Day: July 25, 2019

On
Kevin Wondrash, Catholic Herald Staff

Totus Tuus teaches and shares truths

totus tuus
Totus Tuus team member and Diocese of Madison seminarian Ryan Ruhle, center, leads a class during a recent session at Immaculate Conception Parish in Kieler. (Catholic Herald photo/Kevin Wondrash)

KIELER — The week ended with a water fight.

A week at Totus Tuus typically ends with a water fight, and if you talk to many of the program’s young participants, such as nine-year-old Kara Weber-Droessler, you’d hear, “I really look forward to Fridays because we get to do a giant water fight if we get three 10s.”

The “three 10s” are rewards for good behavior and learning well during the week.

Her friend, nine-year-old Kaylin Crippes, also shared that “I like how we get to do Water Day,” remarking how she’d love to get a bucket of cold water dumped on her as part of the end-of-the-week festivities.

Totus Tuus participants loving the water fight is a truth.

Kids at Totus Tuus also learn other deeper truths, such as the presence of Christ in the Eucharist at Mass, the graces that come from the sacraments, and the importance of prayer as part of daily life.

Program for youth

For the sixth summer in a row, the Diocese of Madison is presenting the summer Catholic youth program dedicated to sharing the Gospel and promoting the Catholic faith through evangelization, catechesis, Christian witness, and Eucharistic worship.

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On
Julie Allington, For the Catholic Herald

Rosary Rallies held at Christ the King Parish, McFarland

MCFARLAND — Many in this country view right as wrong and wrong as right and consider God, religion, and the Bible as obsolete, or worse, hateful.

How should Christians respond when our beliefs and religious freedom are under attack? We must first recognize that we are in a spiritual battle for the salvation of our souls and souls of our loved ones. Next, we need to determine the most effective weapons and strategies for this spiritual warfare.

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On
Rachel Dietzman and Amy Lachuk

Persons with Disabilities need Community and Connections

For adults with disabilities, becoming socially isolated is a major concern. To address this issue within Rock County, Catholic Charities of Madison operates two programs out of the Community Connections facility that give adults experiencing intellectual and physical disabilities opportunities to connect socially.

The purpose of these programs is for adults with disabilities to experience community integration activities, learn social skills, and develop friendships. In all, these two programs offer increased activity, which has a positive impact on clients’ physical and emotional health, as well as their ability to care for themselves.

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On
Bishop Robert Barron

St. Paul’s master class in evangelization

The account of St. Paul’s address on the Areopagus in Athens, found in the 17th chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, is a sort of master class in the evangelization of the culture, and anyone engaged today in that essential task should read it with care.

The context for Paul’s speech is his mission to Greece, which commenced when he crossed over from Asia Minor to the mainland of Europe. As the great Catholic historian Christopher Dawson indicated, this transition of an itinerant Jewish preacher from one side of the Aegean to the other would have excited the interest of no conventional historian or commentator of the time, but constituted, nevertheless, one of the most decisive events in history.

It signaled the introduction of Christianity to Europe and, through Europe, to the rest of the world. A first lesson for us: the evangelist never rests, for the call of the Lord is to announce the Good News to the ends of earth.

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On
Fr. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, Ph.D.

Concerns about harvesting body parts

Most people recognize the importance of obtaining consent before retrieving organs from the bodies of deceased persons. They also understand the necessity of showing respect for those bodily remains following death.

Selling body parts

Recent news stories have chronicled the troubling story of a funeral home in Colorado clandestinely taking body parts out of corpses and selling them to medical supply companies.

One family was horrified to learn that their mother’s head, arms, pelvis, and parts of her legs had been harvested without their knowledge or consent. They and others are now suing the company.

The funeral home had been selling body parts to places as far away as Saudi Arabia, and returning containers of ashes to the families that did not contain any actual trace of their loved ones.

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On
Elizabeth Durack

Speak up for public morality; teach virtues

To the editor:

We have in my neighborhood in Madison annually a kind of reenactment of the tornado of human bodies witnessed by Dante in the Inferno’s scene about sins against chastity: a nude swarm swirling around busy downtown on bicycles, eliciting a wave of stares, grins, whoops, glee, and photo taking by bystanders, as perhaps the demons enjoy seeing tormented souls, and certainly a vignette of post-sexual-revolution social sin.

Madison’s “World Naked Bike Ride” either opposes fossil fuels or celebrates the immunity of moral chaos to correction by authority. Not everyone experiences it as altogether benign: a local woman who had been sexually assaulted in early life recently told a journalist that “seeing dozens, often hundreds of naked bodies unexpectedly is a trigger for her.”

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On
Mary C. Uhler, Catholic Herald Staff

Continue to explore space

When I was in sixth grade, I remember writing a paper about why space exploration was important. I felt that it was essential to explore outer space, since it is part of God’s creation.

That’s why on July 20, 1969, while I was in college, my friend Ginny and I were glued to the television to watch Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong step onto the surface of the moon. He famously said, “That’s one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind.”

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