SINCE of all the evils that we can possibly incur, either here or hereafter, there is none comparable to the evil we bring upon ourselves by mortal sin; so, if all men upon earth, and all the devils in hell should conspire together, with a general license form God, to do all the mischief, and to inflict upon us all the torments they could invent, they would never do us half so much hurt as we do ourselves by one mortal sin. Because all that they can do, as long as we do not consent to sin, cannot hurt the soul; whereas we ourselves, by consenting to any one mortal sin, bring upon our own souls a dreadful death, both for time and eternity. Good God! never suffer us to be so wretchedly blind, as to become thus the wilful murderers of our own souls. 

— Richard Challoner, 1807

FROM How to Root Out Hidden Faults by Fr. James F. McElhone:

Pride of sensitiveness is brought about by self-love being wounded. The sensitive person is quickly hurt. In fact, it may be said, he prepares himself to be wounded. Ordinarily he imagines things, he misjudges, he misinterprets, he exaggerates, he is suspicious and distrustful. His memory is prone to cling to what has happened to him in an adverse way; he remembers who and what have hurt him. He is ready to see a slight and to feel it. He plans revenge. He fights mental battles of what he will say and how he will act. He is unforgiving, carrying ill-feeling for short or long periods of time and in the same mood refusing to speak or speaking coldly to the one who is the object of his bitterness. Read More »

“IT IS clear that the Gospel is the gradual revelation of the Cross as the key to the riddle of existence. The Cross, not stoically submitted to as an instrument of torture, but bravely accepted as an instrument of healing, destroys the obstacles that lie between man and his happiness. Salvation, in its finality, consists in the destruction of these obstacles. To be happy is to see God.”

— Fr. Edward Leen, “Why the Cross?“

ALAN writes:

The city of St. Louis is now run by a loose coalition of “Progressives”, Communists, Feminists, thieves, and shysters.  Under their leadership, downtown St. Louis now looks as Bolshevik Russia must have looked in the 1920s-‘30s, replete with abandonment, degradation, vandalism, lawlessness, and splendid examples of the calculated ugliness called Communist “art”.

It’s been a short path from yesterday to today.

In mid-afternoon on July 11, 1932, several thousand unemployed men and women gathered outside City Hall in downtown St. Louis “to demand relief measures of some sort”. Doubtless many in the crowd were ordinary men and women who were lured into the event by typical Communist agitprop methods.  A few well-trained agitators incited the crowd to move forward and attempt to rush into City Hall against 50 policemen who were there to stop them.

The resulting confrontation included tear gas bombs thrown into the mob by police, shots fired into the air in an attempt to disperse the mob, bricks and clubs thrown at officers by some people in the mob, glass doors and windows broken, theft from a vendor across the street, some people injured and some arrested. A World War I-vintage hand grenade was thrown at police, but it did not explode.

Read More »

MASSACHUSSETTS taxpayers are fitting the bill for thousands of illegal immigrants to live in shelters, hotels and motels. Those without kitchen facilities receive catered meals worth $64 a day.

The state’s Right to Shelter law requires it to provide families with refrigeration and basic cooking facilities. But some of the accommodations do not have those appliances leaving the state to contract out for food and delivery.

Spinelli Ravioli Manufacturing Company in East Boston, a full-service drop-off catering company with 30 years’ experience in the industry was awarded a $10 million-dollar six-month no-bid contract to provide and deliver meals.

State officials say they must spend more than $800 million to respond to the “crisis.” It is an entirely manufactured crisis — and these costs are just the tip of the iceberg of the immense costs in the years ahead. The solution to this “crisis” is mass deportation, not ravioli.

FROM the renowned Cornelius a Lapide’s Commentary on 1 Corinthians xiv. 35:

“Ver. 34. Let women keep silence in the churches. Ambrose, and after him Anselm, say that even the prophetesses are to keep silence: (1.) Because it is against the order of nature and of the Law, in Genesis 3:16, for women, who have been made subject to men, to speak in their presence. (2.) Because it is opposed to the modesty and humility which befits them. (3.) Because man is endowed with better judgment, reason, discursive power, and discretion than woman. (4.) She is rightly bidden, says S. Anselm, to keep silence, because when she spoke it was to persuade man to sin (Gen 3:6). (5.) To curb her loquacity, for, as it is said, ‘when two women quarrel it is like the beating of two cymbals or the clanging of two bells.’ This might readily enough happen in the church if they were allowed to teach. About this silence enjoined on women, see notes on 1 Timothy 2:9 . How much is it then against the command of S. Paul, against all law, right, and seemliness, for a woman to be the head of a church! Read More »

“REFLECT frequently, therefore, that a single aspiration, an ejaculatory prayer, a genuflection, the least mark of respect for the divine majesty, is of greater value than all the treasures of the earth, and that every time a person mortifies his inclinations, the angels present him a crown of glory in recompence for the victory gained over himself. On the contrary, God withdraws his graces by degrees from the slothful who neglect them, and heaps them on the fervent who by their means, as faithful servants, may one day enter into the joy of their Lord, Mat. xxv. 21.”

