A Word on Wednesday, Wednesday, April 25, 2012, St Theresa of Avila

"He who neglects mental prayer needs not a devil to carry him to hell, but he brings himself there with his own hands."  St Theresa of Avila

Early Church Fathers, Sunday, April 22, 2012 St Clement of Rome

"And know, brethren, that our stay in this world in the flesh is short and fleeting; but the promise of Christ is great and wonderful, and brings us rest in the kingdom which is to come and in life everlasting . . .If then, we do the will of Christ, we shall obtain rest; but if not, if we neglect His commandments, nothing will rescue us from eternal punishment." Clement of Rome

Friday Florilegia, Friday, April 20, 2012

This weeks reading is from the Gospel for next Sunday, April 27.

Gospel Jn 10:11-18

Jesus said:
"I am the good shepherd.
A good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.
A hired man, who is not a shepherd
and whose sheep are not his own,
sees a wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away,
and the wolf catches and scatters them.
This is because he works for pay and has no concern for the sheep.
I am the good shepherd,
and I know mine and mine know me,
just as the Father knows me and I know the Father;
and I will lay down my life for the sheep.
I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold.
These also I must lead, and they will hear my voice,
and there will be one flock, one shepherd.
This is why the Father loves me,
because I lay down my life in order to take it up again.
No one takes it from me, but I lay it down on my own.
I have power to lay it down, and power to take it up again.
This command I have received from my Father."

Miscellaneous Musings, Thursday, April 19, 2012, How Did This Happen?

I remember growing up that many, if not most, stores and businesses were closed on Sunday.  I remember that the question was never whether a person you knew went to church or not, the question was, which church did he or she go to?  When I was young, Bishop Fulton J Sheen had the number one rated television show in the land – Protestants and Catholics alike tuned in to watch him, my parents included.  In other words, faith, Christian faith, was an integral part of society and, yes, even culture.  What we have today is a disaster that seems only to get worse with each passing day.  Bishop Chaput asks a very good question when he writes,

The question is: How did we get from the America of Tocqueville, where on Sundays “the commercial and industrial life of the nation seems suspended [in piety, and] all noise ceases,” to the America where—borrowing from the words of Pascal Bruckner— we’re the “galley slaves of pleasure,” an America of obsessive consumption and confused sexuality where “the intention was to produce freedom, but the result was advertising; [where] what was liberated was less our libido than our appetite for unlimited shopping”? Archbishop Charles Chaput, A Heart on Fire: Catholic Withness and the Next America, Kindle edition, Location 232

“The galley slaves of pleasure. . .” is an apt description of what is going on today, and a very sad one.  To make matters worse, we have an administration bent on making in impossible legally to return our society to some sort of freedom and sanity; they consider what was once good and normal in this country to be evil and repressive.  One can only see the work of dark forces in their motives, and one can spend a lot of time in prayer and remembrance that these forces must lose, have already truly lost.

The Desert Fathers, Sunday, April 15, 2012, St Irenaeus

The Lord of all gave to His apostles the power of the gospel, and by them we also have learned the truth, that is, the teaching of the Son of God - as the Lord said to them, `He who hears you hears Me, and he who despises you despises Me, and Him Who sent Me' [Lk.10:16]. For we learned the plan of our salvation from no other than from those through whom the gospel came to us. The first preached it abroad, and then later by the will of God handed it down to us in Scriptures, to be the foundation and pillar of our faith. For it is not right to say that they preached before they had come to perfect knowledge, as some dare to say, boasting that they are the correctors of the apostles. For after our Lord had risen from the dead, and they were clothed with the power from on high when the Holy Spirit came upon them, they were filled with all things and had perfect knowledge. They went out to the ends of the earth, preaching the good things that come to us from God, and proclaiming peace from heaven to all men, all and each of them equally being in possession of the gospel of God.
St. Irenaeus, Against the Heresies, III

Natural Law and the Constitution

Hadley Arkes, at The Catholic Thing, offers a wonderful, if brief, analysis of the understanding our Founding Fathers had of the role of natural law in framing our Constitution, I hope you give it a read.  This is especially important for all Catholics to be informed on, so I present a brief quote from the column:

William Blackstone, that legendary commentator on the laws of England, remarked that the law could not contain a principle of revolution. Laws settle the order of things; revolutions unsettle them. But James Wilson, one of the leading minds among the American Founders, insisted that “a revolution principle certainly is, and certainly should be taught as a principle for the constitution.”

For the law in America would begin with the recognition that there could indeed be an unjust law. But that made sense only if one understood that there was a body of principles by which one could judge the rightness or wrongness, the justice or injustice, of those measure that were enacted into law.

The philosopher John Locke unfolded the logic of the matter in a series of questions. What was the source, he asked, of the positive law, the law that was “posited” or enacted. Answer: the legislature. What was the source of the legislature? Answer: the constitution, for it tells of whether we have a legislature and of how many chambers.

But then what was the source of the constitution? It had to be found, said, Locke in some source “antecedent to all positive laws” and that authority was “depending wholly on the people,” on their natural right to be governed with their own consent.

Friday Florilegia, Friday April 13, 2012

The reading for next week is the first reading of the third Sunday of Easter. I hope you prayerfully enjoy!

Reading 1: Acts 3:13-15, 17-19

Peter said to the people:
"The God of Abraham,
the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob,
the God of our fathers, has glorified his servant Jesus,
whom you handed over and denied in Pilate's presence
when he had decided to release him.
You denied the Holy and Righteous One
and asked that a murderer be released to you.
The author of life you put to death,
but God raised him from the dead; of this we are witnesses.
Now I know, brothers,
that you acted out of ignorance, just as your leaders did;
but God has thus brought to fulfillment
what he had announced beforehand
through the mouth of all the prophets,
that his Christ would suffer.
Repent, therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be wiped away."