Christ Carrying the Cross, Andrea Solario

BELOW is a list of reading possibilities for Lent, including familiar classics and lesser known works — all of which are secondary to the most important books of all: the Old and New Testaments. If you don’t mind reading on a screen (or listening to audio versions), you can obtain any of these books below for free.

LENTEN READING

Perfect Contrition: The Golden Key to Paradise, Fr. J. de Driesch
The Passion and the Death of Our Lord Jesus Christ, St. Alphonsus de Liguori
A Catholic commentary on Holy Scripture; Bernard Orchard, ed.
Haydock’s Bible Commentary,George Leo Haydock
Of Prayer and Meditation, Ven. Louis of Granada
The Sinner’s Guide, Ven. Louis of Granada
Meditations for Lent, St. Thomas Aquinas
Lenten Sermons, Fr. Augustine Wirth
Pope St. Leo the Great’s Sermons on Lent
The Mystery of the Crown of Thorns, A Passionist
What Jesus Saw from the Cross, Fr. A.G. Sertillanges
A Doctor at Calvary: the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ as described by a surgeon, Dr. Pierre Barbet
The Foot of the Cross, by Fr. Frederick William Faber
Spiritual Conferences, by Fr. Frederick William Faber
The Sacred Passion of Jesus Christ, Rev. Richard Clarke
The Sufferings of Our Lord Jesus Christ, Fr. Thomas Jesus Read More »

“DONALD Trump has paid roughly $30 million to settle child-sex complaints brought against him since 1989, according to a D.C.-based investigative journalist.

“Wayne Madsen Report (WMR), which is a subscription site, describes the settlements in a Jan 14-15 post titled ‘Why is Trump so afraid of Cohen’s testimony?'”

Read more.

“UNLESS we ponder and consider the mysteries of our faith, our faith is as it were a letter closed up, and sealed.”

— Ven. Louis of Grenada, Of Prayer and Meditation

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FUNNY and true comments from J.D. Hall:

These men choose their political beliefs like they choose their theology; they choose whatever belief that is least likely to bring controversy to their door step, as close to the middle as they can possibly get, so as to offend the least number of God’s enemies as is humanly possible while still keeping up the facade that they’re conservatives. Read More »

S. writes:

I hope this finds you well.

I remember a few months ago there was a discussion on your blog about the flooding in Western North Carolina and other areas from hurricane Helene and whether the weather could actually be modified to make storms more severe.

I thought I would send this old short film I just found. It seems they have been working on this technology for a while.

“When the shepherd becomes a wolf, the first duty of the flock is to defend itself. It is usual and regular, no doubt, for doctrine to descend from the bishops to the faithful, and those who are subject in the faith are not to judge their superiors. But in the treasure of revelation there are essential doctrines which all Christians, by the very fact of their title as such, are bound to know and defend. The principle is the same whether it be a question of belief or conduct, dogma or morals.”

— (The Liturgical Year, Dom Guéranger Vol. 4 Septuagesima, p. 379-380)

THE man the world recognizes as pope and supreme ruler of the Catholic Church, who proclaimed in the first year of his pseudo-reign, “I want a mess,” is gravely ill. While Francis may recover from this latest health crisis, his remaining days on earth are clearly to be few. It is likely his condition is worse than is being publicly let on today.

As he lies ill at Gemelli Hospital in Rome, may God have mercy on the many victims of this audacious vulgarian, head not of the Catholic Church but of the One-World Ekumenik Church. As an indicator of just how bad off the institution he led is, the city of Boston, once a stronghold of Catholicism, now has one seminarian per nearly 30,000 nominal Catholics, while the city of Chicago has one seminarian for every 67,000 parishioners. (And sadly, those seminarians will never be true Catholic priests, no matter how well-intentioned they are.)

