“FOR my part, I believe that honor and money nearly always go together, and that he who desires honor never hates money, while he who hates money cares little for honor. Understand this clearly, for I think this concern about honor always implies some slight regard for endowments or money: seldom or never is a poor man honored by the world; however worthy of honor he may be, he is apt rather to be despised by it. With true poverty there goes a different kind of honor to which nobody can take objection. I mean that, if poverty is embraced for God’s sake alone, no one has to be pleased save God. It is certain that a man who has no need of anyone has many friends: in my own experience I have found this to be true.”

— St. Teresa of Avila, The Way of Perfection

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FROM “Indifferentism, the Heresy that All Religions are Equal” by Rev. Bertrand L. Conway, C.S.P, 1929:

Is not one religion as good as another? Are not creeds in themselves unimportant, and conduct the one thing essential? Do we not frequently meet men who believe in Christ and all His teachings, and yet day by day do things that would bring a blush to a pagan’s cheek?

One of the most common heresies outside the Catholic Church in our day and country is the heresy of indifferentism. [Ed.: Conway is not speaking here of the Vatican II Church, which is inherently indifferentist and promotes this heresy everyday and everywhere.] The indifferentist will speak patronizingly of religion as a police force to keep the discontented in check, or as an outlet for the emotions of pious sentimentalists. He will praise all religions for the virtuous men they have produced; he will maintain that intelligence and good breeding alike call for a kindly toleration towards all creeds, and churches; he will vehemently denounce the Catholic Church as bigoted, intolerant and autocratic, because she claims obedience under sin as the infallible mouthpiece of a divine revelation. There are many roads, he informs you, leading to the kingdom of heaven, and an honest man may travel any one of them with the conviction that he is pleasing God.

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See Part One of this post here.

FROM Bernard Fay’s Revolution and Freemasonry, 1680-1800 (Little, Brown and Company, 1935):

[Benjamin] Franklin, the Masonic apostle, was not only organizing a Masonic intellectual front in America, but was also building up a Masonic press. He was by far the most outstanding newspaperman in the New World. His Pennsylvania Gazette was the most energetic and forceful newspaper in America. He was also the first owner and director of a chain of newspapers in America; he lent money to his workmen to enable them to start newspapers in other cities: Whitemarsh in Charleston, Parker in New York, and so on. Thus, he established in all the English colonies of America a network of Masonic newspapers animated with the same spirit and working in collaboration. In New York the Journal of Zenger, in New England the Boston Gazette of Eden, constituted the northern strongholds of this Masonic press. They agreed on preaching unity, fraternity, liberty, in defending Protestantism against Catholicism, the Hanoverian kings against the Bourbons, the English Parliament against the French despotism and everything that was Saxon and Whig against everything that was Latin and obsolete. The government could not be dissatisfied; these newspapers were truly patriotic; but this patriotism went so far that it passed beyond the goal — inclined to turn against Britain itself as not being English enough.

This danger became obvious when the first lodges of the Ancients began working in America. At once they showed more activity and boldness than their predecessors. They were outspoken, ready to take a stand against governors, magistrates and churchmen; their influence was evident. Not that the American lodges had forgotten the fundamental rule of the Brotherhood, to avoid entanglements in politics; but they could not, as the English lodges did, exert their influence without playing politics….

…. This Masonic boldness was more noticeable in America, because conditions in the New World differed from those of Europe, where literature was the main outlet for dissatisfaction.

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FROM Mementoes of the English Martyrs and Confessors for Every Day of the Year:

Son of a well-known Catholic physician at Chichester, he was sent to St. Omer’s, and thence entered the Franciscan Order in Spain. He first offered himself for the Mission in the West Indies, but England ^being pointed out as a richer field for his labours, thither he went. On landing at Plymouth he was arrested and imprisoned, and his sufferings then endured affected his health for the remainder of his life. As nothing could be proved against him, he was discharged, and for eleven years laboured in the country. The heroic sufferings of Father Ward enkindled in him, however, a holy envy, and he obtained leave to remove to London. He chose that part of the city where he was most in peril, but his hope for martyrdom was constantly deferred. Pursuivants came to his house, but would not take him, though he declared himself a priest. The next day they returned, and, though his Breviary was on the table, they left without arresting him. Deem ing himself unworthy of the crown, he re doubled his prayers and tears, and was arrested on Sunday, September 11, 1642, at the begin ning of his Mass, and to his great joy was executed at Tyburn, October 12, 1642.

“I am come to cast fire on the earth, and what will I but that it be enkindled ? ” — LUKE xii. 49.

