The Daily Take

And the winner is...

As you can clearly see from the photo at left (or maybe you can't), the contest winner was chosen in a very scientific manner. Names were written on slips of looseleaf paper and folded by an 11-year-old. Then a 6-year-old in froggy pajamas picked the winner from a sunflower hat. Can't get more official than that, right?

And the name that was picked to win a copy of Simplifying the Soul: Lenten Practices to Renew Your Spirit by Paula Huston is....Kat Holmstrom.

Kat shared the following Lenten practice in the comment section yesterday:

I am going to try Jen Fulwiler's suggestion of turning off the lights during Lent. Also, I want to learn how to make rosaries - not the simple knotted kind - but with the beads and wire....

Thank you to everyone who shared your Lenten practices and entered the contest. Kat, I'll be in touch today via email to get your address. Feel free to contact me (Mary DeTurris Poust) through Facebook as well. Blessings as we begin our Lenten journey!

Simplify your soul this Lent

Paula Huston’s beautiful new book, Simplifying the Soul: Lenten Practices to Renew Your Spirit, is so much more than spiritual reading for one particular season. With its daily meditations, practical exercises, and gentle guidance, I know this book will be one I pull out not only during each Lenten season but any time I feel spiritually “stuck” and in need of something to jump start my prayer life.

Maybe it’s because so many of the daily activities remind me of things I’ve tried at different points along my journey -- making a meal from “stored or forgotten items,” spending time in solitude and silence, turning off the cell phone or TV, learning to do the Examen. Maybe it’s because I'm intrigued by suggestions I hadn’t yet considered or tried -- sleeping on the floor for a night or covering the mirrors for a day. And maybe it’s because Paula reminds readers that her book of Lenten practices does not include Sundays, days typically set aside as celebrations of the resurrection in miniature. Do you know how many times I’ve had to argue that point with people who insist the Sundays “count”?

Here’s a brief excerpt from Paula’s introduction:

“The beauty of the Lenten season is that it encourages the development of a humble heart. In Lent, we are invited to look deeply inside, identify what is impeding our ability to follow Christ along the way of humility, and begin applying antidotes...Simplifying the Soul is meant to aid you in this process...My prayer for you as you begin this retreat is that, first of all, you enter into it with the right spirit. This book is not meant to be a spiritual version of the Girl Scout honor badge program, and if you look upon it as a handbook for self-improvement, you’ll more likely become frustrated and disappointed. Instead, think of it as an invitation to self-knowledge and as a small step in liberation from destructive complicatedness -- that is, from sin.”

And here’s a snippet from Ash Wednesday, with its focus on clearing out a junk drawer or closet, so you can get started while you wait for your book to arrive:

A junk drawer is the classic repository for what we are meant to leave behind. Not only does it symbolize our histories, but it also reveals the speed at which we lived through them: how did a sunflower seed wind up among the rubber bands and old corks, and this seventy-five-year-old baptismal gown stuffed into a brown paper sack?

When we clear out a junk drawer for Lent, we are in some small way dealing with the detritus of breathless hurry and our corresponding inability to focus. We are beginning to tear through the sticky web that binds us to our past: not only to the fine and happy times, the poignant seasons of growth and change, but also to the tears we once shed, the idols we once worshiped, the myths we once believed, and the lies we once told ourselves.

If you’re hungry for more, enter our book giveaway and you just might win a copy of Simplifying the Soul (Ave Maria Press, $14.95). Leave a comment here today, sharing what you’ll be doing as a spiritual practice this Lent, and we’ll pick one winner at random. The contest ends at 11:59 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 21, 2012, so be sure to leave your comment before that time.

Happy Fat Tuesday, and blessings as you begin the journey through Lent.

Don't miss the Fat Tuesday book giveaway

Tomorrow (Tuesday) I'll be posting excerpts from Paula Huston's new book Simplifying the Soul: Lenten Practices to Renew Your Spirit (Ave Maria Press, $14.95). And here's a bonus: I was sent two copies, one to review and one to give away to a lucky OSV Daily Take reader.

So come back tomorrow prepared to leave a comment, preferably about your plans for Lent. The winner will be chosen at random from the comment section.

Shaw: Why people don't like the Catholic Church

By Russell Shaw

As the controversy over the Obama administration’s January directive to religious institutions to pay for employees’ contraceptives, sterilizations and abortion-inducing drugs was heating up, Michael Gerson — a conservative columnist frequently friendly to the Church’s views — speculated on the reasoning behind this provocative move.

“The Obama administration seems to have calculated that, since contraceptives are popular and the Catholic Church is not, the outcry would be isolated,” Gerson wrote.

Leaving aside whether the administration actually thought that, as well as the element of exaggeration in the formulation, there’s a core element of truth here that serious Catholics need to face. In some quarters at least, the Church really is unpopular. The question isn’t whether but why.

A comprehensive answer would far exceed the space available. Countless individuals and groups have countless quarrels with the Church over countless grievances, real or imaginary. Let me speak of just one group — America’s secular establishment — which is of particular relevance in the present context.

By “secular establishment,” I mean the cluster of people who dominate America’s secular culture and its institutions — the great universities, the national media, the big foundations and think tanks, and now of course the White House.

It’s fair to say these people for the most part subscribe to a world view in which traditional religion does not play a large role. They are not just “secular” but secularists — secular ideologues — for whom a certain coolness (I use as neutral a word as possible) toward the Catholic Church comes naturally.

They also share a particular approach to resolving ethical questions. Pope Benedict XVI famously spoke of the “dictatorship of relativism,” and that is one way to express it. Another way, highlighting the sources of antipathy to the Church, is along the following lines.

The Catholic Church adheres to an ethic of substantive human purposes — things like life, truth, and justice — that establish the parameters of ethically acceptable choices and behavior. To do the right thing is to act within these boundaries; to do what is wrong is to act outside them.

The secularist mindset, by contrast, favors a libertarian ethic of process and procedure — values like democracy, equal opportunity, and that epitome of the process ethic: the “right to choose.” To be sure, most people rightly live by a mix of values of both kinds — partly substantive, partly procedural — but the differences in emphasis are real and often extremely important.

According to the process ethic, there is in principle no such thing as absolute right and wrong — no substantive good that can’t be violated in a pinch if violating it furthers the exercise of choice by a sufficient number of persons.

So what if making religious institutions part of a system for providing contraceptives, sterilizations, and abortifacients (this is what Obama’s February “accommodation” would do) violates the consciences of people with traditional views on matters of substantive right and wrong? The overriding procedural imperative of the secular culture requires permitting, even subsidizing, the choices of those who want these things.

A Washington Post columnist called President Obama’s purported concession to of the bishops’ objections to the contraception-sterilization-abortifacient mandate (a proposal hailed even by some Catholic individuals and groups) “a dodge — a quite clever and positive one.” So it was — a skillful procedural sleight-of-hand aimed not at upholding some strongly held standard of right and wrong but doing a deal.

Meanwhile the Catholic Church stands as the principal obstacle to realization of the secularists’ procedural paradise of all-but-unconditional choice. However the current controversy ends, this larger conflict will continue.

Russell Shaw is an OSV contributing editor.

Congratulations to our new U.S. cardinals

Newly elevated Cardinal Edwin O'Brien, grand master of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre and former archbishop of Baltimore, joins Cardinal Timothy Dolan, archbishop of New York, outside St. Peter's after this morning's Consistory. Congratulations and prayerful best wishes to both of them and to all of the 22 cardinals elevated by Pope Benedict XVI today.