Video from those murderous, cursed warmongerers at Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin November 20, 2015
Posted by Tantumblogo in Admin, Flightline Friday, foolishness, General Catholic, non squitur, silliness, Society, technology.comments closed
Sent in by reader, TE, who worked on this progam, a successful test of a generic battlefield management system that uses data from remote sensors to guide missiles (from yet another place) to intercept a target, in this case a drone representing a cruise missile that could be carrying a WMD to wipe out a city.
But apparently defending yourself from attack is now cursed:
That’s all the Flightline Friday you get this week. I will not be blogging much next week. I pray you have a blessed Thanksgiving, and get to Mass many times! Say a prayer for me and my wife! She’s still doing very well but I’m convinced your prayers are helping immensely!
Did St. Josephat die in vain? November 20, 2015
Posted by Tantumblogo in awesomeness, Basics, Christendom, Ecumenism, episcopate, General Catholic, Holy suffering, martyrdom, Revolution, sanctity, scandals, secularism, Society, Tradition, true leadership, Virtue.comments closed
Via reader Skeinster, a really good post from Shameless Popery on St. Josephat and what it means to be Catholic and have Faith. More to the point, with all the ecumania and doctrinal indifference, did St. Josephat and other martyrs to the Faith die in vain?
392 years ago today, Saint Josaphat, an Eastern Catholic bishop in Ukraine, was dragged out of his rectory and murdered by the Eastern Orthodox townspeople that he was trying to lead back into union with the Roman Catholic Church. The Church does not hesitate, in her prayers, to say that he poured out his blood like Christ. He died for the principle that it matterswhether we Christians are Catholics. My question for you today is did he die in vain?
After all, I frequently hear that it doesn’t matter whether or not someone is Catholic, as long as they’re Christian. They’ve got better music down the block, or you like the preaching better. Catholicism becomes just one denomination, just one option. Or perhaps we’ll go further and say that the Church itself doesn’t matter: all that matters is having a “personal relationship with Jesus Christ.” That personal relationship is obviously vital, but Cardinal Dolan has pointed out the folly of trying to have the Good Shepherd without the flock, trying to have the King of Kings without His Kingdom, trying to have the Head without the Body of Christ. So to answer my initial question, I ask you to consider four more questions:
The first question: Did Jesus intend to inaugurate the Kingdom of God on earth?Yes.
The very first words out of Jesus’ mouth in St. Mark’s Gospel are “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel” (Mk. 1:15). And we hear that again in today’s Gospel, when Jesus says that, although it has not yet arrived fully, the Kingdom of God is among us.
The second question: Did Jesus establish this Kingdom in His Church? Yes.
In the famous passage of Matthew 16:18-19, Jesus says to Peter, “you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the powers of death shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” Note, He doesn’t say He’s giving the keys to the Kingdom to everyone, to all believers. Instead, Christ explicitly gives the keys to the Kingdom to St. Peter, the head of the Church, using the singular “you.”……
……….So where do we stand? Do we think the Church is dispensable? That it no longer has the protection of the Holy Spirit, or no longer has the fullness of truth? That Christ’s Church no longer has an earthly head? In short, do we think that St. Josaphat died in vain?
There’s two more questions and answers at the link. You know how I feel. I think lack of charity and faith in the Church has placed tens if not hundreds of millions in grave jeopardy of hellfire.
Moral cowardice carries a very steep price.
REPOST: A prayer I highly recommend: Crusade for the family prayer November 20, 2015
Posted by Tantumblogo in Abortion, Basics, Christendom, contraception, Dallas Diocese, Domestic Church, family, General Catholic, Interior Life, paganism, persecution, secularism, sexual depravity, sickness, Society, Tradition, Virtue.comments closed
REPOST: I was about to post this prayer, then I recalled that it seemed very familiar. A quick check revealed I was right, I posted this 6 1/2 months ago.
Still, it’s very good, there’s always new readers, so………..enjoy.
We live in a time when the family is under greater attack than at any other time in the history of the Church. We can argue about whether the general crisis facing the Church is the greatest ever, but with regard to the assault on the family by those who would leave souls broken and defenseless, utterly dependent on the government for succor, there has never been a time in 2000 years of Christianity when the family has been so successfully and completely rent asunder. Be it divorce, abortion, fornication, adultery, radical pretended redefinitions of marriage, general pride and selfishness…….the family has never been more under attack wounded than it has been in the past several decades.
