May 2018: Building the Domestic Church: The Family Fully Alive

Lead article from the May 2018 bulletin, online now.

By Supreme Knight Carl A. Anderson

In founding the Knights of Columbus, Venerable Father Michael J. McGivney sought to respond to the crisis in family life affecting Catholics in 19th-century America. As a young man he witnessed firsthand the challenges his widowed mother faced with seven children at home. Later, as a priest, he confronted on a daily basis the problems affecting the families of his parish community due to poverty, violence, alcoholism, immigration, anti-Catholic prejudice and discrimination.

Father McGivney’s vision for family life was not only that each family might find financial and material aid. He understood that holiness is the calling of all baptized Christians. And considering that two brothers followed him into the priesthood, we can understand how truly important the sanctuary of the home was to the McGivney family.

His family was a living example of what the second Vatican Council later taught: each man, woman and child is called to holiness through proclaiming the Gospel and communicating the divine gift of love in the activities of their daily lives.

When Christian families respond in this way to the design of the Creator, they become a “domestic church” that, as Pope Paul VI explained, mirrors “the various aspects of the entire Church.” (Evangelii Nuntiandi, 71).

The modern family recently has been a topic of particular focus for the Church, with the two-year synod on the family and the post-synodal exhortation by Pope Francis, Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of Love). During this time, the Knights of Columbus has been involved in supporting families in their Christian vocation through our new Building the Domestic Church While Strengthening our Parish initiative. This initiative, which includes The Family Fully Alive program, is designed to help families become more centered on their task of serving God, neighbor and parish.

Since the second Vatican Council, and especially during the pontificate of St. John Paul II, it has become clear that the family is “the way of the Church.” In one sense, this obviously means that the family is the object of the Church’s evangelization efforts.

But the Christian family too has its own indispensable mission. As St. John Paul II wrote in Familiaris Consortio, “The family has the mission to guard, reveal and communicate love.” This mission is at the heart of the “community of life and love” that begins with the married couple in the sacrament of matrimony.

To lead us in that mission we are fortunate to have a guidebook — Pope Francis’ exhortation Amoris Laetitia— to help us build the Catholic family as a domestic church. In Amoris Laetitia, Pope Francis describes the Church as “a family of families.” He reminds us to view the family as the sanctuary of life and love that is at the heart of the domestic church. Our Knights’ families can take special guidance from Pope Francis as he calls us to a new “family apostolate” based upon “joy-filled witness as domestic churches.” Our parish-based councils also have a role in connecting men and their families with the parish.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church tells us, “Conjugal love involves a totality, in which all the elements of the person enter. … It aims at a deeply personal unity, a unity that, beyond union in one flesh, leads to forming one heart and soul.” In other words, sacramental marriage involves not just an agreement between the spouses but a radical transformation of the spouses.

As Pope Benedict XVI wrote in Deus Caritas Est, “Marriage based on an exclusive and definitive love becomes the icon of the relationship between God and his people and vice versa. God’s way of loving becomes the measure of human love.”

In this way, the witness of husband and wife within the daily life of the family can guard, reveal and communicate love as they make their own the gifts of marriage — unity, indissolubility, faithfulness and openness to new life.

A Vatican document on the role and mission of the family states, “The family needs to be rediscovered as the essential agent in the work of evangelization” (Instrumentum Laboris, 103). It also points to the necessity to better understand the “missionary dimension of the family as a domestic church” (Instrumentum Laboris, 48).

These observations echo those of St. John Paul II, who said, during a meeting with the Latin American bishops in 1979, that “in the future, evangelization will depend largely on the domestic church.” (Pope John Paul II, Address to the Third General Conference of the Latin American Episcopate).

Clearly, the role of the family in the work of evangelization is not primarily a matter of programs, projects or strategies. These all have their place, but they are secondary. Their place is to be at the service of what is essential — the love between a husband and wife that, sanctified through the love of Christ, radiates to each member of their family.

