The Smoke of Satan in the Temple of God

Benedict XVI responds to Mother Angelica's death

Vatican City, Mar 28, 2016 / 02:54 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Benedict XVI had a special response to Mother Angelica’s death falling on Easter Sunday: “it’s a gift.”

Archbishop Georg Ganswein, Benedict’s personal secretary, told CNA about the Pope emeritus’ comment March 28.

Mother Angelica, an Ohio-born Poor Clare nun, founded EWTN Global Catholic Network in Alabama in 1981. It has since become the largest religious media network in the world. She passed away March 27, Easter Sunday, at the age of 92.

Her death prompted memorials, eulogies and remembrances from around the world.

In Rome, Monsignor Dario Vigano, prefect of the Secretariat for Communications, pledged that he would pray for the repose of her soul. Many other priests, religious, and laity in Rome are praying for her.

Archbishop Joseph Kurtz of Louisville, president of the U.S. bishops' conference, said Mother Angelica was an “extraordinary woman, devout believer and media pioneer.”

“Mother Angelica reflected the Gospel commission to go forth and make disciples of all nations (Mt 28:19), and like the best evangelists, she used the communications tools of her time to make this happen,” he said March 28. “She displayed a unique capacity for mission and showed the world once again the vital contribution of women religious.”

Archbishop Kurtz praised Mother Angelica’s role in founding EWTN, Our Lady of the Angels Monastery, the Franciscan Missionaries of the Eternal Word, the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament, and the Knights of the Holy Eucharist.

“Her work, begun in the cloister, reached across the globe. She was a convincing sign as to how even the humblest of beginnings can yield abundant fruit.”

Kristina Arriaga, executive director of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, remembered the nun as “a shining example of courage and faith.”

“We mourn her loss, but her legacy lives on in EWTN and in the lives of all those she touched,” Arriaga said.

The Becket Fund is defending EWTN in its legal fight against the federal government’s requirement that its insurance coverage include drugs and procedures that violate Catholic faith and morals, including provision of drugs that can cause abortions. Refusal to comply could result in heavy fines. A U.S. Supreme Court decision in June could impact the fate of Mother Angelica’s network.

Other Catholic bishops reflected on the nun’s life.

“In founding and growing EWTN into a major media resource for the global Church, she achieved things almost everyone thought impossible,” Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia, a past EWTN board member, said March 27. “She will be sorely missed, but she has left us an on-going gift in the men and women who continue the great service of the EWTN apostolate.”

Bishop Robert Barron, an auxiliary of Los Angeles, remembered Mother Angelica as “one of the most significant figures in the post-conciliar Catholic Church in America.” She was “the most watched and most effective Catholic evangelizer of the last fifty years.”

He said that during the 1980s and 90s, some of her critics mocked her as a “crude popularizer,” an “arch-conservative,” and a “culture warrior.”

“And yet while her critics have largely faded away, her impact and influence are uncontestable. Against all odds and expectations, she created an evangelical vehicle without equal in the history of the Catholic Church.”

Bishop Barron praised Mother Angelica for “her trust in God’s providence, her keen sense of the supernatural quality of religion, and her conviction that suffering is of salvific value.” He lauded her emphasis on prayer, liturgy, the sacraments, the saints, Eucharistic Adoration, and spiritual warfare.

“Mother endured tremendous suffering, both physical and psychological, most of her life, and she appreciated these trials as opportunities for spiritual growth,” he said.

The bishop granted that Mother Angelica would have recognized she was not perfect. Sometimes her comments were “insufficiently nuanced and balanced,” while her “hot temper” could lead her to characterize her opponents unfairly.

However, the bishop said Mother Angelica will have “a very honored place” in Catholic history.

Bishop Robert Baker of Birmingham, the diocese where EWTN is headquartered, said Mother Angelica was a pioneer in using the media as a force for good.

“Her greatest gift was her strong reverence for the Lord of the Holy Eucharist and devotion to the Blessed Mother,” he said March 28.

“Mother Angelica has left the Church and world a great legacy through her Eternal Word Television Network and family, which have brought a multitude of people closer to the Lord and his Church,” he continued.

“How providential that her death occurred on Easter Sunday, our celebration of Our Lord’s victory over sin, suffering and death!”

Comments

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.

