On the National Thanksgiving Day, which was established in late 18th Century to commemorate Poland’s patriotic struggle for independence, thousands of the inhabitants of Warsaw took part in an annual open-air Holy Mass, also massively attended by top state officials with the President-Elect Andrzej Sebastian Duda in person.
During the Holy Communion a sudden gust of wind blew off one of the consecrated Hosts from the chalice that was held by a priest giving the Corpus Christi to the gathered believers. Unseen by any of the participants, a small Host dropped on the ground and then driven by the wind rolled along the pavement for a several meters before It finally stopped in front of the kneeling and praying newly elected President Andrzej Duda. Having spotted the Holy Host rolling on the ground, the President spontaneously rushed to catch It with his hands and then strode up to the altar where he handed It over to the Cardinal Nycz, who was celebrating the Mass.
This unprecedented event was caught by the camera eye and could be observed on TV screens by millions of Poles all across the country.
You can see him picking the Host up here.
That is a man with obvious reverence for the Blessed Sacrament. You could see he was unsure what to do after rescuing the Host. Then he brought it to Cardinal Nycz, who has been steadfast in opposing proposed “pastoral changes” to the Church’s Doctrine on divorce, attempted bigamy, and the Blessed Sacrament:
As for the Russians, who have experienced a miraculous restoration of their faith, a huge resurgence in the (still problematic and quite possibly politically compromised) Orthodox Church, and a significant turn towards Christian morality, they are having no part with the attempt to foist sodomy on their country by the craven West:
The public authorities and citizens of Moscow continued their long-standing resistance to homosexual ideology this year, stopping an unauthorized “gay pride” parade in the center of their city and arresting participants, according to reports in local and international media.
Despite being refused a permit for the tenth year in a row, parade organizers attempted to carry out a demonstration on Tverskaya Street, just across from the mayor’s office, but were foiled by pro-family counter-protesters and police, who descended upon them in large numbers to interrupt the illegal event……. [Are Russians braver or more faithful people than Americans? Why has there been no similar response from we Americans over the past several decades to the steady advance of the advocates of sodomy in our country?]
……Moscow authorities detained an estimated 20 people in all, representing both points of view.
The principal organizer of the event, Nikolai Alexeyev, was lead away with a bloody hand after police said he refused to obey orders. He was sentenced the following Monday to ten days in jail. [So this is hardly a really draconian response]Moscow residents are strongly opposed to homosexual “parades,” which are often the scenes of public nudity, obscene images, and even public sex acts, and see such events as direct attacks upon the values of their society. [None of the above can be effectively refuted]
They also see such events as infringing upon their culture perpetrated by the countries of the European Union, which treat the homosexual lifestyle as a “right” and have attempted to impose such marches on Moscow. In 2010, the EU-dominated European Court of Human Rights declared Moscow’s “pride” ban to be illegal and ordered the city to permit such parades. However, the government has refused to comply. [Lord, have we fallen. Terrible.]
According to a recent poll by Russia’s Levada Center, 84 percent of Russians oppose homosexual “marriage,” and only seven percent support it.
The public’s support for the country’s law banning homosexual propaganda has risen from 64 percent in 2013 to 74 percent today.
Those last bits of data are of enormous import. They reveal that this move in the US and so many other countries towards embrace of previously unmentionable evil is not some movement of the human spirit or some great advance in the recognition of “liberty,” but is the exhausted surrender of a culture in severe decay. Only 7 percent of Russians support pseudo-sodo-marriage, while 56 percent of pretended American “Catholics” think it’s great! That certainly shows the incredible effect pro-sodomy propaganda in the media has had, as well as the unbelievably impoverished understanding of marriage that exists in the US.
But there is more to the dichotomy: Russia is a country that shook off the shackles of communism only 23 years ago. Under communism, Russia had the highest rate of abortion in the world (the rate is still sky high), and also was one of the first countries to suffer under a regime of so-called no fault divorce. Divorce remains quite prevalent in Russian society. Contraceptive use is also rampant. I do think in the post-Christian West the faulty understanding of what marriage is, or should be, has played a huge role in people’s acceptance of this gravely evil “redefinition” of marriage. But Russians still today give evidence of suffering under the same misunderstandings. How is it possible then that they are able to see through this sick facade and comprehend the evil of sodomy, still? At least to the incredible degree that they do. Is the propaganda campaign – prevented by political leadership in Russia – the true source of the sodomites unprecedented victories in the fallen West?
