HOW STRANGE that God became a man. But is it any stranger than that man is man? Is it stranger than that each of us will die? Or that we can conceive of sin or justice or sacrifice? Or that we can conceive of such a God?  Mortal and immortal. Powerless and powerful. Creature and Creator. Loved and despised. Human and superhuman. Man and God. Now we understand what we never understood. But, as it is written: That eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man, what things God hath prepared for them that love him. Corinthians 2:9

  IT IS no accident that international events heated up on the brink of Holy Week. Satan will do anything and everything to distract people and draw them away from focusing on the most important event in human history. But nothing that is happening in the world is more important than what transpired in Jerusalem almost 2,000 years ago. Nothing is more important than your own participation in that event. Thomas Droleskey writes at Christ or Chaos: He willingly embraced His Cross so as to pay back in His Sacred Humanity the debt that was owed to Him in His Infinity as God, to re-open the Gates of Heaven that had been closed by Adam’s sin and to stretch out His arms on the horizontal beam of the Cross so as to embrace all men for all time to lift them up on the vertical beam to the Father in Heaven in Spirit and in Truth. Whether any one human being cooperates with the graces won for his immortal soul on the wood of the Holy Cross is up to the free will of that person. We do know, however, that God wants us to cooperate with the graces, made possible for us by the shedding of every single drop of His Most Precious Blood and that flow into our hearts and souls through the loving hands of Our Lady, the Mediatrix of All Graces, and to be conscious of the fact…

IT'S not a solution, but it helps. From Life Site News: The proposed budget allocates $20 million for the state's "Alternatives to Abortion" program, a network of pro-life crisis pregnancy centers, maternity homes and adoption agencies that provide care for mothers and their babies, in and out of the womb. The Alternatives to Abortion program gave free assistance to more than 131,000 pregnant women between 2006 and 2015 with a confidential pregnancy hotline, a pregnancy care network website, maternity and baby clothing, car seats, diapers, formula, food, furniture, temporary shelter, and referrals to community agencies and medical resources.

BOTH are founded on the same premises.

  EGYPT mourns this week the 44 Coptic Christians killed in the attacks on Palm Sunday. ISIS has declared war on the nation's Christians.

"Shortly before 6 PM, I was fetched by an administrator and a few police officers to take an out-of-the-way elevator into the Athenaeum. The massive hall, where I was supposed to meet with students for dinner before my talk, was empty—the mob, by then numbering close to 300, had succeeded in preventing anyone from entering. The large plate-glass windows were covered with translucent blinds, so that from the inside one could only see a mass of indistinct bodies pounding on the windows. The administration had decided that I would live-stream my speech in the vacant room in order to preserve some semblance of the original plan. The podium was moved away from a window so that, as night fell and the lights inside came on, I would not be visible to the agitators outside. I prefaced my speech by observing that I had heard chants for the last two hours that “black lives matter.” I therefore hoped that the protesters were equally fervent in expressing their outrage when five-year-old Aaron Shannon, Jr., was killed on Halloween 2010 in South-Central Los Angeles, while proudly showing off his Spiderman costume. A 26-year-old member of Watts’s Kitchen Crips sent a single bullet through Aaron’s head, and also shot Aaron’s uncle and grandfather. I said that I hoped the protesters also objected when nine-year-old Tyshawn Lee was lured into an alley in Chicago with the promise of candy in November 2015 and assassinated by…

  GREAT comments by U.S. Marine veteran Ken O'Keefe in this discussion about the allegations in 2013 -- later proven to be false -- that the Syrian government used chemical weapons against its own people. Notice how the word "regime" is always used to describe a targeted country, even if the leaders were democratically elected.  

TWEETS from James Perloff:

LEAVING ASIDE the issue of human casualties -- a far more serious concern -- how much did it cost America to fire 59 Tomahawk missiles at Syria? Estimated cost: $60 million. That could have done a lot for the Rust Belt that Trump so often referred to in his campaign.

  Jesu! From out thine opened Side Thou hast the thirsty world supplied With endless streams of love; Come ye who would your sickness heal, Draw freely from that sacred well, Its heavenly virtues prove. Hail, Jesu! pray for us. From the Rosary of Fr. Frederick William Faber

A LECTURE by Heather Mac Donald on anti-police propaganda at Claremont McKenna College was cut short due to protests.