The fact that this attack is the deliberate plan and policy of the ascendant leftist over-culture makes the tragedy surrounding the state of the family all the worse, because this hasn’t happened entirely “by accident,” but has been instigated as part of a concerted plan to weaken the family as an institution, the better to serve the endless appetite for power among certain depraved individuals. While there have been nations that have embraced these evils at times in the past, never has there been such a widespread acceptance by virtually every part of the world as we see today. Outside some pockets in South America, Africa, and a few other places, almost all of these means of undermining the family are not just legal, but widely accepted and committed with grim abandon. There remain very few places where none of them are legal, and I would hazard there is no place left on earth where they are not regularly practiced. Thus, worldwide, the family has never faced such a panoply of threats that could even, God forbid, lead to its near extinction.
The prayer below was composed by Fr. John Hardon, SJ, I believe in the early 70s, just as so many of these grave evils were becoming pandemic in the culture. I think it’s a beautiful prayer that is important enough, and worthy enough, to be included among your regular prayers:
Mary, Mother of God, at your request, Jesus worked His first miracle. He changed water into wine for the wedding guests at Cana in Galilee.
Over the centuries you have not ceased to obtain countless signs and wonders for the poor, exiled children of Eve.
We therefore ask you to intercede with your Divine Son for the miraculous graces which the modern world so desperately needs:
For the conversion and reconversion of whole nations to Jesus Christ and His teaching on marriage and the family.
For the heroic preservation among Christians of their faith in the indissolubility of marriage, marital fidelity and the loving acceptance of children, as the bedrock of the Christian family.
For the courage of martyrs in all of us followers of Christ, that we may witness to His power to overcome the powers of darkness that are bent on destroying the human family and the moral law.
Mary, Mother of the Holy Family, and Mother of our families, pray for us. Amen.
I fear we are going to need the courage of martyrs. Sadly, such courage is increasingly uncommon today, as we saw VP Biden receive the Blessed Sacrament at a parish in this city, with the idea of enforcing Canon Law to deny him Communion dismissed out of hand over fears regarding the loss of tax exempt status. As I’ve noted in other recent posts, and as some commenters have noted, as well, the Church is going to lose its tax-exempt status almost no matter what, unless some disastrous doctrinal “compromise” is reached regarding fake sodo-marriage. Solid Catholic Supreme Court Justice Alito forced that admission from the Obama administration – perverse and always false redefinitions of marriage will inevitably lead to a cruel choice for Holy Mother Church in this country: acquiesce in sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance, or suffer the loss of probably over half her current revenue with the denial of tax exempt status for failing to accord with federal law.
Folks, I wish I could say I’m rock-solid confident which choice the bishops will make, but I cannot. Not with decades of example of compromise with the sexular pagan culture. It was Cardinal Cushing himself who drove a reluctant Massachusetts legislature, predominately Catholic, to vote in favor of legalizing contraception.
I relay these sad facts to further impress upon us all the vital need for more prayer and penance. I know many of you already do a lot, but we are faced with some of the gravest threats the family and Church have ever faced. I’m afraid we are well past the point for worldly solutions or grand plans to restore sanity to the world. It is down to Grace, which means prayer and penance.
God bless all of you for what you do.
Deo Gratias!
Cardinal Sarah: not even Pope can change Divine Law on Communion November 20, 2015
Posted by Tantumblogo in awesomeness, Basics, catachesis, episcopate, Eucharist, General Catholic, Papa, Revolution, scandals, secularism, self-serving, sexual depravity, Society, the struggle for the Church, Tradition, true leadership.comments closed
Via LifeSiteNews, not exactly surprising, but perhaps some cold comfort that not everyone in Church leadership is on board with some of the notions abounding in the Church today. In fact, Cardinal Sarah gives some commendably strong catechesis below, even if he does not condemn the source of the sudden resurgence of error as some might like:
On the heels of a statement by Pope Francis seeming to suggest openness to non-Catholic Christians receiving Holy Communion, the cardinal who heads the Vatican congregation dealing with the sacraments has said that there are preconditions for the reception of Holy Communion and when those conditions are not met, and the situation is publicly known, ministers of the sacrament “have no right to give him communion.”
