“The Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928, is the oldest and largest Islamist movement in the world, with affiliates in most Muslim countries and adherents in Europe and the United States.
Its size and diversity, and the legal ban that has kept it from genuine political power in Egypt for decades, make it hard to characterize simply. As the Roman Catholic Church includes both those who practice leftist liberation theology and conservative anti-abortion advocates, so the Brotherhood includes both practical reformers and firebrand ideologues.
Get that? Faithful Catholics are just like suicide bombers and those who believe that Islam requires women who are raped be stoned to death.
It has been a wonderful 48 hours. I met a favorite deacon who is a prominient blogger. I have been lurking on his mega popular blog since the first week that he started.
He was a guest speaker for the Des Moines Deacon Community. He was awesome, and he reignited the fire in my evangelizing belly.
But I am not going to tell you who the famous deacon blogger is. Yet. I am going to keep you guessing for awhile. Do you want to guess who the secret blogger is? Let me know who you think it might be.
While I am Psyched up, I am also a bit tired. Here are a few things to keep you busy for awhile.
Just saw this over at Deacon Greg’s place. It is a very clever and funny commercial. I can see my grandsons acting like the tyke in the commercial, and their Dad and deacon grandpa acting like the Dad in the ad.
One of the things that I love about being Catholic is our sacramentals.
I have been meaning to write a post on sacramentals. But now I don’t have to. Pat Gohn is positively Sentimental about Sacramentals:
“Despite their name, sacramentals are not sacraments. Nor are they lucky charms or magical talismans. I harbor no superstitions about them, as no powers accompany them. Yet they do reflect all the special graces I have already received, pointing to the gift of God’s on-going presence in my life.
A sacrament actually confers grace that comes directly from Christ. If the sacraments are the big-ticket events—the most important moments of grace in the lives of Catholics—then sacramentals might be happily referred to as the small change of the sacraments. They do not confer any grace in and of themselves, but they prepare us to receive the fruit of the sacraments. They sanctify our daily lives.”
I wants it, I needs it. Oh dear. I like tech toys way to much. But Catholic News Service reports that iPhone has a cool app–that is Church approved–to help.
Designed to be used in the confessional, this app is the perfect aid for every penitent. With a personalized examination of conscience for each user, password protected profiles, and a step-by-step guide to the sacrament, this app invites Catholics to prayerfully prepare for and participate in the Rite of Penance. Individuals who have been away from the sacrament for some time will find Confession: A Roman Catholic App to be a useful and inviting tool.
The text of this app was developed in collaboration with Rev. Thomas G. Weinandy, OFM, Executive Director of the Secretariat for Doctrine and Pastoral Practices of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, and Rev. Dan Scheidt, pastor of Queen of Peace Catholic Church in Mishawaka, IN. The app received an imprimatur from Bishop Kevin C. Rhodes of the Diocese of Fort Wayne – South Bend. It is the first known imprimatur to be given for an iPhone/iPad app.”
There is a new book out by an Italian Priest, Fr. Marcello Stanzione, The Popes and Angels. Fr. has written several books on Angels in an attempt to promote devotion to them.
The Church teaches that we all have a Guardian Angel to protect and intercede for us. Well sometimes.
A few years ago I was making a left hand turn into the Church parking lot. It was in the wee dark hours of morning. I was broadsided. Hey wait a minute God, I was going to Adoration, and it was the feast day of the Guardian Angels. I told my spiritual director that my angel must have been asleep on the job. Father reminded me that no one was injured. Besides, Guardian Angels don’t protect us from our own stupidity. Gee thanks Father.
Rome Reports has a YouTube video up on Fr. Stanzione’s latest book.
Demons
Msgr. Pope saw the movie, The Rite; which is loosly based on the non fiction book by an excorcist, The Rite: The Making of a Modern Exorcist by Matt Baglio. Msgr. liked the movie.
He has a very informative post up on exorcism.
Excerpt:
The Church is very careful when it comes to approving an exorcism. Natural causes must be ruled out as a likely cause of the behavior of the afflicted person. Bishops normally will not approve an exorcism unless, and until, psychotherapists and psychiatrists, as well as medical doctors have thoroughly examined the afflicted person and generally concur that natural or organic causes are not at work. There is no rush to perform formal exorcisms if the guidelines are followed. The Ritual stipulates that an exorcist may use these prayers only when he is “morally certain” that the person he is praying over is possessed. Numerous mental illnesses can be mistaken for possession. Hence a careful and thoughtful evaluation is necessary by experts who do not simply reject the notion of possession but who are also not the sort to quickly presume it either.
2. The Ritual mentions three signs that indicate the possible presence of a demon: abnormal strength, the ability to speak or understand a previously unknown language, and the knowledge of hidden things. There are also possible signs in an aversion to the sacred. For example, one may experience the inability to pray or say the name of Jesus or Mary, to go to mass, or to receive communion. Another important sign is some degree of unawareness or refusal in the afflicted one of the notion that they are possessed. If some one comes to a priest and says, “I am possessed.” That is usually a sign they are not.
If you want to learn more about exorcism in the Church get thou there.
“St. Blaise enjoyed widespread veneration in the Eastern and Western Churches due to many cures attributed to him. According to tradition, he was Bishop of Sebaste in Armenia and was martyred under Licinius. On this day the Church gives a “Blessing of the Throats” in honor of St. Blaise. From the eighth century he has been invoked on behalf of the sick, especially those afflicted with illnesses of the throat.
