Read:
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.
About this blog…
“This blog is like a fusion of the Baroque ‘salon’ with its well-tuned harpsichord around which polite society gathered for entertainment and edification and, on the other hand, a Wild West “saloon” with its out-of-tune piano and swinging doors, where everyone has a gun and something to say. Nevertheless, we try to point our discussions back to what it is to be Catholic in this increasingly difficult age, to love God, and how to get to heaven.” – Fr. Z
Coat of Arms by D Burkart
Polls
Loading ...Donate using VENMO
GREAT BEER from Traditional Benedictine Monks in Italy
CLICK and say your daily offerings!
A Daily Prayer for Priests
Do you have a faithful Catholic website that needs competent and reliable tech support?
NEW OPPORTUNITY – 10% off with code: FATHERZ10
Fr. Z’s VOICEMAIL
Nota bene: I do not answer these numbers or this Skype address. You won't get me "live". I check for messages regularly.
WDTPRS
020 8133 4535
651-447-6265YOUR RECENT COMMENTS
on Vatican Synod’s (“walking together”) on spirituality of synodality (“walking togetherality”) is coming: The merciful heart loves… demons.: “I’m kinda done with the touchy-feely-synodalitinessiness. A general might consult his troops for situational intel, but when he says march…”
on 29 June 1972. Paul VI says, “the smoke of Satan has entered the Church of God”: “Does the doctrine of apostolic succession mean there are to be successors of Judas Iscariot?”
on 1 July – Most Precious Blood and also the Feasts of St. Junipero Serra and St. Aaron, brother of Moses: “Some of these prayers are the same as in the litany of the Precious Blood: https://www.preces-latinae.org/thesaurus/Filius/LitPSDNIC.html”
on ROME 22/06 – Day 31: Someone saw the list… no… the Letter!: “Thank you for naming a Roman restaurant that you like.”
on 29 June 1972. Paul VI says, “the smoke of Satan has entered the Church of God”: “Paul VI was his own worst enemy. He brought his liberal humanist buddies (e.g. Lercaro and Bugnini) into power, thinking…”
on 1 July – Most Precious Blood and also the Feasts of St. Junipero Serra and St. Aaron, brother of Moses: “The Precious Blood of Christ is at the top of my list of devotions that mean so much to me.…”
on Francis’ NEW “Desiderio desideravi” an Apostolic Letter “on the liturgical formation of the people of God” – an attempt to explain Traditionis custodes, to calm the storm: “In the Passover Seder the participants drink four cups of wine, the last of which is the Cup of Consummation.…”
on Look at more of “Desiderio desideravi”: “I have always resisted the label of “traditionalist” and I have always believed that it was possible to have a…”
on You have seen the logo for the 2025 Jubilee? – UPDATED: ““The official logo … has been unveiled.” Manifestatio manifestat. A veil is an instrument of mystery — of the nuptial…”
on ASK FATHER: Are we obliged to avoid businesses which will pay for employees’ abortion?: “This question of cooperation raises an issue that has been bothering me ever since Dobbs was announced. If you live…”
on You have seen the logo for the 2025 Jubilee? – UPDATED: “I would like something a little less Madison Ave. and even less Christopher St. Don’t we have something in a…”
on 29 June 1972. Paul VI says, “the smoke of Satan has entered the Church of God”: “James C, your comments on St. Paul VI are unjustly harsh as well as historically incorrect. St. Paul VI faced…”
on Look at more of “Desiderio desideravi”: “In Dd, Pope Francis writes, “A celebration that does not evangelize is not authentic, just as a proclamation that does…”
on You have seen the logo for the 2025 Jubilee? – UPDATED: “They could have used red, green, violet, and gold (white) to resemble the liturgical colors. But then again…maybe they did.…”
This REALLY helps! And it’s great coffee (and tea)
I use this when I travel both in these USA and abroad. Very useful. Fast enough for Zoom. I connect my DMR (ham radio) through it. If you use my link, they give me more data. A GREAT back up.
This blog has to earn its keep!
PLEASE subscribe via PayPal if it is useful.
That way I have steady income I can plan on, and you wind up regularly on my list of benefactors for whom I pray and for whom I periodically say Holy Mass.
In view of the rapidly changing challenges I now face, I would like to add more $10/month subscribers. Will you please help?
For a one time donation...
Yes, Fr. Z is taking ads…
Use the coupon code...
fatherz10
Be a “Zed-Head”!
CHALLENGE COINS!
My "challenge coin" for my 25th anniversary of ordination in 2016.
Want one? I do exchanges with military and LEOs, etc.
PLEASE RESPOND. Pretty pleeeease?
Loading ...This is really useful when travelling… and also when you aren’t and you need backup internet NOW! I use this for my DMR “Zednet” hotspot when I’m mobile. It’s a ham radio thing.
If you travel internationally, this is a super useful gizmo for your mobile internet data. I use one. If you get one through my link, I get data rewards.
WDTPRS POLL
Loading ...Fr. Z’s stuff is everywhere
Help support Fr. Z’s Gospel of Life work at no cost to you. Do you need a Real Estate Agent? Calling these people is the FIRST thing you should do!
They find you a pro-life agent in your area who commits to giving a portion of the fee to a pro-life group!
GREAT causes to support
Help Monks in Wyoming (coffee – UPDATED LINK) and Norcia (beer) and the wonderful "Soap Sisters" of Summit, NJ!
Please follow me on Twitter!
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.