LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) – “A marriage is on the rocks when the lines of communication fail. You can´t have an effective relationship if either one of you won´t discuss your feelings, can´t talk about your mutual or personal issues, will keep your resentments simmering under wraps, and expect your partner to guess what the whole problem is about,” Panse says.

In addition, marriages fail “because people rarely discuss their expectations in detail prior to marriage, are less willing to work on their marriages afterwords, and would like quick solutions rather than having to resolve issues. People have gotten divorced for trivial reasons like snoring.”

Panse adds that people who come from broken homes are more likely to head to divorce court than those who do not. “Divorce seems less like a big deal if you have seen your parents go through with it.”

Going against modern rationale is the fact that “people who cohabit before marriage have higher rates of divorce than people who didn´t cohabit before marriage,” Panse says.

“In many cases, quite a few of the problems that cause divorce have existed in the couple´s relationship long before they got married. The problems were either not acknowledged or were ignored in the fond hope that marriage might offer a miraculous panacea. And, guess what, it doesn´t. Nobody can make you feel better about yourself and you can´t change and save anybody,” Panse says.

WASHINGTON, D.C. (Catholic Online) – Do you ever feel as though you’re climbing an enormous mountain of rock, and there’s a particular ledge you just cannot surmount?  You claw your way up the steep face but can never pull yourself all the way up to the top.  You slide down, again and again, and land on your rump in a heap, discouraged to the point of despair.  This rock face may be a particular wound in your heart or a stumbling block in your faith that you can’t seem to get past.  Anybody out there relate to this?

There’s a certain rock face that I have struggled to climb all my life; that is, until now.  This Eastertide the Lord has answered my deepest, heartfelt cry and I cannot help but share it with you.  Not so that you’ll be amazed or burst into applause, but that you might be encouraged not to give up.

I do not know when, where, or how it became part of me, but from a very young age, I have carried a yoke of rejection and disfavor.  I’ve worn it like an invisible scarlet letter on my chest, like a secret between me and God.  Despite an aching desire to please the Lord, to serve Him, to follow Him and be like Him, there was ever-present in my deepest heart a nagging voice that said, “You’re a disappointment to Him.  You can tag along if you like, but you’re nothing special.  He’ll probably never notice you.”

None of the usual suspects are to blame -   I had loving, attentive and holy parents and a happy family.  I was raised in the Church and I knew that Jesus died for my sins that I might be saved for eternity.  I was never harmed by anyone.  Yet this heartache never really left me, and I can’t count how many times I  cried rivers of tears as I begged Jesus to love me as I loved Him.  A corner of my heart seemed always fractured by this shaming belief that I was a disappointment to God.

My head knew that Jesus did love me; my heart and soul were never truly convinced.  I lived with this bizarre dichotomy inside – part of me knowing the truth and part of me doing continuous battle with that nagging doubt, that despairing voice that kept me bound by fear and a belief that I was inadequate, unworthy, and undesirable. 

So great was my frustration with my fractured heart that I finally cried (literally) to Jesus and said, “Forget about healing my heart.  It’s too pitiful.  Just rip it out and give me Yours instead.”  (Perhaps the best prayer I’ve ever prayed!)  In His perfect wisdom, He began showing me that what had started as insecurity had morphed into a habit of self-pity and self-loathing.  He gently revealed that I was eating the strange fruit of pride.  This “Oh woe is me, Jesus doesn’t love me!” stuff is a beguiling impostor of lowliness!  How is it possible that pride and feelings of worthlessness can go hand in hand?  But they often do… and in me, they were two sides of the same coin.

Thanks be to God for His great mercy that allowed me to finally recognize this in myself.   Without realizing it, I’d taken the long road trip from a little girl who wasn’t really sure what made her special to a grown woman who’d decided she was only special because she was the one soul on earth whom Jesus could never really love.

Somewhere along the way my sincere pleas for Jesus’ love warped into a blasphemy I wasn’t even consciously aware of.  I was calling Jesus a liar.  I was saying His heart had room for everyone but me.  I was saying the blood He shed washed everyone clean but me.  I was “special” in my unworthiness.  I required more than every other soul on earth.  Pretty arrogant, eh?  Pride is a clever chameleon.

