There's a "Catholic" App for That

Dear Theophilous,

As the speed of life ramps itself up to an alarming pace, there has been a growing trend to turn even more often to technology to keep one’s self afloat – never mind being ahead of the game. Over the past couple of years, whenever one has felt the pressure of keeping up with the times, when there has been a sense of floundering in the current of the world, the answer to the problem has been a pat: There’s an app for that. A quick perusal of iTunes or the Google Play Store confirms this to be true – there is an app for everything, including our Catholic faith.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a bit of a Luddite when it comes to the techno world. For the longest time I resisted the siren song of assimilation. My wife and I shared a flip-phone until only a couple of years ago, and the smart phone I have now is probably woefully out of date… but it works. Frankly, I’m sure I use my phone and laptop to about 1% of their capacity – my laptop really isn’t much more than a glorified typewriter (if you can remember what that is).

This all said, I have found that my smart phone has helped me to deepen my faith, simply because There’s an app for that. Actually, there are many Catholic apps out there, and I’ll honestly admit that I haven’t researched them all, but I have found 3 Catholic apps that I use almost daily.

Laudate

Billed in the Google Play Store as the #1 Free Catholic App, Laudate lives up to the hype. Comprehensive, yet concise, this app has it all, but is streamlined for quick and easy use. I use the Laudate app daily for my morning offering, the saints of the day, as well as for the daily readings. I have also used the app sporadically to find prayers that are outside of my daily routine, to search out particular Bible verses, the Catechism or Vatican documents, as well as for its Examination of Conscience. The app also has other features such as the Liturgy of the Hours, Rosary/Chaplet, daily reflections, Stations of the Cross, Latin Prayers, EWTN, two Bible versions (NARE, Douay-Rheims) and access to a variety of Catholic media. Like I said, it has it all. Best of all, there is a Bookmark function that allows you to keep favourite aspects of the app at the top of the home page, saving you from having to hunt them out with 3 or 4 clicks. There is also an iPad version of the app, which my students have found to be very helpful in the classroom.

Honor your Inner Monk

This app is produced the Brothers at Saint Meinrad Archabbey to help the laity develop their daily prayer life, to discover their Inner Monk. I (try to) turn to this app twice a day for the morning and afternoon prayer. The prayers are short and to the point (never taking more than a minute), and with reflection are often very appropriate for whatever is going on in my life that day. One of the key elements of this app is your prayer tracker; like the tracker on your treadmill, you can watch your red line grow as you complete your prayers each day, ending with either cheers or jeers at the end of the month. In all honesty, each month my morning bar is usually a bit longer than my afternoon bar. The Inner Monk app has some other cool features including other short Catholic prayers, which you can use to accumulate bonus accolades, as well as a series of Gregorian Chants by the monks at the archabbey.

The Pope App

Admittedly, I don’t use The Pope App very often (but a good friend of my swears by it). This app is put out by news.va and is for Francis junkies. The Pope App provides video, audio and text of just about everything the Pope does. This app goes beyond news releases and brings the user the words of Francis from his public audiences, homilies and exhortations. It is even possible to live stream Papal events or pick up his Twitter feed (@pontifex).

I have a few other Catholic apps on my phone, which I really haven’t discovered yet. Perhaps the summer holidays will give me the chance to find a new favourite, or at least an app to come back to from time to time. These include Lighthouse Catholic Media, Shalom World, and DivineOffice. I would also be very curious if you have any other suggestions of Catholic apps for my smart phone, so leave them in the combox below.

Facing Our Fears with 5 Smooth Stones

Dear Theophilous,

I’ve gotten into the habit of listening to the cd’s put out by Lighthouse Catholic Media whenever I drive to and from my parents’ house. The ride is an hour door-to-door, which is perfect since the talks are also usually 45 minutes to an hour long. Doing the drive almost weekly for the past 20 years, I know the road well enough to be able to give the talks enough attention while still driving safely.

