GROWING UP a guide to puberty DVD Ref: 0097DI attended a viewing of this DVD with some parents some time ago. Whilst some parents expressed some uneasiness, none wanted to withdraw their children from the presentations, which would be given by school nurses, for fear of disadvantaging their children. A couple who have experience of raising a large family were very much opposed to it.
The film describes the changes happening to a child's body as he/she approaches and enters adolescence, dealing with both the physical and emotional aspects involved. Topics covered include:- Puberty, Changing Emotions, Social Expectations, Masturbation, Wet Dreams, Circumcision, Menstruation, Management of Periods and Hygiene. "the Bounty video 'Growing Up: A Guide to Puberty' widely used up and down the country and often thought of as being ideal to help plan and deliver SRE within primary school' Chris Mayer Editor of RCN School Nurse Forum Newsletter 2003.
Audience 8 - 12 yrs
Notes (updated 2003)
'I bless you, Father, Lord or heaven and earth, for hiding these things from the learned and the clever and revealing them to mere children.' (Mt 11:25 - Jerusalem Bible)These words could not be more appropriate for today's commemoration. Here are some details about Blessed Kateri from AmericanCatholic.org.
The blood of martyrs is the seed of saints. Nine years after the Jesuits Isaac Jogues and John de Brébeuf were tomahawked by Iroquois warriors, a baby girl was born near the place of their martyrdom, Auriesville, New York.
Her mother was a Christian Algonquin, taken captive by the Iroquois and given as wife to the chief of the Mohawk clan, the boldest and fiercest of the Five Nations. When she was four, Kateri lost her parents and little brother in a smallpox epidemic that left her disfigured and half blind. She was adopted by an uncle, who succeeded her father as chief. He hated the coming of the Blackrobes (Jesuit missionaries), but could do nothing to them because a peace treaty with the French required their presence in villages with Christian captives. She was moved by the words of three Blackrobes who lodged with her uncle, but fear of him kept her from seeking instruction. She refused to marry a Mohawk brave and at 19 finally got the courage to take the step of converting. She was baptized with the name Kateri (Catherine) on Easter Sunday.
Now she would be treated as a slave. Because she would not work on Sunday, she received no food that day. Her life in grace grew rapidly. She told a missionary that she often meditated on the great dignity of being baptized. She was powerfully moved by God’s love for human beings and saw the dignity of each of her people.
She was always in danger, for her conversion and holy life created great opposition. On the advice of a priest, she stole away one night and began a 200-mile walking journey to a Christian Indian village at Sault St. Louis, near Montreal.
For three years she grew in holiness under the direction of a priest and an older Iroquois woman, giving herself totally to God in long hours of prayer, in charity and in strenuous penance. At 23 she took a vow of virginity, an unprecedented act for an Indian woman, whose future depended on being married. She found a place in the woods where she could pray an hour a day—and was accused of meeting a man there!
Her dedication to virginity was instinctive: She did not know about religious life for women until she visited Montreal. Inspired by this, she and two friends wanted to start a community, but the local priest dissuaded her. She humbly accepted an “ordinary” life. She practiced extremely severe fasting as penance for the conversion of her nation. She died the afternoon before Holy Thursday. Witnesses said that her emaciated face changed color and became like that of a healthy child. The lines of suffering, even the pockmarks, disappeared and the touch of a smile came upon her lips. She was beatified in 1980.
Comment:
We like to think that our proposed holiness is thwarted by our situation. If only we could have more solitude, less opposition, better health. Kateri repeats the example of the saints: Holiness thrives on the cross, anywhere. Yet she did have what Christians—all people—need: the support of a community. She had a good mother, helpful priests, Christian friends. These were present in what we call primitive conditions, and blossomed in the age-old Christian triad of prayer, fasting and alms: union with God in Jesus and the Spirit, self-discipline and often suffering, and charity for her brothers and sisters.
Quote:
Kateri said: “I am not my own; I have given myself to Jesus. He must be my only love. The state of helpless poverty that may befall me if I do not marry does not frighten me. All I need is a little food and a few pieces of clothing. With the work of my hands I shall always earn what is necessary and what is left over I’ll give to my relatives and to the poor. If I should become sick and unable to work, then I shall be like the Lord on the cross. He will have mercy on me and help me, I am sure.”
Maybe I should begin by introducing myself and saying why I am here in Marquette. Why have I come to this part of the world which is certainly very beautiful in the summer but which I have been warned is so cold in winter?
I’ve been a priest for 13 years, the first four of which were at the Cathedral of my archdiocese of Southwark which comprises that part of London which is south of the River Thames and the whole of the county of Kent. For the last 9+ years, I was pastor of a parish in Ashford, Kent. It was not without its challenges but, thanks be to God, it was a time of many blessings and I was able to rejoice in the spiritual growth of many people in the parish and in the reconciliation of many with the Church after having been away. My special joy was to share the lives, the joys and the sorrows, of many lovely families. However, I discerned that it was time to ‘move on’. Rather than immediately become pastor of another parish I thought it might be better to have an opportunity to review and renew my priestly life and ministry by being in another local Church. Whilst visiting Bishop Sample last summer, I asked whether a sabbatical year in his diocese might be a possibility and he immediately responded affirmatively. So, here I am. Bishop Sample and I were classmates in Rome and so I am privileged to count him as a friend. I hope I don’t say or do anything in my time here in Marquette to ruin that friendship!