The family as domestic church is a place of encounter with Christ within the community of a particular Christian family — a place where each member of the family has an important role.

The “mission” of the family in the task of evangelization is to be what it is called to be — that is, to live its daily life as a Christian family. As St. John Paul II said so often, “families, become what you are!”

The family’s mission to “guard, reveal and communicate love”— like the parish community — does not exist in an ideal place. The truth and beauty of the family must be communicated to every Christian family, even those that are fragile, wounded or broken. These families too may read the words of St. Paul with confidence: “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?” (Rom 8:35). And they may find in that confidence a path of hope and healing.

During his visit to the Philippines, Pope Francis cited the need for “holy and loving families to protect the beauty and truth of the family in God’s plan and to be an example for other families” (Pope Francis, Address to Families at the Mall of Asia Arena. Our Building the Domestic Church initiative and The Family Fully Alive monthly devotions are concrete ways that Knights of Columbus, in solidarity with Pope Francis, can offer holy and loving families for the Church’s mission of evangelization in our time.

April 2018 Bulletin: Easter Vigil

Lead article from the April 2018 bulletin, online now.

For the first forty-nine years of my life, the Easter Vigil meant nothing to me. That all changed at the Easter Vigil 2009 when Fr. Gregory Abbott and Fr. Michael Becker led me into the water as a Catechumen as I welcomed the light of Christ. I found myself immersed in the same baptismal font that my youngest daughter Anna was baptized in five years earlier. I had literally followed all three of my girls into the faith. The occurrence would not have taken place without them.

God set me on my path in February 1986 aged twenty six years. The journey was started as a result of my signature on a document that clearly explained my commitment to raise my future children in the Catholic faith. Father Joe at St. Gerard's Catholic church would not marry us without it. After all, I was being honest when I informed him of my agnostic beliefs. We hoped to have a bunch of kids, but they did not come.

The next 14 years were filled with infertility, doctors and frustration. As a Catholic, my wife Gina prayed on it. I also offered prayers that followed within my agnostic parameters, you know, "If you are up there please present us with children" type of prayer. Those prayers were answered in 2001- 2003 when we journeyed to the Russian Republic on four occasions and gained our daughters through adoption. We moved to Albertville between daughters and set up shop. We were reminded of our commitment to raise our daughters Catholic and began to attend Mass on Sundays. Father Siebenaler then baptized Marina in 2003 and Father Michael Becker baptized Anna in the new church in 2005.

For the next five years I attended Mass with my family on a weekly basis. I behaved myself as a non-Catholic and stayed in my seat during communion while paying close attention to that which was going on around me. I asked Gina many questions about the Mass: the stand-up-sit-down-stand-up-sit-down, the doing of the dishes, and such. 

What I witnessed also was a lot of men bringing their families to church, and leading them to faith filled lives. This began to chip away at my uncertain position about Christ and God. I began to watch the EWTN network and studied Pope John Paul to some extent due to his huge cultural impact in the Christian world. My wife asked me if I was stalking the Catholic church. I guess I was and we placed both girls on the list to attend the Catholic school and continued attending Mass.

One day I found my way to Father Abbott's office discussing the RCIA program. I joined and spent the next year pouring over the Catechism. The long, 49-year, meandering path then ended in 2009 at the Easter Vigil where Fr. Abbott and Fr. Becker led me into that same baptismal font that my daughter was led into five years earlier. The congregation that night could not have made me feel more welcome. I was bathed in Christ's light for the first time in my life, delivered there in no small part due to my three girls. 

So when you are thinking about which Easter service to attend, please consider the wonderful Easter Vigil. Where else can you witness a large group of people coming into the light of Jesus and embraced by his welcoming arms?

God bless,

Gary Frandsen

Grand Knight

February 2016 Bulletin: Prayer Matters

Lead article from the February 2016 bulletin, online now.

