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Time is precious, and — let’s be honest — most of us would like to do more things than a full day allows.

So we have to make choices: Should I read a book or watch TV before bed? Should I relax at home or visit a friend on Saturday?

On the one hand, you should plan your day rather than let it slip by. On the other, you shouldn’t overplan it and leave no room for spontaneity.

Here are some tips for planning a fruitful day. Note: They don’t fully apply to everyone, as each person’s interests and temperament play a role in the decision-making process.

Start with what’s most important.
Often, your vocation reveals your priorities. If you’re married, your chief focus should be on your family members. Coming second is the work you do to support them (either by earning money or homemaking). If you’re a parish priest, your parishioners’ spiritual welfare comes first.

Of course, all vocations should prioritize prayer, although not in the same way. A busy mother of six needs to pray each day, but obviously can’t spend as much time on that as a hermit. In fact, some saints chide laypeople for trying to act too much like religious, to the detriment of the daily work God calls them to do.

In general, it’s better to focus on people rather than tasks.
God made us to live in communion with other people, reflecting how He Himself is a communion of Persons.

We’re here to love and serve God and neighbor. Everything else is secondary. We should plan our days with this in mind. If you thrive by completing daily to-do lists, you could intentionally maintain some flexibility in case someone needs your presence, even if it’s just for a few minutes.

Does this mean you need to give in to everyone who demands your time? No. You’re not meant to be there for everyone 24/7.

Start by planning one day, then go bigger.
If you decide to get up at 5:15 a.m. every day, great! But now you need to figure out when to go to bed, so you don’t stay up too late. And then you’ll notice the need to plan larger blocks of time — weeks and months — to help you accomplish your goals and necessary tasks.

Break large tasks into smaller pieces.
The prospect of a huge task — such as writing a book or remodeling a house — can cause anxiety. It’s usually better to carve out a part of each day to work on the project rather than binge everything at once. That will help keep your emotions in check and make the project more manageable.

Don’t ignore free chunks of time that appear in your day.
Sometimes you’ll discover that you have an unexpected half hour of free time. Too often, people tell themselves that it isn’t enough to do anything worthwhile. Wrong!

You could read a few more pages of that book you’re struggling to finish, say a prayer, or take a walk

Plan small breaks.
You don’t want to fill every day with activities that tire your body and soul if you can help it. Take short breaks to refresh yourself. God doesn’t intend for us to work all our waking hours. We need rest and leisure to have a balanced life.

Try these tips but don’t feel overwhelmed if you can’t apply them all at once. Often, we have to make life changes little by little. Start with a couple and, if they work, apply the rest.

If Christmas is the “most wonderful time of the year,” then election season is the most angsty and apocalyptic. And it is upon us…

With those cold election greetings and angry online meetings;
When friends no longer come to call.

There’ll be scary candidate stories
And tales of the glories of
America long, long ago.

Seriously, though, it’s easy to lose your mind over the constant deluge of sensational election news and conversation. Here are seven tips for maintaining your peace amidst the chaos.

 

1. Keep your emotions in check.
Society attaches much importance to elections, so it makes sense that we focus our attention on them. We know that the future of our families and communities is at stake, and that causes us emotional and psychological turmoil.

Elections are important, but keep your expectations modest. We all possess a fallen human nature. People will lie, steal, and cheat.

We’re not saying any hope, excitement, fear, or outrage is unwarranted. But keep these emotions in check so they don’t overtake you.

2. Take stock of your attention.
Politics can absorb a lot of your time, including hours better spent on family, work, worship, and hobbies. Strive to manage that consumption by designating news-free blocks of the day.

For example, don’t doomscroll right before Mass when your mind and heart should be focused on God. Leave politics for another time.

Also, regulate what you read. While there really aren’t any media sources that are completely unbiased, some are more balanced than others.

3. Work for unity instead of stirring the pot.
You are meant to contribute to the political good of your nation. Much of that is going to take place through simple conversations with family and friends. Don’t throw bombastic accusations at them or cut them out of your life because they don’t support your candidate. Focus your discussions on building bridges and identifying points of agreement.