From Breitbart:

“During my speech, the protesters banged on the glass windows and shouted. It was extremely noisy inside the hall. I took two questions from students who were watching on livestream, but then the cops decided that things were getting too chaotic and I should stop speaking,” Mac Donald said. “An escape plan through the kitchen into an unmarked police van was devised; I was surrounded by about four cops. Protesters were sitting on the stoop outside the door through which I exited, but we had taken them by surprise and we got through them.”

In her short lecture, Mac Donald argued that there is no institution more dedicated to protecting black lives than cops. (more…)

THEY CLAIM the Syrian children were murdered for propaganda purposes with injections of opiates.

WHY did the United States attempt to destroy Syria’s most important airbase, a military base that was being used to fight Muslim terrorists? An explanation from Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, from an April 6th interview:

Concern about a war is unrealistic, because the reality is that we are living this war. But as for calling it a Syrian-Israeli war, you can assume in any case that these terrorists are fighting for Israel. Even if they are not a regular Israeli army, they are still fighting for Israel. And Israel shares the objectives with Turkey, the United States, France, Britain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other states. They all share the same objective. It is a war that has taken a new form and uses new instruments. Practically, our victory over the terrorists is a victory over all those states put together. That’s why Israel is doing its best to support these terrorists in every place the Syrian Army advances. They attack in one way or another in order to provide support to the terrorists and in order to stall the momentum of the Syrian Arab Army in facing them.

Other quotes from the interview:

Those Western countries, led by the United States, in partnership mainly with Britain and France, and unfortunately some European countries which did not have a colonial history, do not accept independent states and do not accept peer relations. They want satellite states which implement their policies. (more…)

THE “America First” nationalists in the Trump administration (e.g. Steve Bannon) are being marginalized for the real power behind the throne: the Kushners, the Goldman Sachs bankers and the moronic warhawks. See Mike King’s report (salty language, indecent images):

We believe that Jared & Ivanka “won the battle” because the game was rigged against the Nationalists all along. The object of the game was to paint the Democrat Trumpstein as a born-again nationalist, then draw in Christians, pro-lifers, union workers, “angry White guys” and all the various sub-groups of “alt-right-wingers” (including us, though we always had some doubts), and then discard us all like used-up lemon rinds soon after the election — making it look like the result of a lost “power struggle,” rather than the calculated, pre-meditated betrayal it was intended to be all along.

Why anyone would be surprised at all this is … surprising. In general, don’t trust people who make their living in casinos or New York real estate or beauty pageants. Don’t trust people who brag about sleeping with married women and cheating on their own wives. And, call me prejudiced, but don’t trust people who build ugly skyscrapers. (more…)

  THE Resurrection of Jesus Christ met with skepticism from the very beginning. The Apostles and other disciples were the first doubters. When the women, who had gone to the tomb to anoint Jesus's body, found that it was empty and witnessed an angel, they then went to tell the Apostles, who did not believe them. When Christ appeared to the Apostles later they thought He was a spirit. People were not anymore inclined then than they are today to believe death can be reversed. The evangelists - Mark, Matthew, Luke and John - ultimately convinced vast multitudes of the veracity of their accounts. Could they have been fooled? Could they have made up the story for some ulterior purpose? This 1945 pamphlet by Rev. Martin J. Scott. S.J. provides brief answers to skeptics.

  FROM Bach's magnificent St. Matthew Passion

  THIS excellent video was posted on Youtube by "Reason and Logic" with the quote: "Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our own society and abroad. We tear down the old order every day, from business to science, literature, art, architecture, and cinema to politics and the law. Our enemies have always hated this whirlwind of energy and creativity, which menaces their traditions (whatever they may be) and shames them for their inability to keep pace." Neocon Michael Ledeen

THIRTEEN tweets that illustrate Trump’s hypocrisy on Syria.

In related news:

Iran’s president said on Saturday that “terrorists” were applauding his US counterpart Donald Trump for launching a missile strike on an airbase of his Syrian government ally.

But Hassan Rouhani backed calls for an independent inquiry into a suspected chemical weapons attack on a rebel-held town in northwestern Syria on Tuesday that Trump blamed on Damascus.

“This man who is now in office in America claimed that he wanted to fight terrorism but today all terrorists in Syria are celebrating the US attack,” Rouhani said in a speech on state television. (more…)