This is a 2-part series from the folks at The Sacred Page, that’s definitely worth reading:
Thorny question: Desecrate the Holy Eucharist … or risk hurting a lesbian’s feelings?
Just a few minutes before the funeral began, Father Marcel Guarnizo, who was presiding over the service, apparently learned that Barbara was involved in a romantic relationship with another woman.
A lifelong Catholic and former Catholic school teacher, Barbara says she hadn’t even considered that her sexual orientation would be a problem with Father Marcel until she stepped forward to take communion.
“He said, ‘I can not give you communion because you live with a woman,” Barbara says.
Editor’s note: Act in haste … repent at leisure. Look for the priest to get hung out to dry over this one.
The Mohammedan Candidate: Under the Islamic doctrine of taqiyya [dissimulation], Muslims are permitted—in certain contexts, and even encouraged—to deny being Muslim, if so doing secures them or Islam an advantage.
In other words, if an American president were a secret Muslim, and if he were lying about it, and even if he were secretly working to subvert the U.S. to Islam’s advantage —not only would taqiyya, or dissimulation, be justified by Islam’s doctrines of loyalty and deception, but it would have ample precedents, stretching back to the dawn of Islam. Muhammad, for example, commanded a convert from an adversarial tribe to conceal his new Muslim identity and go back to his tribe—which he cajoled with “You are my stock and my family, the dearest of men to me”—only to betray them to Islam’s invading armies.
Graham further upset certain sensitivities by saying, “All I know is under Obama, President Obama, the Muslims of the world, he seems to be more concerned about them than the Christians that are being murdered in the Muslim countries,” adding that “Islam has gotten a free pass under Obama.”
Mother Angelica vs. Barack Obama: an epic struggle!
The latest American secularist onslaught against the Church, of course, is Obama’s recent edict that under his administration’s healthcare reform any provider of health care (including Catholic institutions) must be prepared to supply artificial contraception (including drugs which, though labelled contraceptive, are in fact abortifacient). I have recently written about this more than once. I now do so again to bring up to date anyone who has missed it, with one particular skirmish in the US Catholic fightback, that led by the redoubtable (and entirely admirable) Mother Angelica, founder of EWTN, who is now taking the fight against Obama to the courts.
Editor’s note: As “Joliet Jake” would say, “The smart money’s on the Penguin!”
A handy index of Roman Catholic resources
This page contains links to over a hundred classic Franciscan, Carmelite, and other authentically Catholic documentary works, including the complete Douay-Rheims Bible.
Merrill: Bishops are engaged in the active global promotion of the sexual revolution – through agencies such as their own Catholic Relief Services.
I have worked on and off in Africa, for “humanitarian” organizations, for some thirty years, during both Republican and Democratic administrations, and I have not seen that the U.S. Government’s efforts to promote the sexual revolution – with the willing cooperation of the U.S. bishops’ own overseas “humanitarian” organization, and of other “Christian” subcontractors – has varied much in intensity over those years.
The “foreign aid” agencies of both the U.S. federal government and the USCCB (the latter a contractor of the former) are both “owned” and staffed by either secularists, or by fellow-traveling-sexual-revolutionist “Catholics” and other vaguely “faith-motivated” types. Regardless of the particular ideology of the sitting president or of the very-theoretical anti-sexual-revolution stance of the bishops, those agencies find ways to effectively advance the sexual revolution. Personnel is policy.
Concerted hacker attack on Vatican website fails
The campaign against the Vatican, which did not receive wide attention at the time, involved hundreds of people, some with hacking skills and some without. A core group of participants openly drummed up support for the attack using YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. Others searched for vulnerabilities on a Vatican Web site and, when that failed, enlisted amateur recruits to flood the site with traffic, hoping it would crash, according to a computer security firm’s report to be released this week.
The attack, albeit an unsuccessful one, provides a rare glimpse into the recruiting, reconnaissance and warfare tactics used by the shadowy hacking collective.
The efficacious virtue of divine light and grace remains our only true hope for salvation.
by Doug Lawrence
The only church that was ever personally founded by Jesus Christ is the one, holy, apostolic and universal church … known today as Catholic.
The ordinary means of personal salvation in Jesus Christ is through baptism … which is “the door” by which someone typically enters … along with a lifetime of subsequent, faithful participation in all of the work, worship, sacraments and devotions of the Catholic Church.
Outside the Catholic Church there is no salvation. But God is sovereign, merciful, and all powerful … and he can save whomsoever he wishes … for any reason or for none … even in direct exception to the rules of the church, which are necessarily subject to the will of God, in all things.
