I wish you all a blessed Lent. Below are some words from Pope Benedict’s Ash Wednesday address. He describes the 40 days of Lent as an experience of a desert in which we can experience God and His love in the midst of so much emptiness, superficiality and contradiction that surrounds us. Hope his words are helpful to you. God bless and prayers, Fr. Charles Sikorsky, LC
“In this “desert” we believers certainly have the opportunity to profoundly experience God, an experience that makes the spirit strong, confirms the faith, nourishes hope, animates charity; an experience that makes us partakers of Christ’s victory over sin and death through the Sacrifice of love on the Cross. But the “desert” is also the negative aspects of the reality that surrounds us: the arid, the poverty of words of life and of values, secularism and the materialist culture, which shut people within a horizon of mundane existence, robbing them of all reference to transcendence. And this is also the environment in which the sky above us is obscured, because covered by the clouds of egoism, misunderstanding and deception. Despite this, even for the Church of today the period in the desert can be transformed into a time of grace, because we have the certainty that even from the hardest rock God can bring forth the living water that refreshes and restores”.
About Fr. Charles Sikorsky, LC
President, Institute for the Psychological Sciences
www.ipsciences.edu
Fr. Charles came to the Institute for the Psychological Sciences in 2007, after finishing his Licentiate in Canon Law at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. His thesis focused on various issues relating to the legal compatibility of the observance of Canon Law and Ex Corde Ecclesiae by Catholic universities in the United States of America. He also has degrees in philosophy and theology from the Regina Apostolorum Pontifical Atheneum.
A native of Baltimore, MD, Fr. Charles graduated from the University of Maryland School of Law, where he founded Law Students for Life. He received a B.A. in political economy from The Johns Hopkins University where he also played college basketball. He is a graduate of Calvert Hall College High School in Towson, MD, where he played on the 1981-82 National Championship high school basketball team.
He practiced law for two years before joining the Legionaries of Christ in 1992. He did a four year apostolic internship in South America, working in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela. He also spent nine years in Rome for study and ministry. He was ordained a priest in 2002.
The Institute for the Psychological Sciences is a Catholic graduate school of Psychology in Arlington, VA, offering Master’s and Doctoral degrees in psychology. The mission of the Institute is to harmonize the science of psychology with the Christian vision of the person and his or her dignity. Its programs enable graduates to grasp all the complexities of the human person, including the transcendent, spiritual and moral dimensions, so that they can help their patients to flourish as individuals created and loved by God.
