THY ALMIGHT WORD LEAPT DOWN FROM HEAVEN....
The Book of Wisdom, Chapter 18, verse 11
On December 31, Rocky and I went to a convent's chapel to look at their wonderful decorations and he saw the extern sister step outside the cloister to pick up the UPS delivery. It was the first time he's ever seen a Carmelite nun in person and he was delighted to see that she looked like any painting he's ever seen of St. Teresa of Avila. After that we went outside and were going to peep at the original, historic convent when we were surprised and delighted to see a Sister Servant nun along with young several novices in the courtyard. They were taking a field trip and decided to visit the oldest convent in the English colonies. We waved at them and they returned our greeting. Next we took took a drive on the windy back country roads and had lunch and then went to Mass at a mid sized church. It was the best Mass I've been to all year. It's been so long since I've heard the Confiteor and the Canon and the Angus Dei at Mass that I cried cried from almost the beginning until Communion. It was a wonderful day.
Saint Thomas Becket, Bishop and Martyr - 29 December, from the Raccolta
St Thomas of Canterbury, son of Gilbert Becket, was born in Southwark, England, in 1117. When a youth he was attached to the household of Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury, who sent him to Paris and Bologna to study law. He became Archdeacon of Canterbury, then Lord High Chancellor of England; and in 1160, when Archbishop Theobald died, the king insisted on the consecration of St. Thomas in his stead. St. Thomas refused, warning the king that from that hour their friendship would be broken. In the end he yielded, and was consecrated. The conflict at once broke out; St. Thomas resisted the royal customs, which violated the liberties of the Church and the laws of the realm. After six years of contention, partly spent in. exile, St. Thomas, with full foresight of martyrdom before him, returned as a good shepherd to his Church. On the 29th of December, 1170, just as vespers were beginning, four knights broke into the cathedral, crying: “Where is the archbishop? where is the traitor?” The monks fled, and St. Thomas might easily have escaped. But he advanced, saying: “Here I am—no traitor, but archbishop. What seek you?” “Your life,” they cried. “Gladly do I give it,” was the reply; and bowing his head, the invincible martyr was hacked and hewn till his soul went to God. Six months later Henry II. submitted to be publicly scourged at the Saint’s shrine, and restored to the Church her full rights.
Reflection.—"Learn from St. Thomas,“ says Father Faber, “to fight the good fight even to the shedding of blood, or, to what men find harder, the shedding of their good name by pouring it out to waste on the earth.”
My husband is home from work. I've finally heard from my Tennessee relatives and now Rocky and I are happily eating bacon sandwiches and listening to the greatest Christmas album of all time,
Pavarotti at Notre Dame, Montreal.
We watch old movies and TV shows almost exclusively. I've known that Hollywood kept pushing perversion for decades and were only kept in check by the Church but I'm seeing how Hollywood executives managed to subtly manipulate the public even in the so called Golden Age of entertainment. It was often done with such a delicate touch that it must have taken a huge amount of rewriting and meetings to pull it off.
Rocky was watching a nearly 60 year old Western TV show a few weeks ago and suddenly I saw something that I never would have noticed as a child. The heroine owns a saloon (No, it's not Gunsmoke), but to my adult eyes it seemed more like a brothel with scantily clad "girls" living upstairs. The hero is the local sheriff and he and lady saloon owner have a relationship that will not end in marriage, because the heroine likes her freedom and the sheriff doesn't want to be tied down or leave a widow in case he gets killed trying to clean up his very rough town.
A local farm girl leaves her dreary, puritanical father and finds work and happiness in the saloon. Her widower father is broken hearted and shows up at the saloon demanding that his daughter return home. He is shocked to see that a cowboy is apparently sleeping in his daughter's room and he angrily tells the woman owner of the saloon that she is a sinner who has debauched his child. He comes back late that night with his shot gun and is prevented from killing the cowboy by the sheriff.
It turns out that the girl is not a prostitute and she and the cowboy are married. The saloon is really just a saloon, (probably for the sake of the censors), and the scantily clad girls who work there just serve food and drinks and flirt but really don't do anything upstairs but sleep alone. The father is made a fool of and everyone laughs at him while he stands there looking embarrassed but relieved. That show very cleverly made the church going father look bad. That was a poison in the subconscious of the young viewers.
Another movie that I watched was even more overt. In this one a local woman is an adulteress who sees a murder as she returns from her off screen assignation with her lover. An innocent man is accused and is going to hang. He has one witness, a girl from the saloon who says she saw him going about his own business at the time of the murder and he had nothing to do with it. The innocent man's lawyer, who is the hero of the movie somehow finds out about the local wife and questions her in court. Desperate to save her marriage and not be humiliated in public, she perjures herself. The prosecutor jumps up and demands that the court can't possibly take the word of a harlot over that of a respectable married woman. The innocent man's lawyer gets the married woman to confess and the innocent man is saved from the gallows. This movie was made in the late 40s or early 50s but it deliberately made the prostitute the truly good woman and denigrates the married lady. Hollywood was never our friend.
