Trek To Rome

Wow! Just wow! This book was absolutely amazing! If you are a priest reading this, you need to go buy yourself a copy of Priest – The Man Of God right now. I’ve bought several copies as gifts to my friends in the priesthood, and I can only say that this is a wonderful work from a holy author.

Let me answer that in a round about way.

It may prove helpful to first know of the famous St. John Bosco who was affectionately known as “Don” Bosco. Don Bosco:

• Founded the Preventative Method of education that emphasized kindness over punishment
• Opened orphanages for street children and helped reform young men away from a life of crime
• Had prophetic dreams, a collection of which were compiled into Forty Dreams of St. John Bosco: The Apostle of Youth.

Now Don Bosco only wrote two books in his life. Interestingly they were both biographies, and both people went on to become saints. One was The Life of Saint Dominic Savio one of the orphans he adopted, and the other was St. Joseph Cafasso.
So if a man of Don Bosco’s caliber was so moved by his much admired contemporary as to write a biography of the man, you know he has something important to say.

Now, St. Joseph Cafasso was head of a seminary in Italy (to say nothing of his work in the gallows–for which he was best known for). That means he was responsible for priestly formation.

Priest – The Man Of God is actually a collection of sixteen talks given by St. Joseph Cafasso during a retreat for priests!

What more do I need to say? You can now go on a retreat for priests given by St. Joseph Cafasso, simply by reading this book.

Just check out these chapters (highlights from the Table of Contents):

• Second Conference: The Dispositions necessary to become a Good Priest
• Fifth Conference: The Priest must be a man of Prayer
• Ninth Conference: The Zeal of a Priest
• Eleventh Conference: Preaching
• Twelfth Conference: The Ministry of Confession

I think the two last chapters “The Priest Devoted to Mary” and “The Comforts and Consolations of a Priest” are fascinating as well.

In this book Cafasso takes us in detail through how a priest should conduct himself from dress, to speach, to amusements. He devotes special attention to preaching, and esepcially to the ministry of Confession. Do you wish you could have had St. Joseph Cafasso tell you how to hear confessions? Priests, what are you waiting for? Get the book!

Now for a few quotes, straight from the pen of St. Joseph Cafasso!

It is not possible for us, I repeat, to maintain ourselves in a state of mediocrity. – p. 33

Amen.

We shall not stop here to consider what prayer is; we know already that, considered in it’s object… a flight of the heart towards the throne of God – p. 68

Beautiful.

All around me people are laboring in this world, they are studying, they are exhausting themselves, they are wearing themselves out till they can do no more; but they labor for the mud and dirt of this world, for empty, useless folly, while I labor for God and for His glory! – p. 148

That’s it. That’s the line!

And shall we who have these days, who possess them though they are escaping from our hands so swiftly, devote them to the foolish and empty things of this world, thus bartering the glory of God for a little slime of this earth? – p. 249

Cafasso just ROCKED IT!

Unbelievable. I hope you will get a copy for your parish priest as a gift.

I just finished reading Victory Over Vice by Bishop Fulton Sheen. I shouldn’t have to say anything other than Fulton Sheen for you to know it’s good, but hereagoes…

Don’t let the title fool you.. far from this being a self-help book for people suffering from vice, Sheen takes us through each of the seven deadly sins and juxtaposes them to Christ’s seven words from the cross. He shows how each of Christ’s seven words refute each of the seven sins. He draws rich comparisons from Christ’s life and uses incredible analogies and vivid imagery; the famous hallmark of this incredible author.

That being said, if you were indeed struggling with a specific sin, this is definitely the book for you. Coming in at seven chapters, Sheen will give you an entire chapter of examples from Christ’s life as well as practical advice to help you with whatever you are struggling with. He makes such good connections between things that on every page there is yet another brilliant observation. Sheen is a master, a true treasure of the Catholic Church and for all faiths, and this book is thrilling to read…

The avarice of the rich is being matched by the envy of the poor. Some poor hate the rich, not because they have unjustly stolen their possessions, but because they want their possessions. – p. 19

Have you ever found yourself thinking like this?

Born between an ox and an ass, they now crucify Him between two criminals. That was the last insult they could give Him. To the public eye, they created the impresion that three theives, and not two, were silhouetted against the sky. In a certain sense, it was true: two stole gold out of avarice; one stole hearts out of love. – p. 21

Oh how beautiful is that line! I could have died when I read that.

many in the world today who are envious of wealth would probably lose their souls if they had that wealth. – p. 22

So true Sheen! As Our Lord said in Matthew 19:24, “Again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for one who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” Perhaps poverty is a blessing… did anyone ever think of that?

It looks not so much to the good of the other, as to the pleasure of self. – p. 32

If you really loved someone you would be capable of forgoing all physical intimacy out of love. It is love for self and one’s own pleasure that leads to impurity.

As the appeal to the spiritual relaxes, the demands of the flesh increase. – p. 32

This is what I would call the thesis statement for the masterful remedy Sheen recommends against this sin–crowd out thoughts of lust with thoughts of love for God. Drawing on modern psychology, Sheen knows that the human mind can not normally make itself “stop” thinking about something. If someone asked you not to think about a panda bear for 30 seconds, that would be all you would be able to think of! Instead, Sheen says (both here and elsewhere) to consciously fill our minds with other thoughts, namely thoughts of a higher love of God, in order to put our minds at ease.

It is never the pure who say that chastity is impossible but only the impure. – p. 33

Well said.

Two lessons are to be learned from this Third Word from the Cross ["Behold thy mother"]: that the only real escape from the demands of the flesh is to find something more than the flesh to love; and that Mary is the refuge of sinners. – p. 38

There we have it! Sheen goes on masterfully to explain “the psychology of this enthusiasm for a higher love”.

Pride is an inordinate love of one’s own excellence, either of body or mind or the unlawful pleasure we derive from thinking we have no superiors. Pride being swollen egoism, it erects the human soul into a separate center of origin apart from God, exaggerates its own importance, and becomes a world in and for itself. – p. 45

Well put. What I find most striking about that is the phrase “thinking we have no superiors”. How many times have we all thought that about ourselves when performing some work or engaged in some conversation?

Pride manifests itself in many forms: atheism, which is a denial of our dependence on God, our Creator and our final end; intellectual vanity, which makes minds unteachable because they think they know all there is to know; superficiality, which judges others by their clothes, their accent, and their bank account; snobbery, which sneers at inferiors as the earmark of its own superiority, “they are not of our set”; vainglory, which prompts some Catholic parents to refuse to send their boys and girls to Catholic colleges, because they would there associate only with the children of carpenters; presumptuousness, which inclines a man to seek honors and positions quite beyond his capacity; and exaggerated sensitiveness, which makes one incapable of moral improvements because of unwillingness to hear one’s own faults. – p. 46

Fascinating.

If my own eternal salvation were conditioned upon saving the soul of one self-wise man who prided himself on his learning, or one hundred of the most morally corrupt men and women of the streets, I would choose the easier task of converting the hundred. Nothing is more difficult to conquer in all the world than intellectual pride. If battleships could be lined with it instead of armor, no shell could ever pierce it. – p. 50

lol. Goodness!

The rich boy need not wear good clothes to impress his friends with his wealth, but the poor boy must do so to create the false impression of wealth. – p. 55

I think most of my youth was spent witnessing the veracity of this statement. The poor are often the most ostentatious because of their desire to be rich.

Ok, I’ll have to stop there before I quote the whole book. Sheen is a master. What are you waiting for? Go get your copy from Amazon right now.

Instantly one of my favorite books.