Sunday 31 March 2013
He Is Risen As He Said...
Posted on 08:10 by Unknown
Posted in Alleluia, art masterpieces, Easter Sunday, He is Risen, Rembrandt Resurrection
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Saturday 30 March 2013
Easter: the Season of Saints and Hypocrites
Posted on 16:05 by Unknown
And one hypocrite really takes the cake. How can Obama, a man who champions abortion up to birth and beyond, talk about the "least of these?" The man rivals the whited sepulchres full of dead men's bones. It would behoove him to remember that the blood of the little ones calls out to God for vengeance.
Obama: We Will Follow Jesus in 'Seeing Everyone, Especially the Least of These, As a Child of God'
Obama: We Will Follow Jesus in 'Seeing Everyone, Especially the Least of These, As a Child of God'
Blessed John Newman's Meditation on the Lord's Passion
Posted on 16:01 by Unknown
Hat tip to Richard for sending this along.
Discourse 16. Mental Sufferings of Our Lord in His Passion
Discourse 16. Mental Sufferings of Our Lord in His Passion
EVERY passage in the history of our Lord and Saviour is of unfathomable depth, and affords inexhaustible matter of contemplation. All that concerns Him is infinite, and what we first discern is but the surface of that which begins and ends in eternity. It would be presumptuous for any one short of saints and doctors to attempt to comment on His words and deeds, except in the way of meditation; but meditation and mental prayer are so much a duty in all who wish to cherish true faith and love towards Him, that it may be allowed us, my brethren, under the guidance of holy men who have gone before us, to dwell and enlarge upon what otherwise would more fitly be adored than scrutinised. And certain times of the year, this especially, call upon us to consider, as closely and minutely as we can, even the more sacred portions of the Gospel history. I would rather be thought feeble or officious in my treatment of them, than wanting to the Season; and so I now proceed because the religious usage of the Church requires it, and though any individual preacher may well shrink from it, to direct your thoughts to a subject, especially suitable now, and about which many of us perhaps think very little, the sufferings which our Lord endured in His innocent and sinless soul.
You know, my brethren, that our Lord and Saviour, though He was God, was also perfect man; and hence He had not only a body, but a soul likewise, such as ours, though pure from all stain of evil. He did not take a body without a soul, God forbid! for that would not have been to become man. How would He have sanctified our nature by taking a nature which was not ours? Man without a soul is on a level with the beasts of the field; but our Lord came to save a race capable of praising and obeying Him, possessed of immortality, though that immortality had lost its promised blessedness. Man was created in the image of God, and that image is in his soul; when then his Maker, by an unspeakable condescension, came in his nature, He took on Himself a soul in order to take on Him a body; He took on Him a soul as the means of His union with a body; He took on Him in the first place the soul, then the body of man, both at once, but in this order, the soul and the body; He Himself created the soul which He took on Himself, while He took His body from the flesh of the Blessed Virgin, His Mother. Thus He became perfect man with body and soul; and as He took on Him a body of flesh and nerves, which admitted of wounds and death, and was capable of suffering, so did He take a soul, too, which was susceptible of that suffering, and moreover was susceptible of the pain and sorrow which are proper to a human soul; and, as His atoning passion was undergone in the body, so it was undergone in the soul also.
As the solemn days proceed, we shall be especially called on, my brethren, to consider His sufferings in the body, His seizure, His forced journeyings to and fro, His blows and wounds, His scourging, the crown of thorns, the nails, the Cross. They are all summed up in the Crucifix itself, as it meets our eyes; they are represented all at once on His sacred flesh, as it hangs up before us—and meditation is made easy by the spectacle. It is otherwise with the sufferings of His soul; they cannot be painted for us, nor can they even be duly investigated: they are beyond both sense and thought; and yet they anticipated His bodily sufferings. The agony, a pain of the soul, not of the body, was the first act of His tremendous sacrifice; "My soul is sorrowful even unto death," He said; nay; if He suffered in the body, it really was in the soul, for the body did but convey the infliction on to that which was the true recipient and seat of the suffering.
This it is very much to the purpose to insist upon; I say, it was not the body that suffered, but the soul in the body; it was the soul and not the body which was the seat of the suffering of the Eternal Word. Consider, then, there is no real pain, though there may be apparent suffering, when there is no kind of inward sensibility or spirit to be the seat of it. A tree, for instance, has life, organs, growth, and decay; it may be wounded and injured; it droops, and is killed; but it does not suffer, because it has no mind or sensible principle within it. But wherever this gift of an immaterial principle is found, there pain is possible, and greater pain according to the quality of the gift. Had we no spirit of any kind, we should feel as little as a tree feels; had we no soul, we should not feel pain more acutely than a brute feels it; but, being men, we feel pain in a way in which none but those who have souls can feel it.
Living beings, I say, feel more or less according to the spirit which is in them; brutes feel far less than man, because they cannot reflect on what they feel; they have no advertence or direct consciousness of their sufferings. This it is that makes pain so trying, viz., that we cannot help thinking of it, while we suffer it. It is before us, it possesses the mind, it keeps our thoughts fixed upon it. Whatever draws the mind off the thought of it lessens it; hence friends try to amuse us when we are in pain, for amusement is a diversion. If the pain is slight, they sometimes succeed with us; and then we are, so to say, without pain, even while we suffer. And hence it continually happens that in violent exercise or labour, men meet with blows or cuts, so considerable and so durable in their effect, as to bear witness to the suffering which must have attended their infliction, of which nevertheless they recollect nothing. And in quarrels and in battles wounds are received which, from the excitement of the moment, are brought home to the consciousness of the combatant, not by the pain at the time of receiving them, but by the loss of blood that follows.
I will show you presently, my brethren, how I mean to apply what I have said to the consideration of our Lord's sufferings; first I will make another remark. Consider, then, that hardly any one stroke of pain is intolerable; it is intolerable when it continues. You cry out perhaps that you cannot bear more; patients feel as if they could stop the surgeon's hand, simply because he continues to pain them. Their feeling is that they have borne as much as they can bear; as if the continuance and not the intenseness was what made it too much for them. What does this mean, but that the memory of the foregoing moments of pain acts upon and (as it were) edges the pain that succeeds? If the third or fourth or twentieth moment of pain could be taken by itself, if the succession of the moments that preceded it could be forgotten, it would be no more than the first moment, as bearable as the first (taking away the shock which accompanies the first); but what makes it unbearable is, that it is the twentieth; that the first, the second, the third, on to the nineteenth moment of pain, are all concentrated in the twentieth; so that every additional moment of pain has all the force, the ever-increasing force, of all that has preceded it. Hence, I repeat, it is that brute animals would seem to feel so little pain, because, that is, they have not the power of reflection or of consciousness. They do not know they exist; they do not contemplate themselves; they do not look backwards or forwards; every moment as it succeeds is their all; they wander over the face of the earth, and see this thing and that, and feel pleasure and pain, but still they take everything as it comes, and then let it go again, as men do in dreams. They have memory, but not the memory of an intellectual being; they put together nothing, they make nothing properly one and individual to themselves out of the particular sensations which they receive; nothing is to them a reality, or has a substance, 4-beyond those sensations; they are but sensible of a number of successive impressions. And hence, as their other feelings, so their feeling of pain is but faint and dull, in spite of their outward manifestations of it. It is the intellectual comprehension of pain, as a whole diffused through successive moments, which gives it its special power and keenness, and it is the soul only, which a brute has not, which is capable of that comprehension.
Now apply this to the sufferings of our Lord;—do you recollect their offering Him wine mingled with myrrh, when He was on the point of being crucified? He would not drink of it; why? because such a portion would have stupefied His mind, and He was bent on bearing the pain in all its bitterness. You see from this, my brethren, the character of His sufferings; He would have fain escaped them, had that been His Father's will; "If it be possible," He said, "let this chalice pass from Me;" but since it was not possible, He says calmly and decidedly to the Apostle, who would have rescued Him from suffering, "The chalice which My Father hath given Me, shall I not drink it?" If He was to suffer, He gave Himself to suffering; He did not come to suffer as little as He could; He did not turn away His face from the suffering; He confronted it, or, as I may say, He breasted it, that every particular portion of it might make its due impression on Him. And as men are superior to brute animals, and are affected by pain more than they, by reason of the mind within them, which gives a substance to pain, such as it cannot have in the instance of brutes; so, in like manner, our Lord felt pain of the body, with an advertence and a consciousness, and therefore with a keenness and intensity, and with a unity of perception, which none of us can possibly fathom or compass, because His soul was so absolutely in His power, so simply free from the influence of distractions, so fully directed upon the pain, so utterly surrendered, so simply subjected to the suffering. And thus He may truly be said to have suffered the whole of His passion in every moment of it.
Recollect that our Blessed Lord was in this respect different from us, that, though He was perfect man, yet there was a power in Him greater than His soul, which ruled His soul, for He was God. The soul of other men is subjected to its own wishes, feelings, impulses, passions, perturbations; His soul was subjected simply to His Eternal and Divine Personality. Nothing happened to His soul by chance, or on a sudden; He never was taken by surprise; nothing affected Him without His willing beforehand that it should affect Him. Never did He sorrow, or fear, or desire, or rejoice in spirit, but He first willed to be sorrowful, or afraid, or desirous, or joyful. When we suffer, it is because outward agents and the uncontrollable emotions of our minds bring suffering upon us. We are brought under the discipline of pain involuntarily, we suffer from it more or less acutely according to accidental circumstances, we find our patience more or less tried by it according to our state of mind, and we do our best to provide alleviations or remedies of it. We cannot anticipate beforehand how much of it will come upon us, or how far we shall be able to sustain it; nor can we say afterwards why we have felt just what we have felt, or why we did not bear the suffering better. It was otherwise with our Lord. His Divine Person was not subject, could not be exposed, to the influence of His own human affections and feelings, except so far as He chose. I repeat, when He chose to fear, He feared; when He chose to be angry, He was angry; when He chose to grieve, He was grieved. He was not open to emotion, but He opened upon Himself voluntarily the impulse by which He was moved. Consequently, when He determined to suffer the pain of His vicarious passion, whatever He did, He did, as the Wise Man says, instanter, "earnestly," with His might; He did not do it by halves; He did not turn away His mind from the suffering as we do—(how should He, who came to suffer, who could not have suffered but of His own act?) no, He did not say and unsay, do and undo; He said and He did; He said, "Lo, I come to do Thy will, O God; sacrifice and offering Thou wouldest not, but a body hast Thou fitted to Me". He took a body in order that He might suffer; He became man, that He might suffer as man; and when His hour was come, that hour of Satan and of darkness, the hour when sin was to pour its full malignity upon Him, it followed that He offered Himself wholly, a holocaust, a whole burnt-offering;—as the whole of His body, stretched out upon the Cross, so the whole of His soul, His whole advertence, His whole consciousness, a mind awake, a sense acute, a living cooperation, a present, absolute intention, not a virtual permission, not a heartless submission, this did He present to His tormentors. His passion was an action; He lived most energetically, while He lay languishing, fainting, and dying. Nor did He die, except by an act of the will; for He bowed His head, in command as well as in resignation, and said, "Father, into Thy hands I commend My Spirit;" He gave the word, He surrendered His soul, He did not lose it.
Thus you see, my brethren, had our Lord only suffered in the body, and in it not so much as other men, still as regards the pain, He would have really suffered indefinitely more, because pain is to be measured by the power of realising it. God was the sufferer; God suffered in His human nature; the sufferings belonged to God, and were drunk up, were drained out to the bottom of the chalice, because God drank them; not tasted or sipped, not flavoured, disguised by human medicaments, as man disposes of the cup of anguish. And what I have been saying will further serve to answer an objection, which I shall proceed to notice, and which perhaps exists latently in the minds of many, and leads them to overlook the part which our Lord's soul had in His gracious satisfaction for sin.
Our Lord said, when His agony was commencing, "My soul is sorrowful unto death"; now you may ask, my brethren, whether He had not certain consolations peculiar to Himself, impossible in any other, which diminished or impeded the distress of His soul, and caused Him to feel, not more, but less than an ordinary man. For instance, He had a sense of innocence which no other sufferer could have; even His persecutors, even the false apostle who betrayed Him, the judge who sentenced Him, and the soldiers who conducted the execution, testified His innocence. "I have condemned the innocent blood," said Judas; "I am clear from the blood of this just Person," said Pilate; "Truly this was a just Man," cried the centurion. And if even they, sinners, bore witness to His sinlessness, how much more did His own soul! And we know well that even in our own case, sinners as we are, on the consciousness of innocence or of guilt mainly turns our power of enduring opposition and calumny; how much more, you will say, in the case of our Lord, did the sense of inward sanctity compensate for the suffering and annihilate the shame! Again, you may say that He knew that His sufferings would be short, and that their issue would be joyful, whereas uncertainty of the future is the keenest element of human distress; but He could not have anxiety, for He was not in suspense; nor despondency or despair, for He never was deserted. And in confirmation you may refer to St. Paul, who expressly tells us that, "for the joy set before Him," our Lord "despised the shame". And certainly there is a marvellous calm and self-possession in all He does: consider His warning to the Apostles, "Watch and pray, lest ye enter into temptation; the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak"; or His words to Judas, "Friend, wherefore art thou come?" and, "Judas, betrayest thou the Son of Man with a kiss?" or to Peter, "All that take the sword shall perish with the sword"; or to the man who struck Him, "If I have spoken evil, bear witness of the evil; but if well, why smitest thou Me?" or to His Mother, "Woman, behold thy Son".
