Reparation prayer

REPARATION PRAYER

Eternal Father, turn away Thy angry gaze from our guilty people whose face has become unsightly in Thine eyes. Look instead upon the Face of Thy Beloved Son, for this is the Face of Him in Whom Thou art well pleased. We now offer Thee this Holy Face, covered with shame and disfigured by bloody bruises in reparation for the crimes of our age in order to appease Thine anger, justly provoked against us. Because Thy Divine Son, our Redeemer, has taken upon His Head all the sins of His members, that they might be spared, we now beg of Thee, Eternal Father, to grant us mercy. AMEN.

(from the Holy Face Devotion prayers)

Repartion prayer

REPARATION PRAYER

Eternal Father, turn away Thy angry gaze from our guilty people whose face has become unsightly in Thine eyes. Look instead upon the Face of Thy Beloved Son, for this is the Face of Him in Whom Thou art well pleased. We now offer Thee this Holy Face, covered with shame and disfigured by bloody bruises in reparation for the crimes of our age in order to appease Thine anger, justly provoked against us. Because Thy Divine Son, our Redeemer, has taken upon His Head all the sins of His members, that they might be spared, we now beg of Thee, Eternal Father, to grant us mercy. AMEN.

(from the Holy Face Devotion prayers)

Farewell Sonny Boy

My uncle passed away. He was 17 when I was born and being so much younger than my other uncles and aunts I never even remotely saw him as an authority figure or held him in reserve the way I did with other "real" adults.  He was one of the funniest men I'll ever meet and a person of great charm. Our family being Southern have a nickname for each one of us and his was Sonny Boy. 

Sonny's mother taught him to cook when he was young child and he was so talented that when he grew up he made a career as cook at some of DCs better hotels and fine restaurants. When he was a boy two tragedies cast a shadow over an otherwise happy go lucky youth. First, his father died after a long illness and then when he was 15, he discovered and became betrothed to Lady Alcohol. This grieved his mother and infuriated his big sister, my mother so he stopped... as far as they knew until he was 18. After that he would abstain all week and then binge on Friday night. Later he would go for months with only a few maintenance daily drinks and then inexplicably he would binge. 

My mother's family are remarkably robust people but even with our metabolism this could not go on forever. When he was in his late 50s my mother noticed that something was not right with his memory. At first his symptoms were so subtle than no-one but she saw them and then one day we all had to admit that she was right. In his 60s we got a terrible diagnosis....dementia. I went to court, obtained guardianship for him and found a nursing home. For four years my uncle was essentially my son. It was hard but it was also a grace and a privilege. On February 9th, my birthday he was taken to the hospital with pneumonia and he never really recovered. He spent the rest of his life with a tracheotomy and was on and off a ventilator. He was too much for his lungs and heart. I loved him very much.

Eternal rest grant unto him Oh Lord and let perpetual light shine upon him. May he rest in peace.

Amen

........

Grant me a place among the sheep, and take me out from among the goats, setting me on the right side. When the wicked are confounded, Doomed to flames of woe unbounded, Call me with Thy saints surrounded. Low I kneel, with heart's submission, See, like ashes, my contrition, Help me in my last condition. Ah! that day of tears and mourning, From the dust of earth returning Man for judgement must prepare him, Spare, O God, in mercy spare him. Lord, all-pitying, Jesus blest, Grant them Thine eternal rest. Amen.----From Dies Irae

Reparation Prayer

REPARATION PRAYER

Eternal Father, turn away Thy angry gaze from our guilty people whose face has become unsightly in Thine eyes. Look instead upon the Face of Thy Beloved Son, for this is the Face of Him in Whom Thou art well pleased. We now offer Thee this Holy Face, covered with shame and disfigured by bloody bruises in reparation for the crimes of our age in order to appease Thine anger, justly provoked against us. Because Thy Divine Son, our Redeemer, has taken upon His Head all the sins of His members, that they might be spared, we now beg of Thee, Eternal Father, to grant us mercy. AMEN.

(from the Holy Face Devotion prayers)

Requiem Aeternum

Alteranatives to the Scouts

The Boy Scouts have died and the Girl Scouts have been messed up for years, if not decades. If you want your child to have outdoor fun but don't want to involve them in the official scouting program there are alternatives.

Trail Life USA 

The Knights of Columbus Squires

American Heritage Girls

North American Explorers

Not outdoors focused but they look like fun

Little Flowers   

Blue Knights

Is your kid going on a mission trip? Parents beware.

I'm not at liberty to go into details but I just heard a tragic story  that I can't get out of my head. If you are considering sending your innocent teenager off on a mission trip to somewhere like El Salvador, which is infamous for its violence ask a few questions of the representatives of the mission group. How are the volunteers housed and what steps are taken to ensure that no kid is left alone? Even if they give you a reasonable answer, do you really want your son or your daughter in a place where they are in constant danger and have to be guarded (by whom?) in order to be spared from robbery or rape? If you want your child to be acquainted with a little hard work and gratitude for what they have it's too, too late to wait until they are teenagers and you are foolish to send your child to a dangerous place for the sake of charity.