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“WHEN you have committed faults, be sorry for them, but do not distress yourself; and as for the imagination, try quietly to apply a remedy, by diverting it from the subject of its application, and following such advice as experienced persons will give you. This done, disturb yourself no further; and be assured once for all that any effects which proceed from your sins, or from your imagination, and which have ceased to be voluntary in you, are crosses which God wills that you shall bear. Be not depressed, then, by your sufferings because you have brought them on yourself; but take courage and be comforted: God, who did not will the cause, wills the effect. I have already said, and peradventure I shall say it again: Have the pains of Purgatory any other cause but sin? Do like those holy souls who suffer therein: endure in peace, with placidity and tranquillity of soul.”

—- Fr. Henri Marie Boudon, The Holy Ways of the Cross; 1875

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“AMONG these moral virtues, obedience is the most important: it despises a greater good in order to be united with God. And there are three kinds of goods that man can despise for God: the least are external goods; the middle, bodily goods; and the highest goods, those of the soul. Among these, the will is in a certain way the principal one , insofar as it is through the will that man makes use of all the others. Accordingly, properly speaking, the virtue of obedience, which renounces one’s own will for God, is more important than the other moral virtues , which renounce some other goods for God. This is why St. Gregory says, in his Moralia, that obedience is rightly placed before sacrifices: because through sacrifices one sacrifices the flesh of another, while through obedience one immolates one’s own will .”

— St. Thomas Aquinas,  Doctor of the Church, Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Question 104).

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INGENIOUS ways to keep your garlic from spoiling, drying out or sprouting green shoots. (more…)

WHY worship God when you can worship (and show off your supposed virtue) the Most Holy and Immaculate Migrant instead?

“Heterodox Cardinal Blase Cupich told Catholics gathered for a ‘City of Welcome’ event that advocacy for immigrants “belongs to every single disciple of Jesus, and it is, in its truest sense, an act of divine worship,” again collapsing legal and illegal immigration into a single moral claim.

“The October 3 homily at the Archdiocese of Chicago celebration titled ‘Celebrating a City of Welcome, where Catholic Solidarity and the Journey of Migration Meet,’ praised Chicago as a city ‘woven from the courageous journeys’ of earlier immigrants, African American migrants, and more recent Latino and Asian communities.”

Link

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DECREE of Pope Saint Pius V on the power of the Holy Rosary:

“…And so, Dominic considered this simple way of praying and supplicating God, which is called the Rosary, or Psalter of the Blessed Virgin, accessible to all and completely devout. In it, the Blessed Virgin is venerated with the angelic salutation repeated one hundred and fifty times, that is, according to the number in the Psalter of David, and with the Lord’s Prayer in each decade. Interspersed with these prayers are certain meditations that illustrate the entire life of Our Lord Jesus Christ, thus completing the method of prayer devised by the Fathers of the Holy Roman Church. This same method was propagated by Saint Dominic and disseminated by the friars of Blessed Dominic (…). The faithful of Christ, inflamed by these prayers, immediately began to be transformed into new men. The darkness of heresy began to dissipate, and the light of the Catholic faith was revealed. In many places, the friars of the Order began to found confraternities in honor of this prayer (…). Following the example of our predecessors, seeing that the Church militant, which God has placed In our hands, shaken in these times by so many heresies, and gravely afflicted by so many wars and by the depravity of men’s morals, we also raise our eyes, weeping, but full of hope, towards that same mountain, from which all help arises, and we encourage and admonish every member of Christ’s faithful to do the same in the Lord.”

“Rome, St. Peter’s Basilica, September 17, 1569, the fourth year of Our Pontificate.”

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“FROM this healthy exercise have grown up numberless good fruits in the Christian Commonwealth. Among these deserveth well to be named that great victory over the Sultan of Turkey, which the most holy Pope Pius V, and the Christian Princes whom he had roused, won at Lepanto, (on the 7th day of October, the first Lord’s Day in the month, in the year of our Lord 1571) The day whereon this victory was gained was the very one whereon the Guildbrethren of the most holy Rosary, throughout the whole world, were used to offer their accustomed prayers and appointed supplications, and the event therefore was not unnaturally connected therewith. This being the avowed opinion of Gregory XIII, he ordered that in all Churches where there was, or should be, an Altar of the Rosary, a Feast, in the form of a Greater Double, should be kept for ever upon the first Lord’s Day of the month of October, to give unceasing thanks to the Blessed Virgin, under her style of (Queen of) the (Most Holy) Rosary, for that extraordinary mercy of God. Other Popes also have granted almost numberless Indulgences to those who say the Rosary, and to those who join its Guilds.

