Weekend Retreat: How things went on our Confirmation retreat (March 3 2008)

For those of you who have been keeping an eye on the “Upcoming Events” column on the right, you know that some of us spent this past weekend over at Holy Apostles on a retreat. I know that not everyone was able to attend the retreat, so I thought I would take a few moments to talk about what some of you unfortunately missed. The speaker for the weekend was Chris Stefanick. The first talk, given on Friday evening, was about chastity, contraception, and STDs. Chris reiterated the Church’s teaching that contraception is not only intrinsically evil (CCC 2370), but also degrading to the humanity of everyone involved. As I put it to the Confirmation class a few weeks ago, “How does keeping a woman all drugged up so that you can have sex with her whenever you want without getting her pregnant say ‘I love you?’” I am not even going to enter into the lies that come with using condoms, at least not this week. The point of the matter is this, contraception is the antithesis of true love, and as such has no place in a loving relationship. Chris also went on to talk about how in a world where the divorce rate is above 50%, the divorce rate for couples who use Natural Family Planning to space their children is below 5%. Even if I wasn’t a Catholic, I think that I would consider switching over to using NFP instead of contraception just to figure out how to increase the chances of making my marriage last for a life time. These statistics alone tell me exactly what happens when we turn our back on Gods plan for love and marriage and try to do it our own way, we get broken. It is not God that breaks us, but rather we who break ourselves. By rejecting the plan of the author of Love, we find that we have actually rejected Love itself. Anyway, the last talk that was given was a talk on relativism and living out our faith. Relativism is where we say that nothing is really right or wrong, except in the eye of the beholder. There are no real moral truths, because in the realm of faiths and morals there is no empirical evidence to support claims of right and wrong. This is, of course, a bunch of hogwash and we must reject it outright. There is such a thing as right and wrong, regardless of our opinions. If the U.S. passed a law tomorrow saying that rape was no longer a crime, wouldn’t it still be wrong? Of course it would. As Catholics we are heirs to the fullness of Christ’s revealed truth. We have a responsibility to live that truth out in our daily lives.
There, I summed up the beginning and the end of the retreat. In the middle there was a great game of pictionary, Eucharistic Adoration, Confession, Mass, tasty food, and a few other excellent talks. If you missed this one, Brendan Case is coming April 20 so don’t miss it.