When we cast our cares upon the Lord, He leads us to safety. It is called Divine Providence. When the atheist can prove that he makes the rain fall, the snow fall, the seed germinate and the crops grow, than he can be taken at face value, otherwise the atheist is a usurper.
Priests, the Holy Father insisted, must “go out and give ourselves and the Gospel to others, giving what little ointment we have to those who have nothing, nothing at all.” When he shepherds his flock, the priest brings with him the fragrance of his anointing—“the fragrance of the Anointed One, of Christ.”
But that’s not all. A good priest, like a good shepherd, knows his flock. He spends time with them; he lives among them; he shares in their cares and concerns, no matter how trivial they seem. In return, he receives the love and prayers of the people. He receives the gratitude of those he enriches through his ministry. He receives the joy and peace that come from doing the work of the Lord. But there is something else he receives—the telltale sign of a man who lives among his flock, who knows “the realities of their everyday lives, their troubles, their joys, their burdens and their hopes.”
“I call you to this,” said Pope Francis to his priests, “Be shepherds with the odor of sheep!”
Good Friday is the most solemn day of the Christian year.
It is the day our Savior died for us.
It is the day we were redeemed from our sins by the voluntary death of God Himself at the hands of man.
Here are 9 things you need to know.
…last week, The Scooter Store notified most of its remaining 1,800 employees that their jobs were being eliminated. The company said in a statement to the Associated Press that it is operating with a workforce of 300 employees — down from the 2,500 workforce it had at its peak — while trying to restructure its operations.
The mass layoffs followed a raid in February by about 150 agents from the FBI, the Department of Justice and the Texas attorney general’s Medicaid fraud unit at the company’s headquarters.
Editor’s note: All this, at little or no cost to you.
Every single Mass, we hear the words “on the night he was betrayed.”
That night was Holy Thursday, and it is one of the most important nights in all of history.
Here are 10 things you need to know.
1. What happened on the original Holy Thursday?
An amazing amount of stuff! This was one of the most pivotal days in the life of Jesus Christ.
Here are some of the things the gospels record for this day (including events that happened after midnight). Jesus:
It was a momentous day!
If you’d like to read the gospel accounts themselves, you can use these links:
No matter which way the US Supreme Court rules in the “gay marriage” cases before it the international debate over the definition of marriage will continue because that debate is, at root, about matters beyond a civil court’s competence, things like the nature of human beings and the fundamental good of society. Because we Catholics are and will surely remain major participants in such a debate we should be clear among ourselves as to what our Church teaches in this area. I offer as a primer (I stress, primer) toward such better understanding my position on the following points.
1. The Catholic Church teaches, through its ordinary magisterium and with infallible certainty, that marriage exists only between one man and one woman.
When I was a college senior, pregnant, unwed, barely a month off crystal meth, I joked with the Ogre that I might as well just sew a red A on my chest. I said that while we parked, the first day of that first semester back, and I laughed manically and thought I might hyperventilate. I was terrified. It took all the courage I had, and a hefty dose of stubborn pride besides, to step out of the car and walk onto campus. I had grown up in the Bible Belt, you see, and I knew how girls like me were treated.
As I was going under there was a defined period of blackness, not a color, but a sense, all around me, even inside me, this wasn’t the usual fade out, I was being given a message. I woke up in the recovery room, with my wife by my side and the next couple of weeks with all the medicine I wasn’t quite myself.
Over the next month I started to develop this debilitating fear: That blackness kept haunting me, always anxious, could not keep my hands steady, fear of failing my family. This was completely opposite of my normal personality. But the seed that had been planted was starting to develop. I sought the help of professionals, to no avail.
One evening when I was talking with my wife’s aunt, she suggested I might want to talk to a priest. I had been thinking about it anyway. I was pretty sure God had given me a message: I need to change my life, I need to be baptized.
As soon as I started thinking about my life in this way, everything started to make sense.
Official Vatican Photo
Interviews with nearly two dozen people including his sister, colleagues from the Jesuit order in Argentina, his archdiocese and social circle, build a picture of a devout and dedicated priest whose scholarly grasp of Church doctrine rarely hindered his down-to-earth focus on charity, compassion and social work.