“In the year 1716, Charles VI, Elect-Emperor of the Romans, won a famous victory over countless hordes of Turks, near Timisoara, in the kingdom of Hungary, upon the day when the Feast of the Dedication of the Church of St. Mary of the Snows was being kept, and almost at the very moment when the Guild-brethren of the most holy Rosary were moving through the streets of Rome in public and solemn procession, amid vast multitudes, all filled with the deepest enthusiasm, calling vehemently upon God for the defeat of the Turks, and entreating the Virgin Mother of God to bring the might of her succour to the help of the Christians. (more…)

FROM The Great and Enduring Heresy of Mohammed by Hilaire Belloc:

Mohammedanism was a heresy: that is the essential point to grasp before going any further. It began as a heresy, not as a new religion. It was not a pagan contrast with the Church; it was not an alien enemy. It was a perversion of Christian doctrine. Its vitality and endurance soon gave it the appearance of a new religion, but those who were contemporary with its rise saw it for what it was – not a denial, but an adaptation and a misuse, of the Christian thing. It differed from most (not from all) heresies in this, that it did not arise within the bounds of the Christian Church. The chief heresiarch, Mohammed himself, was not, like most heresiarchs, a man of Catholic birth and doctrine to begin with. He sprang from pagans. But that which he taught was in the main Catholic doctrine, oversimplified. It was the great Catholic world – on the frontiers of which he lived, whose influence was all around him and whose territories he had known by travel – which inspired his convictions. He came of, and mixed with, the degraded idolaters of the Arabian wilderness, the conquest of which had never seemed worth the Romans’ while. (more…)

“While the world changes, the cross stands firm.”

—- St. Bruno, (1101 A.D.) founder of the Carthusian Order of Monks

The Monastery of the Grande Chartreuse
by a Carthusian monk, 1893

“Most Catholics are aware that a Carthusian monastery consists of a number of little houses all grouped together, and that each monk has a little establishment of his own. He has a bed-room, a study, and an eating-room, all as bare and plain as can be. The eating-room was also originally a kitchen, but it was found that so much time was taken from prayer and study by the duties of cookery, that a common kitchen supplied the meals of all by means of a little sort of turn about, where the monk finds his meals at stated hours. He has also a work-room for manual labour, and a little garden of his own. There is no denying that the life is a very trying one: the perpetual silence, the monotony, the abstinence from all fleshmeat, the long night Offices, render it impossible to all save those who have from God the privilege of a Carthusian vocation. But it is a very happy life to the faithful son of St. Bruno, and what is more, a very healthy one ; the average longevity is far in excess of the world outside. The Carthusians have had centenarians not a few, and the general health is remarkably good. The law respecting flesh-meat is an absolute one; not even to save his life, or under most urgent medical advice, is a Carthusian allowed to let it pass his lips.

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KATHY G. writes:

I received an e-reader as a gift and was downloading The Liturgical Year by Dom Guéranger and these words, written by Gary Potter, from the introduction of the Loreto Publication’s version reveal a keen understanding of history and the splitting of the spiritual from the material in the minds of men:

There is a dimension of the work that can surprise the American reader. Political is the only fit word for that dimension. This is to speak of politics, not in terms of parties or elections, but simply as the means whereby the life of a society is regulated or governed. Dom Guéranger believed the means should be Christian because he believed society itself should be. We Americans may believe our society is fundamentally Christian, or used to be, but every schoolboy knows we have never had Christian government. That would be exclusionarу.

As a consequence, we [contend] that the real target of modern revolutionaries, whether in France in 1789 or Russia in 1917, has been the Christian Faith – that they have overthrown governments in order to get at it. Dom Guéranger knew this view was wrong, that it was backwards. He saw what had really happened: that the revolutionaries began their march to power in the 18th century by first undermining religious belief, including belief in the very existence of God and, above all, His Incarnation, in order to dethrone Christ as King of Society. The Christian political order, not the Christian religion, was their real target. They were determined to replace Christ with themselves. Instead of Christian government, there would be government according to their lights.

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“THE Church of Christ, the faithful depository of the teaching of Divine Wisdom, cannot and does not think of deprecating or disdaining the particular characteristics which each people, with jealous and intelligible pride, cherishes and retains as a precious heritage.

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“Nor is there any fear lest the consciousness of universal brotherhood aroused by the teaching of Christianity, and the spirit which it inspires, be in contrast with love of traditions or the glories of one’s fatherland, or impede the progress of prosperity or legitimate interests. For that same Christianity teaches that in the exercise of charity we must follow a God-given order, yielding the place of honor in our affections and good works to those who are bound to us by special ties. Nay, the Divine Master Himself gave an example of this preference for His Own country and fatherland, as He wept over the coming destruction of the Holy City.” [bold added]

— Pope Pius XII, Summi Pontificatus, 1939

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“HOLINESS consists simply in doing God’s will.”

— St. Thérèse of Lisieux

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“OUR Lord needs from us neither great deeds nor profound thoughts. Neither intelligence nor talents. He cherishes simplicity.”

— St. Thérèse of Lisieux

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