4. Don’t be reactionary.
When someone you ordinarily disagree with makes a claim, it’s easy to immediately say the opposite. This behavior doesn’t involve thinking so much as reacting. Usually, we’re reacting out of outrage, fear, or sadness.

Issues are often more nuanced than we imagine. Also, just because your friend seems wrong on many issues doesn’t mean they’re never right.

5. Don’t whitewash.
Too often, we look for the perfect candidate — someone with no skeletons in the closet. But, as we’ve said, politicians are human, and human beings are fallen creatures. Some are worse than others, but we all have our issues.

Once you embrace a candidate, it’s easy to look past their faults. However, you need to admit to their shortcomings, which also will boost your credibility.

6. Check apocalyptic thinking.
We tend to think that if things don’t go our way, everything will fall into utter ruin. With elections, the feeling is that if our candidate doesn’t win, that’s the end of this nation.

Maybe or maybe not. We are in a period of cultural decline, but pining after some “golden age” is rarely helpful. Embrace the time God placed you in and work for its betterment.

7. Remember what politics really is.
Politics is sometimes described as “the art of the possible.” We’re rarely able to fully implement our political ideals in society. The goal should be to work for the common good while keeping a realistic perspective of what’s possible.

We’ll close with a reminder from St. Teresa of Avila: “Let nothing disturb you. Let nothing frighten you. All things are passing away: God never changes….God alone suffices.”

The debate over whether women should be ordained priests keeps coming up, gathering steam through the unfolding of the Vatican’s Synod on Synodality.

People in favor of such ordination often claim that the Church has discriminated against women throughout its history and needs to make amends. (We should acknowledge that some Church leaders have engaged in discriminatory behavior against women. Even St. Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle’s biology about women, said things that we should distance ourselves from.)

Others point to the fact that, in the early Church, women engaged in many ministries, although not as ordained ministers.

Pope St. John Paul II declared that the Church’s ordinary magisterium has settled the question, restricting ordination to men alone.

This isn’t because the Church is anti-women, as some people think. Here are some reasons why ordination to the diaconate and priesthood are reserved for men alone.

Jesus chose only men as His apostles.
The apostles were the first priests and bishops of the Church. All 12 were men, called by Christ out of their daily lives to be the foundation of His Church.

One view is that Jesus didn’t include women because He was restricted by the cultural norms of first-century Palestine.

But Jesus is God, so nothing can restrain Him. He acts with complete freedom.

Also, no one can seriously accuse our Lord of looking down on women. He challenged cultural norms by interacting with women, including them among His closest friends, and—above all—making His mother the greatest saint of all time!

Equality doesn’t mean sameness.
Every aspect of creation reflects only a sliver of God’s glory. Every created thing is a finite being, which means it can’t communicate the entirety of God.

God made men and women equal but different. They both are created in the image of their creator and participate in human nature, but they reflect different aspects of God’s love. Far from being something bad, this should lead us to rejoice!

For example, mothers experience a bond with their babies that men will never feel, while men who are ordained priests are blessed to act in the Person of Christ during Mass.

A final point to remember is that none of us—man or woman—needs to suffer sadness seeing the gifts God has bestowed upon another person. He has given us what is best suited to us in our journey to heaven. We all have a chance at getting there. Once we do, what we did on this earth will matter less than experiencing full communion with the Holy Trinity.

There is a class of arguments used by atheists to disprove God’s existence by showing that He can’t be omnipotent (all-powerful). There are many variations: “Can God make something more powerful than Himself?” “Can God make a square circle?” “Can God make a rock that’s too heavy for Him to lift?”

Believers are often stumped. Whether they answer “yes” or “no,” they seem to be denying God’s power. If God can indeed make a rock too heavy for Him to lift, then He’s not all-powerful. But if He can’t create such a rock, then His creative power is limited.

Here’s how to solve this dilemma.

Power corresponds to possibility.
St. Thomas Aquinas identifies two meanings of “possible.”

