Saturday, 15 June 2013

Trouble in the Sky

EgyptAir flight bound for JFK is diverted to Glasgow CNN, JUne 15, 2013

London (CNN) -- The British Royal Air Force scrambled a fighter jet to escort an EgyptAir flight that had been bound for New York City to Glasgow instead, the Defense Ministry said Saturday.

The Boeing 777, bound for John F. Kennedy International Airport, was diverted Saturday afternoon to Prestwick Airport, the airport's press office said.

The BBC said that one of its producers, who was aboard the flight, reported that the diversion occurred after a note was found in one of the plane's bathrooms that read, "I'll set this plane on fire' and a seat number."

Strathclyde police were handling the matter, the ministry said.

Highlights of the June Sky

http://www.astronomy.co.uk/skytonight

Of course, where I am, it is cloudy.

Look for Spica.....

and Bootes....

thanks to Wiki for charts

The silent media and Christian persecution....

Christianity has an estimated 2.2 billion followers or 32% of the world population, according to a report by the Washington-based Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

Despite these numbers, Christianity faces restrictions and hostility in 111 countries around the world, ahead of the 90 countries limiting or harassing the second-largest faith, Islam, another Pew report reveals. Father Preble laments the plight of followers caught up in war-torn states has been little remarked in the west’s mainstream media.

Thanks to Acton Institute Blog

More here...http://www.torontosun.com/2013/06/09/christians-face-being-driven-from-the-middle-east

Love This from A Protector!

http://www.ncregister.com/blog/pat-archbold/8-rules-for-marrying-my-daughter

Traces of Humanity

Catholic traditional bloggers reveal the traces of humanity. We are like Hansel and Gretel putting down the bread crumbs in the woods to find our way back to Truth, safety, home. But, the crows have eaten the traces of humanity.

The world is becoming a planet of sub-humans. Evolution obviously has not created a super-race of highly moral and highly intelligent people. The philosophy of Star-Trek has failed many.

The daily news in the Church and in the world reveals a sub-human, anti-natural law bias.

The examples are too numerous to list.

Those of us who saw this coming cannot believe the pace of the dehumanization of Europe and America. Some of us had hints of this in the 1970s. Roe v. Wade and the NO caused us to wonder where Catholicism was hiding in the culture. Some of us tried to change the stream of abuses and heresies. Some of us have many war wounds from engaging in these battles.

Laws which allow men and women to kill their babies, children and aged parents, as well as law which allow one to kill one's self have been passed with a speed only a spiritual view can understand.

Laws which allow unnatural sex and the ability of those who practice such to adopt children have become more common and are being passed in countries around the world.

Laws which allow polygamy have been passed. Laws forbidding home schooling exist in some countries.

Laws which restrict Catholic freedom of conscience and freedom of speech are either passed or about to be.

One can barely keep up with the news of the corruption in the highest circles of the Church.

Those forces set in motion at the decisions of our First Parents are coming to a head. But, the laxity of the laity and the apostasy of the clergy have encouraged evil to spread rapidly.

The Post-Christian countries leave us with no defense.

Stay in the state of grace. Pursue perfection. Ignore trivial things. Stop talking so much. Do not use television news for truth-it is not there.

Pray for us bloggers.

And Another Bit on Tolerance from Fulton J. Sheen

From THE CURSE OF BROADMINDEDNESS
Bishop Fulton J. Sheen
Taken from the book “Moods and Truths”
Published in 1932

http://catholicforum.fisheaters.com/index.php?topic=2340953.0;wap2

There is no other subject on which the average mind is so much confused as the subject of tolerance and intolerance. Tolerance is always supposed to be desirable because it is taken to be synonymous with broadmindedness. Intolerance is always supposed to be undesirable, because it is taken to be synonymous with narrow-mindedness. This is not true, for tolerance and intolerance apply to two totally different things. Tolerance applies only to persons, but never to principles. Intolerance applies only to principles, but never to persons. We must be tolerant to persons because they are human; we must be intolerant about principles because they are divine. We must be tolerant to the erring, because ignorance may have led them astray; but we must be intolerant to the error, because Truth is not our making, but God's. And hence the Church in her history, due reparation made, has always welcomed the heretic back into the treasury of her souls, but never his heresy into the treasury of her wisdom.

The Church, like Our Blessed Lord, advocates charity to all persons who disagree with her by word or by violence. Even those who in the strictest sense of the term-are bigots, are to be treated with the utmost kindness. They really do not hate the Church, they hate only what they mistakenly believe to be the Church. If I believed all the lies that are told about the Church, if I gave credence to all the foul stories told about her priesthood and Papacy, if I had been brought up on falsehoods about her teachings and her sacraments, I would probably hate the Church a thousand times more than they do.

