How Daily Mass Benefitted My Day to Day Life

Prayer is at the heart of any relationship with God, but to many people, including myself, maintaining a healthy prayer life is a constant struggle. Our daily schedules become so filled with our careers, family, and other activities that it seems we barely have time to breathe. But this is really when we need prayer the most. As I write this I am reminded of a quote from St. Francis de Sales, “Every one of us needs a half hour of prayer a day, except when we are busy, and then we need an hour.” In other words, as life becomes increasingly more complicated and hectic, that’s when our relationship with God becomes ever more critical.

In my personal experience, attendance at daily mass as helped me greatly in this area. I am fortunate in that there are a few churches near my job that offer daily mass at times that are easy to attend before I have to report to the office. I also realize that not everyone reading this may be in a similar situation and finding a daily mass may be much more difficult. I strongly encourage everyone to give it serious consideration. Start off slowly by attending a daily mass once or twice a week and you can eventually grow from there.  The benefits and graces from faithfully attending a weekday mass even once or twice weekly are powerful.

Putting Masculinity back in Church

I recently came across these three articles by Doug Giles about the lack of men in churches and its affect on society.

Christianity with Cojones, Part 1
Christianity with Cojones, Part 2: Rebels With A Cause
Christianity with Cojones, Part 3

I have to admit that I liked the author's choice of words for the titles. But more importantly are the very strong arguments that the author makes for the need to bring men and real masculinity back into our churches. I have highlighted below some of the main points from each article:

The current lack of strong men within the Church, both in the numeric and leadership sense, has crippled our churches and has helped devastate our nation. 

The masculine spirit being absent from the pulpit, the pew and subsequently the public square has not only slowed down the forward progress of the Church, it has also weakened our nation’s morality and security, increased our country’s secularity, and has assisted [owing to our absence] the lascivious Left’s re-definition of life, sex, marriage and law.  That’s all.

Get it right, folks: It wasn’t the church’s belief that Jesus is God, or their love of covered dish dinners, or their Christian rock music that got them the ax; it was their holy defiance to the demonic edicts that Caesar attempted to slap them with. Rome didn’t give a rat’s backside whom or what they believed in just as long as that belief didn’t rock the boat of the Roman state. And that’s exactly what first-century Christianity did: It adhered to God’s laws versus Rome’s. The Church believed that Christ was Lord and therefore, respectfully of course, Caesar could kiss their fish sticker. Indeed, following the teachings of Jesus, the initial Ichthus crowd was rowdy when it came to an oppressive state.