Wednesday, February 26, 2020

Pope Saint John Paul II Homily, Ash Wedesday during the Jubilee Year




ASH WEDNESDAY

HOMILY OF JOHN PAUL II

Wednesday, 8 March 2000




1. "Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me. Cast me not away from your presence, and take not your holy Spirit from me" (Ps 51: 10-11).

Today, Ash Wednesday, this is how the Psalmist, King David, prays:  a great and powerful king in Israel, but at the same time frail and sinful. At the beginning of these 40 days of preparation for Easter, the Church puts his words on the lips of all who take part in the austere liturgy of Ash Wednesday.

"Create in me a clean heart, O God, ... take not your holy Spirit from me". We hear this plea echoing in our hearts, while in a few moments we will approach the Lord's altar to receive ashes on our forehead in accordance with a very ancient tradition. This act is filled with spiritual allusions and is an important sign of conversion and inner renewal. Considered in itself, it is a simple liturgical rite, but very profound because of its penitential meaning:  with it the Church reminds man, believer and sinner, of his weakness in the face of evil and especially of his total dependence on God's infinite majesty.

The liturgy calls for the celebrant to say these words as he places ashes on the foreheads of the faithful:  "Remember, man, you are dust and to dust you will return"; or, "Turn away from sin and be faithful to the Gospel".

2. "Remember, ... to dust you will return".

Earthly life is marked from its beginning by the prospect of death. Our bodies are mortal, that is, subject to the inevitable prospect of death. We live with this end before us:  every passing day brings us inexorably closer to it. And death has something destructive about it. With death it seems that everything will end for us. And here, precisely in the face of this disheartening prospect, man, who is aware of his sin, raises a cry of hope to heaven:  O God, "create in me a clean heart and put a new and right spirit within me. Cast me not away from your presence, and take not your holy Spirit from me".

Today too, the believer who feels threatened by evil and death calls on God in this way, knowing that he has reserved for him a destiny of eternal life. He knows that he is not only a body condemned to death because of sin, but that he also has an immortal soul. Therefore he turns to God the Father, who has the power to create out of nothing; to God the Only-begotten Son, who became man for our salvation, died for us and now, risen, lives in glory; to God the immortal Spirit, who calls us to life and restores life.

"Create in me a clean heart and put a new and right spirit within me". The whole Church makes the Psalmist's prayer her own. These are prophetic words that penetrate our spirit on this special day, the first day of the Lenten journey that will bring us to the celebration of Easter during the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000.

3. "Repent and believe in the Gospel". This invitation, which we find at the beginning of Jesus' preaching, introduces us into the Lenten season, a time to be dedicated in a special way to conversion and renewal, to prayer, to fasting and to works of charity. In recalling the experience of the chosen people, we too set out as it were to retrace the journey that Israel made across the desert to the Promised Land. We too will reach our goal; after these weeks of penance, we will experience the joy of Easter. Our eyes, purified by prayer and penance, will be able to behold with greater clarity the face of the living God, to whom man makes his own pilgrimage on the paths of earthly life.

"Cast me not away from your presence, and take not your holy Spirit from me" - this man, created not for death but for life, prays in exactly this way. Although he is aware of his weaknesses, he walks sustained by the certainty of his divine destiny.

May almighty God hear the prayers of the Church which, in today's Ash Wednesday liturgy, lifts up her heart to heaven with greater trust. May the merciful Lord grant us all to open our hearts to the gift of his grace, so that we can all take part with new maturity in the paschal mystery of Christ, our only Redeemer.

Tuesday, February 18, 2020

Boy Scouts in crisis...




