where you can revel in the JOY of being Catholic
Mountain Climbing is a significant motif throughout salvation history, according to this.
My climb up the Croagh Patrick in Ireland certainly bears that out.
At various points I felt united to Christ in the Via Crucis, it became a metaphor for my Grief, and it reminded me very much of a Labyrinth walk. I was climbing St. Patrick's mountain on St. Jospeh's day, thinking very much about St. Peter the Rock, and several other holy men and women.
from the hymn by John Montgomery:
Early hasten to the tomb,
where they laid his breathless clay.
All is solitude and gloom-
Who has taken him away?
Christ is risen! He meets our eyes.
Savior, teach us so to rise.
text by James Montgomery:
Go to dark Gethsemane,
you who feel the tempter's power.
Your redeemer's conflict see;
watch with Him one bitter hour.
Turn not from his griefs away-
learn of Jesus Christ to pray.
See him at the judgment hall;
view the Lord of life arraigned.
Oh, the wormwood and the gall!
oh! the pangs His soul sustained!
Shun not suffering, shame, nor loss-
learn of Christ to bear the Cross.
Calvary's mournful mountain climb,
there adoring at His feet.
Mark that miracle of time,
Lo, the sacrifice complete.
'It is finished!' hear Him cry-
learn of Jesus Christ to die.
Reading this is like a breath of fresh air after trudging through the Mordor of this pontificate:
Throughout the Lenten itinerary of conversion we have lived for six weeks, the Church has asked us to reflect on God’s thirst for us. Thus, the paradigmatic Lenten Gospel reading of Jesus and the woman at the well on the Third Sunday of Lent points to prayer as a “gift of God” (John 4:10): Prayer is our divinely empowered response to God’s burning desire for our holiness. Other paradigmatic Lenten Sunday Gospels strike a similar note: The cure of the man born blind (who is empowered to see Jesus as the Light of the World [John 9, 5, 38]) and the raising of Lazarus from the dead (which follows Martha’s act of faith in John 11:27). God creates or “speaks” the world into being through his “Word” (John 1:3) and redeems the world through the Word incarnate (John 1:14) to share the divine holiness. God yearns, God “thirsts,” for the holiness of the human creatures he has created, so that he might be in covenant relationship with them.
The Redemption wrought in Christ is not, therefore, some sort of addendum to creation. The paschal mystery of Christ’s passion, death, resurrection, and ascension is the axial point of the entire drama of creation: the decisive, definitive turning point that reveals why there is “creation” at all. Thus, the answer that Christian faith, which is Easter faith, gives to a question philosophy has pondered for millennia—Why is there something rather than nothing?—is, in a word, holiness. The Thrice-Holy God created so that the holiness shared among Father, Son, and Holy Spirit might be shared ad extra: in a world brought into being to experience the eternal giving-and-receiving of love that is God’s inner-trinitarian life.
via Happy Catholic
"Disbelief in the Christian revelation is, for most people, not a matter of philosophical argument or historical evidence, it is simply a matter of desire: a desire not to believe, and almost invariably not to be judged, especially in matters of sexual morality.
Secularization in the West is, in effect, an alternative faith, entirely fictitious, subjective, and driven by short-term self-interest. And while it poses as progressive – the Science! – it’s instead the path of moral, intellectual, and cultural decadence, where adolescent attitudes rule, reason is forfeit, objective truth denied, and moral law abandoned."
This is why people lose their belief in the Church at 13. If it feels so good, it can't possibly be sinful.
But we had the largest group of humans turning 13 at the same time, and hence, the 1960s, leading to the nadir of human civilization, the 1970s.
OF THE NINE-MONTH NOVENA TO OUR LADY OF GUADALUPE
To be prayed daily throughout the nine-month novena from March 12 to December 12, 2024.
O Virgin Mother of God, we fly to your protection and beg your intercession against the darkness and sin, which ever more envelope the world and menace the Church. Your Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ, gave you to us as our mother as He died on the Cross for our salvation. So too, in 1531, when darkness and sin beset us, He sent you, as Our Lady of Guadalupe, on Tepayac to lead us to Him Who alone is our light and our salvation.
Through your apparitions on Tepayac and your abiding presence with us on the miraculous mantle of your messenger, Saint Juan Diego, millions of souls converted to faith in your Divine Son. Through this novena and our consecration to you, we humbly implore your intercession for our daily conversion of life to Him and the conversion of millions more who do not yet believe in Him. In our homes an in our nation, lead us to Him Who lone wins the victory over sin and darkness in us and in the world.
