Angels High and Low

The Catholic faith holds that God created an angelic world, composed of beings that are pure spirits. At Christmas we sing that we have heard their song on high. Some remained faithful to God and reached their heavenly destiny, while others, though gifted with divine grace, lost it and were thereby condemned to eternal punishment. It is part of God's providence to have the heavenly angels minister our needs and assist us in reaching heaven. It is also part of divine permissive providence to allow the fallen angels to try and tempt us into sin in order to keep us from heaven. Thus, though it is often ignored, the Church does teach that there exists a dark kingdom, employing the same intelligence and power as have the heavenly angels, to prevent the spread of God’s kingdom, get more recruits, and unite the powers of evil in the world. It has been said: we are as ants to them (Good news: demons are as ants to Christ).

Indeed, in Luke’s gospel Satan declares that power over the kingdoms of the world have been delivered to him. He offers Jesus a share in this power, if Jesus would worship him. Jesus dodges the temptation, but does not deny Satan’s claim of power. Thus the spiritual landscape we are faced with these days includes extraordinarily intelligent, gifted, influential and murderous demons proficient in outwitting all the powers of “the other side.”

In my book I recounted the story of Pope Leo XIII’s account of a vision of Satan, which gave rise to use of the St. Michael prayer following Mass prior to Vatican II. Popes yet to come also discerned diabolical opposition—one thinks of Pope Paul VI’s warning about the “smoke of Satan” in the Church, and Pope Francis’ recent remarks ascribing thepersecution of Christians to the devil, and exhorting “Let us renounce Satan and all his works and seductions because he is a seducer.” Think of those times you have renewed your baptismal promises:

V. Do you renounce Satan? R. I do.

V. And all his works? R. I do.

V. And all his empty promises? R. I do.

Perhaps the greatest advantages in his plan for subverting the Church is the experience he has had with Christians for two thousand years. Theologians posit that He probably doesn't know whether most individuals who have died are in heaven or purgatory, but has very accurate knowledge of all those human souls who have joined his forces in hell, as well as what things brought him or her to this final destiny. Tempting people to murder and steal and lie would be on his agenda. But, as I recount in my third chapter, sex may take first place here—i.e., fornication, adultery, sodomy, pornography/sex addiction, the sex trade and the abortions triggered by those seeking to avoid the consequences of sex, or the use of abortifacients for purposes of “safe sex,” all efforts to reduce procreation so as to block God’s plan, outrageous sins against God Himself.

The dissent that followed Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical Humanae vitae on contraception was the point of departure for widespread dismissal of papal authority in matters of faith and morals. Today we do not hear priests preaching about Catholic teaching on contraception, divorce, sodomy, etc. offering the excuse that to do so would keep some in their congregation from entering their doors again. Does silence from the pulpit in the hope of not giving offense reduce evil in the world? (to be continued...)

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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.

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'

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...

Oremus

Catholic World News - October 23, 2015 The Synod of Bishops spent Friday, October 23, discussing a proposed final statement, which will come up for a vote, paragraph by paragraph, on Saturday. The statement was presented to the bishops on Thursday evening, with Cardinal Peter Erdo, the relator general of the Synod, introducing the text. Because the statement was available only in Italian, some Synod participant were unable to read it, and there was an angry outcry when they were told-- by Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri, the secretary-general of the Synod-- that no copies of the sensitive document could be taken out of the Synod Hall. Eventually Cardinal Baldiserri relented, and allowed bishops to take the text home, but insisted that they could not show the document to outside translators. For a summary:

The Body of Christ and the City of Men

The “Statement of Principles” issued by select Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives on June 18, disapproving of Bishops in the United States for allegedly “politicizing the Eucharist” is an example of deceitful equivocation. Essentially, the Statement maintains that the Bishops should not “politicize” the Eucharist. On this the insight of Flannery O’Connor proves enlightening: Those whose lives are not ordered by, around, and toward the Eucharist, therefore, are those whose lives are defined by some love other than love of the Christ who is present there. Rather, their lives are ordered by the earthly city, manifest in this case, by, variously, partisan political identity or individual, radially sovereign conscience. This applies across the American political spectrum, to those who deny human dignity of the unborn, the immigrant, and the person on death row. In Catholic teaching the Eucharist creates St. Augustine’s City of God, the definit...