Editor’s note and WARNING: The above paragraph seems to indicate a distinct bias against Traditional Catholic doctrinal truth and for Catholic social justice work … when the two … properly done and focused … through, with and in Jesus Christ … in the unity of the Holy Spirit … are actually totally complementary. Try to keep the writers’ biases and personal limitations in mind while you read the otherwise wide ranging, generally informative article.
HAVANA (AP) — Pope Francis issued a strong critique of the church before the College of Cardinals just hours before it selected him as the new pontiff, according to comments published Tuesday by a Roman Catholic magazine in Cuba.
Part of an interview with a former Satanist:
CWR: How would you advise the faithful to keep the devil out of their lives?
Deborah: First of all, in this life he’s always going to be in your life and close by. So, you have to protect yourself by going to Mass and receiving the Eucharist. It’s powerful protection. Holy water is extremely effective. I call it “industrial-strength spiritual Lysol.” I keep it in my home and regularly bless myself.
The sacrament of confession is important. One of the fastest ways for the demon to enter our lives is through unconfessed sin. I freely tell people, Catholic or not, that the Catholic Church is the only church that has the tools to deal effectively with the demonic. That includes devotion to the Blessed Mother.
Also, be careful about your hobbies and entertainment. The drinking, partying, carousing lifestyle can create an opening for the devil to come in; I also recommend people avoid slasher movies.
We live in something of a meritocracy, and our rulers believe they are by far the most enlightened and well-informed people who ever lived. For that reason they feel entitled to make the aspirations of the present day, or what they consider such, the compulsory standard for public life. They view the claim that there are principles that transcend those aspirations as the sort of thing that led to 9/11, and treat the past as worth considering only as something to escape from or a foreshadowing of the glories of the present.
Nonetheless, a variety of conditions, from the state of education and the arts to that of political discussion, makes it evident that Western society is growing less and less able to think clearly and effectively. That’s a big problem, and one that’s hard to deal with, because it is difficult to cure oneself of mindlessness. Still, we should do our best to understand what’s going on.
Thanks to his finished work on the cross at Calvary, Jesus Christ, eternally enthroned in Heaven at the right hand of God the Father, already personifies the supernatural reality of human perfection …
a state of being which all Christians hope to achieve, according to the power of God’s grace.
(616 – From the Catechism of the Catholic Church)
We know this is true because Jesus is not a mythical figure.
Jesus Christ is in fact, a real, well documented, historical person.
Jesus fulfilled every Messianic Bible prophecy, to the letter.
No one else has ever done so. No one else ever will.
Jesus demonstrated the power of God by His perfect, sinless,
earthly existence, by His (truly) charismatic personality,
and by His miracles.
No one else has ever done so. No one else ever will.
Jesus demonstrated His divinity
and His mastery over the power of death
by raising Himself up again from the dead,
just as he said he would.
No one else has ever done so. No one else ever will.
In 21st Century America, it’s perfectly acceptable to relentlessly mock all three groups without fear of being labeled a bigot. This cultural double standard was on its fullest, most egregious display during the media’s coverage of the Papal Conclave.
A “theologically orthodox”
Catholic school teacher sounds off
I could recount many nightmarish stories of how most of the Catholic school educators and administrators I have encountered have been men and women of little or no faith in Christ and Church. Even in the religion departments it is common to encounter ex-nuns who feel the Church is in sin because they can’t be priests, homosexual men who are more interested in defending the lifestyle than in teaching the straight Catholic faith, and a range of those who are in dissent on some or another important Catholic doctrine.
If there are problems of personnel inside the Religion departments, the other disciplines are almost completely immersed in doing exactly what they would be doing in a public school. I have often wondered what small percentage of Catholic high school teachers actually like the Catholic Church? It is obvious that in hiring these folks, the biggest unspoken question is not “Are you enthusiastic about your Catholic faith?” but “Can you tolerate pretending to be on board with the Catholic stuff you will encounter from time to time here?”
Editor’s note: Be sure to see the reader comments … all of them.
An opinion piece/rant carried by Yahoo as a news item illustrates the danger of a class of unregulated journalists we term “Assault Writers”.
Doug Lawrence's Catholic Site 