Because Rope Sales are up...

In light (or dark?) of the Fifty Shades of Grey bewilderment, I think it time catechesis on the dignity of women be emphasized every chance one gets. Alexandra Richards reminds us that women are a threat to his mission of the destruction of souls. But not if they are his property. The following warrants prayerful thought:

To Women: Be What God Made You

You don’t need to read Genesis to see that God created men and He created women, but have you ever asked yourself why he created you a woman and not a man?

We live in a time where gender is as interchangeable as ketchup and mustard, where men dress up as women and women dress up as men. We are having an identity crisis, and it’s time to find out why God created you the way He did.
God created your feminine heart to give and to receive true love. Yet, why is your heart is daily torn apart by a culture that is blinded to your indispensable dignity? We need only look at how the contraceptive industry not only destroys the body of a woman but also how it shreds her heart.

Was there ever a time when women were not the target of abuse, pain and lies? Was there ever a time when women were not ‘its,’ mere means to an end, something replaceable not someone irreplaceable?
Our story begins in the Garden of Eden, where lustful deceit did not exist and the only language spoken was the language of Love Himself.
Recall the story in your mind. Satan goes to Eve not Adam. Notice how woman has been the special target of the devil since the very beginning of Creation. Satan wants to bring the downfall of Eve out of his prideful jealousy. Eve mirrors God’s creative beauty. Eve is not only more beautiful than Lucifer, but she also has the power to give life. Lucifer certainly hates you and all women, especially since it was through a woman that the Savior was born. To Satan, women are a threat to his life-destroying mission.
I think it is safe to say that Satan is overjoyed with our Culture of Death. Women have eaten up his life-sucking lies since the very first bite of the apple. Look at how women see pregnancy: a disease that should be avoided by any and all means. Women feed into this Culture of Death and settle for false loverather than true love for the sake of this culture’s approval.

Our present identity crisis takes root in the Garden of Eden. In the garden, Eve invited Adam to his death rather than to greater life. However, Adam, who stood next to Eve, is not off the hook. In the garden, Adam, instead of taking on his protective role, passively allowed Eve to bring both of them into to shame rather than glory.
In the story of the Fall we learn that when women and men stop being who they are supposed to be they stop speaking the language of Love Himself, God. Adam and Eve took God out of the center of their relationship, and it was then that they knew they were naked and felt shame. It was then that they were exiled from paradise. We, too, fall in our daily life when we take Love Himself out of the way and replace Him with the lesser counterfeit.
Women, we are created to give and receive true love. Lust, whether we are its object or its willing cause, always destroys our heart. It is like putting the wrong gasoline in your car. It might run for a few hundred miles, but it will most certainly break down in the middle of your trip. Remember this: lust seeks to take, while love seeks to give. Lust is selfish, while love is self-less. Lust is an uncontrolled desire, while love is a controlled decision.
God, out of Love, sent His only Son to redeem our womanhood. I challenge you to start placing God at the center of all your relationships so that only Love Himself will be embraced as the only true and worthy language spoken between men and women.
“[...] Male and female He created them [...] and it was very good” (Genesis 1:27,31)

Alexandra Richards is a long-time Atlanta resident and a senior at at Holy Spirit College. Her major is philosophy and her particular interests include ethics, phenomenology, and classical metaphysics. Alexandra actively participates in several ministries and outreaches within the Archdiocese of Atlanta, where she teaches numerous catechetical subjects, especially Theology of the Body.

Comments

This video of a young boy twerking at Pride has homophobes outraged | Gay Star News

DANCING WITH MR. D: This video of a young boy twerking at Pride has homophobes outraged | Gay Star News : 'via Blog this'

On the Smoke of Modernism

A S is well known to all but those who choose not to see, the broken or irregular home has gone from being the exception to the rule. The family is the building block upon which all secular and Christian civilization is built. Marriage is a divine and natural institution perfectly portrayed by Christ the bridegroom and His Church, the bride. Though the world has been trying to change both, we find ourselves with a gap between how the world sees family and marriage and what the Church knows about them. The Fourteenth General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops took place from October 4 to October 25, 2015, in Vatican City. While it is inspiring that the Church fathers are attempting to develop pastoral solutions to the overwhelming problems we face as a global society concerning marriage and family, it is rewarding to know the roots of the problems that we face. If we untangle the modernism on both topics we will discover that the problem lies in the contraceptive mindset. ...

On Marriage

Marriage comes to us from nature. In Catholic teaching Jesus sanctifies marriage as a sacrament for the baptized, giving it significance beyond its natural reality. Traditionally the state has safeguarded marriage because it is indispensable to family and thus to the common good of society. But neither Church nor State instituted marriage, and neither can change its nature. God created two mutually complementary sexes, able to transmit life through marital union. Consummated sexual intercourse between a man and a woman is ideally based on mutual love and must always be based on mutual consent, if they are genuinely human actions. No matter how strong a friendship or deep a love between persons of the same sex might be, it is physically impossible for two men, or two women, to consummate a marital union. (In civil law, non-consummation of a marriage constitutes grounds for annulment). It is easy to see that sexual intercourse between a man and a w...

Our Lord Refuses to Dance With Mr. D

During his weekly Angelus address on Sunday, Pope Francis spoke about the day’s Gospel reading, which focused on the temptation of Jesus in the desert. Satan, the Pope said, tried “to divert Jesus from the Father’s plan” by tempting Him “to take an easy path,” a path “of success and power.” Jesus definitively rejects these temptations, reaffirming His “firm intention to follow the path established by the Father, without any compromise with sin or with the logic of the world.” This commitment to follow the plan of the Father is realized in Jesus actions; “His absolute fidelity to the Father's plan of love will lead Him, after about three years, to the final confrontation with the “prince of this world” (Jn 16:11), in the hour of the Passion and of the Cross, and there Jesus will achieve His final victory, the victory of love!” The Holy Father encouraged all of us to take the opportunity afforded by Lent to renew our Baptismal promises, renouncing Satan and his seductions, “i...

