It just feels like prayer and sacrifice are the weapons now. Human solutions are no use. I always want to fix a problem but this is so utterly beyond our scope. I just pray "come Lord Jesus" and a very slow sincere Our Father because I beg for His Kingdom and how desperately we need to be delivered from the evil one.
St. John Bosco had a dream or vision of a ship passing between two columns. On the top of the first was the Blessed Sacrament/Eucharist and on the top of the second was the Holy Rosary. In the midst of this gathering tempest, the safest and surest course to navigate is between these two points. Let's not fixate on the affairs of the Vatican too much for in so doing we might lose our peace and take our focus off where it should be, Christ. Let's plot a course in our lives between the Blessed Sacrament and the Rosary. Let's pray for the Church, for the good and holy priests and religious and those countless millions of ordinary lay people who are struggling in these confusing and distressing days. Our Lord has told us "let not your hearts be troubled". It is true that things are not as they should be in the world and in the Church. It is also true that there is little that we as lay people can do to effect positive change. However there are most assuredly things we can do. Does your church hold regular daily Eucharistic Adoration? If so, commit to visiting Our Lord more often. This is powerful beyond words and will bring peace and serenity to your life as well as making reparation to Our Lord. If Eucharistic Adoration is not available, why not resolve to ask your priest to offer it and arrange a little group to begin regular Adoration. This alone is enough to radically transform a parish over time. Pray the Rosary diligently and perhaps organise a little prayer group to pray the Rosary even twice a week. Communal prayer is powerful. Get enrolled in and wear the scapular. Encourage people in the parish to use sacramentals, holy water, miraculous medals etc. We CAN take territory back from the enemy. We each must make a choice. We choose either Christ or against Him. This goes for even those in high level positions in the Church. God is most assuredly not impressed by cassocks, zuchettos or fine ecclesiastical offices and titles and these will count for nothing when those who have been tasked with tending to His vineyard are made to give an account of their stewardship. So let us pray for all those in the Church from the most lowly to the most exalted positions that we do what is asked of us and do it well and keep our station so that we are not caught napping when the Bridegroom comes as most assuredly He will.
Funny I was just thinking as I was walking around the Park with the dogs this morning on failure in life and what it means. I had been reading the life of J RR Tolkein the author of, 'The Lord of the Rings' now said to be the greatest work of literature of the 20th century. I was comparing his life to mine and thinking what an utter , utter failure my life would seem to most people. Then the Lord smiled and reminded me how most people would have regarded His life a failure as He died naked, bleeding , tortured and rejected on a Cross. He also reminded me how His Mother , Mary would have been regarded as a failure as she only had the one child, a Son and that He died a claimed criminal on a Cross. But of course if you look at it the other way around, thorough the lens of heaven you see things so differently. The Queen of Heaven and the Saviour of the World. God looks at things so differently than we poor mortals. When we die we will leave this world naked as we were born. The only thing we will carry with us the love we have grown in our hearts. Perhaps that is the mistake that so many make in these latter times, to consider this world more important than the Kingdom of God. The world growing in our hearts and the world to come... But we really are like the grass that arises in the morning and at evening withers. One thing about J R R Tolkein that touched me. His mother came from an Anglican family and when she became Catholic they cut her off entirely although she was an impoverished widow with two young sons. Later his wife Edith who was also an Anglican converted at her marriage and also lost all her friends and was also cut off. So you have this double whammy of anti Catholicism in J R 's life the two women he loved most his mother and his wife being crushed for being Catholic. Yet you know there is no evidence at all that he ever showed the least trace of anti Protestant bias or hate himself, not a whiff of it.
I think that is the great mistake many of our Catholic sisters and brothers, including those in the highest place in the Church are making at the moment. To place more importance to the world and the things of the world as compared to the Growth of the Kingdom of God within , giving flower to the Kingdom of God in Heaven in the very, very near future when we go there. St Teresa of Avila compared this life to a , 'Night in a bad hotel'. How true. Yet people who wish to marry Christ and His Church to the world are a bit like people on high speed trains who reach out and try to clutch passing branches of trees in order to become part of that which passes.But we will always be pilgrims passing through. Which of us looking back at life as we leave it will reproach ourselves for having talked too little? Which of us will reproach ourselves for having spent too much time alone in prayer, kneeling in front of the Blessed Sacrament or attending Mass and Confession? For at the End of Life , when all is hush we shall judge ourselves on love.