 I beg you to instead send them to a mission in Appalachia, South Dakota or Mississippi.   At the very least, if something bad should happen in the US you will be able to go to the police. In Latin America your son or daughter will be helpless, and at the mercy of possibly hostile, greedy or dangerous authorities.

Kim Davis

You can be a really nasty snob and make fun of Kim Davis because, her style, or because she's not your class or any petty thing you can think of, or you can mock her for her four marriages before she began to search for God, (the lady is a Protestant), or you could say "Well, the law is the law," or you could agree with Carly Fiorina  that the thing to do is to resign, but surely, surely you can't be behind the shackling of this woman as she's hauled off to jail. Right now this poor woman is sitting in jail and has been treated as if she were a drug lord with the blood of hundreds on her hands.

Abortion is murder and like any other form of that mortal sin, priests can and do absolve it

Don't get confused by the Year of Mercy announcement.

Reparation prayer

REPARATION PRAYER

Eternal Father, turn away Thy angry gaze from our guilty people whose face has become unsightly in Thine eyes. Look instead upon the Face of Thy Beloved Son, for this is the Face of Him in Whom Thou art well pleased. We now offer Thee this Holy Face, covered with shame and disfigured by bloody bruises in reparation for the crimes of our age in order to appease Thine anger, justly provoked against us. Because Thy Divine Son, our Redeemer, has taken upon His Head all the sins of His members, that they might be spared, we now beg of Thee, Eternal Father, to grant us mercy. AMEN.

(from the Holy Face Devotion prayers)

an unusual crucifxion

In most paintings of the crucifixion you see St. John standing by Our Lady  or comforting her. I think this is the first time I've ever seen St. John folded in to her comforting, protecting arms and I think that it is closer to the truth than other paintings I've seen. St. John was there because he ran to Mary after leaving Caiphas's house. It was she who gave him the courage to follow Our Lord to Calvary.

Story time

This painting reminds me of Sr. Jean Marie, from 1rst grade.

Random thoughts on magic, the traumas of Gen X childhood and other bits...

•  Rocky and I visited the chapel of the Comboni Missionary Sisters in Richmond.  The sister who showed us around was Italian and so kind. It's a lovely chapel and they have a retreat house for big groups. After than we went to the Botanical Garden and spent hours walking and sitting amid the plants and flowers.

• Once, the Vatican rebuked the author Alexander Dumas because he portrayed a member of the clergy in an insulting way. Today we have a Vatican official writing on behalf of the pope to a lesbian who writes pro-gay books for children.  I'm reminded of the last scene from the movie , The Manchurian Candidate where a grief stricken Major Marco can't go on anymore with what he is saying and just leans  back  and moans "Hell....Hell."
  

• The deliberately ignored Christians of the Middle East have a message for us.   I don't think most of us in Europe and North America are going to like it but maybe tears and blood has to be shed, maybe the scourge of Islam is what is needed to restore people to their senses.
  
  
• Am I the only one who can't wait for the pope's visit in September to be over? It looks like Philadelphia is going be a public relations failure. Besides the pro abortion involvement in the planning of the World Meeting of Families,  Philly people are not going to be happy with closed roads, bridges and towed cars. Much like Evilene from the musical, The Wiz, Archbishop Chaput seems to be singing "Don't bring me no bad news."  and in DC the diocese don't seem to be managing the logistics as well as it did when Benedict came to DC.
  
  
  
• There is no such thing as good magic. In rural South Carolina, where my parents come from, witches are known as root doctors. A skilled root doctor can give you a potion to make your arthritic hands hurt less, he can also give you a tea that will cause a heavy menstrual cycle--an abortion really---, or give you a powder that will make someone you don't like very sick or dead. All magic seeks to take the power belonging only to God. All magic is evil. Certain forms are very flexible which is in part, why they are so sucessful. My mother remembers that a person could go to the root doctor on a regular basis and still go to church. This shocked her as a girl but only a few adults that she met seemed to be troubled by it.
  
  I don't want to get into Harry Potter because even decent people lose their minds over it and can not be reasoned with but magic is pushed heavily by our media. Remember Buffy,the Vampire Slayer? That was one toxic show. Fathers were either useless or cruel. Mothers, even the one gentle and loving one  on the show, were useless and needed to be kept ignorant or their own good. Sex outside of marriage was normal. Sex with non-humans was also normal. In fact fornication of all kinds was ok, except for that between a normal man and woman. Conjugal relations were never mentioned and there wasn't a single happy marriage. Witchcraft was normal, and so-called white magic was held in high esteem. A whole lot of girls were influenced by that show and their daughters and younger sisters were captivated by Twilight, another toxic series of novels that portrays normal humans as boring and cursed humans and lessor demons, as beautiful, exiting, eminently superior and worth dying for so long as you can be with them forever. Somone is reading this and asking "What about Narnia?" Oh bother, Narnia. I was eight years old and realized that it was an allegory and that Aslan was supposed to represent Jesus. The White Witch was not at all appealing and was clearly a satanic figure.
  