All this is true and much to be insisted on; but it quite agrees with, or rather illustrates, what I have been observing. My brethren, you have only said (to use a human phrase) that He was always Himself. His mind was its own centre, and was never in the slightest degree thrown off its heavenly and most perfect balance. What He suffered, He suffered because He put Himself under suffering, and that deliberately and calmly. As He said to the leper, "I will, be thou clean"; and to the paralytic, "Thy sins be forgiven thee"; and to the centurion, "I will come and heal him"; and of Lazarus, "I go to wake him out of sleep"; so He said, "Now I will begin to suffer," and He did begin. His composure is but the proof how entirely He governed His own mind. He drew back, at the proper moment, the bolts and fastenings, and opened the gates, and the floods fell right upon His soul in all their fulness. That is what St. Mark tells us of Him; and he is said to have written his Gospels from the very mouth of St. Peter, who was one of three witnesses present at the time. "They came," he says, "to the place which is called Gethsemani; and He saith to His disciples, Sit you here while I pray. And He taketh with Him Peter and James and John, and He began to be frightened and to be very heavy." You see how deliberately He acts; He comes to a certain spot; and then, giving the word of command, and withdrawing the support of the God-head from His soul, distress, terror, and dejection at once rush in upon it. Thus He walks forth into a mental agony with as definite an action as if it were some bodily torture, the fire or the wheel.
This being the case, you will see at once, my brethren, that it is nothing to the purpose to say that He would be supported under His trial by the consciousness of innocence and the anticipation of triumph; for His trial consisted in the withdrawal, as of other causes of consolation, so of that very consciousness and anticipation. The same act of the will which admitted the influence upon His soul of any distress at all, admitted all distresses at once. It was not the contest between antagonist impulses and views, coming from without, but the operation of an inward resolution. As men of self-command can turn from one thought to another at their will, so much more did He deliberately deny Himself the comfort, and satiate Himself with the woe. In that moment His soul thought not of the future, He thought only of the present burden which was upon Him, and which He had come upon earth to sustain.
And now, my brethren, what was it He had to bear, when He thus opened upon His soul the torrent of this predestinated pain? Alas! He had to bear what is well known to us, what is familiar to us, but what to Him was woe unutterable. He had to bear that which is so easy a thing to us, so natural, so welcome, that we cannot conceive of it as of a great endurance, but which to Him had the scent and the poison of death—He had, my dear brethren, to bear the weight of sin; He had to bear your sins; He had to bear the sins of the whole world. Sin is an easy thing to us; we think little of it; we do not understand how the Creator can think much of it; we cannot bring our imagination to believe that it deserves retribution, and, when even in this world punishments follow upon it, we explain them away or turn our minds from them. But consider what sin is in itself; it is rebellion against God; it is a traitor's act who aims at the overthrow and death of His sovereign; it is that, if I may use a strong expression, which, could the Divine Governor of the world cease to be, would be sufficient to bring it about. Sin is the mortal enemy of the All-holy, so that He and it cannot be together; and as the All-holy drives it from His presence into the outer darkness, so, if God could be less than God, it is sin that would have power to make Him less. And here observe, my brethren, that when once Almighty Love, by taking flesh, entered this created system, and submitted Himself to its laws, then forthwith this antagonist of good and truth, taking advantage of the opportunity, flew at that flesh which He had taken, and fixed on it, and was its death. The envy of the Pharisees, the treachery of Judas, and the madness of the people, were but the instrument or the expression of the enmity which sin felt towards Eternal Purity as soon as, in infinite mercy towards men, He put Himself within its reach. Sin could not touch His Divine Majesty; but it could assail Him in that way in which He allowed Himself to be assailed, that is, through the medium of His humanity. And in the issue, in the death of God incarnate, you are but taught, my brethren, what sin is in itself, and what it was which then was falling, in its hour and in its strength, upon His human nature, when He allowed that nature to be so filled with horror and dismay at the very anticipation.
There, then, in that most awful hour, knelt the Saviour of the world, putting off the defences of His divinity, dismissing His reluctant Angels, who in myriads were ready at His call, and opening His arms, baring His breast, sinless as He was, to the assault of His foe,—of a foe whose breath was a pestilence, and whose embrace was an agony. There He knelt, motionless and still, while the vile and horrible fiend clad His spirit in a robe steeped in all that is hateful and heinous in human crime, which clung close round His heart, and filled His conscience, and found its way into every sense and pore of His mind, and spread over Him a moral leprosy, till He almost felt Himself to be that which He never could be, and which His foe would fain have made Him. Oh, the horror, when He looked, and did not know Himself, and felt as a foul and loathsome sinner, from His vivid perception of that mass of corruption which poured over His head and ran down even to the skirts of His garments! Oh, the distraction, when He found His eyes, and hands, and feet, and lips, and heart, as if the members of the Evil One, and not of God! Are these the hands of the Immaculate Lamb of God, once innocent, but now red with ten thousand barbarous deeds of blood? are these His lips, not uttering prayer, and praise, and holy blessings, but as if defiled with oaths, and blasphemies, and doctrines of devils? or His eyes, profaned as they are by all the evil visions and idolatrous fascinations for which men have abandoned their adorable Creator? And His ears, they ring with sounds of revelry and of strife; and His heart is frozen with avarice, and cruelty, and unbelief; and His very memory is laden with every sin which has been committed since the fall, in all regions of the earth, with the pride of the old giants, and the lusts of the five cities, and the obduracy of Egypt, and the ambition of Babel, and the unthankfulness and scorn of Israel. Oh, who does not know the misery of a haunting thought which comes again and again, in spite of rejection, to annoy, if it cannot seduce? or of some odious and sickening imagination, in no sense one's own, but forced upon the mind from without? or of evil
knowledge, gained with or without a man's fault, but which he would give a great price to be rid of at once and for ever? And adversaries such as these gather around Thee, Blessed Lord, in millions now; they come in troops more numerous than the locust or the palmer-worm, or the plagues of hail, and flies, and frogs, which were sent against Pharaoh. Of the living and of the dead and of the as yet unborn, of the lost and of the saved, of Thy people and of strangers, of sinners and of saints, all sins are there. Thy dearest are there, Thy saints and Thy chosen are upon Thee; Thy three Apostles, Peter, James, and John; but not as comforters, but as accusers, like the friends of Job, "sprinkling dust towards heaven," and heaping curses on Thy head. All are there but one; one only is not there, one only; for she who had no part in sin, she only could console Thee, and therefore she is not nigh. She will be near Thee on the Cross, she is separated from Thee in the garden. She has been Thy companion and Thy confidant through Thy life, she interchanged with Thee the pure thoughts and holy meditations of thirty years; but her virgin ear may not take in, nor may her immaculate heart conceive, what now is in vision before Thee. None was equal to the weight but God; sometimes before Thy saints Thou hast brought the image of a single sin, as it appears in the light of Thy countenance, or of venial sins, not mortal; and they have told us that the sight did all but kill them, nay, would have killed them, had it not been instantly withdrawn. The Mother of God, for all her sanctity, nay by reason of it, could not have borne even one brood of that innumerable progeny of Satan which now compasses Thee about. It is the long history of a world, and God alone can bear the load of it. Hopes blighted, vows broken, lights quenched, warnings scorned, opportunities lost; the innocent betrayed, the young hardened, the penitent relapsing, the just overcome, the aged failing; the sophistry of misbelief, the wilfulness of passion, the obduracy of pride, the tyranny of habit, the canker of remorse, the wasting fever of care, the anguish of shame, the pining of disappointment, the sickness of despair; such cruel, such pitiable spectacles, such heartrending, revolting, detestable, maddening scenes; nay, the haggard faces, the convulsed lips, the flushed cheek, the dark brow of the willing slaves of evil, they are all before Him now; they are upon Him and in Him. They are with Him instead of that ineffable peace which has inhabited His soul since the moment of His conception. They are upon Him, they are all but His own; He cries to His Father as if He were the criminal, not the victim; His agony takes the form of guilt and compunction. He is doing penance, He is making confession, He is exercising contrition, with a reality and a virtue infinitely greater than that of all saints and penitents together; for He is the One Victim for us all, the sole Satisfaction, the real Penitent, all but the real sinner.
He rises languidly from the earth, and turns around to meet the traitor and his band, now quickly nearing the deep shade. He turns, and lo there is blood upon His garment and in His footprints. Whence come these first-fruits of the passion of the Lamb? no soldier's scourge has touched His shoulders, nor the hangman's nails His hands and feet. My brethren, He has bled before His time; He has shed blood; yes, and it is His agonising soul which has broken up His framework of flesh and poured it forth. His passion has begun from within. That tormented Heart, the seat of tenderness and love, began at length to labour and to beat with vehemence beyond its nature; "the foundations of the great deep were broken up;" the red streams rushed forth so copious and fierce as to overflow the veins, and bursting through the pores, they stood in a thick dew over His whole skin; then forming into drops, they rolled down full and heavy, and drenched the ground. "My soul is sorrowful even unto death," He said. It has been said of that dreadful pestilence which now is upon us, that it begins with death; by which is meant that it has no stage or crisis, that hope is over when it comes, and that what looks like its course is but the death agony and the process of dissolution; and thus our Atoning Sacrifice, in a much higher sense, began with this passion of woe, and only did not die, because at His Omnipotent will His Heart did not break, nor Soul separate from Body, till He had suffered on the Cross.
No; He has not yet exhausted that full chalice, from which at first His natural infirmity shrank. The seizure and the arraignment, and the buffeting, and the prison, and the trial, and the mocking, and the passing to and fro, and the scourging, and the crown of thorns, and the slow march to Calvary, and the crucifixion, these are all to come. A night and a day, hour after hour, is slowly to run out before the end comes, and the satisfaction is completed. And then, when the appointed moment arrived, and He gave the word, as His passion had begun with His soul, with the soul did it end. He did not die of bodily exhaustion, or of bodily pain; at His will His tormented Heart broke, and He commended His Spirit to the Father.
You know, my brethren, that our Lord and Saviour, though He was God, was also perfect man; and hence He had not only a body, but a soul likewise, such as ours, though pure from all stain of evil. He did not take a body without a soul, God forbid! for that would not have been to become man. How would He have sanctified our nature by taking a nature which was not ours? Man without a soul is on a level with the beasts of the field; but our Lord came to save a race capable of praising and obeying Him, possessed of immortality, though that immortality had lost its promised blessedness. Man was created in the image of God, and that image is in his soul; when then his Maker, by an unspeakable condescension, came in his nature, He took on Himself a soul in order to take on Him a body; He took on Him a soul as the means of His union with a body; He took on Him in the first place the soul, then the body of man, both at once, but in this order, the soul and the body; He Himself created the soul which He took on Himself, while He took His body from the flesh of the Blessed Virgin, His Mother. Thus He became perfect man with body and soul; and as He took on Him a body of flesh and nerves, which admitted of wounds and death, and was capable of suffering, so did He take a soul, too, which was susceptible of that suffering, and moreover was susceptible of the pain and sorrow which are proper to a human soul; and, as His atoning passion was undergone in the body, so it was undergone in the soul also.
As the solemn days proceed, we shall be especially called on, my brethren, to consider His sufferings in the body, His seizure, His forced journeyings to and fro, His blows and wounds, His scourging, the crown of thorns, the nails, the Cross. They are all summed up in the Crucifix itself, as it meets our eyes; they are represented all at once on His sacred flesh, as it hangs up before us—and meditation is made easy by the spectacle. It is otherwise with the sufferings of His soul; they cannot be painted for us, nor can they even be duly investigated: they are beyond both sense and thought; and yet they anticipated His bodily sufferings. The agony, a pain of the soul, not of the body, was the first act of His tremendous sacrifice; "My soul is sorrowful even unto death," He said; nay; if He suffered in the body, it really was in the soul, for the body did but convey the infliction on to that which was the true recipient and seat of the suffering.
This it is very much to the purpose to insist upon; I say, it was not the body that suffered, but the soul in the body; it was the soul and not the body which was the seat of the suffering of the Eternal Word. Consider, then, there is no real pain, though there may be apparent suffering, when there is no kind of inward sensibility or spirit to be the seat of it. A tree, for instance, has life, organs, growth, and decay; it may be wounded and injured; it droops, and is killed; but it does not suffer, because it has no mind or sensible principle within it. But wherever this gift of an immaterial principle is found, there pain is possible, and greater pain according to the quality of the gift. Had we no spirit of any kind, we should feel as little as a tree feels; had we no soul, we should not feel pain more acutely than a brute feels it; but, being men, we feel pain in a way in which none but those who have souls can feel it.
Living beings, I say, feel more or less according to the spirit which is in them; brutes feel far less than man, because they cannot reflect on what they feel; they have no advertence or direct consciousness of their sufferings. This it is that makes pain so trying, viz., that we cannot help thinking of it, while we suffer it. It is before us, it possesses the mind, it keeps our thoughts fixed upon it. Whatever draws the mind off the thought of it lessens it; hence friends try to amuse us when we are in pain, for amusement is a diversion. If the pain is slight, they sometimes succeed with us; and then we are, so to say, without pain, even while we suffer. And hence it continually happens that in violent exercise or labour, men meet with blows or cuts, so considerable and so durable in their effect, as to bear witness to the suffering which must have attended their infliction, of which nevertheless they recollect nothing. And in quarrels and in battles wounds are received which, from the excitement of the moment, are brought home to the consciousness of the combatant, not by the pain at the time of receiving them, but by the loss of blood that follows.