When I tell people I am a Canon Lawyer, the expression ‘Oh no!’ is not unusual. For perhaps they perceive laws to be somewhat incompatible with the ‘new commandment’ of love that the Lord proclaimed. And we hear something about law in today’s scripture readings. In the book of Deuteronomy, Moses tells the people to ‘heed the voice of the Lord … and keep his commandments … that are written in the book of the law.’ But he also says that this law is also contained somewhere else: ‘in your mouths and in your hearts.’ And yet how often we find God’s law difficult to discern, hear, obey and proclaim.
It is an expert in the law who tries to test Jesus in today’s Gospel. But Jesus tells him that it is in the very law in which he is an expert that the key to eternal life is to be found and he gets the lawyer to summarise for himself, in quoting from the books of Deuteronomy and Leviticus, the law to love the Lord God will all one’s heart, being, strength and mind, and to love one’s neighbour as oneself. But this expert in the law appears not to understand a key point of the law. He thinks he knows what loving God is about, but does not know who his neighbour is. Here we see how this law which is not distant from us, which is in our hearts, is not always easy for us to discern as our minds and our wills are wounded by sin: the original sin of our first parents, and our own personal sins.
We are like that man on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. Jerusalem is the house of peace, the place of worship where God’s temple is to be found. The plain of Jericho on the other hand is waste and desolate, its climate hot and unhealthy. The man in our Good Samaritan parable was travelling from the city of the temple and health to the city where the conditions for a healthy life are not so good. He was travelling from the city perched on Mount Zion downhill to a city 1200 feet below sea level. He was descending rather than ascending. He was sliding away from God, and became vulnerable to spiritual attacks symbolised by the encounter with the robbers who stripped him of his true dignity as a man made to dwell in the city of God, stripped him of the splendour of supernatural grace, left him beaten and half dead, wounded in the core of his nature. Pope Benedict in his book ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ says that ‘The road from Jerusalem to Jericho thus turns out to be an image of human history (and) the half-dead man lying by the side of it is an image of humanity.’
We can think how mankind turns from God and seeks himself: indulging his ego; allowing passions to be uncontrolled; craving after riches, the esteem of others, wealth, even physical fitness to the excess of obsession; always wanting to be ‘on top’. Mankind does not find his true dignity in these things. And so beaten up mankind needs a neighbour to heal him. This healing cannot come from within human history alone but it is an outsider, a foreigner who makes Himself neighbour to wounded mankind. It is Jesus Christ, foreign and distant, who sets out to take care of him, to offer him the soothing oil and cleansing wine of the sacraments, bringing him to the inn of the Church, the Church which is precisely present by those highways of the earth on which man is travelling away from God and attacked by evil so that men and women may be brought in and healed and restored.
It is Jesus who is our Good Samaritan who makes Himself our neighbour. It is He who promises to pay whatever it costs – by His saving Passion and Death – to restore mankind to the full glory of supernatural life and divine sonship. The healing oil and cleansing wine will be administered in the inn which is the Church until the end of time when our Good Samaritan, Jesus Christ, will return.
The fundamental law of the Church is mercy. And the lawyer recognised that it was the merciful Samaritan who showed himself a neighbour to the man who fell among the robbers. The conclusion that the lawyer must draw is to ‘Go and do likewise.’ And we must do so too: showing compassion to all, whoever they might be, and helping all who are in any physical need; but also by being neighbours to those who are far from God, who have forgotten their great dignity as creatures created in God’s image, or who are sliding away from God down the path of dissoluteness, so that we might draw them towards the healing and cleansing power of the sacraments and to worship in the communion and fellowship of all the saints in God’s Church.
Regarding Scotus' pivotal role in understanding the Immaculate Conception, the Pope said this: "In Duns Scotus' times, the majority of theologians offered an objection that seemed insurmountable to the doctrine that Most Holy Mary was free from original sin from the first instant of her conception. In fact, the universality of the redemption wrought by Christ, at first glance, might seem compromised by such an affirmation, as if Mary had no need of Christ and of his redemption. Because of this theologians were opposed to this thesis."
The Pontiff recounted how Scotus developed an argument that Pope Pius IX would go on to use in 1854 when he solemnly defined the dogma.
"And this argument," Benedict XVI said, "is that of the 'preventive redemption,' according to which the Immaculate Conception represents the masterpiece of the redemption wrought by Christ, because in fact the power of his love and of his mediation obtained that the Mother be preserved from original sin. Hence Mary is totally redeemed by Christ, but already before her conception."
"faith in the Immaculate Conception or in the bodily assumption of the Virgin was already present in the People of God, while theology had not yet found the key to interpret it in the totality of the doctrine of the faith. Thus the People of God precede theologians and all this thanks to that supernatural 'sensus fidei,' namely, that capacity infused by the Holy Spirit, which qualifies us to embrace the reality of the faith, with humility of heart and mind.
"In this sense, the People of God is 'magisterium that precedes,' and that later must be deepened and intellectually accepted by theology."
"listen to this source of faith and have the humility and simplicity of little ones!"
The cassock
The poor cassock was enough for you
and the poor ordination too.
Because you knew who you are for God
and you knew God gave you.
You did not hear His words,
He did not knock on your doors.
However you come to Him:
He would give you His Cross among ways of life.
You knocked and stood by His doors.
Whatever Jesus could give you
apart from the difficult way.
Whatever He could say by way of greeting.
He knows very well how difficult His ways are
and mostly He talks about vocation.
You experienced lots of beautiful moments,
you said goodbye to your family house.
You knew you would never come back
and your life would be different from then.
If you want me to serve only your heart,
if you love me just a little,
lead me Jesus, lead me please, my unequalled friend.
In casual vocation's robe dress me.
