The CatholiCity Message

Volume XV, Number 5 – May 31, 2011

Dear CatholiCity Citizen,

Short and sweet this month...

THE WD-40 OF SAINTS
We do not remember when we first dubbed Saint Anthony "the WD-40" of saints, but the gist was that his intercession does not end at helping find lost items. The Miracle Worker of Padua is truly an effective friend for anything you need. We will ask for his help together at the end of this message. If you want to make a nine-day novena to him, his feast day is on Monday, June 13, so you should start on Sunday, June 5.

WHAT IS HEAVEN LIKE?
For some, it is a beautiful sunset or mountain landscape. For others, the face of a baby. For your writer, along with these other things, a foreshadowing of what heaven will be like is a spoonful of maple syrup on the tongue. Seriously, where did this taste come from?

OLD TIME PHRASE
The phrase is "near occasion of sin." Such is the local bar for an alcoholic. In the diocese where the Mary Foundation is located, our bishop often hears confessions at the downtown cathedral. During a most recent confession, as the penitent reminded himself that the Holy Spirit speaks through the priest, our bishop emphasized that Jesus will help us avoid sin, but that we are obliged to do our part, which is to use our free will to avoid the near occasions of sin. All our readers know their particular "local bars." Let us review them. From Jesus, through His bishop, into our hearts.

NEW FREE TOOL FOR EVANGELIZATION
Within a matter of weeks, our parent organization, the Mary Foundation, will release its first new tool for evangelization since the free Catholic novel—free Catholic booklets. Booklets might seem low-tech, but the challenge of manufacturing high quality booklets for low-cost and delivering them to your door is decidedly high-tech. The content of our first booklet will in no possible way, we assure you, be like the expensive, wishy-washy pabulum found in the racks of most churches nowadays. Our first free booklet, if you bring them to others, along with God's grace, has the definite potential, in five or ten minutes, to changes lives and destinies. We will have more details soon.

JOKE OF THE MONTH
A young man, who did not get married, dies and goes to heaven. When he gets there, he sees two lines filled exclusively with men. The line of his left is a half-mile long and packed three wide, with a sign in front saying: All Wimps and Hen-Pecked Husbands Register Here. To his right, on the other line, is one man standing alone under a sign that says: All Others Register Here. So the new guy walks up to the lone man in that line and asks, "Why are you standing in this line?" And the man replied, "Listen, buddy, my wife told me to stand here and I AM NOT MOVING!"

WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME...
...you visited Father John McCloskey's page in CatholiCity? He has dozens of great articles, including some new ones in recent months. It is the kind of stuff that you read, and then, you are not the same. If you have not read "Winning New Converts" or "Recovering Stray Catholics," you are really missing important stuff. If even 1% of the folks reading this CatholiCity Message took these two articles to heart, a year from now there would be many new souls in the Catholic Church. Here is the link:

http://www.catholicity.com/mccloskey/

TEN THOUSAND HOURS
In his fascinating book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell makes a case that virtually all highly successful people spend at least 10,000 hours practicing their skills. This rule seems to apply universally to concert musicians and professional athletes. As a modestly or pathetically accomplished novelist, even your writer knows that he started logging in those ten thousand hours beginning in late grammar school, almost four decades ago. So do not give up on any of your children being proficient at Math. Help them to put in the hours. We should all ask ourselves, how many hours have we put into prayer?

TENS OF THOUSANDS PRAYING
Along with your fellow CatholiCity Citizens all over the globe, let us pray in
the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit...

Dear Saint Anthony,
We invite you to join our families as a loving uncle. In every possible way, in all things and in every thing, beyond our wildest dreams, please intercede in our lives in whatever way Jesus sees fitting or desires, providing supernatural miracles where needed, to help us solve personal problems, relationship problems, problems of sickness in the soul, finding lost or dormant faith, financial problems, and spiritual healing, especially for (STATE INTENTION). We know from the testament of others that you simply cannot turn away when we ask for your help. So please, help us, Uncle Anthony. And if you could, when Jesus does respond to your advocacy, send us a small sign to let us know it was you, all the better to inspire us to bring others into our extended family of love. Amen.

QUOTES

"We do the works, but God works in us the doing of the works."
Saint Augustine

"As the esteem of good men cannot be taken away by false accusations, so it cannot be won by the attention of flattery."
Saint Bernard

"No one is excluded from the Kingdom of Heaven except through human fault."
Saint Thomas Aquinas

"The devil invented gambling."
Saint Augustine, City of God

"If you want to be like a child, then the child to be like is Jesus, and Jesus loved and obeyed Saint Joseph, and so should you."
Joseph Wood

Thanks for being such a faithful part of our work. CatholiCity Citizens are the best!

With Immaculate Mary,

Your Friends at CatholiCity