Being Catholic is ALWAYS Fun

“Five years ago, I would have been afraid of saying anything like what the pope said in his [recent] interview,” the Rev. Tom Reese told Sally Quin . “I’m ecstatic. I haven’t been this hopeful about the church in decades....” “It’s fun to be a religion reporter again. For a while it felt like being on the crime beat. It’s fun to be Catholic again.” George Weigel has raised the question of whether or not Fr. Tom has been paying attention throughout the last quarter of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st. Among his findings on the legacies of Pope Francis' predecessors:

Fr. Thomas Reese, S.J.

millions of adults have been baptized as or entered into full communion with the Catholic Church.
new forms of campus ministry in the mold of JPII's "New Evangelization" have developed across the United States.
Catholic-studies programs have bloomed on genuinely Catholic campuses across the U.S.
the Church has produced the most compelling televisual tool for the New Evangelization available in the world: Father Robert Barron’s Catholicism series.
Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia Congregation (Nashville) built a new novitiate to house candidates for their growing community of religious sisters.
The Pontifical North American College, the U.S. Church’s seminary in Rome, has more students than at any time since the mid-1960s.
Mt. St. Mary’s Seminary in Emmitsburg, Md., is full; Mundelein Seminary in Chicago is now increasing, due to the leadership of the Father Barron, and is founding new models of training in evangelization and defense of the Faith.
the Conference of Major Superiors of Women Religious has been formed to help support the work of the orders of religious sisters that are actually attracting young women.
Bishops of the United States are challenging the United States government’s efforts to chip away at religious freedom — to the benefit of all Americans, and these U.S. bishops are increasingly about to “put out into the deep” of the New Evangelization of Pope St. John Paul II.
The liturgical inane season has nearly ended, as the reform of the reform of the liturgy according to the Second Vatican Council has been accelerated, though much remains to be done.
Catholic-sponsored crisis-pregnancies centers have served tens of thousands of women in crisis pregnancies and their children.
And so on....

For dear Fr. Tom to say that he is “ecstatic” and more “hopeful” about the Church than he has been “in decades” because of Pope Francis' America interview is tantamount in my view to being guilty of inattention to what has been happening in the Catholic Church in the United States. Perhaps Fr. has accepted the stereotyping of Catholics that is one of the last acceptable prejudices in America, supposedly triggered by John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Certainly in his time as editor of the Jesuit magazine America Fr. Tom has given no evidence of being a happy warrior in the culture wars, preferring to ape a Chamberlainesque negotiation with the culture, ceding territory repeatedly. Possessing these attitudes would hardly make for genuine happiness….

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Are We in a War?

Power Line POSTED ON NOVEMBER 22, 2020 BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN DEMOCRATS , LIBERALS , SOCIALISM FIGHTING WORDS, BY DAVID HOROWITZ Our friend David Horowitz wrote this essay, which he titled “Fighting Words.” It is a call for freedom-loving Americans to fight back against the totalitarian Left. By now it should be obvious – even to conservatives – that we are in a war. It is a conflict that began nearly fifty years ago when the street revolutionaries of the Sixties joined the Democrat Party. Their immediate goal was to help the Communist enemy win the war in Vietnam, but they stayed to expand their influence in the Democrat Party and create the radical force that confronts us today. The war that today’s Democrats are engaged in reflects the values and methods of those radicals. It is a war against us – against individual freedom, against America’s constitutional order, and against the capitalist engine of our prosperity. Democrat radi...

VATICAN III?

New York Times best-selling author and Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist Regina Brett has issued a call for Vatican III . She says the Church needs true renewal. I agree that She does need true renewal, the best explanation of which is set down in Vatican II's call to personal holiness, yet to be acknowledged by a majority of Catholics in the U.S. at present (hence the Year of Faith!). Brett writes: " Instead of renewing our faith by returning to the fundamentals of church teachings, why not open our minds to a new church? It's been 50 years since Vatican II renewed the church and helped it face the modern world. The world has only gotten more modern. The Catholic Church hasn't." Just how will this produce true renewal? The New Evangelization is about true renewal, and the first step toward personal holiness. She also recites the familiar " God speaks, not only through popes, bishops and priests, but through ordinary p...