— Dom Lorenzo Scupoli, The Spiritual Combat

SHERLOCK arrives within minutes at the scene.

The ambulances are empty. The bodies, strangely unreal, were never taken to the hospital. He is not permitted to inspect them.

“Hmm, Watson. Something is amiss!”

A candle-light vigil is already in the works. Piles of teddy bears miraculously appear. Witnesses to grotesque horrors smile and wipe away non-existent tears.

The police are strangely unconcerned. The FBI is already involved. Press conferences with top state officials on the scene speak of “community,” “fears” and “We will be strong!” The perpetrator has been killed and whisked away. Facts about his life are known without the slightest research needed.

Hmmm, something is amiss.

Sherlock has never seen so much activity at a murder scene — and so little evidence of a murder.

“PRIDE of complacency is commonly called pride of vanity. It is self-love demanding self-esteem or the esteem of others. Yet it is not so much the self-esteem that is sought as it is the craving for the good opinion of others. That is, one suffering from this type of pride is anxious to be well thought of in regard to things spiritual, mental, or physical, so he thinks or speaks or acts vainly. Read More »

THE TALMUD, the sacred text of  Judaism, is comprised of rabbinic commentaries that were written over a period of hundreds of years and contain the oral traditions that have shaped Judaism since shortly after the destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D.

Americans, including many Jews, are generally unfamiliar with the Talmud’s content. While it is widely acceptable to criticize the intolerance of the Quran, the Talmud is off bounds for mainstream commentary. Thus many do not know just how intolerant the revered text of the official religion of the state of Israel is.

Benjamin Freedman was a successful Jewish businessman and Zionist activist who lived from 1890 to 1984. Later in his adult life, he became an outspoken critic of the Judaic mentality and eventually converted to Catholicism. He is said to have devoted much of his fortune to researching and publicizing the history of Judaism.

“The Talmud today virtually exercises totalitarian dictatorship over the lives of so-called or self-styled ‘Jews,’ whether they are aware of that fact or not,” he wrote in his 1954 work “Facts are Facts,” which is an extended letter to another Jewish convert. “Their spiritual leaders make no attempt to conceal the control they exercise over the lives of so-called or self-styled ‘Jews’. They extend their authority far beyond the legitimate limits of spiritual matters. Their authority has no equal outside religion.”

Not only does the Talmud, which includes more than 60 volumes of commentaries, regulate the thinking and daily lives of Jews, he wrote, it inculcates in them hostility toward gentiles, or non-Jews, in general.

Using the translation from the Hebrew by the Latvian priest and eminent scholar, the Rev. I.B. Pranaitis, Master of Theology and Professor of the Hebrew Language at the Imperial Ecclesiastical Academy of the Roman Catholic Church in Old St. Petersburg, Russia, Freedman proved his point by listing summarized Talmudic references for some of the specific laws regarding Christians, and gentiles in general. I list them below. They conform with many other translations of the Talmud. Please feel free to correct any of these summaries if you can prove they are faulty. Again, some of these references refer to all non-Jews, not just Christians. Read More »

“I DON’T care if women’s sports are completely eradicated by men in dresses. Women’s sports were never a benefit to women or society. Physical competitions between women build zero feminine virtues.

“It was always just a sign of an unhealthy and decadent society.”

I completely agree with this short statement found on Gab.

MY article, nearly ten years old, on Peter Schafer’s 2009 book, Jesus in the Talmud, might interest readers.

FROM Abbé François Trochu’s Saint Bernadette Soubirous, (1844-1879):

At St. John’s Club, conversation on the subject had just taken a livelier turn. Its members used to meet in a room of the Café Français near the church — and here were to be found the notables of the town, independent gentlemen, doctors, lawyers, magistrates, officials of all ranks.

The frequenters of St.John’s Club were not anti-clericals: not one of them would have passed the parish priest without greeting him or, on occasion, shaking hands with him. Moreover, no one in authority could have taken any exception to their convictions or their conduct. At this period, the Imperial government showed itself favourable to Catholics: The Revolution had not as yet had time to ‘recapture Napolean III’ on the morrow of his attempted assassination  by Orsini on January 14th of this same year, 1858.

