Variety #193 – Fr. Thomas Ward ( 18min) >>> Play

Ave Maria!

Fr. Thomas Ward of St. Mary of the Assumption Church in Binghamton, NY, expounds on the sacred truth of the Dignity of the Human Person. This Truth is under attack on all sides by the one who is the “Father of lies” and “Murderer from the beginning.” Father Ward explains how tolerance of lies and sin ultimately leads to the destruction of human life, and the loss of souls.

He then exhorts us to respond with uncompromising truth, generous kindness, and universal charity, all of which must animate the merciful work of the Pro-Life movement.

This sermon was given for the Annual Pro-Life Prayer Service organized by the Broome County Right to Life Committee.

Ave Maria!

Audio (MP3)

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“It grieves me, my God, that I should be so wicked and that I am able to do so little in Your service. I well know that it is my own fault that You have not granted me the favours which You gave to those who went before me…. I grieve over my life, Lord, when I compare it with theirs; and I cannot say this without weeping. When I meditate, my God, upon the glory which You have prepared for those who persevere in doing Your will, and when I think how many trials and pains it cost Your Son to gain it for us, and how little we have deserved it, and how bound we are not to be ungrateful for this wondrous love which has taught us love at such a cost to itself, my soul becomes greatly afflicted.

How is it possible, Lord, that all this should be forgotten, and that, when they offend You, mortal men should be so forgetful of You? O my Redeemer, how forgetful are men! They are forgetful even of themselves. And how great is Your goodness that You should remember us when we have fallen and have tried to strike You a mortal blow, and that You forget what we have done and give us Your hand again and awaken us from our incurable madness so that we seek and beg You for salvation. Blessed be such a Lord, blessed be such great mercy and praised be He forever for His merciful pity! O my soul, bless forever so great a God! How can a soul turn against Him?” (St Teresa of Jesus, Foundations, 4 — Exclamations of the Soul to God, 3)

O Lord, although I know how much this poor soul of mine has cost You, yet how often have I offended You, resisted Your grace, been unfaithful to Your love, and deaf to Your invitation to a more perfect life, to sanctity.

You, my God, have given everything, You have given Yourself entirely for me; therefore, it is not seeking too much in return to ask me to give myself entirely to You, to give You everything in order to match Your love for me. Yes, I know that You are not satisfied with my thinking only of saving my soul, just as You were not satisfied to acquire for me only the means necessary for my salvation, but willed also to acquire the means necessary for my sanctification. You have already purchased and paid for all of them; therefore, if I do not become a saint, it is entirely my own fault.

But, O Lord, how can a soul as weak and miserable as mine, one so full of faults, selfishness and meanness aspire to an ideal as high as that of sanctity? Oh yes, my pretensions would certainly be the greatest temerity if You Yourself had not shown me that this is exactly what You will. You have even given me a precious commandment concerning it, “Be you therefore perfect as also Your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48)

I beseech You, O Lord, repeat this sublime invitation to my poor soul, pressingly, compellingly, so that held by this ideal, it may be urged to greater generosity, stronger resolutions, and more complete confidence in Your merciful work of redemption and sanctification.

Fr. Gabriel of St. Mary Magdalene OCD

Conferences #128 – Mike Cutone on Catholic Leadership ( 04min) >>> Play

Ave Maria!

Master Sargent Mike Cutone gives his conference on Catholic Leadership going through the acronym L.E.A.D.E.R.S.H.I.P. as he has outlined in his book Catholics Lead the Way. In this segment he is on “L” for “Lead by Example”. Just as Jesus lead by example by carrying his Cross so we must not ask anything of our subordinates that we are unwilling to do.

Ave Maria!

Audio (MP3)

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40 Days for Life takes a determined, peaceful approach to showing local communities the consequences of abortion in their own neighborhoods, for their own friends and families. It puts into action a desire to cooperate with God in the carrying out of His plan for the end of abortion in America.

The 40-day campaign tracks Biblical history, where God used 40-day periods to transform individuals, communities … and the entire world. From Noah in the flood to Moses on the mountain to the disciples after Christ’s resurrection, it is clear that God sees the transformative value of His people accepting and meeting a 40-day challenge.