Highlights from his false pontificate in 2014 alone include:

Held the first Muslim/Jewish prayers and Koran readings at the Vatican; Sent an iPhone message to evangelicals through prosperity-gospel TV preacher Kenneth Copeland; Peace doves attacked; Said to ‘scold the Lord‘ and also that he would baptize aliens; Cover of Rolling Stone; Accidentally said ‘the F word’; Cardinal Dolan claimed Francis said ‘Catholic Church should not dismiss gay marriage‘; Mentioned re-thinking celibacy for priests; Said he’s ‘not interested in converting evangelicals to Catholicism‘; Initial synod document suggested shift in Church’s position on homosexuality, but was revised; Said man is ‘the king of the universe!‘; Told a woman in invalid marriage it’s alright to take Holy Communion, saying ‘A little bread and wine does no harm‘; Compared Islamic terrorists to Christian fundamentalists…

But, the purpose of this post is to focus on the countless casualties, not on the state of Francis himself. The people harmed by this outrageous imposture that a man who joked about the Crucifixion, who said “Communists think like Christians” and who rejects key doctrines of Catholic belief and its sacred rites can be head of the Church include the following:

*Protestants repelled by his clearly immoral, anti-Christian statements, his eager support for the flooding of Western countries with immigrants, and his enthusiasm for every globalist U.N. agenda, including the Covid fraud. Francis has scandalized them and confirmed many in their obstinate blindness against the unshaken spiritual authority of the papacy which comes from Christ himself.

*Muslims, Maoists, Buddhists, voodooists, Jews, and assorted pagans who have been led to believe they worship the same God as Catholics. They too have been confirmed in their errors and continually given the impression that objective truth in spiritual matters does not exist. Francis went so far as to wish Muslims a Happy Ramadan: “I also think with affection of those Muslim immigrants who this evening begin the fast of Ramadan, which I trust will bear abundant spiritual fruit.” (Homily given at Lampedusa on 8 July 2013 with illegal Muslim immigrants)

*The people all over before whom Francis has insulted and apologized for the martyrs and saints of the past, dragging the name of Christ’s Church through the mud.

*Sincere, would-be Catholics deceived into believing Francis is a true pope when he is not even so much as a member of the body he claims to govern. The spiritual harm to them is incalculable and most have lost the true faith. Many are woefully uneducated about their faith and do not even know of the many anti-popes in Church history.

*Would-be Catholics offended by Vatican II apostasy who yet believe a heretic and apostate such as Francis can somehow be a true pope and that it is permissible to refuse him submission, thereby destroying all honor due to the papacy. (This is known as the “recognize-and-resist” position.)

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“FAITH is always asking people to do things that are unusual, and out of the ordinary. This must happen if men deal with God. God can never be ordinary. He must always be outside of order as we know it and can see it and can measure it. God is within his own limits, which are limitless. Therefore, God is always breaking in on things that men have settled — not really settled but only observed.”

— Bede Jarrett, O.P., Returning to the Lord

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Ida Tarbell

“IT IS common enough to hear women arguing that this close grappling with household economy is narrowing, not worthy of them. Why keeping track of the cost of eggs and butter and calculating how much your income will allow you to buy is any more narrowing than keeping track of the cost and quality of cotton or wool or iron and calculating how much a mill requires, it is hard to see. It is the same kind of a problem. Moreover, it has the added interest of being always an independent personal problem. Most men work under the deadening effect of impersonal routine. They do that which others have planned and for results in which they have no permanent share. Read More »

Cooperstown, New York, where Susan Fenimore Cooper lived and shopped.

FROM Rural Hours (1850) by Susan Fenimore Cooper, daughter of James Fenimore Cooper:

But to return to the “store;” there are half a dozen of these on quite a large scale. It is amusing to note the variety within their walls. Barrels, ploughs, stoves, brooms, rakes and pitch forks; muslins, flannels, laces and shawls; sometimes in winter, a dead porker is hung up by the heels at the door; frequently, frozen fowls, turkeys and geese, garnish the entrance. The shelves are filled with a thousand things required by civilized man, in the long list of his wants. Here you see a display of glass and crockery, imported, perhaps, directly by this inland firm from the European manufacturer; there you observe a pile of silks and satins; this is a roll of carpeting, that a box of artificial flowers. At the same counter you may buy kid gloves and a spade; a lace veil and a jug of molasses; a satin dress and a broom, looking-glasses, grass-seed, fire-irons, Valenciennes lace, butter and eggs, embroidery, blankets, candles, cheese, and a fancy fan.

And yet, in addition to this medley, there are regular milliners’ shops and groceries in the place, and of a superior class too. But so long as a village retains its rural character, so long will the country “store” be found there; it is only when it has become a young city that the shop and warehouse take the place of the convenient store where so many wants are supplied on the same spot.

