Craig Lodge Community is a lay community of the Roman Catholic Church based in Dalmally, Argyll in the west Highlands of Scotland.
Craig Lodge, a former hunting lodge in Dalmally, Argyll, Scotland, was run by Calum and Mary Anne MacFarlane-Barrow as a guest house until a pilgrimage to Medjugorje in 1984 gave their lives a new direction. It was their children who first read about the events at Medjugorje, and the reports that the Virgin Mary was appearing to six teenagers. They had grown up in a Catholic family and were well versed in the stories of Marian apparitions at Lourdes and Fatima. They were intrigued with the idea something like this could happen in their own time and were determined to go and visit and find out more. The visit to Medjugorje, a small village in Bosnia-Herzegovina, was a life changing experience. The region was then still part of Communist Yugoslavia and to practice the Catholic faith often met with persecution. Seeing the deep faith of the local people and hearing about the extraordinary events firsthand left a lasting impression on the group. They also learnt about the messages the Virgin Mary, under the title, Queen of Peace, was giving through the visionaries. As in Lourdes and Fatima her message at Medjugorje continues to be a call to return to the gospel values; to decide for God, to pray and to fast. When they returned home they urged their parents to go and visit Medjugorje too. Their experiences in Medjugorje paved the way for Calum and Mary Anne taking the decision to turn their guest house into a retreat centre – Craig Lodge Family House of Prayer. Guests come to join in with organized retreats or just to enjoy the beautiful, peaceful surroundings and take part in the Community's daily prayer routine. In 1990 Calum and Mary Anne invited a group of young people to form a youth community (named Krizevac Community) at Craig Lodge. The commitment was for one year and the purpose was to deepen their faith through living out the messages of Medjugorje. “Dear Children my heart is full of grace and love. My heart is the gift I give you. Be united! Pray together! Love together!”
The Community soon began to get involved in evangelizing other young people through youth weekend retreats at Craig Lodge, visiting parishes and initiating prayer groups. Ten years later in 2000, it was decided the Community should incorporate Permanent members too – families, single people or religious who choose to renew their commitment annually. This is Craig Lodge Community as it is today. While members of the House Community live in Craig Lodge itself and commit to one year, Permanent members live independently, in their own homes, close by to Craig Lodge. Their daily commitment is different to that of the House Community to take into account family and work responsibilities.
The purpose of the Community is to foster holiness in the members by living out the messages of the Virgin Mary at Medjugorje. Living in community has always been recognized as a way of progressing in the spiritual life. It is a way of finding companions on the journey of faith, of supporting each other and helps to open hearts to Jesus and to others. The understanding is that people are the pathway to the growth of virtue in each of us.
"Pray, pray, pray."
Daily Life
Prayer is integral to the daily life of the Community: Divine Office, the Rosary, Praise and Worship, Lectio Divina, Intercessory prayer particularly for priests. If prayer is the breath of the Community then the Eucharist is the heart. Daily life centres on the Holy Mass and Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament.
“Today I invite you all to fall in love with the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar. Adore him, little children, in your parishes. In this way you will be united with the entire world. Jesus will become your friend and you will not talk of Him as someone you hardly know. Union with him will be a joy for you and you will become witnesses to Jesus’ love which he has for every creature. Little children when you adore Jesus you are also close to me.”
The overarching rule of the Community is to love:
“Love each other deeply, because love covers a multitude of sins, offer hospitality to one another without grumbling. Each one should use whatever gifts he has received to serve others, faithfully administering God’s grace in its various forms." 1 Peter 4: 8–11
Service
The Community's life has a strong calling to service. First and foremost by offering hospitality to the guests who come on retreat at Craig Lodge; by praying with them and making them feel at home. The Community is committed to youth work running several youth events each year at Craig Lodge – Easter, Summer & Advent. There is also an outreach team that carries out missions in secondary schools. The Community has a popular music ministry that leads the lively weekly praise and worship prayer group and is a hallmark of the Craig Lodge youth events. The Community is also eager to support family life and makes special efforts to make families welcome at Craig Lodge. Over the last years it has developed Family Week retreats that are geared to the needs of young families and include talks for parents alongside activities for the children. The patron saints of Craig Lodge Community are: Our Lady Queen of Peace, St Joseph and St Therese of Lisieux.
Retreats
As a Roman Catholic retreat centre, Craig Lodge has a wide variety of retreats throughout the year. They cover topics such as: healing, Scripture, Theology of the Body, Pope John Paul II, Ignatius Spiritual Exercises and fasting.
Way of the Cross
Visitors to Craig Lodge can make A Way of the Cross, marked out with cairns of stone for each Station, on the hill behind Craig Lodge.