Or…..could it have to do with faith? Even though Russia is still very sick in many respects (regarding marriage), many Russians have returned to at least a fairly serious practice of their Orthodox faith – a valid if schismatic Church that never went through anything quite like the aggiornamento that the Catholic Church experienced. I’m really just guessing, but it seems that more Russians today have a deep reverence for God, and allow God into their lives, than do Western Christians? If that is the difference, it would certainly make sense, and it would show the degree to which we block God’s magnificent beneficence in our culture when we reject him from our private lives.
I’m out of time! Maybe you can figure it out better than I, why the Russians are able to oppose this immoral madness and we are not!
Sorry for the format problems below. I’ve been fighting them for weeks. Any Google site content just obliterates the format in WordPress and takes me a long time to fix. This one wasn’t too bad so I left it.
Readers are likely already aware of the disastrous vote over pseudo-sodo-marriage held in Ireland a few weeks ago, in which the Irish overwhelmingly embraced this pretense at redefining marriage. Cardinal Burke had some choice words for the people of St. Patrick’s realm, words that speak of a grave moral culpability for favoring such an abomination. Irish primate Diarmuid Martin of Dublin did not like Cardinal Burke’s rebuke at all, especially given that Martin has proven himself incapable of articulating even a slight defense of the near universal opprobrium not only Christendom, but virtually all the major religions of the world have held towards sodomy going back thousands of years. I guess if there was a war in Heaven between the angels, we should not be surprised that there is a war of words among the hierarchy of the Church.
Still……is this not precisely what Our Lady has warned us of since Quito (I add emphasis and comments)?
Asked about “Raymond Burke, who was reported as saying that Ireland has gone further than paganism and defied God by legalizing gay marriage,” Archbishop Eamon Martin of Armagh responded: “I wouldn’t use that language and I think that throughout the debate and the discussion we did indeed ask people to try to be respectful and inoffensive in language, and sometimes we can be offensive even when we don’t mean to be.” [Oh what an heir to the Apostles we have in this one, eh!!? Let your yes be yes and your no be no, but this man specializes in the weasel words]
Martin, who holds the title Primate of All Ireland, was responding to Cardinal Burke’s statement in a May 27 speech to Oxford University’s Newman Society, in which he said of the referendum: “I mean, this is a defiance of God. It’s just incredible. Pagans may have tolerated homosexual behaviors, [but] they never dared to say this was marriage.” [When one deliberately and consciously rejects Christian Truth, even though horribly formed, there is a tendency to go even farther in that rejection than those who were utterly ignorant of Christianity to begin with would have gone. You could say the devil is having quite an effect on people these days]
Asked if priests should be able to bless a “family” made up of two homosexual men and their adopted child, Martin responded: “I think that if we’re suggesting that this is the same as marriage, I think no, but I do think that it is important to let these people say, ‘Look, you’re part of your church, come along to your church, you’re part of the Church, and you’re welcome in the Church. I think that’s the most important statement that we can make.’” [If one rejects Church Doctrine, preferring one’s favorite sins over the Doctrine of the Faith (that is to say, declaring the Faith WRONG in denouncing your sin), then one has placed oneself outside the Church. One has rejected Christ in favor of sin. So what is this silly, beyond naive talk about “you’re part of the Church, come to ‘your’ Church?” Can Martin’s statements be viewed as anything but heterodox, even heretical?]
Although Martin opposed the homosexual “marriage” measure, he has rarely spoken critically of homosexual behavior, and has even spoken positively about gay unions, calling them “loving relationships.” [I would say he actually supported the measure. He spoke so highly in favor of sodomy and its adherents, and so poorly in defense of the Truth Christ has revealed, I think many people understood his “opposition” to actually be covert support.]