Thank you to all those who came out to the Monica Mize Benefit. I can tell you that during all the planning leading up to the event we never thought it would be as successful as it was. There was so much outpouring from the community that words cannot describe it. I especially want to thank DGK Gary Frandsen for coordinating the spaghetti feed and Andrea Zachman and the CRHP women that did most of the event planning. I also want to thank all the Knights and their families who showed up to help out. I was fortunate enough to help count the proceeds that evening and be able to share the final number with Steve and Monica. That final number, that has grown even more since that evening, turned out to be over $25,000. How amazing is that?

Gary and I were talking while we were cleaning up about how it seemed a little superficial that we did all of this to raise a bunch of money. It just felt like there is something more we can do.  The truth is we did do a lot more than raise money for the family. We got a whole community praying for them. At one point in the evening there was a prayer circle around Monica, which was unbelievably touching to see. We cannot heal the disease or take away the suffering that the family is going through. But we can pray for them and try to take away the worldly stresses as much as possible. Hopefully, the family can focus on healing and spending time together rather than worrying about getting the bills paid. Hopefully our prayers have an impact. Hopefully our community grew a little bit closer. Hopefully we all grew a little bit stronger in our faith.

I also had the pleasure of delivering checks to Cornerstone and the Parish School this month.  It's got to be my favorite part of being Grand Knight.  I get to see first hand the appreciation on the faces of those we help.  It's a blessing I will never forget.  I am very thankful and proud of all of you for what we have built. Keep up the good work!

God Bless,
Joe VanHoorik
Grand Knight

December 2012 Grand Knight's Article: A New Beginning

Grand Knight's message from the December 2012 bulletin:

“Hail, Full of Grace” — Luke 1:28 

I promised myself this article would not be about the election. Personally, I feel the elections support a belief many of us felt: that our culture is sliding further from a just society—further and further into an unjust society. Many issues we hold in our hearts to be just and true were defeated. And what is important is seen as unimportant in our society.

Before I move on to the man point of this article, I feel it essential to recognize the courageous position the laity, priests and bishops took in speaking up on issues of morality. I have been Catholic for 18 years — and in the span of 2,000 years, that’s not much. However, I can say that in my short life as a Catholic, never before have I seen the Church defend her teachings so concretely. The next time you see one of our clerics, thank them for their bold proclamation of the truth. I am sure those who do not agree with their position on issues are more than happy to let them know what they think.

John Paul the Great, at the beginning of his pontificate, proclaimed “Do not be afraid.” In light of very uncertain times, Blessed John Paul always seemed to lead us with great joy and hope. The perfect response to poll results we do not like can be found in scripture:

In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent forth from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin’s name was Mary. And he came to her and said, “Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with you!” But she was greatly troubled at the saying, and considered in her mind what sort of greeting this may be. And the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God, And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus.” — Luke 1:26-31

In the Incarnation, hope is never lost. In fact, we shall, in the words of John Paul II, “fear not.” In the great mystery of the Incarnation, we place all of our hope and joy in the victory yet to come. We look forward with joy to Christmas morning and hope for the fulfillment of time when heaven and earth are united for eternity. The season of advent helps refocus our thoughts of things of this world, and direct them to what really matters, the supernatural world. It helps us to remember that while we must live in this world, we are intended for another. We should see this season as a time to focus and prepare on the greatest gift ever — Christmas morning, and ultimately our fulfillment with God at the end of time. In light of this truth, this great joy, our struggles here begin to be put into place. And while even greater persecution shall come to us, our hope is not lost. In fact, it can become a cause for joy. For in times of great persecution, God always raises up great saints to help guide Mother Church. He is calling each of us to become the saint we were intended to be. We are placed in a society in which we will be given plenty of opportunity to die to self for Christ.

The Incarnation is God’s response to darkness. For He sent his son, the “Light of the World,” to illuminate our world, and so this light overcomes all troubles we may have.

In light of this great truth, we begin to move forward with hope. Our mission is to spread hope this Advent and to let those who may think differently that we are not defeated, but rather, rejuvenated in Christ. So in Advent, we hope in the possibilities of a new beginning.