One meaning of “possible” refers to something that’s not contradictory. An example is flying humans. Although humans don’t really fly, there’s nothing inherently contradictory about the concept of being human and flying. It’s what St. Thomas calls an “intelligible” concept, which means a concept we can conceive.

The other meaning of “possible” refers to the power a person or thing has to bring something about. We humans don’t have the power to fly, so that action is not possible for us. But God can create humans with wings if He wants to.

However, a square circle is impossible for any power to create — not because it’s too hard to make, but because it can’t exist either in the real world nor even in our thoughts. Sure, we can stick the words “square” and “circle” together, but all we’re doing is playing word games. If you try to conceive of such a thing, you’ll inevitably be thinking of either a circle or a square — or one slowly transforming the other.

If you excuse the expression, a square circle resides in the realm of non-being. It’s not so much that God can’t make it as it is a thing that can’t be made, or, to put it more accurately, it is NOTHING.

God also can’t make a being more powerful than Himself because this involves an inherent contradiction. God IS being. And any more powerful being He creates would immediately be less powerful because they began to exist when created by Him, whereas God has existed by His own power for eternity.

The atheists’ arguments are word games and not based on reality. Don’t let them trip you up!

Many Catholics have heard of G.K. Chesterton, but haven’t read him. He is one of the most delightful authors and many of his arguments for Christianity and against the errors of his day remain relevant.

His witty writing style isn’t for everyone, but we strongly recommend giving him a try. His books “Orthodoxy” and “The Everlasting Man” are treasures not only of faith but also of literature in general. His numerous essays will make you laugh and think.

Here are five reasons to read and love G.K. Chesterton.

1. His View of Reality
Many people have a mundane view of life, seeing it as little more than a to-do list filled with work, chores, and a bit of free time. Chesterton gazed at reality with a sense of wonder. He believed that everything was a gift, even dandelions.

He eschewed optimism and pessimism for a third attitude: patriotism (as he refers to it). By this, he meant loving things because they’ve been entrusted to us as gifts.

His writings will help you realize that everything in your daily existence — morning coffees, the robins on your lawn, and the people you see daily — could have never existed. But they do, and that type of realization filled Chesterton with a sense of wonder and appreciation.

2. His Insight
Chesterton was a master of identifying what’s essential in our human experience. He was less prone to adopt the latest fad and was critical of his optimistic contemporaries who treated human progress as inevitable.

His insights were startling, including his observation that our God is, in a sense, youthful. Small children enjoy doing things repeatedly, such as playing the same game each night. God does the same with the sunrise, never growing weary of saying “Again!” each morning.

3. His Energy
Chesterton’s vast literary output included books, essays, plays, and poems. He was a regular contributor to “The Illustrated London News.” To him, writing wasn’t just a job or even a hobby. It was part of the battle to communicate truth to a world rife with false ideas.

4. His Humanity
Word warrior though he was, Chesterton nevertheless maintained a human touch in his work. His love of family, friends, food, drink, and cigars comes through even in his most polemical writings. He famously said, “The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”

5. His Humor
Make no mistake, Chesterton was well aware of the problems and suffering in this world. But he strongly believed in the victory of Christ’s resurrection. God has won the battle, so we can laugh even though we suffer. At the end of his book “Orthodoxy,” he postulates that God’s mirth is so great that He chose to hide it from us for the time being. But it will be revealed to us in heaven!

Hopefully, we’ve convinced you to give Chesterton a try. If you do, you’re in for a delightful treat!

When Catholics hear the word “vocation,” they often think of states of life, such as marriage or the priesthood. We are each called by God to follow a particular path in life and go through a process of discernment to discover His plan for us.

But there is an even more profound vocation than marriage, priesthood, and religious life. It’s a vocation all of us are called to.

It’s the call to heaven.

Our earthly vocations are meant to lead to our heavenly home.
Marriage, religious life, and the priesthood are not the ultimate goals of life. They are paths that lead us to heaven. The joys and struggles of each one help us cultivate perfect charity.

They also provide a faint picture of what life in heaven is like. There, our union with God will be exclusive (nothing coming in between it), fruitful, and permanent. In other words, it’s covenant love.

