Pray for Norcia August 24, 2016
Posted by Tantumblogo in Art and Architecture, Basics, Christendom, disaster, General Catholic, Holy suffering, Latin Mass, manhood, religious, sadness, Society, Tradition, Virtue.comments closed
I had heard, vaguely, about an earthquake in Italy this morning, but I had no idea it struck so near to Norcia, a site very dear to all Catholics, but orthodox American Catholics especially, due to the admirable Benedictine community there. In fact, at this very multinational company at which I now work,I heard a co-worker from Italy being queried about this earthquake and lunchtime; apparently, he had been in touch with some family and they were ok, but some could not be found. So, I certainly pray for him.
The good news is that the community in Norcia relates that none of the monks were injured. That’s especially cheering to me, since we know one of them at least a little. The bad news is that the basilica and other facilities they have spent such great effort refurbishing and restoring have suffered significant damage. Even worse, ongoing aftershocks have forced all the monks but two to relocate to Rome for the time being. They are being hosted by the generosity of the Benedictine international headquarters at St. Anselmo, while two brothers remain in Norcia to watch over their monastery, sleeping in tents outside for safety.
The monks are asking for, first, prayer support, and, secondly, financial support. They are going to incur significant expenses, it may be expected, returning the basilica and other facilities to their former condition. Donations may be made here.
This is a very good community that is doing quite a bit of good work to try to restore a much more authentic practice of religious life in the Church today. One of their foremost concerns in this time of trial, as related by Rorate, was their ability to maintain the order of the Rule while they must relocate and undergo what must be a severe trauma. I am certain that with God’s grace they will succeed in doing so with little difficulty. The final note from the monks, that I’ve seen:
Please continue to pray for our community, and consider giving a gift (https://en.nursia.org/donations/) to help our effort to rebuild.
May God bless and sustain them, and shower them in His infinite mercy.
Please also, of course, maintain all those others suffering through this disaster in your prayers. The last I heard was 140 dead, with many more injured. The toll may continue to rise. Apparently, many of the small villages around Norcia were particularly devastated. We do not know why it pleases God to allow such things to happen, but we do know that He causes great good to come from them if we cooperate with His Grace.
Damage to the sanctuary, courtesy Rorate:
That is so sad.
CDC: Majority of HIV Cases Afflict Tiny Population August 24, 2016
Posted by Tantumblogo in Basics, disaster, error, foolishness, General Catholic, horror, sadness, scandals, secularism, self-serving, sexual depravity, sickness, Society.comments closed
And I’m quite certain you don’t need my help to discern what population that is. In fact, as noted below, over 90% of new HIV cases in the US occur in those who engage in male-male sodomy, and sodomites have 55% of all HIV cases in the country.
But everyone keep pretending this behavior is perfectly natural, healthy, and beloved of God, even as the lightning bolts strike all around. BTW, CDC is being a bit liberal in their assessing sodomy-inclined men as being 2% of the population. I read a lot of data and polls on this subject and they show that it is more like 0.5% – 1.5% depending on the source, with the mean a little over 1%:
Although homosexual men are a tiny sliver of the U.S. population, they account for the majority of all Americans living with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has announced.
Men who have sex with men (MSM) are two percent of the population but make up 55 percent of people who were HIV-positive in 2013, according to a CDC fact sheet released last Wednesday.
More than nine out of 10 new HIV diagnoses (92 percent) come from young gay and bisexual MSM, ages 13 to 24…….
……..“Gay and bisexual men are also at increased risk for other STDs, like syphilis, gonorrhea, and chlamydia,” the CDC added.
“Two things never change when it comes to the U.S. government and homosexualism. First, the CDC is constantly providing evidence like this of the high risks associated with male homosexual behavior; and second, the CDC and pro-LGBT politicians never admit that the problem is unnatural homosexual behavior itself,” Peter LaBarbera, president of Americans for Truth, told LifeSiteNews.
The CDC reported that men who have sex with men are 44-times more likely to contract HIV than heterosexual males, and 40-times more likely than women. Earlier this year, the CDC estimated that half of all black MSM will get the disease, a statistic that is repeated in the latest fact sheet.