Fraternally In Christ,

Mike Engel

Grand Knight, Council 4174

 P.S. I apologize that this article had more to do with the election than I had hoped!

Chivalry Is Not Dead: Sacramental Sexuality in an Age of Lust

"Keeping to one woman is a small price for so much as seeing one woman. ... A man is a fool who complains that he cannot enter Eden by five gates at once."

— G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

by Jim Thorp, Council Director

I remember, a few years back, sitting around a little round table in a crowded Minneapolis bar with two former co-workers. They were talking about their work and home lives — their wives and children (one each at the time) and the challenges of unwinding after a day at work. One of the two enjoys computer games, but said he had to wait until after his wife — and especially his daughter — went to bed, because he didn't want them walking in on the particularly violent or sexual scenes in the game. The other agreed, saying very matter-of-factly that it was the same with viewing online pornography — you always had to be looking over your shoulder, not because your wife doesn't know, but because it's better for everyone if she doesn't see.

Only natural?
They spoke very openly about it, as though everyone does it and it's perfectly normal. I know only too well that these are common — even rampant — habits in our society, but I'm always dismayed when men pretend that they are natural, insurmountable, or even desirable as part of being an adult male. Another co-worker used to speak of men "in their natural state" as being herd bulls, biologically inclined to breed with as many females as possible — and he marveled that I could appear so happy in an intentionally lifelong and monogamous relationship.

The idea that men are nothing more than rutting bulls ignores God's intention in the matter, to be sure, but it also ignores anthropology and common sense. From a common-sense perspective, the drive to breed is not what motivates a lustful or promiscuous male — in fact, many go to great lengths not to leave offspring behind. From an anthropological standpoint, the idea that there were ever primeval human males, free of cultural constraints, who could breed with whomever they wanted, whenever they wanted, flies in the face of what scientists currently think about evolution. Current theory suggests that culture predates the modern human species by millions of years. In other words, even if you are convinced that God has nothing to say in the matter, we were already "artificially" overcoming our biology well before we were human.

That's not to say that our presumed prehuman ancestors were lifelong and faithful spouses — it merely makes the point that we have been re-writing the rules of strict call-and-response biology for eons now, so claiming that we can't do it today, or in this particular case, is a cop-out.

Pope John Paul II once wrote, "There are people who try to ridicule, or even to deny, the idea of a faithful bond which lasts a lifetime. These people — you can be very sure — do not know what love is." We can be faithful, lifelong spouses — knights in shining armor — and the Church shows us how.

Higher calling
The great Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton discovered in the Catholic Church the wonder and hope and beauty that had inspired him as a child and helped him to understand the world. The romance of the Church struck him as a more Truth-filled worldview than the coldly scientific view of the cosmos that many of the great thinkers and writers of his day espoused. No doubt many of his contemporaries saw him as a hopelessly devoted to a way of life that was quaint at best, and dangerously outmoded at worst.

We live in the same world as he did — you could argue that we fight the same battle as the knights of the middle ages. In The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell paraphrases another scholar of stories, Ortega y Gasset, in talking about the famous, foolish romantic Don Quixote:

Don Quixote was the last hero of the Middle Ages. He rode out to encounter giants, but instead of giants, his environment produced windmills. Ortega points out that this story takes place about the time that a mechanistic interpretation of the world came in, so that the environment was no longer spiritually responsive to the hero. The hero is today running up against a hard world that is in no way responsive to his spiritual need....

Now it has become to such an extent a sheerly mechanistic world, as interpreted through our physical sciences, Marxist sociology, and behavioristic psychology, that we're nothing but a predictable pattern of wires responding to stimuli. The nineteenth century interpretation has squeezed the freedom of the human will out of modern life.

