One of my favorite Christmas traditions is decorating the
tree, which we always do on my parents’ wedding anniversary. Like most families, we have amassed a large and
diverse collection of Christmas ornaments.
Most of the ornaments have a story connected to it so every year I get
to find out new stories.
This very
human desire, to be connected to our past, to find out why exactly we do things
the way that we do them, is a major part of Blessed John Henry Newman’s life. He and the rest of the Oxford Movement were
trying to reconnect what they were doing as Anglicans to what the Church has
always done, and this desire would end with his conversion to Catholicism.
I’m looking
forward to visiting the ancient pilgrimage sites like Canterbury, the sites of
the imprisonment and martyrdom of the English Martyrs, the places where Newman
lived and worked, and seeing Charing Cross. Through exposure to
these places, I will be able to understand and connect to my faith in a new and
different way.
Once we’ve
connected, though we have a duty to bring the faith to others. I feel extremely blessed that as the
Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis gears up for the Rediscover
initiative and the universal Church celebrates the Year of Faith, this program
has decided to focus on Bl. Newman and his connection to the new evangelization. At the heart of the new evangelization is the
call to connect on a personal level with Christ and to make the story of
salvation our own.-John Powers
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