St. Ansgar became known as the “Apostle of the North” for his great evangelical work in Denmark and Sweden. He was Bishop of Hamburg and then of Bremen. Gregory IV appointed him as his delegate to Denmark and Sweden.”
“The trick will be not so much to remain orthodox (that’s fairly easy, considering how dreadfully dull the theological legacy of the Pepsi Generation is). Rather, the trick will be avoiding becoming a bitter Pharisee who turns Catholic faith into a particularly nasty and uninviting sort of Protestantism.
What do I mean? I mean that you cannot build a life on protest, not even a protest against heresy. If your Catholic faith is primarily a reaction against Those People Over There (whoever They are) then it is not about Jesus Christ, but about anger over some human hurt you have received (like the hurt of getting drivel from teachers who have betrayed their office and used it to subvert the gospel). The Catholic faith is not a mere reaction to this world. It is about God breaking into this world with joy in order to save it. It is hell, not the Faith, that is on the defensive. That’s why “the gates of hell” (a defensive image from siege warfare) shall not prevail against the Church. So the trick is to be joyful, not angry and bitter, in your work of subverting the dominant paradigm. Have worldly teachers sold the Faith for a pot of heterodox message? Sure! What did you expect the world to do?
But the good news is, not only is that project failing, but the gospel is emerging stronger than ever because Jesus Christ lives. Brickbats and crosses it shall endure till That Day, but it remains full of joy, not bitterness, till then. So the approach we take is not the mere anger of the Revolutionary against the Old Regime, but the gladness of the saint. As Jesus put it:
I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. Behold, I have given you authority to tread upon serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy; and nothing shall hurt you. Nevertheless do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you; but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.” (Luke 10:18-20) This mistaken focus on defeating the spirits rather than rejoicing in Heaven is the central mistake that many of those concerned about retrieving the Tradition from the vandals have made. They have become so focused on their anger over the vandalism that they have forgotten that it’s not about defeating Hell, but about rejoicing over the triumph of a Heaven that has already defeated Hell on Easter.
So do your subversive work joyfully, fixing your eyes on heavenly things and not on earthly ones. You will receive all the opposition and hostility that are the saint’s badge of honor. Take it to God and do not let Hell take away your joy. It’s your birthright in Baptism.”
Mark’s advice is the only way that I survived four years of a program led by dissident Catholics. It wasn’t fun, but it toughened up by spiritual muscles. Anger does not change hearts. But joy and steadfast faith often can.
While it is true that we can never make a judgment that a person is evil, it is also true that evil acts are perpetrated by actual human beings. I just don’t know a person’s heart or state of mind. It is up to God to judge a persons culpability.
Those that commit grave sins and evil acts are not monsters. They are human beings; they are made in the image and likeness of God.
I don’t know how to even begin to understand a person like Kermit Gosnell the abortionist in Philadelphia. I believe that he has a very dark heart. But he did not act alone. Many other individuals were complicit in his evil activity. If state inspectors and regulators had not turned a blind eye to the filthy and dangerous conditions of the clinic ,women would not have died. But they did. Human beings, agents for the state turned a blind eye to the carnage of innocent babies who were brutally murdered.
Then we have the media. Abortion has become, for many progressives, a sacred cow. If the progressive agenda is a religion, than abortion is the progressive sacrament. There is, therefore, no screaming headlines. No calls for regulation of abortatoriums. No outrage that Gosnell crimes were perpetrated on poor immigrant and minority women.
“The story of Kermit Gosnell, the Philadelphia abortionist who ran what a Grand Jury report referred to as “a baby charnel house,” where viable babies—“big enough to walk around with me or walk me to the bus,” as Gosnell joked—were delivered and then outright killed with a “snip” to the spinal cord, their feet sometimes severed for souvenirs, is one the press quickly consigned to the memory hole. It is not being talked about by the “strong feminist” voices on daytime TV, or on night time cable news. There are no headlines, no feature articles in leading magazines.
The mainstream media, confronted with a house of horrors that was gestated and born of a single-minded mania for “protecting choice for women” had no choice but to report on Gosnell being charged for the murder of one woman who died while under his dubious “care” (another woman’s death had been “settled” for a financial consideration), and they mush-mouthed their way through his killing of at least seven living, viable babies, but they did not like this story.
They did not want to discuss that authorities had repeatedly received reports of Gosnell’s mayhem and had chosen to look the other way. They did not want to have to mention that Gosnell’s disgusting, “third-world” abortion mill—a place where women were abused, manhandled, disrespected, over-sedated, punctured, infected, sterilized, interiorly ripped, and otherwise treated like pieces of meat—would still be running, unimpeded, were it not for an investigation into illegal drug trafficking.
The Gosnell story—a story that by any measure deserved in-depth coverage, some serious discussion about regulation and responsibility, and a few features forcing the nation to consider just when a “late-term” abortion slips into the category of “infanticide” or what our leadership and politicians really think of all of this—proved too big and too messy for the mainstream media.
They did not want light shed on dark truths that cannot be prettied up with euphemisms and nebulous notions of “choice.” They did not want to have to ponder the likelihood of Gosnell’s stinking, body-piled-and-bloodstained rooms being replicated in other cities, in other states, where other authorities chose to look away from the carnage, rather than address it.” Continue reading over at First Things.
Then there is this YouTube video of what appears to be a Planned Parenthood employee helping out a pimp who hires out under aged girls.
A Deacon's Wife 