“In a sane world, the CDC would encourage all men, but especially young men and teenage boys, to avoid homosexual sex,” LaBarbera said. “Instead, the CDC blames societal ‘homophobia’ and ‘stigma’ for the rising disease rates, even though the American public’s acceptance of homosexuality is at an all-time high.” [It’s not a sane world. A world divorced from Jesus Christ is categorically insane, and grows more so daily]
It’s almost as if God designed a disease that was specifically associated with an abhorrent behavior. That’s a bit pat, and harsh, but there is some truth to it. Aside from lung cancer and habitual smoking, there are few deadly diseases that so tightly correspond to a specific behavior. Whether HIV is really some scourge from God or not I don’t pretend to know, but its rapid onset and virulent spread to epidemic proportions are fairly unprecedented in the annals of epidemiology, as is its resistance to a cure.
And, of course, it’s far more than just one disease. Nor is disease the only problem. There is herpes, chlamydia, antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea, syphillis, alcoholism, drug addiction, mental illness, deliberate self-harm, and suicide, to name a few.
The excuse that some of these evils stem from “homophobia” is wearing excessively thin, now that the pro-“homosexual” lobby has decisively won the culture war, at least for the time being.
I think it no surprise that sodomy and other moral evils have become increasingly ascendant in the culture wars at a time when more and more Americans are falling away from Christianity entirely and embracing all manner of other false, demonic beliefs, be they “sciencism,” the worship of science as a religion, leftism, new age, eastern mysticism, hedonism, etc., etc. It’s difficult to discern which is the chicken and which the egg in this collapse of moral standards and Christian faith – does immorality cause people to fall away from Christianity, or falling away cause them to become more immoral? In reality, it doesn’t matter much.
This is the sewer in which we now are forced by circumstance to live. Stay very, very close to Our Lady at the Foot of the Cross.
Trust in Saint Joseph! August 24, 2016
Posted by Tantumblogo in Admin, awesomeness, Basics, Domestic Church, family, General Catholic, Glory, Good St. Joseph, Grace, Interior Life, Novenas, Saints, sanctity, Spiritual Warfare, Tradition, Victory, Virtue.comments closed
My dear readers, I have intended for some time to share some testimony I have of good St. Joseph’s incredible intercessory power. As St. Teresa of Avila said, I have 
never known St. Joseph to fail in a intercessory request made with a fervent heart.
Longer-term readers will recall that I was laid off from my job this past February. I already had a very strong devotion to St. Joseph, offering daily prayers and two perpetual Novenas to this great Saint, so very powerful and so perfectly suited for the needs of fathers and workers. I of course turned to him in this time of need, less for myself, but so that I could continue to provide for the many souls who depend upon me.
Needless to say, St. Joseph – with the help of my reader’s many prayers, I am sure – came through in spectacular fashion. I am sort of “maxxed out,” if you will, in my 
career field and profession. Without a move into some kind of mid- or upper-management, it would be very difficult for me to find a job with compensation to match the one I lost in February, let alone improve upon that. And yet, within a week of being laid off, I was already in discussion on a new job that did just that! And I had that job offer within 5 weeks of being laid off! The compensation was even a little better than I had previously, which I thought would be almost impossible, humanly speaking, to obtain. I was not out of work for even two months. If you recall the circumstances of my layoff, getting notified just days after the birth of our seventh child, you can see how well the Lord, through St. Joseph’s intercession, provided for me and my family!
But that’s not the half of it. I have had a continuing, ongoing need for the 
past several months. It’s rather personal and I’d rather not go into what it is, but it’s sort of a constant need that requires continuous intervention or intercession. And, to be quite frank, meeting this need requires what amounts to a miraculous intervention, because, by human means, there is really no way this need could be met. There are far too many variables, far too many unprecedented coincidences, for this need to have not only been met once, but over and over again over months. I attribute this amazing benefit I’ve received to the intercession of St. Joseph, along with the Blessed Mother and my Guardian Angel. All I can say is, St. Joseph, Deo Gratias!