CBS News reports:


"The Boy Scouts of America, barraged by hundreds of sex-abuse lawsuits, filed for bankruptcy protection Tuesday in hopes of working out a potentially mammoth victim compensation plan that would enable the hallowed, 110-year-old organization to carry on.
The Chapter 11 filing in federal bankruptcy court in Wilmington, Delaware, sets in motion what could be one of the biggest, most complex bankruptcies ever seen. Scores of lawyers are seeking settlements on behalf of several thousand men who say they were molested by scoutmasters or other leaders decades ago but are only now eligible to sue because of recent changes in their states' statute-of-limitations laws.
By going to bankruptcy court, the Scouts can put those lawsuits on hold for now. But they could ultimately be forced to sell off some of their vast property holdings, including campgrounds and hiking trails, to raise money for a compensation fund that could surpass $1 billion. BSA first explored bankruptcy in December 2018."

The Boy Scouts of today is not the same organization many of us knew decades ago.  Today it favors abortion and gender-bending ideology.  It has become, as this article makes clear, an institution committed toward immorality and filth.

I've addressed this sad development here and here.

Thursday, February 13, 2020

Our Lady and the coming plagues...





As the Coronavirus continues to spread, we all need to reflect very carefully on what Our Lady told Father Stefano Gobbi about the coming plagues.


Christ, in a vision to the stigmatist Martha Robin, said: "I play with the plans of men. My right hand prepares miracles and My Name shall be glorified in all the world. I shall be pleased to break the pride of the wicked much more when the world will be most hostile to all that is supernatural. And much more admirable and extraordinary will be the event that will come out of our encounter. In place of the throne of the Beast two glorious thrones will arise, one of My Sacred Heart and the other of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

Then it will be understood that neither human power nor demons nor the genius of industry will end the conflict, but that will end only when reparation has been consummated. Be courageous! The Kingdom of God is near. It will begin with something that will come so suddenly as to be entirely unexpected."

Pray now.  Prepare yourselves now.

Sunday, February 09, 2020

Francis the false shepherd: On fire to build man's world..


From an excellent analysis at National Review:

The pontiff’s erroneous path

In the first year or two of Pope Francis’s pontificate, conservative-minded Catholics made heroic efforts to place the perplexing ways of the new pope in continuity with the thought and deeds of his immediate predecessors. It was said that he had been a forceful critic of liberation theology, at least in its Marxist expressions, that he was a man of traditional piety, that he spoke about the machinations of the Evil One with surprising regularity, and that his style — brash, critical of established ways, anxious for dialogue with the modern world — was a refreshing way of bringing Christian orthodoxy to bear on the modern world. But there were early signs that challenged this reassuring consensus. Francis seemed suspicious of the most faithful Catholics — they were, in his estimation, rigid, obsessed with the evils of abortion and sexual sins, closed to the need for a Church open to humanitarian activism and a de-emphasis on dogma and even truth.


If Pope John Paul II stood up to Communist savagery and mendacity with a courage and integrity that helped ignite the revolutions of 1989, and if the immensely learned Pope Benedict XVI gave soft nihilism a remarkably descriptive and accurate name, “the dictatorship of relativism,” Pope Francis stood for nothing less than accommodating the world in the name of “change” and deference to the alleged “signs of the times.” As Cardinal Zen of Hong Kong once noted, Francis could see Communists as merely the victims of Latin American military dictatorship and lovers of the poor and thus more Christian than Christians in decisive respects. The gulags, and massive religious persecution, did not fit into this vision of relatively benign Communists.


As the estimable Father Raymond J. de Souza pointed out in the November 28, 2019, issue of the Catholic Herald, Pope Francis has a soft spot for leftist leaders who oppress civil society in the name of social justice and solidarity with the poor. The recently deposed Bolivian leader Evo Morales was, de Souza writes, “the Holy Father’s favorite leader in the Americas,” which “was passing strange, as [Morales] was a tyrant.” Francis met with the demagogic Morales six times in six years and considered the man to be his friend. In an act never adequately explained by the Vatican, de Souza notes, when the Argentine pope visited Bolivia in 2015 he accepted from Morales a crucifix adorned with a hammer and sickle.