Marriage reflects this by bringing together a man and a woman in a fruitful, exclusive relationship that lasts until death. Religious life and the priesthood require people to forgo marriage and live for God alone, yet priests and religious enjoy a type of fruitful parenthood by begetting spiritual children — such as when the priest brings new people into the Church through baptism. Priests and religious embrace their state of life until death and priests enjoy a permanent spiritual mark of their priesthood into eternity.

As beautiful as these states are, they offer only glimpses of the joy and fulfillment we’ll experience with God, who alone can satisfy all of our desires. We’ll behold Him face-to-face without mediation.

This is why we shouldn’t make idols out of the states of life, saying, for example, “I won’t be happy if I don’t get married,” or “Religious life alone will solve all my problems.” Only union with God heals, and you discern a state of life simply to discover the best path back to your Creator.

It’s also why you shouldn’t despair if you never enter one of these states during your life. You can still attain charity — and thus heaven — without them. God has given you superabundant means to grow in charity, including prayer, the sacraments, and the people He puts in your life.

None of this is meant to belittle the vocations of marriage, priesthood, and religious life. But without keeping our primary vocation in mind, we’ll lose the right perspective on these secondary vocations.

Recently, we published a blog giving 4 Reasons to Celebrate Mass Ad Orientem, based on one of our weekly Fr. Gregory Pine episodes.

Both the video and blog got a lot of feedback, including some objections to the reasons given for celebrating Mass ad orientem.

Here are some of those objections along with responses to each.

1. “Jesus and the Apostles faced each other at the Last Supper.”
That’s true. But what we’re aiming for in Mass is an adherence to Christ’s institution and not a strict literal reenactment of every aspect of the Last Supper.

Jesus spoke Aramaic. Does that mean we should worship in that language? Most Masses during the first few centuries were celebrated in Greek, but few who argue against ad orientem also advocate for a return to that language. And if we’re going to get that literal, should we dress as first-century Jews when we attend Mass?

Remember, Mass makes not only the Last Supper present but also the Passion. On Calvary, everyone was turned in the same direction: to our Lord hanging on the Cross.

While Catholic worship is fueled by traditions dating back thousands of years, we don’t have to mirror all of them, especially things that haven’t been part of the organic development of the Church’s liturgy through the centuries.

2. “When the priest faces us, he better reflects the humanity of Christ.”
That’s a fair argument. Many advocates of Mass facing the people (versus populum) feel that the priest feels more distant when facing the same direction as them.

On the other hand, the Mass is a sacred act and so naturally represents a certain distance between us and God. Mass ad orientem reminds us that we are on this earth to scale the heights of holiness to reach our heavenly homeland. Mass shouldn’t feel too familiar, for it is not of this earth.

Also, when the priest faces the people there’s a risk of his personality becoming a focal point. Some priests have great personalities, others don’t. When they turn their backs to us, more distractions are removed and we can focus on Jesus.

3. “Isn’t the Resurrection also part of the Paschal Mystery?”
Yes. All the deeds of Christ’s life save us. But some of us wonder why there’s such a focus on the Crucifix (and thus the Passion) when Mass is celebrated ad orientem.

We believe that the Mass meditates the Passion in a particular way. It is, after all, the representation of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross.

This doesn’t mean the Resurrection is absent, nor that Mass celebrated ad orientem only looks backward in time. Remember that, ideally, an ad orientem Mass orients the priest and people to the East, from which Christ will return at the end of the world.

4. “Isn’t the Mass also supposed to be a banquet?”
Yes, it is. However, this attitude can be carried so far that the sacred nature of the Mass is deemphasized. Sadly, we see this happening in many parishes throughout the world. For example, if it’s merely a banquet, why not invite the laity to come into the sanctuary and gather around the altar? This abuse happens in some churches.

We must remember that the Mass is first and foremost a sacrifice.

To be clear, none of this is meant to say that Mass facing the people is bad. It’s a question of fittingness: Which orientation of the Mass represents the sacred actions taking place and calls forth the best responses in us?

It still seems like ad orientem is the overall winner here.