But like Quixote, if we take a hard look at the world around us, we can see the marauding giants — especially with regard to marriage and sex. Divorce, in particular, is so widespread that many children shrug it off as commonplace, and men and women joke that marriage isn't worth it because the wedding is too expensive and lasts longer than the commitment. Roughly half of marriages end in divorce, and the results aren't significantly different for Catholic couples, because even with traditional Catholic marriage preparation, many couples simply go through the required motions and never actually come to understand the why behind the Church's teachings. Why does the Church oppose living together or having sexual relations before marriage? Why, in the 21st century, does the Catholic Church stand essentially alone in opposing artificial means of birth control?

According to Christopher West, the well-known Catholic speaker who has dedicated his life to spreading Pope John Paul II's Theology of Body teachings, in the past two millenia, the Catholic Church has written roughly 6,000 pages on marriage and sexuality — and 4,000 of those were written by John Paul II since the 1970s. Obviously he saw giants, too, and knew they must be fought and slain. He armed the Church with a renewed understanding of the essential relationship of marriage and sexuality to what it means to be human and created in God's image. Until recently, however, relatively few people had been exposed to these teachings.

Through the efforts of West and other impassioned lay leaders, bishops and parish priests, awareness is growing — and marriages are changing for the better. My own marriage is a case in point. My wife and I came late to understanding and embracing the Church's teachings on marriage and sexuality. We've been married 13 years now, with four kids, ages 11 to 5. Catholic marriage preparation wasn't easy for me — while I admired the strength of my bride's faith, I didn't have a strong religious upbringing. Although I had been raised with many of the same values and was quite proud of the fact that we had both "saved ourselves" for marriage, I wasn't a fan of some of the Church's teachings, especially on birth control.

I'm sure the married couples who discussed Natural Family Planning with us at our Engaged Encounter weekend told us that NFP is a scientifically safe and sound way for couples to determine a woman's fertility each month in order to achieve or avoid pregnancy. I know they told us it was completely aligned with the Church's teachings on marriage and sexuality — and while I argued with them about how NFP was different from contraception, inside I had two thoughts, one positive and one negative:

• I thought that NFP might help me to better understand what made my wife tick as a Catholic and as a woman —
• But I was sure it was going to take time to figure out and I wasn't anxious to have a child right away or to wait any longer than we already had after the wedding.

We tried — briefly — to teach ourselves NFP from a book, and quickly scrapped that idea. We agreed to start our life together using artificial methods of family planning until we had a chance to take an NFP class. We quickly became very comfortable with our artificial method and easily justified not exploring NFP further. We also quickly became pregnant with our first child and had visions of switching to NFP and winding up with several more in rapid succession.

During the next 10 years, my wife coaxed me back to the Church, we had three more children, and my conscience began to nag me. Our children had all been large at birth, and when our youngest arrived at 12 pounds 2 ounces, the doctor suggested we stop having babies. That was fine with my wife, who was feeling emotionally drained and exhausted — so the timing was less than ideal for me to start reading up on NFP, to decide after a decade to confess to our priest that we had been using artificial birth control, and to push her to try something completely new.

She wasn't convinced at first, and I was nervous, so for a year or more we discussed and prayed, took a class through the Couple to Couple League, and slowly came to share the Church's understanding that married love is supposed to mirror God's love: free, total, faithful and fruitful; sacrificial and life-giving.

Finally, we made the switch, and that one change changed everything else. First and foremost, we (and especially I) learned self-control. Christopher West likes to point out that what many in our culture promote as sexual freedom — in particular, the capability that artificial birth control gives us to experience sex whenever we want to, without concerns about fertility cycles, pregnancy, parenthood, love or commitment — is actually sexual addiction. We get so accustomed to being able to indulge our urges whenever we want to that we can't say no, and we feel frustrated, angry or unwanted when our partners want to abstain.

This is not God's vision. He gave us free will so we can love freely. He allows us to say no to Him so that our yes means something, and same holds true between spouses: if we can say no, our yes mean something; if we can abstain together, our embrace becomes a mutual choice and a free and total gift.

For us, every month is like a honeymoon now: we watch and anticipate together, we don't pressure each other as much, and we pray together about our marriage and our family more than ever before. We communicate better in general and feel more deeply in love, because we understand each other and what God meant us to be to each other.