I will show you presently, my brethren, how I mean to apply what I have said to the consideration of our Lord's sufferings; first I will make another remark. Consider, then, that hardly any one stroke of pain is intolerable; it is intolerable when it continues. You cry out perhaps that you cannot bear more; patients feel as if they could stop the surgeon's hand, simply because he continues to pain them. Their feeling is that they have borne as much as they can bear; as if the continuance and not the intenseness was what made it too much for them. What does this mean, but that the memory of the foregoing moments of pain acts upon and (as it were) edges the pain that succeeds? If the third or fourth or twentieth moment of pain could be taken by itself, if the succession of the moments that preceded it could be forgotten, it would be no more than the first moment, as bearable as the first (taking away the shock which accompanies the first); but what makes it unbearable is, that it is the twentieth; that the first, the second, the third, on to the nineteenth moment of pain, are all concentrated in the twentieth; so that every additional moment of pain has all the force, the ever-increasing force, of all that has preceded it. Hence, I repeat, it is that brute animals would seem to feel so little pain, because, that is, they have not the power of reflection or of consciousness. They do not know they exist; they do not contemplate themselves; they do not look backwards or forwards; every moment as it succeeds is their all; they wander over the face of the earth, and see this thing and that, and feel pleasure and pain, but still they take everything as it comes, and then let it go again, as men do in dreams. They have memory, but not the memory of an intellectual being; they put together nothing, they make nothing properly one and individual to themselves out of the particular sensations which they receive; nothing is to them a reality, or has a substance, 4-beyond those sensations; they are but sensible of a number of successive impressions. And hence, as their other feelings, so their feeling of pain is but faint and dull, in spite of their outward manifestations of it. It is the intellectual comprehension of pain, as a whole diffused through successive moments, which gives it its special power and keenness, and it is the soul only, which a brute has not, which is capable of that comprehension.
Now apply this to the sufferings of our Lord;—do you recollect their offering Him wine mingled with myrrh, when He was on the point of being crucified? He would not drink of it; why? because such a portion would have stupefied His mind, and He was bent on bearing the pain in all its bitterness. You see from this, my brethren, the character of His sufferings; He would have fain escaped them, had that been His Father's will; "If it be possible," He said, "let this chalice pass from Me;" but since it was not possible, He says calmly and decidedly to the Apostle, who would have rescued Him from suffering, "The chalice which My Father hath given Me, shall I not drink it?" If He was to suffer, He gave Himself to suffering; He did not come to suffer as little as He could; He did not turn away His face from the suffering; He confronted it, or, as I may say, He breasted it, that every particular portion of it might make its due impression on Him. And as men are superior to brute animals, and are affected by pain more than they, by reason of the mind within them, which gives a substance to pain, such as it cannot have in the instance of brutes; so, in like manner, our Lord felt pain of the body, with an advertence and a consciousness, and therefore with a keenness and intensity, and with a unity of perception, which none of us can possibly fathom or compass, because His soul was so absolutely in His power, so simply free from the influence of distractions, so fully directed upon the pain, so utterly surrendered, so simply subjected to the suffering. And thus He may truly be said to have suffered the whole of His passion in every moment of it.
Recollect that our Blessed Lord was in this respect different from us, that, though He was perfect man, yet there was a power in Him greater than His soul, which ruled His soul, for He was God. The soul of other men is subjected to its own wishes, feelings, impulses, passions, perturbations; His soul was subjected simply to His Eternal and Divine Personality. Nothing happened to His soul by chance, or on a sudden; He never was taken by surprise; nothing affected Him without His willing beforehand that it should affect Him. Never did He sorrow, or fear, or desire, or rejoice in spirit, but He first willed to be sorrowful, or afraid, or desirous, or joyful. When we suffer, it is because outward agents and the uncontrollable emotions of our minds bring suffering upon us. We are brought under the discipline of pain involuntarily, we suffer from it more or less acutely according to accidental circumstances, we find our patience more or less tried by it according to our state of mind, and we do our best to provide alleviations or remedies of it. We cannot anticipate beforehand how much of it will come upon us, or how far we shall be able to sustain it; nor can we say afterwards why we have felt just what we have felt, or why we did not bear the suffering better. It was otherwise with our Lord. His Divine Person was not subject, could not be exposed, to the influence of His own human affections and feelings, except so far as He chose. I repeat, when He chose to fear, He feared; when He chose to be angry, He was angry; when He chose to grieve, He was grieved. He was not open to emotion, but He opened upon Himself voluntarily the impulse by which He was moved. Consequently, when He determined to suffer the pain of His vicarious passion, whatever He did, He did, as the Wise Man says, instanter, "earnestly," with His might; He did not do it by halves; He did not turn away His mind from the suffering as we do—(how should He, who came to suffer, who could not have suffered but of His own act?) no, He did not say and unsay, do and undo; He said and He did; He said, "Lo, I come to do Thy will, O God; sacrifice and offering Thou wouldest not, but a body hast Thou fitted to Me". He took a body in order that He might suffer; He became man, that He might suffer as man; and when His hour was come, that hour of Satan and of darkness, the hour when sin was to pour its full malignity upon Him, it followed that He offered Himself wholly, a holocaust, a whole burnt-offering;—as the whole of His body, stretched out upon the Cross, so the whole of His soul, His whole advertence, His whole consciousness, a mind awake, a sense acute, a living cooperation, a present, absolute intention, not a virtual permission, not a heartless submission, this did He present to His tormentors. His passion was an action; He lived most energetically, while He lay languishing, fainting, and dying. Nor did He die, except by an act of the will; for He bowed His head, in command as well as in resignation, and said, "Father, into Thy hands I commend My Spirit;" He gave the word, He surrendered His soul, He did not lose it.
Thus you see, my brethren, had our Lord only suffered in the body, and in it not so much as other men, still as regards the pain, He would have really suffered indefinitely more, because pain is to be measured by the power of realising it. God was the sufferer; God suffered in His human nature; the sufferings belonged to God, and were drunk up, were drained out to the bottom of the chalice, because God drank them; not tasted or sipped, not flavoured, disguised by human medicaments, as man disposes of the cup of anguish. And what I have been saying will further serve to answer an objection, which I shall proceed to notice, and which perhaps exists latently in the minds of many, and leads them to overlook the part which our Lord's soul had in His gracious satisfaction for sin.
Our Lord said, when His agony was commencing, "My soul is sorrowful unto death"; now you may ask, my brethren, whether He had not certain consolations peculiar to Himself, impossible in any other, which diminished or impeded the distress of His soul, and caused Him to feel, not more, but less than an ordinary man. For instance, He had a sense of innocence which no other sufferer could have; even His persecutors, even the false apostle who betrayed Him, the judge who sentenced Him, and the soldiers who conducted the execution, testified His innocence. "I have condemned the innocent blood," said Judas; "I am clear from the blood of this just Person," said Pilate; "Truly this was a just Man," cried the centurion. And if even they, sinners, bore witness to His sinlessness, how much more did His own soul! And we know well that even in our own case, sinners as we are, on the consciousness of innocence or of guilt mainly turns our power of enduring opposition and calumny; how much more, you will say, in the case of our Lord, did the sense of inward sanctity compensate for the suffering and annihilate the shame! Again, you may say that He knew that His sufferings would be short, and that their issue would be joyful, whereas uncertainty of the future is the keenest element of human distress; but He could not have anxiety, for He was not in suspense; nor despondency or despair, for He never was deserted. And in confirmation you may refer to St. Paul, who expressly tells us that, "for the joy set before Him," our Lord "despised the shame". And certainly there is a marvellous calm and self-possession in all He does: consider His warning to the Apostles, "Watch and pray, lest ye enter into temptation; the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak"; or His words to Judas, "Friend, wherefore art thou come?" and, "Judas, betrayest thou the Son of Man with a kiss?" or to Peter, "All that take the sword shall perish with the sword"; or to the man who struck Him, "If I have spoken evil, bear witness of the evil; but if well, why smitest thou Me?" or to His Mother, "Woman, behold thy Son".
All this is true and much to be insisted on; but it quite agrees with, or rather illustrates, what I have been observing. My brethren, you have only said (to use a human phrase) that He was always Himself. His mind was its own centre, and was never in the slightest degree thrown off its heavenly and most perfect balance. What He suffered, He suffered because He put Himself under suffering, and that deliberately and calmly. As He said to the leper, "I will, be thou clean"; and to the paralytic, "Thy sins be forgiven thee"; and to the centurion, "I will come and heal him"; and of Lazarus, "I go to wake him out of sleep"; so He said, "Now I will begin to suffer," and He did begin. His composure is but the proof how entirely He governed His own mind. He drew back, at the proper moment, the bolts and fastenings, and opened the gates, and the floods fell right upon His soul in all their fulness. That is what St. Mark tells us of Him; and he is said to have written his Gospels from the very mouth of St. Peter, who was one of three witnesses present at the time. "They came," he says, "to the place which is called Gethsemani; and He saith to His disciples, Sit you here while I pray. And He taketh with Him Peter and James and John, and He began to be frightened and to be very heavy." You see how deliberately He acts; He comes to a certain spot; and then, giving the word of command, and withdrawing the support of the God-head from His soul, distress, terror, and dejection at once rush in upon it. Thus He walks forth into a mental agony with as definite an action as if it were some bodily torture, the fire or the wheel.
This being the case, you will see at once, my brethren, that it is nothing to the purpose to say that He would be supported under His trial by the consciousness of innocence and the anticipation of triumph; for His trial consisted in the withdrawal, as of other causes of consolation, so of that very consciousness and anticipation. The same act of the will which admitted the influence upon His soul of any distress at all, admitted all distresses at once. It was not the contest between antagonist impulses and views, coming from without, but the operation of an inward resolution. As men of self-command can turn from one thought to another at their will, so much more did He deliberately deny Himself the comfort, and satiate Himself with the woe. In that moment His soul thought not of the future, He thought only of the present burden which was upon Him, and which He had come upon earth to sustain.
And now, my brethren, what was it He had to bear, when He thus opened upon His soul the torrent of this predestinated pain? Alas! He had to bear what is well known to us, what is familiar to us, but what to Him was woe unutterable. He had to bear that which is so easy a thing to us, so natural, so welcome, that we cannot conceive of it as of a great endurance, but which to Him had the scent and the poison of death—He had, my dear brethren, to bear the weight of sin; He had to bear your sins; He had to bear the sins of the whole world. Sin is an easy thing to us; we think little of it; we do not understand how the Creator can think much of it; we cannot bring our imagination to believe that it deserves retribution, and, when even in this world punishments follow upon it, we explain them away or turn our minds from them. But consider what sin is in itself; it is rebellion against God; it is a traitor's act who aims at the overthrow and death of His sovereign; it is that, if I may use a strong expression, which, could the Divine Governor of the world cease to be, would be sufficient to bring it about. Sin is the mortal enemy of the All-holy, so that He and it cannot be together; and as the All-holy drives it from His presence into the outer darkness, so, if God could be less than God, it is sin that would have power to make Him less. And here observe, my brethren, that when once Almighty Love, by taking flesh, entered this created system, and submitted Himself to its laws, then forthwith this antagonist of good and truth, taking advantage of the opportunity, flew at that flesh which He had taken, and fixed on it, and was its death. The envy of the Pharisees, the treachery of Judas, and the madness of the people, were but the instrument or the expression of the enmity which sin felt towards Eternal Purity as soon as, in infinite mercy towards men, He put Himself within its reach. Sin could not touch His Divine Majesty; but it could assail Him in that way in which He allowed Himself to be assailed, that is, through the medium of His humanity. And in the issue, in the death of God incarnate, you are but taught, my brethren, what sin is in itself, and what it was which then was falling, in its hour and in its strength, upon His human nature, when He allowed that nature to be so filled with horror and dismay at the very anticipation.
There, then, in that most awful hour, knelt the Saviour of the world, putting off the defences of His divinity, dismissing His reluctant Angels, who in myriads were ready at His call, and opening His arms, baring His breast, sinless as He was, to the assault of His foe,—of a foe whose breath was a pestilence, and whose embrace was an agony. There He knelt, motionless and still, while the vile and horrible fiend clad His spirit in a robe steeped in all that is hateful and heinous in human crime, which clung close round His heart, and filled His conscience, and found its way into every sense and pore of His mind, and spread over Him a moral leprosy, till He almost felt Himself to be that which He never could be, and which His foe would fain have made Him. Oh, the horror, when He looked, and did not know Himself, and felt as a foul and loathsome sinner, from His vivid perception of that mass of corruption which poured over His head and ran down even to the skirts of His garments! Oh, the distraction, when He found His eyes, and hands, and feet, and lips, and heart, as if the members of the Evil One, and not of God! Are these the hands of the Immaculate Lamb of God, once innocent, but now red with ten thousand barbarous deeds of blood? are these His lips, not uttering prayer, and praise, and holy blessings, but as if defiled with oaths, and blasphemies, and doctrines of devils? or His eyes, profaned as they are by all the evil visions and idolatrous fascinations for which men have abandoned their adorable Creator? And His ears, they ring with sounds of revelry and of strife; and His heart is frozen with avarice, and cruelty, and unbelief; and His very memory is laden with every sin which has been committed since the fall, in all regions of the earth, with the pride of the old giants, and the lusts of the five cities, and the obduracy of Egypt, and the ambition of Babel, and the unthankfulness and scorn of Israel. Oh, who does not know the misery of a haunting thought which comes again and again, in spite of rejection, to annoy, if it cannot seduce? or of some odious and sickening imagination, in no sense one's own, but forced upon the mind from without? or of evil
knowledge, gained with or without a man's fault, but which he would give a great price to be rid of at once and for ever? And adversaries such as these gather around Thee, Blessed Lord, in millions now; they come in troops more numerous than the locust or the palmer-worm, or the plagues of hail, and flies, and frogs, which were sent against Pharaoh. Of the living and of the dead and of the as yet unborn, of the lost and of the saved, of Thy people and of strangers, of sinners and of saints, all sins are there. Thy dearest are there, Thy saints and Thy chosen are upon Thee; Thy three Apostles, Peter, James, and John; but not as comforters, but as accusers, like the friends of Job, "sprinkling dust towards heaven," and heaping curses on Thy head. All are there but one; one only is not there, one only; for she who had no part in sin, she only could console Thee, and therefore she is not nigh. She will be near Thee on the Cross, she is separated from Thee in the garden. She has been Thy companion and Thy confidant through Thy life, she interchanged with Thee the pure thoughts and holy meditations of thirty years; but her virgin ear may not take in, nor may her immaculate heart conceive, what now is in vision before Thee. None was equal to the weight but God; sometimes before Thy saints Thou hast brought the image of a single sin, as it appears in the light of Thy countenance, or of venial sins, not mortal; and they have told us that the sight did all but kill them, nay, would have killed them, had it not been instantly withdrawn. The Mother of God, for all her sanctity, nay by reason of it, could not have borne even one brood of that innumerable progeny of Satan which now compasses Thee about. It is the long history of a world, and God alone can bear the load of it. Hopes blighted, vows broken, lights quenched, warnings scorned, opportunities lost; the innocent betrayed, the young hardened, the penitent relapsing, the just overcome, the aged failing; the sophistry of misbelief, the wilfulness of passion, the obduracy of pride, the tyranny of habit, the canker of remorse, the wasting fever of care, the anguish of shame, the pining of disappointment, the sickness of despair; such cruel, such pitiable spectacles, such heartrending, revolting, detestable, maddening scenes; nay, the haggard faces, the convulsed lips, the flushed cheek, the dark brow of the willing slaves of evil, they are all before Him now; they are upon Him and in Him. They are with Him instead of that ineffable peace which has inhabited His soul since the moment of His conception. They are upon Him, they are all but His own; He cries to His Father as if He were the criminal, not the victim; His agony takes the form of guilt and compunction. He is doing penance, He is making confession, He is exercising contrition, with a reality and a virtue infinitely greater than that of all saints and penitents together; for He is the One Victim for us all, the sole Satisfaction, the real Penitent, all but the real sinner.
