My family descended into the ravine, following the footsteps of one martyr-saint who had searched there for the bones of another. As we traced the downhill path alongside a small stream, we read the words of St. Isaac Jogues describing his search for the body of his Jesuit companion, René.

Killed at the hands of the Iroquois Indians, St. René Goupil would become the first canonized martyr of the United States. We were passing over the holiest ground in our country, we realized, in this out-of-the-way valley in New York.

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If you are able to get a copy of the print version of this issue, be sure to check out the photographs which accompanied my article – they were taken by my daughter Lucy!

Joy, however, is often an overlooked virtue in the Christian life. But Fr. James Martin gives a great (and hilarious) defense of joy in this speech he recently gave (note: the talk is almost 30 minutes and the audio quality at times is poor, but it is worth it):

James Martin, SJ from The Leadership Roundtable on Vimeo.

H/t: OSV Daily Take

It should first be noted that lay Catholics are free to go to whatever parish they desire; they are not bound under canon law to attend their territorial parish. However, canon law does stipulate that a pastor of a parish is responsible for all the souls in that parish’s geographic territory, regardless of whether they attend his parish or not (or even if they are Catholic or not). So, in a certain sense, the pastor of your territorial parish is your pastor no matter if you attend his parish or not.

But even if it is allowed, is it a good idea to do the parish “shop and hop”? Should Catholics just attend their territorial parish or should they search around for a “good” parish? Opinions abound. My in-laws, who grew up before Vatican II, would never have dreamed of attending any parish but their “proper” one; they felt that a Catholic was supposed to support their local parish, no matter their personal opinion of it. However, many Catholics feel that it is necessary for their spiritual well-being to attend the “best” parish they can find.

When I first became Catholic, I was in the group that felt that you should attend your territorial parish unless the pastor there was preaching outright heresy. Even if the liturgy was poorly celebrated, the music stunk, and the pastor preached a “be nice” Gospel, a Catholic should support his local parish.

Then I had kids.

As any parent will tell you, having kids changes your entire perspective; you now see everything through their eyes. And I saw a child being raised in a watered-down Catholic Faith and it scared me. After that point, I decided I would attend the best parish within a reasonable distance because I wanted my kids to experience Catholicism and the Mass in a reverent, enthusiastic environment if at all possible.

Of course, one can take the parish “shop and hop” too far and demand perfection from a parish. But a perfect parish does not exist, and frankly, that attitude is one step away from Protestantism. We cannot expect a parish to be EXACTLY what we want, and we must be understanding of the difficulties of being a pastor. Leaving a parish simply because the music isn’t Gregorian Chant or the pastor’s homilies are dry isn’t a valid reason, in my opinion. And furthermore, we should actively work to improve our parishes; too often I hear people complain about their parishes, but they do nothing to help improve them. A parish doesn’t become faithful by magic, it is done by the hard work and prayers of its members. In the end, though, I see no problem with attending the most faithful parish one can in their general geographic area. It is not an ideal solution, but it is an acknowledgment of reality.

Before anyone says it in the comments, I do understand that many Catholics in this country live in a situation in which there are no parishes around them that are strongly faithful to the teachings and practices of the Church. I sympathize with them and know that this situation can be quite a cross. I pray that they unite their sufferings with our Lord for the renewal of the entire Church, including their own parish.

An interesting sidenote: when my family moved to Gaithersburg, we started attending the closest parish to us – St. John Neumann, which was only about 1.5 miles down the road. It is a great parish and we have happily attended it for years. But about two years ago, I discovered that we actually live in the boundaries of another parish! That parish, which is about 4-5 miles away, is also a great parish, but we decided to stay at St. John Neumann, as we had become active members and had found a spiritual home there. But technically, we unknowingly hopped parishes.

Canadian Anglican Catholic group votes to unite with Rome

Faith and Reason in the Context of Conversion – the story of an Evangelical’s conversion to the Catholic Church

The Pearl of Great Price – another Protestant minister converts to Catholicism

I make no claim to be an expert on the topic, but I do have a few ideas that might help other bloggers to drive traffic to their site.

1) Content, Content, Content
If you don’t have interesting (and well-written!) content, people will not be interested in your blog. Sometimes blogs get popular because they espouse “controversial” views, but I think the better way to increase visitors is to have content that people want to read on a regular basis. Note, however, that this takes a lot of hard work. Emphasis on “lot” and “hard” and “work.”