In his official statement on the referendum issued May 2 and entitled “Care for the Covenant of Marriage,” the archbishop nowhere condemned homosexual acts, but wrote that “during the current debate we are conscious of same-sex partners who love each other and wish to share their life together,” adding, “‘Marriage’ is about much more than a loving relationship between consenting adults.” Martin has also consistently portrayed gays as victims of prejudice and mistreatment, expressing concern about the possibility of “offending” them by a negative vote in the referendum. [God forbid the 98% offend the 2%! God forbid the morally right offend the morally derelict! Marriage is primarily about openness to life, which “homosexuality” totally precludes. As for the “same sex partners who love each other and wish to share their life together,” 92% of same sex relationships last less than 4 years, Dr. Mark Regnerus’ study of adults raised by homophiles could find ZERO individuals who had the same two same-sex parents throughout their childhood (that is, out of ~150 partnerships, ZERO lasted 18 years), and even the few relationships that persist beyond a few months are without question founded on rank promiscuity.]
In the same statement, the archbishop did warn that creating same-sex “marriage” would threaten religious freedom. “If society adopts and imposes a ‘new orthodoxy’ of ‘gender-neutral’ marriage, … then it will become increasingly difficult to speak or teach in public about marriage as being between a man and a woman,” he wrote. [Why, you lion of the Faith! I’m sure Saint Augustine is up in Heaven just green with envy after a demonstration like that!]
……..In an address to All Hallows College a few weeks before the vote, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin seemed to endorse homosexual unions, claiming that “a pluralist society can be creative in finding ways in which people of same-sex orientation have their rights and their loving and caring relationships recognized and cherished in a culture of difference, while respecting the uniqueness of the male-female relationship,” and adding that “I know that the harshness with which the Irish Church treated gay and lesbian people in the past – and in some cases still today – may make it hard for LGBT people to accept that I am sincere in what I am proposing,” according to Ireland’s Independent newspaper. [This strikes me as a pathetic, whimpering attempt by the prelate to not be forced by the sodomite lobby into more vigorous defense of the Faith. He seems to be saying “please leave me a fig leaf so that my position may be more comfortable.” Once again we see most of his statement simply repeats pro-sodomite propaganda.]
The Dublin archbishop’s spokeswoman told the media that the prelate would be voting no. “It is not his policy, however, to tell others how to vote except to stress that, given the importance of marriage and the family, decisions should not be taken lightly and that people should be informed of what is involved, she added.
Donal McKeown, Bishop of Derry, rejected the notion that people couldn’t vote “yes” in good conscience, and implied that some who voted “no” might be doing so because they want to “bully” homosexuals. [I have a hard time not reading this as being from someone with a distinct interest in the matter]
……..Throughout the debate bishops and priests refrained from virtually any mention of the Catholic Church’s perennial teaching condemning homosexual behavior as gravely sinful and “intrinsically disordered,” in the words of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. [I prefer the words of Saint Peter Damian, Bishop and Doctor of the Church, who declared sodomy such an evil act that even the demons who help instigate it turn their faces in shame from this abomination]
The ambivalence of the Irish Catholic hierarchy’s reaction to the referendum led the British homosexual and atheist columnist Matthew Parris to express disgust at the vacillation and inconsistency of clergymen in the face of the gay agenda, in a recent blog post for the Spectator.
“Even as a (gay) atheist, I wince to see the philosophical mess that religious conservatives are making of their case. Is there nobody of any intellectual stature left in our English church, or the Roman church, to frame the argument against Christianity’s slide into just going with the flow of social and cultural change?” he asked. [Last minute regrets? Or victories won over a cowering, whimpering foe are no fun? I read just yesterday that most of the hierarchy foolishly embraced modernism just as the cultural elites were leaving modernism for the even more toxic post-modernism. They thus still appear silly, out of touch, and behind the times, even as they trash the 2000 years of superhuman effort that was passed onto them. I’ll tell you what does not interest people: a religion that has utterly nothing interesting to say. And I don’t think these poor, pathetic creatures like Martin and McKeown and most of the rest of the institutional Irish Church could possibly be any less interesting than their reflexively self-serving liberal selves.]