Vision and mission

40 Days for Life is a focused pro-life campaign with a vision to access God’s power through prayer, fasting, and peaceful vigil to end abortion in America. The mission of the campaign is to bring together the body of Christ in a spirit of unity during a focused 40 day campaign of prayer, fasting, and peaceful activism, with the purpose of repentance, to seek God’s favor to turn hearts and minds from a culture of death to a culture of life, thus bringing an end to abortion in America.

From September 28th-November 6th, many communities will be joining together for a faith-filled, groundbreaking, coordinated pro-life mobilization — 40 Days for Life.

We are praying that, with God’s help, this groundbreaking effort will mark the beginning of the end of abortion in our city — and throughout America and the world.

Please prayerfully consider how you might take part in this pro-life effort this Lent.  www.40daysforlife.com

The universal call to holiness 

All Sacred Scripture is a calling to holiness, to the fullness of charity, but Jesus makes it quite explicit in the Gospel: You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.  And Christ is not addressing his words to the Apostles or to just a few of his followers, but to everyone. Saint Matthew makes the point at the conclusion of these discourses that the crowds were astonished at his teaching.  Jesus does not demand sanctity of an exclusive coterie of disciples who accompany him everywhere, but of all who approach him: the multitudes, among whom were mothers of families, laborers, and skilled craftsmen who would stop to hear him after work, children, tax-collectors, beggars and cripples … The Lord calls people to follow him without distinction of state, race or condition.  

Christ speaks to us, to each one in particular, to our neighbors, coworkers or friends in the office or in the Faculty and to those who pass us and each other in the street: Be perfect … he says, and grants us the means and the appropriate graces that will make perfection possible. This is not just advice from the master, but an imperative command. All in the Church, whether they belong to the Hierarchy or are cared for by it, are called to holiness, according to the Apostle’s saying: ‘For this is the will of God, your sanctification’ (l Thes 4:3).  

All Christians, in any state or walk of life, are called to the full­ness of Christian life and to the perfection of love.In the doctrine of Christ there is no invitation to mediocrity, but a clear call to heroism, to love and to cheerful sacrifice.  

Love is within reach of the child, of the invalid who has been confined to a hospital bed for a lengthy period, of the businessman, of the doctor who hardly has a minute to spare, because sanctity is a matter of love, and of the effort we make to reach the Master with the help of grace. We have to give a new meaning to life, together with all its joys and exhilarations, its pains and woes. Sanctity requires a fight against conformity, against lukewarmness, against an easy-going worldly attitude. It demands heroism – not in extraordinary situations that we ‘are unlikely to encounter, but in continual fidelity to our task in the unremarkable duties of each day.  

Today we implore this of God: Lord, grant us a lively desire for sanctity, that we may be exemplary in our duty of loving you more each day. Help us to spread your doctrine every­where. Our Lord is not happy with a lukewarm life and a half-hearted dedication.  Let us ask the Blessed Virgin for an effective zeal for sanctity in the circumstances in which we find ourselves now…let us not wait. 

Fr. Francis Fernandez

Today is the Feast of the Patron of the Third Order of St. Francis, St. Louis the King.  He lived his faith with conviction and publicly.  Here is a meditation on this topic  from a modern Franciscan who is presently the Archbishop of Denver and soon to be the Archbishop of Philadelphia:

“Speak in the light”

Cardinal Henri de Lubac: once wrote that “It is not true … that man cannot organize the world without God. What is true is that, without God, [man] can ultimately only organize it against man. Exclusive humanism is inhuman humanism … ”

Living within the truth means living according to Jesus Christ and God’s Word in Sacred Scripture. It means proclaiming the truth of the Christian Gospel, not only by our words but by our example. It means living everyday and every moment from the unshakeable conviction that God lives, and that his love is the motive force of human history and the engine of every authentic human life. It means believing that the truths of the Creed are worth suffering and dying for. Living within the truth also means telling the truth and calling things by their right names. And that means exposing the lies by which some men try to force others to live.

The world urgently needs a re-awakening of the Church in our actions and in our public and private witness … We need really to believe what we say we believe. Then we need to prove it by the witness of our lives. We need to be so convinced of the truths of the Creed that we are on fire to live by these truths, to love by these truths, and to defend these truths, even to the point of our own discomfort and suffering.