I must also say that St. Joseph played a critical role in my initial conversion and my abstinence from drugs and alcohol, as well as other, even more deeply attached sins.
St. Joseph has played a huge role in the transformation of my life, and continues to provide amazing, really supernatural blessings to myself and my family. I cannot recommend an ongoing, deep devotion to the foster father of the Lord strongly enough.
In mentioning that need above, which has required truly miraculous intercession, this is the prayer I have used as a perpetual Novena going back 2 years or more now. I pray this every day with my family, and St. Joseph has always provided for us in our needs:
O Glorious St. Joseph, you who have power to render possible even things that are considered impossible, come to our aid in our present trouble and distress. Take this important and difficult affair under your particular protection that it may end happily. (mention your request)
O dear St. Joseph, all our confidence is in you. Let it not be said that we would invoke you in vain; and since you are so powerful with Jesus and Mary, show that your goodness equals your power. Amen.
St. Joseph, friend of the Sacred Heart, pray for us.
We follow that with an Our Father, a Hail Mary, and a Glory Be.
That’s it! I think it does help that we pray on our knees and with great devotion. 
Such a short prayer, but one that is very, very powerful. I can attest to that.
I am not doing this post to brag, or to toot my horn in the slightest. I have done nothing, other than rely on one of the best gifts Our Lord makes available to us through His Church.
I am doing it to express my heartfelt gratitude to St. Joseph and to encourage others to rely on this benefactor of such sublime power and efficacy. He is my most trusted Saint and heavenly friend/intercessor, after Our Lady, of course.
St. Joseph, pray for us!
St. John Vianney on the Torments of Purgatory and Our Duty to Pray for the Poor Souls August 24, 2016
Posted by Tantumblogo in awesomeness, Basics, catachesis, Four Last Things, General Catholic, Glory, Grace, Holy suffering, priests, reading, Saints, sanctity, Spiritual Warfare, Tradition, true leadership, Virtue.comments closed
Sort of a long excerpt, so the intro and conclusion will be brief. One of the great forgotten acts of charity in the Church of the past 50 years has been the duty to pray for the souls in Purgatory. With seemingly almost every Requiem Mass turning into an instant canonization, most people no longer bother to pray for the departed souls, blithely assuming they have no need to do so. But Saint John Vianney, and our Catholic ancestors, knew far better. From pp. 171-3 of The Sermons of the Cure of Ars:
Oh! How we suffer, they cry to us. Oh! You, our brethren, deliver us from these torments. You can do it! Ah, if you only experienced the sorrow of being separated from God! Cruel separation! To burn in the fire kindled by the justice of God! To suffer sorrows incomprehensible to mortal man! To be devoured by regret, knowing that we could so easily have avoided such sorrows! Oh! My children, cry the fathers and the mothers, can you thus so readily abandon us, we who loved you so much? Can you then sleep in comfort and leave us stretched upon a bed of fire? Will you have the courage to give yourselves up to pleasure and joy while we are here suffering and weeping day and night? You have our wealth, our homes, you are enjoying the fruit of our labors, and you abandon us here in this place of torments , where we are suffering such frightful evils for so many years! And not a single almsgiving, not a single Mass which would help to deliver us! You can relieve our sufferings, you can open our prison, and you abandon us! Oh! How cruel these sufferings are!