Truth works
People often have the idea that the Catholic Church is against sex, when in fact, the opposite is true. Properly understood, sexuality is sacred to the Church — it is considered so beautiful and good, so important and such a gift, that it is to be honored and preserved. Indeed, some use the term sacramental sexuality to underscore the nature and meaning of sex in Catholic marriage. Each of the Church's sacraments has form (the spoken words) and matter (the material sign of the sacrament) — so in the case of Baptism, the form is the particular rite read by the pastor and the matter is water; in the case of the Eucharist, the form is the Words of Consecration and the matter is the bread and wine.

What many Catholic spouses don't realize is that, in the case of the sacrament of marriage, the form consists of the questions of consent and the vows, but the substance of the sacrament is the "one flesh" union of husband and wife, mirroring the free, total, faithful and fruitful love of God. This understanding elevates sexuality to its true importance in the Church — as close to an experience of the life-giving love of the Trinity as we can have here on earth. Indeed, West opens the first chapter of his book, The Good News About Sex and Marriage, with this quote from Pope John Paul II: "The 'great mystery,' which is the Church and humanity in Christ, does not exist apart from the 'great mystery' expressed in the 'one flesh'...reality of marriage and family."

Shortly after we made our switch to NFP, our pastor connected us to a team of couples who put on Theology of the Body retreats for engaged couples in the parish. St. Michael Catholic Church requires these retreats in addition to diocesan marriage preparation for couple who wish to be married in our parish, and the results we've seen over the past two years have been inspiring.

Many of the young couples who attend these retreats are living together or are sexually active, few have been exposed to Theology of the Body teachings, and most know very little about Natural Family Planning. Using Christopher West's video series God's Plan for a Joy-Filled Marriage (and his book mentioned above) as a framework, several married couples bear witness to the truth about sex and marriage in the Catholic Church throughout the morning and afternoon. Anonymous evaluations completed by participants ask about their religious upbringing, spiritual life, sexual activity, living arrangements and plans for children — regardless of their current situation, following the retreat, most of the couples indicate that they are planning on (or at least considering) abstaining until marriage, moving apart, and using Natural Family Planning.

The Truth resonates, not only with the engaged couples, but with the witnesses, too — we all grow in understanding, faith and love by sharing these powerful teachings. In fact, some have characterized NFP as marriage insurance: while the divorce rate among Catholics in general is similar to the national average — about 50 percent — the rate among couples using NFP is 1 to 2 percent. I believe this is in part because Natural Family Planning is a couple-based method of family planning that demands mutual participation, requiring spouses to act in loving but chaste ways at times and to learn and practice self-control.

Self-control is essential in an age of lust, when so much around us insists that "men will be men," and that we should do what feels good. When we first married, I thought that our love and lifelong commitment was justification enough for our private lives — like many well-meaning spouses, I overlooked the possibility of lust in marriage; of using my spouse rather than loving her selflessly. In recent years, it has been my personal experience that learning to control myself in our married relationship has strengthened my self-control in private — I am not tempted as strongly to selfish or lustful behaviors, and I am able to resist these temptations much more easily.

It is no accident that great warrior traditions from the world over insist that our greatest enemy is ourselves, that our greatest battles are within. As men, we are called to love our wives as Christ loved the Church: to death. Jesus came to serve and to die for his Bride, and we must do the same. This is the heroic calling — the great and noble deed — that we seek as Catholic men, husbands and fathers. Chivalry is not dead. It lives in the romance and teachings of the Church, and in the life-giving love and example of our Creator.

Resources
Suggested reading on marriage, sexuality and the Church:

• The Good News About Sex and Marriage by Christopher West
• The Theology of the Body: Human Love in the Divine Plan by Blessed John Paul II
• Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis
• Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton

Blogger's Note: I originally wrote this article in summer of 2009; it was published in the Knights of Columbus Council 4174 newsletter.