I was comparing his life to mine and thinking what an utter , utter failure my life would seem to most people. Then the Lord smiled and reminded me how most people would have regarded His life a failure as He died naked, bleeding , tortured and rejected on a Cross. He also reminded me how His Mother , Mary would have been regarded as a failure as she only had the one child, a Son and that He died a claimed criminal on a Cross. But of course if you look at it the other way around, thorough the lens of heaven you see things so differently. The Queen of Heaven and the Saviour of the World. Well said, thank you. I needed that little pick me up.
I got this on my facebook feed and could not help to think how so many clergy are indeed stubbornly blinded by the things of the world, just like the rest of world: "Two greatest commandments of this culture: love the world your god with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. The second is like it: never judge anyone or anything to be wrong ever unless it offends you or speaks against what the first commandment seeks to safeguard. On these two hang all the agendas and the politics."
I was reading the bio of one great French intellectual and theologian Fr Louis Bouyer. He was a good friend of Blessed Pope Paul VI and central to much of what went on at Vatican 2 (though he became a fierce critic of the abuses, especially the liturigical abuses later on) Anyway Fr Louis when he was young went through a real trial (and I think St Cardinal John Henry Newman went through a similiar trial) when he deeply worried that all around him was a dream and unreal. I can sympathise with that. To me it seems that the only reality is God and all the comes from God, everything else is a lie. I think that is the true difference between people who pray and follow God's law and those who do not. Those who do not pray get lost in a false dream of lies and illusion. Those who do pray live in the light of the truth. We, if, you like ,step out of the false light of lies and into the truth. I notice this morning in the Gospel, I believe it commented that Jesus never taught them but in Parables. Jesus was a man of few words but His words were so simple and profound. The same for our Blessed Lady , words few but deep. On the other hand the Modernists who wish to marry us to the world are those of many , many , endless words. On and on and on. Endless. But when you pick them up to study them they crumble to black dust in our hands and blow away, meaningless, a dark dream. Nonsense , a chattering babble. Shadows of The Lie. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Bouyer
Padraig, I couldn't agree more. Even those of us who pray need to discern, but we can trust in the inspiration and guidance of the Holy Spirit who indwells our hearts. Those who fail to pray, operate primarily on the level of the rational mind which is often clueless to the leading of the Spirit. 1Cor 2:10 God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. 11 For what person knows a man's thoughts except the spirit of the man which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. 12 Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit which is from God, that we might understand the gifts bestowed on us by God. 13 And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who possess the Spirit. 14 The unspiritual man does not receive the gifts of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.
Great quote ,Terry. I wonder if you have had the same feeling I have had that much that is going the rounds at the moment is quite simply meaningless? I don't mean just that I disagree with it, I mean it is simply nonsense. I am mean that it has no logic or sense. It sounds wonderful. deeply profound, insightful and so on. But just nonsense. C. S Lewis has a character in his SF novel , 'Our of the Silent Planet' . He is an Anglican clergyman the most modern of the modernists. But Lewis compares his speaking to flies buzzing in glass jar. I am glad I am not the only one who has picked up on this, but you and St Paul have too. There are times when you listen to these folk talking nonsense..and it is nonsense..I begin to feel like I am the one who is crazy. My mother when we were young and talked too much used to warn us from Scripture, 'For every idle word that man shall speak!!' Which used to scare me to silence. Matthew 12:36 But I tell you that everyone will have to give account on the day of judgment for every empty word they have spoken.
You make me nervous by placing my name before St. Paul's, after all, I have never said anything to influence him- only the opposite! Safe in the Refuge of the Immaculate Heart!
