Fr. Dwight Longenecker writes "Laughing at Lucifer in Lent"

In 1942 C.S. Lewis published one of his most enduring and endearing books. The Screwtape Letters is a collection of imaginative epistles from a senior devil to his junior colleague, outlining how he should handle his “patient.” Lewis wrote the book as a series of essays for The Guardian newspaper and confessed that the pieces were not fun to write.

Over the years Lewis’ Luciferian letters have become ever more popular. In 2003 the Fellowship for the Performing Arts created a stage adaptation of Screwtape. It ran for 11 weeks in New York City and is now on a national tour. Walden Media, which produced The Chronicles of Narnia films, has promised a film version, and various famous actors have recorded audio versions of the book — the most recent being Andy Serkis, who plays Gollum in The Lord of the Rings movies. (This audiobook is sold by the Register’s sister company, Circle Press, at CirclePress.org.)

Lewis’ classic has also spawned a subgenre of books. Peter Kreeft wrote The Snakebite Letters. Randy Alcorn has written two books, Lord Foulgrin’s Letters and The Ishbane Conspiracy. Screwtape has been featured in a Bono music video and the cartoon strip “Calvin and Hobbes,” and there has even been a Mormon book written in the same style.

Lewis didn’t apologize for the fact that Screwtape Letters is an entertaining and amusing read. Indeed, in the opening pages, he quotes Martin Luther and St. Thomas More on the need to take Lucifer lightly. Luther wrote, “The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn.”

For his part, St. Thomas More said: “The devil … that proud spirit … cannot endure to be mocked.”

Love me. Love me. I'm not what you expected, but oh, please love me.

I think birth stories are especially touching... specifically this one right here. Happy Catholic posted it first. It's long, but I promise it's worth it.

Little Arms

May my prayer be set before you like incense; may the lifting up of my hands be like the evening sacrifice. ~Psalm 141:2

I always have loved those soft, warm pretzels but I never knew the story behind it until now. I have been enlightened and I just have to say that I always appreciate hearing the story about something I eat or have eaten -where it all started.

Fr. William Saunders wrote in the Catholic Education Resource Center:

According to pretzel maker Snyder’s of Hanover, a young monk in the early 600s in Italy was preparing a special Lenten bread of water, flour and salt. To remind his brother monks that Lent was a time of prayer, he rolled the bread dough in strips and then shaped each strip in the form of crossed arms, mimicking the then popular prayer position of folding one’s arms over each other on the chest. The bread was then baked as a soft bread, just like the big soft pretzels one can find today. (To be fair, some traditions date the story to even the 300s.)

Because these breads were shaped into the form of crossed arms, they were called bracellae, the Latin word for "little arms." From this word, the Germans derived the word bretzel which has since mutated to the familiar word pretzel.

Another possibility for the origins of the word pretzel is that the young monk gave these breads to children as a reward when they could recite their prayers. The Latin word pretiola means "little reward," from which pretzel could also be reasonably derived.

So there you have it. I never knew the special meaning behind the pretzel or should I say “Little Arms”. I may just have to bake some this Lent for my family and I won’t forget to share the story either!

Here’s a recipe for “Little Arms”

Ingredients:

1 package of dry yeast

1 ½ cups warm water

1 Tablespoon of sugar

4 cups flour

1 beaten egg

Coarse salt

Dissolve the yeast in water. Then add the sugar and salt. Blend in the flour and turn the dough onto a lightly floured board. Knead until smooth. Cut off slices of the dough and roll them into ropes. Twist the ropes into pretzel shapes and arrange them on a cookie sheet lined with greased brown paper. Brush the pretzels with the egg and sprinkle coarse salt on them. Bake at 425* oven for 12-15 minutes or until golden brown. Enjoy!

Take Five - Meditations with Pope Benedict XVI

This little treasure of a book goes well with a cup of hot tea. You can pick it up and thumb through it and just about any one meditation you land on will inspire you. For me, the “Think about its” at the end of each meditation really was thought inspiring. Sometimes they were gentle reminders of who I want to become, sometimes they were “Aha!” moments. But overall, I learned a lot more about love and how to love the way God wants us to love. Segments of Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclicals and some of the books he has written are what make up the meditations and the questions you ask your self at the end really help to drive the point home and give you a helping hand in understanding the meditation and apply it to your own life. It really is a little treasure. You should check it out!

This review was written as part of the Catholic book Reviewer program from The Catholic Company. Visit The Catholic Company to find more information on Take Five - Meditations with Pope Benedict XVI.

Where We Got the Bible

Did Martin Luther save the bible from the Roman Catholic Church? Was John Wycliff the first to translate the Bible into the English language in 1382 so the regular-Joe could read the Bible too?