As horrible as 2020 is and has been, there may come a day when we all look back on it as the calm before the storm and may even call it the good ole days. St. Januarius's blood did not liquefy today. The last three times it did not liquefy were in 1939, 1944, 1973, and 1980. Sooooo, yeah. Things can always get worse.
You know, I really don't think Archbishop Sheen should ever be canonized. He was a great showman before Vatican II but in his old age he either really lost the plot or maybe he was just a company man all along and he moved with whatever the company said at any given time. His canonization process was probably disrupted due to spite and other bad reasons but we may have dodged a bullet here. Saint Fulton might have been as embarrassing as Saint John Paul II, Saint Paul VI and Saint John Newman may turn out to be. Let's wait a few more decades and let a future pope and committee who aren't star struck, coolly examine the evidence for or against a canonization.
Years ago there was a blogger whom I thought of as the prophet of doom and overly dramatic on top of that. I made it a point to avoid reading her because I found her to be so depressing. Well, 2020, happened and you know what? Everything that blogger predicted has come horribly true. Our courts, our governors, our universities, media and public intellectuals-- everything about them that Etherelda said would come to pass; has. Rest in peace, ma'am. You were right.
The report is said to be somewhere between 400 to 600 pages which will be grim reading I'm sure. Blaming the dead rock star pope and an 81 year old man, who let's face it, is closer to the grave than the cradle, is a masterstroke.
You see, if Saint John Paul II, who apparently never listened to anybody who tried to tell him that Bishop So-and-So was bad news, gave McCarrick his power then it calls into question JPII's sanctity or at least, his wisdom. A seed of doubt has been sowed. Since JPII was wrong about McCarrick, what else was he wrong about? Many people see JPII as their linchpin. Catholics of my generation looked up to him as the holiest pope since Pope St. Pius X. Discredit JPII and those people are going to be shaken. If you've ever been exasperated after reading Hilary White's rage against JPII and Benedict XVI for not satisfying her father hunger then get ready for more of the same but from all kinds of people including some of your friends and family members.
The McCarrick Report allows Francis to say, "Hey it wasn't me. My holy predecessor trusted McCarrick so why shouldn't I have? I was misled." I think most people are going to react to the McCarrick Report the same way their parents and grandparents did when the Novus Ordo was forced on them in 1968-1970. They will sit in the pews for an hour on Sunday and that's it or they'll stop coming to Mass or they will conclude that we've all been misled and they will apostatize.
LITANY OF THE HOLY FACE OF JESUS I salute Thee, I adore Thee and I love Thee, O adorable Face of Jesus, my Beloved, noble Seal of the Divinity! Outraged anew by blasphemers. I offer Thee, through the heart of Thy blessed Mother, the worship of all the Angels and Saints, most humbly beseeching Thee to repair and renew in me and in all men Thy Image disfigured by sin. Adorable Face of Jesus which was so mercifully bowed down on the Cross, on the day of Thy Passion, for the salvation of the world! Once more today in pity bend down towards us poor sinners. Cast upon us a glance of compassion and give us Thy peace.
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So this is where we're at, America. A male, (he's not fit to be called a man), posted photos of nuns on Twitter and is deliberately trying to cause harm to them and their order because they went to the Trump rally. The whole point of "doxing" is to put people's personal information on the Web in order that other evil people will harass or perhaps even harm your victim. This individual would have been right at home with the kind of males who went after good women in Paris, the Vendee, Poland and Spain.
I just watched a video by a priest cheering because Dr. Jordan Peterson is back from his near death experience. I have a few questions but the main one is this: Considering that Peterson did not practice what he preached and his personal life seems to have been a train wreck what advice can he give a young man?
Louie Verrechio used to annoy me when he'd carp about the March for Life or the Knights of Columbus's involvement because he'd always allude to what he thought was wrong but was vague on details. Now, he and the magnificent Randy Engel have spelled out their argument. It's a thorough and disturbing one.
It looks like Nellie Gray was betrayed either on her deathbed or after her death by the people running the March now. It also looks like the heads of the organization aren't fighting for the outright abolition of abortion but rather, a slow nibbling away at it. Essentially, the consensus idea seems to be to pragmatically ignore babies in the first trimester for now in order to convince people that abortion in the latter trimesters is evil and should done away with. Supposedly after years of that people will come to realize that protection should be extended for all babies.
