Parental Rights

09-01-2024Weekly ReflectionFr. Leonard F. Villa

VOTE TO PROTECT PARENTAL RIGHTS

Parents, by natural-right and Church-teaching, are the primary educators of their children NOT the State or schools.

VOTE NO TO PROPOSAL NUMBER ONE

Proposal Number One is a proposed-amendment to the NY State Constitution. It singles out both age and gender identity and expression; it opens the door for judges to permit minor children to make life-altering decisions about their bodies without any parental approval or notification. It is a ploy to impose gender ideology on children in the schools overriding the rights of parents!

“Additionally, it would make it impossible to ever pass even the most common-sense restrictions on abortion.

The Catholic Church teaches that God created us, male and female, and that our bodies, souls, and identities as male and female are all integral to who we are as human persons.

The Virgin Mary: Preparing for Final Victory

From the homily of Cardinal Ivan Dias, legate of the Holy Father for the opening of the celebrations of the beginning of the Jubilee of the 150th anniversary of the Apparitions of Blessed Virgin Mary at Lourdes, delivered (December 8, 2007)

The message of the Virgin today

It may be asked: what significance may the message of Our Lady of Lourdes have for us today? ... After her apparitions at Lourdes, the Holy Virgin has not ceased to manifest her great maternal concerns for the fate of mankind in her several apparitions worldwide. She has everywhere asked for prayers and penance for the conversion of sinners, for she predicted the spiritual ruin of certain nations, the sufferings that the Holy Father would face, the general weakening of the Christian faith, the difficulties of the Church, the rise of the Antichrist and of his attempts to replace God in the life of men, attempts which, despite their instant success, would nevertheless be destined to fail. Here, at Lourdes, as everywhere in the world, the Virgin Mary is weaving a enormous web of her spiritual sons and daughters in the whole world in order to launch a strong offensive against the forces of the Evil one, to lock him up and thus prepare the final victory of her divine Son, Jesus Christ.

The Virgin Mary invites us once again today to be a part of her combat legion against the forces of evil. As a sign of our participation at her offensive, she demands, among other things, the conversion of the heart, a great devotion to the Holy Eucharist, the daily recitation of the rosary, unceasing prayer without hypocrisy, the acceptance of sufferings for the salvation of the world. Those could seem to be small things, but they are powerful in the hands of God, to whom nothing is impossible. As the young David who, with a small stone and a sling, brought down the giant Goliath who came to meet him armed with a sword, a spear, and a shield (cf. 1 Sam 17,4-51), we will also, with the small beads of our rosary, be able to heroically face the assaults of our awesome adversary and defeat him.

The struggle between God and his enemy still takes place, even more so today than at the time of Bernadette, 150 years ago. Because the world finds itself stuck in the swamp of a secularism that wishes to create a world without God; of a relativism that stifles the permanent and unchangeable values of the Gospel; and of a religious-indifference that remains undisturbed regarding the higher good of the matters of God and the Church. This battle makes innumerable victims within our families and among our young people. Some months before becoming Pope John Paul II, Cardinal Karol Woytjila said (November 9, 1976): "We are today before the greatest combat that mankind has ever seen. I do not believe that the Christian community has completely understood it. We are today before the final struggle between the Church and the Anti-Church, between the Gospel and the Anti-Gospel." One thing remains certain: the final victory belongs to God and that will happen thanks to Mary, the Woman of Genesis and of the Apocalypse, who will fight at the head of the army of her sons and daughters against the enemy forces of Satan and will crush the head of the serpent.