——–End Quote———
LifeSiteNews is an awesome site. You should support it – or John Henry Westen will break my legs for stealing so much good stuff.
Or something to that effect…….what I have in mind is a response to the almost certain Supreme Court imposition of law that pretends that people of the same sex can be married. I’m a bit hazy on the early days of the pro-life movement and just how it became so deeply a part of the mainstream (if a bit orthodox) American Catholic Church experience, but I do know there was a March for Life on Jan 22, 1974 – the first anniversary of Roe v. Wade. And while I do know that organizations opposed to pseudo-sodomarriage certainly do exist and do fine work, we also know that a majority of self-described Catholics are in favor of this abominable pretended “redefinition.” Are there any efforts to start a Catholic grass-roots response to judicial imposition of pseudo-sodomarriage?
I have a feeling this is going to be a necessity. By hook or crook, we’ve seen a preference cascade in the past 3-4 years under Obama with Americans swinging hard left on many cultural issues, especially this affirmation of sodomy. But I also still have faith that we’re going through the furthest extreme of the pendulum swing of opinion, and that many people can be moved back from their support – exactly as occurred with abortion. Support for abortion among Americans peaked in the mid-late 70s, but has declined more or less steadily ever since. While most Americans do favor keeping abortion at least nominally legal, a large majority would prefer far more onerous restrictions than presently exist in most of the country. I think a similar swing is possible on this fake-gay-marriage issue- that is, if God does not quite rightly obliterate this nation 5 minutes after the Supreme Court’s edict is read.
But how to start? Where is the grass roots surge that led to the creation of the pro-life movement? Are you guys aware of any such efforts? Again, I’m talking primarily from a Church perspective. The Catholic Church has been the heart and soul of the pro-life movement since its inception, I’m certain it will be so in any pro-real-marriage movement that gets underway.
Along those lines…..what should this movement call itself? Whoever came up with the expression “pro-life” was a genius. Our cultural enemies recognize what a coup that was – at a start, it puts the pro-aborts on the defensive as they should rightly be. Readers may recall that I am reading Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Sodomy is Changing Everything. In that book, author Robert Reilly quotes sodomite activist Kevin Jennings as noting the import of the pro-life movement effectively seizing a term that granted it the moral high ground. He also outlined how sodomites had effectively deflected similar efforts by cultural conservatives to gain the high ground on the matter of marriage specifically and sodomy generally. I think his comments are astute, and have to wonder what role the lack of a simple, compelling “tag” has played in the forces of darkness rolling over the culture? The sodomites have the “marriage equality” and equal sign in their favor and I think those have been hugely influential. I think the effectiveness of simple pro-sodomy propaganda of this kind, and the lack of any similar simple “tags” from our side has played a very large role in our side losing consistently on this matter for several years now.
Certainly, there are true believers on both sides, people who won’t be moved by something as basic as a tag-line. But there is a great mass of people who rarely pay much mind to these kinds of matters and who are easily moved by such things as a well coined phrase.
So, I started trying to play around with little brief, pithy phrases to call this effort to roll back the tide of perversion and specifically the attempts to legally redefine marriage. Nothing I came up with seemed very satisfactory to me. A few of the ideas:
PRO-MARRIAGE: Sodomites have effectively seized on people’s confusion regarding the nature of marriage to claim that they are “pro-marriage,” too, and only seek equality. I think this could work, but would require a lot of effort re-instilling a proper understanding of marriage in people. Pro-aborts try to claim to be “pro-life,” too, but only once that life has left the womb, or until it becomes inconvenient in some way. Their attempts have failed. Would ours?
PRO-LOVE: Reilly’s book makes plain that, whatever feeling there may exist in sodomite relationships, given how unstable, short duration, and promiscuous they are, spousal love, properly understood, is not what they have. Again, this would require quite a bit of education and peeling back layers of effective propaganda by the sodomites before it could really work. Also, there is love between people of the same sex that is morally upright and which does not involve abuse of others.
PRO-DEVOTION: I think this is too nebulous to really work. It highlights the degree to which sodomites use people as grist for their self-serving acting out, as well as the unstable nature of their relationships, but I’m not sure it has the “pop” that pro-life does in the abortion context.