He rises languidly from the earth, and turns around to meet the traitor and his band, now quickly nearing the deep shade. He turns, and lo there is blood upon His garment and in His footprints. Whence come these first-fruits of the passion of the Lamb? no soldier's scourge has touched His shoulders, nor the hangman's nails His hands and feet. My brethren, He has bled before His time; He has shed blood; yes, and it is His agonising soul which has broken up His framework of flesh and poured it forth. His passion has begun from within. That tormented Heart, the seat of tenderness and love, began at length to labour and to beat with vehemence beyond its nature; "the foundations of the great deep were broken up;" the red streams rushed forth so copious and fierce as to overflow the veins, and bursting through the pores, they stood in a thick dew over His whole skin; then forming into drops, they rolled down full and heavy, and drenched the ground. "My soul is sorrowful even unto death," He said. It has been said of that dreadful pestilence which now is upon us, that it begins with death; by which is meant that it has no stage or crisis, that hope is over when it comes, and that what looks like its course is but the death agony and the process of dissolution; and thus our Atoning Sacrifice, in a much higher sense, began with this passion of woe, and only did not die, because at His Omnipotent will His Heart did not break, nor Soul separate from Body, till He had suffered on the Cross.
No; He has not yet exhausted that full chalice, from which at first His natural infirmity shrank. The seizure and the arraignment, and the buffeting, and the prison, and the trial, and the mocking, and the passing to and fro, and the scourging, and the crown of thorns, and the slow march to Calvary, and the crucifixion, these are all to come. A night and a day, hour after hour, is slowly to run out before the end comes, and the satisfaction is completed. And then, when the appointed moment arrived, and He gave the word, as His passion had begun with His soul, with the soul did it end. He did not die of bodily exhaustion, or of bodily pain; at His will His tormented Heart broke, and He commended His Spirit to the Father.
A Hero Celebrates the Triduum with Jesus
Posted on 04:00 by Unknown
Fr. John Malloy died on Wednesday, a hero gone home to His Lord. What a heroic example of the manly priest, unafraid to stand up to the evils of the world. I'm sure Fr. Hardon met him at the pearly gates so they could pray together for the Church in the United States. With intercessors like these two holy priests, we can hope for a revival of the faith here in our beloved, but sick and wounded, country
Fr. Malloy, please pray for those of us who continue to fight on in the Church Militant. Please pray that God will grant us the same zeal and energy with which you fought for the faith in the belly of the beast there in San Francisco.
Read about Fr. Malloy here.
Fr. Malloy, please pray for those of us who continue to fight on in the Church Militant. Please pray that God will grant us the same zeal and energy with which you fought for the faith in the belly of the beast there in San Francisco.
Read about Fr. Malloy here.
Friday 29 March 2013
Good Friday Silence
Posted on 06:34 by Unknown
Thursday 28 March 2013
Fr. John Hardon: Servant of God
Posted on 18:33 by Unknown
I had the great privilege of making two retreats with Fr. John Hardon. A friend recently sent me the video below asking me if a photo in it was me? It was and I had no idea it had been included in a video. It was taken at the last retreat he gave for the Marian catechists which was held in Windsor, Canada. My sister Carol and I were thrilled to be on the retreat with Father and took the opportunity to get a snapshot before we left. I thought another retreatant took it with Carol's camera, but maybe not. I have no idea how it ended up in the video. What a funny world! Fr. Hardon, pray for us!
Homosexuals Acting Out at the Supreme Court
Posted on 18:08 by Unknown
These folks exhibit arrested development. They are permanent children, not innocent children though. And they are engaged in a perpetual tantrum. Gosh, it gets old. Pray for them, but keep telling the truth. Pretending that something is true doesn't make it so. Two men or two women CAN NEVER BE MARRIED! It's that simple. Their body parts don't fit together.
Infiltrating the Death Peddlers' Camp
Posted on 12:40 by Unknown
Fr. Paul Marx (RIP), that fearless grandfather of pro-life activism, often infiltrated the camp of the enemy to report on their diabolical activities. I remember vividly his descriptions of the cold-blooded discussions at pro-abortion and pro-euthanasia conferences where gruesome death methods were matched with gruesome "jokes."
The tradition goes on as the article below illustrates. Pray for all those who fearlessly, like Joshua's spies, infiltrate the enemy's camp to uncover their plots and plans.
Undercover at a Pro-Abortion Conference
The tradition goes on as the article below illustrates. Pray for all those who fearlessly, like Joshua's spies, infiltrate the enemy's camp to uncover their plots and plans.
Undercover at a Pro-Abortion Conference
Come See the Village That Raises the Child
Posted on 09:45 by Unknown
If you want to see the village that raises the children, come to my house for Easter Dinner. We will be a crowd of 30 including us, four of our five children with their spouses and children, one grandchild from our fifth child's family (we brought her back with us from Texas recently), and one of my siblings and his wife in the "grand" generation. What a happy chaos it will be with lots of praying and playing together.
Our first visitors arrive tomorrow. We will have our own indoor village with a one-bedroom "house" for each couple and two "dorm houses" for the girls and boys. The children will help with the chores and cleanup and will have the benefit of lots of adult guidance as they enjoy our village trampoline and playground and engage in an enthusiastic Easter egg hunt. Yes, it will be a joyful village celebration including honoring all the March and April birthdays to say, "We're glad you were born!" There can never be too many children or too many birthdays in a big Catholic family. Like Mother Teresa said, that's like saying there are too many flowers.
Our first visitors arrive tomorrow. We will have our own indoor village with a one-bedroom "house" for each couple and two "dorm houses" for the girls and boys. The children will help with the chores and cleanup and will have the benefit of lots of adult guidance as they enjoy our village trampoline and playground and engage in an enthusiastic Easter egg hunt. Yes, it will be a joyful village celebration including honoring all the March and April birthdays to say, "We're glad you were born!" There can never be too many children or too many birthdays in a big Catholic family. Like Mother Teresa said, that's like saying there are too many flowers.
So Much for Obama's Promise of Lower Health Care Costs
Posted on 07:32 by Unknown
20,000 pages of regs and growing! |
Obamacare Guarantees Higher Health Insurance Premiums -- $3,000+ Higher
We're only just beginning to see the impact of Obamacare and who can possibly know what's in those 20,000 pages of regulations expanding from the 2,000 page original bill. Among them is the likelihood of a tax on smartphones since they can contain medical apps. But not to worry; you'll find out what's in the bill and the 20,000 pages of regulations - especially this time of year, i.e., tax time. Because, remember, as Chief Justice John Roberts pointed out, Obamacare isn't about health care -- it's a tax bill and you all who love our tax and spend president basically gave him unlimited power to tax you into the grave. And since the bill hits the young the most, you young liberals can pat yourself on the back as you pony up your "fair share." Because, obviously you are the rich who Obama promised to tax more!
Cronyism in Gay "Marriage" Case?
Posted on 07:13 by Unknown
Gosh! Who woulda thunk it? An openly gay judge conniving with attorneys to overthrow the will of the people and impose a perverse definition of marriage on the state? Unthinkable? Or is it just business as usual among activist judges imposing their will through judicial legislation? Think about it...no matter what the people vote for, judges can just make it disappear...poof!...by finding new rights in the penumbra of the Constitution. What a carnival trick!
Pope Francis: Meditation on Holy Week
Posted on 07:01 by Unknown
Brothers and sisters, good morning!
I am pleased to welcome you to my first general audience. With deep gratitude and veneration I am taking up the "witness" from the hands of my beloved predecessor, Benedict XVI. After Easter we will resume the catechesis on the Year of Faith. Today I would like to focus a little on Holy Week. With Palm Sunday we began this week - the center of the whole liturgical year - in which we accompany Jesus in His Passion, Death and Resurrection.
But what does it mean for us to live Holy Week? What does it means to follow Jesus on His way to the Cross on Calvary and the Resurrection? In His earthly mission, Jesus walked the streets of the Holy Land; He called twelve simple people to remain with Him, to share His journey and continue His mission; He chose them among the people full of faith in the promises of God. He spoke to everyone, without distinction, to the great and the lowly; to the rich young man and the poor widow, the powerful and the weak; He brought the mercy and forgiveness of God to all; He healed, comforted, understood, gave hope, He led all to the presence of God, who is interested in every man and woman, like a good father and a good mother is interested in each child.
God did not wait for us to go to Him, but He moved towards us, without calculation, without measures. This is how God is: He is always the first, He moves towards us. Jesus lived the daily realities of most ordinary people: He was moved by the crowd that seemed like a flock without a shepherd, and He cried in front of the suffering of Martha and Mary on the death of their brother Lazarus; He called a tax collector to be His disciple and also suffered the betrayal of a friend. In Christ, God has given us the assurance that He is with us, in our midst. "Foxes", Jesus said, "have dens and birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to rest His head" (Mt 8:20). Jesus did not have a home because His house is the people -- that is, us; His mission is to open all God's doors, to be the loving presence of God.
In Holy Week we live the highest point of this journey, this loving plan that runs throughout the entire history of the relationship between God and humanity. Jesus enters Jerusalem to take the final step, in which His whole life is summarized: He gives Himself totally; He keeps nothing for Himself, not even His life. At the Last Supper, with His friends, He shares the bread and distributes the chalice "for us." The Son of God is offered to us, He consigns His Body and his Blood into our hands to be with us always, to dwell among us. And on the Mount of Olives, as in the trial before Pilate, He puts up no resistance, He gifts Himself: He is the Suffering Servant foretold by Isaiah, who stripped himself unto death (Is 53:12).
Jesus does not live this love that leads to sacrifice passively or as a fatal destiny; certainly He does not hide His deep human commotion in the face of a violent death, but He entrusts Himself with full confidence to the Father. Jesus voluntarily consigned Himself to death to respond to the love of God the Father, in perfect union with His will, to demonstrate His love for us. On the Cross, Jesus "loved me and gave Himself for me" (Gal 2:20). Each of us can say, "He loved me and gave Himself for me." Everyone can say that "for me".
What does this mean for us? It means that this is my, your, our path. Living Holy Week following Jesus not only with the emotions of the heart; living Holy Week following Jesus means learning how to come out of ourselves - as I said on Sunday - to reach out to others, to go to the outskirts of existence, to be the first to move towards our brothers and sisters, especially those who are most distant, those who are forgotten, those who are most in need of understanding, consolation and help. There is so much need to bring the living presence of Jesus, merciful and full of love!
Living Holy Week means increasingly entering into God's logic, the logic of the Cross, which is not first of all that of pain and death, but of love and of self-giving that brings life. It means entering into the logic of the Gospel. Following, accompanying Christ, remaining with Him requires a "stepping outside". Stepping outside of ourselves - of a tired and routine way of living the faith, of the temptation to withdraw into pre-established patterns that end up closing our horizon to the creative action of God.
God stepped outside of Himself to come among us, He pitched His tent among us to bring the mercy of God that saves and gives hope. Even if we want to follow Him and stay with Him, we must not be content to remain in the enclosure of the ninety-nine sheep, we have to...step outside", to search for the lost sheep together with Him, the one furthest away. Remember well: stepping outside of ourselves, like Jesus, like God has stepped outside of Himself in Jesus and Jesus stepped outside of Himself for all of us.
Some might say to me, "But, Father, I have no time", "I have so many things to do", "it is difficult", "what can I do with my little strength?", "with my sin, with so many things"? Often we settle for a few prayers, a distracted and inconsistent presence at Sunday Mass, a random act of charity, but we lack this courage to "step outside" to bring Christ. We are a bit like St. Peter. As soon as Jesus speaks of the Passion, Death and Resurrection, of self-giving, of love for all, the Apostle takes him aside and rebukes him.
What Jesus says upsets his plans, seems unacceptable, and undermines the sense of security that he had built up, his idea ofthe Messiah. And Jesus looks at the disciples and addresses Peter with perhaps one of the strongest words of the Gospel: "Get behind me, Satan. You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do"(Mk 8:33). God always thinks with mercy: do not forget this. God always thinks with mercy: our merciful Father. God thinks like a father who awaits the return of his child and goes to meet him, sees him come when he is still far away.
