A reminder from The Record.com

On Christmas Day in 1969, a little known German theologian outlined his own assessment on the future of the Catholic Church during a radio broadcast.

Mankind was at a turning point in history, he said, and the Church was fighting against a force which intended to annihilate it definitively. The theologian’s name was Joseph Ratzinger.

He predicted that the Body of Christ on earth would be undermined by the temptation to reduce priests to social workers and the Church’s work to a mere political presence.

During his speech, which came shortly after the socially and morally revolutionary tumult of 1968, while the ramifications of Vatican II were emerging and secular influences were fervently desiring to “liberate” themselves from the “shackles” of religious and social institutions, Ratzinger said, “From today’s crisis will emerge a Church that will have lost a great deal”.

Structures that had been built in times of prosperity would be lost and numbers would decrease, he stated; he Church would “pretty much have to start all over again”.

Ratzinger, however, then suggested “when all the suffering is past, a great power will emerge from a more spiritual and simple Church”.

He believed there would be small groups and movements arising and a minority who would make faith central to experience.

“It will be poor and will become the Church of the destitute”, he said.

Not my America

http://global.christianpost.com/news/fla-professor-makes-class-trample-on-jesus-name-suspends-student-who-refused-92445/

For those parents of big Catholic families

Today, I want to write a tribute to all those neighbors, fellow parishioners  and friends who followed God's Plan for their families and did not contracept. I want to honor my parents and all those of their generation who had wonderful, large Catholic families.

Many of my friends have six, eight, ten, eleven or more children.

God bless those parents.

I have to honor them for choosing a lower standard of living than their Protestants neighbors who moved out of the old houses into the really nice ones with their 2.5 kids.

I want to praise these Catholic parents for not having vacations in order to home school or save money for expensive private Catholic education.

I want to tell the world how great is the responsibility to educate children in the Faith and praise those who did so.

And are doing so....

We have been persecuted for such. Some of my friends have been criticized publicly in grocery stores and even in Church for having large families.

Some of us were severely criticized for home schooling back in the late '80s, '90s and even into the 2000s.

I honor you, .pro-life Catholics. God bless you all, always and in every way

Superb comment from Steveaz on Sultan Knish

http://sultanknish.blogspot.ca/2013/03/night-falls-on-civilization.html

So good, I had to replicate it here.


Well, as usual, as we Yanks were distracted by China's potential pathologies, we failed to notice our own. [This is anecdotal, so take it with a grain of salt, but...] A majority of my acquaintances who work in academe (all "liberals) were single children. 

They cannot hide it either. Many reveal in their political views and debating styles that they have never contended with any sibling for Legos, parental attention nor mundane chores. And they seem unaware that their liberal campaigns for illusory things such as "sustainability" and "world peace" are rote manifestations of their single-child experience.

As America digests its own poison-pill generation of spoilt, single children cum adults, it should rile no one to state the obvious: America's citizenry are the managed wards of our own arrogant, spoilt "Emperors." 

Simply sample the biographies of our current ruling class. Obama is this generation's icon: globe-trotting, wealthy, doted-on, and without competition in the family! 

Some properly derogate this generation by calling it the "Me-Generation." Others patronize this cadre and rebel at crude categorization of it, preferring to flatter it with labels like "Creative," "modern," and "Taste-Makers."

No matter the label we use to identify this trend, it is what it is. And it'd like to replicate itself of course to form another first-person pronoun hyphenated generation to govern the besotted masses for the century ahead. 

To the spoilt, urban prograssive, Kids from big "fly-over" families are drole and tacky. They aren't easily cowed by external scolds and peer pressures, and they're wake-up to the games adversaries like to play, like deliberate dishonesty, proxy moves and brown-nosing. In short, if you're the third son in a Kansas family with 4 other siblings, two of them sisters, then you are immunized against the Prog's campusing techniques.

But "Little Emperors," not so much. They're nubile, malleable little princes and princesses, hungry to strive any 'attagirl' or confirmation of their uncontested merits, greater beauty or smarts. And being untested entrants to the Progs' series' of artificial societies, they suffer from performance anxiety. The spoilt child is the perfect, nervous little tool for the march to the Progressive's vaunted future and beyond!

And, another good comment by someone called Supertradmum

The cause of all this depression about human beings is the lack of knowledge or belief that we are made differently than the rest of creation. The West use to believe that men and women were made in the likeness of God. No more.

Now, we are made in the likeness of whoever political powers that be, or educational, or moneyed, or Marxist, or just plain stupid powers.

In the past several thousand years, we have seen the replacement of God as the centre of creation to humans being in that centre, to finally something odd called the 'environment'. Even the Medievals were not this daft to create a false god out of climate changes....or false ideals of demographics.

Annunciation by John Donne

John Donne (1572-1631)

Annunciation

Salvation to all that will is nigh;

That All, which always is all everywhere,

Which cannot sin, and yet all sins must bear,

Which cannot die, yet cannot choose but die,

Lo, faithful virgin, yields Himself to lie

In prison, in thy womb; and though He there

Can take no sin, nor thou give, yet He will wear,

Taken from thence, flesh, which death's force may try.

Ere by the spheres time was created, thou

Wast in His mind, who is thy Son and Brother;

Whom thou conceivst, conceived; yea thou art now

Thy Maker's maker, and thy Father's mother;

Thou hast light in dark, and shutst in little room,

Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb.

A David Jones Crucifixion: Monday in Holy Week

I am going to put a different Crucifixion scene on everyday this week for your meditations during Holy Week.

Here is the first one by David Jones. Many years ago, some of my David Jones prints were stolen. This one was my favorite that I had.