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'

Libido Redux Explained

When I read for the first time Pope Paul VI's 1972 “Smoke of Satan” homily, I was intrigued by his reference to the human sex drive as one way Satan can seek the ruin of souls. The sexual decadence of popular culture—in music, television, and videos—is only the most obvious manifestation. But let us consider from the standpoint of Catholic moral teaching the evils of fornication, adultery, cohabitation, divorce, bearing children outside wedlock and homosexual sex. Controlling these sins, living chastely, is a basic Catholic moral value. But I blog on these because, even as the social and economic results from these practices becomes ever more obvious and serious, priests and laity seem determined to ignore talking of them. No parish today seems willing to admonish or rebuke someone because of sexual misconduct, this in spite of the reality that it is precisely these sins that are wreaking havoc throughout society. Just what are social consequences of uncontrolled libido? For...

Out of the Mouths of babes and Sucklings...

...Thou has effected praise! Click here should your faith have gone behind a cloud of late.

On the Spirit of the Liturgy

Defending the papacy of Benedict XVI vs . the New York Times (!), Randall B. Smith has written : Like his predecessor before him, Benedict effectively carried on the authentic reforms of the Second Vatican Council, as opposed to the false “reforms” that so often led the Church astray in the post-conciliar period. A cardinal archbishop told an audience recently that the liturgy was so abused in the early seventies when he was in seminary that the faithful seminarians would say about the ersatz masses being done by their elders: “Everything in them changes but the bread and wine.” Benedict, by contrast, did a great deal to help realize the original intentions of the liturgical reformers. Given that the lex orandi (the law of praying) is intimately intertwined with the lex credendi (the law of believing)—which is another way of saying that what we pray is what we believe—reforming the liturgy has always been an absolutely essential way of helping...

Novus Motus Liturgicus

From The Smoke of Satan in the Temple of God: In 1959, Pope John XXIII saw a true need for liturgical renewal within the Roman Rite in accordance with the metaphorical principle of organic development, the aim of the Liturgical Movement endorsed by Pope St. Pius X. In authentic organic development, the Church listens to what liturgical scholars deem necessary for the gradual improvement of liturgical tradition, and evaluate the need for such development, always with a careful eye on the preservation of the received liturgical tradition handed down from century to century. In this way, continuity of belief and liturgical practice is ensured. As Cardinal Ratzinger wrote at the time, the principle of organic development ensures that in the Mass, “only respect for the Liturgy’s fundamental unspontaneity and pre-existing identity can give us what we hope for: the feast in which the great reality comes to us that we ourselves do not manufacture , but receive as a gift. Organic de...

Dancing With Mr. D: Grooming the Little Children

A former pro-transgender activist said she regretted her previous work in pro-transgender activism, adding she felt she was "indoctrinated" on gender ideology in an interview with Fox News Digital. "I started to realize that what I had been doing at my job at the LGBT Center, it was grooming," Kay Yang, a former employee of a location in New York, said. Grooming in this context means "to get into readiness for a specific objective." Kay works as a 'deprogrammer' to help parents and children who have been 'indoctrinated' by the 'cult-like' transgender agenda. Yang herself previously went by they/them and worked as a 'trans educator' in schools for years. Listen to her testimony.

A Book for all Seasons

Decades as a Christian leader — most notably at the U.N. as president of the Center for Family & Human Rights — have earned writer Austin Ruse, once a Washington liberal with little faith, his share of defeats and triumphs. Perhaps most valuably, he has intuited keen tactical insights from his confrontations with the dark side of human nature. You come away from this groundbreaking book with the sense that Ruse knows the enemy better than the enemy knows himself. In Under Seige, Ruse carefully examines how the anti-Christian forces gained power over every elite institution in America. He exposes their most deviant plans for the future. He then issues his authoritative call to arms, brilliantly arguing that there is no finer time to be a faithful Catholic. God Himself called each of us to live in this time and place, to contribute to the renewal society and the Church, and to vanquish the enemies of civilization. Ruse argues that each of us is called specifically to th...

"The Spirit of Vatican II"

My advice to one confronted with doubt sown by those who make reference to “correct interpretations of Vatican II” is to reflect closely upon the words of John Paul II: With the Council, the Church first had an experience of faith, as she abandoned herself to God without reserve, as one who trusts and is certain of being loved. It is precisely this act of abandonment to God which stands out from an objective examination of the Acts. Anyone who wished to approach the Council without considering this interpretive key would be unable to penetrate its depths. Only from a faith perspective can we see the Council event as a gift whose still hidden wealth we must know how to mine . In short, it is this abandonment, this interpretive faith perspective that is woefully lacking in many who would offer to explain what the Council taught in “the spirit of Vatican II.” Watch here to see what abandonment looks like!

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