What does this mean? That each and every day he went out to see if his son was coming home. This is our merciful Father. It is the sign that he was waiting for him from the terrace of his house; God thinks like the Samaritan that does not approach the victim to commiserate with him, or look the other way, but to rescue him without asking for anything in return, without asking if he was Jew, if he was pagan, a Samaritan, rich or poor: he does not ask anything. He does not ask these things, he asks for nothing. He goes to his aid: This is how God thinks. God thinks like the shepherd who gives his life to defend and save his sheep.
Holy Week is a time of grace which the Lord gifts us to open the doors of our hearts, our lives, our parishes - what a pity, so many parishes are closed! - in our parishes, movements, associations, and to "step outside" towards others, to draw close to them so we can bring the light and joy of our faith. Always step outside yourself! And with the love and tenderness of God, with respect and patience, knowing that we put our hands, our feet, our hearts, but then it is God who guides them and makes all our actions fruitful.
May you all live these days well, following the Lord with courage, carrying within a ray of His love for all those whom we meet.
I am pleased to welcome you to my first general audience. With deep gratitude and veneration I am taking up the "witness" from the hands of my beloved predecessor, Benedict XVI. After Easter we will resume the catechesis on the Year of Faith. Today I would like to focus a little on Holy Week. With Palm Sunday we began this week - the center of the whole liturgical year - in which we accompany Jesus in His Passion, Death and Resurrection.
But what does it mean for us to live Holy Week? What does it means to follow Jesus on His way to the Cross on Calvary and the Resurrection? In His earthly mission, Jesus walked the streets of the Holy Land; He called twelve simple people to remain with Him, to share His journey and continue His mission; He chose them among the people full of faith in the promises of God. He spoke to everyone, without distinction, to the great and the lowly; to the rich young man and the poor widow, the powerful and the weak; He brought the mercy and forgiveness of God to all; He healed, comforted, understood, gave hope, He led all to the presence of God, who is interested in every man and woman, like a good father and a good mother is interested in each child.
God did not wait for us to go to Him, but He moved towards us, without calculation, without measures. This is how God is: He is always the first, He moves towards us. Jesus lived the daily realities of most ordinary people: He was moved by the crowd that seemed like a flock without a shepherd, and He cried in front of the suffering of Martha and Mary on the death of their brother Lazarus; He called a tax collector to be His disciple and also suffered the betrayal of a friend. In Christ, God has given us the assurance that He is with us, in our midst. "Foxes", Jesus said, "have dens and birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to rest His head" (Mt 8:20). Jesus did not have a home because His house is the people -- that is, us; His mission is to open all God's doors, to be the loving presence of God.
In Holy Week we live the highest point of this journey, this loving plan that runs throughout the entire history of the relationship between God and humanity. Jesus enters Jerusalem to take the final step, in which His whole life is summarized: He gives Himself totally; He keeps nothing for Himself, not even His life. At the Last Supper, with His friends, He shares the bread and distributes the chalice "for us." The Son of God is offered to us, He consigns His Body and his Blood into our hands to be with us always, to dwell among us. And on the Mount of Olives, as in the trial before Pilate, He puts up no resistance, He gifts Himself: He is the Suffering Servant foretold by Isaiah, who stripped himself unto death (Is 53:12).
Jesus does not live this love that leads to sacrifice passively or as a fatal destiny; certainly He does not hide His deep human commotion in the face of a violent death, but He entrusts Himself with full confidence to the Father. Jesus voluntarily consigned Himself to death to respond to the love of God the Father, in perfect union with His will, to demonstrate His love for us. On the Cross, Jesus "loved me and gave Himself for me" (Gal 2:20). Each of us can say, "He loved me and gave Himself for me." Everyone can say that "for me".
What does this mean for us? It means that this is my, your, our path. Living Holy Week following Jesus not only with the emotions of the heart; living Holy Week following Jesus means learning how to come out of ourselves - as I said on Sunday - to reach out to others, to go to the outskirts of existence, to be the first to move towards our brothers and sisters, especially those who are most distant, those who are forgotten, those who are most in need of understanding, consolation and help. There is so much need to bring the living presence of Jesus, merciful and full of love!
Living Holy Week means increasingly entering into God's logic, the logic of the Cross, which is not first of all that of pain and death, but of love and of self-giving that brings life. It means entering into the logic of the Gospel. Following, accompanying Christ, remaining with Him requires a "stepping outside". Stepping outside of ourselves - of a tired and routine way of living the faith, of the temptation to withdraw into pre-established patterns that end up closing our horizon to the creative action of God.
God stepped outside of Himself to come among us, He pitched His tent among us to bring the mercy of God that saves and gives hope. Even if we want to follow Him and stay with Him, we must not be content to remain in the enclosure of the ninety-nine sheep, we have to...step outside", to search for the lost sheep together with Him, the one furthest away. Remember well: stepping outside of ourselves, like Jesus, like God has stepped outside of Himself in Jesus and Jesus stepped outside of Himself for all of us.
Some might say to me, "But, Father, I have no time", "I have so many things to do", "it is difficult", "what can I do with my little strength?", "with my sin, with so many things"? Often we settle for a few prayers, a distracted and inconsistent presence at Sunday Mass, a random act of charity, but we lack this courage to "step outside" to bring Christ. We are a bit like St. Peter. As soon as Jesus speaks of the Passion, Death and Resurrection, of self-giving, of love for all, the Apostle takes him aside and rebukes him.
What Jesus says upsets his plans, seems unacceptable, and undermines the sense of security that he had built up, his idea ofthe Messiah. And Jesus looks at the disciples and addresses Peter with perhaps one of the strongest words of the Gospel: "Get behind me, Satan. You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do"(Mk 8:33). God always thinks with mercy: do not forget this. God always thinks with mercy: our merciful Father. God thinks like a father who awaits the return of his child and goes to meet him, sees him come when he is still far away.
What does this mean? That each and every day he went out to see if his son was coming home. This is our merciful Father. It is the sign that he was waiting for him from the terrace of his house; God thinks like the Samaritan that does not approach the victim to commiserate with him, or look the other way, but to rescue him without asking for anything in return, without asking if he was Jew, if he was pagan, a Samaritan, rich or poor: he does not ask anything. He does not ask these things, he asks for nothing. He goes to his aid: This is how God thinks. God thinks like the shepherd who gives his life to defend and save his sheep.
Holy Week is a time of grace which the Lord gifts us to open the doors of our hearts, our lives, our parishes - what a pity, so many parishes are closed! - in our parishes, movements, associations, and to "step outside" towards others, to draw close to them so we can bring the light and joy of our faith. Always step outside yourself! And with the love and tenderness of God, with respect and patience, knowing that we put our hands, our feet, our hearts, but then it is God who guides them and makes all our actions fruitful.
May you all live these days well, following the Lord with courage, carrying within a ray of His love for all those whom we meet.
Wednesday 27 March 2013
Just who is Notre Dame's "lady?"
Posted on 20:01 by Unknown
University of Notre Dame Looks to Hire LGBTQ Director
Notre Dame used to honor the Blessed Mother. Her image towers over the campus. But these days Notre Dame's "lady" is more likely to be a lesbian. It's time for someone to mount the dome and remove the statue there. Not only is Mary's presence a lie, since the university honors neither her nor her son, but it is also a blasphemy in view of the numerous scandals perpetrated by the administration. Their actions are the equivalent of plastering Mary with elephant dung like the notorious blasphemous art work.
But what is worse in God's eyes? For a secular, unbelieving bigot to desecrate an image of Mary or for a prestigious, well-known Catholic university run by men whose order is named for Mary's Son Jesus to promote perverse lifestyles, celebrate lewd sex, and honor those who advocate murdering the innocent? I don't think that question is hard to answer. Jesus always held the Israelites to a higher standard because they were His chosen own.
And the writing is already on the wall that Notre Dame will cave on the HHS contraceptive mandate. Fr. John Jenkins chortled in February over President Obama's bogus "compromise" which was nothing of the sort. Does anyone really believe the Notre Dame administration will fight for a faith they already treat with contempt? And many Catholic schools caved long ago.
Tonight I watched A Man for All Seasons. I had a different feeling about the movie than I've ever had before. We are living it. Not only does our Church in the United States lack men like Thomas More who stand for the truth, but many are clones of the pathetic little swine Richard Rich who perjured himself for Wales. How many men like Fr. Jenkins at Notre Dame will sell themselves to party with the powerful and pander for federal money? We live in tragic times. But nothing's new under the sun. Fr. Jenkins reminds me of Richard Rich. His duplicity during the Obama commencement debacle and his vicious treatment of the protesters known as the Notre Dame 88 speak for themselves. Pray for him and other clerics of his ilk who bring such disgrace on our beloved Church.
Caiphas? No...Cardinal Dolan who Loves the Rich and Powerful
Posted on 10:38 by Unknown
...and in Holy Week no less. "Boot-licking and lap-dogging" Dolan supporters will no doubt make excuses as they did when he honored Obama at the Al Smith dinner. How low can this prince of the Church go? When Jesus castigated the "hypocrites" and "whited sepulchres" he wasn't just talking about the pharisees of his day, he saw all the heretical and apostate clerics marching in lockstep down the centuries assisting the blood sacrifice of abortion and the perversion of sodomy. Maybe it's time for a GAP project outside St. Patrick's Cathedral.
"The most evident mark of God's anger, and the most terrible castigation He can inflict upon the world, is manifest when He permits His people to fall into the hands of a clergy who are more in name than in deed, priests who practice the cruelty of ravening wolves rather than the charity and affection of devoted shepherds. They abandon the things of God to devote themselves to the things of the world and, in their saintly calling of holiness, they spend their time in profane and worldly pursuits. When God permits such things, it is a very positive proof that He is thoroughly angry with His people and is visiting His most dreadful wrath upon them." Saint John Eudes
"The most evident mark of God's anger, and the most terrible castigation He can inflict upon the world, is manifest when He permits His people to fall into the hands of a clergy who are more in name than in deed, priests who practice the cruelty of ravening wolves rather than the charity and affection of devoted shepherds. They abandon the things of God to devote themselves to the things of the world and, in their saintly calling of holiness, they spend their time in profane and worldly pursuits. When God permits such things, it is a very positive proof that He is thoroughly angry with His people and is visiting His most dreadful wrath upon them." Saint John Eudes
Florida Atlantic University Apologizes for "Stomp on Jesus" Inciident
Posted on 07:20 by Unknown
Once again, an event illustrates the power of one. ONE student (that we know of) stood up and refused to participate in the offensive violation of his religious rights. God bless this Mormon student. (Were there no Catholics in the class?) Stand up for the truth and for the respect our Lord and Savior deserves. And never underestimate the impact of one bold warrior for the truth!
Read more here.
It didn't hurt that Republican Governor Rick Scott got involved! Of course, this was no doubt a political blessing for him since the professor, Deandre Poole, is vice-chairman of the Palm Beach County Democratic Party -- nothing like a rep from the "party of sensitivity and tolerance" exhibiting insensitive intolerance. But how stupid can the professor be not to recognize such an act was likely to cause a firestorm? Suppose the student had asked the professor if he could write Martin Luther King on the paper? Or Allah? Or Ghandi? The exercise was obviously bigoted. So where was the professor's brain? Or has anti-Christian bigotry become so second nature to liberals that they are too blind to see it?
If you've ever seen the film Life is Beautiful, you may recall the Nazis using antisemitic and pro-Aryan items in student textbooks. Math word problems disparaged Jews with the stereotype of the greedy Jewish businessman. The classrooms of the U.S. today are following the Third Reich's hellish example as this episode (among many others) illustrates.
Parents, be vigilant, and raise your children to be critical thinkers who never obey an authority that orders something immoral!
Tuesday 26 March 2013
Well No Wonder the White House Tours Were Cancelled....
Posted on 13:50 by Unknown
....Don't you lock your house when you go on vacation? Ah...if only the rest of us amongst the hoi polloi of the world had the money and leisure to take all those vacations. What a lovely world it would be!
More than a vacation a month for the first family
More than a vacation a month for the first family
Monday 25 March 2013
Get Ready for Another Roe v. Wade...
Posted on 09:00 by Unknown
...mandating legalization of same sex sodomy as "marriage." Oh yes, we all have a right to define marriage to be whatever we say it is and the Supreme Court is reviewing two cases that could result in the Roe case for homosexuals who want to play house and call it marriage. The first case is Hollingsworth v. Perry seeking to overturn California's Proposition 8 banning same-sex "marriage." Of course, the Supreme Court in the past had no trouble overturning the will of the people and making their votes irrelevant. They used the "penumbra" of the Constitution to do it and we all know they can find anything they want there to legislate from the bench. The second case relates to the Defense of Marriage Act, a piece of federal legislation protecting marriage that Obama very publicly refused to enforce. So, here we are again, with the courts addressing a moral issue, a sin, that "cries to heaven for vengeance." How will they decide? I'm not optimistic, but perhaps it just means they bring us closer to the day of judgment. As Padre Pio said, "Pray, hope, and don't worry." And remember that "All things work together for good to those who love the Lord and serve according to His purpose." Keep loving the Lord and loving your neighbor and all will be well no matter how bad things look!
What are the cases all about?
Ahead of Supreme Court Arguments, Sunday News Shows Favor Gay Marriage Supporters
What are the cases all about?
Ahead of Supreme Court Arguments, Sunday News Shows Favor Gay Marriage Supporters
Portland Teacher Facing Dismissal for Opposing Planned Parenthood
Posted on 08:03 by Unknown
Do you think he'd be facing dismissal if he had the kids write Jesus on a piece of paper and told them to put it on the floor and stomp on it?
Starbucks Doesn't Want Your Money If You're a Person of Faith...