Did you know that the father of the Big Bang theory was a Catholic priest? Fr. Georges Lemaître (1894–1966) was a man of the cloth AND science. He challenged models of the universe that tried to portray the cosmos as eternal.

Here’s how he proposed the Big Bang Theory and proved the great Albert Einstein wrong.

Competing Models of the Universe
During Fr. Lemaître’s time, many scientists believed that the universe always was — there was no beginning. This was a comfortable position for many atheists, as it seemed to eliminate the necessity of God.

Sir Fred Hoyle introduced the term “Big Bang” as a way to mock the idea that the universe had a beginning. Einstein subscribed to the idea of an eternal universe.

But Fr. Lemaître was about to turn Einstein’s own math against him.

Einstein Meets Fr. Lemaître
In the early 20th century, Einstein was hard at work mathematically modeling the universe and working on his theory of general relativity.

Fr. Lemaître took Einstein’s math and found that it implied that the universe was expanding. By rewinding Einstein’s model, Fr. Lemaître discovered it would come to a point where everything contracts down to a starting point.

In the 1920s, Fr. Lemaître began publishing papers to support his findings. Einstein started communicating with him soon after, purportedly telling the Belgian priest, “Your calculations are correct, but your grasp of physics is abominable.” Einstein clearly saw that the equations worked, but he was still resistant to the idea that the universe had a beginning.

In the 1930s, astronomer Edwin Hubble observed the galaxies moving away from each other, further supporting Fr. Lemaître’s findings.

Finally, Einstein had to admit that the universe did have a beginning. One of science’s great geniuses made way for the genius of a Catholic priest.

Catholic Bibles are bigger than Protestant Bibles. That’s because we have seven more books. Called the Deuterocanonicals, they are: 1 and 2 Maccabees; Sirach; Wisdom; Baruch; Tobit; and Judith.

Catholics believe that these books are just as much a part of God’s Word as the rest of the Bible, while Protestants accuse us of adding these “human” books.

Some of our non-Catholic brothers and sisters claim that the New Testament never quotes the Deuterocanonicals with the phrase “It is written” or similar phrases Jesus often used to signal a passage from God’s Word.

Here’s how a Catholic should respond.

The New Testament formally quotes only a few books.
Many other books that Protestants accept as inspired are never cited in the New Testament, such as Ruth and Ezra. Does this mean they’re not part of Scripture? No Protestant would dare claim that.

Therefore, just because direct quotes from the Deuterocanonicals are not found in the New Testament does not mean they shouln’t be in the Bible.

There were many lists of books of Scripture back then.
Some Protestants point out that the Jewish leaders didn’t include the Deuterocanonicals in their Scripture. Since the Christian Bible grew from the Jewish Scripture, it seems we should follow our forefathers in faith, right?

There are two problems with this position. First, the Rabbis didn’t officially decide on all of the books of the Old Testament until somewhere around the early second century A.D., after Christianity already started. Second, different Jewish groups didn’t agree on what books should be included in Scripture. The Sadducees only accepted the first five books; other sects embraced some of the Deuterocanonicals.

The New Testament does allude to the Deuterocanonicals.
Here’s one example from Matthew 27:39-43:

“And those who passed by derided him [Jesus on the cross], wagging their heads and saying, “You who would destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself! If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross.” So also the chief priests, with the scribes and elders, mocked him, saying, “He saved others; he cannot save himself. He is the King of Israel; let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in him. He trusts in God; let God deliver him now, if he desires him; for he said, ‘I am the Son of God.’”

This passage alludes to Psalm 22, which is in every Christian’s Bible. But it more strongly resembles one of the Deuterocanonicals, specifically Wisdom 2:17-18: “Let us see if his words are true and let us test what will happen at the end of his life; for if the righteous man is God’s son, he will help him and will deliver him from the hand of his adversaries.”

If the Jewish leaders rejected the Deuterocanonicals, why would they allude to a book that wasn’t really part of Scripture?

The Deuterocanonicals are the Word of God and a rich source of wisdom and inspiration. Let’s not cut God off when He wants to speak!