Yet He, with perfect irony and poetry, stooped low enough to show me how great a price He paid for my sinful, pitiful heart.  He who owed me nothing at all, who had nothing to prove, patiently and gently proved to me that He rescued me from hell for the sake of pure love.  Endless, unfathomable love… poured out on me, His beloved daughter.

His severe mercy that plunged me into a brutally honest evaluation of myself had brought me so much healing and restoration.  Little did I know that on Good Friday He would blow away the last remaining bits of debris and plant confidence in place of doubt.

I sat and watched “The Passion of the Christ” alone in my living room just before midnight.  I’d never seen the movie before and I could barely make it through the brutality.  The scourging was the worst part.  I cried out loud to my television, “Stop it!  Stop it!  Leave Him alone!”  Say what you will about artistic license and whether it really was as bloody, violent and merciless as it was portrayed, but for my money, it rang true.  I …

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) – Named Kaspar, the robot has shaggy black hair, a baseball cap, a few wires protruding from his neck, and striped red socks. He was built by scientists at the University of Hertfordshire at a cost of about $2,118.
 
Student Eden Sawczenko used to recoil when other little girls held her hand and turned stiff when they hugged her. The 4-year-old girl began playing with Kaspar – and now she hugs everyone.

“She’s a lot more affectionate with her friends now and will even initiate the embrace,” said Claire Sawczenko, Eden’s mother.

There are several versions of Kaspar, including one advanced enough to play Nintendo Wii. The robot is still in the experimental stage, and researchers hope he could be mass-produced one day for a few hundred dollars.

“Children with autism don’t react well to people because they don’t understand facial expressions,” Ben Robins, a senior research fellow in computer science at the University of Hertfordshire says. “Robots are much safer for them because there’s less for them to interpret and they are very predictable.”

There are similar projects in Canada, Japan and the U.S., but the British one is the most advanced according to other European robot researchers not connected with the project.

The newest model of Kaspar is covered in silicone patches that feel like skin to help children become more comfortable with touching people. Almost 300 kids in Britain with autism, a disorder that affects development of social interaction and communication, have played with a Kaspar robot as part of scientific research.

The robot has only a handful of tricks, like saying “Hello, my name is Kaspar. Let’s play together,” The robot also laughs when his sides or feet are touched, raising his arms up and down, or hiding his face with his hands and crying out “Ouch. This hurts,” when he’s slapped too hard.

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) – Abbas said the Palestinians needed to “take on the legal status, of the occupation, not of Israel itself.” Abbas is expected to hand in the application in person to Ban Ki-moon, the U.N. secretary-general at the beginning of next week.

Abbas is acting in his capacity as chairman of the PLO, not as the president of the PA, in a bid that Washington has repeatedly said it would veto at the UNSC.

A senior U.S. diplomatic team was in the region in order to dissuade the PLO leadership from doing so in favor of restarting peace talks.

“The Palestinians will not and cannot achieve statehood through a declaration at the United Nations. It is a distraction, and in fact, it’s counterproductive,” Jay Carney, the White House spokesman said.

Carney says that “the only way to resolve the issues between the Palestinians and the Israelis, and to ultimately create a Palestinian state, is through direct negotiations.”

“We understand the crux of [Abbas'] speech, the headline of the speech is going to be ‘this is the moment of truth for the Palestinian people and for Palestine,’” reported Al Jazeera’s Cal Perry.

“We expect President Abbas to really talk about the roadmap and all the steps that have led up to this moment, saying the U.N. is now the only option for the Palestinian people, sitting down at the table has failed before, and that it will fail again. And that negotiations prove themselves to be not an acceptable route for the Palestinian people,” he reported.

The Palestinian Authority’s Foreign Minister Riad Malki says that the U.S. stance risks putting the country in a “confrontational position” with the rest of the world.

“I don’t know what it means to the standing of the U.S. in the United Nations and among the countries of the world,” he said.

Nevertheless, the Palestinians have left the door open for compromise, with Malki saying that the PA is willing to listen to suggestions from U.S. envoys.

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