  
  
• Hilary White has an interesting post on science fiction  where she wonders if  the constant drumbeat of hopelessness, and godlessness of  70s and 80s sci-fi didn't help cause the anxiety that seems to be so much a part of Generation X.  It wasn't just science fiction though, Lurleen McDaniel made a fortune writing teen-aged liebestod  novels. I think I picked up one  and it depressed me so badly I never touched her stuff again but think of all the poor silly girls who did read that stuff and grew up believing that you better grab "love" now because you could die young and miss it all. I'll bet that some of those girls are the ones who impulsively divorce their husbands, blow up their families but do it because they have a right to be happy NOW and life is too short to miss out.
  
  
  
•  After an apparently homosexual reporter slaughtered two people in Roanoke the media had a quandary. They can't bring themselves to criticize the murderer so  they blame weapon that he used.  Some people have been shocked by the conduct of the female victims family. How could you talk politics when your child is dead? I think it's because the lure of being on TV is so powerful that it trumps all natural inclinations.  I've seen people being interviewed who had glazed eyes and goofy grins while a dead body lies only a few feet away. It's like a drug. Later they may cry or go silent but while the camera is on them they go through the motions like zombies. It's astonishing and frightening to watch. 

The Passion of St. John

This painting may be seen by visiting St. John the Baptist Church in Front Royal, Virginia

I can't figure out how to repost properly so thanks to the copy and paste feature here's what I wrote about John, and the Herodian clan, last year.


 The House of Herod was an astonishingly sick one even by the standards of the day. Herod the Great, was a monstrous individual and the first of a long line of anti-Christs. A Roman contemporary famously quipped that it was better to be Herod's pig than his son and that was true. Herod did not eat pork--in public anyway but his paranoia drove him to kill not only his wife, her mother and her still teen-aged brother but two of his sons as well.When Herod wasn't killing his family, he was killing enemies, real and imagined and making his subjects miserable. His viciousness was such that his courtiers probably weren't shocked when he ordered the Slaughter of the Innocents.

Herodias  who was a key figure in the Passion of St. John, was the granddaughter of Herod the Great by one of his murdered sons. She was married to her half uncle, Herod II, (also called Herod Phillip) a son by King Herod's third wife.  At some point she dumped  her husband and taking her daughter, Salome went off to Gallilee  in order to be with his half brother Herod Antipas, another son of Herod the Great by his fourth wife.  Her new husband, Herod Antipas was both her brother-in-law and her uncle.

St. John the Baptist, the last of the prophets, of whom Our Lord said there was none greater born of woman, looked at the adulterous, incestuous couple and saw that they were crooked people sprung from a crooked house. Most people would've turned away, repulsed and given the situation up as hopeless  but John did not. The Gospels tell us the rest of the story. His passion is commemorated on August 29.

Reparation prayer

REPARATION PRAYER

Eternal Father, turn away Thy angry gaze from our guilty people whose face has become unsightly in Thine eyes. Look instead upon the Face of Thy Beloved Son, for this is the Face of Him in Whom Thou art well pleased. We now offer Thee this Holy Face, covered with shame and disfigured by bloody bruises in reparation for the crimes of our age in order to appease Thine anger, justly provoked against us. Because Thy Divine Son, our Redeemer, has taken upon His Head all the sins of His members, that they might be spared, we now beg of Thee, Eternal Father, to grant us mercy. AMEN.

(from the Holy Face Devotion prayers)

Our Lady of Lourdes

Song for Mary

Prayer

The most beautiful thing this side of Heaven

Mass tonight was even more thrilling than usual. There were a lot of new people there besides the regulars and the confession line was long. Among the regulars were a charming woman I've nicknamed Sweet Mommy and her Delightful Daughter. Sweet Mommy is married to Funny Daddy. The Handsome Indian Couple were their usual pew. Big Irish, who looks like he could kneecap you but is actually a very tender hearted guy was up front, the Three Cute Girls were on the St. Joseph side, the Shy Young Fellows were on the Our Lady side and the Big Jolly Family who come in a tank were spread out in two pews. There is always a big assortment of single people in their 20s and we get worshipers from around the world. To see this kind of variety in peoples you'd have to go to a cathedral in the city but we were were all together in a little back water parish for the Tridentine Mass. What a beautiful thing.

A word to the guys

• A woman who works in ANY capacity for Planned Parenthood or who mentions that yeah sure, she had one or more abortions,  says she is not the least bit sorry  and takes offense when you are disturbed by that knowledge will, inevitably hurt you to the soul one day. Without total conversion she simply can't help herself. Having paid someone to slaughter her own little baby she can now do anything. Run away.

• Do not marry the perpetual damsel in distress. The woman who needs you to save her from herself will bring painful drama to your life forever. 

•  Don't marry an unbeliever thinking that it will convert them. Missionary dating and marriage rarely work and  the cases where it did work owe it to divine intervention. You probably aren't St. Clotilda or  the Prophet Hosea so don't go looking for suffering young bro.