Now Available! Built to Last: A Retreat Guide on St. Peter and the Papacy Weekly Message – June 23, 2015

Dear Fellow Digital Missionary, pax Christi:

The Pope is coming town! That is, if you live in Philadelphia, PA. I know the World Meeting of Families won’t take place until late September, but since many of our Retreat Guide users and Ask a Priest askers reside in the USA, I wanted to encourage them all to begin to pray for the Pope’s visit, and to prepare their own hearts and minds. Our latest Retreat Guide Built to Last: A Retreat Guide on St. Peter and the Papacy in time to celebrate the Feast of St’s Peter and Paul this coming June 29th, is a perfect way to do this.

The papacy is so much more than how the news reports (even when they are positive) tend to portray it. The papacy is a divine institution, given to the world and the Church for a specific purpose. Built to Last, will give you some excellent points of reflection about that. If we, as individuals and communities, are going to reap the benefits of the papacy, we need to keep on trying to see it from God’s perspective. We need to reflect deeply on its real role in the building of Christ’s Kingdom. We need to distinguish between its essential identity and functions, and those that are non-essential. I am confident Built to Last will help you do that.

Soon after I converted from evangelical Christianity to the Catholic Church, I was trying to convince one of my best friends to do the same. He told me he would never become Catholic, because he could never permit himself to kiss the pope’s hand – he felt that it was a kind of idolatry to treat a mere man as somehow divine. I pointed out that we don’t kiss the pope’s hand, but we kiss his ring. That’s a big difference. The fisherman’s ring symbolizes the papal office, as it was created and envisioned by Christ, and as it has been sustained throughout 20 centuries by the Holy Spirit. Let’s take some time this summer to reflect on that amazing truth.  

Thanks once again to all of you who are supporting RC Spirituality’s digital evangelization efforts with your prayers and donations. We couldn’t do any of this without you. Count on my prayers.

Yours in Him, Fr. John Bartunek, LC