Cardinal Robert Sarah, prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, added, speaking of priests: “If they do so, their sin will be more grave before the Lord. It would be unequivocally a premeditated complicity and profanation of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Jesus.” [Yeah, well, most priests, in their horrific formation, couldn’t care less. They’re invincibly convinced none of this matters and almost everyone (save for those mean ol’ judgy types and all right wingers) go to Heaven, anyway]
The statements from Cardinal Sarah come from a forthcoming article in the French Catholic magazine L’Homme Nouveau. Vatican specialist Sandro Magister has published an excerpt in advance.
“The entire Church has always firmly held that one may not receive communion with the knowledge of being in a state of mortal sin, a principle recalled as definitive by John Paul II in his 2003 encyclical ‘Ecclesia de Eucharistia,’” said the prefect. “Not even a pope can dispense from such a divine law.” [I agree. But perhaps be even more explicit in your refutation]
……Regarding “communion for all, without discrimination,” Cardinal Sarah says that those in grave sin who are unrepentant (unless in total ignorance) “would remain in a state of mortal sin and would commit a grave sin by receiving communion.”
Even in the toughest case of an abused wife who left her first marriage and was remarried without an annulment, Cardinal Sarah notes there can be no communion unless she decides to live without sexual relations with her new partner.
The cardinal’s most powerful statements, however, are his lament at the confusion about Holy Communion among the clergy. “I feel wounded in my heart as a bishop in witnessing such incomprehension of the Church’s definitive teaching on the part of my brother priests,” he said. “I cannot allow myself to imagine as the cause of such confusion anything but the insufficiency of the formation of my confreres.” [Bad formation, yet. But also likely a marked predisposition towards progressive-modernist beliefs, and a likely attachment to sexual immorality which powered such beliefs, before they even entered seminary. How many good men have been denied admittance to seminary, and how many manifestly unfit men chosen in their stead, all to help force the “crisis in the priesthood” to such a state that the Church would, in desperation, complete the final destruction of the priesthood by opening it to married men and even women? That’s been the modernist game for 50 years now, anyway]
Recalling his position as “responsible for the discipline of the sacraments in the whole Latin Church,” Cardinal Sarah said he was “bound in conscience” to spell out the Church’s teaching regarding sexuality – the source of much of the current confusion.
The Church, he said, “stigmatizes the deformations introduced into human love: homosexuality, polygamy, chauvinism, free love, divorce, contraception, etc.”
“In any case, it never condemns persons. But it does not leave them in their sin. Like its Master, it has the courage and the charity to say to them: go and from now on sin no more.”
That’s always been the key, the missing bit from the modernist program to redefine the Church. They say “go and sin some more,” which is the exact opposite of what Christ and His Church have always said.
We’re all sinners. All of us sin to one degree or another. Our Lord warned us more sternly not to judge ourselves superior to those whose outward sins are greater than our own. But at the same time, Jesus Christ took an already strict Jewish moral law and made it far stricter. He, God Incarnate, died for our sins, but He did so after conveying a very high moral standard. We will all fall short of that standard to one degree or another, but what Our Lord made plain was absolutely vital was our constant striving to meet it (carrying our cross).
Modernists throw out the bit about striving, and just pretend – on no real rational basis – that Jesus just forgives carte blanche, no matter how much we not only continue to sin, but make no effort whatsoever to amend our lives. They reveal their dishonesty in the fact that they pretend Christ’s only condemnation is reserved for their ideological opponents, but I digress.
That’s the key. Intent. The difference between a faithful soul and an immoral one comes down to will/intention. The unfaithful soul loves his sins, revels in them, and feels no need to change. The faithful soul abhors his sins and strives, to varying degrees, to no longer fall into them. This used to be Catholicism for Kindergartners, but apparently its beyond the vast majority of bishops and cardinals today, who prefer to go along with the zeitgeist than hold culturally disapproved beliefs. It’s only beyond them, because they want it to be.
Shock! Pope Francis unequivocally condemns tens of millions worldwide! November 20, 2015
Posted by Tantumblogo in abdication of duty, asshatery, different religion, disaster, episcopate, error, foolishness, General Catholic, horror, Papa, scandals, secularism, self-serving, sickness, Society, the struggle for the Church.comments closed
Too bad those tens of millions are involved in a perfectly legitimate enterprise that has long been found as perfectly justifiable by the Church.