On the most recent jaunt to my folks’ to drop off my son for a “sleep” over, we listened to Mark Hart’s talk Facing Your Fears. My son loves listening to the Lighthouse cd’s and about 20 minutes into the ride he piped up from the back seat: “This guy’s quite a comedian!” A few minutes later we added our own comedic genius when Mark challenged his audience to meditate on what we would become the patron saint of once we got to heaven (God willing). Mark himself claims that he will become the patron saint of turning off lights in empty room. I couldn’t resist dropping the well-intentioned barb, “I’ll be the patron saint of flushing un-flushed toilets!” To which my son retorted without missing a beat: “And I’ll be the patron saint of not flushing toilets!”

As much as we are all called to become saints, Mark Hart’s talk went much deeper. He talks about how our fears keep us from becoming the saints we are meant to be. He likens our fears to the Philistine giant, Goliath; and that like David, we need to slay our giants, our Goliaths, our fears if we are to become the saints God has called us to be.

Although we all know the gist of the David and Goliath story, many of us don’t necessarily know all of the details. By divine providence, this story from the 1^st Book of Samuel provided the readings of the day for the week leading up to when I heard Mark Hart’s talk.

The story of David and Goliath can be found at 1 Samuel 17:32-51, and I won’t re-write the entire story here; but there are a couple of verses that I would like to highlight:

As David and Goliath squared off, the Philistine giant taunted the Hebrew shepherd boy, “Am I a dog, that you would come to me with sticks?” (1 Sm 17:43) Goliath then cursed David, threatening that he would leave him for dead; carrion for the birds. (1 Sm 17:44)

The giant, shield bearer before him and sword in hand, must have cut an imposing figure. It’s no wonder that none of the Israelite soldiers wanted to take him on. In the same way, our fears can also seem insurmountable, and we will do whatever we can to avoid them, instead of facing them head on.

We must answer the taunts of our fears the same way David answered the taunts of Goliath: “You come to me with sword and spear and javelin; but I come to you in the name of the Lord of hosts.” (1 Sm 17:45)

As Mark Hart puts it so clearly: “We don’t need to tell God how big our problems are; we need to tell our problems how big God is.”

That’s exactly what David did, he told Goliath how big God is.

We all know how the story ends… David slays Goliath with his sling and he cuts off the Giant’s head. But how did he do it? How did this ruddy youth, a mere shepherd boy, bring down the giant, a professional warrior who was armed to the teeth?

He put his trust in God.

When Saul saw that David was adamant in facing down the giant, he had him kitted out in his own personal armour. As a shepherd and not a warrior, however, David wasn’t used to the armour, could hardly walk in it, and refused to wear it (1 Sm 17:38-39). Instead, “David took his staff in his hand, and chose five smooth stones from the wadi and put them in his shepherd’s bag, in the pouch.” (1 Sm 17:40)

This is how David faced Goliath. Not with royal armour; not with the king’s sword; but with 5 smooth stones. This is how God calls us to face our own giants, our fears; not with the armour and sword of this world, but with the 5 smooth stones he provides for us.

So what are our 5 smooth stones provided by God to fight our fears?

I would propose that they are:

Ø  Humility;

Ø  Wisdom;

Ø  Virtue;

Ø  Courage; and the

Ø  Grace of God

I think that humility needs to be the first stone we place in our pouch. Too often our pride gets in our way and we see needing others as a sign of weakness. We would rather face our fears alone and fail, rather than admit that we have fears to begin with. We would rather cower in fear than put ourselves in debt to the Lord. Although David stood alone before Goliath, he was humble enough to know that he could not defeat the giant with out God’s help – “This very day the Lord will deliver you into my hand” (1 Sm 17:46). It takes a bigger person to admit that they are frightened, that they need help, that they need to put their trust in someone. In order to slay the giants of our fears, in all humility we need to say: Jesus, I trust in you!

The second stone we need to pick up and put in our pouch is Wisdom. How can we trust in God if we do not know His ways? The wisdom with which we arm ourselves cannot be boastful or arrogant – it needs to be the humble wisdom of understanding the difference between right and wrong; knowing that God’s way is always right, whether we understand or like it or not. If we have wisdom in the ways of the Lord, then, like Mark Hart says, we can tell our fears just how big our God is.