PRO-DECENCY: has some of the aforementioned weaknesses, the prime being that so few people are capable of recognizing moral decency anymore, especially when it comes to their groins.
REAL/TRUE MARRIAGE: departs from the “pro” format, whatever that means. It does run the risk of acknowledging a “second tier” or marriage for those of perverse sexual inclinations. On the plus side, it is clear, to the point, implies a derogation of pseudo-sodomarriage, and does provide a moral high point leaving the other side somewhat on the defensive. I like this one best of all, plus a whole bunch of others I considered.
I am certainly open to your ideas. Again assuming the US of A is not a smoking cinder come July 1, how might efforts to role back this moral monstrosity get started, and how might they play out? Would it be similar to limiting abortion mostly at the state level, with states gradually applying more and more limits to pretended sodo-marriage in a “death of a thousand cuts” fashion? Or is straight up abolition the only way to go?
How can we start local pro-real-marriage efforts in our parishes? How did all the pro-life groups get started? And what other kind of action should we take? When the pro-life movement was in its infancy, it was much more confrontational than it is now. There were protests outside court houses and abortion mills, human chains that blocked entry to abortuaries, actions to disrupt the normal course of business in mills, people dragged off into police custody, etc., etc. I know the pro-life movement, as it has institutionalized, has rejected these kinds of more ‘extreme’ behaviors, but should we start protesting or keeping vigils outside, for instance, court houses where these abominable simulacrums of marriage take place, or even outside the incredibly disordered, un-Christian “Metropolitan Community Churches” and other such sects that cater to the perverse?
I’m open to your ideas. I’m sadly quite convinced we’re going to be faced with the legal imposition of a completely false understanding of “marriage” between people of the same sex very soon. And that will certainly lead directly to persecution. But that doesn’t mean we have to simply bend over and take it……….so to speak.
House Bill 2 passed the Texas Legislature in 2013 and imposed a number of very sensical restrictions on abortion mills. These included requiring abortionists to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital and requiring abortuaries meet the same minimal health and safety requirements as other ambulatory surgery centers. As a result of the provisions of this bill, the large majority of the mills in the state have closed. Dallas was down to 3 mills, but now with the Fifth Circuit upholding, unanimously, almost all provisions of HB2, Routh Street will close and only Southwest Women’s Butchershop and Planned Barrenhood will remain. Via Karen Garnett of the Dallas Diocese CPLC:
I know many of you have been prayerfully waiting since January to hear whether the epic omnibus pro-life law HB 2 (passed in July 2013) would stand against the most recent legal challenges and be enforced in Texas to protect women and their children. Today I couldn’t be more thrilled to share with you the answer: YES!! The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled unanimously today to uphold virtually all of HB 2 in an appeal brought by the State of Texas to reverse a ruling by a district judge in Austin barring the full enforcement of HB 2. The appeal arose out of a lawsuit brought by Texas abortion providers challenging the HB 2 requirement that all Texas abortion facilities meet the standards set for ambulatory surgical centers (ASC) and the abortionist admitting privileges requirement as applied to McAllen and El Paso abortion facilities. Judges Edward Prado, Catharina Haynes and Jennifer Elrod heard the appeal and concluded:
“H.B. 2 and its provisions may be applied throughout Texas, except that Supreme Court precedent requires us to partially uphold the district court’s injunction of the ASC requirement as applied to the Whole Woman’s Health abortion facility in McAllen, Texas, and to uphold the district court’s injunction of the admitting privileges requirement as applied to Dr. Lynn when he is working at the McAllen facility.” (Opinion in full available here)
This means that across the state of Texas, all but one abortion facility must meet the standards of an ambulatory surgical center, and the state may continue to enforce the requirement that abortionists maintain local hospital admitting privileges. This ruling is expected to result in a decrease in the number of operational abortion facilities in Texas to only those which currently meet ASC standards — seven or eight in the state. Only two such facilities in Dallas meet ASC standards — Southwestern on Greenville Ave and Planned Parenthood on West Virginia Dr.