Enlightenment thinking and "the Spirit of Vatican II"

Present in an analysis of the Enlightenment are the three themes which played an integral part in the disintegration of the liturgy: the denial of the transcendent, the resulting apostasy, and the exaltation of the community. That the movement was hostile to revealed Christianity is beyond debate. At bottom, the Enlightenment was hostile to Christian revelation for its teaching that salvation comes through Jesus Christ alone. In its stead, the Philosophes substituted a rational religion which emphasized the universal moral law shared by all men by virtue of their reason, not what they regarded as the untrustworthy historicity of the life message of Jesus. They saw this rational religion as a refining of, not a repudiation of Christian moral teaching. For example, the Mass, which celebrates the revelation that Christ’s sacrificial death reconciles us to the Father and each other, making present to the believer the same sacrifice of the Cross, was reduced to the mere celebration ...

Bishop Barron on Martin Luther

Bishop Robert Barron, in his June 13 article titled "Looking at Luther With Fresh Eyes," describes Martin Luther as "a mystic of grace, someone who had fallen completely in love." Fr. describes Luther as the "undisputed father of the Reformation" and as "cantankerous, pious, very funny, shockingly anti-Semitic, deeply insightful and utterly exasperating." While admiring of Luther, Fr. adds: "I disagree with lots and lots of his ideas," without clarifications. Barron summarizes: "For at the core of Luther's life and theology was an overwhelming experience of grace. After years of trying in vain to please God through heroic moral and spiritual effort, Luther realized that, despite his unworthiness, he was loved by a God who had died to save him," adding, "Luther was an ecstatic, and the religious movement he launched [Protestantism] was 'a love affair.'" Was Dr. Luther in love with God...

Libido Redux: The Pill Circa 2014

If I were a female, and I am not, but if I were, and were Catholic, I would take seriously this read concerning what happens when the rights of God are violated. I have written of these violations before, here . Let us pray that this snare of the prince of this world may not celebrate the 60th birthday of "the pill."

On the Contemporary U.S. Scene

M ichael Flynn made a lot of enemies inside the government during his career. When he exposed himself as vulnerable these pounced. How?? Anonymous and possibly illegal leaks of private conversations with a foreign national. Now, we aren't supposed to spy on Americans without probable cause, nor disclose the results of our spying in the pages of the Washington Post because it suits a partisan or personal agenda (overturning the results of an election). Current and former national security officials used their position, their sources, and their methods to destroy a political enemy. Why aren’t all Americans upset by this? Mr. Flynn is not the only recent occurrence of such. The New York Times reports that civil servants at the EPA lobbied Congress to reject Donald Trump's nominee to run the agency because Pruitt was critical of the way the EPA was run during the Obama years. Traditionally, civil servants follow the direction of the political ap...

Be Not Lukewarm

Is it possible that Church leaders and Catholic institutions in the U.S. are assisting the furtherance of central tenets of the secularist political and cultural plot? Have you ever read of a prominent Catholic who contends that the Bible instructs us not to judge people ? How often have you heard this phrase in the social media? I think there is the phenomena of an unsuspecting acceptance in some Catholic circles of a secularist understanding of important cultural issues. If a Catholic supports the notion that men who have sex with men, or women who have sex with women “come out,” he or she assists the Gay agenda in achieving its dream of getting an imprimatur from society for grave sin. Many Catholics, woefully ignorant of Catholic moral teaching, by default seem to be accepting of secularist identity politics and the groundless idea that same-sex attraction is innate, and the defining characteristic for those aggrieved by it. Often such Catholics cite the homosexual pries...

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