Fatima, 100 Years Ago

Today is the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima.  It is also the 100th anniversary of her first appearance to the Fatima children.  She spoke of the need to repent of sin to avoid hell.  Later she appeared to a Japanese sister at Akita and basically continued her message.  There she said that "if men do not repent and better themselves the Father will inflict a terrible punishment."  Between 1917 and now, what has been the change?  Our Lady delivered her words to a world that still was nominally Christian.  That cannot be said anymore, with thousands of babies being slaughtered under cover of civil law, sexual perversion being celebrated, marriage being trivialized and God being openly scorned.

Our Lady of Akita also mentioned that the devil would infiltrate the church, setting clergy against each other.  We certainly see that these days, don't we?

Please pray your Rosaries daily for God's grace of repentance.  Our Lady is making abundantly clear that souls will go to hell if they don't repent and turn to God.

Matthew Kelly Poison In DC Parishes Again

After Christmas Mass we all received a Christmas present.  It was a book by Matthew Kelly called "Rediscover Jesus".  I've written about Kelly in the past as I have found his stuff to be, quite frankly, less than Catholic.  Because it was free (meaning I did not have to pony my cash to Kelly's wallet) I took one and glanced through it.  That one glance told me that Kelly's theology had not improved one iota.  I copied the page and post it below.

The problem is the last sentence of the third paragraph.  I tried to highlight it, but it is faint.  At any rate, that last sentence is enough to cause a sane Catholic to junk this book.  Ladies and gentlemen, note the phrase "half-brother of Jesus".  Jesus had no "half-siblings".  The Perpetual Virginity of Mary is defined Catholic dogma!  Please let no one delude themselves into thinking that this point is "just a technicality".  If Holy Mother Church thought it important enough to make the perpetual virginity of Mary a dogma, then it deserves all due consideration.

Whether or not Kelly intended it, he wrote heresy.  Perhaps this lapse can be chalked up to faulty formation that he may have received as a child.  We all know how far Catholic education has declined in the past 50 years or so.  But isn't that all the more reason for our parishes and chanceries to carefully vet these books before they're released to the Catholics in the pew?

There are other issues with this book (and his previous books).  While this book does state that sin hinders our relationship with God, it is quite selective about the kinds of sins with which it deals.  I see talk of "greed" and "losing one's temper", but nowhere did I detect any mention of mortal sins such as the support of abortion, contraception, gay #mowwidge.  But anyone with two functioning eyeballs can see that it's rampant in the pews - not only the support but the participation in these mortal sins.  That means we have Catholics in the pews who may well be hell-bound, and there's no mention of these real dangers.  Speaking of hell, I see no mention of that important reality whatsoever in that book (or his other books).  Why not?  Our Lord mentioned it often as a solemn warning.  In all fairness to Kelly, it can be argued that he's merely following the lead of the American clergy in not specifying mortal sins and the reality of hell.  In their misguided and dare I say feckless desire not to upset people, they are doing the Catholic congregation a gross disservice.

Another related issue is the overemphasis on "experience".  As I read the Gospels, I see no mention of Jesus calling people to "experience" Him.  Rather, there is the call for repentance and obedience, with the graces communicated through the Sacraments as administered by the Church.  Indeed, in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus's first recorded word is "repent".  The soon-to-be-canonized Mother Teresa of Calcutta is said to have gone most of her life with no experience of God's presence.  She did count that as a cross, but still it goes to show that "experience" is not a necessary component of the Catholic's spiritual life.  One could call Kelly's approach "putting the cart before the horse", but without specific mention of the serious sins for which one should repent and obtain absolution, I'd have to say in this instance that "there's a cart but no horse".

Some might think my characterization of Kelly's materials as being "poison" to be a bit harsh.  They might say that the great majority (while somewhat vapid for its "peaches and ice cream tone") is decent enough.  But no one can gainsay the heresy that is there in plain sight.  For reasons that I stated in an earlier post, I don't think anything that contains heresy can be used as a spiritual guide regardless of other material contained within.

Is this book showing up in other parishes?

UPDATE - The answer to that last question is "yes".  Someone from St. Andrew the Apostle told me they have it.  That suggests impetus from the DC chancery.

UPDATE #2 - Per Jeff's comment below, the phrase I wrote above, "he wrote heresy" should be rendered "he published heresy".  Kelly says it's from another source but in his own book offered no correction nor clarification regarding the Church dogma.

On July 4, 2015 - As Clouds Darken Our National Horizon

Let's not kid ourselves.  Because we, as a nation, have rejected God and disobeyed His laws, particularly those laws touching upon marriage, sexuality and family life, we have incurred His wrath and are now beginning to experience the ramifications.  The time is late.  We need to sober up and recall the One who made us and for Whom we are made.  Not only is our nation in peril but civilization in general, with many souls in danger of hell.

Some passages from Scripture (Douay-Rheims) that are most appropriate for today:

2 Chronicles 7:14  "And my people, upon whom my name is called, being converted, shall make supplication to me, and seek out my face, and do penance for their most wicked ways: then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sins and will heal their land."

