Now in its sixty-fourth year, Pioneer magazine is a favorite in many families. With articles on Spirituality, personalities, short stories, a crossword and games, there is something to appeal to everyone. Below find some of the recent articles and some of the highlights from the past.
Giving up chocolate? Deleting your Facebook account? We all choose to mark Lent in different ways and more often than not focus on abstaining from something we enjoy, but is this always good for us? NICHOLAS AUSTIN SJ explores how our attempts at an ascetic way of life for forty days each year can go wrong if our motivations are not rooted in the wisdom of the Christian tradition. How can we rediscover the virtue of asceticism?
So what have you decided to give up for Lent? We often we hear that the important thing is not to give something up, but to do something positive. But it’s strange, isn’t it, that the feeling still sticks that Lent is really about giving up stuff? Giving up chocolate, giving up alcohol, giving up desserts, giving up cigarettes, giving up TV, giving up meat on Fridays….
For better or worse, we tend to ask ourselves not ‘What am I going to do, in a positive way, for Lent?’ but ‘What am I going to give up?’ So why are we so fixated on fasting, abstaining, giving stuff up?
Life isn’t fair. Tragedies happen and people let us down. Whether it is a death of a child or your friend betraying a confidence, it can be difficult to let go of the past. The Serenity Prayer can help. It is a simple but practical prayer that can help us keep from looking back to the past and move on to a positive and peaceful future.
We Pioneers are in a process of examining our roots as we face into the challenges of the Third Milllennium. This requires a sustained effort to explore in depth the charism, a special gift of the Holy Spirit to the Church, which led Fr. James Cullen to found the Pioneer Association in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. According to the teaching of the Servant of God, Pope Paul VI, this effort will help us identify what is to be done to adapt our Association to the demands of the twenty-first century. Obviously, there are things that are obsolete today and have to be changed. However there are aspects of the Association that will never change. Fr Cullen was convinced that an association based on prayer: abstinence and public witness in honour of the Sacred Heart of Jesus could make a valuable contribution to life in society. This is as valid today as in his lifetime.
When evil things happen in life we may ask where God is. Why doesn’t he prevent wars and famines? Why does he allow people to do bad things to each other? But if we expect accountability from God we don’t really know what we’re asking for, suggests TOM CAHILL SVD
Luke’s Gospel portrays Jesus as a miraculous healer We, his followers, are healers too. But our focus is the miracle of healthy relationships, suggests Tom Cahill SVD
We are told to believe in this - to trust in God who is totally looking after us. All our cares are being dealt with by him – our food, drink and clothing. JAMES KELLY SJ expands on the theme of relying on God to provide us with our daily bread.
This is a very serious request made to the Almighty. We are aware that we are sinners — as the Psalmist says: ‘My sin is ever before me. Against thee, thee alone, have I sinned' (Ps Sl.3, 4). And when we think about it, it is extraordinary that we can plead with God, who is so mighty and upright, to show us mercy and remove our sins. By sinning, we have let him down.
Alphonse Ratisbonne had no time for Christianity. He didn’t practise his Jewish faith and had become agnostic, but when his brother became a Catholic and then a priest, Alphonse developed a deep hatred of his brother and of Catholicism. That was until a vision of the Blessed Virgin turned his life upside-down. PATRICK P ROWAN recounts the journey of Ratisbonne, a most remarkable conversion.
It is often said that the contemporary world is increasingly secular and non-religious. When one looks at Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan and several other countries, this generalisation seems roughly accurate. The USA seems different.
Three priests were sitting in their presbytery’s garden one fine summer’s day discussing the relative merits of various body postures for prayer. It happened that a telephone repairman was in the garden too working on a line not far from where they sat. He couldn’t help but overhear their conversation.
PAUL HURLEY SVD, writes about the town, second only in importance to Jerusalem in the post-Resurrectional history of Christianity. In the region that was to become modern Turkey, Antioch features prominently in the Acts of the Apostles and the Letters of Saint Paul.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton was a giant in many ways. His six-feet-two inches and corpulent figure made him a physical giant but it was the extent and diversity of his writings that made him a giant in the field of literature and theology. He proved to be a great defender of the Catholic faith and crossed swords with the likes of George Bernard Shaw on theological matters yet they remained friends, and Shaw called him ‘a man of colossal genius’, writes PATRICK P ROWAN
Florence Nightingale was born in 1820 in Florence, ltaly, from where she got her name, but she grew up on her father’s estates in Derbyshire and Hampshire. From a wealthy Victorian background, when, at 23, she told her family that she wanted to be a nurse they were vigorously against the idea, nursing being then associated with working-class women. Her father: an anti—slavery campaigner; had taught her Greek, Latin, French, German and Italian, as well as philosophy and maths. In I851 he finally agreed to her becoming a nurse. She studied nursing at the Institute of Protestant Deaconesses in Kaiserwerth-am-Rhein in Germany.
That his two best plays are now on in London’s West End shows how perennial is the work of Oscar Wilde. His interest in the Catholic Church also goes back a long way. At Oxford he became friendly with another student, Sir David Hunter Blair, who became a Catholic too and, after joining the Benedictines, was made Abbot at Dunfermline Abbey. In his book, Victorian Days, he wrote of a very different Wilde from the caricature portrait of the playboy of the West End. What he remembered most vividly about him was his attractive personality, enhanced by his extraordinary conversational abilities and his appreciation of the classics. He asked Blair many questions which revealed “how genuine were his own sympathies with Catholicism.”
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