How To Detach While Loving People
Lay folks are getting more and more into Carmelite theology. And that is a great thing. Carmelite theology is all about detaching from creatures in order to attach to the Creator. For a Carmelite priest like St. John of the Cross, this was ascetically difficult but strategically simple: Detaching from creatures will automatically make a soul in grace cling more closely to the Creator. Thus, a monk can live alone with The Alone. What Eastern Rite Christians call askesis is to detach from all creatures (people, food, pets, comforts, pleasures, locations) in order to go deeper into the prayer life. Some of the greatest authors on this topic of ascetical theology [...]
Tucker Stumbles Across Fatima
Tucker Carlson recently had on his show the former Navy-man Jack Posobiec. Jack frequently attends the Traditional Latin Mass. Tucker seems to be on his way to Catholicism, or at least is taking his Christianity very seriously these days. I set the time stamp in the above video around 1:43:00 in a chapter called "The Subversion of Christianity." Part of their conversation goes like this: Jack: "And so maybe the fact that communism kills 100 million people actually is the point of communism. And it's not equality, justice, diversity, DEI, peace, land, bread... What if the point actually is the killing?" Tucker: "And maybe if the victims are disproportionately [...]
Reason and Order Discouraged in US Seminary?
And I will give children to be their princes, and the effeminate shall rule over them.—Isaiah 3:4 Today, we're going to consider at who is allowed in a US seminary (the 6-7 year long post-graduate school where celibate men study for the Roman Catholic Priesthood.) But this article is not going to be macho. I am not going to argue for Catholic seminarians to weight-lift (admittedly a good idea) or know how to handle a firearm (also good idea) or to learn how to stave off feminism at their future parish (yet another good idea.) What worries me is that the very basics of male psychological health are being suppressed [...]
Bishops’ Indemnities Revisited
The Epoch Times recently estimated that 17,000,000 people have been killed by the "Covid-Vaccine." I believe that number is an extremely conservative estimate. Whether high or low, we now know that the injection causing so many deaths was not in fact a vaccine, but rather gene therapy made from aborted babies. It was released under emergency-use authorization by the FDA, and still has not been approved. Many Catholics died after taking it, including my own mother after taking a third dose. I wrote about her tragedy but good death here last year. Why did so many Catholics take it? Like most Americans of other religions, Catholics listened to their physicians [...]
The “Universal Call to Holiness” Was Always There
Vatican II's Lumen Gentium's chapter five is titled "Universal Call to Holiness" and it includes this sentence: "Therefore in the Church, everyone whether belonging to the hierarchy, or being cared for by it, is called to holiness." By "cared for by it," it simply means lay people. In other words, lay folks are also called to holiness. Obviously, there is nothing wrong with that sentence. But it's also super obvious, so something else is behind it. What is it? I don't know, but there's an old Protestant myth that Catholic priests and nuns told lay people they're not called to holiness. Have modernists run with this in Vatican II? We [...]
The Grey Wolves of Modernist Ambiguity
p/c North American Whitetail. Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will recognize them by their fruits.—Mt 7:15-16. Many traditional Catholics today rip on the ultra-leftists because it's easy to knock out of the park really low-hanging fruit like "Clown Masses" or social-justice warriors to oppose Eucharistic rallies because it detracts from the poor or even pro-abortion "Catholics." Trads tackling people that far left on the political and theological spectrum are after "easy likes" on Twitter and Instagram. The bigger problem is that neo-conservative (non-traditional) priests who may be found making pro-life statements or be seen headlining at a national [...]
A Nanny-Church to Match the Nanny-State
Recently, Archbishop Viganò wrote, "Change – or better still, aggiornamento – has been so much at the center of the conciliar narrative that it has been the hallmark of Vatican II and has posited this assembly as the terminus post quem that sanctions the end of the ancien régime – the regime of the 'old religion,' of the 'old Mass,' of the 'pre-council' – and the beginning of the 'conciliar church,' with its 'new mass' and the substantial relativization of all dogma." Now, before everyone calls Viganò a "schismatic" for simply putting those two words "conciliar church" in scare quotes, we have to realize that some important clergy (who have [...]
How To Pray for the Enemies of Holy Mother Church
My post-Mass meditation usually comes from a 19th century book of Jesuit Meditations. It's a phenomenal book. The meditation following Sunday's Mass was about enduring persecutions in light of the Sermon on the Mount. Before we get to the topic at hand, How To Pray for the Enemies of Holy Mother Church, I want to highlight a few other parts of Sunday's meditation on enduring persecutions. One of the most astonishing insights the anonymous Jesuit author made is that false-accusations make us already like Christ on earth. It reads: "And besides, is not the glory of being thus made like to the Son of God on earth before we [...]
Trump Shot But Alive
This evening, on the 13th of July 2024, President Trump was shot in the ear at a rally in Butler, PA. It was obviously a failed assassination attempt. Trump got up triumphantly as seen in the picture above. One America News reports: "Butler county district attorney Richard Goldinger said the shooter is dead after injuring former President Trump, killing one audience member and injuring another in the shooting." Here's the most important tweets I have seen so far: Impeached. Arrested. Convicted. Shot. Still standing. pic.twitter.com/ys50YJfdyZ — Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) July 13, 2024 Joe Biden and the Democrats don’t get to wiggle out of this with half hearted statements. They framed [...]
You Did Not Irretrievably Botch Your Life.
Fr. Walter J. Ciszek S.J. wrote: Though our situation may have been somewhat unique, the temptation [to give up] was not. It is the same temptation faced by everyone who has followed a call and found that the realities of life were nothing like the expectations he had in the first flush of his vision and his enthusiasm. It is the temptation that comes to anyone, for example, who has entered religious life with a burning desire to serve God and him alone, only to find that the day-to-day life in religion is humdrum and pedestrian, equally as filled with moments of human misunderstanding, daily routines, and distractions. It is [...]