The international aid charity Mary's Meals has its headquarters in the grounds of Craig Lodge. Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow OBE [1] (Order of the British Empire), the founder and chief executive of Mary's Meals, is based at Craig Lodge.
The Rosary, also known as the Dominican Rosary, refers to a set of prayers used primarily in the Catholic Church, and to the physical string of knots or beads used to count the component prayers. When referring to the prayer, the word is usually capitalized ; when referring to the prayer beads as an object, it is written with a lower-case initial letter.
A Marian apparition is a reported supernatural appearance by Mary the mother of Jesus, or a series of related such appearances during a period of time.
Medjugorje is a village in the municipality of Čitluk in Herzegovina-Neretva Canton of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, an entity of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Since 1981, it has become a popular site of Catholic pilgrimage due to Our Lady of Medjugorje, a purported series of apparitions of the Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus, to six local children that are supposedly still happening to this day.
Intercession of the Saints is a Christian doctrine that maintains that saints can intercede for others. To intercede is to go or come between two parties, to plead before one of them on behalf of the other. It is held by the Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Assyrian Church of the East, and Oriental Orthodox churches, and some Lutherans and Anglicans. The practice of praying to saints for their intercession can be found in Christian writings from the 3rd century onwards.
The Madonna House Apostolate is a Catholic Christian community of laymen, women, and priests, all of whom take lifelong promises of poverty, chastity, and obedience and who are dedicated to loving and serving Jesus Christ in all areas of life. Madonna House was founded in 1947 by Catherine Doherty in Combermere, Ontario, and has established mission houses throughout the world. It is recognized by the Catholic Church as an Association of the Faithful.
The Chaplet of the Divine Mercy, also called the Divine Mercy Chaplet, is a Catholic devotion to the Divine Mercy, based on the Christological apparitions of Jesus reported by Faustina Kowalska (1905–1938), known as "the Apostle of Mercy". She was a Polish religious sister of the Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy and canonized as a Catholic saint in 2000.
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Estela Ruiz is an alleged Marian visionary in Phoenix, Arizona.
The Sinner's prayer is an evangelical Baptist term referring to any prayer of repentance, prayed by individuals who feel sin in their lives and have the desire to form or renew a personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ. It is a popular prayer in evangelical circles. It is not intended as liturgical like a creed or a confiteor said or chanted within the Catholic Mass, but rather, is intended to be an act of initial conversion to Christianity; at the same time, it is roughly analogous to the Catholic Act of Contrition, though the theology behind each is markedly different, due to the intrinsically different views of salvation between Catholicism and Protestantism. While some Christians see reciting the Sinner's prayer as the moment defining one's salvation, others see it as a beginning step of one's lifelong faith journey.
Catholic spirituality includes the various ways in which Catholics live out their Baptismal promise through prayer and action. The primary prayer of all Catholics is the Eucharistic liturgy in which they celebrate and share their faith together, in accord with Jesus' instruction: "Do this in memory of me." The Catholic bishops at the Second Vatican Council decreed that "devotions should be so drawn up that they harmonize with the liturgical seasons, accord with the sacred liturgy, are in some fashion derived from it, and lead the people to it, since, in fact, the liturgy by its very nature far surpasses any of them." In accord with this, many additional forms of prayer have developed over the centuries as means of animating one's personal Christian life, at times in gatherings with others. Each of the religious orders and congregations of the Catholic church, as well as lay groupings, has specifics to its own spirituality – its way of approaching God in prayer to foster its way of living out the Gospel.
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Dalmally is a village in Argyll and Bute, Scotland. It is near the A85 road and is served by Dalmally railway station.
Fr. Robert Faricy, S.J. was a Jesuit priest and theologian who was an Emeritus Professor of Spirituality and lived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He was an Emeritus Professor of Spirituality at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome.
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Mary's Meals, formerly known as Scottish International Relief (SIR), is a registered charity which sets up school feeding programmes in some of the world's poorest communities, where hunger and poverty prevent children from gaining an education. It was founded in 2002 and has grown from its first feeding operation of 200 children in Malawi, to a worldwide campaign, providing free school meals in hundreds of schools and feeding more than two million children daily. Mary's Meals is named after Mary, the mother of Jesus, by its founders, who were inspired by their Catholic faith, although the charity is not a Catholic organisation.
Our Lady of Medjugorje, also called Queen of Peace and Mother of the Redeemer, is the title given to alleged visions of Mary, the mother of Jesus, said to have begun in 1981 to six Herzegovinian Croat teenagers in Medjugorje, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The alleged visionaries are Ivan Dragičević, Ivanka Ivanković, Jakov Čolo, Marija Pavlović, Mirjana Dragičević and Vicka Ivanković. They ranged from ten to sixteen years old at the time of the first apparition.
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