This page contains various spiritual resources for our parishioners or anyone who wishes to use them. They include various articles, and videos produced by our priests or parish. Also available are past recorded Masses. Below are buttons that will lead you to the subpages. Below the buttons are other miscellaneous resources.
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Here are various articles and devotional documents created by our parish or our priests.
Published in The Devils Lake Journal on Friday, September 11, 2020
“I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do” (Rom 8:19).
This is an interesting quote from St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans. The context is St. Paul’s description of a war within himself, a war between the law of God and the law of sin. While St. Paul delights in his discovery of this law of God, he still finds himself wrestling internally with his old habits of sin.
Can we not all relate to St. Paul’s struggles? We seek to live upright lives and to follow the commandments, especially love of God and love of neighbor. But we struggle! Like St. Paul, we don’t do the good that we seek, but we do the very evil we are trying to avoid. Why is this?!
The ancient Greek philosophers also noticed this difficulty. Some like Plato divided the human psyche into different levels with rationality and intellect at the top and our passions and emotions at the bottom. For Plato, the human being who was living his/her best life was the one who put the passions and the emotions under the control of the intellect. In other words, the mind was in charge of the person, not their emotions, urges, and desires.
The early Christians took up the philosophers’ theory and merged it with what we know from God’s revelation. What they came up with is an insightful view of humanity that both explains how we are supposed to be and why we struggle to live up to that ideal.
The early Christians claimed that God created us to be in harmony with Him, with each other, and even within ourselves. In this perfect plan our passions, emotions, urges, and desires would be in service to our good. For example, our hunger and cravings for food would be perfectly ordered to our health. Our anger would have been ordered to correcting a wrong and giving us the energy to take correct action. Our sexual desires would have been ordered to love of spouse and the creation of children. All this was lived in the Garden of Eden with the sinless Adam and Eve who were naked without shame.
But then it all went wrong! Reading the book of Genesis we see how quickly things changed after the Original Sin of Adam and Eve. There was an immediate disharmony between our first parents and God (they hid from Him), between each other (they began to blame each other), and even within themselves (they had to cloth/protect themselves from the other’s disorder desires).
This effect of interior disharmony has been passed down through the ages. All those things that were supposed to led us to health, happiness, and goodness now mislead us. We can no longer trust our hunger, anger, sexual desires, emotions, stress reactions, anxieties, or any other urges of our mind and body to lead us to doing what is good.
How are we supposed to live in such a state of disharmony?! “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Rom 8:24-25). This is St. Paul’s response. He knows his struggles, and in those struggles he turns to God and to the Grace given by Jesus. God is the one who initially designed us, and He designed us to be good. He is the one who can restore what sin has destroyed.
Examine your own life. Pick one of your passions and pay attention to where it leads you. Note how your desires which were supposed to lead you to correct choices often lead you astray. How your hunger for food doesn’t lead to eating the right foods in the right proportions but to eating the wrong foods in excess. How your anger doesn’t stop at correcting a wrong, but leads to bitterness, vengeance, and hatred. How your sexual desires lead your eyes or your mind to people or images that distract from the love of your spouse or future spouse.
After you have noticed your own disharmony, bring it to God in prayer. Invite Him. “God, please enter this area of my life. With your Grace, help me to bring harmony to my life. Help me not to let my passions, urges, and desires control what I do, but to subject them to what is good and right.”
It may seem like sin has stacked the cards against us. But like St. Paul, we know that we have a God who is willing to help us. A God about whom the Angel Gabriel said, “With God nothing will be impossible” (Lk 1:37). So, let us strive, with the help of God’s Grace, to restore the harmony within ourselves, that we may do the good that we want and avoid the evil we do not want.
During this time of illness and all the various consequences that result from this pandemic, our Holy Father, Pope Francis, has authorized several indulgences for the faithful. Some of these indulgences are for specific groups of people during this pandemic, but others are available for all the faithful. In addition, the usual requirements of going to Confession and receiving Holy Communion are allowed to be delayed due to their difficulty.
Please CLICK HERE to view a document from the Diocese of Fargo that gives a fuller explanation. And never fear in this time or any time to call upon the mercy of God.
Watch Sunday Mass from the Cathedral of St. Mary in Fargo.
Mass will be celebrated at
10:00 A.M. on Sundays
The Celebrant will either be Bishop John T. Folda or one of the local Fargo area priests.
Locally broadcasted Sunday Mass can be viewed Sundays on WDAZ at 10:30 A.M.
Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN) provides several opportunites to watch Mass on TV.
When Mass and the Eucharist are unavailiable Catholics are encouraged to make a "Spiritual Communion." But how does one do that? One way is to watch one of the above to watch the Mass on TV or the internet. During the time of Communion to say a Spiritual Communion Prayer like the one on the right, inviting Jesus into your heart.
My Jesus, I believe that you are in the Blessed Sacrament. I love you above all things, and I long for you in my soul. Since I cannot now receive you Sacramentally, come at least spiritually into my heart. As though you have already come, I embrace you and unite myself entirely to you; never permit me to be separated from you.