Friday, October 19, 2007

Prayers to St. Anthony for Conversion

Catholics Deny Communion on Political Grounds

Conservative Catholics are once again up in arms against the Sisters, this time because members went to Most Holy Redeemer Church in the Castro on the Sunday morning of the Castro Street Fair to partake in one of the world’s stranger religious rituals: the eating of the body of Jesus Christ (their alleged crucified savior) and the drinking of his blood in the form of a wafer of bread and a sip of grape juice (or are they still using wine?). Archbishop Niederauer, who was saying the Mass, noticed the unusually dressed persons, but gave them Communion anyway. After all, when in Rome.I’m not a Catholic anymore, but as I recall, that’s what priests are supposed to do. Nuns and priests in the schools I attended never said, “we don’t give Communion to gay guys dressed as nuns.”

[snip]

So very sad!

At least it’s not the bad old days when the Archbishop would have just ordered the Sisters burned at the stake.

Tommi Avicolli Mecca is thankfully an ex-Catholic, atheist writer and performer with a website, www.avicollimecca.com

Prayers to St. Anthony for Conversion

Loving Saint Anthony you always reached out in compassion to those who had lost their faith. You were especially concerned because they had lost access to the healing words of Jesus found in the Sacrament of Reconciliation and in the nourishing presence of Jesus in the Sacrament of the Eucharist.

Intercede for (name) who has stopped practicing his/her faith. Reawaken in his/her heart a love for our Church and the sacraments, and enkindle in his/her heart a sense of forgiveness for the ways he/she might have been hurt by members of the Church who fell short of the teaching of Christ.

Finally, St. Anthony, help me to respond to my own call to conversion so that I might become an example of someone who has found great peace in the arms of Christ. May the joy I experience as a Catholic be an invitation to those who are lost to come home again to the Church which we love. Amen.

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