Blogposts

The Fighting Church, the Attacks of Satan, and the Laity

07-30-2023Weekly Reflection

The pivotal meditation in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola is called “The Two Standards.” Fr. Ambruzzi1 comments: Satan summons together innumerable devils and spurs them to go, someone to city, some to another, throughout the world, omitting no province, place or state of life, nor any person in particular. His attack is universal. St. Ignatius is the last man to attribute all temptations to the devil. Still the fact remains, and the Saint strongly emphasizes it, that Satan is constantly at our side, as the embodiment of evil, bent on organizing the attacks of the world and the flesh against us, and on undoing God’s work in our souls. …(T)he Son of Man is manifested, that He might undo the works of the devil. 1 John iii, 8. See Ephesians 6: 11-171 Fr Aloysius Ambruzzi S.J., Companion to the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius

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Real Life, Its Enemy, and the Mass

07-23-2023Weekly Reflection

Real life is the interior life of the Christian whereby an adopted son/daughter, lives in intimacy with God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is called being in the state of grace. I have come that they may have life and have it to the full. John 10:10

1997 Grace is a participation in the life of God. It introduces us into the intimacy of Trinitarian life: by Baptism the Christian participates in the grace of Christ, the Head of his Body. As an "adopted son" he can henceforth call God "Father," in union with the only Son. He receives the life of the Spirit who breathes charity into him and who forms the Church.

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Amusing the Self to Death…..

07-16-2023Weekly Reflection

... long ago, we sold our vote to no man, now the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, sheds its cares, and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses * —Juvenal, Satire 10.77–81

God created man and woman to praise, reverence, and serve God, and by doing this, to save their souls. God created all other things on the face of the earth to help fulfill this purpose. From this it follows that we are to use the things of this world only to the extent that they help us to this end, and we ought to rid ourselves of the things of this world to the extent that they get in the way of this end. St. Ignatius Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises

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The Alien Presence

07-09-2023Weekly Reflection

The drama of the Faith has exorcisms against Satan a reminder of the Lord’s battle with the Evil One culminating in the Lord’s victory over Satan through His Passion, Death, and Resurrection. To this end was the Son of God manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil. 1John 3:8 The Church in each age shares in the Passion of the Lord particularly in her struggle with the Evil One. A particular manifestation of Satan is infidelity. St. John refers to those who go from the Church and deny Christ as antichrists. St. Paul refers to his struggles with “false brethren.”

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Old hatreds of the Church alive and well in Paris

07-02-2023Weekly Reflection

We don't live in a carefree society. Our lives are really part of a merciless struggle against infernal powers, all the more dangerous because they are invisible and all the more powerful because they effectively influence a certain number of people. The Word of God teaches us this through the mouth of Saint Paul: "We do not have to fight (only) against flesh and blood, but against the rulers of this dark world, against the evil spirits that are in the air" (Eph. 6:12).

NOTE: One of the signs of this is where Christ’s Name is attacked with conscious rebellious hatred. The recent beatification of five martyrs of the Commune is a timely reminder of this reality. On Holy Thursday 6 April 1871, Henri Planchat was the first to be imprisoned. Many other faithful Catholics followed. For some, it was the beginning of a real ordeal. One of the revolutionaries' hostages, Archbishop Darboy, summed up the situation for one of his companions in these words: "They don't want to kill us because I'm Archbishop Darboy and you're Mgr Soand-so, but because I'm the Archbishop of Paris and you're one of my priests".

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The Sacred Heart and the Political Order

06-25-2023Weekly Reflection

Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, to which the entire month of June is consecrated, carries with it undoubtedly socio-political meanings which, although everything possible has been done in the last half century to condemn them to oblivion, are indelibly part of the history of this worship and are rooted in it. The worship of the Sacred Heart is a worship of adoration of the Lord Jesus with particular emphasis on his holy and true humanity, hence the hostility with which the Jansenists opposed it in the eighteenth century, considering it not very "spiritual" and even idolatrous.

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The Deadly Sin of Pride and Its Healing

06-18-2023Weekly Reflection

The nature of pride

Pride is a sin of the spirit, which in itself is less shameful and less degrading than sins of the flesh, but is much more serious than they (though they are also "mortal sins"[1]), since it distances us much more and diametrically from God (S. Th., I-II, q. 73, a. 5). Carnal sins are not found in the devil, who is a pure spirit and was damned by his pride, which prompted him to cry out "non serviam!" (“I will not serve!”) Divine Revelation very often repeats that pride is the principle of every other sin (Eccli., X, 15), since it excludes any true and healthy relationship with God, that is, the submission of the person created to the Creator. Therefore, it interrupts all our relationship with God and irreparably separates us from Him. Even original sin was a sin of pride (S. Th., I-II, q. 84, a. 2), that is, wanting to “be like God” (Gen., III, 5) and claiming for oneself the "knowledge of good and evil" (Gen., III, 6), in order to be able to rule himself without being submissive to anyone, not even to God.

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The Sacred Heart: the Warmth of God

06-11-2023Weekly ReflectionBlessed Rupert Mayer S.J., Apostle of Munich

And they looked on Him Whom they have pierced. John 19:37 Warmth must come from us, which puts people at ease in our presence, and they must sense that the reason for this lies in our union with God.
Christ the center of our lives, there can be no half-measures.

