The Holy Innocents - Then and NOW

 Herod sought to safeguard his position and lifestyle by the murder of all male children up to two years old. I can't even wrap my mind around the terror that had to ring out that fateful night with infants and children being ripped from their parents arms and slaughtered violently right in front of them and likely their older siblings! How all of heaven and the angels must have anguished over it. 

Today however, we have many Herods, male and female Herods,  that seek to maintain their sinful lifestyles uncluttered as they continue on their journey to find "happiness" through sin and debauchery. Think that's strong? Isn't that just what they're doing? Jumping in and out of different beds hoping that one  will be  "just right" and make them happy forever? Is this not what modern times calls "dating"?  

The sexual union was created for procreation. When it's used as RECREATION not REcreation, but RECreation; not only is something lost in the *translation*, but the dignity of the person -IN MORE WAYS THAN ONE- is lost FOREVER. So, if the error of their ways catches them and a woman should find herself WITH CHILD ... not "PREGNANT" but WITH CHILD; it's legal to just KILL THE BABY before it's born. And they can do this right up to the time it's ready TO BE BORN. The heart is beating, the little limbs are moving, it's taking nourishment and stretching. Then one day, IN WHAT SHOULD BE THE SAFEST PLACE IN THE UNIVERSE, a mother's womb, suction tears it apart literally limb from limb or a drill cracks its skull as brains are sucked out. DO THEY THINK THERE IS ANY LESS PAIN FOR THESE LITTLE ONES THAN THE NIGHT OF THE HOLY INNOCENTS with swords piercing them? And we call this *MEDICAL PROCEDURE*, abortion; as if pregnancy is a DISEASE that needs to be cured. 

They wonder where the cure for cancer is ... they wonder why we don't have people that will keep our nation strong and our economy stable ... WELL WE LIKELY ABORTED THEM ALL! These are those that will never know a mother's love and tender embrace. Those that CHOSE this path for their CHILDREN will never see the love in their eyes lifted up to them or hear their giggles or see their accomplishments because at the time it didn't fit in with their lives and was INCONVENENT. 

WHAT A HORROR!!!!

May Almighty God have mercy on all who have taken a hand in this horrific atrocity from encouraging words to assisting and performing this murderous act. May all these who had a hand in it be given the GIFT of PERFECT CONTRITION so that they're made aware of just how horrific this vile intrinsic evil is and how conditioned we've become to accept it. It IS the reason why so much has gone wrong in the world from the family unit to the economic breakdown. Pray daily for the dignity of the human person to once again be VALUED as it should, as it was meant to ... in ALL STAGES from CONCEPTION TO NATURAL DEATH. 

Matthew 2: 16-18

16	Then Herod, when he saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, was in a furious rage, and he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under, according to the time which he had ascertained from the wise men.
17	Then was fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet Jeremiah:
18	"A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they were no more."

Saint Charbel

Saint Charbel (or Sharbel) was a Maronite monk from Lebanon. He was born May 8, 1859, and died December 24, 1898. He was beatified December 5, 1965 and canonized October 9, 1977. 
In the first centuries of Christianity, the Middle East was populated by monks and religious. The Maronite order in particular is know nor its love of the monastic life. Out of this tradition God raised up the humble monk Charbel as a light to the whole Church. Charbel is known for his fidelity to his vows, his love for the Eucharist, and his devotion to Our Blessed Mother.
 
Saint Charbel suffered a stroke while saying Mass the day before Christmas. He was reciting the prayer from the Maronite Mass, "Father of Truth". He continued to recite this prayer and to repeat over and over Jesus and Mary until he died several hours later.

Chaplet of St. Charbel
INSTRUCTIONS

After the death of Charbel, a light began to shine from his tomb attracting the local villagers. Miracles of healing began to take place. Four months after his death his body was exhumed and found to be incorrupt and floating in water. His body remained incorrupt, perspiring blood and liquid until the day of his beatification. Miracles are occurring through the intercession of Saint Charbel to this day.

This program is from ChurchMilitant.TV

A Blessed Christmas to One and ALL!

We all need to take a moment and reflect on the true meaning of Christmas ... particularly in view of recent national events.