Yes, it is very sad indeed. But we must do as Our Mother has asked us to "Pray, pray, pray" - there is no one whos heart is more saddened then Our Blessed Mother for these boys and the Priests who commit these sins (and other sins). I was once shown a vision of many Priests walking about with their heads down, and below them was a very large cliff where several of the Priests would come to the very edge and not see that they were about to fall in. After this, I began praying much for Priests. It was a very frightening vision and I had only been in the Catholic Church for a couple of years so I hadn't known about these things that are only coming out into the light these past few years. God is revealing to us who is in desperate need of prayer. Hell is for all eternity! God bless you.
Jesus told Sister Natalia of Hungary about the trials of the Church. She said, "The Lord Jesus let me know that just before the victory that will bring peace to the world, great confusion and terror will reign in the Church. The reason for this confusion will be the penetration of godlessness into the closed sanctuaries of the Church; tradition will be ruined and there will be worldliness everywhere....I learned that many will attack the Church; their goal will be to alienate the believers from the Church, to take away their trust in her, and thereby they will become free prey for satan." Our Lady of Sorrows, pray for us!
God allows us good as well as bad leaders. If it brings us closer to him maybe this is his intention in allowing it. Waking us up to his ways and how far we have traveled from them.
Another comment about THAT article (consider the source): A Vatican Shot Across the Bow for Hard-Line U.S. Catholics ...... Fans of the article said it made clear that the conservatives who ran the American church for decades were out of step with the new Catholic mainstream under Francis. Massimo Faggioli, a professor of historical theology at Villanova University and a contributor to liberal Catholic journals, said the Civiltà Cattolica article would “be remembered in church history as one of the most important to understand the Vatican of Francis and the United States and American Catholicism.” American Catholicism, he argued, echoing the article’s thesis, “has become different than mainstream European Catholicism and mainstream Latin American Catholicism,” and has fallen “into the hands of the religious right.” [Ha! "Mainstream Catholicism" is now something to be emulated!!] ............ Benjamin Harnwell, a Catholic traditionalist in Rome, fan of Mr. Bannon and confidant of Cardinal Burke’s, said the article’s authors were doing little more than “trolling Steve Bannon.” Mr. Bannon, a former altar boy who once articulated his worldview to a Vatican conference, wrote in a brief email that the pope’s associates “lit me up.” Archbishop Charles J. Chaput of Philadelphia, a standard-bearer for conservatism in America, likened the Civiltà Cattolica authors in his weekly newsletter to the “useful idiots” who supported the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. He called the article “an exercise in dumbing down and inadequately presenting the nature of Catholic/evangelical cooperation on religious freedom and other key issues.” If Archbishop Chaput’s own thwarted ambitions are any indication, Francis might not agree. The pope has vexed conservatives by repeatedly declining to elevate Archbishop Chaput to the rank of cardinal, a requirement for entrance into the conclave that will choose the pontiff’s successor. ............. “We should speak in a way that invites people and creates a sense of unity in society,” Cardinal Cupich said in an interview at the Vatican on the day of his elevation. Some progressive Catholics have even begun expressing a previously tacit resentment of the hard-right zeal of evangelical, Calvinist and Protestant converts to Catholicism, among them Newt Gingrich, the husband of Callista Gingrich, the new American ambassador to the Holy See. “I am so tired of converts telling us that the pope is not Catholic,” Michael Sean Winters wrote last week in the newspaper National Catholic Reporter. More: http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world...-hard-line-us-catholics/ar-AApkaR9?li=BBnb7Kz
We love to politicize everything here in America. Even the Church. It is interesting that so many of the mainstream news outlets are covering this same article. Almost as if they are receiving talking points or something. Steering the news and as much public opinion as possible to further make their case for a populist approach to all things regardless of the merit of it.
"Almost as if.......". We can omit the almost and if. Thanks wikileaks. The Holy Spirit is indeed a God of surprises.
It is very odd that those in the Vatican who wrote the original article are so upset. Presumably they support the decentralization of the Church which is supposed to allow better the local cultural differences to come out. So are they saying it's okay to be different as long as you are different in a way I approve?