2) Be yourself
Don’t try to imitate other popular Catholic blogs – write about what you care about and what is interesting to you. The only way to produce good content (see above) is to write about what you are passionate about. If you just try to pick topics that you think are popular, your writing will suffer and you won’t stand out in the crowded blogosphere. Find your niche and stick to it.

3) Promote your blog
For most of us, promoting ourselves is difficult, as we are afraid that we are putting ourselves in front, instead of Christ. And it can be a danger for bloggers. But if you have written something that you think will help people, then by all means tell others about it. Write to other bloggers and tell them about interesting posts you have written (but don’t overwhelm them with every post you ever write: only pick ones that you think that particular blogger might find interesting). No one will magically show up at your blog – they need to be told by someone they trust to go there.

4) Links
The best way to help your search engine ranking, which will allow people to more easily find you, is to have many inbound links to your blog. To do this, you have to ask people to add you to your blogroll or otherwise link to you. Some people will do so and others won’t (I don’t link to very many blogs on my blogroll, for example), but any link will help.

5) Be Patient
If you look at the most popular Catholic blogs out there, you will notice that they all have been around for years. Building an audience on the internet takes time; people usually have to visit your site a number of times before deciding to make it a regular destination and to recommend it to others. Do not expect a quick jump in traffic and be prepared to blog for years before you have any substantial audience.

And finally, don’t take your blog too seriously. Yes, blogs can address serious subjects but we have to remember that they are just blogs, after all. Ultimately, how you interact with those around you – your family, your friends, your co-workers – is more important to your spiritual life than how well-trafficked your blog is.

Such is the case today with artificial contraception. When you take a step back and think about it, it is unbelievable (and diabolical) that just 100 years ago every practicing Christian, no matter their tradition, would acknowledge that artificial contraception is immoral. But today, almost none do; artificial contraception is as normal as cell phones and McDonald’s. As an Evangelical Christian, I never once gave a thought to the morality of using artificial contraception; to me that would be as silly as contemplating the morality of using a fork instead of my hands to eat. This is still the situation in most of the Evangelical world (and scandalously much of the Catholic world as well).

But perhaps the tide is turning:

(RNS) Is contraception a sin? The very suggestion made Bryan Hodge and his classmates at Chicago’s Moody Bible Institute laugh.

As his friends scoffed and began rebutting the oddball idea, Hodge found himself on the other side, poking holes in their arguments. He finished a bachelor’s degree in biblical theology at Moody and earned a master’s degree at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

Now, more than a decade later, he is trying to drive a hole the size of the ark through what has become conventional wisdom among many Christians: that contraception is perfectly moral.

His book, “The Christian Case Against Contraception,” was published in November. Hodge, a former Presbyterian pastor who is now a layman in the conservative Orthodox Presbyterian Church, realizes his mission is quixotic.

In the 50 years since the birth-control pill hit the market, contraception in all its forms has become as ubiquitous as the minivan, and dramatically changed social mores as it opened the possibilities for women.

No less than other Americans, Christians were caught up in the cultural conflagration. In a nation where 77 percent of the population claims to be Christian, 98 percent of women who have ever had sexual intercourse say they’ve used at least one method of birth control.

The pill is the most preferred method, followed closely by female sterilization (usually tying off fallopian tubes).

“People are no longer … thinking about it,” says Hodge, 36, who had to agree with a Christian publisher who rejected his book on grounds that contraception is a nonstarter, a settled issue.

“People don’t even ask if there is anything possibly morally wrong about it.”

For more than 19 centuries, every Christian church opposed contraception.

Under pressure from social reformers such as Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, the Anglican Communion (and its U.S. branch, the Episcopal Church) became the first to allow married couples with grave reasons to use birth control.

That decision cracked a door that, four decades later, was thrown wide open with the relatively safe, effective birth-control pill, which went on the market in this country in the summer of 1960. Virtually every Protestant denomination had lifted the ban by the mid-1960s.

Even evangelicals within mainline Protestant and nondenominational churches embraced the pill as a way that married couples could enjoy their God-given sexuality without fear of untimely pregnancy.

“It was a reaction to that whole Victorian thing where sex was seen as dirty,” says Hodge, who lives in Pennsylvania.