This Christmas we remember those who courageously called for forgiveness in times of suffering. Americans shine above all when we forgive those who hurt families and our country. Unfortunately America's violence is never ending because we rely too much on politicians and judges who continue to make unjust laws against God. Let us pray and never fail in our efforts to restore God and Prayer in this Nation. God and USA are inseparable. No human law can change that. Let us all remember the Holy Family and Infant Jesus that He came to this world and died for us. Let us pray without ceasing to TRULY once again become ONE NATION UNDER GOD! God Bless America.

 
 Solemnity of Christmas

On December 25, the Church celebrates the Solemnity of Christmas, a holy day of obligation. Of all the Christian feasts, Christmas is perhaps the most beloved and the most popular. On Christmas we celebrate the temporal birth of the Lord Jesus Christ two thousand years ago. We celebrate His eternal birth from the Father in the splendors of the Godhead. But we celebrate also a third birth of Our Lord, the birth for which Advent has been particularly preparing us, the birth which occurs every Christmas - it is the birth of Our Lord Jesus Christ in the Church, His birth in those who are the members of the Body of Christ, so His birth in the souls of each of us here, and in the souls of all throughout the world, who receive Him on this day having confessed their sins and opened their hearts in faith and love.

On Christmas, let us adore Jesus in the Eucharist. Let us adore Him through frequent visits to Christ present in the Blessed Sacrament in our tabernacles. Let us adore Him at that real mystical Bethlehem which is His Eucharistic Presence. So as with the ears of our spirit we hear the angels' voices on Christmas, let our voices, in the joy of our hearts, blend with theirs:

Click here for the Holy Father's Christmas Message

Glory to God in the highest

and peace to his people on earth!

This program is from ChurchMilitant.TV

Moral Relativism Is Leading Mankind To The Abyss!

Pope Benedict has weighed in on the issue of “gay marriage.” Our Holy Father continues to be extremely concerned about the current state of the world, especially as it pertains many governments and peoples out right rejection of the moral and natural law. Once again, our Holy Father has stated that the “very future of mankind is at stake.” The following are highlights of one of the pope’s end of the year speeches delivered today in Italian.

  The Telegraph:
Pope Benedict XVI: "In the fight for the family, the very notion of being – of what being human really means is being called into question," the Pope said in Italian during an end-of-year speech.

“The question of the family … is the question of what it means to be a man, and what it is necessary to do to be true men,” he said.

The Pope spoke of the “falseness” of gender theories and cited at length France’s chief Rabbi Gilles Bernheim, who has spoken out against gay marriage.

“Bernheim has shown in a very detailed and profoundly moving study that the attack we are currently experiencing on the true structure of the family, made up of father, mother, and child, goes much deeper,” he said.

He cited feminist gender theorist Simone de Beauvoir’s view to the effect that one is not born a woman, but one becomes so that sex was no longer an element of nature but a social role people chose for themselves.

“The profound falsehood of this theory and of the anthropological revolution contained within it is obvious,” he said.

The defense of the family, the Pope said, “is about man himself. And it becomes clear that when God is denied, human dignity also disappears.”

On Monday, the Vatican’s newspaper described laws on gay marriage as an attempt at a communist-like “utopia”, a day after tens of thousands of demonstrators turned out in France to support legalizing both marriages and adoption for gay couples.
France’s parliament is to debate the government-backed “marriage for all” bill early next year.
With President Francois Hollande’s Socialists enjoying a strong majority, the bill is expected to pass despite vehement opposition from the right and religious groups.

Only if there is such a consensus on the essentials can constitutions and law function. This fundamental consensus derived from the Christian heritage is at risk. In reality, this makes reason blind to what is essential. To resist this eclipse of reason and to preserve its capacity for seeing the essential, for seeing God and man, for seeing what is good and what is true, is the common interest that must unite all people of good will. The very future of the world is at stake.

Moral consensus is collapsing. Consequently the forces mobilized for the defense of such structures seem doomed to failure. However, the grave challenges confronting the world at the start of this new Millennium lead us to think that only an intervention from on high, capable of guiding the hearts of those living in situations of conflict and those governing the destinies of nations, can give reason to hope for a brighter future.

“Better Gun Laws. Better Mental Healthcare…Give Me A Break!”

