Question: At bars, I kiss my roommate (we’re both female) to get the attention of guys. It’s just kinda fun and we think it’s harmless and we don’t go farther than that. Is that a sin?

There exist thin lines between harmless, dumb, stupid, harmful and sinful. Two women using their sexuality in “harmless” ways can often verge on doing or causing great harm. Why are you trying to get the attention on guys this way? What’s the difference between this and flashing your naked breasts?
Chastity is the integration of sexuality into our lives (Catechism of the Catholic Church # 2337). Does making out with your girlfriend integrate or disintegrate sexuality in your lives?
St. Ignatius teaches…

Question: Should I have my kids only receive gifts for a charity this Christmas or would that be against our tradition?  We’re pretty well off but I understand that we really should exchange some kind of gift during the Christmas season?
We live in convoluted and confusing times.  Before the present economic crisis, people in the USA spent $200 Billion a year on Christmas gifts (de Graff cited in Malloy 2007:144).  That’s $850 per person! (I need go get better friends).  All this to celebrate the birth of Jesus born in poverty.  We often give someone something they really don’t want or need, and, a few months later, cannot remember what the gift was (or what was given us in return).
Nowhere in canon…

Pope Paul VI, in his encyclical Humanae Vitae (On Human Life), clearly states there are at least “two meanings of the conjugal act: the unitive meaning and the procreative meaning” (HV #12).  Certainly a husband and wife who cannot conceive a child are called to continue to express their love for one another (the unitive meaning).  Sex is a gift and gifts are to be accepted and enjoyed.  Just as a couple who are past child bearing years can relax and enjoy sex even more as their love deepens and ripens with age, so too can those who unfortunately cannot conceive still grow in their love for one another and express that love through their sexual union.
Secondly, the couple has no control over the natural rhythms…

Read Bustedhalo.com daily! =)
And read some of the classic reflections on faith and service like Thomas Merton’s letter to a young activist or the “Oscar Romero” prayer (which actually was penned by Bishop Ken Utener.
Read about the great ones: Gandhi, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr. Read good contemporary spiritual writers: John Dear, S.J., Annie Lamott, Anthony DeMello, S.J., Richard Rohr, Megan McKenna. There are many more.
Read and re-read the gospels and try and attend Mass often. Usually, busyness can make it seem we have no time for prayer and reflection, but there are always 10 minute spaces where one can pull out the rosary beads.
One practice many young people doing a year of service find helpful…

The answer to this question is a bit above my pay grade. As a Jesuit, I’m not in the loop of the diocesan priests’ world. They better know who is moving up the ladder of ecclesiastical offices. The priests who study in Rome seem to get to know one another and they would have a better sense of who from other countries has a chance of becoming Pope. If you really want the inside gossip on such matters, the respected blog “Whispers in the Loggia” is the site to click.
The Center for Research in the Apostolate in Washington provides some great info on the world wide church. In 2025, there will be some 606 million Catholics in Latin America; 228 million in Africa; 81 million in the USA (Malloy 2007, p. 168). So you can see the…

The simple answer is that statues of saints remind us of the saint and their heroic efforts on behalf of the people of God and the spreading of the Gospel Good News so needed in every age. We gaze upon and ponder statues and pray to become like the great witnesses to God’s love and mercy and justice. We don’t worship the statue or the saint. We let our imagination be fired up by thoughts of who that saint was and what he or she did. We hope to grow to be like the saint in their dedication to God and God’s people.
I have coffee mug with an image of a young St. Ignatius on it and a famous quote of his. Every morning, the image and the quote remind me to strive to be a faithful and loving Jesuit as St. Ignatius wants us to be.
Graven images…