Posted on 06:36 by Unknown
...so don't give it to them for heaven's sake! Read the article and CEO Howard Schultz's comments here.
If everybody who has traditional values stops buying their over-priced lattes, maybe they'll change their tune. But apparently Schultz is so sure of the way the world is going, he isn't worried. And in view of the growing approval of homosexual sodomy masquerading as marriage, maybe his optimism isn't surprising. But don't despair.
But those of us who believe in God and in God's moral laws choose God over Mammon no matter what the outcome. So Catholics and other people of faith, stop feeding idols! Let's encourage Chick fil A to add coffee drinks to the menu. Give us a choice, Mr. Cathy! And if your only choice is giving up lattes, offer it up for an end to sins of lust!
If everybody who has traditional values stops buying their over-priced lattes, maybe they'll change their tune. But apparently Schultz is so sure of the way the world is going, he isn't worried. And in view of the growing approval of homosexual sodomy masquerading as marriage, maybe his optimism isn't surprising. But don't despair.
But those of us who believe in God and in God's moral laws choose God over Mammon no matter what the outcome. So Catholics and other people of faith, stop feeding idols! Let's encourage Chick fil A to add coffee drinks to the menu. Give us a choice, Mr. Cathy! And if your only choice is giving up lattes, offer it up for an end to sins of lust!
Why Does DHS Need Weapons of War?...
Posted on 04:00 by Unknown
...unless it's planning a war against the people of the United States.
I'm reposting this without permission of the author, but I suspect he would be happy to see his letter (below) go viral. It is overdue for the Congress to demand answers as to why a homeland organization is stockpiling weapons that before this have been limited to our military fighting foreign wars. Why does DHS need these weapons unless they are planning to use them during the next Waco or Ruby Ridge federal assault against American citizens?
Ret. Army Captain Terry M. Hestilow warns DHS's Arms Build-Up a “bold threat of war” against AmericansSubmitted by Betty Liberty on Sun, 03/24/2013 - 12:08
in Peace / WarTexas
Posted with permission of Ret. Captain Hestilow:
http://imgur.com/a57ICQr
Re: Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and that agency's preparation for war against citizens of the United States of America.
To Senator John Cornyn:
It is with gravest concern that I write to you today concerning the recent appropriation of weapons by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that can only be understood as a bold threat of war by that agency, and the Obama administration, against the citizens of the United States of America. To date, DHS has been unwilling to provide to you, the elected representatives of the People, justification for recent purchases of almost 3,000 mine-resistant ambush-protected (MRAP) armored personnel carriers, 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition (with associated weapons), and other weapons systems, when, in fact, the DHS has no war mission or war making authority within the limits of the United States of America.
Significant is the fact that at the same time the Obama administration is arming his DHS for war within the limits of the United States against the People of the United States in accordance with his 2008 campaign speech claiming,
“We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we’ve set. We’ve gotta (sic) have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well funded [as the United States military]”--Candidate Barack Obama, 2008.
The Obama administration is deliberately defunding, overextending, and hollowing the Department of Defense; the only legitimate agency of the U.S. government with a war mission.
This act of the Obama administration stands as a glaring threat of war against our nation’s citizens! This act of the Obama administration can only be understood as a tyrannical threat against the Constitution of the United States of America! If left unresolved, the peace loving citizens who have sworn to defend the United States Constitution “against all enemies, both foreign and domestic” are left no option except to prepare to defend themselves, and the U.S. Constitution, against this Administration’s “coup” against the People and the foundations of liberty fought for and defended for the past 238 years. We have no choice if we honor our oaths.
The only proper response to this threat against the American people is for the representatives of the People, the members of the U.S. House and Senate, to demand in clear terms that the Administration cannot ignore, that the Department of Homeland Security immediately surrender their newly appropriated weapons of war to the Department of Defense (DoD). Further, since the DHS has assumed a position in the Administration to enforce the tyrannical acts of this president against the People of the United States against the limits of the United States Constitution, it remains for the United States Congress to exercise its limiting power in the balancing of powers established by our founding fathers, to disestablish and dissolve the DHS as soon as possible. One needs only to look to the rise of Adolf Hitler, and his associated DHS organizations, the SA and the SS, of 1932-1934, to see the outcome of allowing an agency of government this kind of control over the free citizens of a nation. The people of Germany could not have imagined, until it was too late, the danger of allowing a tyrant this kind of power. We must not be so naïve as to think it will not happen to us as well if we remain passive toward this power grab by the Marxist Obama administration!
Finally, for more than two centuries the nation has lived in peace at home because of the protections of our legitimate military and the many appropriate state and federal law enforcement agencies, supported by Constitutional courts. We stand today at a cross-road. Will we allow this present Administration to overthrow our United States Constitution and its legal processes to amend injustices, or, will we honor our obligations to defend the Constitution against a “domestic” enemy? Our Constitution lays out the proper methods of resolving our differences; and it does not include its overthrow by a rogue agency of a Marxist leadership at home. You, sir, are our constitutionally elected agent to defend our Constitution at home. We are counting upon you. We remain aware, however, of this present threat and will not expose ourselves as an easy prey to the authors of the destruction of our nation.
I know that this letter demands much of you. We elected you because we, the citizens of the State of Texas, believe that you are up to the task at hand and will, against all threats, honor your oath and office. We are also writing to your fellow members of the House and Senate to stand in integrity with the Constitution and against this present threat by the Obama administration and his DHS.
We refuse to surrender our Constitution or our nation!
Resolved,
Captain Terry M. Hestilow
United States Army, Retired
Fort Worth, Texas
March 23, 2013
I'm reposting this without permission of the author, but I suspect he would be happy to see his letter (below) go viral. It is overdue for the Congress to demand answers as to why a homeland organization is stockpiling weapons that before this have been limited to our military fighting foreign wars. Why does DHS need these weapons unless they are planning to use them during the next Waco or Ruby Ridge federal assault against American citizens?
Ret. Army Captain Terry M. Hestilow warns DHS's Arms Build-Up a “bold threat of war” against AmericansSubmitted by Betty Liberty on Sun, 03/24/2013 - 12:08
in Peace / WarTexas
Posted with permission of Ret. Captain Hestilow:
http://imgur.com/a57ICQr
Re: Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and that agency's preparation for war against citizens of the United States of America.
To Senator John Cornyn:
It is with gravest concern that I write to you today concerning the recent appropriation of weapons by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that can only be understood as a bold threat of war by that agency, and the Obama administration, against the citizens of the United States of America. To date, DHS has been unwilling to provide to you, the elected representatives of the People, justification for recent purchases of almost 3,000 mine-resistant ambush-protected (MRAP) armored personnel carriers, 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition (with associated weapons), and other weapons systems, when, in fact, the DHS has no war mission or war making authority within the limits of the United States of America.
Significant is the fact that at the same time the Obama administration is arming his DHS for war within the limits of the United States against the People of the United States in accordance with his 2008 campaign speech claiming,
“We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we’ve set. We’ve gotta (sic) have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well funded [as the United States military]”--Candidate Barack Obama, 2008.
The Obama administration is deliberately defunding, overextending, and hollowing the Department of Defense; the only legitimate agency of the U.S. government with a war mission.
This act of the Obama administration stands as a glaring threat of war against our nation’s citizens! This act of the Obama administration can only be understood as a tyrannical threat against the Constitution of the United States of America! If left unresolved, the peace loving citizens who have sworn to defend the United States Constitution “against all enemies, both foreign and domestic” are left no option except to prepare to defend themselves, and the U.S. Constitution, against this Administration’s “coup” against the People and the foundations of liberty fought for and defended for the past 238 years. We have no choice if we honor our oaths.
The only proper response to this threat against the American people is for the representatives of the People, the members of the U.S. House and Senate, to demand in clear terms that the Administration cannot ignore, that the Department of Homeland Security immediately surrender their newly appropriated weapons of war to the Department of Defense (DoD). Further, since the DHS has assumed a position in the Administration to enforce the tyrannical acts of this president against the People of the United States against the limits of the United States Constitution, it remains for the United States Congress to exercise its limiting power in the balancing of powers established by our founding fathers, to disestablish and dissolve the DHS as soon as possible. One needs only to look to the rise of Adolf Hitler, and his associated DHS organizations, the SA and the SS, of 1932-1934, to see the outcome of allowing an agency of government this kind of control over the free citizens of a nation. The people of Germany could not have imagined, until it was too late, the danger of allowing a tyrant this kind of power. We must not be so naïve as to think it will not happen to us as well if we remain passive toward this power grab by the Marxist Obama administration!
Finally, for more than two centuries the nation has lived in peace at home because of the protections of our legitimate military and the many appropriate state and federal law enforcement agencies, supported by Constitutional courts. We stand today at a cross-road. Will we allow this present Administration to overthrow our United States Constitution and its legal processes to amend injustices, or, will we honor our obligations to defend the Constitution against a “domestic” enemy? Our Constitution lays out the proper methods of resolving our differences; and it does not include its overthrow by a rogue agency of a Marxist leadership at home. You, sir, are our constitutionally elected agent to defend our Constitution at home. We are counting upon you. We remain aware, however, of this present threat and will not expose ourselves as an easy prey to the authors of the destruction of our nation.
I know that this letter demands much of you. We elected you because we, the citizens of the State of Texas, believe that you are up to the task at hand and will, against all threats, honor your oath and office. We are also writing to your fellow members of the House and Senate to stand in integrity with the Constitution and against this present threat by the Obama administration and his DHS.
We refuse to surrender our Constitution or our nation!
Resolved,
Captain Terry M. Hestilow
United States Army, Retired
Fort Worth, Texas
March 23, 2013
Sunday 24 March 2013
The Soviets and Barack Obama
Posted on 12:44 by Unknown
The thing that disturbs me about the story below is that Tom Fife only began telling it in 2010. At least that's the earliest it seems to appear. Did he reveal it earlier as he saw Obama rising? If not, why not? Would a commie operative really expose so much of the Soviets' plan to an American who might take it to the CIA? Or was she so arrogant she didn't think it would matter? What's happening in the U.S. today seems to confirm the truth of what he says.... What do you think about this?
Never Forget: The Soviet War against Religion
Posted on 11:19 by Unknown
Militant atheism such as existed in the former Soviet Union and in other socialist countries like China and Cambodia leads inexorably to murder for no other reason than belief in God. As the persecution against Christians rises in our own country we need to have our eyes wide open to what happened historically in other countries where militant atheists did all they could to annihilate Christianity: the French Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, the Mexican Revolution - all involved the persecution and murder of people of faith. Consider a donation to bring this project to fruition. Those who forget the horrors of history are likely to repeat them.
Read more here.
Read more here.
Sunday Meditation: Poems for Holy Week
Posted on 11:04 by Unknown
I was putting away some books I bought at the library used book sale. ($3.00 a bag!) and found the poetry of Robert Frost. After reading a few of my favorite poems, I got to thinking about Lenten and Holy Week poems. After a little research here are a few to ponder and perhaps delight in. One by a Protestant, one by a martyr-saint, and one by a notorious sinner who repented and entered the Church on his deathbed like the good thief. Isn't God wonderful?
TO KEEP A TRUE LENT.
By Robert Herrick (1591-1674)
IS this a fast, to keep
The larder lean ?
And clean
From fat of veals and sheep ?
Is it to quit the dish
Of flesh, yet still
To fill
The platter high with fish ?
Is it to fast an hour,
Or ragg’d to go,
Or show
A downcast look and sour ?
No ; ‘tis a fast to dole
Thy sheaf of wheat,
And meat,
Unto the hungry soul.
It is to fast from strife,
From old debate
And hate ;
To circumcise thy life.
To show a heart grief-rent ;
To starve thy sin,
Not bin ;
And that’s to keep thy Lent.
THE VIRGIN MARY TO CHRIST ON THE CROSS.
By St. Robert Southwell, S.J. (1561-1595, martyred at Tyburn at age 33 under Elizabeth I)
What mist hath dimm'd that glorious face?
What seas of grief my sun doth toss?
The golden rays of heavenly grace
Lies now eclipsèd on the cross.
Jesus, my love, my Son, my God,
Behold Thy mother wash'd in tears:
Thy bloody wounds be made a rod
To chasten these my later years.
You cruel Jews, come work your ire
Upon this worthless flesh of mine,
And kindle not eternal fire
By wounding Him who is divine.
Thou messenger that didst impart
His first descent into my womb,
Come help me now to cleave my heart,
That there I may my Son entomb.
You angels, all that present were
To show His birth with harmony,
Why are you not now ready here,
To make a mourning symphony?
The cause I know you wail alone,
And shed your tears in secrecy,
Lest I should movèd be to moan,
By force of heavy company.
But wail, my soul, thy comfort dies,
My woful womb, lament thy fruit;
My heart give tears unto mine eyes,
Let sorrow string my heavy lute.
E Tenebris
TO KEEP A TRUE LENT.
By Robert Herrick (1591-1674)
IS this a fast, to keep
The larder lean ?
And clean
From fat of veals and sheep ?
Is it to quit the dish
Of flesh, yet still
To fill
The platter high with fish ?
Is it to fast an hour,
Or ragg’d to go,
Or show
A downcast look and sour ?
No ; ‘tis a fast to dole
Thy sheaf of wheat,
And meat,
Unto the hungry soul.
It is to fast from strife,
From old debate
And hate ;
To circumcise thy life.
To show a heart grief-rent ;
To starve thy sin,
Not bin ;
And that’s to keep thy Lent.
THE VIRGIN MARY TO CHRIST ON THE CROSS.
By St. Robert Southwell, S.J. (1561-1595, martyred at Tyburn at age 33 under Elizabeth I)
What mist hath dimm'd that glorious face?
What seas of grief my sun doth toss?
The golden rays of heavenly grace
Lies now eclipsèd on the cross.
