live in a society, in terms of morals, that has fallen back into full-blown paganism and full-blown idolatry of sex,” the 83-year-old preacher told the pope and Curia officials.
“The daily news of abuses and scandals in this field, including among members of the clergy and religious, are there to remind us of this bitter reality,” he said.
Father Cantalamessa said he was not calling for a return to “a purity based on fear, taboos, prohibitions and men and women avoiding each other as if the other is always necessarily a snare and a potential enemy rather than a help.”
The response, he said, is to “do something new” at the prompting of the Holy Spirit. “He is asking us to bear witness to the world to the original innocence of creatures and things.”
ROME (CNS) — While it is true that the world is full of sin and sinful behavior, priests must learn to scrutinize the “signs of the times” for new trends and attitudes that are good and healthy and holy, Pope Francis told pastors from the Diocese of Rome.
While there is “moral conduct that we aren’t used to seeing,” such as the normalization of living together before marriage, there also is a greater awareness of human rights, a push for tolerance and equality and appreciation for the values of peace and solidarity,” he said Feb. 15.
“We should not be frightened of the difficulties, but discern the signs of the times, the things that come from the Spirit” and then “help with the others,” he said, according to RomaSette, the diocesan newspaper.
As is customary on the day after Ash Wednesday, Pope Francis spent the morning with the pastors in the Basilica of St. John Lateran, the Rome cathedral. The session began with a penitential liturgy and with the pope spending almost an hour hearing confessions.
Afterward, he responded to some of their questions. The event was closed to the press, although the Vatican Media website and RomaSette provided some information later in the day.
The questions were submitted by groups of priests according to how long they had been ordained.
The younger priests asked how they could fully live their vocation. Pope Francis has three recommendations: first, learn to balance commitments; second, “find your own style”; and finally, spend time in private prayer and find a good spiritual director with whom to talk over what arises in prayer.
While forgiveness always is available, the pope said, a person needs to learn how to examine the things that lead to sin in their lives and, especially for that reason, a mature spiritual guide is necessary.
To priests who are 40 to 50 years old and have been ordained a bit longer, Pope Francis said theirs is a time when ideals tend to become weaker and when the weight of ministry and administrative duties start to be felt.
The approach of middle age is a time of “many temptations,” he said, but also the time of a “second calling from the Lord,” a call to greater realism about ministry and greater maturity.
“One cannot continue without this necessary transformation because if you keep going like this, without maturing, making a way for crisis,” the pope said, “it will end badly. You’ll end up living a double life or leaving everything.”
The older group of priests, those ordained more than 35 years ago, asked the pope about handling change, saying “we cannot always draw on our experience to respond to new questions” raised by society. They also asked the pope how he handled that mature phase of his ministry.
While the pope said he understood their unease with the fast-changing culture, he insisted that what people need most today are things they are more than able to provide: a smile, a listening ear and “offering pardon without condition in the sacrament of reconciliation.”
Elderly priests, he said, know the trials of life and the difficulties and pain that people experience. They don’t have to talk much, but they should listen a lot.
In his own life, when he faced big changes in his ministry, he told the priests, what helped most was to spend more time in prayer and adoration before the tabernacle.
VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Advent is a time to be watchful and alert to the ways one strays from God’s path, but also to signs of his presence in other people and in the beauty of the world, Pope Francis said.
Reciting the Angelus prayer Dec. 3, the first Sunday of Advent, Pope Francis told people gathered in St. Peter’s Square, “Being watchful and alert are the prerequisites for not continuing ‘to wander far from the Lord’s path,’ lost in our sins and infidelities; being watchful and alert are the conditions for allowing God to break into our existence, to give it meaning and value with his presence full of goodness and tenderness.”
Like the ancient Israelites who wandered in the desert, the pope said, “we, too, often find ourselves in a situation of infidelity to the Lord’s call; he indicates the right path, the path of faith, the path of love, but we look for happiness elsewhere.”