Symbols matter and communicate. What we wear “says” something. One would not show up at a Philadelphia Eagles game in a NY Giants jersey and expect to go unnoticed. A man who takes off his wedding ring before going on a business trip to Las Vegas would be questioned closely by his wife.
Funerals are times of sober reflection, prayer and celebration of a deceased person’s life. If I am not going to wear black, I need to think about what my attire communicates. Does my choice of dress or suit say I care about the person and appreciate and understand the profundity of the occasion? Or do my jeans and tee shirt or tank top say, “This is no different than a quick trip to Target.” If I choose not to wear black, why do I choose…

Born in Spain in 1580, Peter Claver, a bright student, entered the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) and spent most of his life serving the slaves in Cartagena. From 1610 until his death he reached out to those captured by slave traders and brought to the new world. A third of the imprisoned Africans died in transit, the dreaded middle passage. Claver made his life’s mission outreach to these people caught up in the horrors of the slave trade. For over 40 years he brought small gifts (medicine, fruit, brandy, bread, etc.) to those held in cargo holds and shipside slave pens. He catechized and baptized over 300,000 slaves. When invited by the slave traders to lodge in better quarters, Claver chose to stay with the slaves.…

St. Peter Canisius, a Dutchman known as the second apostle of Germany, was a 16th century Jesuit in the forefront of the effort to respond to the critiques of the Catholic church being made by protestant reformers in Germany, Switzerland and other parts of Europe. His pastoral strategies were built on the Jesuit idea of trying to see the good in the ideas and opinions of one’s interlocutor. He felt clarification of the church’s teaching was more helpful than decrying the ideas of the Lutherans and others. The three catechisms he published left a lasting imprint on the religious formation of many, many people of his times. He was one of the most respected and influential churchmen of his age, advising Emperors…

St. Edmund Campion was born in 1540 and rose to great political, ecclesiastical and academic prominence in Elizabethan England. The Queen (the daughter of Henry VIII) and others recognized Campion’s talents and many spoke of him as a future Archbishop of Canterbury in the young Anglican church. To be a Roman Catholic in Elizabethan England was a crime punishable by death. In his early 30s, Campion chucked it all and went to Rome where he entered the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits. At the age of 40, he returned to England to preach the faith. Soon imprisoned for his work, the Queen offered him honors and influential offices if he would renounce the Catholic faith of Rome. Campion refused. He suffered torture on the…

“The mandatum is fundamentally an acknowledgment by Church authority that a Catholic professor of a theological discipline is a teacher within the full communion of the Catholic Church” (http://www.usccb.org/bishops/guidelines.shtml ). The mandatum is a relational reality between a Bishop and a Catholic person teaching Catholic theology within the diocese. A Catholic teaching Buddhism, or a non-Catholic teaching church history are not given mandatums. The Bishop is expected to give the mandatum to the theologian (“If all the conditions for granting the mandatum are fulfilled, the teacher has a right to receive it and ecclesiastical authority has an obligation in justice to grant it. (Cf. http://www.usccb.org/bishops/guidelines.shtml…

Tell them the church is a hospital for sinners, not a showcase for saints. The transformation that begins at our Baptism is, for most of us, an affair of one step forward, three steps sideways, two steps back, and two steps forward. The human condition is characterized by original sin, the truth that things are not as they should be. The good news is that God comes to save us from the sinfulness of our lives and times.
Also, challenge those who will eschew the church because of the hypocrisy of some members. Sure there are some hypocrites, but what about the millions of Catholics of good character who authentically integrate the practice of the faith into their lives of love and service? Do other institutions (education,…

The answer is “No.” And many people wonder why. I have met many men who would gladly serve as deacons, but they cannot promise to remain unmarried if their wife should die. Most cogently say, “How could I deny my children a women who would love them as their mother did if she died? They would need a new Mom.”
It is little known, but a married deacon whose wife dies can petition Rome for permission to remarry. See Deacon Greg Kandra’s cogent comments on this issue.
On some different lines, a married protestant minister can now be ordained a deacon and then a priest. His wife and children attend his ordinations. There are dozens of such married priests serving in the Roman Catholic church in the USA today…

Question: I have had to be away from my wife of ten years and our children for several weeks as I am taking a Christian course but my sexual urge is driving me “crazy” now. It’s almost all I think about and I am not happy about that.  I need to focus on other things but sex is almost all i think about! Would it be a sin against God if my wife and I were to masturbate with each other over the phone?

