Priorities - Who to love?

Life's busy! We have to do what's most important. Sorry, I haven't blogged recently. I figure that finishing my studies and getting ordained a priest is the priority for now. I hope you will agree - I'm counting on the prayers.

Now that I finished THE paper for my bachelor's in theology on St. Augustine's view of the human will, I hope to have a little more time.For now, I read this yesterday in the breviary. It's worth reading once, twice, three times!

Silence: iNoise and the battle for our soul. 4 Simple Steps.

Reading this on the computer? On the iPhone? You only sat down for a moment, but someone already Tweeted you. Now, a FaceBook friend request - accept or decline? But here's a blog post from some seminarian in Rome. Sounds like the phone, and out comes the earbud. Back to FaceBook, and wow, that’s a great picture…

STOP! We need a brick wall to stop our mental freight train.

Our world is full of frenzy, distraction, and gratification. Every day more Tweets, IM's, texts, FaceBooks (don’t know if that works in the plural), and calls flood into our heads.

Silence! “Why?” you ask.

CampionProject: the first half of "What's up with the title?"

What the blog about, anyway? Why is it called the CampionProject? The two-part title doesn't seem to have to do with the content. Once in a while, I want to post directly related to the title to fix this, and this time about the first word - Campion.

As I mentioned blog explanation, it's about renewing our vision of man, his destiny, his happiness, and thus ourselves. But how?

A Blog

It seems like I have been meaning to write this forever. God had a plan, and the idea occurred to me on a trip to England last December. But how to make it happen?

How to explain the Campion transformation?! What made a sickly old man into a pillar of strength and hope - like John Paul II? How can we explain the radical change in the life of St. Edmund, John Paul II, or any other?

An Idea

Me in front of Westminster

I walked into the huge stone vaulted ceiling, and it seemed like I was stepping back in time. Hard to believe what this hall had seen in the previous centuries, but my mind went back to November 14, 1581. Edmund Campion stood his ground as he was convicted for treason. But in his own words, “The plain reason of our standing here is religion and not treason.”

Edmund Campion was an incredible Catholic, Christian, but above all, he was an incredible man. We need figures like this today. So often we look to musicians, athletes, or movie stars that aren’t even worth our admiration.

But I can hear the words of another man also spoken in England echoing in my ears:

When I invite you to become saints, I am asking you not to be content with second best. Having money makes it possible to be generous and to do good in the world, but on its own, it is not enough to make us happy. 

Happiness is something we all want, but one of the great tragedies in this world is that so many people never find it, because they look for it in the wrong places.

The key to it is very simple – true happiness is to be found in God. We need to have the courage to place our deepest hopes in God alone, not in money, in a career, in worldly success, or in our relationships with others, but in God. 

God wants your friendship. And once you enter into friendship with God, everything in your life begins to change. (17 September 2011)

Benedict XVI said this to the youth on September 17, 2010. What the world needs today are men and saints! What we need are men and saints! This might sound crazy, but this is what we need to think about, talk about and live out if we are going to be happy.