Rebecca Teti is married to Dennis and has four children (3 boys, 1 girl) who -- like yours no doubt -- are pious and kind, gorgeous, and can spin flax into gold. A Washington, DC, native, she converted to Catholicism while an undergrad at the U. Dallas, where she double-majored in Political Philosophy & Drama. She holds an MA in Political Theory from Catholic University and pre-children worked a variety of non-profit jobs, including as a pro-life lobbyist and later director of the Center for Family Development in Bethesda, MD. Rebecca now writes from home, with special interest in marriage and family issues, whatever the Pope is doing, retrieving Lego bricks from underfoot, and homemade pie.
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Not Helping!
Faith and Family Live! | Posted by Rebecca Teti in News on Wednesday, January 18, 2012
I doubt this audience needs any persuading that women can do better than abortion, but here is some grim evidence anyway.
This is the advice Fund Abortion Now is giving women about how to pay for their abortions.
Some of it is sensible economizing.
Some of it is desperate measures anyone truly poor might take to cover an unexpected expense (pawning goods, volunteering for medical experiments).
But... READ MORE
Dr. King & Turning The Other Cheek
Faith and Family Live! | Posted by Rebecca Teti in News on Monday, January 16, 2012
Though it’s late in the day, I wanted to honor the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., and I couldn’t do better than this short presentation from Fr. Barron.
He works it all in: King’s Christian commitment; his “re-founding” of America by recalling it to the principles of the Declaration; his magnificent oratory.
In particular I call your attention to his teaching on what “turn the other cheek” means.
It is not a call to let wickedness run roughshod over us, but on the contrary, a summons to stiff spines and firm endurance: “that wickedness shall not stand on my watch.”
Watch and enjoy!
And on this holiday in his honor, may we forgive Dr. King his failings and have a measure of his strength and courage in the moral battles of our generation.
"I've Added A Bit of A Limp This Time"
Faith and Family Live! | Posted by Rebecca Teti in Reviews on Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Rachel, thank you for having the courage to admit being hooked on Downton Abbey, which was a guilty pleasure for me last year, and will be again this season.
Can’t resist sharing this parody of season 1.
Count Your Christmas Blessings
Faith and Family Live! | Posted by Rebecca Teti in Just me on Monday, January 09, 2012
Unless you’re one of those stalwarts who can keep celebrating right through Candlemas on February 2, our Christmas celebration closes with Epiphany (yesterday) and today’s transferred feast of the Baptism of the Lord.
Each feast celebrates public manifestations of Christ: news of his coming reaching beyond Israel to the gentiles, and the beginning of his public ministry.
I thought it might be nice... READ MORE
Happy Epiphany!
Faith and Family Live! | Posted by Rebecca Teti in Faith on Sunday, January 08, 2012
Those figures who came from the East were not the last but the first of a great procession of those who, throughout the epochs of history, are able to recognize the message of the Star, who know how to walk on the paths indicated by Sacred Scripture.
Thus they also know how to find the One who seems weak and fragile but instead has the power to grant the greatest and most profound joy to the heart of man.
In him, indeed, is made manifest the stupendous reality that God knows us and is close to us, that his greatness and power are not expressed according to the world’s logic, but to the logic of a helpless baby whose strength is only that of the love which he entrusts to us.
In the journey of history, there are always people who are enlightened by the light of the Star, who find the way and reach him. They all live, each in his or her own way, the experience of the Magi.
—Benedict XVI, Solemnity of Epiphany 2010
The Restless Heart of God
Faith and Family Live! | Posted by Rebecca Teti in Faith on Friday, January 06, 2012
You must read the Holy Father’s homily for Epiphany this year.
The whole thing is quotable, but I’ll whet your whistle with this:
The restless heart of which we spoke earlier, echoing Saint Augustine, is the heart that is ultimately satisfied with nothing less than God, and in this way becomes a loving heart. Our heart is restless for God and remains so, even if every effort is made today, by means of most effective anaesthetizing methods, to deliver people from this unrest. But not only are we restless for God: God’s heart is restless for us. God is waiting for us. He is looking for us. He knows no rest either, until he finds us. God’s heart is restless, and that is why he set out on the path towards us – to Bethlehem, to Calvary, from Jerusalem to Galilee and on to the very ends of the earth.
Merry Christmas, Day 12
Faith and Family Live! | Posted by Rebecca Teti in Faith on Thursday, January 05, 2012
Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, The Family of John the Baptist Visiting Christ
Thank God, this negative detail [“no room in the inn”—mankind too preoccupied with itself to make space for God] is not the only one, nor the last one that we find in the Gospel.