The March leadership, Randy Engel writes, has also made an effort to water down the Catholicism that led Nellie Gray to start the March in the first place because the current president of March for Life feels that "Nellie Gray's leadership was "too Catholic," " and continuing in Nellie's path might offend the kindly Protestants, Jews and even pagans who might be pro-life but would hold their noses and let babies die rather than rally with Catholics to stop it.
I'm going to have to read the whole thing a few times to fully digest it but I don't like what I've read and as the wife of Knight of Columbus I really am disgusted with Carl Anderson.
Jesuit Tampa High School had the Stanley Cup on display before the Blessed Sacrament. You don't have to be a theologian or a saint to know that this is wrong. Whoever allowed this needs to step down or be removed.
Do they have the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd at your parish? Before you enroll your tot you might want to read this.
The same people who told your parents that they were unsophisticated rubes when they objected to Brooke Shields being a sex symbol at 10 are now telling you that you are not smart or cool enough to realize how wonderful "Cuties" is.
In your charity would you please pray for my uncle? I think he's become depressed. He's 77 and admitted that he doesn't eat everyday. He doesn't see the point. He also sits in the dark because he doesn't see the point of spending money for electricity at night.
It's allergy season and I started coughing at Mass. Several people looked at me and gave me some hard stares. I felt Rocky tense up beside me. If anyone had dared to say anything to me he was ready to tell them off.
George Neumayr, confirming what @TaylorRMarshall said yesterday regarding Steubenville: https://t.co/YYqJVzH759 pic.twitter.com/MmrAjEDg9y
The Assumption was not a Holy Day of obligation this year and there was not a word about it at Mass today. Here's a beautiful homily for the feast.
My mother-in-law had ovarian cancer. She had massive surgery and lived with a colostomy bag for 15 years. All of her friends from the chemo ward died. She held on until a new surgeon was able stitch her together in such a way that she no longer needed the bag. I remember how happy she was when she was able to go to the bathroom like a normal person again. My mother-in-law's insides were held together by prayer and pelvic mesh. She survived to see her sons married, and to know her grandchildren. She went back to work but eventually her kidneys, damaged by the chemo, began to fail. She fought every day in some form for 23 years. Ovarian cancer is awful and watching what it did to my mother-in-law left me speechless.
Geska Lima was a beautiful soul, a great lady whom brightened up Catholic Twitter with her wisdom, her prayers and meditations. She fought her ovarian cancer with great courage and when her doctor's finally told her there was no hope she tried alternative treatments. Now she has passed away. May the angels lead her to Paradise.
Two days ago I read a Twitter post by a teacher who was concerned that since he will be teaching via Zoom parents will be able to hear what he's telling the kids about sex issues. Parents, if a grown man wants to talk to your kid without you knowing what he's telling them, something funky is going on.
If a grown man wants to talk to your kid about sex, something funky is going on. If a grown man frets about how to get around you and calls you a "helicopter" or "snow plow" parent because you pay attention to what he's trying to do then you have a problem. Parents beware and keep your guard up. Any teacher who wants you to leave the room in your own home needs to be challenged and corrected.
None of this kind of thing is new. Bad people go where the kids are and there have always been teachers who overstepped their bounds. Decades ago, my mother got a phone call from her oldest brother, Jr. He was 17 then and triumphantly told her that "they" (parents) had finally got one of their teachers. The teacher was a pervert who had flirted with and seduced students. When the principal, school board and most importantly, the parents found out he was run out of town and out of the county.
Go read the Little House on the Prairie series or watch an old movie, particularly an old Western. Teachers were held to a very high standard up until the 60s. Parents demanded that teachers to be as respectable as a nun and before the advent of teacher's unions, teachers got fired and lost their license to teach if there was proof of inappropriate behavior. Why were parents so strict? Because the man or woman who has custody of your child's mind for hours has a powerful impact that can shape or warp them for the rest of their lives.
Joe Biden is not a good Catholic and if he ever was, he hasn't been for decades. I've wondered for some time if he isn't a sly trickster as well. When he pawed and sniffed women and girls in public we saw the people around him get these stunned looks on their faces or they did the 1000 yard stare. Some people shook their heads and said it just Joe being...eccentric. Others were rightfully appalled and thought he was either losing control of his faculties or a narcissistic pervert or both.
Every now and then I wonder if the old rogue isn't pulling an I Claudius? Emperor Claudius if you remember from the book and the series, had to pretend to be a harmless, half wit so he would be ignored by his immediate family's enemies. The scene where he is crowned and then stuns all the Roman court by suddenly speaking and behaving normally is still one of the most thrilling I've ever seen.
Is Biden a pitiful figurehead being used by his family, and some shady characters or is he a straight up villain playing his supporters for useful idiots? Hey, it's 2020. Anything short of zombies and dragons would not surprise me one bit.
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Fr. McGiveney, pray for us |