Yes, my dear brethren, people judge very differently, when in the flames of Purgatory, of all those light faults, if indeed it is possible to call anything light which makes us under such rigorous sorrows. What woe would there be to man, the Royal Prophet cries, even the most just of men, if God were to judge him without mercy. If God has founds spots in the sun and malice in the angels, what, then, is this sinful man? And for us, who have committed so many mortal sins and who have done practically nothing to satisfy the justice of God, how many years of Purgatory! [A quick note: I know the belief widespread in the Church in recent years has been that Purgatory is out of time, and thus the idea of “years” or “decades” in Purgatory has no meaning. This belief is attributed to God being outside time, and so Purgatory/Heaven/hell must be outside time, too. But I think this idea is a bit reductive, in addition to being quite counter to the wisdom of the Saints from the earliest Church through to at least the mid-20th century. God may exist outside time, but He also created time, and has chosen to enter into time when it has pleased Him to do so. As such, it is entirely possible that He could have instituted a temporal sense outside of creation, even in Purgatory. Human beings are contingent creatures bound by a sense of time. We cannot escape contingency, or, perhaps better said in this case, our changeable nature, until we reach our final destination, be it Heaven or hell. Thus, it seems to make eminent sense to me, that while we remain contingent or changeable, while we are still not at our final destination, that a temporal sort of existence could remain. Something to consider, anyway]
“My God,” said St. Teresa, “what soul will be pure enough to enter into Heaven without passing through the vengeful flames?” In her last illness, she cried suddenly: “O justice and power of my
god, how terrible you are!” During her agony, God allowed her to see His holiness as the angels and the Saints see Him in Heaven, which caused her so much dread that her sisters, seeing her trembling and extraordinarily agitated, spoke to her, weeping: “Ah Mother, what has happened to you; surely you do not fear death after so many penances and such abundant and bitter tears?”
“No, my children,” St. Teresa replied, “I do not fear death; on the contrary, I desire it so that I may be united forever with my God.”
“is it your sins, then, which terrify you, after so much mortification?”
“Yes, my children,” she told them. “I do fear my sins, but I fear still another thing even more.”
“Is it the judgment, then?”
“Yes, I tremble at the formidable account that it will be necessary to render to God, Who, in that moment, will be without mercy, but there is still something else of which the very thought alone makes me die with terror.”
The poor sisters were deeply distressed.
“Alas! Can it be hell, then?”
“No,” she told them. “Hell, thank God, is not for me. Oh! My sisters, it is the holiness of God. My God, have pity upon me! My life must be brought face to face with that of Jesus Christ Himself! Woe to me if I have the least blemish or stain! Woe to me if I am even in the very shadow of sin!”
“Alas,” cried these poor sisters. “What will our deaths be like!”
What will ours be like, then, my dear brethren, we who, perhaps in all our penances and our good works, have never yet satisfied for one single sin forgiven in the tribunal of Penance? Ah! What years and centuries of torment to punish us!……How dearly we shall pay for all those faults thatw e look upon as nothing at all, like those little lies that we tell to amuse ourselves, those little scandals, the despising of the graces which God gives us at every moment, those little murmurings in the difficulties that He sends us! No, my dear brethren, we would never have the courage to commit the least sin if we could understand how much it outrages God, and how greatly it deserves to be rigorously punished, even in this world.
———-End Quote————
I try to make prayer for the poor holy souls in Purgatory my number one prayer intention every day. I try to give special focus to those souls who have been forgotten or ignored for who knows how long. May God have mercy on them, and on us. And may the holy souls during and after Purgatory pray for us always!
National Catholic Register Fires Two Writers Nobody Read Anymore August 24, 2016
Posted by Tantumblogo in abdication of duty, blogfoolery, disaster, error, foolishness, General Catholic, pr stunts, rank stupidity, scandals, secularism, Society, the struggle for the Church.comments closed
And this is supposed to be big news? In reality, I know both writers (Mark Shea and Simcha Fisher) probably still enjoy followings far larger than mine (not that I care in the slightest), but their influence has steadily shrunk over the last several years, especially among the milieu I am primarily concerned with – orthodox/believing/traditional Catholics, or, just Catholics.
Mark Shea has serious problems. That much has been evident for years for those with eyes to see. He may have even hassled this blog a bit a couple of years ago, in a stupid and immature manner. I never read Simcha. For one thing, mommy blogs bore the daylights out of me. Beyond that, I never found her to have anything interesting to say, nor to be much of a writer (which is sort of a damning condemnation, coming from me), the few times I tried to read her. Shea, however, was something else. He reminds of someone I know quite well and used to collaborate with, another local blogger, a man possessed of such a volcanic temperament that he would literally turn his beliefs upside down in order to score a rhetorical point, to win an ideological victory.