“There can be no Virtue without temptation,” is a quote from St. Augustine that has become almost a mantra for me. The devil prays on our fears. Satan knows that our fears are the chink in our armour; a weakness to be exploited through temptation. I find that the more I give in to a particular temptation, the greater my fear grows. By leading a life of virtue, a life that is in many ways harder than a life of vice, I can face down my fears and move on to the bigger and better things that God has called me to. A virtuous life is one that grows out of both humility and wisdom; the knowledge of His ways and the confidence to trust in Him.

Every day I pray for the smooth stone of Courage. Every morning before we leave the house, my son and I pray for the courage to be a light of God’s will in the darkness of the world. Let’s face it, the world must be a dark and scary place if even St. John Paul the Great proclaimed the presence of a Culture of Death. If we don’t have courage, how can we ever face our fears? We will remain paralysed, unable to move, unable to find the joy God has planned for us. Like the stones we’ve already placed in our pouch, courage is built upon the stones that have gone in before it.

It is the Grace of God, however, that is the stone that slays the giant of our fears. David himself recognizes this in Psalm 124 when he sings: If it had not been for the Lord who was on our side, when our enemies attacked us, then they would have swallowed us up alive. (Ps 124:2-3) St. Paul reiterates this when he writes: But by the grace of God I am what I am, and His grace toward me has not been in vain. (1 Cor 15:10) And of course there is the ubiquitous citation: If but for the grace of God go I; meaning that if it were not for the will of God, I too would have suffered. It truly is the Grace of God that defeats our demons. Demons, Satan and the temptations they play with our fears are greater than this world, and it will take God’s grace to defeat them, but we have the hope of knowing that our Lord will deliver us from our enemies.

The world is a dark and scary place, and our fears can seem bigger than ourselves. However, when we put the 5 smooth stones of humility, wisdom, virtue, courage, and God’s Grace in our pouch, we can face down our fears and win, just like David faced down Goliath and was victorious.

Re-sensitizing Ourselves to Sin



Dear Theophilus,

I was listening to a talk by Matthew Kelly published by Lighthouse Catholic Media the other day and I was struck by the imagery he used to describe how our souls can become desensitized to sin.

We treat our souls, it seems, much like we treat our cars.

When we wash our cars and clean out the backseat, for the first few days we’ll do whatever it takes to keep it clean. We’ll swerve into oncoming traffic to avoid puddles and forbid any kind of food in both the front and back seats. Each spring, once I’ve vacuumed a winter’s worth of grunge and dog fur out of my Volkswagen, my son is forced to endure a whole new set of stringent car rules with the promise that this year is going to be different and they will be enforced henceforth.

The problem is, Matthew Kelly points out, is that once the freshness of clean has worn off, we tend to let things slide a little. The dog will jump in the back seat, leaving behind fur and muddy paw prints that I promise myself I’ll clean on the weekend, but I never get to it. The empty water bottle used to refresh myself on a long car ride gets tossed into the back seat with the notion to dispose of it at my destination, but is forgotten once I get there. A coffee cup can languish for days in the cup holder. After awhile it’s no longer small bits of garbage, but sheets of paper, books, gym bags with even my hockey bag having spent a night or two in the back.

Each item, no matter how small, stands out like a sore thumb in a newly cleaned car, but becomes hidden, no matter how large, amongst all the other junk cluttering up my car. I’ve become desensitized to the mess that surrounds me.

Our souls are the same. A small venial sin will stand out on its own, but will soon seem inconsequential when it’s hidden among a host of other – seemingly inconsequential sins. What happens, though, is that all of these inconsequential sins will help make larger sins also seem inconsequential. We become desensitized to the mess that fills our soul.

The best way to remain sensitive to the clutter in our car is to keep it clean – heading to the car wash on a regular basis.

We can re-sensitize our souls to our sin in much the same way – keeping them clean by going to confession.

The Catholic Church stipulates that we go to confession at least once a year, but most of us will wash our car more often than that. On average, we go through a car once every 5 to 10 years, but our souls are for eternity – which should we keep better care of?

I’ve found that making a good and regular confession has re-sensitized me to my sin and I’m now much more aware of even the small, venial sins that I never considered to be sins before. If you haven’t been to confession in a while, I urge you to return to this grace-filled sacrament, using this examination of conscience as a guide. If it’s been so long that you feel intimidated by the experience, be not afraid, be up front with the priest and he will gently guide you through the process to help you refresh the cleanliness of your soul.