Joel 2:12  "Now therefore saith the Lord: Be converted to me with all your heart, in fasting, and in weeping, and in mourning."

Come home to Jesus Christ in His One True Church.  Go to Confession.  Receive Holy Communion as often as you can (provided you are in a state of grace and have fasted properly).  Pray the Rosary.  Speak out when you see evil.  Time is running short.

More On Why The Father Ray Kelly Fan Club Is Flirting With Hell

God bless these Protestant preachers.  They see the perils to which so many Christians expose themselves by dint of their emphasis on subjective "good feelings" versus God and His Word.

At 8:40 we hear that "entertainment is the devil's substitute for joy".  Hear!  Hear!

May God Bless These Street Preachers

The below scene occurred a few weeks ago in Salisbury NC at their annual "gay-pride" debauchery-fest.  The Christians are providing much-needed truth and the message of repentance.  Obviously the people with the noise-makers are acting from guilty consciences; try as they might to drown the truth, they will always fail.  So will Planned Parenthood; their booth personnel received much-needed rebuke.

Not All Are Victims

A few months ago I went to a talk given by a fairly prominent pro-life leader.  In his talk he spoke of what he believed our attitudes towards abortion-minded people should be when we're approaching them.  With one of those attitudes I take exception.  He stated that we should be prepared to assume no malice, to presume good will and even "make excuses" for them.  He went on to say that Jesus, while being crucified, "made excuses" for His tormentors when He prayed, "Father forgive them for they know not what they do".  His analogy was flat out wrong.

Jesus never "made excuses" for His tormentors.  He, being God, had divine knowledge of what was in the hearts of those crucifying Him (see John 2:24-25).  His statement was not mere presumption but a statement of fact that only He, as the Second Person of the Trinity, could know.  I then thought of the example of Stephen, the first martyr.  When he prayed his prayer of forgiveness on the brink of his own death, he prayed, "Lord, hold not this sin against them".  Notice that Stephen acknowledged the objectively sinful nature of the evil that was being inflicted upon him.  While he didn't accuse them, neither did he presume to "make excuses".

I think this has great relevance for a troubling trend that I'm seeing among pro-life activists and leaders.  That trend is to cast all women having abortion as being strictly victims of circumstances beyond their control, be it overbearing family members, economic hardship, whatever.  Please understand - I'm sure that is true for a great many of these women - but not all.  I'm taking exception with the trend that I'm seeing of late to paint all abortion-bound people with this broad brush of victim-hood.  To illustrate, I do see way too many women walk into the mills who are obviously brow-beat by their boyfriends, parents, etc.  Yet I've seen other women bound and determined to "take care of this shit" (a direct quote) while their boyfriends are following them in tears, begging the women for the lives of their babies.

I fear that I'm seeing this broad brush being brandished in the handling of the deaths of both Jennifer Morbelli and her baby girl at the hands of Leroy Carhart.  There have been two press conferences.  In both these press conferences we see numerous references to the grief that her family is bearing (and no doubt they are) and many prayers for their solace and peace. I have heard no such prayer for their repentance for their roles in the two deaths.  Let's get real.  We're fools if we really believe that family didn't have some degree of culpability for their deaths.  The common theme of those talks is that Leroy Carhart bears sole responsibility for their deaths.  Of course he bears a majority of the blame.  But let's face this.  Carhart would not have touched Jennifer and Madison if the family never walked into his abortuary, plunked down their money and asked him to murder Madison.  He was the paid "hit-man" to be sure - but who paid him???

I was involved in a rather raucous discussion on this matter in Facebook.  Some argued that this woman must not have realized the humanity of the baby.  I find that difficult to believe.  The baby was 33 weeks along - no doubt she was kicking and moving about in Jennifer's womb.  I'm willing to bet they saw routine sonograms.  They named her Madison.  Moreover, during the week they were reporting to Carhart's office, sidewalk counselors tried to offer her and her family both offers of assistance and warning of the dangers of this procedure.  I understand from some of those counselors that they all rebuffed those warning rather angrily.  For this rejection of knowledge they now bear the ultimate consequences.

I say this not to minimize the pain that the Morbellis and McKennas are undergoing.  However, if there is to be true peace and solace, it can only come about if they face up to their own grievous roles in the debacle of last week, repent and seek out the Sacrament of Confession.  Where were the public prayers for that????  This is not "condemning" or "judging" but an attempt to acknowledge truth and not to offer false compassion rooted in sentimentality that will do nothing to restore a state of grace.  I understand that a priest was with Jennifer; I pray that she was disposed to receive absolution.

In using the "victim" language and tip-toeing around crucial spiritual issues, I suspect some are merely trying to win the sympathy of the culture at large.  Ain't gonna happen!  We cannot try to "speak their language" for when we use "their language" we adopt their thinking.  We have to define the language and the thinking.  Rather, we must preach the Gospel unabashedly rather than try to nod to political correctness.

I'll end this by linking to a story from Jill Stanek's blog about a young woman in dire circumstances who refused to be a victim - or to be seen as such.  Here is Anna.