Yet, anyone God chooses to save is saved only by the effective application of the grace that Jesus obtained for all, on the cross at Calvary.
The Catholic Church itself has canonized only a few thousand saints. Hence, the church claims no direct knowledge of the salvation … or damnation … of the great majority of souls.
In spite of all this, some Catholics maintain
that we can be absolutely confident of the salvation
of other apparently “good” people,
who through no fault of their own,
never became members of the Catholic Church.
Yet we know not of a single one, for certain!
Jesus remains the Blessed Hope of our salvation. Until the moment Jesus, the just judge personally invites into heaven (or banishes us to hell) the best we can do is depend upon his saving grace, so that we might one day, like Saint Paul, be able to truthfully exclaim:
For I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand. I have fought a good fight, I have finished [my] course, I have kept the faith: Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give me at that day: and not to me only, but unto all them also that love his appearing. (2 Timothy 4:1-8)
St. Paul turned out to be correct, and the Church subsequently confirmed as much, by officially declaring him a saint. Yet we have absolutely no specific knowledge of anyone outside the church ever being admitted to heaven.
But what about St. Daniel the Prophet, St. John the Baptist, St. Dismas – the “good” thief, and the many prophets and patriarchs of old? It remains a complicated subject!
Mike Stechschulte: Catholics aren’t out of touch on birth control
“Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God?” Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 6:19-20. “You are not your own; you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.”
The Catholic Church does not teach that contraception is immoral because it wants to control people. It’s not some grand scheme to get more posteriors in the pews. Nor is it because the church is sexually “unenlightened” or thinks its only use is for procreation.
The church teaches against birth control because it believes sex, life and love are inseparable, designed by God to join a husband and wife in unity, so “the two shall become one flesh.”
Becoming “one flesh,” as is probably obvious, has more than one meaning. In addition to the union of bodies, the result of the act is that a new person is created — one flesh from two spouses.
When a couple contracepts, they sever the dual purpose of sex as a unitive and procreative act — a renewal of marriage vows.
President Barack Hussein Obama, what is it about “The Bill of Rights” you don’t understand?
by Doug Lawrence
The people who founded the United States of America were intimately familiar with tyrants, along with all their petty, self-serving and unjust edicts. They also knew that the only answer to such edicts and the people who made them was a firm and resounding “NO”!
The Revolutionary War was fought in order to give a permanent and particular kind of life to that “no” … and as a warning to petty despots … anywhere and everywhere … that there is now a “free people” on the earth who will accept nothing less than liberty, and who will also be quite happy to give their lives in defense of the God-given rights of all.
But many of our contemporaries seem to think the founding fathers were wrong, that the God-given rights that they so painstakingly enumerated, defined, and enshrined were somehow inadequate, that those rights lacked a divine origin, in fact … and that what we Americans know as “The Bill of Rights” and “The U.S. Constitution” should somehow be reformed or replaced with something more to their liking.
They even go so far as to label those who choose to uphold and defend the traditional rights of all Americans as “mean-spirited bigots” … while at the same time, attempting to rewrite the very history of our great country.
In an attempt to besmirch the reputations of the founding fathers … while trumpeting the cause of “diversity” … these shameless anarchists happily point out that all of the founding fathers … without exception … were men!
In an attempt to undermine the divine basis of the God-given rights that we Americans, and by extension … all human beings possess … they love to trot out (and have been quietly working for generations to codify) an imaginary, totally non-existent “wall of separation between church and state”.
In an attempt to “sneak” all of this by the American people, they have succeeded in “dumbing down” the younger generations through their successful infiltration of the teachers unions and their subversion of the primary and secondary school systems.
Our great universities have become havens for an outspoken “protected class” of “secular theologians” … godless professors … many of whom are avowed Marxists and blatant, outright haters of the American way … who, at great expense … and with considerable pomp and circumstance … churn out mindless hordes, formed in their own image and likeness, lacking any sense of who they really are, where they actually came from, or what their actual rights, responsibilities and potential as “free people” … might truly be!
Hollywood and the mainstream media grow fat by feeding this massive group of clueless sycophants a steady diet of mental “pap” and “pablum”, while corporate America grows rich … keeping them busy and quite off balance … by “stoking the fires” of their mindless personal quest for money, approval, and influence (as opposed to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.)
Fortunately, recent events have served to bring all these things to light, in the presidency and the particularly corrupt regime of one Barack Hussein Obama, who in his notorious speaking engagement at the formerly Catholic, Notre Dame University, unwittingly became the national “poster boy” for all of the abuses mentioned above (and unfortunately, many, many more.)