That’s how it reads to me, anyway, when he indulged in this……..I have to call it a rant…….today at Casa Santa Marta. So apparently fornicators, adulterers, and even sodomites are beyond judgment, but those involved in the defense of nations……..cursed:
Pope Francis went on to recall the recent commemorations of the Second World War, the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, his visit to Redipuglia last year on the anniversary of the Great War: “Useless slaughters,” he called them, repeating the words of Pope Benedict XV. “Everywhere there is war today, there is hatred,” he said. Then he asked, “What shall remain in the wake of this war, in the midst of which we are living now?”
“What shall remain? Ruins, thousands of children without education, so many innocent victims: and lots of money in the pockets of arms dealers. Jesus once said: ‘You can not serve two masters: either God or riches.’ War is the right choice for him, who would serve wealth: ‘Let us build weapons, so that the economy will right itself somewhat, and let us go forward in pursuit of our interests. There is an ugly word the Lord spoke: ‘Cursed!’ Because He said: ‘Blessed are the peacemakers!.’ The men who work war, who make war, are cursed, they are criminals. A war can be justified – so to speak – with many, many reasons, but when all the world as it is today, at war – piecemeal though that war may be – a little here, a little there, and everywhere – there is no justification – and God weeps. Jesus weeps.”
The Holy Father went on to say that, while the arms dealers go about their business, there are the poor peacemakers who, perforce to help another person, and another and another, spend themselves utterly, and even give their lives……
Pope Francis is applying a corollary that is non-scriptural and also not part of the Tradition. Yes, our Blessed Lord certainly did say “Blessed are the peacemakers,” but he did not say “damned are the soldiers are weapons merchants.” That’s a huge logical leap that is totally unsupported by the Church’s extremely well developed doctrine surrounding warfare and the taking of human life. Pope Francis is emoting that false modern belief that to be Christian is to be pacifist. This belief, like so many others, is based entirely on distortions of the words of great Saints and fathers, wrong interpretations of bits of Scripture, and a burning desire to witness not to the Faith but the worldly progressive zeitgeist.
It is also manifestly unjust. It takes more than a bit of cheek for a man who, by many reports, cooperated with the military junta during Argentina’s Dirty wWar, to call those “who work war, who make war” cursed and criminals. There are many perfectly morally justifiable reasons to serve in the armed forces and to be involved in the defense of one’s country. There are situations in which armed combat is not just permissible, but even a moral imperative. Our Lord never once condemned soldiers, he simply told them to do their duty and not abuse people sinfully. Our Lord in fact reserved some of his highest praise for a Roman Centurion, who described his faith in terms of military discipline and left Our Lord amazed.
This pope once again shows himself as a man upon whom nuance is lost. He also shows himself to be a disturbingly ideological creature, and a man given to fits of passion. He has here condemned many dozens of very good souls I know who are involved either in the defense industry or the military. It is simply an amazing departure from the kind of careful thought and thorough grounding in tradition we have come to expect from popes going back centuries, even the relatively recent (and more problematic) ones. I wonder if the Holy Father gave any thought to the grave disconcert his statements would give to the millions of Catholics worldwide who work in some capacity related to the defense industry and/or armed forces? This is a blanket condemnation without exception, compared to the extravagant “mercy” he extends to those involved in actual moral depravities, it’s really an unconscionable statement.
It’s also inconsistent as hell. Remember when he excoriated the WWII Allies for not bombing the railroads leading to Dachau and Sachsenhausen? But I thought all war-making and war-fighting was cursed? Never ask a liberal to be consistent, it all depends on his feels at a given moment.
But not altogether unpredictable. Indeed, in so many ways, this pope seems to be gradually revealing his very novel, doctrinaire vision to the world as time unfolds.
Rorate notes the translation appears solid. They also add this:
More than ever, Francis symbolizes a Church and a civilization that is tired and has lost its will to live: a “West” that in the face of wrath it could not comprehend, possessed with only a fraction of the conviction that its enemies has, takes refuge in meaningless slogans that inspire no one, help no one, and only encourage those who would like to destroy everything that is holy, everything that is of value.
Indeed. Enjoy your Camp of the Saints.
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