Nevertheless, in spites of its name and possible without its members being fully conscious of the fact, there was at St. John’s Club a certain Voltarianism in the air. On the tables of the Café Français lay the two Paris the two Paris dailies, La Presse and Le Siecle, which — to quote Montalembert — ‘have three times as many subscribers as all the other newspapers put together and contain almost daily attacks on religion and the clergy.’

Among the registered members of the club, the big Catholic daily, the Univers, counted but one solitary subscriber, Pailhasson, the chemist. The others no doubt considered that the ‘ultramontane’ journal of the fiery Louis Veuillot put the Pope too much above the Emperor, and so they fell back upon Le Siecle and La Presse. Periodically these two very secular papers would remind their readers that in those days of electric telegraphy and the steam-engine it was absurd simplicity, stupidity and obscurantism to admit the possibility of apparitions and miracles.

The previous evening, at the Lourdes club, in between two games of cards, the more free-thinking among the groups of friends found much amusement in the story of this young neurotic falling into trances every morning at the foot of the Massabielle rocks. But the genteel laughter of these gentlemen did not even shake the Cafe windows.

“I had hardly begun to take off my stocking when I heard the sound of wind, as in a storm. I turned towards the meadow, and I saw that the trees were not moving at all. I had half-noticed, but without paying any particular heed, that the branches and brambles were waving beside the grotto.

I went on taking my stockings off, and was putting one foot into the water, when I heard the same sound in front of me. I looked up and saw a cluster of branches and brambles underneath the topmost opening in the grotto tossing and swaying to and fro, though nothing else stirred all around.

Behind these branches and within the opening, I saw immediately afterwards a girl in white, no bigger than myself, who greeted me with a slight bow of the head; at the same time, she stretched out her arms slightly away from her body, opening her hands, as in pictures of Our Lady; over her right arm hung a rosary.

I was afraid. I stepped back. I wanted to call the two little girls; I hadn’t the courage to do so. I rubbed my eyes again and again: I thought I must be mistaken.

Raising my eyes again, I saw the girl smiling at me most graciously and seeming to invite me to come nearer. But I was still afraid. It was not however a fear such as I have had at other times, for I would have stayed there for ever looking at her: whereas, when you are afraid, you run away quickly.”

 — Recounted by Abbé François Trochu in Saint Bernadette Soubirous, (1844-1879)

— Comments —

Kathy writes:

I think the film “The Song of Bernadette” does a nice job of depicting the “Voltairians” opinions of little Soubirous. I am in such awe of the great saints of the past, even the talents and simple common sense of our ancestors. What a weak, dumbed down, enslaved lot we are, and how appalled they would be at what has happened to Western Civilization. at what we have become. I recall reading “Revelations” as a kid, and thinking ‘That’ll never happen in my lifetime!”, and the very idea that Christians could be actually persecuted in America! Laughable! 50 years later, it’s happening.

Peccantem me quotidie by Carlo Gesualdo

I who sin every day
and am not penitent
the fear of death troubles me:

Responsum
For in hell there is no redemption.
Have mercy upon me, O God, and save me.

Versus
God, in your name save me,
and in your virtue set me free.

Variant 1

I tremble at my misdeeds and blush before you:
when you come to judge, condemn me not:
have mercy upon me, O God, and save me.

“HOW to Root out Hidden Faults” by Rev. James F. McElhone (1890-1963) is another great resource for Lent (and the rest of the year). Here he looks at the fault of gluttony — caring too much about the quality or quantity of what we eat or drink:

In our day the tendency is to think and speak much about things to eat and drink. Emphasis is placed on physical fitness. In fact, there are many who practice self-denial for the sake of physical fitness alone. Now there is no doubt that temperance is a help to health; but should not the spiritual idea come first? Temperance is a virtue; to practice it is to gain merit and grace; to practice it is a means of keeping well.

Right reason should regulate our lives in regard to eating and drinking. We should think correctly in this matter; our state of mind should be spiritual. We eat to live; we should not live to eat. Excess is to be avoided, so is defect; to be over-fed or under-nourished is harmful and wrong. Prudence is the guide, for what might be too much or too little for one is not excessive or defective for another. Let reason determine the amount to be taken and the manner in which it is taken. [emphasis added]

THE Seven Penitential Psalms were traditionally prayed every day in Lent.

See here.