Advent gives people time to review the paths they have taken and to turn back to the ways of God, he said.
It is a time for paying attention to the needs of others, “trying to counter the indifference and cruelty” present in the world, the pope said. But it is also a time to “rejoice in the treasures of beauty that also exist and should be protected.”
“It is a matter of having an understanding gaze to recognize both the misery and poverty of individuals and societies, but also to recognize the riches hidden in the little things of daily life precisely where God has put them,” he said.
Pope Francis, who had returned to the Vatican late the night before after a six-day trip to Myanmar and Bangladesh, also used his midday address as an opportunity to thank everyone who had prayed for the trip’s success and everyone who had a hand in organizing it.
The pope said he carried with him “the memory of so many faces tried by life, but still noble and smiling. I carry them in my heart and in my prayers.”
Vatican City, Mar 15, 2017 / 03:41 pm (CNA/EWTN News) – Business is obliged to protect peoples’ dignity – and those who lay off employees solely for economic gain commit a serious sin, Pope Francis told employees of a TV platform in Italy.
“He who shuts factories and closes companies as a result of economic operations and unclear negotiations, depriving men and women from work, commits a very grave sin,” the Pope said in reference to Sky Italy’s recent cutbacks.
Sky Italy is a platform for digital satellite television. Partly owned by 21st Century Fox, they are also a major broadcaster for sports. Sky has recently announced plans to downsize and move 300 employees to Milan from Rome.
The Pope emphasized the dignity work gives to men and women and lamented employers who do not keep their responsibility to access to this dignity.
“Work gives dignity, and managers are obliged to do all possible so that every man and woman can work and so carry their heads high and look others in the eye with dignity.”
Pope Francis has spoken on the accountability of a business to its workers before. Addressing the Italian Christian Union of Business Executives in 2015, he encouraged the estimated 7,000 gathered at the Vatican to look at ethics as a necessity for economics and business.
“You are called to cooperate in order to grow an entrepreneurial spirit of subsidiarity, to deal with the ethical challenges of the market and, above all the challenge of creating good employment opportunities.”
The Pope ended his speech with hope for a quick resolution that “takes into account the respect for the rights of all, especially for families.”
Madrid, Spain, Aug 25, 2015 / 03:17 am (CNA) – Is an exorcist afraid? What is the devil’s favorite sin? These and other questions were tackled in a recent interview with the Dominican priest, Father Juan José Gallego, an exorcist from the Archdiocese of Barcelona in Catalonia, Spain.
It has been nine years since Fr. Gallego was appointed as exorcist. In an interview conducted by the Spanish daily El Mundo, the priest said that in his experience, pride is the sin the devil likes the most.
“Have you ever been afraid?” the interviewer asked.
“In the beginning I had a lot of fear,” Fr. Gallego replied. “All I had to do was look over my shoulder and I saw demons… the other day I was doing an exorcism, ‘I command you! I order you!’…and the Evil One, with a loud voice fires back at me: ‘Galleeeego, you’re over-doooing it.’ That shook me.”
Nevertheless, he knows that the devil is not more powerful than God. The exorcist recalled that “when they appointed me, a relative told me, ‘Whoa, Juan José, I’m really afraid, because in the movie ‘The Exorcist,’ one person died and the other threw himself through a window. I said to her ‘Don’t forget that the devil is (just a) creature of God.’”
When people are possessed, he added, “they lose consciousness, they speak strange languages, they have inordinate strength, they feel really bad, you see very well-mannered people vomiting and blaspheming.”
“There was a boy whom the demon would set his shirt on fire at night and things like that. He told me what the demons were proposing him to do: If you make a pact with us, you’ll never have to go through any more of what you’re going through now.”
Father Gallego also warned that “New Age” practices like reiki and some yoga can be points of entry for the demons. He also said that addictions are “a type of possession.”
“When people are going through a crisis they suffer more. They can feel hopeless, People feel like they’ve got the devil inside,” he said.
