Living in the (Increasingly Narcissistic) World

Here is an interesting reflection for Catholics who take their salvation seriously. It makes for an interesting examen....

Casting Out the Demons

CARYLL HOUSELANDER

The devil knows that the soul whose heart is fixed on God is lost to hell, so he must drag the gaze back from God to self.

But when it comes to someone who has arrived at some measure of strongly conscious spirituality, who has proved a willingness to suffer for God and his truth, the devil must find subtler ways: he must find something which resembles God in this — that it is always present.

What could be better than self? — and what more certain to imprison and ultimately obsess a sensitive soul than awareness of something wrong with self?

Somehow or other the soul must be made to strive to attain a certain level of holiness, a certain peace or at least untroubledness, before abandoning itself to God. It will be held back by this, prevented from seeing more and more the beauty of God. The devil knows that the soul whose heart is fixed on God is lost to hell, so he must drag the gaze back from God to self. He whispers, through a clergyman or friend, or just your own prompting: "You are doing wrong. Of course you have no peace; you are putting your peace of soul before the happiness of better souls, anyway" — and so on and so on. If you listen, you half agree; you begin again to examine your motives; you let conflict and anxiety rage in you — which is in itself exhausting. A vicious circle begins: you are too tired to pray; you think all consolation has been taken from you, aridity sets in....

I feel sure that the treatment is to ignore the suggestions. Even ignore your own soul: keep your mind on God, on his love....

Do not wait until you feel not uneasy; do not wait to be doing a more prayerful act; do not wait to feel more unity and completeness: offer yourself, your will to do right, your anxiety about not doing it, your being interrupted just now, the act of taking So-and-so's temperature — all, just as it is, to God. Leave it to God to transform all this into himself. It's all you've got, and he gave it to you.

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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'

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.

Blogging Disciples!

To promote a book I spent years in writing , I began this blog. I am a baby boomer who knows all too little about blogging and the latest techie stuff. As I was perusing various Catholic blog sites, I noticed a post by Fr. Longenecker entitled, "The Smoke of Satan." If one troubles oneself to read Fr.'s quite accurate assessment, and becomes interested in just exactly how, according to the Pope who coined the phrase "Smoke of Satan" the Devil made his entrance into the post-Vatican II Church in the U.S., then my book is just what the Savior may have ordered, so why don't you!?

Pope Francis blasts “gender” ideology, quotes Benedict XVI: “this is the age of sin against the Creator!”

Here is an excerpt. From Vatican Insider : “In Europe, America, Latin America, Africa and some Asian countries we are seeing some real ideological colonisations,” he repeated. “And one of these, I’m going to say it outright, is gender ”: “Today, children, children! are told at school that they can choose their sex. Why are they taught this? Because the books are supplied by the people and institutions that give you the money. These are the ideological colonisations backed also by countries that wield a great deal of influence. And this is terrible. Speaking with Benedict XVI ,” he said, “who is well and lucid, he told me: ‘ Holiness, this is the age of sin against the Creator! ’ He is intelligent! God created man and woman; God made the world like this, like this, like this… and we are doing the exact opposite. ” Watch video:

About the Author II

In the years prior to the Second Vatican Council, I also remember attending daily Mass before elementary school, which, because we had fasted for three hours, allowed us to eat breakfast in Mr. Sullivan’s math class. I remember bellowing out Tantum Ergo at Wednesday Evening Benediction, which I was in the habit of attending with my Mom, siblings and “Gramp,” (her Dad, John). I also remember looking forward to participating in the praying of that most sublime form of prayer, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, with my St. Joseph’s Daily Missal. With Pope Benedict’s having granted permission for priests to offer the Extraordinary form of the Roman Rite, we hear much ado in the form of reaction against this from Catholic “progressives,” and about how the Council placed a new emphasis on the laity’s participation at Mass, the implication being that Catholics did not actively participate at Mass prior to Vatican II, opting for such devotions as the praying of the Rosary or Holy Car...

Bishops Bishoping!

As the nation’s courts increasingly strike down popularly-supported state bans on marriage between men who have sex with men, and women who have sex with women, bishops increasingly are “bishoping”, to coin a term I use often in my book; i.e., they are at long last defending the faith against the onslaught always sure to come from the secular culture. Diocesan Catholic schools in Cincinnati and Oakland, Calif., are weathering criticism for contracts that require teachers not only to witness to the faith in the classroom, but also in how they live their lives in the public square. Condemnation of Catholic-school contracts that ask teachers to not controvert the Church in public have received dramatized coverage from the secular media in California and Ohio, where a slight number of teachers are opposing the contractual language. A a teacher in a Catholic school it is heartening to see the dioceses in question standing their ground, emphasizing the dynamic role teachers ...

Progressive Catholics? Catholic Right Catholics? Whaddup?

But I, brethren, could not address you as spiritual men, but as men of the flesh, as babes in Christ. I fed you with milk, not solid food; for you were not ready for it; and even yet you are not ready, for you are still of the flesh. For while there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not of the flesh, and behaving like ordinary men? For when one says, "I belong to Paul," and another, "I belong to Apollos," are you not merely men? -1 Corinthians 3: 1-4 During the cou...

Have Nothing To Do With the Dragon!

In Chapter three, I wrote the following: "If one is worldly and hedonistic, Satan enters with temptations of the flesh. One hears often that the “liberation” of the human libido began in earnest in the United States in the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s. Americans, troubled over repressive attitudes toward human sexuality, hoped for a revolution that would free them from outdated moral and social constraints. The ensuing revolution resulted not in liberation but in license and a host of societal sexual crises. One has only to think of the tremendous increase in the number of post-1960s illegitimate births and abortions, sexually transmitted diseases, opposition to censorship of pornography (especially on the Internet), and the resulting sexual addiction (in some extreme instances resulting in murder). Consider too the tremendous blows to marriage and the family done by adultery, the battle over the homosexual lifestyle in the United States, Canada and Europe (now to the poi...

From the WAPO Compost

Benedict XVI once wrote on the Parable of the Sower and the Seed: “When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what is sown in his heart; this is what was sown along the path.” Our Lord reminds us here that His teaching on the Kingdom of God in its fullness remains fruitless for those who see the Kingdom as merely an earthly kingdom, having rejected its supernatural dimension. This seed bears no fruit, and its fate is the spiritual fate of the hearer. What the Sisters of Notre Dame DeNamur taught me in my formative years was that there was more to my existence than things temporal, challenging me to work toward holiness and the salvation of my soul Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam that I might enjoy happiness with Him forever. Here is the lastest example of furuitlessness: Outlook Perspective Evangelicals and Catholics made their peace. Catholics are paying the price. Some have begun to realize they tra...

From: The Smoke of Satan in the Temple of God

Lumen Gentium instructed that religious are to live out the counsels in community to a greater degree in service to the Church (living for God alone), and in doing so model for the laity what grace can accomplish. Reflecting upon why God made us, which is to share in His life forever, religious are only too happy to be a road sign for the rest of humanity pointing the best way to love of neighbor. Paul VI, expanding on Lumen Gentium , alluded to this in Evangelica Testificatio , his Apostolic Exhortation of June, 1971: It is precisely for the sake of the kingdom of heaven that you have vowed to Christ, generously and without reservation, that capacity to love, that need to possess and that freedom to regulate one's own life, which are so precious to man. Such is your consecration, made within the Church and through her ministry—both that of her representatives who receive your profession and that of the Christian community itself, whose love recognizes, welcomes, sustains ...

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