Hello Everyone! My name is Joseph Hafenbredl and I am 22 years old. I was born and raised in Colorado and have been Catholic my whole life. I am currently going to CU Denver to get my Bachelors in Information Systems with a minor in Business Analytics. I have recently started my fitness journey and I have started to take my faith more seriously. I realized I have been a lukewarm Catholic by only doing the bare minimum and not focusing on improvement at all. My goal is to grow stronger in my faith through community and discipline. I plan to achieve this by doing a weekly Bible study and losing 30 pounds by the end of the year (For context, I started at 250lbs, I am currently 230lbs, and I want to be 200 by the end of the year). Thank you all for reading and God bless!! Joseph Hafenbredl

Brothers, we are within the Octave of the Assumption of our Blessed Mother. I think it fitting, therefore, to speak of her glories and heroic virtues. I shall dwell, in particular, on the heroic mortification that the Blessed Virgin practiced. This, I hope, will move us to greater virtue—even in the area of fitness which is our particular interest as Catholic men on this group. There are two kinds of mortification: exterior mortification and interior mortification. While it is indeed true that interior mortification is more meritorious than exterior mortification, the former can hardly be attained without the latter. So, let us see how the Mother of God practiced both kinds of mortification. Holy Scripture tells us that Mary Most Holy was a Virgin. Furthermore, we can deduce from her response to Saint Gabriel—“How shall this be for I know not man?”—that Mary had previously made a vow of perpetual virginity to God. She renounced the pleasure of the conjugal act, which in and of itself is not sinful within matrimony, as an oblation of love to God. The Sacred Tradition of the Church furnishes us with more information on the heroic life led by Our Blessed Lady prior to and after the Annunciation of Saint Gabriel. According to Sacred Tradition, Mary was presented to the Lord in the Temple at the age of three, and lived there in the service of God till her twelfth or thirteenth birthday. Saint Anselm tells us: “Mary was docile, spoke little, was always composed, did not laugh … She also persevered in prayer, in the study of the Sacred Scriptures, in fastings and all virtuous works.” Saint Jerome tells us that the Immaculate Virgin spent the first three hours of her day from dawn in prayer, the next six hours in manual work, followed by more hours of prayer again. The mystics, such as Venerable Mary of Agreda and Blessed Anne-Catherine Emmerich, tell us that the Blessed Virgin, on being presented to the Lord in the Temple requested of the priests: abstinence from meat, dairy and fruits; sleeping on the bare floor and sacrificing her sleep by three vigils of prayer in the night. We are also told by the mystics that Our Holy Mother resolved to live a more rigorous life of sacrifice after Our Lord’s Passion and Resurrection as an oblation to God for the conversion of sinners and the triumph of the Holy Church, which was then in its infancy and was on the brink of great persecution. Add on top of all that, her material poverty, her flight to Egypt and her unfathomably sorrowful mystical suffering during the Passion, and you have One who was a living and constant Martyr.