Many people answer yes to these questions. The same people also commonly accuse the Catholic Church of things like “hiding the Bible from the people.” And not letting the laity read the Bible for themselves in fear that the people would learn how wickedly warped and un-biblical the teachings of the Catholic Church truly were. So, naturally, for these reasons the Catholic Church kept Bibles locked up, hard to find and in languages nobody could understand.

This absolutely ridiculous, academically inept, historically false and blatantly ignorant point of view oozes with irony. Here are just a few reasons why:

1) Throughout much of Church history, if you could read, you could read Latin. The Church translated the Bible into Latin in the first few centuries of its inception so that all who could read would be able to do so.

2) The Church distributed the Bible in every country it was in and in the common language of the people from the 7th down to the 14th century and beyond.

3) There were “626 editions of the Bible, of which 198 were in the language of the laity…before the first Protestant version of the scriptures was sent forth into the world.” (Where We Got The Bible)

4) There were 27 versions of the Bible in the German language before Martin Luther’s version came out.

5) It was almost solely in those countries which have remained most Catholic that popular versions of the Bible had been published; while it was precisely Protestant countries (like England, Scotland, Sweden, Denmark and Norway) that no bible existed when they embraced Protestantism (Dublin Review - Oct 1837). So there is no evidence that access to a Bible in the vernacular caused people to become more protestant. If anything, it made them become more Catholic. It was the spread of such “traditions of men” as private Judgment and Sola Scriptura which caused the spread of Protestantism and further division within the Body of Christ.

The reasons many people still didn’t have access to a Bible was not because of the Catholic Church (The Catholic Church supported access to it). One of the main reasons was the high cost and labor to produce and/or obtain one. That changed drastically with the printing press, of course.

So why then did the Catholic Church reject and forbid the use of protestant “bibles” such as the one published by John Wycliff? It was not because they were in English or another vernacular. It was not because they were being made available to the laity. It was because they were corrupt versions of the Bible. They were bad translations. And were often being used to spread false doctrine. It’s that simple.

If the Catholic Church had wanted to destroy or alter the Bible, it could have done so at just about any time in its long history. The Catholic Church is the reason we even have the Bible today. It is the institution that protected and preserved it. It would have been easy for those in the Church to destroy original documents and come up with something else if they didn’t like what the Bible taught. But they didn’t do that because of their love for Scripture and genuine desire to share it with the entire world.

If you can read, thank a teacher. If you can read a Bible, thank the Catholic Church.

From the National Catholic Register

Unintended Consequences

No good deed goes unpunished.

How many of us have used that phrase at one time or another? Sometimes it means that we secretly wanted more gratitude than we got in return for our trouble. Sometimes it’s a preemptive excuse for not going to the trouble in the first place. In general, it is a lousy phrase, and I hate it when I hear myself using it.

Nevertheless, I have learned that there are genuine risks to trying to help others, and it is best to stop and anticipate those risks before leaping into situations we may not fully understand. Otherwise, the results can be the very opposite of what we intended to achieve.

I think of Jack Henry Abbott, the self-educated career criminal whose book on life behind bars, In the Belly of the Beast, came to the attention of the writer Norman Mailer in 1981. Impressed with Abbott’s talent, Mailer involved a number of other literary figures in a successful effort to get Abbott paroled, and for a brief while Abbott became a sort of poster child for redemption through literature — until, just a few months out of prison and living in a halfway house on New York’s Lower East Side, Abbott stabbed and killed an unarmed stranger over a trivial misunderstanding outside a restaurant. Ironically, the young man he killed, Richard Adan, was also a writer, an aspiring actor and playwright in his twenties who had just gotten married. (Continued here...)

Reconciliation & Prayer

Well, it's been a few weeks since I posted anything here, I wasn't having a whole lot of grand ideas to put down between the piles of laundry, doctor visits and taking my oldest to school. Nothing has really moved me lately.

I went to Reconciliation this past weekend and laughed all the way through -except the parts where I was sorry of course -so it wasn't exactly ALL the way through! I went there because I had a few things to confess, but mostly because I was feeling spiritually sluggish. Truth be told, I wasn't praying like I was before. It was almost like the only thing I said to God was, this is really crappy. I feel crappy and my prayers are crappy. Please, I don't want to feel crappy anymore. Amen.

Father said of all the things I had to confess, that was the most important one. He also told me I gave him hope for the church... (insert laugh & are you serious?!) I still find it a little funny -but it made me feel better. That and he told me how to calm my mind before I pray: Our Father & Hail Mary's until I was ready to pray. Oh! And it works nicely if I do say so.

I know you've probably heard it as many times as me, how important praying is. But it never was so clear as when I wasn't doing it. Seriously, NEVER underestimate the power of prayer! Or the Sacrament of Reconciliation. It's truly a gift from God!