Just as in Luke we encounter the maternal love of Mary and the fidelity of Saint Joseph, the vigilance of the shepherds and their great joy, just as in Matthew we encounter the visit of the wise men, come from afar, so too John says to us: “To all who received him, he gave power to become children of God” (Jn 1:12).
There are those who receive him, and thus, beginning with the stable, with the outside, there grows silently the new house, the new city, the new world.
The message of Christmas makes us recognize the darkness of a closed world, and thereby no doubt illustrates a reality that we see daily.
Yet it also tells us that God does not allow himself to be shut out. He finds a space, even if it means entering through the stable; there are people who see his light and pass it on.
—Benedict XVI, Midnight Mass 2007
Merry Christmas, Day 11
Faith and Family Live! | Posted by Rebecca Teti in Faith on Wednesday, January 04, 2012
The first thing we are told about the shepherds is that they were on the watch – they could hear the message precisely because they were awake. We must be awake, so that we can hear the message. We must become truly vigilant people.
What does this mean?
The principal difference between someone dreaming and someone awake is that the dreamer is in a world of his own. His “self” is locked into this dreamworld that is his alone and does not connect him with others. To wake up means to leave that private world of one’s own and to enter the common reality, the truth that alone can unite all people….
Awake, the Gospel tells us. Step outside, so as to enter the great communal truth, the communion of the one God. To awake, then, means to develop a receptivity for God: for the silent promptings with which he chooses to guide us; for the many indications of his presence.
There are people who describe themselves as “religiously tone deaf.” The gift of a capacity to perceive God seems as if it is withheld from some. And indeed – our way of thinking and acting, the mentality of today’s world, the whole range of our experience is inclined to deaden our receptivity for God, to make us “tone deaf” towards him. And yet in every soul, the desire for God, the capacity to encounter him, is present, whether in a hidden way or overtly. In order to arrive at this vigilance, this awakening to what is essential, we should pray for ourselves and for others, for those who appear “tone deaf” and yet in whom there is a keen desire for God to manifest himself.
Benedict XVI, Midnight Mass, 2009
Merry Christmas, Day 10
Faith and Family Live! | Posted by Rebecca Teti in Faith on Tuesday, January 03, 2012
See more of Sheila Diemert’s work at SheilaDiemert.com
In the Bethlehem Grotto human loneliness is overcome, our existence is no longer left to the impersonal forces of natural and historical processes, our house can be built on the rock: we can plan our history, the history of humanity, not in Utopia but in the certainty that the God of Jesus Christ is present and goes with us.
...
let us run joyfully towards Bethlehem, let us welcome in our arms the Child that Mary and Joseph will present to us. Let us start out from him and with him, facing all the difficulties. The Lord asks each one of you to cooperate in building the city of man, seriously and enthusiastically conjugating faith and culture. For this reason I invite you to seek always, with patient perseverance, the true Face of God…. Seeking the Face of God is the profound aspiration of our heart and is also the answer to the fundamental question that continues to surface ever anew in contemporary society.
—Vespers for the University Students of Rome, December 15, 2011
Merry Christmas, Day 9
Faith and Family Live! | Posted by Rebecca Teti in Faith on Monday, January 02, 2012
Icon, The Nativity of Christ
Today, anyone wishing to enter the Church of Jesus’ Nativity in Bethlehem will find that the doorway five and a half metres high, through which emperors and caliphs used to enter the building, is now largely walled up. Only a low opening of one and a half metres has remained. The intention was probably to provide the church with better protection from attack, but…it seems to me that a deeper truth is revealed here, which should touch our hearts on this holy night: if we want to find the God who appeared as a child, then we must dismount from the high horse of our “enlightened” reason.
...
We must bend down, spiritually we must as it were go on foot, in order to pass through the portal of faith and encounter the God who is so different from our prejudices and opinions – the God who conceals himself in the humility of a newborn baby. In this spirit let us celebrate the liturgy of the holy night, let us strip away our fixation on what is material, on what can be measured and grasped. Let us allow ourselves to be made simple by the God who reveals himself to the simple of heart. And let us also pray especially at this hour for all who have to celebrate Christmas in poverty, in suffering, as migrants, that a ray of God’s kindness may shine upon them, that they – and we – may be touched by the kindness that God chose to bring into the world through the birth of his Son in a stable.
—Benedict XVI, Homily for Midnight Mass, 2011
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