Signs of These Times, or "Life Under the Relativist Dictatorship"

While reading Ralph Martin’s A Church in Crisis I encontered an endnote reference to a blog post by Fr. Longenecker, which sheds light on the roots of contemporary secular befuddlement: RELATIVISM, IRRATIONAL RAGE AND REVOLUTION One of the most disturbing aspects of the troubles of 2020 has been the confusion and bewilderment caused by so much uncertainty. When it comes to the COVID-19 pandemic every other news report or social media link or comment has been contradictory. “Masks are useless. Everybody must wear a mask! Only sick old people will get this disease. My friend knows a guy in his forties who is an athlete and very fit and he nearly died! You can get it just from touching your groceries. The virus doesn’t transmit that way. The threat is global. Only New York City is being hit. Not us.” We’ve seen the most amazing contradictions over the last week with the massive demonstrations. We’re supposed to observe social distancing, but thousands are encouraged ...

On Prideful, Utopian Thought

( Continued from September 13 ) T he Church believes that we can change. She teachs that all sacraments, but most importantly the Eucharist, can and do change our lives. This belief in the power of the Eucharist is manifest in Thomas Merton, the great twentieth-century Catholic mystic: “the grace of the Eucharist is not confined to the moments of thanksgiving after Mass and communion, but reaches out into our whole day and into all the affairs of our life, in order to sanctify and transform them in Christ.” Change, conversion through the Eucharist does not happen overnight. But the Church believes at her core that Her sacramental life, over time, leads us towards holiness, the call of Vatican II. At the same time, we as Catholics scrap the idea that as a society we will ever arrive at a Morean utopia. To cite only one example, Jesus said: “you always will have the poor with you” (Mark 14:7). Pope Paul VI, about whom I wrote my book, stated in his 1971 en...

A Good Shepherd....

Bottom of Form Indianapolis archbishop revokes Jesuit prep school's Catholic identity 7.4K1313 Top of Form Bottom of Form Indianapolis, Ind., Jun 20, 2019 / 01:49 pm ( CNA ).- The Archdiocese of Indianapolis announced Thursday that a local Jesuit high school will no longer be recognized as a Catholic school, due to a disagreement about the employment of a teacher who attempted to contract a same-sex marriage. “All those who minister in Catholic educational institutions carry out an important ministry in communicating the fullness of Catholic teaching to students both by word and action inside and outside the classroom,” the archdiocese said in a statement Thursday. “In the Archdiocese of Indianapolis, every archdiocesan Catholic school and private Catholic school has been instructed to clearly state in its contracts and ministerial job descriptions that all ministers must convey and be supportive of all teachings of the Catholic Church.” Teachers, the ar...

Divide et Impera

Mr. Patrick Boyden has penned a reflection worth noting. In 2013 I wrote: Lest we forget, there were indeed reform-minded Council Fathers who responded to Pope John’s vision of the Church growing in spiritual riches as a fruit of the Council under the guidance of the Holy Spirit in the hope that the faithful might through grace be aided in turning hearts and minds toward heavenly things. Given what has been said thus far, it should not surprise the reader that many “liberal Catholics” view the pontificate of John Paul II as too “conservative,” and out of touch with the modern world, while the traditionalists view the writings and teachings of the Holy Father as modernist! Thus the schema of “liberal” (progressive, left) vs. conservative (traditional, right) which followed upon the close of Vatican II is wholly inadequate for explaining the present-day crisis of faith within the Church of Jesus Christ, though it is most unfortunate that usage of these terms persist...

Archangels

On Monday’s feast of the archangels, Pope Francis spoke of the ongoing battle between the devil and mankind, encouraging attendees to pray to the angels, who have been charged to defend us. “He presents things as if they were good, but his intention is destruction. And the angels defend us,” the Holy Father told those gathered for his Sept. 29 Mass in the Vatican’s Saint Martha residence. Francis began by pointing to the day’s readings, taken from Daniel Chapter 7, in which the prophet has a vision of God the Father on a throne of fire giving Jesus dominion over the world, and Revelation Chapter 12, which recounts the battle in which Satan, as a large dragon, is cast out of heaven by St. Michael. Noting how these are strong images portraying “the great dragon, the ancient serpent,” who “seduces all of inhabited earth,” the Pope also drew attention to Jesus’ words to the prophet Nathanael in the day’s Gospel from John, when he tells him: “You will see heaven opened and the ange...

Homosexual Marriage

The urgency of the issue of gay marriage at this time and the compelling arguments raised against it here, make this paper an important resource: Answering Advocates of Gay Marriage KATHERINE YOUNG AND PAUL NATHANSON Claim 1 : Marriage is an institution designed to foster the love between two people. Gay people can love each other just as straight people can. Ergo, marriage should be open to gay people. Claim 2 : Not all straight couples have children, but no one argues that their marriages are unacceptable Claim 3 : Some gay couples do have children and therefore need marriage to provide the appropriate context. Claim 4 : Marriage and the family are always changing anyway, so why not allow this change? Claim 5 : Marriage and the family have already changed, so why not acknowledge the reality? Claim 6 : Children would be no worse off with happily married gay parents than they are with unhappily married straight ones. Claim 7 : Given global overpopulation, why w...

Search This Blog