Having said the above, does this mean anything? Is EWTN/NCR turning more orthodox or traditional? I will admit to some skepticism here. I don’t think either writer was canned for their beliefs, but for their behavior outside of NCR, which was frequently scandalous and sophomoric, especially with regard to Shea, but increasingly with Fisher, too. I think these two underwent some tragic transformation, for various reasons (though Fisher’s are more obvious than Shea’s).
Some may say using foul language, going totally unhinged in arguments, or dropping gratuitous sexual innuendos or outright statements doesn’t mean anything, that we should all lighten up, but for someone who puts themselves out as a Catholic (something of a model, whether they want or deserve to be, or not, you become something of a model when you have a large following AS A CATHOLIC), someone whose beliefs and even practices should be emulated, it’s not a good thing. There are times I’m tempted to use foul language on this blog, and I’ve let it slip once or twice in the distant past, but overall I agree that we should expect more from Catholic writers than foul language, gratuitous sex, circular firing squads (oops), constant click-whoring internecine conflicts, blanket condemnation of hundreds of thousands of the most committed, faithful souls in the Church in this country, and the kind of lowbrow, morally problematic conduct we can see on the TV anytime we want, if we still have one.
I think NCR is not leaning Trad. If they were, they’d have never let Pat Archbold go. I think they’re just reaffirming their place in the (shrinking?) EWTN/Catholic Answers/post-conciliar conservativish post conciliar Amchurch circle. They certainly have some solid content, don’t get me wrong, but they’re not going to post/publish anything that undermines that status quo to which they belong, say, penetrating analysis of Guadium Et Spes 12, or the questionable level of doctrinal authority in the various documents of Vatican II, or an analysis of the grave deficiencies, and even dangers, present in the Novus Ordo Missae. It is what it is.
And Shea and Fisher are what they are, or have chosen to become. I regret their loss of livelihood, while being jealous of the fact that mine is in no way dependent on the Church and good will of bishops and others, with all the compromises that invariably involves. Frankly, I pray for them, for many reasons, but most of all that they can find the peace they, it might be said, need, heroic practice of virtue, and fuller adherence to the Truth Jesus Christ has revealed through His Church and its constant, perennial belief and practice. I believe ever more strongly that inward rejection of the traditional Catholic understanding of the Faith tends to manifest itself in outward ways. There were not many Saints who got into virtual daily shouting matches with other people, or who would politically support a rabid pro-abort and completely amoral woman for reasons of material self-interest while posting daily “dick” jokes.
Eponymous Flower was a bit more caustic and to the point, not that I disagree:
Edit: after years of attacking faithful Catholics and clergy, their reign at the Neoconservative news organ, The National Catholic Register, Simcha Fisher and Mark Shea have finally been dealt with. They’ve been what’s wrong with EWTN for a long while. We’ve certainly been calling for these people’s ouster for a long time. Now, how about Steve Graydanus. Has anyone forgot that they fired the Cankerous?
There’s nothing more despicable than these kinds of people who feed off the American Church.
While harsher than I would say, I do not disagree that Shea, in particular, has become extremely destructive in recent years. He is not helping souls, he is in fact undermining the good of the Church.
There is probably better analysis here by Boniface, but it’s late and I wrote this in a terrible rush. Forgive me!
Also forgive me for the blogfoolery. About once a year, apparently, I let one of these fly. For the most part, for me, however, these people were really nonentities. I didn’t read their stuff, I didn’t care what they had to say, as I had long ago determined that they simply did not comprehend the Faith in the same manner I do, and had nothing positive to offer me. I have found that most readers of this blog have come to the same conclusion. I generally try to avoid negatively commenting on those who I perceive as having good will and having a sufficiently shared understanding of the Faith and what it means/how it should be applied, but both of these folks have ceased to be in that camp for a quite some time. So perhaps this is not blogfoolery/circular firing squad after all, but needed clarity.
More time, and better things, tomorrow, God willing.
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