 By Fr. John Hollowell

Some have asked for my thoughts on the tragedies of today, and so I share them for what they are worth.

It seems like a line was crossed today that, in our country at least, has never been crossed to date. Columbine was horrendous and was a paradigm shift for the nation, but given our collective experiences as teenagers growing up, and given the fact that most everyone still carries scars from teenage hazing and bullying in some form or another, I think most people at least could fathom the source of the hatred, the evil, and the revenge that we saw in Columbine. From Stephen King’s “Carrie” to Ralphie in “A Christmas Story”, we’ve grown up knowing that bullying does real harm and pushes people to the breaking point.

But a classroom of little children…it doesn’t register on any level, nor should it.

So now the carousel of blame starts spinning – people pointing at things external to fix…”better gun laws”, “better mental health care”, “better health insurance”…give me a break! I could care less, one way or the other, on gun control, but anyone who thinks that these types of measures would have prevented today is really hoping to avoid the issue that really matters.

The dignity of the person.

In our culture, the dignity of the human person has been spat upon, mocked, and destroyed. There is no “dignity of the human person” to speak of anymore. Anytime someone stands up to speak about “the dignity of the human person” they are shouted down in the public square and mocked for using words from an archaic culture that we have, so we’re told, moved beyond and surpassed.

A human person today only has dignity if others will it to be so – a child grasping for breath on the abortionist’s table is granted dignity solely based on the wishes of the mother. The abortionist, and our President, like the emperors in the Colosseum of Rome, wait for the thumb up or down of the mother to decide whether the child lives or dies.
Embryos sit in freezers across the country, parents have their reproductive systems mangled in order to have pleasure without the burden of children, wars are now fought, like video games, through the lenses of drones, we tell third world countries that “children are the problem” and so if you want any of our food to eat, you are going to have to stop having children…

Today, in Connecticut, a big fat mirror was held up to our nation, and a monster from the depths of Hell illustrated and showed us exactly what we don’t want to see in ourselves…we hate children, we hate life, and human dignity is on life support in this country.

The Joker in “The Dark Knight” utters a seriously frightening, and seriously prophetic line about us:

“Nobody panics when things go “according to plan.” Even if the plan is horrifying! If, tomorrow, I tell the press that, like, a gang banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it’s all “part of the plan”. But when I say that one little old mayor will die, well then everyone loses their minds!”

We’re accustomed to the plan of 4,000 abortions a day, it has become part of our character as a nation, and it has faded away into being simply “a part of the plan.”

The dignity of the children lost today did not come simply from the fact that their parents happened to want them!! Their dignity came from the fact that God wanted them, and willed them into existence…that is the sole source of human dignity, and we are meant to marvel at the dignity of such miraculous creation, the miraculous nature of it all only amplified by the fact that all of us have been blessed with a role to play in nurturing and bringing into existence the miracles that are human persons!

We have been anti-life and anti-child and anti-human dignity for a long time in this country, and it is time to stand up and say ENOUGH!!!

We must rise up and demand a return to respect for the dignity of the human person!!!! We must rise up and say that a child is not a choice, a child does not derive his/her dignity from the choice of another human person, a child does not derive his/her dignity based on whether they are born into poverty or not…we must rise up and say every human person has an unassailable dignity, and that dignity is given to each human person by God, with a capital G,…and if we refuse to do that, if we refuse to acknowledge how utterly evil and depraved this nation is becoming, and if we fail to acknowledge how putrid “the plan” has become that we call every day life in America, and we keep blaming guns and health care insurance, then we should never expect a return to sanity.

Please hit your knees for the families and the loved ones left behind in Connecticut and say a lot of prayers for our country. Today, a new line was crossed; what remains to be seen is whether we will wake up because of it, or if we will continue to bury our heads in the sand and act like we don’t know what is going on.

All Holy Innocents, pray for us!

Please pray for Fr. John and all whose Faith is rooted  firmly in the TRUTH that *is* JESUS regardless of public or popular opinion!!!!!

BEWARE!: The Nativity Story Movie - Blasphemous and Sacrilegious

 Dr. Taylor Marshall, thankfully, sets us straight, telling us to BEWARE of this "Christmas" Movie called "The Nativity Story" .... 
 
