“When we were lost, and could not find our way to you, you loved us more than ever.”
 
You didn’t give up in disgust with us and our evil ways.
You didn’t turn your back on us and let us die eternally in our sins.
Instead, you loved us more than ever and came running to rescue us.
 
Thank you, almighty Savior!

 
On CatholicExchange.com today, there is an inspiring article about Pierre Toussaint, a black slave who became a free man and who lived an extraordinary life of virtue in Christ. Even as a slave, once his master died, he continued to work to provide for his master’s wife and family! He also bought his future wife’s freedom and his sister’s before obtaining his own–a truly courageous and selfless man of God.
 
On a different, discordant note, I read with disappointment an article on catholic.org today with this headline:
“Canadian religious criticize church on sexual rigidity, gays, women, clericalism” that said “representatives of more than 200 Canadian religious orders” have criticized their bishops ultimately for following the Church teachings.
 
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Since I have not been going to blogs for a while as a perpetual fast, my work lunch half-hour is often spent looking at catholic.org, which is a portal site that aggregates articles and stories from both secular sources as well as Catholic sources of different stripes.
 
These Catholic sources include what I deem both orthodox and heterodox journals and newspapers. For example, they link to articles from “Commonweal” and “The National Catholic Reporter” (not to be confused with the orthodox Register). I usually don’t read articles from these sources that I know propound heterodox beliefs, but sometimes I do just to see what they say.
 
After reading one from the editor of Commonweal today, I poked around their site to figure out who they are. Here was the excerpt from their About us page that was most enlightening to me: “[Commonweal] has taken well-reasoned positions against…the centralization of church power during the papacy of John Paul II…”.
 
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Pope John Paul II, in the “Theology of the Body”, writes that the body expresses the person, that our bodies, while struggling with disordered passions, still reflect our persons in some way. It seems that, intrinsically, we as humans know this. For example, last Friday, I noticed that one of my students had a pink and puckered new scar on his hand, circular and about the size of a cigarette lighter; I asked him with concern what had happened, and he looked somewhat sheepish.
 
Was the scar from a burn, I asked.
 
Yes.
 
Was it self-inflicted?
 
Yes.
 
Oh, dear Jesus, this poor young man chose to make known his inner anguish by marking it into his very flesh. Here was an emerging man, created by God to image Christ and His love for the Church. Here was a young man who would only find fulfillment through his self-gift. Yet, he lacks adequate personal formation and has turned that self-giving energy in upon himself, in despair and undirected energy.
 
Blessed be God that I can pray for that student and consecrate him to Our Lady and St. Joseph. Perhaps no one before has every prayed for him. Maybe he’s not baptized…well, not yet, anyway–Our Lady can work miracles with the power of Her Son. So, praise God, he’s officially consecrated now to Our Lady, and I’m glad that I can pray for him. Saint Joseph, please father him and draw him to become the man Our Lord wants him to be!

 
Hi, dear readers! This is officially my maiden voyage on the Vanguard, and I’m so honored to share this blog with Devin and the G. I’ll guess that most of my posts on the blog will reflect a few choice themes, namely Pope John Paul II’s theology of the body, Catholic feminism and the dignity of women, my adventures in teaching 10th grade Language Arts, and the virtues of my wonderfully masculine boyfriend, Devin.
 
I’m so delighted to meet you! YKC!

 
More wisdom from John Paul II in Love and Responsibility (L&R) in the chapter on chastity:
 

I need only recall in passing the various objections of an allegedly hygienic and medical nature made against chastity and sexual self control. The argument that “exaggerated chastity” (it is difficult to determine what this means) is harmful to health–”a young man must have sexual relief”–is always in fashion.

 
I remember as an atheist hearing this mantra on the radio call-in shows of supposed “love gurus”. Our Holy Father summarily disposes of these lies without even breaking a sweat:
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Of course! Why didn’t I realize this fact before, since his birth name is Joseph Ratzinger.
 
I realized this cool truth when I read our Holy Father’s address to seminarians in Rome on zenit.org where he especially recommends devotion to St. Joseph for each seminarian!
 
What graces has St. Joseph obtained for Pope Benedict during his entire life and now more than ever as our Lord bestowed upon him the majestic honor of being his Vicar on earth, the servant of the servants of God.
 
Welcome to the Catholic Church!

 
With a new author named Katie. I won’t say more until she makes her first post and introduces herself in her own words, but I wanted to give some advance notice and officially roll out the red carpet for this most lovely young woman.
 
I also added her picture on the right side of the page with her beloved nephew!

 
It’ll have to wait for Heaven for us to get to know each other well, but for now I enjoy Danielle Bean’s blog, in particular this post on her Ash Wednesday experience with her 7 children at Mass.
 
Excerpt from some of the highlights:

One way-too-old-for-this child who managed to have a major potty accident somewhere between our pew and the bathroom at the back of the church.
One child who chugged a bottle of milk (think Mean Joe Green in the famous Coke commercial) and then kept it down just long enough for it to curdle and develop a rather unpleasant odor before regurgitating the entire thing on his shirt, my lap, his sister, and the floor.

 
Because of Danielle Bean’s ebullient writing style and irrepressible humor, even such catastrophically gross descriptions of her family life make me smile and long for a family of my own.

 
Father Pavone of Priests for Life has an interesting and sad article on CatholicExchange.com today about many abortion doctors’ pitiful state.

