Godspell Jr. performance at my Church

I saw all 3 Godspell Jr. performances at my Church last weekend and they were very good. My daughter was in the play and it was performed by junior high children from our Church and Catholic school. If some of you are not familiar with Godspell, it is a musical from the late 60s about the Gospel of Matthew done in a hippie/modern setting. As a parent that has most of the Veggie Tales videos ( Christian videos that have a lot of silly recreation of bible stories), I can appreciate attempts to modernize and make the Gospel easier for children to understand. I believe that if Christ had come at our time, he would be reaching out to the youth in a similar way as the Jesus character in Godspell - I even imagine that he would pick his 12 apostles from Catholic youth that probably wouldn't be the clean cut type. Jesus didn't come for those that are already devout, he came for those on the fringes, those who were struggling with their faith and wanted to do good but fell short. He called them to new holiness and he calls all of us even today to new holiness, so if Godspell can interest young people to the Gospel message then it is for God's goodness. I know it already has borne fruit because my daughter has been able to encourage some of the youth in the play to come to Church more often and to attend youth catechism.

Good news with California's Capital Punishment

I heard the good news that the execution of Mr. Morales last night was put off indefinitely. Hopefully this will start a discussion on the morality of the death penalty and I can only hope that it will be stopped. The United States does not need the death penalty, it has a very good prison system that can keep society safe from convicted killers. Let us all pray that this latest development will be the first step toward eradicating the death penalty from the United States and the world.

Deus Caritas Est

I read the Pope's encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, last week and I liked it very much. The first part was a good explanation on Christian Love and how it ties together with romantic love and brotherly love. This may be something that we all should read every once in a while so we can remind ourselves that the Gospel message is basically Love, God is Love and he wants us to Love him and Love our neighbors (or we should just say love everyone as everyone is our neighbor). I liked the second part myself because Pope Benedict reminds us that we all need to do our part and be charitable to all - we can not put all charity onto the government and he is even stating that we shouldn't put all charity onto government because then this charity will lose its Christian dimension. I have always felt that it is sad that the Church has given so much of its responsibility to help those in the Church to the government. It would be great if the deacons of the Church went back to helping those in need and having the congregation helping. My Parish just recently had a call out to help someone in need with clothing and blankets and my wife sent out an email and got around 7 responses from people willing to help. Let us all pray that we can be more charitable this year to those in need especially in our own neighborhoods and in the Church.