Our contemporary world presents us with possibilities and choices never thought of in previous times.
On one level, I wonder if you should strive more to control your sexual appetites and not allow your sexual urge to drive you “crazy.” Easy for me to say. And I’m the guy who cannot resist eating an extra Tastykake…

Mike Hayes, one of the editors at Bustedhalo® opined in response to this question, “I think kissing WITHOUT passion might be a sin.”
Mortal sin is “deadly sin,” sin that separates us from the community and God on a deep and real level. To persist in mortal sin, knowingly and will full intention of the will, cuts us off from the life of grace, the power of God to save us and bring us to eternal life.
It is difficult to argue that passionate kissing by itself could rise to the level of mortal sin. Now if you’re kissing another person’s spouse or your close relative, consequences may be more complicated.…

The Church is very clear. Full, complete, genital sexual activity is reserved for those in the sacramental covenant of marriage.
Let me gently challenge the “where should the line be drawn” type questions. Love is not a reality that is measured and molded by rigid rules. The reality of love, God’s very self, is the transformation of human persons into beings who can live forever with God. That transformation begins when we are conceived and is marked by our Baptism. Any and everything we choose to do should be in tune with that transformation of our hearts and minds and souls.
The challenge for those who are not married is to find appropriate and just ways of expressing what their relationship means. The “100…

The simple answer is “Yes.” The priest may just have forgotten to lead the community in the prayer or may have a good pastoral reason for omitting it (e.g., a baptism during Mass, time constraints, etc.)
Could I also gently challenge the questioner? Where do these “does it count” questions come from? What spirit elicits in us this need or desire to worry about what “counts”? For some, Mass devolves into doing the bare minimum: “Does Mass “count” if I’m there from offertory to communion?” And those who leave before the final blessing make me wonder why they come at all, although again, maybe someone has a real need to leave immediately after communion: e.g., a sick child or elderly parent who…

God does not desire that we suffer. God realizes that creation has gone horribly wrong (that’s what the book of Genesis gets at poetically). God’s plan is to respond with the power of Divine redemptive and healing love to the ways in which creation has gone awry. God’s love is the transformative power of the Holy Spirit given us in our relationship with Jesus.
The reality is that suffering in human life is a given. God desires to save us from suffering and death. I have often preached, “There are only two things of which I am absolutely certain. One is that God loves us. Two, human persons suffer.” No one has ever disagreed with number two.
The great lesson of our faith is that there is no resurrection without…

The only thing I know for certain is that a rule of architecture says that “form follows function.” And therefore, we have a bit of a clash in post Vatican II Church Architecture.
We have older churches with high ceilings and long aisles with pews lined up in parallel rows. This emphasized the transcendent nature of worship and our relationship to God Almighty high above us.
Newer churches, with lower ceilings, often “in the round,” having people sit so they can see one another, emphasized the communal sense of worship and the community formed as we join around the table of the Lord.
The Eucharist is both meal and sacrifice. We have both a table and an altar. Church architecture reflects this breadth and width…

1. Read the reading beforehand. Read it again. And again. Ask the priest or someone how to pronounce a word of which you are unsure. Read notes about the readings. Get a sense of what you are proclaiming.
2. Realize you are proclaiming the Word. Be expressive (but not histrionic). Don’t rush. But don’t be so slow that people think you cannot read easily.
3. Keep your finger on your space in the text and look up, make eye contact with your brothers and sisters for whom you are reading. You are helping them encounter God in the Word proclaimed.
4. Use your “thirty foot” voice, not your “six inch” voice. Speak from your diaphragm not your throat.
5. Practice with the microphone beforehand. Ask someone if you can…