Blessed Rupert Mayer S.J., Apostle of Munich

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Why Communism/Socialism is harmful to the human person, and society

06-04-2023Weekly Reflection

Every question under discussion, every revolutionary idea and every conservative reaction—all boil down to the question, How should man be treated? … (W)e can only answer this in the light of our view of what man is. No society can be united, if it is not united about this fundamental question Society and Sanity (p. 9).

Catholics who wish to understand the Church’s teaching warning about the evil of communism ought to read the landmark encyclical of Pope Pius XI On Atheistic Communism. What is the attraction of communism today, not to mention socialism?

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Guardini: The Dissolution of the Modern World

05-28-2023Weekly ReflectionFr. Romano Guardini & Fr. John Lankeit

One of the thinkers who had great influence on Pope Benedict XVI was Fr. Romano Guardini. Below is an excerpt about the challenges we face as Christians in this postmodern world.

From Fr. Romano Guardini’s The End of the Modern World: “The Dissolution of the Modern World”:

The Faith of Christian men will need to take on a new decisiveness. It must strip itself of all secularism, all analogies with the secular world, all flabbiness and eclectic mixtures. Here, it seems to me, we have solid reasons for confidence. The Christian has always found it difficult to come to an understanding of modern attitudes, but we touch an issue here which needs more exact consideration. We do not mean that the Middle Ages was an historic epoch fully Christian in nature, nor do we mean that the modern world was an age fully un-Christian.

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The four hundred years of the Vatican Secret Archive – Lux in arcana The propensity of the Church for memory

05-21-2023Weekly ReflectionInterview with Cardinal Raffaele Farina by Roberto Rotondo

Eminence, the Secret Archive is four hundred years old, but has collected documents that are much more ancient. Why has the Church always felt the need to preserve the acts and documents of its business in a systematic way? From the earliest days of the Church of Rome, as the Liber Pontificalis recalls, the popes used to preserve in their own ‘scrinium’ (archive) the gesta martyrum, the liturgical codices, the memoirs of the episcopal consecrations, donations made to the Bishop of Rome and to the Christians in the early centuries. The need arose from the necessity to pass on the memory of the early Church after the persecutions and the ‘administrative’ need of the Roman Church itself, which of course wanted to know the witnesses of the faith who died for Christ (its best treasure of faith) and the action of the pastors and the faithful in Rome. From the fourth century onwards the Archive of the Church of Rome was enriched with documents, codes, provincial books, formulas of oaths, certificates of consecration of churches or foundations of abbeys, papyri relating to the correspondence sent to the popes from the emperors of the East, first, and then the West, pastoral and administrative and other writings, as is well demonstrated by the Liber diurnus Romanorum Pontificum, an ancient chancellary code form, owned by the Vatican secret archive which dates from the late eighth or early ninth century.

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Rectitude of Intention

05-14-2023Weekly Reflection

The life of the first Christians and their witness to the world makes known to us their quality and their character. Their norm of conduct was not to take the easy way out, or opt for the more comfortable line or the more popular decision but rather did they seek to fulfill completely the will of God. They ignored the danger of death… they forgot how few they were, they never noticed how many were against them or the power or strength or wisdom of their enemies. Their power was greater than all of that: theirs was the power of him who had died on the Cross and risen again. [ii] They had their gaze riveted on Christ, who gave his life for all men. They were not seeking their own personal glory, nor the applause of their fellow citizens. They always acted with a right intention, because they had their eyes fixed on the Lord. That is what allows St. Stephen to say at the moment of his martyrdom: Lord do not take their sin into account…[iii]

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The Great Tempter

05-14-2023From the desk of Fr. Villa

In his useful book on the devil called, The Great Tempter, Cardinal Dionigi Tettamanzi, gives us ten salutary points by way of a “decalogue against temptation”:

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Ideology of Gender as “Secular-Religion”

05-07-2023From the desk of Fr. Villa

Gender-ideology is the fastest growing “religion” in this country. Like many religions, its “theology” involves a transformation: the moment in which a person transforms from one gender to another. Converts to this faith abandon their old lives and embrace a whole new one: their previous identities no longer exist. They are dead names. They believe that they themselves are a god with the power to control nature and, if you think about it, this should be cause for concern because it is a recipe for extremism. People who believe they are a god tend sometimes to react very badly when told that they are not. There is no greater mental illusion than the illusion of being a god, and this is exactly what this ideology teaches its followers: you are a god, you can change nature with your will and thinking.

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The False Religion of Biosecurity

05-07-2023Weekly Reflection

In the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) we find the following: under the First Commandment it teaches Idolatry not only refers to false pagan worship. It remains a constant temptation to faith. Idolatry consists in divinizing what is not God. Man commits idolatry whenever he honors and reveres a creature in place of God. (2113)

Under the Fifth Commandment it teaches: Life and physical health are precious gifts entrusted to us by God. We must take reasonable care of them, taking into account the needs of others and the common good. (2288) Also: If morality requires respect for the life of the body, it does not make it an absolute value. It rejects a neo-pagan notion that tends to promote the cult of the body, to sacrifice everything for its sake, (emphasis added) to idolize physical perfection and success at sports….(2289)

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