Every Christmas I try to show that the Fathers and Doctors of the Church unanimously teach that Mary was without pain on that first Christmas (see post: "Mary's Painless Delivery of Christ"). The reason for this is plain - Mary was without original sin and thus she did not experience the curse of Eve in painful childbirth. Mary is the New Eve and stands higher than Eve. It also inconceivable that the Christ would cause physical harm to his mother. Moreover, the Church Fathers cite Isaiah 66:7 as referring to Mary's painless delivery of Christ:

"Before she travailed, she brought forth; before her pain came, she was delivered of a man child" (Isa 66:7)

This year, I want to focus on something different. I recently listened to this sermon in which the priest demonstrated that the Nativity Story movie is both blasphemous and sacrilegious. The priest notes the following:

The Nativity Story film depicts Mary as experiencing pain in child birth and therefore depicts her as subject to original sin. In other words, the Mary of the Nativity Story is not the immaculately conceived Mary of Scripture, Tradition, and the Catholic Church. This is serious business when we recall what Pope Pius IX solemnly proclaimed:

We declare, pronounce, and define that the doctrine which holds that the most Blessed Virgin Mary, in the first instance of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege granted by Almighty God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Savior of the human race, was preserved free from all stain of original sin, is a doctrine revealed by God and therefore to be believed firmly and constantly by all the faithful.

Hence, if anyone shall dare -- which God forbid! -- to think otherwise than as has been defined by us, let him know and understand that he is condemned by his own judgment; that he has suffered shipwreck in the faith; that he has separated from the unity of the Church; and that, furthermore, by his own action he incurs the penalties established by law if he should are to express in words or writing or by any other outward means the errors he think in his heart (Ineffabilis Deus).

But that's not the worst part. The Nativity Story depicts the Blessed Virgin consenting to have her palm read by a medium or witch. This is a capital crime in the Old Testament law of Moses and anyone who engaged in divination (e.g. palm reading) received the death penalty by God's command. A good rule of thumb is that if a sin received the death penalty in the Old Testament then the same sin constitutes a mortal sin in the New Testament (when full consent and knowledge is present). The death penalty of the Old Law reveals the spiritual death that the soul receives through mortal sin - mortal sin meaning "deadly sin."

So would Mary have committed a mortal sin and allowed a medium to divine her palm? Absolutely not! If she had, she would have consented to Satan and she would no longer have held enmity with the infernal serpent as Scripture inerrantly teaches:

I will put enmities between thee and the woman, and thy seed and her seed: she shall crush thy head, and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel (Gen 3:15).

So The Nativity Story explicitly depicts the Blessed Virgin Mary as 1) subject to original sin; and 2) committing a mortal sin of divination. This is the height of blasphemy and Satan grins as thousands of well-meaning Christians watch this film in preparation for the holidays.

I wouldn't watch a movie in which my mother was slandered and depicted committing mortal sins. Why should we watch a film that depicts the Immaculate Mother of Christ in submission to Satan

Just say no to The Nativity Story.

In order to add a positive twist, please suggest some solid and helpful "Christmas movie" suggestions in the comments below.

ad Jesum per Mariam,
Taylor Marshall

PS: I just added a new post in defense of the painless and intact nativity of Christ:

"Mary's Painless Delivery of Christ" from Scripture, Church Fathers, Popes, and Doctors of the Church

The Priest: Another Social Worker, Counselor, Feminized Neuter, Ineffectual Twit?

In the words of Fr. Dwight Longenecker:

When I was first ordained as an Anglican priest I dropped by to see Fr Richard–a retired priest of the old school. He would regularly celebrate the early morning Eucharist. When I asked him how many were at Mass he smiled and said, “Millions! But I could only see four.”
As I celebrated Mass today–only seeing twelve–I thought how secretly God works in the world. In the midst of the hurly burly, hurrying world God’s priests quietly go to church to say Mass. Here an ancient priest who can barely walk hobbles into a drafty church and celebrates the Mass faithfully with love and simplicity. There a young African priest strides to celebrate Mass in a church that is little more than a thatched hut. Here an Archbishop celebrates Mass in his cathedral or there an imprisoned priest huddles secretly over a little table to recite the words over a scrap of bread and a thimbleful of smuggled wine.

