Author's Story II

Blessed Sacrament Cathedral

I graduated from St. Eugene’s in 1966, when the liturgical changes after the close of the council promulgated in Sacrosanctum Concilium to the best of my memory had not yet been thoroughly implemented. I journeyed off to Detroit Cathedral High School downtown, where my experience of the presence of Christ in the Eucharist began to fade, as I no longer was required (sadly, in retrospect) to attend daily Mass, and cannot to save my life remember one thing taught to me in high school religion class by my teacher, who was also the Business Ed. and Typing teacher and track coach. A rumination of the yearbooks for these years reveals photo captions such as “DC Sodality Men Reach Out,” and “Fr. Trainor Celebrates Mass Facing the Seniors as he Closes the Senior Retreat.” To be sure, in my adolescent years I hadn’t the foggiest idea of what was happening in the Church in the United States after the Council, and, after seeing a pretty, red-headed Sophomore on the bus on her way to Immaculata High one day (in the end I proved too shy to sit next to her on the DSR bus...), I confess I really never paid it much attention.

In the ensuing years I drifted further and further away from the Church, the Body of Christ, in true “prodigal son” fashion, often arguing with my mother over matters of faith. In college, I was approached by evangelicals asking, “Are you saved, brother?,” something they did not believe of me as long as I was Catholic. The norm would have been for this now-lukewarm Catholic to have been lured away from the Church, but baptismal grace proved me an exception. Though I was not all that holy, I wasn’t about to become a Pentecostal! How Our Lord led me home is outside the scope of this endeavor; suffice it to say that there are rough parallels with St. Augustine.

When I did return, I was unable to find employment in my undergraduate major, history, so I began to volunteer teaching CCD in my parish, hoping eventually to land a job there teaching history. This required me to earn catechist certification offered by the Archdiocese of Detroit, which I did in 1978. No sooner had I completed the requirements, when a combination Religion/History opening occurred at a co-ed Catholic High school in inner-city Detroit. I taught there for one year, after which I landed a job teaching Scripture (for which I, by true Catholic standards, was woefully unprepared to do) in my parish high school, where I remained for one year. I then took a position at a Catholic high school in a suburb of Detroit, where I have been ever since. Since 1995, however, and my “reversion” (no doubt through the prayers of my Mom) to the fullness of Catholic teaching, I have made an extensive study of the post-conciliar years in the United States, for which my training in history and as a catechist at the St. John Bosco Institute for Catechetics, as well as twenty-five years as a catechist in the Archdiocese of Detroit have come in handy.

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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'

Several Hundred people do Not Lie!

At present many Catholics and non-Catholics like have little to no understanding of the emotional causes of homosexual attractions and behavior, largely due to spiritual laziness or lack of will to do extensive research into causes of the disorder. Nor is there an awareness of the powerful role that Catholic spirituality can play in the healing of this disorder. In fairness, the reasons for this state of ignorance include the scant literature available on the value of the Catholic Faith and the sacraments in the resolution of homosexual attractions and acts, this in spite of the hundreds of success stories for those seeking to resolve the disorder--hence this blog post. Furthermore, traditional therapy has failed to resolve homosexual behavior, because by definition there is an all-powerful divine element excluded from the process. Add to this the views within the media and educational, social service, health and political fields, and the matter grows more complex. It is no s...

The Dysfunctional Nations

From time to time a local pastor fires us up with fortitudinal e-blasts, of which this is his latest: Dear Parishioners, Every Catholic should be angry about this. Please take the time to read the editorial below that recently appeared in Investor's Business Daily . Cheers in the Lord, Fr. Tony United Nations Scolds Catholic Church On Human Rights Anti-Religion: Ignoring abhorrences such as China's one-child policy and atrocities condoned by Shariah law, a U.N. committee tells the Vatican to deal with abusive priests and change its teachings on abortion, contraception and homosexuality. That the report issued by the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child would mention the instances of abuse of children by priests in the United States is not surprising. What is surprising and unfortunate is that the U.N. would act as if the Catholic Church had done nothing about it and use the report as a ...

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...

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.

An Important Reflection for Catholics Intending to Vote for Hillary November 8th....

In his recent Crisis article, "Two Newmans and Two Springs," Fr. Rutler offered a brilliant analysis of the current situation facing Catholics loyal to the teachings of Jesus Christ as we approach the November 8th presidential election. I should like to offer a summary of the points he made, which I hope will sober up all but the most tepid of Catholics. On a Tuesday in 1852, at the First Provincial Synod of Westminster at Oscott College, Blessed John Henry Newman delivered a sermon, “The Second Spring, in which he observed:” Have we any right to take it strange, if, in this English land, the spring-time of the Church should turn out to be an English spring, an uncertain, anxious time of hope and fear, of joy and suffering,—of bright promise and budding hopes, yet withal, of keen blasts, and cold showers, and sudden storms? Newman might deliver these words in our day, when the Body of Christ seems as divided as the U.S. The issues which confront the American peop...

One of America’s premier orthodox catechists, Fr. Alfred McBride, O. Praem., delivered a talk at the Catholic University of America in the summer of 1969 on the transcendence of God. He noted that his students, budding nuns, priests, seminarians, brothers and laymen, seemed “content rich” but pedagogically destitute. Fr, McBride correctly discerned that a more efficacious catechesis could be had by both an immanent dimension to complement the transcendent dimension, in faithfulness to Vatican II’s Gaudium et Spes (and later recommended by John Paul II). As he recalled, Fr. McBride unfortunately assumed that his students had grasped and given consent to Catholic teaching (when they had not), and sensed that worldly thinking had invaded their minds: After three years teaching my human dimensions course, I realized that secularity had intruded into the consciousness of many of these students. A number of them had succumbed to a modernity that rejected history and tradition. What’s ...

From The Smoke of Satan in the Temple of God

In our attempt to get a clear understanding of how we arrived at the present crisis of faith, it is instructive to examine the experience of another council peritus , Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, theologian, Prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, gloriously elevated by the Holy Spirit to the Chair of St. Peter as Pope Benedict XVI in April, 2005. By way of background, from 1930-1950 in response to the pervasive secularism of these years in Europe , a broad intellectual and theological movement emerged among prominent European theologians, among them Frs. Romano Guardini, Karl Adam, Henri de Lubac, Jean Danielou, Yves Congar, Louis Boyer, and Hans Urs von Balthasar. The inspiration for this movement was a belief that the Catholic Faith had to speak more effectively to the modern world, and that to do this a rediscovery of all of the riches of the two-thousand year tradition of the Church was a crucial step. These reform-minded theologians saw that the precursor t...

From Chapter 5 of The Smoke of Satan in the Temple of God

When conciliar teaching precluded such deviant “reforms,” an appeal to “the spirit of Vatican II” was made by the defectors. Religious themselves were sent to seminars, conferences, and think-tanks which pressured them to abandon hierarchical structures in favor of the “democratic,” to question traditional doctrinal certainties, and to demand reasons for those things formerly regarded as sacred, the most important of which was the basis for their vocation to the religious life. They became exposed to new anthropologies under the influence of psychology, sociology, and other social sciences, acceptance of which many sisters were naturally compliant under obedience — all this in spite of the obviousness that such changes were not approved by Rome and threatened the existence of their communities. In other words, the desired ressourcement of the council Fathers , rather than providing the guiding atmosphere in which aggiornamento was to occur, was ignored in favor of “updating.” ...

The Smoke of Satan in the Temple of God to be published soon!

With the help of God, if it be His will, my work, The Smoke of Satan in the Temple of God , excerpts of which have been posted on this blog, will be published and available on Amazon.com Be sure to check back often!

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