The only answer to tyrants like Barack Obama, to all those of his political party, and to all his political operatives, no matter under which rock they might presently be be hiding … is a firm, unyielding “NO”. And the best place to firmly register that “NO” is at the ballot box, come November.
As for the specific “whys” … have a look at “The Bill of Rights”!
North Korean flood of counterfeit U.S. “greenbacks” doing less damage to the economy than Obama’s economic policies.
Since the superdollars were first detected about a decade ago, the regime has been pocketing an estimated $15 to $25 million a year from them. (Other estimates are much higher — up to several hundred million dollars’ worth.) That sounds like a lot of money, but compared to the $1 trillion in cash circulating in the great ocean of commerce, a few hundred million is chump change. Although certainly costly for small business owners who unknowingly accept a bunch of forgeries, counterfeits probably won’t bring about a crisis of faith in our paper money anytime soon.
Yet taking the long view, maybe a rash of new superdollars from the hermetic regime of Kim Jong-un would be beneficial. How so? Because counterfeits have a way of reminding people of what material money is and how it functions, and that could lead to a discussion of its pros and cons.
New York celebrates Cardinal Dolan. 1776 foot tall One World Trade Building decked out in red.
According to reports, the tribute will continue every evening for the next week. Notably, while a private group controls the Empire State lights, the One World Trade decision was made by its government-chartered owner, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
An incomparable photo essay of an incorruptible saint
Every photo ever taken of the beautiful Saint Bernadette Soubirous.
Submitted by Nancy W.
Single, chaste, Catholic woman who studied church teaching on contraception is happy to live by it.
I understand that most people in America, including Catholics, have a hard time believing or understanding that contraception hurts them and their marriages. This is a bigger issue and one that I will not take on right now; but I would suggest that the church has many reasons for this controversial position, which it has held firmly after Protestants abandoned it in 1930 and even after it was urged from within the church in the 1960s to change the teaching.
Blessed Pope John Paul II proclaimed it time and again. Blessed Mother Teresa advocated NFP at the National Prayer Breakfast in 1994, among other places, and she taught the poor and illiterate how to read the signs of fertility in their bodies. If anyone were to be immune from O’Brien’s criticism that the church needs to “meet people where they already are and find out what they need,” surely it was she.
Perhaps a woman seeking contraception needs more than birth control pills. She needs compassion and love that calls her to a different kind of life— a life in which she does not have to fear conceiving a child.
Editor’s note: Catholics (and others) who have thoroughly studied the matter typically understand and agree with Ms. Perla … even if they sometimes fail to faithfully practice what the church teaches.
Any married couple who is in the habit of using artificial contraception is certainly free to discontinue the practice at any time, and go to confession … instantly making things right with God, their own marriage, and the Catholic Church.
Married couples must be the primary object of the Catholic Church’s teachings on artificial contraception, since unmarried Catholics are presumed (and expected) to remain chaste and celibate, and should (ideally) have no need of contraception.
And that’s where the real world and the ideal fatally diverge. To put it bluntly, the real problem is the the extraordinary amount of “cheating” that’s going on … both inside and outside the sacrament of matrimony.
People who choose to engage in sinful, illicit sexual relationships don’t want children, and they aren’t too concerned about what the Catholic Church teaches. What they really want is convenient, risk-free sex.
That’s where Obama and his group of sexual panderers come in … with their supportive, affirming, and totally phony secular theology … encouraging people to simply give in to their baser instincts … rather than struggling to live the good, Catholic ideal.
That’s why Barack Obama is bad for the country … a near occasion of sin, for so many … and why the man must be officially retired by the voters … come November.
Pope Benedict: We must be convinced that God is close, even if he seems silent.
“In the most difficult situations, when it seems that God does not hear, we must not fear to entrust to him our overburdened hearts”. The Holy Father said to the faithful at the General Audience on Wednesday, 8 February, in the Paul VI Audience Hall.
In his series of reflections on Christian prayer, the Pope was talking about the prayer of Jesus when he was facing death. The following is a translation of Benedict XVI’s Catechesis, which was given in Italian.
It is I, I, who wipe out, for my own sake, your offenses; your sins I remember no more.
“My own sake” = Jesus Christ
Thus says the LORD:
Remember not the events of the past,
the things of long ago consider not;
see, I am doing something new!
Now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
In the desert I make a way,
in the wasteland, rivers.
The people I formed for myself,
that they might announce my praise.
Yet you did not call upon me, O Jacob,
for you grew weary of me, O Israel.
You burdened me with your sins,
and wearied me with your crimes.
It is I, I, who wipe out,
for my own sake, your offenses;
your sins I remember no more.
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