This is a huge victory. If there are only two mills in Dallas, one in Fort Worth, two in Houston, one in Austin, and one in the Valley, where is the possible eighth one?
Texas now has far less than half the number of mills it had even 3 years ago. It hasn’t been very long since there were six or seven mills in Dallas alone.
I have to think that even with the proliferation of chemical abortion, this great reduction in number of mills – and their increasing distance from many people – will have a substantial effect on the number of abortions received in this state. Boyd’s facility on Greenville is already maxed out on space, and while the new Planned Barrenhood is quite large, there’s got to be a limit on how many abortions they can realistically perform, I would think.
At the very least, this ruling means that pro-lifers can further focus their prayer efforts on the few remaining mills. That’s how it has played out in other cities and states, where the pro-life movement was able to gradually whittle down the number of mills until there were none. Having a heavy, visible presence of holy priests has been found to be most efficacious in this process.
God bless you and thank you for your prayers! Many of us have been praying for months for this judgment to come to pass. Praise God for this bit of very welcome news. May we see the day right soon when not a single legal abortion can take place in this great State of Texas. But I am quite convinced that day will not occur until contraceptive use stops being the diabolical sacrament of far too many marriages and disordered/sinful couplings.
I just realized this morning that I never gave a report of the prayer vigil outside the strip joint from last Wednesday.
It was really awesome. The group was down a bit in size but we had a new man join us so that was great. Thanks to all who came out.
We are starting to make a difference. We are getting a lot more attention from the people at the “Men’s Club.” Some of the, ahem, dancers were standing in the doorway watching us. And then this woman in a black Chevy truck drove into the parking lot of the joint, spotted us, did a double take, and started driving around the parking lot across the way from us watching us. Then she went in. She came out a short while later, got back in her truck and drove over to where we were at the post office. She got out with bottles of water (that was very nice) and approached us with a rapid-fire stream of conscious attempt at justifying what she and the other women who “dance” there are doing. We didn’t have much chance to respond, we were in the middle of a Rosary and a bit unprepared. I wish I would have just dropped the Rosary (as much as I would hate to do so) and spoken more with her. Her justifications were along the lines of “we have girls paying for college abandoned by men times are hard judge not etc etc.” To which I thought of several brilliant repostes just seconds after they would have done any good.
So, in the event this happens again, and I think it very well might, we’re going to have a policy going forward that one of us will drop the prayers and try to speak with anyone who approaches us like that again. The rest will provide prayer support, just as we do outside abortion mills. It won’t do to have five men appearing to gang up on a woman – I know that would not be our intent, but we have to keep in mind the woman’s perspective. We need to decide at the start of each vigil who will be doing the engaging.
I’m pretty sure we touched this woman by our presence to at least some degree. She was definitely trying to justify her and the other performers selling themselves so cheaply there. And I think the fact that other women were observing us from afar indicates she was probably not alone. Women are extremely responsive to perceived negative judgments of their behaviors, but those responses can take many forms. Given that this woman responded with an act of charity I think provides a great deal of ground for hope.
Some possible points to keep in mind in future, should we be approached again:
We’re not judging you or any particular individual associated with the place. We have no idea of your particular circumstances or why you might feel compelled to work there.
Yes our Blessed Lord said not to judge. You do not have to worry about our judgment. You have to worry about His.
Our Blessed Lord said that a man who looks on a woman with lust in his heart commits adultery. The place they work at encourages adultery.
The things (just go with it) you are displaying for all manner of men are intended by God to be reserved for your husband
We bear no ill will towards anyone who works in such a place, nor the visitors, but we deplore its presence in our city. It is contrary to God and moral decency and must go.
Drug and alcohol abuse are rampant among performers. Why?
Whatever your particular situation, there is ample help available and working in a place like this is a choice. There are many other means to make a living as demonstrated by thousands of other people who work hard jobs for less pay.
Even though attendance was down, I’ve also gotten contacts of interest from other men. I am feeling like once a month may not be enough to really make an impact. So I may start going every other week. I know that would be a substantial burden on the family lives of the men involved, so I am a bit hesitant to do so, but I’m feeling a pull to do more. I will pray about this more.
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