Athletes deny themselves all sorts of things, to win a crown that withers, but we fight for an imperishable crown.  So, run so as to win the race.

Ascesis is the practice of self-discipline.  For the Christian it is the interior combat: a spiritual combat that is harder than man’s battles.  In the relationship with God we have the freedom which gives us the ability to rise to our highest good.  What we need to have are senses that are alive, sharpened and perceptive to the good.  Ascesis is an awakening from the sleep-walking of daily life.  The purpose of ascesis is to divest oneself of surplus weight, of spiritual fat.  Ascesis is not obedience to some abstract categorical imperative.  It frees human nature to follow its deep instinct to ascend towards God.  We pass from a state of being “contrary to nature” to one of being in “harmony with nature,” in harmony, that is, with that human (and cosmic in the sense of the world, but not “worldliness”) material united with Christ, with the godhead, without separation or confusion.  St. Benedict, the father of Western monasticism.  “If justice leads us to propose some mild constraint in order to correct vices and to preserve love, do not at once fly in dismay from the path of salvation, which once cannot enter except through a narrow gate.  For as you gradually in a holy life and in faith, your heart is enlarged and you run the way of God’s commandments in an ineffable sweetness of love.”  Rule, prologue 47-49.  Fasting aids us in the journey of Lent, and must be joined to love of neighbor or it is devoid of strength.  “Fasting lightens the body, prepares is for resurrection, and opens it to healing grace.  It makes the soul more readily transparent and predisposes it to the study of Wisdom, to listening to the Word.  It makes mutual sharing possible.”  Thoughts from Olivier Clement.

Madrid has finally launched the much anticipated English version of the Official WYD website.

Click here to visit.

The official Kansas World Youth Brochure for Madrid 2011 has been released! You can find it by clicking here.

To come to know God—the true God—means to receive hope. We who have always lived with the Christian concept of God, and have grown accustomed to it, have almost ceased to notice that we possess the hope that ensues from a real encounter with this God. The example of a saint of our time can to some degree help us understand what it means to have a real encounter with this God for the first time. I am thinking of the African Josephine Bakhita, canonized by Pope John Paul II. She was born around 1869—she herself did not know the precise date—in Darfur in Sudan. At the age of nine, she was kidnapped by slave-traders, beaten till she bled, and sold five times in the slave-markets of Sudan. Eventually she found herself working as a slave for the mother and the wife of a general, and there she was flogged every day till she bled; as a result of this she bore 144 scars throughout her life. Finally, in 1882, she was bought by an Italian merchant for the Italian consul Callisto Legnani, who returned to Italy as the Mahdists advanced. Here, after the terrifying “masters” who had owned her up to that point, Bakhita came to know a totally different kind of “master”—in Venetian dialect, which she was now learning, she used the name “paron” for the living God, the God of Jesus Christ. Up to that time she had known only masters who despised and maltreated her, or at best considered her a useful slave. Now, however, she heard that there is a “paron” above all masters, the Lord of all lords, and that this Lord is good, goodness in person. She came to know that this Lord even knew her, that he had created her—that he actually loved her. She too was loved, and by none other than the supreme “Paron”, before whom all other masters are themselves no more than lowly servants. She was known and loved and she was awaited. What is more, this master had himself accepted the destiny of being flogged and now he was waiting for her “at the Father's right hand”. Now she had “hope” —no longer simply the modest hope of finding masters who would be less cruel, but the great hope: “I am definitively loved and whatever happens to me—I am awaited by this Love. And so my life is good.” Through the knowledge of this hope she was “redeemed”, no longer a slave, but a free child of God. She understood what Paul meant when he reminded the Ephesians that previously they were without hope and without God in the world—without hope because without God. Hence, when she was about to be taken back to Sudan, Bakhita refused; she did not wish to be separated again from her “Paron”. On 9 January 1890, she was baptized and confirmed and received her first Holy Communion from the hands of the Patriarch of Venice. On 8 December 1896, in Verona, she took her vows in the Congregation of the Canossian Sisters and from that time onwards, besides her work in the sacristy and in the porter's lodge at the convent, she made several journeys round Italy in order to promote the missions: the liberation that she had received through her encounter with the God of Jesus Christ, she felt she had to extend, it had to be handed on to others, to the greatest possible number of people. The hope born in her which had “redeemed” her she could not keep to herself; this hope had to reach many, to reach everybody. Pope Benedict XVI Spe Salvi 3