Official Mormon teaching through the late 1960s was against birth control. But by 1998, the church’s General Handbook of Instructions made it clear that only a couple can decide how many children to have and no one else is to judge.

There remains one massive holdout among major Christian churches—the Roman Catholic Church, which expressed its opposition in no uncertain terms in Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical, Humanae Vitae.

To separate the two functions of marital intimacy—the life-transmitting from the bonding—is to reject God’s design, Paul VI wrote.

“The fundamental nature of the marriage act, while uniting husband and wife in the closest intimacy, also renders them capable of generating new life—and this as a result of laws written into the actual nature of man and of woman,” Humanae Vitae proclaimed.

Janet Smith, a Catholic seminary professor whose writing and talks have been influential for two decades, puts it this way: “God himself is love, and it’s the very nature of love to overflow into new life. Take the baby-making power out of sex, and it doesn’t express love. All it expresses is physical attraction.”

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A critical aspect of love is how we view our beloved, such as a spouse, our children, or our close friends. Dietrich von Hildebrand said that when we truly love someone, we give them three “credits:”

Faith
When we love someone, we firmly believe in the beauty of that person, even in areas we have not yet discovered. We do not take a critical point of view towards the beloved, but instead believe that they are beautiful in many and various ways. We are convinced that the more we know about the person, the more we will love them.

Hope
Whenever one deals with another person, there are events and actions that are open to interpretation. When we love someone, we always assume the highest interpretation, assuming the best, until we have definitive proof that our interpretation is false. We never assume the worst about those we love.

Solidarity
Of course, every person has faults, including those we love. When we discover these faults in a beloved, we mourn and grieve over them, because we feel that they betray the true beauty of that person. We continue to affirm that it is good that our beloved exists, and we desire nothing more than that they overcome their faults.

Anyone who has loved another person can easily see how they have applied these three credits to their beloved. Who assumes the worst about their spouse, or believes that their child is not beautiful, or doesn’t grieve over a close friend’s faults?

But Christ does not just ask us to love our beloved, he commands that we “love our enemies” (Matthew 5:44). In other words, we must apply those three “credits” to our enemies. We must believe in the intrinsic beauty of our enemies, assume the highest interpretations of their actions, and grieve over any faults they may have. We do this for our spouses, our children, and our friends. Do we do it for our enemies?

Mark and Gretchen Nelson, owners of Nelson Fine Art and Gifts and Catholic to the Max (if you need any Catholic art or gifts, you’ll find it there). Our family stayed with them in Steubenville a few days, and as always they were gracious hosts.

Vito Carchedi, chairman of the Society of St. John Chrysostom Youngstown Chapter, who invited me to speak to their group last Tuesday. The Society is a great group with wonderful people, and I enjoyed meeting Vito, Richard Mattiussi, Fr. George Gage, Raymond Nakely and all the fine folks there. Hopefully my talk helped in the goal that we all “might be one” someday.

Matt Swaim, Brian Patrick, Anna Mitchell and everyone at The Son Rise Morning Show, who had me as an in-studio guest on Friday. It was wonderful to finally meet them after numerous phone interviews over the past year. I also was able to meet Rich Leonardi, who runs the wonderful blog Ten Reasons. Rich and I have corresponded for years via email and blogs, but haven’t been able to meet in person until we happened to be interviewed back-to-back on Son Rise.

Now, back to blogging!

On Tuesday, July 20th at 7pm at St. Mary Byzantine Catholic Church in Youngstown, I’ll be speaking to the Society of Saint John Chrysostom, an ecumenical group composed mostly of Eastern Catholics, Orthodox and Roman Catholics. I will be talking about Catholic-Orthodox ecumenism and my recent involvement in the Orientale Lumen Conference here in DC. If you are anywhere near the Youngstown area on Tuesday, I’d love to see you there! (And if you are looking for a Catholic speaker for your group, click here.)

Next Friday, July 23rd, I’ll be an in-studio guest of the Son Rise Morning Show radio program (they are based in my hometown of Cincinnati). I’ve been a regular guest on the program for the past year, so it will be great to personally meet Brian, Matt and everyone involved in the show. I’ll try to refrain from any “WKRP in Cincinnati” jokes while I’m there.

Needless to say, blogging will be light (most likely non-existent) next week!

*Bonus points if you know the song referenced in the post title (without googling it).
**Double bonus points if you know the most likely place to hear this song today.