Keeping the distinction well in mind between persons and principles, cast a hurried glance over the general religious conditions of our country. America, it is commonly said, is suffering from intolerance. While there is much want of charity to our fellow-citizens, I believe it is truer to say that America is not suffering so much from intolerance as it is suffering from a false kind of tolerance: tolerance of right and wrong; truth and error; virtue and vice; Christ and chaos. The man, in our country, who can make up his mind and hold to certain truths with all the fervor of his soul, is called narrow-minded, whereas the man who cannot make up his mind is called broadminded. And now this false broad¬mindedness or tolerance of truth and error has carried many minds so far that they say one religion is just as good as another, or that because one contradicts another, therefore, there is no such thing as religion. This is just like concluding that because, in the days of Columbus, some said the world was round and others said it was flat, therefore, there is no world at all.

Such indifference to the oneness of truth is at the root of all the assumptions so current in present-day thinking that religion is an open question, like the tariff, whereas science is a closed question, like the multiplication table. It is behind that queer kind of broadmindedness which teaches that any one may tell us about God, though it would never admit that any one but a scientist should tell us about an atom. It has inspired the idea that we should be broad enough to publish our sins to any psychoanalyst living in a glass house, but never so narrow as to tell them to a priest in a confessional box. It has created the general impression that any individual opinion about religion is right, and it has disposed modern minds to accept its religion dished up in the form of articles entitled: "My Idea of Religion," written by any nondescript from a Hollywood movie star to the chief cook of the Ritz-Carlton.

This kind of broadmindedness which sacrifices principles to whims, dissolves entities into environment, and reduces truth to opinion, is an unmistakable sign of the decay of the logical faculty.

more on site listed above...

Fulton J. Sheen Again Today

A Plea for Intolerance by Fulton J. Sheen
Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen

In 1931, Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen wrote the following essay:

“America, it is said, is suffering from intolerance-it is not. It is suffering from tolerance. Tolerance of right and wrong, truth and error, virtue and evil, Christ and chaos. Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded.”
“Tolerance is an attitude of reasoned patience toward evil … a forbearance that restrains us from showing anger or inflicting punishment. Tolerance applies only to persons … never to truth. Tolerance applies to the erring, intolerance to the error … Architects are as intolerant about sand as foundations for skyscrapers as doctors are intolerant about germs in the laboratory.
Tolerance does not apply to truth or principles. About these things we must be intolerant, and for this kind of intolerance, so much needed to rouse us from sentimental gush, I make a plea. Intolerance of this kind is the foundation of all stability.”

Thanks to

http://www.alliance4lifemin.org/articles.php?id=158

I am letting Fulton J. Sheen speak today on the evil of tolerance

Love is not tolerance

BISHOP FULTON J. SHEEN

thanks to http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/apologetics/ap0014.html

Christian love bears evil, but it does not tolerate it.

Christian love bears evil, but it does not tolerate it.

It does penance for the sins of others, but it is not broadminded about sin.

The cry for tolerance never induces it to quench its hatred of the evil philosophies that have entered into contest with the Truth.

It forgives the sinner, and it hates the sin; it is unmerciful to the error in his mind.

The sinner it will always take back into the bosom of the Mystical Body;
but his lie will never be taken into the treasury of His Wisdom.

Real love involves real hatred:
whoever has lost the power of moral indignation and the urge to drive the buyers and sellers from the temples
has also lost a living, fervent love of Truth.

Charity, then, is not a mild philosophy of "live and let live";
it is not a species of sloppy sentiment.

Charity is the infusion of the Spirit of God,
which makes us love the beautiful and hate the morally ugly.

Thoughts on a cold Saturday afternoon

In today's reading, we are told that Christ is reconciling the world to Himself. It may not seem like this at this point in time. Here is a section from this morning's reading:

And for anyone who is in Christ, there is a new creation; the old creation has gone, and now the new one is here. It is all God’s work. It was God who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the work of handing on this reconciliation. In other words, God in Christ was reconciling the world to himself, not holding men’s faults against them, and he has entrusted to us the news that they are reconciled. So we are ambassadors for Christ; it is as though God were appealing through us, and the appeal that we make in Christ’s name is: be reconciled to God. For our sake God made the sinless one into sin, so that in him we might become the goodness of God. from 2 Corinthians 5

Now, most people do not understand that this new creation is a necessity, as Christ told Nicodemus in John 8. This is not the first conversion, but the second conversion, to which I alluded to several weeks ago.

Unless one cooperates with God in the entering into the purgation necessary, one will not experience the new creation. One becomes like the child in the womb, but in the Spirit, one is born again. This is not what the charismatics means by being born again. This is a mature cleansing of the self from sin, the tendencies towards sin and even imperfections.

We are reconciled to ourselves, to God and then to others. Once we decrease and Christ increases, then Christ is appealing to others outside the Church. The weaknesses within the Church weakened our ability to evangelize.

I am sad today at the thought of wasted graces which weaken the Church.

Do not waste grace, and do not waste time.

Etheldredasplace