 
I posted a week or so back on Siberia and my coworker who hails from there. He gave me a picture of his home country that is really beautiful:
 

 
More evidence that Siberia isn’t all ice and freezing cold temperatures!

 
Here was my second breakfast this morning:
 

 
I needed to cook the egg and also heat up the leftover pizza and the pre-cooked milanesa, so I used the big skillet to kill all three birds with one stone! After dousing with tomatillo sauce, the meal was complete.

 
I love reading about anything that Cardinal Francis Arinze says. He is the prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and a Nigerian.
 
In the latest edition of the National Catholic Register, he is interviewed about his thoughts on liturgical abuses. One of the questions put to him is:
“What can be done to help cradle Catholics better understand and appreciate the sacraments and the beauty of the Catholic faith?”
 
Cardinal Arinze: “To begin with, information. We must not presume that people know their whole faith. In religious matters, many people don’t know much and unfortunately, they don’t know that they don’t know. So it is to them that our faith can be put into words, articulated….Buy the Catechism of the Catholic Church….Those Catholics who do not have the Catechism of the Catholic Church for their families should sell their overcat and buy one within a week.” (emphasis mine)
 
Yes! I have often presumed erroneously that my fellow Catholics know their faith–here I am not talking primarily about Joe Catholic who goes to my parish but whom I don’t know but rather my friend John Catholic who I see often and hang out with sometimes. This point is critical to another forthcoming blog post that I plan to write after I discuss it with close and trusted loved ones.
 
We who have been given good instruction in our faith and studied it deeply on our own have a duty from Christ to share this gift with our fellow Catholics and fellow man.

 
This is a public service announcement brought to you by the “Learn-it-the-hard-way” department of St. Joseph’s Vanguard.
 
If you buy a house and put less than 20% down on it, do not, I repeat, do not get Private Mortgage Insurance (PMI) on your loan.
 
Instead, find a lender who will give you a second lien. For example, if I bought a house and put 5% down, then most likely I would get the first lien paying 80%, then the second lien paying 15%, which when combined with my 5% would pay for the house.
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I’ve been listening to Relevant radio during the days I don’t listen to music, and Father Corapi has a program that comes on each day which I sometimes catch.
 
This is probably really old news to many of you, but it was new to me! Father Corapi gave an accurate and easy-to-remember defense of why Protestants shouldn’t be offended when Catholics say that the Virgin Mary is their mother:
 
“If she’s good enough for Jesus, she’s good enough for you!”

 
He’s this good.
 
I don’t watch TV much, so I had not seen this video nor heard this boy’s story, but it is worth your while. I tried to imagine our Lord’s joy as this autistic boy nailed three-pointer after three-pointer. Just making one shot would have been a tremendous blessing, but Jesus wanted to pour out so much love to this child and his family and friends that he made many more.

 
Robert sent me a picture of himself and his girlfriend Andrea before they went to a wedding recently:
 

 
And I never tire of looking at pictures of my lovely girlfriend Katie:
 

 
(Roxy, I would love to post a picture of you and Gerardo, but I want to get his permission before doing so. Maybe you could convince him? :))
 
What honor and graces have been given to Robert and me and Gerardo in being chosen by our Father to lead his daughters in courtship! I know how easily I begin to take this blessing and even life in general for granted (more on that in another blog post forthcoming) and the amazing call of Christ in it.
 
May our Lord strengthen us this Lent in faith and total trust in Him, so that we will lead our girlfriends to holiness!

 
From Karol Wojtyla (our beloved Holy Father of happy memory) in “Love and Responsibility” (L&R):
 
“Willed love expresses itself above all in the desire of what is good for the beloved person….[The will] is free, or in other words capable of desiring everything relating to the unqualified good, the unlimited good, that is happiness. And it commits this capacity, its natural and noble potentiality, to the other person concerned….The sexual instinct wants above all to take over, to make use of another person, whereas love wants to give, to create a good, to bring happiness. We see yet again how important it is for betrothed love to be permeated with that which constitutes the essence of friendship. From the desire for the ‘unlimited’ good of another ‘I’ springs the whole creative drive of true love–the drive to endow beloved persons with the good, to make them happy….to desire ‘unlimited’ good for another person is really to desire God for that person.”
 
I really wish I could just transcribe the entire chapter and have you read it, for every sentence is like the ones I reproduced here, full of powerful insight and beautiful truth.
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Lent has snuck up on me this year.
 
I returned from my visit to see Katie in New Mexico, spent a busy and tired day catching up at work and with personal matters, and then woke up for 6:30 am Ash Wednesday Mass.
 
How perfect is our Lord in the way He has created the liturgical seasons, knowing that we need them to draw closer to Him. Lent could not have come at a better time for me as I can see that I really need a long period of prayerful silence, penance, self-examination, and renewed humility and openness to our Lord.
 
I pray your Lenten season has begun well with Christ, and that He will lead you out into the desert to instruct you in His way of love. I am going to begin blogging off and on about “Love and Responsibility”, a book by Pope John Paul II that he wrote before becoming the pope and which has been enlightening me more deeply in matters of sexuality, love, and marriage.
 
It is really cool, and I look forward to sharing some of the insights that our Lord has given me through the book and in discussing it with my girlfriend Katie, who read it a few years ago.