Libido Redux: A Case of Mistaken Identity

Back in June of this year I wrote about Pope Francis' view of Gender identity : " Gender ideology is demonic!’” said the Holy Father. One thinks of this statement wonders what the New York Times thinks of t his statement by a Pope they admire after running this piece on gender identity . The article tells of how there are not only man and woman, but also other ‘genders;' furthermore: every person can choose his or her gender . Fr. Longenecker stands this on its head: " Well, call me old fashioned, but remember Humanae Vitae? The underlying teaching was a defense of the essentials of human sexuality. Basically “sex is for babies” and if you separate sex from babies all sorts of monstrous things will come about. When sex becomes more about recreation than pro creation people become confused about what sex is for, and if they’re confused about what sex is for, then they soon become confuse...

The 21st Century Must Come Into the Church

Continued from September 14.... T hrough the Church’s teachings, God has also revealed his truth on how humanity can live happily. What is so little understood by Catholics and Christians is that doctrinal revelations that come through the Church come out of God’s very Self. They are not tied to culturally constructed norms! Read Vatican II’s Dei Verbum : “by divine revelation God wished to manifest and communicate both himself and the eternal decrees of his will concerning the salvation of humankind.” Our Lord’s Church derives its basic vision not from mere human speculation, which would be tentative and uncertain, but from God’s own testimony—from a historically given divine revelation. Thus Catholics believe that just as God himself is immutable, so, too, are His teachings as revealed through the Church because they come from him. As I discuss in my book, although the Church does not change its central teachings, we do see the theological principle of “devel...

Pray for Papa Bergoglio

I s the Holy Father being "sifted like wheat" of late? I ask this because he has made some interesting remarks of late, such as: Pastors should not be “putting our noses into the moral life of other people.” Isn't there the requirement that confessors and a pastors priests have some sense of the moral life of those to whom they minister? S econdly, during a question-and-answer session , Francis spoke of a “pastoral cruelty,” such as priests who refuse to baptize the children of young single mothers. “They’re animals,” he said . Most priests are very generous in extending baptism to infants, realizing that they are not responsible for the sins or shortcomings of their parents. Those who do, at times, delay baptism do so for other reasons, such as little evidence for a well-founded hope that the child will be raised in the faith. There are some prudential judgments to be made and pastors are required to make them (see canon 868). ...

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...

Libido Redux: Germain Grisez on Vatican II

Germain Grisez For 30 years, until 2009, Germain Grisez was professor of Christian Ethics at Mount St. Mary’s University in Emmitsburg, Md. He is one of America’s most respected Catholic philosophers. He began his career teaching ethics at Georgetown in 1959. His 1965 book Contraception and the Natural Law was an important part of the debate over contraception, and he assisted Jesuit Father John Ford when Pope Paul VI called on him to serve on the Pontifical Commission for Population, Family and Birthrate prior to the drafting of the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae . Both men's writings provided a counterpoint to those who suggested that birth control was not an intrinsic evil and the choice to use it should left to couples, and were instrumental in research for my chapter on Catholic sexual moral teaching. His magnum opus , The Way of the Lord Jesus Christ , can be found both online and in print . He recently discussed the Second Va...

What God Hath Joined Together...

A recent 2016 study of suicide risk from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows a 24% increase in suicides in the United States over the 15-year period between 1999 and 2014, including a tripling of the suicide rate for females 10-14, this in a culture that posits that all family structures are the same. Research on the children of divorce provides overwhelming evidence to disprove the myth that divorce does not harm children. In fact, the divorce epidemic has contributed to the serious and growing psychopathology in American youth. One example is the 2010 study of American adolescent psychopathology published in 2010: 49 percent of the 10,000 teenagers studied met the criteria for one psychiatric disorder and 40 percent met the criteria for two disorders. Research by Penn State sociologist Paul Amato (2005) on the long-term damage to children from divorce demonstrated that, if the United States enjoyed the same level of famil...

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'

Who is Behind the Church That Never was?

At the close of Vatican II, Pope Paul VI remarked that Christianity, the religion of God-Incarnate, had encountered the religion of man-made God. He was of the opinion that much of the Council was given over to demonstrating the compatibility of Enlightenment belief with Catholicism. 4 Several years hence, on June 29, 1972, Paul delivered another assessment of the state of the Roman Catholic Church since the close of Vatican II. As Cardinal Silvio Oddi recalled it (in an article first published on March 17, 1990, in Il Sabato magazine in Rome) the Holy Father told a congregation: We have the impression that through some cracks in the wall the smoke of Satan has entered the temple of God: it is doubt, uncertainty, questioning, dissatisfaction, confrontation. And how did this come about? We will confide to you the thought that may be, we ourselves admit in free discussion, that may be unfounded, and that is that there has been a power, an adversary power. Let us call him by his n...

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...

Search This Blog