I was coming from an Evangelical Protestant background, and before that from atheism, and ironically both had taught me, in different ways, that people will do evil things and fail.
So the abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, as disgusting as it was, did not shake my faith in God or His Church, and the resurgence and new revelations about the abuse crisis currently going on, likewise have not shaken my faith, nor should it shake yours.
But why shouldn’t it shake my faith? And shouldn’t we be justifiably angry? And shouldn’t we do something about this? And if so, what?
After graduating high school, I learned that a beloved teacher, whom I had for two years, had serially abused classmates of mine in school. That teacher moved around to different schools and school districts, and eventually when a brave child came forward with allegations, he went home to his house, poured gasoline around it, and set it and himself on fire. He died.
Then in college, I had just converted to Evangelical Protestantism from atheism, after suffering from a social anxiety disorder and depression. I joined a Baptist church. Some months later, a fellow Protestant young man, someone in many of my classes throughout college (we had the same major) was accused of abusing two children through the Protestant church.
So when I became Catholic, I did not have high expectations of how Catholics, whether lay or ordained, would behave. I did not expect them to be immune from the temptations that everyone faces to do evil. Of course, being Catholics they should have more graces to resist such evil, but given the anemic state of the Church when I became Catholic, which was evident to me even then, it did not surprise me that massive evils and failures had been perpetrated by even priests and bishops.
My faith was in God, not in the human leaders of His Church here on earth.
Fast forward to 17 years later. I’m still Catholic. No intention of being anything else.
Now we have new revelations of the depth of evil that was done by hundreds of priests, and how it was covered up. We have revelations as well of a high ranking bishop who, even after the abuse scandal exploded, continued to abuse seminarians, and that many other bishops knew about it (a “secret in plain sight”) and did nothing about it.
My Catholic friends are up in arms. Here’s several things they have been doing:
They are angry. They want reform. They want to send a loud message to the craven bishops that they won’t take this garbage anymore.
Meanwhile, one bishop wrote a letter to be read at his diocese at all the Masses. In this letter, the bishop:
No wonder that my friends have been angry and have resorted to activism. Such milquetoast, bureaucratic statements from bishops read more like lawyer-speak and bean-counting than true spiritual leadership.
Other friends of mine are making blog posts, creating videos, and digging into to “get the dirt” on all that is going on. Where was Vigano when? What did Pope Benedict know about all this? Which bishops are telling the truth and which are lying? What did Pope Francis know and what did he do, and is he lying now?
I understand: we want to know the truth. We want to have the answers. We want to demand that the leaders of Christ’s Church, even up to the Pope, answer for their actions, face the music, and are punished if they have been lying to us.
I saw a bumper sticker the other day on a truck that said “throw out all the incumbents!” An alluring thought: all those people we just voted in? Yeah let’s throw them out because they’re no good. Then let’s elect new people! That will solve it.
But the new people would be just as bad as the old people. Because the soil from which all the people have grown is poisonous.
So if activism is not the best response, what is?
Personally, I have decided that I can’t change other people. At least not directly. So while I don’t condemn my friends for taking the actions they have, I am approaching it through prayer and personal conversion.
The only person I can change is myself. The only way I can change (and become a saint) is through prayer.
So I am praying novenas, praying the Rosary daily with my family (20 minutes of vocal prayer per day, the bare minimum in justice we owe to our Lord), and practicing mental prayer each day for 10 minutes (the second level of prayer after vocal prayer).
I wish I were at the prayer of simplicity, level 3 of prayer, but I am not. I am barely at level 2, in spite of being a Catholic for 17 years.
And regarding novenas, I pray novenas through my mobile app that you can get here for free: https://pray.app.link/GetTheApp
God is not mocked. He has allowed all this evil to go on in His Church, scandalizing countless people. These men think that they have gotten away with it, escaping human authorities. They may have done that, but they haven’t escaped God’s ultimate justice. No one escapes it. And many of them are old now, and close to meeting God face-to-face. No amount of smirks and dissembling will work then. The millstones are heavy they have tied around their necks.
My faith remains in the Holy Trinity. The Church’s teachings continue to be as true as they ever were, in spite of the men who have violated those teachings in abhorrent ways.
Put your faith in God; follow the teachings of the Church, and become a saint through prayer.
]]>Many are expecting something momentous to occur on that day.
All are called to pray in a special way on that day.
The Blessed Virgin Mary appeared on 1917 to three Portuguese children: Lucia, Francisco, and Jacinta. From May 13th to October 13th she appeared six times in the little village of Fatima, Portugal.
World War I or The Great War as it was known at the time, was ongoing, leaving devastation across Europe. Our Lady of Fatima came at this pivotal time telling the children that peace was possible if people would heed her warnings.
Lucia, Francisco, and Jacinta were reared in faithful Catholic homes, in a town that remained faithful to the Church amidst persecution from the government. Lucia de Jesus Santos was the youngest of seven children. Her first cousins, Francisco and Jacinta Marto, likewise were devout children from a large family. Through the apparitions of our Lady, the children grew in holiness and wisdom that belied their young age.
Francisco and Jacinta both died a few years later, as our Lady had informed them, while Lucia lived to be 97 years old. Pope Francis will canonize Jacinta and Francisco on May 13th, 2017, in Fatima on the 100th anniversary of the apparitions.
The Miracle of the Sun occurred on October 13th, 1917, witnessed by 70,000 people. Our Lady of Fatima had told the children of the date and place it would occur.
All could look directly at the sun without any injury to their eyes. The sun grew in size, shrunk, rotated and spun, looking as if it were dancing. Even non-Catholics and unbelievers witnessed their miracles, and many immediately were converted to God and asked for forgiveness for their sins.
The Church through the local bishop declared the apparitions worthy of belief in October of 1930.
Our Lady called for the consecration of Russia, with the hope that Russia would not spread her errors around the world. Note that the (Communist) Russian Revolution occurred also in 1917 around the same time period as the Marian apparitions.
Many have debated whether Russia was consecrated or not, whether her errors were spread or not, but everyone agrees that the decades after 1917 in the twentieth century witnessed unspeakable evils: atheistic Communism, World War I, Nazism, World War II, nuclear bombs, the Cold War, the sexual revolution, and along with it the widespread loss of faith to secularism and the weakening of the Church.
Now, the one hundred year period is ending. Could this also mean, at long last, a renewal and restoration in the Church, and through her, in the world at large?
We see signs of such life here and there, but from a human, natural perspective we don’t seem on the precipice of such a pivot. It will take a supernatural event or movement.
Fortunately, our Lord had made it simple for us: we are called to pray.
In particular, we can pray the Novena to Our Lady of Fatima beginning May 4. This novena is even more powerful on this anniversary as millions will be praying it together.
Join your heart with theirs, lifted up to God for the great need the world is in of conversion and salvation in Christ.
Will we see a miraculous event? I can’t say. Our Lord alone knows. But I will pray that His will be done!
Originally published at heroicvirtuecreations.com on May 2, 2017.
]]>I knew it helped me to remember to pray novenas and to not forget which day I was on, but would other Catholics find it similarly useful?
Well, the verdict came in: Catholics loved the app. We were inundated with (mostly) five-star reviews, novena requests, and emails of thanks. We saw prayer warriors from Tanzania to England, the Philippines to Japan, Australia to Sweden and many countries in between.
We listened to what users wanted and implemented their requests in the app.
Along the way, I was touched by the heartfelt emails that people sent to me through the app–yes they all go right into my email–with requests for prayers on everything from cancer to depression, to finding their future spouse to conceiving children.
I could relate to most of these requests–I had prayed novenas for the very same hopes!–and so a community was born based around this ancient devotional practice within Christ’s Church.
During my single years, while seeking God’s vocation for my life, I prayed numerous novenas to St. Joseph for wisdom in discernment and then for the grace to meet my future wife. It was through such prayers that I met my wife Catherine.
We hoped for children right away, but months passed and no children were conceived. So we prayed more novenas, and we conceived. We had such joy, but two months later we miscarried, the first first of three children we lost to miscarriage.
We turned again to God through novenas and conceived, and our son Edmund was born.
Again and again our Lord has been faithful to us through the prayers of the saints. Through the novenas, we have grown closer to these great saints as well, learning more about them, feeling a kinship with them in the communion of saints.
The only problem was: the Pray app was serving roughly half of Catholics: it was only on Apple devices like iPhones and iPads, not on Android ones. And given that many inexpensive Android devices are accessible and used by Catholics in developing countries and around the world, we needed to port the app to Android.
Technically speaking, this is a difficult task. It required a rewrite of the app using a different programming language on a completely different platform.
We did a crowdfunding campaign through IndieGogo and raised $1,300. Normally, that would not pay for even one-tenth of the price of a mobile app, but because Chad and I are programmers and have ties to the software development community, we were able to find a mutually beneficial situation with a up-and-coming Android developer. He was willing to write the app for almost the exact amount we had raised!
The result: we are now live in the Google Play store with the Pray app!
I’ve been amazed at how many Catholics are now praying novenas with the app. Before the app, I prayed perhaps two novenas per year. In the past year, I prayed 19 novenas! The app made it that easy.
What’s also been amazing is how generous our patrons have been. Originally in the app, there was no way to pay for it (app was free) and no way to donate to our mission of spreading novena prayers around the world.
You could unlock novenas by sharing them with a friend. But people emailed me explaining they had already invited all their friends, or didn’t have many friends, so could they please just donate or pay us?
We listened and added in a patronage model. You could become a patron for $4.99 per year or $9.99 per year. You get the same benefits no matter which level you choose to become a patron at. The surprising result: half the patrons chose the higher level of patronage!