All of this, alas, fits into a much broader pattern. Francis genuinely esteemed Fidel Castro and told reporters after his visit to Cuba in 2015 that he saw in Castro a strongly committed ecologist. He remained silent publicly and privately about the sufferings and persecution of his coreligionists in Cuba under Communism. Castro’s hideous despotism and draconian restrictions on the Roman Catholic Church did not influence the pope’s judgment of the man or the regime. In Venezuela, the bishops repeatedly pleaded with the Latin American pope to speak out against the emerging anti-Christian leftist despotism in Caracas; the best the pope could do was call for “dialogue” between an oppressed and mutilated civil society and a regime whose “socialism” he still seemed to esteem.

________________________________________

On fire to build man's world.

Malachi Martin, in his book “The Jesuits: The Society of Jesus and the Betrayal of the Roman Catholic Church,” says that, “Those who..know the history of Liberation Theology..may point out that Gutierrez’s work [Father Gustavo Gutierrez, author of A Theology of Liberation] was inspired by a 1968 Conference of Latin American bishops at Medellin, near Bogota, in Colombia, where the delegates highlighted the plight of the poor, and the needy to remedy their awful conditions…

Essentially, Liberation Theology is the answer to that summons to the Church codified so many years before by Maritain – to identify itself with the revolutionary hopes of the masses. The difference, perhaps, insofar as there is one, is that while Maritain adopted a theology of history built on a misapprehension of Marxist philosophy, Liberation Theologians adopted a theology of politics built on Soviet tactics. In essence, the propagators of Liberation Theology took the current of theological thought developed in Europe and applied it to the very concrete situations in Latin America. Suddenly, theological and philosophical theory became the pragmatic proposals and actual programs for changing the face of all social and political institutions in Latin America….

Liberation Theology turned its back on the entire scope of Scholastic Theology, including what was sound in Maritain. It did not base its reasoning on papal teaching, or on the ancient theological tradition of the Church, or on the Decrees of the Church’s Ecumenical Councils. In fact, Liberation Theology refused to start where Councils and Popes had always started: with God as Supreme Being, as Creator, as Redeemer, as Founder of the Church, as the One Who had placed among men a Vicar who was called the Pope, as Ultimate Rewarder of the Good and Punisher of the Evil. Rather, Liberation Theology’s basic presumption was ‘the people,’ sometimes indeed ‘the people of God.’ ‘The people’ were the source of spiritual revelation and religious authority. What mattered in theology was how ‘the people’ fared here and now, in the social, political, and economic realities of the evolving material world. The ‘experience of the people was the womb of theology,’ was the consecrated phrase.

At one stroke, therefore, Liberation Theology unburdened prepared and restless minds from an entire panoply of ancient concepts, dogmas, and mental processes governed by the fixed rules of Thomistic reasoning, and from the directives of the authoritative voice of Rome…Liberation Theology was no theology in the Roman Catholic sense of the word. It was not primarily about God, about God’s law, about God’s redemption, about God’s promises. Liberation Theology was interested in God as revealed today through the oppressed people. In God for himself, practically speaking, no genuine Liberation Theology was interested.

The second promise of Liberation Theology was even more exciting than freedom from Rome’s theology..” (The Jesuits: The Society of Jesus and the Betrayal of the Roman Catholic Church, pp. 308-309).

Under the banner of “liberation,” many in the Church’s hierarchy began to enlist the Church’s resources to advance the Marxist plan of revolution. Having abandoned the Church’s supernatural mission – building the Kingdom of God, these confused clerics began to turn exclusively toward a new goal: that of building a new world centered on man, a City of Man.