It is amusing once in a while to look on as the different customers come and go. Some people like shopping in a large town, where all sorts of pretty novelties are spread out on the counters to tempt purchasers; but there is much more real interest connected with such matters in a large country store, whatever fine ladies tossing about laces and gauzes at Beck’s or Stewart’s may fancy. Read More »

THE legal descendants of the Jewish court that sentenced Christ to death have published an open letter to Donald Trump, congratulating him on his divine mission and urging him to help establish a one world religious court under Jewish rule. The court will not recognize the existence of Jesus Christ. From the letter:

You have been elected, as Cyrus was in his time, to fulfill a heavenly mission: Read More »

“WE can be sure of one thing: the ongoing migrant crisis in Europe appears to be a carefully planned catastrophe, not an unfortunate accident. It has been on the cards for decades, ever since Count Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi (1894–1972), an Austro-Hungarian aristocrat whose mother was Japanese, arrived on the scene in the early 1920s and established the Pan European Union, the prototype for the United States of Europe.

“This was to be a multicultural superstate populated by mongrelized Europeans, according to the Count, who was himself a mongrel. Moreover, it was to be under Jewish rule—or rather, under a mandarinate of elite Jews and enlightened support groups of non-Jewish philosemitic foot soldiers who believed as passionately as the Jews did in tikkun olam and the establishment of a one-world government.”

More here.

Nikolai Abildgaard, Adam and Eve

“WE ARE sojourners upon this earth; we are exiles and captives in Babylon, that city which plots our ruin. If we love our country, — if we long to return to it, — we must be proof against the lying allurements of this strange land, and refuse the cup she proffers us, and with which she maddens so many of our fellow captives. She invites us to join in her feasts and her songs; but we must unstring our harps, and hang them on the willows that grow on her river’s bank, till the
signal be given for our return to Jerusalem. (Psalm 115) She will ask us to sing’ to her the melodies of our dear Sion: but, how shall we, who are so far from home, have heart to sing the Song of the Lord in a strange Land ? (Psalm 136) No, — there must be no sign that we are content to be in bondage, or we shall deserve to be slaves for ever.

“These are the sentiments wherewith the Church would inspire us, during the penitential Season, which we are now beginning. She wishes us to reflect on the dangers that beset us, — dangers which arise from our own selves, and from creatures. During the rest of the year, she loves to hear us chant the song of heaven, the sweet Alleluia! — but now, she bids us close our lips to this word of joy, because we are in Babylon.”

—- Dom Prosper Guéranger, “The Mystery of Septuagesima,” The Liturgical Year, Volume II (English translation, 1867)

SOME wisdom pertaining to romantic love on this day after St. Valentine’s Day from Frank Sheed’s book Sanity and Society (Sheed and Ward, 1953):

Sex is a power of the whole man, one power among many: and man is not an isolated unit, but bound to his fellows in society: and his life on earth is not the whole of life, but only a beginning. To use the power of sex successfully we must use it in balance with the rest of our powers, for the service of the whole personality, within a social order, with eternity to come. And all this is too complex a matter to be left to instinct or chance, to desire or mood or the heat of the blood or the line of least resistance. It calls for hard thinking.

A summons to think about sex will be met with no enthusiasm. Men are not much given to thought about sex; as we have noted, they expect no fun from thought and are not much inclined to it or good at it: whereas they expect a great deal of fun from sex and persist in thinking (in the face of the evidence) that they are good at it. Not only that. They feel that there is something rather repellent, almost improper, in the association of sex and thinking. A man must be cold-blooded, they say, to use his reason on sex. The taunt of cold-bloodedness is one that we can bear with fortitude. To the man with fever, a normal temperature seems cold-blooded—but vitality goes with normal temperature, not with fever. And modern sex life is not, even by its own standards, very vital. Too many men who have reached middle life have to admit that for themselves sex has not lived up to its promise—that on balance their life has been rather more begloomed by sex than delighted by it. They have had plenty of glowing anticipation, a handful of glowing experiences, a mass of half-satisfactions and whole frustrations—with the horizon drawing in, and the worried feeling that the splendour has somehow eluded them. Read More »

“IMAGINE that a group of people break into your house every night, go into your kitchen and use your food, appliances and electricity to prepare meals. Then they take those meals and sell them on their food truck. Compared to other food trucks, the ones breaking into your house have no overhead and no risk. Everything they make is pure profit. Then they use that money to buy things, to send money back home, to drive up costs and scarcity and drive down profits for other food trucks – who have their market share diminished by them.

“This is the scam of illegal invader labor. There’s no benefit to the citizen to have them here. NONE. Every single thing they are able to do, get, have is at the expense of someone who belongs here. Read More »