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We belong to the Church militant ; and she is militant because on earth the powers of darkness are ever restless to encompass her destruction.
And there are variations on the theme.
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It is terrible to have to say it but if abortion and contraception disappear from the USA the country will be faced with a complete change of character. Abortion and contraception bring women into the labor market, lower the cost of labor, make the country more competitive.
Abortion and contraception are a necessity for the accumulation of wealth. Witness the Soviet Union where abortion on demand also brought women into labor force and the country developed rapidly though at the end fruitlessly. That may be our future.
We are as Catholics in a state of awakening. The problems we have seem economic but they are clearly religious.
Unclean spirits have taken hold of of the country and they howl when they are threatened with expulsion.
We ought to be the vicars of Christ personally each one of us.
I don’t see any other way but that of extreme austerity and penance.
JLCG–If abortion and contraception disappear from the USA I see that only as a good thing. Obedience to God’s will always brings peace.
JLCG, When I was a kid and mostly into my college life, women stayed at home and raised the kids. Inflation was really low and a family could live on one salary. Contrary to what you think, the inflationary extremes happened after women went into the workforce in the numbers they are now. Some women, of course, those who had vocations in the world, which has been the case even in the middle ages, worked. But to equate financial gain with two parents working was social engineering in the 1970s par excellence. We did not have yearly or bi-yearly vacations, my mother and grandma made a lot of our clothes and we have one car for a long time and one television. It is the great American Dream Lie which created the mess. Look at the statistics. Patrick Buchanan is good on this as well, in some of his books. Also, read Sowell.
Ending abortion and contraception is not about the resulting societal changes. They are intrinsic evils. The stomping out of evil is its own reward. Evil is never justified, even when it brings about something good.
JLCG said: “It is terrible to have to say it but if abortion and contraception disappear from the USA the country will be faced with a complete change of character. Abortion and contraception bring women into the labor market, lower the cost of labor, make the country more competitive.
Abortion and contraception are a necessity for the accumulation of wealth.”
Substitute slavery for abortion and contraception and you have an argument from the 1850s. Abortion is currently driving the domestic national agenda and Roe v. Wade is just as divisive for the country as the Dred Scott decision was. Steps taken to enforce Roe are similar to the steps taken to enforce the Scott decision and just as onerous to the population that is opposed to the tyranny of abortion.
Lincoln said that the US had to pay a large price in blood for the evil of slavery, we may (although I pray not) have to pay a similar price for the evil of abortion.
Control of biology is the linchpin of the radical feminist makeover of our society. All studies point to women becoming the ‘primary bread-winner’. Men, emasculated and bitter, will tom-cat around seeking in danger, crime and promiscuity to soothe their damaged masculinity. Most top college graduates are now women, women are becoming a majority among the top young professionals. Meanwhile, we have more men in prison than totalitarian China (per capita, 7 times higher!). Now, the Pentagon is working to put women in military front line situations. If that happens, as a man, I renounce my society as unfit for a human being, contra naturum, a cursed and wretched place that is unrecognizable to the place where I was born in the 1950’s.
This coming week, I have decided to celebrate the “Votive Mass for the Defense of the Church” (TLM), in response to all of these recent attacks against the Church.
The third verse of the Battle Hymn of the Republic could be Pope Pius XII’s marching orders (and warning) to the Church (supposedly) Militant.
I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
“As ye deal with my contemners, (despisers) so with you my grace shall deal;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,
Since God is marching on.”
Might not the second line be a warning to the clergy and “religious” of our day? Because they stand by (non militantly) trying to get along with His “contemners”, the Hero (after He has trampled out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored) will loose the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword against their worthless necks as well those of His contemners’.
Pius XII could not have made his point better had he known it would one day wind up on a mug.
The future Pope Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli) in 1931: (primary source?)
“I am worried by the Blessed Virgin Mary’s messages to Lucy of Fatima. This persistence of Mary about the dangers which menace the Church is a divine warning against the suicide of altering the Faith, in her liturgy, her theology and her soul.”
And somewhere else – “The day the Church abandons her universal tongue is the day before she returns to the catacombs.”
Is it now the day after?
Let us pray to Our Lady of Lourdes for her intercession of this her Feast Day.
There are two institutions that can resist a totalitarian government: the Catholic Church and the family. When we are united, when our husbands and children and grandchildren and priests and bishops have our back and we have theirs, we are unbreakable. So the trick must always be to splinter both of them. Split the Church into liberals and conservatives. Play to the differences. And separate the family with fewer and fewer children, more and more “outside” influences, including especially TV, and everybody working in different directions and demanding “time for me”. Tell women that family life is a prison. Tell men it is unnatural to love only one woman. Tell children that their parents are not FEEDING them properly and the new “mother” (FLOTUS) will take care of them. Tell really poor families that they get no help if there is a father in the house. Tell people that it is only just to describe the sterile couplings of homosexuals as “marriage”, (a “right” provided them by the government, not nature, which the government could also take away.) God created a Church. He created, and blessed with His presence, a human family of man, woman and child. These are what we must pray for, stand for, argue for, go to jail for, die for, if necessary.
In Seattle we have a US Senator (Murray) who claims to be Catholic and played prominent role in this offense against the church. When will the Church Militant deal with its Catholic politicians who are in open war against it?
tcreek,
wouldn’t this be a great hymn to hear and sing often during the Recessional this year?
Fr. Z, here’s a little tune I did about this whole issue of the HHS Mandate using Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower”, which strangely fit very well to this whole debacle. If you get a chance, here it is: http://youtu.be/YRJ-n5-37VE. hope you enjoy.
“There must be some way out of here,” said the joker to the thief,
“There’s too much constitution, I can’t get no relief.
Bishops, they won’t drink my wine, and priests won’t dig my earth,
I’m giving away free contraception don’t they know what this is worth?”
“No reason to get excited,” Sebelius, she kindly spoke,
“You, Barack, as well as I know this is but a joke.
Besides you are the anointed one, and this is not your fate,
So let us keep talking falsely now, the hour is getting late.”
But all along the watchtower, the voters kept their view
Come November the Joker’s gone, and his servants, too.
Outside in the distance the Church Militant did growl,
They woke a sleeping giant, and the wind is going to howl.
Where do we get one of the coffee mugs? They would make great gifts!
You can click the mug. above, or go HERE.
Did you know that the liberal Archbishop of Manila, Luis Antonio Tagle, does not want his students in theology class to use the terms: Church Militant, Church Triumphant and Church Suffering. He says these are old, pre-Vatican II mentalities. He insists on the term: COMMUNION OF THE FAITHFUL.
Wow! There goes Heaven and Purgatory!
“Steps taken to enforce Roe are similar to the steps taken to enforce the Scott decision and just as onerous to the population that is opposed to the tyranny of abortion.”
Actually, the enforcement of slavery started long before Dred Scott. For the first 40 years or so of the nation’s existence, it appeared that slavery might eventually die out on its own. Then the rise of the cotton industry made slavery lucrative again, and pro-slavery people started getting more aggressive about pushing the “right” to own slaves anywhere in the country.
The HHS compromise is, in my opinion, the worst compromise by the federal government on an important social/human rights issue since the Compromise of 1850, which included the infamous Fugitive Slave Act, or maybe even since the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which attempted to “solve” the problem of slavery by drawing a geographic line between slave and free territories.