Jesus, my love, my Son, my God,
Behold Thy mother wash'd in tears:
Thy bloody wounds be made a rod
To chasten these my later years.
You cruel Jews, come work your ire
Upon this worthless flesh of mine,
And kindle not eternal fire
By wounding Him who is divine.
Thou messenger that didst impart
His first descent into my womb,
Come help me now to cleave my heart,
That there I may my Son entomb.
You angels, all that present were
To show His birth with harmony,
Why are you not now ready here,
To make a mourning symphony?
The cause I know you wail alone,
And shed your tears in secrecy,
Lest I should movèd be to moan,
By force of heavy company.
But wail, my soul, thy comfort dies,
My woful womb, lament thy fruit;
My heart give tears unto mine eyes,
Let sorrow string my heavy lute.
E Tenebris
By Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
COME down, O Christ, and help me! reach thy hand,
For I am drowning in a stormier sea
Than Simon on thy lake of Galilee:
The wine of life is spilt upon the sand,
My heart is as some famine-murdered land,
Whence all good things have perished utterly,
And well I know my soul in Hell must lie
If I this night before God's throne should stand.
'He sleeps perchance, or rideth to the chase,
Like Baal, when his prophets howled that name
From morn to noon on Carmel's smitten height.'
Nay, peace, I shall behold before the night,
The feet of brass, the robe more white than flame,
The wounded hands, the weary human face.
COME down, O Christ, and help me! reach thy hand,
For I am drowning in a stormier sea
Than Simon on thy lake of Galilee:
The wine of life is spilt upon the sand,
My heart is as some famine-murdered land,
Whence all good things have perished utterly,
And well I know my soul in Hell must lie
If I this night before God's throne should stand.
'He sleeps perchance, or rideth to the chase,
Like Baal, when his prophets howled that name
From morn to noon on Carmel's smitten height.'
Nay, peace, I shall behold before the night,
The feet of brass, the robe more white than flame,
The wounded hands, the weary human face.
Saturday 23 March 2013
Debbie Wasserman Schultz Tells Hard Luck Story
Posted on 12:20 by Unknown
Omigosh! The sequester is reducing Congressional staff to near starvation according to Debbie Wasserman Schultz, (D. FL). Aides, she says, are being "priced out" of a good meal which actually costs about the same as McDonalds at the food service spots in the office buildings around the hill.
When my husband was a senior executive working for the Marine Corps, he took his lunch most days. But mayhe those poor Democrat staffers don't know how to make a sandwich, poor things on their $60 - $160 thousand salaries. Next thing we know we'll see soup lines snaking around the Capitol, staffers holding tin cups and fainting from starvation. Is this woman real? Or is she a comedian with a bad writer?
Debbie Wasserman Schultz: Sequester nearly starving staffers
When my husband was a senior executive working for the Marine Corps, he took his lunch most days. But mayhe those poor Democrat staffers don't know how to make a sandwich, poor things on their $60 - $160 thousand salaries. Next thing we know we'll see soup lines snaking around the Capitol, staffers holding tin cups and fainting from starvation. Is this woman real? Or is she a comedian with a bad writer?
Debbie Wasserman Schultz: Sequester nearly starving staffers
Biden Stays at London, Paris Hotels; Two Nights, $1 Million
He shoulda stayed home and put the money toward reducing the impact of the sequester. Except we all know that the impact of the sequester is nil and just a game played by Democrat politicians. Any suffering is deliberately inflicted on the peasants by our American nobility. Does anyone think Nancy Pelosi will see a reduction in her expense account? As for Joe, I can almost hear him say, "The people cry for bread, let them eat cake."
He shoulda stayed home and put the money toward reducing the impact of the sequester. Except we all know that the impact of the sequester is nil and just a game played by Democrat politicians. Any suffering is deliberately inflicted on the peasants by our American nobility. Does anyone think Nancy Pelosi will see a reduction in her expense account? As for Joe, I can almost hear him say, "The people cry for bread, let them eat cake."
Read the Tale of Two Mothers...
Posted on 04:00 by Unknown
...and ask yourself whom you would rather resemble - Andrea Bomberger who vowed as a little girl to love the unwanted or Margaret Sanger whose whole adult life was committed to eliminating the unwanted whom she considered "unfit."
Read Andrea's Story told by one of her adopted sons. I guarantee you will be uplifted and inspired. Thank you, Lord for men and women like Andrea and her husband who gave so many "unwanted" little ones a happy Christ-centered family!
Read Andrea's Story told by one of her adopted sons. I guarantee you will be uplifted and inspired. Thank you, Lord for men and women like Andrea and her husband who gave so many "unwanted" little ones a happy Christ-centered family!
Friday 22 March 2013
Stomp on Jesus?
Posted on 03:30 by Unknown
A Florida university professor instructed a classroom of students to write the name Jesus on a piece of paper, put it on the floor, and stomp on it! I am not kidding. And then, when a student (Mormon) refused, the professor suspended the student from his class. Even more unbelievable...the university backed the professor.
Think about this. Do you think for a minute this professor would tell his students to write the name Allah on the paper or Mohammed or Martin Luther King or Barack Obama? Heck no! That might offend Muslims or blacks. But offending Christians has become a proof of your tolerance and diversity. (Don't ask me to explain it; I can't and liberals never need to explain anything. Being liberal means never having to say you're sorry!) ,
If you find this unbelievable, I don't blame you, but you can read all about it here. This is what passes for education today. Anyone care to join me in shouting, "The emperor is buck naked!" And the professor is an intolerant bigot who should be fired!
Think about this. Do you think for a minute this professor would tell his students to write the name Allah on the paper or Mohammed or Martin Luther King or Barack Obama? Heck no! That might offend Muslims or blacks. But offending Christians has become a proof of your tolerance and diversity. (Don't ask me to explain it; I can't and liberals never need to explain anything. Being liberal means never having to say you're sorry!) ,
If you find this unbelievable, I don't blame you, but you can read all about it here. This is what passes for education today. Anyone care to join me in shouting, "The emperor is buck naked!" And the professor is an intolerant bigot who should be fired!
Thursday 21 March 2013
Snipping Babies' Spines -- The Ugly Truth of "Safe, Legal" Abortion
Posted on 06:46 by Unknown
There are monsters among us, but you'd never know it from the biased reporting of the mainstream media.
Gosnell Abortion Clinic Worker Admits Snipping Spines of 10 Babies
Big Three Networks Ignore Abortion Doc Who Snipped Babies’ Necks
Hey, revealing the truth about butchers and bottom feeders in the abortion industry might hurt their business and endanger the unholy sacrament of abortion. Spilling innocent blood has always been a mark of the diabolical. Think of Rwanda, the Spanish Civil War, and the continuous genocidal slaughters of the 20th century. One day, we will be condemned as a vile culture that killed its own future, just like we condemn the Aztecs for their bloody sacrifices. May God have mercy on America and put an end to the slaughter of the innocent.
Canon Lawyer Urges Archbishop Cordileone to Withhold Communion
Posted on 06:33 by Unknown
Nancy Pelosi receiving Communion in Rome at the pope's installation where she is no cause celebre is understandable. She Is, after all, as Dr. Ed Peter's says America's problem, not Rome's. But isn't it time that someone cares enough about this obstinate public sinner to warn her -- for the sake of her own soul? Dr. Peters thinks so:
For her sake, therefore, and for those confused by the chronic scandal she gives, Pelosi needs to be formally warned against taking holy Communion for so long as she promotes, as consistent with our Catholic faith, a variety of gravely immoral policies (per cc. 916, 1339); ministers, meanwhile, in her environs need to be directed to withhold Communion from her till advised otherwise by the competent ecclesiastical authority (per c. 915). [i.e., that means Archbishop Cordileone in California and Cardinal Donald Wuerl in Washington, D.C.]Read more here.
Now, won't it be interesting
if Archbishop Cordileone refuses Pelosi Communion and Cardinal Wuerl welcomes her to commit sacrilege at the altar? That would be a fulfillment of the prophecy of Akita:
"The work of the devil will infiltrate even into the Church in such a way that one will see cardinals opposing cardinals, bishops against bishops. The priests who venerate me will be scorned and opposed by their confreres...churches and altars sacked; the Church will be full of those who accept compromises and the demon will press many priests and consecrated souls to leave the service of the Lord.
"The demon will be especially implacable against souls consecrated to God. The thought of the loss of so many souls is the cause of my sadness. If sins increase in number and gravity, there will be no longer pardon for them"Hmm...sounds familiar eh? Keep your rosary running through your fingers that the Holy Spirit will infuse our shepherds with fortitude and zeal for the house of God. Too many put the almighty dollar and their own comfort before almighty God.
Wednesday 20 March 2013
The Scandal Continues: Biden and Pelosi Committed Sacrilege at Papal Mass
Posted on 07:58 by Unknown
Well, the White House has confirmed it: Pelosi and Biden went to Communion sacrilegiously at the papal installation Mass. (Huffington Post article.) What I found especially hypocritical, however, was Cardinal Wuerl's statement:
is not using the Eucharist as "a weapon." It is exercising Church law articulated in Canon Law 915. It shows concern for the soul of the person who is heaping up mortal sin on mortal sin which does several things to the unfortunate soul, i.e., makes it harder to repent, increases the moral debt of the soul so to speak, creates grave scandal when the heretic is a public figure which merits a "millstone," etc. Biden and Pelosi parade their "Catholic" credentials while they give the finger to Catholic doctrine.
Cardinal Wuerl shows little concern for his Washington, D.C. political flock when he announces he will never refuse to let them crucify Christ by unworthy reception His body and blood. Did Christ die for pro-abortion Catholic politicians? Of course. Does He want them to pile up one mortal sin of sacrilege after another? Hardly!
Frankly, I am sorely grieved at the lack of pastoral care bishops like Wuerl have toward these outrageous public sinners. He appears to care more for human respect and his own place in the halls of power than for their eternal salvation. He is like a father who buys his drug-addicted son the next fix instead of loving him enough to say no, because he doesn't want to alienate his son.
When I see Cardinal Wuerl's cowardice (What else can it be?) I think of his foils, bishops like Rene Gracida (bishop emeritus of Corpus Christi) who is a model of pastoral concern and courage when it comes to warning "obstinate public sinners" to refrain from Communion. (See a case study describing how Bishop Gracida put a Catholic politician under interdict.) Why should Biden and Pelosi and others of their ilk repent? Why should they even believe that Christ is present in the Eucharist? There certainly doesn't appear to be much evidence that their bishops believe it. If they did, would they, like Judas, turn Christ over to them to be crucified again? That's exactly what they do when they give Jesus to heretics.
Cardinal Wuerl and other bishops of his ilk illustrate clearly why the Church in the U.S. is in such a mess. They care less about scandalizing the hoi polloi in the pews than hobnobbing with the rich and powerful. Is it any wonder saints lamented that the floor of hell is littered with bishops' skulls and mitres? Sad!
Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, part of the conclave that elected Francis, has said he would offer Pelosi communion despite her views on abortion because he didn't believe communion should be used as a weapon. "We never -– the Church just didn't use Communion this way. It wasn't a part of the way we do things, and it wasn't a way we convinced Catholic politicians to appropriate the faith and live it and apply it; the challenge has always been to convince people," Wuerl said in a 2010 interview. His position would logically extend to Biden. The vice president's bishop, Francis Malooly of Wilmington, Del., has also said he would not deny communion to Biden.Denying Communion to a public heretic (a person who denies at least one doctrine of the Church)
is not using the Eucharist as "a weapon." It is exercising Church law articulated in Canon Law 915. It shows concern for the soul of the person who is heaping up mortal sin on mortal sin which does several things to the unfortunate soul, i.e., makes it harder to repent, increases the moral debt of the soul so to speak, creates grave scandal when the heretic is a public figure which merits a "millstone," etc. Biden and Pelosi parade their "Catholic" credentials while they give the finger to Catholic doctrine.
Cardinal Wuerl shows little concern for his Washington, D.C. political flock when he announces he will never refuse to let them crucify Christ by unworthy reception His body and blood. Did Christ die for pro-abortion Catholic politicians? Of course. Does He want them to pile up one mortal sin of sacrilege after another? Hardly!
Frankly, I am sorely grieved at the lack of pastoral care bishops like Wuerl have toward these outrageous public sinners. He appears to care more for human respect and his own place in the halls of power than for their eternal salvation. He is like a father who buys his drug-addicted son the next fix instead of loving him enough to say no, because he doesn't want to alienate his son.
When I see Cardinal Wuerl's cowardice (What else can it be?) I think of his foils, bishops like Rene Gracida (bishop emeritus of Corpus Christi) who is a model of pastoral concern and courage when it comes to warning "obstinate public sinners" to refrain from Communion. (See a case study describing how Bishop Gracida put a Catholic politician under interdict.) Why should Biden and Pelosi and others of their ilk repent? Why should they even believe that Christ is present in the Eucharist? There certainly doesn't appear to be much evidence that their bishops believe it. If they did, would they, like Judas, turn Christ over to them to be crucified again? That's exactly what they do when they give Jesus to heretics.
Cardinal Wuerl and other bishops of his ilk illustrate clearly why the Church in the U.S. is in such a mess. They care less about scandalizing the hoi polloi in the pews than hobnobbing with the rich and powerful. Is it any wonder saints lamented that the floor of hell is littered with bishops' skulls and mitres? Sad!
Do Something Beautiful for God Today
Posted on 07:13 by Unknown
Wouldn't that be a lovely daily resolution for the rest of Lent? Here are some suggestions to myself:
Call an ailing elderly relative to say I love you and I'm praying for you.
Read a story to a grandchild.
Sing a song of praise to God in thanksgiving for all His blessings.
Pray a decade of the rosary for each of my nine godchildren.
Send a note to a friend telling her she's a real blessing to my life.