And the hurried, harried world goes on, and God works behind the news.This is always his way–to work secretly in the world. A young girl in a backwater village receives the message of an angel and says “yes” and the course of history is changed forever. An uneducated shepherd girl receives the apparition of that same woman who reveals herself to be “the Immaculate Conception” and the course of history is changed. A Mexican peasant receives an apparition of that same woman who, in time, becomes the Empress of America and the patron of a great superpower. So God works secretly–always behind the scenes.

And it is the same with the Mass. In millions of churches all over the world, with a simple unity of expression and an amazing unity of voice the priests of Christ faithfully celebrate these holy mysteries, and as they do they bring the Lord of the Universe into the present moment. They make him real in their own community, their own church, their own hands and in their own tabernacle. In millions of locations around the word Christ is made present by priests who are gifted and priests who are not so gifted, by priests who are saints and priests who are still a work in progress, by priests who stumble and fall and priests who always get up.

If the Mass were to suddenly stop . . .

if all the priests on the world went on strike or if some malignant power were to stop all Masses from being said, I firmly believe that in a very short time the worst kind of violence would break out. War would erupt, killings would burst forth, hatred and violence would flare up in every corner of the world. The demonic rage lurking just beneath the surface would be unrestrained. The enemies of the Light would burst from their secret lairs and wreak havoc on the world. Chaos, anarchy and the dark forces of hell itself would be unleashed.

Why is there a shortage of priests?

Because this understanding of the priesthood has been forgotten. The Catholic priest has become just another social worker–a counselor — a feminized neuter in society — an ineffectual twit – a Mr. Bean who seems worthless and whose real role and identity cannot be understood by the worldlings.

Even this seeming foolishness of the priesthood in society’s eyes is part of God’s secret plan, for in today’s Mass reading for St John of the Cross we hear St Paul proclaim like some saintly Don Quixote on a hopeless quest, “We preach Christ crucified! Foolishness to the Greeks and a stumbling block to the Jews…for the foolishness of God is wiser than the wisdom of men!”

If you believe this to be true as I do–if you believe that it is only the Mass and Christ present there which keeps our fragile world from falling into chaos and darkness, then support your priests. 
Give them a break. Love them and pray for them. Share these truths with your sons and grandsons and pray for them to be priests.
By Fr. Dwight Longenecker

Feast of the Immaculate Conception

*** Blessed be our glorious Triune God .. in His goodness and mercy, He has given us our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ to redeem us through one of our own ... our Blessed Immaculate Mother, Mary .... the very first TABERNACLE! ***

  Today the Church celebrates the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, the solemn dogma defined by Blessed Pope Pius IX in 1854. As Our Lady Immaculately Conceived is the patroness of the United States of America, this is a holy day of obligation in the United States.

Through the centuries the Church has become ever more aware that Mary, "full of grace" through God, was redeemed from the moment of her conception. That is what the dogma of the Immaculate Conception confesses, as Blessed Pope Pius IX proclaimed on December 8, 1854: "The most Blessed Virgin Mary was, from the first moment of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege of almighty God and by virtue of the merits of Jesus Christ, Savior of the human race, preserved immune from all stain of original sin." — Catechism of the Catholic Church

---

Daily Readings for: December 08, 2012

Collect: O God, who by the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin prepared a worthy dwelling for your Son, grant, we pray, that, as you preserved her from every stain by virtue of the Death of your Son, which you foresaw, so, through her intercession, we, too, may be cleansed and admitted to your presence. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