Fr. Martin explains how the Jesuits succumbed to this apostasy: “Classical Jesuitism, based on the spiritual teaching of Ignatius, saw the Jesuit mission in very clear outline. There was a perpetual state of war on earth between Christ and Lucifer. Those who fought on Christ’s side, the truly choice fighters, served the Roman Pontiff diligently, were at his complete disposal, were ‘Pope’s Men.’ The ‘Kingdom’ being fought over was the Heaven of God’s glory. The enemy, the archenemy, the only enemy, was Lucifer. The weapons Jesuits used were supernatural: the Sacraments, preaching, writing, suffering. The objective was spiritual, supernatural, and otherworldly. It was simply this: that as many individuals as possible would die in a state of supernatural grace and friendship with their Savior so that they would spend eternity with God, their Creator…

The renewed Jesuit mission debased this Ignatian ideal of the Jesuits. The ‘Kingdom’ being fought over was the ‘Kingdom’ everyone fights over and always has: material well-being. The enemy was now economic, political, and social: the secular system called democratic and economic capitalism. The objective was material: to uproot poverty and injustice, which were caused by capitalism, and the betterment of the millions who suffered want and injustice from that capitalism. The weapons to be used now were those of social agitation, labor relations, sociopolitical movements, government offices…” (The Jesuits, p. 478).

In this light, we can better understand Pope Francis' speech before Congress. The Pope called on Americans to open themselves to the world and not to see things in terms of good and evil, the righteous and unrighteous.  This, of course, is unscriptural. (See 2 Corinthians 6: 14, 15 and Ephesians 5: 11 for example).

As Fr. Vincent Miceli, S.J., explained in his essay on Call to Action entitled “Detroit: A Call to Revolution in the Church”: “The following are some of the demands the Church simply cannot fulfill for such is not her mission: 1. Wipe out poverty, ignorance, prejudice and war. 2. Democratize the whole world. 3. Stop the sale of arms everywhere. 4. Back the E.R.A. as a constitutional amendment. Like her Saviour, the Church will not turn stones into bread, thereby becoming the Mother of Socialism or a millennium of this world..’


"..the 'theologies of liberation', which reserve credit for restoring to a place of honor the great texts of the prophets and of the Gospel in defense of the poor, go on to a disastrous confusion between the 'poor' of the Scripture and the 'proletariat' of Marx. In this way they pervert the Christian meaning of the poor, and they transform the fight for the rights of the poor into a class fight within the ideological perspective of the class struggle. For them the 'Church of the poor' signifies the Church of the class which has become aware of the requirements of the revolutionary struggle as a step toward liberation and which celebrates this liberation in its liturgy." (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, "Instruction on Certain Aspects of the 'Theology of Liberation,'" No. 10).

The supernatural faith of Catholicism is being watered down for the sake of a new humanitarian religion.  Dialogue is key for this new religion which has abandoned the notion that we must, "Let love be without dissimulation. Hating that which is evil, cleaving to that which is good." (Romans 12: 29).

Tuesday, February 04, 2020

Francis: Homosexual Civil Unions can be acceptable


Lifesite News reports:


"A U.S. archbishop says Pope Francis told a group of American bishops in Rome that civil unions for homosexual couples that give them access to public benefits are 'acceptable,' as long as it’s clear such arrangements can never be considered marriage.

Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco told LifeSiteNews that during their January 27 ad limina visit, the pope said, in the words of the archbishop, that 'civil unions between two people of the same sex can never be marriage.  As long as this is respected, civil unions that give access to government benefits can be acceptable.'

However, to regard homosexual civil unions as acceptable contradicts Catholic teaching, notably reaffirmed in the 1986, 1992 and 2003 documents issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) under Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, now Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, and approved by Pope Saint John Paul II."

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in its document entitled Considerations Regarding Proposals to Give Legal Recognition to Unions Between Homosexual Persons, warns that even where homosexual unions have been legalized, "clear and emphatic opposition is a duty." (No. 5). This important document stresses that, "any kind of formal cooperation in the enactment or application of such gravely unjust laws" and even any "material cooperation on the level of their application" must be avoided. "In this area," states the document, "everyone can exercise the right to conscientious objection."


Considerations makes it abundantly clear that, "The Church teaches that respect for homosexual persons cannot lead in any way to approval of homosexual behavior or to considerations of homosexual unions." (No. 11). In other words, there can be no doubt that all Catholics have a moral duty to oppose the homosexual agenda.

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