Take a grandchild on a praise walk taking special note of the natural beauty of our neighborhood. (This is known in our family as the Damn Walk because of my misspelling of Dam." It's a beautiful walk though!)
Pick some early Spring flowers or interesting grasses from the roadside and put them in vase next to Mary's statue with a prayer.
Tell several people why they are special to me.What's on your list?
Richard Dawkins Exposed as Spineless Wimp!
Posted on 02:00 by Unknown
Richard Dawkins has no problem ridiculing the Christian God, but, asked about the God of the Koran, he ducked the question claiming he doesn't know anything about Islam.
Hahahahaha....how dumb does he think we are? Here's the Fraters Libertas take on Dawkins' sudden tongue-tied silence:
Hahahahaha....how dumb does he think we are? Here's the Fraters Libertas take on Dawkins' sudden tongue-tied silence:
It's funny how these confident, cocksure prophets of atheism-who barely have time to take a breath between slamming the tenets of Christianity and Judaism-often get curiously tongue-tied and shy when the subject of Islam comes up. The idea that Dawkins doesn’t “know so much about” the God of the Koran is absurd. Of course he knows about Islam. And the same disdain and disregard that he has for Judaism and Christianity should surely apply to Islam as well.
The truth is that bashing and mocking Judaism and Christianity is easy and painless. You’ll get praise and admiration from those within the “right” circles of academia, media, and entertainment. Your opponents will argue with and debate your views and they may even offer (gasp) to pray for you. There’s no real price to pay at all.
However, should you direct the same scathing criticisms towards Islam you’ll find those “right” circles suddenly closed off to you. And your opponents’ rebuttals may not be offered in articles and debate halls, but rather with bullets, bombs, and knives. Standing up to that takes real courage not the false bravado we see on displays as atheists attack Judaism and Christianity.I've seen Dawkins bully college coeds and others who disagree with him. But I can never look at him without laughing when I recall his statements in the film Expelled about life beginning on the back of a crystal or being brought by aliens. There is no one so silly as an angry atheist with an axe to grind.
Tuesday 19 March 2013
St. Joseph, Patron of the Universal Church
Posted on 13:59 by Unknown
You Can't Trust the Secular Media to Get It Right - La Republica Article a Case in Point
Posted on 11:56 by Unknown
And often they are irresponsible (and sometimes deliberate) in getting it wrong. The claim that Pope Benedict resigned because of blackmail from an underground homosexual cabal at the Vatican is a case in point. La Republica's article is a classic case of an article based on little information and absolutely no evidence. No one had the dossier, because it was NEVER leaked! But the media made all kinds of assumptions about its content. Ah...speculation is so thrilling and open-ended!
Well, now Fr. Marcel Guarnizo, whose interview with Ignazio Ingrao "sparked" the "media firestorm," wants to set the record straight. All the speculation about "prelates being blackmailed, money being stolen, swirl upon swirl of innuendo and rumors in Rome and around the world" is speculation. "None of this has been verified."
Fr. Guarnizo asks:
Media distorting a story? Wow! Wouldn't that be unusual?
See more:
http://vimeo.com/61886628
Fr. Guarnizo interview with author
Death of Journalism at the Irish Times
Well, now Fr. Marcel Guarnizo, whose interview with Ignazio Ingrao "sparked" the "media firestorm," wants to set the record straight. All the speculation about "prelates being blackmailed, money being stolen, swirl upon swirl of innuendo and rumors in Rome and around the world" is speculation. "None of this has been verified."
Fr. Guarnizo asks:
If I, as a professional journalist state that prelates are being blackmailed by a gay lobby, does this not presuppose that I know who and why, or at the very least, have sources who have substantiated these allegations before I rush them into print? As a responsible news reporter, am I not compelled to determine that there is some news and not just empty speculation? Am I not morally obliged to determine, when repeating the claims of another publication—such as La Repubblica—that the report it quotes exists, that someone has seen it, and that it says what in fact actual, reliable witnesses purport that it says?He goes on to describe an interview with the author of the original article who says the secular media frenzy took his original article in a direction he never intended and drew unsubstantiated conclusions.
Media distorting a story? Wow! Wouldn't that be unusual?
See more:
http://vimeo.com/61886628
Fr. Guarnizo interview with author
Death of Journalism at the Irish Times
The Benghazi Cover-up Continues
Posted on 10:31 by Unknown
Check it out here. Why are the survivors being silenced? Do I need to answer that question? Lindsey Graham says the survivor stories are harrowing. It's time to stop the politics as usual cover-up and hold those responsible accountable.
Sequester Doesn't Stop Lavish White House Party
Posted on 10:07 by Unknown
The hoi polloi may be suffering from the sequester (Closed mess halls for our troops being among the most despicable - it's been going for quite awhile!), but you'll never see the Obama's cancel a lavish party or vacation. Check out the St. Paddy's day party. You can almost hear Michelle saying, "The trooops have no eggs? Let them eat arugula and lobster."
A Reflection on Pope Francis' Liturgical Style
Posted on 09:48 by Unknown
Fr. Longenecker describes our new pope's liturgical style here. And I offer a bit from the article for reflection:
There are a couple of things to remember here. First of all, in the United States the liturgy wars are part of a bigger cultural divide within the American Catholic church. Liberal liturgy very often also means liberal theology. Often the big box Catholic Churches with their praise bands and “gather them in” style are also full of cafeteria Catholics and left wing Obama-voting ideologues, while the traddy congregations are full of right wing members of the John Birch society with “You’ll get my gun when you pry my cold dead fingers from around it” bumper stickers on their cars. (I’m exaggerating to make a point). Naturally, therefore, the liturgy starts being about much more than the liturgy…
In the developing world however, the more informal modes of worship are much more of a general cultural phenomenon. An informal style there doesn’t necessarily carry all the baggage it does here. Just because a priest, bishop or pope is a bit more informal in his style of celebrating doesn’t mean he is a theological liberal or will compromise the faith. Indeed, everything about Pope Francis indicates that he is not only completely orthodox in theology and moral teaching, but that he has suffered for being so.
Monday 18 March 2013
Oh Please...Cardinal Mahony Channels the Holy Spirit?
Posted on 21:20 by Unknown
I read Cardinal Mahony's blog now and then for amusement. And now we know he never decided to vote for Cardinal Bergoglio. The Holy Spirit made him do it:
I picked up my pen to write, and I began. However, my hand was being moved by some greater spiritual force. The name on the ballot just happened. I had not yet narrowed my thinking down to one name; but it was done for me.
I wrote it, then trembled deeply. That's when I knew the Holy Spirit was fully working within the Church of Jesus Christ, and that my role was not to "select" the new Successor to Peter, but to "write down" his name--a name that had been given to me.All I can say is, "Oh please, Cardinal, don't make yourself ridiculous." If what he says is true, it is more associated with the occult than the Holy Spirit. Read about "automatic writing" here. Mahony's description links him to fake mystics like Vassula Ryden who claims to be God's stenographer with her hand guided by her guardian angel "Daniel," Jesus, and sometimes Yahweh. God does not work by casting spells over people and making their pens move automatically. If such a thing really happened, it makes me wonder who exactly was Mahony's spirit guide during the conclave.
After all the devastation he's inflicted on the Church in the United States, Cardinal Mahony should withdraw into dignified silence. Let's pray he does instead of publishing nonsense that makes him sound more like a rogue wizard from a Harry Potter novel rather than a prince of the Church.
On the Other Hand...
Posted on 13:49 by Unknown
I feel a little like Tevye these days with all the conflicting reports of Pope Francis. A traditional blogger says we can't trust him because Mahony is so enthusiastic about his election. But then I read that the orthodox Canadian Cardinal Marc Ouellet threw his support to Cardinal Bergoglio during the conclave to secure his election. On the one hand, his ecumenical activity is criticized as syncretism, but on the other hand the Eastern Orthodox patriarch will attend the installation, the first that time has happened since the Eastern and Western Churches split in schism nearly 1,000 years ago. Traditionalists are upset about what they describe as Pope Francis' hostile reception to Summorum Pontificum, but, on the other hand, Robert Moynihan shared correspondence with a friend from Argentina who said it was permitted and any problems were due to priests who weren't trained to say it properly.
We are living in interesting and often confusing times which brings me back to my friend Tevye, a kind of everyman, who constantly converses and sometimes remonstrates with God. One statement seems appropriate for our own times.
"Sometimes I think, when it gets too quiet up there, You say to Yourself, 'What kind of mischief can I play on My friend Tevye?'"
The difference between our mischief and "God's mischief" is that His always has a purpose and is always for our good.
We are living in interesting and often confusing times which brings me back to my friend Tevye, a kind of everyman, who constantly converses and sometimes remonstrates with God. One statement seems appropriate for our own times.
"Sometimes I think, when it gets too quiet up there, You say to Yourself, 'What kind of mischief can I play on My friend Tevye?'"
The difference between our mischief and "God's mischief" is that His always has a purpose and is always for our good.
Posted in Fiddler on the Roof, God's mischief, on the other hand, Tevye, wisdom of Tevye
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News on Tuesday's Papal Installation Mass
Posted on 09:07 by Unknown
Robert Moynihan reports on it here. Check out the Mass booklet here. Lots of Latin and the Credo I sang in choir as a youngster. Oh, this will bring back fond memories. I can still sing that Latin Credo although I don't get many opportunities to do it. The Roman Canon is also in the program to link up this Mass with the history of our faith remembering especially the long line of Roman martyrs which included all of the earliest popes. I expect this to be a solemn and beautiful liturgy. Let us pray it is not marred by the scandal of Catholic heretics Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden receiving Communion sacrilegiously. Our Lady, Queen of the Church, pray for us.
Pope Francis Has a Past and We Should Recognize It
Posted on 07:54 by Unknown
I have high regard for Marielena Montesino de Stuart and her reporting.
Each of us has a personal history that tells something about us. Marielena's article below serves as a curriculum vitae of Pope Francis, although a partial one. It is better to enter this time with eyes wide open. Ignorance and naivete are not virtues. Let us pray for Pope Francis and our Church.
FRANCIS (Jorge Mario Bergoglio) an Argentinian Jesuit from "the end of the world"-- may end up taking you there...
Each of us has a personal history that tells something about us. Marielena's article below serves as a curriculum vitae of Pope Francis, although a partial one. It is better to enter this time with eyes wide open. Ignorance and naivete are not virtues. Let us pray for Pope Francis and our Church.
FRANCIS (Jorge Mario Bergoglio) an Argentinian Jesuit from "the end of the world"-- may end up taking you there...
Obama Sells Access to the Rich, Shuts Out the Poor
Posted on 07:37 by Unknown
White House tours close, but presidential dog-walker and calligraphers continue. The rules of the sequester game include shutting down things that will inconvenience the hoi polloi while continuing to cater to the rich and famous. We've seen it before. Budget measures that include: closing and reducing hours at DMVs, shutting rest stops on interstates and turnpikes, reducing post office hours, and generally anything that makes people upset. It's a political trick that both parties practice, but the Dems are EXPERTS! Remember Jimmy Carter shutting off the monument lights? How come they never cut the bridges to nowhere, the Hollywood special deals, and the other pork? Easy...it might stop their political donations. It's Monday and business as usual inside the Beltway!
Sunday 17 March 2013
I'm a Lloyd Marcus Fan
Posted on 18:36 by Unknown
He's a black man with common sense who refuses to follow the "Vote for Obama because he's black" crowd.
My Black Family
Obama's election is one of the most racist events in U.S. history. The only reason he's in the White House is because he is black. And he's not even descended from black slaves. Rather, his roots are among the black slave traders. As Marcus points out, Obama is at war with black family values and he is actually a proponent of black genocide. Anyone who endorses abortion favors the annihilation of blacks who represent only 12% of the population but have nearly 40% of the abortions. If you have an elementary understanding of math, you can easily see that abortion discriminates heavily against blacks. And it's certainly no accident, since organizations like Planned Parenthood locate their abortion mills in minority areas.
Please pray for smart black men like Lloyd Marcus, Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell, and Ben Carson that they will influence their own families and other blacks to wake up and smell the bigotry.
I always found it ironic when I was sidewalk counseling to have the pro-choice bullies calling me a bigot when I was trying to save every single baby targeted for murder regardless of color. Whether the moms were Irish white Catholics, Mexican Hispanics, brown-skinned Middle Eastern Muslims, or Asiatic Oriental Hindus I would do anything to help the moms choose life for their babies. I even talked about fate to the Wiccans. Life is precious and God never made a baby by accident. Some of these godly black men know it and are witnessing to the truth. May their numbers grow to be an army!
My Black Family
Obama's election is one of the most racist events in U.S. history. The only reason he's in the White House is because he is black. And he's not even descended from black slaves. Rather, his roots are among the black slave traders. As Marcus points out, Obama is at war with black family values and he is actually a proponent of black genocide. Anyone who endorses abortion favors the annihilation of blacks who represent only 12% of the population but have nearly 40% of the abortions. If you have an elementary understanding of math, you can easily see that abortion discriminates heavily against blacks. And it's certainly no accident, since organizations like Planned Parenthood locate their abortion mills in minority areas.
Please pray for smart black men like Lloyd Marcus, Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell, and Ben Carson that they will influence their own families and other blacks to wake up and smell the bigotry.
I always found it ironic when I was sidewalk counseling to have the pro-choice bullies calling me a bigot when I was trying to save every single baby targeted for murder regardless of color. Whether the moms were Irish white Catholics, Mexican Hispanics, brown-skinned Middle Eastern Muslims, or Asiatic Oriental Hindus I would do anything to help the moms choose life for their babies. I even talked about fate to the Wiccans. Life is precious and God never made a baby by accident. Some of these godly black men know it and are witnessing to the truth. May their numbers grow to be an army!
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