Unite our hearts to your Immaculate Heart so that they may find their true and lasting home in the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus. Ever guide us along the pilgrimage of life to our eternal home with Him. So may our hearts, one with yours, always trust in God's promise of salvation, in His never failing mercy toward all who turn to Him with a humble and contrite heart. Through this novena and our consecration to you, O Virgin of Guadalupe, lead all souls in America and throughout the world to your Divine Son in Whose name we pray. Amen.
Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke
“The voice of a sighing heart,
Its sob and mournful cries,
I offer up to you, O Seer of Secrets.
I play the fruits of my wavering mind
as a savory sacrifice on the fire of my grieving soul
to be delivered to you
In the censer of my will.
Compassionate Lord,
Breathe in this offering.
Look more favorably upon it
than upon a more sumptuous sacrifice,
offered with rich smoke.
Please find these simple words acceptable.
Do not turn in disdain.
Why you have you hardened my miserable heart,
so I do not fear you,
who is beyond words and awe.
Help me, so I will not be unfruitful,
Like the planter vainly sowing seeds into barren ground.
Spare me that I may not
Labor without birth,
Sigh without tears,
Meditate without voice,
Cloud without rain,
Struggle without reaching,
Call without being heard,
Implore without being heeded,
Groan without being comforted,
Beg without being helped,
Smolder without aroma,
See you without being fulfilled.
Hear me, Lord, before I cry out to you,
Who alone are almighty.
Do not leave the wages of my suffering unrecompensed,
For the tallied days of my life of sin,
Wayward soul that I am.”
-from an Armenian text, posted by The Pillar.
“I like to meet you now, while you are deacons, because one does not become a pastor without first being a deacon. The diaconate does not disappear with priesthood: on the contrary, it is the foundation on which it is based. You will be priests in order to serve, conforming with Jesus who “came not to be served but to serve, and to give His life” (cf Mk 10:45). I would say, then, that that there is an inner foundation of priesthood to be preserved, which we could call “diaconal conscience”: just as conscience underlies decisions, so the spirit of service underlies being a priest.”- Pope Francis to those preparing for transitional diaconate
https://thedeaconsbench.com/pope-francis-the-diaconate-does-not-disappear-with-priesthood/
I find this delightfully affirmative of what I have explained to disciples in OCIA; namely, that what we experience on Sunday is the Mass in the Absence of a Deacon, except when the Pastor proclaims the Gospel, he is standing at the Ambo as a Deacon, not a Priest.
Many discussions of the feminine or masculine "geniuses" open themselves up to anecdotal rebuttals about particular men or women who defy the characterization. Here we do not define "genius" as something essential to each of the sexes, such as capacity for motherhood or fatherhood, but, rather as: "a set of characteristics, and proclivities that derive from those essential and mutually distinct capacities." The feminine genius, therefore, is the set of characteristics that a well-formed woman will display with a particular proclivity due to her capacity for motherhood. The masculine genius is the set of characteristics that a well-formed man will display with a particular proclivity due to his capacity for fatherhood.
As Cardinal Ratzinger wrote in his Letter to Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and the World,
It is appropriate…to recall that the feminine values mentioned here [a capacity for the other] are above all human values: the human condition of man and woman created in the image of God is one and indivisible. It is only because women are more immediately attuned to these values that they are the reminder and the privileged sign of such values.
The same could be said for the masculine genius, which is a set of characteristics that are ultimately human values, attainable also by women. The integration of both sets of human values leads to human flourishing, beautifully exemplified by the father of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, described by her thus: "Hard as he was on himself, he was always affectionate towards us. His heart was exceptionally tender toward us. He lived for us alone. No mother's heart could surpass his. Still with all that there was no weakness. All was just and well-regulated."
With these preliminaries in mind, we will now turn to the masculine genius.
speaks to my soul, from the Dominicana blog:
Aquinas identifies sorrow as arising from the recognition of something lacking, a lacking that effects us in a painful and interior way (ST I-II, q. 35). When we are mourning a loved one, we feel this interior pain because we are coming to terms with the reality: this person whom we loved so much is no longer with us. It is precisely in this painful process of mourning that the goodness of the person becomes more apparent to us, which can have the effect of intensifying our sadness (cf. ST I-II, q. 37).
This mourning period—painful as the stirring up of our memory of the person is—can be an opportunity to be thankful to God. In our recollections, we think of the person we miss (how he talked, treated us kindly, etc.). As we think of these qualities, we come to realize how God’s ever present love has been working in our lives for our good, in its own mysterious way. It turns out that what we are really missing is not just the person in himself, but the goodness which God endowed him with in his own particular way. We miss this particular instantiation of the goodness of God as it overflowed and was constructed in this person.
Ah, the true meaning of a MERRY Christmas is a Mercy-filled Christmas, one where we wish passersby that they should be as filled with the sensation of both impending doom & redemption as we are who know Christ truly.