Immaculate Conception of Mary
"Hail Mary, full of grace". For thousands of centuries, millions of times per day the Virgin Mary is greeted by the faithful with the greeting of the Archangel, that we hear resonating anew in today’s Gospel. The sons of the Church learn from the words of the Archangel Gabriel that the fullness of the mystery of God’s grace was realized in Holy Mary. St Paul the Apostle teaches us that the Father made all fullness dwell in His Incarnate Son (c.f. Col 1:12-20), which overflows from Christ’s head and spills out on His Mystical Body that is the Church. Before descending in Body, Christ’s fullness was spread in a unique and unrepeatable way on Mary, predestined from eternity to be the Mother of God.
Significantly in the first reading, the liturgy recalls the figure of Eve, the mother of all the living. The Fathers of the Church saw in Mary, the new Eve that unties the knot bound by the first woman. The knot of disobedience tied by Eve, was untied by the obedience of Mary. As Eve was created in purity and integrity, also the new Eve was miraculously preserved from the contamination of original sin because she had to give humanity the Word, who was incarnated for our ransom.
Saint Irenaeus compares the virginity of the pure earth from which Adam was drawn to the virginity of the immaculate humanity of Mary from which the Second Adam was drawn. ‘And as the protoplast himself, Adam, had his substance from untilled and as yet virgin soil (for God had not yet sent rain, and man had not tilled the ground (Genesis 2:5)) so did He who is the Word, recapitulating Adam in Himself, rightly receive a birth, enabling Him to gather up Adam [into Himself], from Mary, who was as yet a virgin’ (Adversus hereses III, 21:10).
Blessed Pope Pius IX on the 8th of December 1854 proclaimed the Dogma of the faith revealed by God that the Blessed Virgin Mary "in the first instant of her conception, by a singular privilege and grace granted by God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Savior of the human race, was preserved exempt from all stain of original sin" (Denz.-Schonm, 2083). If the official proclamation of the dogma is relatively recent, the profession of faith by Christians and the liturgy is very ancient in this regard. Furthermore, four years later the same Virgin Mary, appearing in Lourdes to St Bernadette, confirmed the truth of the doctrine by presenting herself with the title ‘I am the Immaculate Conception’.
Mary’s predestination to this singular grace—consistent with the suspension of the universal decree by which every man, from the moment of his conception is contaminated with original sin—leads us to ponder in the deepest depths the mystery of the Most Holy Trinity’s salvific plan. God, One and Triune, had foreseen from the very beginning the future incarnation of the Word culminating in the redemption of human nature that had fallen into sin. He therefore predestined pure Mary, so that He could draw from her uncontaminated humanity, which the Son could adopt in order to re-establish in Himself the original purity of creation and reorientate it to eternal glory.
For this reason, in the second reading of today’s liturgy, St Paul reminds us that God wants to see us holy and immaculate before Him. The purity of our origins seemed to be irredeemably lost. However, in Immaculate Mary, God found the perfect solution to reverse the disaster made from the misuse of our liberty, and returned humanity to the original purity that seemed hopelessly lost.
Mary’s Immaculate Conception is a direct consequence of her Divine Maternity. St Anslem of Aosta wrote: ‘Assuredly, it was fitting that the Virgin be beautified with a purity than which a greater cannot be conceived, except for God's. For, toward her, God the Father was so disposed to give His only Son who was naturally one and the same common Son of God the Father and of the Virgin.’ (De conceptu virginali et originali peccato, XVIII)
This link between the privilege of Divine Maternity and Mary’s Immaculate Conception results also in her superiority with respect to us. She is a perfect image of the Church in heaven, the new triumphant Jerusalem, that won’t have any marks nor will there be pain and death. This is why today’s preface recites: '…she was to be a worthy mother of your Son, your sign of favor to the church at its beginning, and the promise of its perfection as the bride of Christ, radiant in beauty’. Also in heaven Mary is not and will never be only a disciple, but her Son’s most exalted. She is and will always be the Mother of God, the Mother of the Church, the Queen of the Angels and Saints. Therefore, the preface of the Mass adds: ‘…You chose her from all creatures to be our advocate with you and our pattern of holiness.’
Mary was Immaculate because she had to be the Mother of God. She, herself has received the original grace of purity and the final state of the blessed life that we also, by collaborating with Divine Grace, hope one day to receive.
Immaculate Mary is full of grace. She is not only Christ’s disciple, who with the help of grace has overcome the chains of sin, but she is totius Trinitatis nobile triclinium, the noble resting place of the Holy Trinity (St Thomas Aquinas, Exposito Salutationis Angelicae, I). The Immaculate, full of grace, will always be Mother and Queen for that elect part of the Church that we hope one day to join, that will one day joyfully sing before the Almighty.