Sunday Gospel Reflections
To help Catholics be formed well in Eucharistic spirituality,
many priests advise their parishioners to read the Sunday gospel
before attending the Mass. This discipline will help Catholics be
rooted in the Word of God, and teach them be more receptive to its
proclamation in the parish.
To help us in this search for a greater devotion to the Eucharist,
here are a few points for reflection on the Sunday gospels for
the 3rd to the 5th Sunday of the Year (C). The themes in these
gospel passages dwell on:
* the Person of Jesus as Prophet, and how we, as a family and
people of God, share in His prophetic mission;
* how the vocation and mission of Jesus as Prophet received
rejection, indignation, and the desire to kill Him from His own
people;
* the call of Peter, James, and John to leave their state of
life as fishermen, and to follow Jesus as "fishers of men" -
recruiting laborers and workers for God's vineyard.
Given below are the gospel reflections for the 3rd, 4th, and 5th
Sundays of the Year (C):
"To announce a year of favor from the Lord."
"No prophet gains acceptance in his native place."
"Leave me Lord. I am a sinful man."
Visionaries, Stigmatics...(Last part)
This is the last blog post on the Series about visionaries of
the Lord and the Blessed Mother, stigmatics who bore the wounds
of Christ in their physical bodies, and holy men and women whose
bodies remain incorrupt to this very day. A special feature of
this blog post are five video files, with the last few files
at the end, presenting the very images of these men and women
whose remains have been preserved through the grace of God, and
have not been touched by the natural law of decay and rot. Some
of these incorrupt bodies originate from the 9th century!
learn more about the incorrupt bodies of saints
Popular Filipino Catholic devotions
January is a special time for the local Catholic Church in the
Philippines. Two of its popular devotions are celebrated every
year in January: the feast of the Sto. Niño (January 17, 2010 -
always on the Second Sunday after the feast of the Lord's
Baptism) and the feast of Señor Nazareno (January 9, 2010).
The feast of Ina ng Laging Saklolo (Our Mother of Perpetual
Help) will be celebrated this June. The Sto. Niño is a Filipino
devotion to the Infant Jesus while Señor Nazareno is a Filipino
Catholic devotion to the image of the Black Nazarene (a life-size
image of Jesus carrying the Cross).
learn more about Filipino Catholic devotions
For Catholic site owners and bloggers
Searching for information to update one's site with the latest
in technology or SEO techniques, involves using the search
engines. Google has progressed very well in its search technology
by providing more options and results for a particular search
query. If for example, you use the search query "new search engine
optimization techniques", you will obtain a page of results which
presents two new features:
* there is a link after each results (either from the main index
of Google's database or from its supplementary index) which say,
"show more results from www.________.com" When you click on this
link, Google will provide more pages from that site's domain
* at the top left corder of the results page, there is a link
which says "Web", "show options". If you click on this link,
Google will present more detailed search results - including
live-search or real-time results, and also results related to
"social search"
Both these features of Google can help Catholic site owners and
bloggers narrow in on the information they are searching for.
Safety and security on the Web
Most of us want to have a safe and secure experience of using the
Web. As of this time, it is now more dangerous compared to what
the Web environment was in the year 2002. When the Web was only
composed of a few web sites, mostly static pages, and simple
online forums, pages can already be hacked, and links were
already being hijacked and redirected to other sites instead of
your own. Some Catholics in online forums whose advocacy tended
to offend some social groups, have experienced receiving sex-
related or pornographic files in their email inbox. Now that the
Web has become more socially interactive and has exponentially
increased in number of users, there are now more risks of being
targetted by hackers and being victimized by cybersabotage. One
way to avoid these problems is not to create too "high" a profile
on the Web. Below are a few suggestions by which you can study
so that you can have a safer and more secure experience on the
Web:
