Chet Collins's Blog: Catholic Husband

Guy Club

Benedict attended a Catholic summer camp this year, a transformative experience that I still see reflected in his life more than 90 days since it ended. Although it only happened once during his five days at camp, there was a group event called Guy Club, where the boys huddled separately from the girls. This was the opportunity to deliver specific, relevant ministry to the boys using methods that would resound with them. Perhaps my favorite outcome from this session was their tagline/chant, “Red...

Faithful Departed

With All Saints Day, and All Souls Day behind us, we are entering into the end of the liturgical year. Soon the Sunday Gospel readings will focus on eschatology, the end times. It’s our annual confirmation, more specific than Lent and Advent, that this world is passing away.

There is a view that the Church uses evil as a stick, a means of scaring people into belief. This contradictory argument ignores many truths, all of which dovetail with our focus at the end of the year. We know that God is g...

Genealogy

The Old Testament, in particular, contains several long and confusing lineages. Whether conducting a census of the nation of Israel, or establishing connections between figures, these long lists of difficult-to-pronounce names glaze over our eyes, but carry an important message.

Family genealogy tends to be the purview of one or two people in each family, but the difficult work of mapping out family connections is significant. It not only connects us with our past, but shows the long and winding...

I Will Serve

Our core identity is as children of God, in an intimate relationship with our Creator and bearing His image and likeness. When we reject, or choose to ignore, our identity, chaos steps in to fill the void. How much more lost can you be in the world than not even knowing who you are?

Our identity is also a paradox. The things that we naturally desire, for the most part, are the things that are injurious to us. I used to believe that animals were rational in that they could only act in their self-...

Given Up for You

The prayers of the Church are always with us. In our private and communal prayer, the words we pray find their origin in Scripture and tradition, echoing through our lives. It’s not uncommon for a word or phrase so familiar to us to strike us, at a particular time and place, in an entirely new way.

During the Eucharistic Prayer at every Mass, the formula that Jesus spoke at the first Mass is prayed by the priest. Before the host is elevated, after the Holy Spirit has been called down, the words ...

Re-form

The process of preparing a man for priestly ordination is more than just educational. It’s true that seminaries are themselves, or affiliated with, degree granting institutions that result in graduate degrees. But it’s not simply enough to do the book work and pass the tests. Priesthood is not the result of a credential; it’s the result of a radical transformation.

Priestly formation takes many years; there’s the establishment of a firm foundation of philosophy before building up theological kno...

Inspire

Life was never simple; it was never easy. Our parents, grandparents, and great parents endured generational struggles. The American revolution, the Civil War, the Great Depression, two global conflicts, social unrest, they endured it all. We live in dark times, but darkness and evil are two threads that have run through human history.

What’s different now, what makes this period so dangerous, is that we’re trying to white-knuckle our way through it without God. When brother fought against brothe...

Choice

Pain is a warning system of the body; it’s a signal to our brains that there’s a problem somewhere in the system. Although discomforting, it aims to protect us from worse outcomes by getting our attention — now. We can feel physical pain or emotional pain, but its objective is the same.

Sainthood is something that feels so far beyond us. We know the stories of the saints, and how easy it is to sin in our golden age of ease. How could our story ever compare to the heroic virtue of theirs? The tru...

Ecclesia

In his 1946 book Remade for Happiness, Bishop Fulton Sheen dedicates considerable time challenging the assertion that religion is a personal experience without need for community. As Sheen moves through his argument, his central theme is the idea of ecclesia, that there is a commonness shared among all Catholics that reaches back to the founding of the Church and moves far beyond our present.

We think about this concept in another, more talked about, idea. The Communion of Saints is the whole Ch...

Give War A Chance

There is a grave sickness afflicting our society and culture. Too many people don’t believe in God; in denying His reality, they deny a part of what it means to be human. Humanity’s existence is due to God, but it also comes from God’s desire for intimacy with each one of us. By denying the existence of God, they deny the reality of evil. The two sides to the coin of this sickness is what drives so much of our misery. By separating ourselves from the font of grace, we are caught out in the open,...