This was a big validation to us that our mission and execution of it in the app was helpful. People wanted us to continue work on the app, and so we have. By their generosity we have been able to add more features, more novenas, bring it to Android, and have many other plans for it.
As this goes to publication, not only is the app now on Android, but also we’ve added the amazing Divine Mercy Novena to the app.
This novena and the Chaplet that goes with it has been a favorite of mine ever since I learned of it shortly after becoming Catholic. The Marians kindly gave me permission to add the novena to the app, for which I am grateful.
The app is becoming the #1 Catholic app in the world. Join us and begin to grow closer to God in prayer!
]]>I’m Devin, and my neighbor and friend Chad decided to develop an app together in the Catholic space, one that I have been involved in for fifteen years.
Originally, the app was going to do All the Catholic Things! but through Chad’s experience we wisely pared it down to have it do one thing well.
That one thing was helping Catholics pray novenas.
A novena is a nine-day prayer to God through the intercession of a saint. So, you might ask St. Joseph to pray for you to become a better husband and father. Or you might ask St. Anne to pray for you for God’s help in finding your husband.
Novenas are hard to pray, because they span nine days, each day has a specific prayer to pray, and trying to remember what day you are on and where the prayers are found (often scattered across the web) can be difficult. Our Pray: the Catholic Novena App solved those problems.
So we started development, focusing on Apple devices first to see if we could get traction with the app. By early June we had a release ready with about twenty novenas possible to pray.
We released and rejoiced when thousands of people discovered the app and started using it! And those people were across the entire world, praying at all hours day and night.
We launched with features enabling people to pray a novena or even multiple ones at a time, giving them the ability to connect to facebook and share prayer intentions with friends, notifying them each day to remind them to pray their novena, tracking the novenas they had prayed, and giving them the option to connect to friends to pray together. All these features took considerable time to develop and refine. And once we released, we heard feedback that many people didn’t want to connect to facebook (privacy concerns, some legitimate, some not, but either way we made that feature optional).
We also had a large number of people clamoring for an Android version. The tough thing is that porting to Android meant a total rewrite of the app with a different programming language, patterns, platform, and devices.
We turned to our blossoming community of novena prayer warriors and set up an IndieGogo crowd funding effort. We raised over $1,300, which normally would not be near enough to fund a mobile app’s development. But by using our extensive connections in the developer community in Austin, Texas, we were able to find a talented young Android developer willing to take on the project and grow his own portfolio and skills.
As of this writing, end of 2016, the Android port is two-thirds complete, and we couldn’t be happier.
We started with zero users praying zero novenas in mid-2016. By the end of the year, thousands of people prayed tens of thousands of novenas in just six months’ time. We averaged three novenas per person, an incredible number given that most Catholics do not even pray one novena per year.
What surprised us was how worldwide our audience was: people were praying in England, Australia, Sweden, Japan, South America, Canada, Africa, and Southeast Asia.
We also have had feature requests, novena requests, and positive feedback pour in everyday. It overwhelmed my inbox, a happy problem to have!
Near the end of the year, we launched our patronage program. You see, the app itself is free. But we had people actually asking us to let them pay us money to support our efforts — wow! So we rolled out a way for users to become patrons at three different levels, and were amazed at the response: Hundreds of users generously became patrons, enabling us to be able to fund the rest of the Android development and bring the app to millions more people. And those patrons came in from countless countries. We had to start looking up the currency of each patron to discover which country it was from! Worldwide prayers going up, incredible.
For 2017, we have several plans.
First is finishing the Android version and releasing it worldwide.
Second is publishing another twenty-five novenas based on the popular demand.
Third is growing the community and strengthening the connections between people in it. (Feel free to join our Facebook community.)
Fourth is helping educate Catholics and all people about the beauty of novena prayers. It’s been a joy to hear how people have been blessed by the app. Such a simple thing, but one that is helpful to people in growing closer to God.
I can’t wait to see mountains move from faithful prayers in 2017!
]]>A year ago we set out to write a mobile app to help Catholics pray novenas — nine day prayers asking for the intercession of a saint — and the result was Pray: the Catholic Novena App.
We were overwhelmed with the response. In the first week we had thousands of users.
People loved the app. They appreciated its focused, intuitive design and flow, as well as the elegance of the overall look and feel.
Over the past six months since our launch, we’ve added many new novenas, features, and even introduced a patronage model. The app is free but users can become a patron to help us with the ongoing work of maintaining and improving the app.
The app is only on Apple devices: iPhones, iPads, iPods. But we had such a great response that we have hired a developer to port the app to Android, and we expect to launch on that platform in early 2017.
Our goal is to change the world through prayer. Specifically, through the prayers of the saints, that great cloud of witnesses that worship before the throne of God. Already thousands of Catholics and non-Catholics have joined us in this mission.
We at Devoted Coders invite you to join us as well.
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