We are ambassadors of the living God to a world that is on the verge of forgetting Him. Our work is to make God real; to be the face of his love; to propose once more to the men and women of our day, the dialogue of salvation…The form of the Church, and the form of every Christian life, is the form of the cross. Our lives must become a liturgy, a self-offering that embodies the love of God and the renewal of the world … Let us preach Jesus Christ with all the energy of our lives. And let us support each other – whatever the cost – so that when we make our accounting to the Lord, we will be numbered among the faithful and courageous, and not the cowardly or the evasive, or those who compromised until there was nothing left of their convictions or those who were silent when they should have spoken the right word at the right time.

Archbishop Charles Chaput OFM Cap, Archbishop of Denver.

A Chilean saint, Fr. Alberto Hurtado (d. 1952), often repeated the saying of the famous French priest, Lacordaire, in speaking of the pathway to holiness: “It is proper for the noblest hearts to discover the most urgent need of their epoch and to consecrate themselves to it.” Saints always have their feet on the ground and their minds on God or at least trying to discern the Will of God for the transformation of their societies. In this perspective there is little doubt that many of those who strive for holiness today will consecrate themselves to the most urgent need of our epoch: namely, putting an end to the wholesale slaughter of the innocents by modern day Herods and Pharaohs. It is to this end that this little book is written. This manual is meant to shake people up and call them to the battle to save lives and souls. The day is far gone and the need has grown increasingly urgent.

Modern American society and, by extension, the rest of the world that is influenced by American politics and culture, is be­ systematically dismantled before our very eyes by a spiritual e of evil that is not recognized as such. If the devil were to appear to the children of this age as he truly is, in all his ugli­ness and horror, he would be roundly rejected. So, of course he doesn’t appear as he truly is. This clever being, it is said, “disguises himself as an angel of light”(2 Cor 11:14)3 and has found count­less illusory costumes in which to conduct his evil, all the while maintaining an appearance of political correctness and accept­ability in polite society. Real Christians don’t fall for his deceit, though. We have eyes to see the truth because we are followers of the Truth, and it’s time to “consecrate” ourselves to the Truth in a new and bold way. 

The idea that the devil is “prowling like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour” (1 Pt 5:8) is not new, but most people are uncomfortable with the idea that the devil could be operating so freely in their world. Yet, those of us who have battled the mono­lith of abortion at close quarters have more than an intuition that abortion has a preternatural strength behind it and that it clouds the minds of men and women with a truly demonic perversion of values. The killing of babies as a form of sacrifice to demons has been roundly condemned by God and His Church from the time of the prophets to the present, but sometimes even the ex­ternal face of the dirty business of child sacrifice shows a consis­tency from one generation to the next. For example, the newly ­dedicated Planned Parenthood killing center in Houston, Texas (2010) has an architectural design that looks uncannily like an Aztec pyramid, where the practice of human sacrifices took place for generations. The existence of demons transcends human time, so it is not surprising that the forms of their idolatrous worship should look fairly similar in different cultures and times.

It is a theme of the spiritual life that when an evil is practiced clandestinely for a long period of time, eventually it sheds its in­visible covering and vaunts itself in its hideous garb. Furthermore, God in His Mercy has programmed reality in this way to expose the nefarious spiritual forces of the underworld for the eyes of all to see. Those who do not reject demons on the basis of faith may then reject them when they see with their own eyes the horrible works of their spiritual hands.

Immense Evil Needs Immense Good to Combat It

A spiritual evil like abortion needs a spiritual force of good to break its power and drive it out of this world. The abortion in­dustry is not just powerful in worldly terms, nor is it just to be understood in its human dimensions. No human being or group of humans on their own can commit such immense atrocities against the human race without a diabolical intelligence and malice giving it power. The scope of the killing, the fervor of abortion’s missionaries of death and the seductive for~e of its ideology transcend the human intellect and will.

Erik Holmberg, in his 1988 documentary, Massacre of Innocence, very aptly details the effects of this evil in our world. Hee titles a section of his film, “The Effects of Child Sacrifice,” and lists six frightening results of such unfettered evil in our world. Abortion, he says,

1.   Destroys human life;

2.   Breaks God’s commandments and thereby puts the nation under a curse;

3.   Opens the door for and empowers demonic spirits;

4.   Binds the practitioners to the demonic spirits (in a blood covenant);

5.   Locks women into perpetual travail and sorrow; and

6.   Releases powers of deception and witchcraft over people, especially women.

Holmberg has summarized in a nutshell the nature of the evil that not only causes such destruction in itself but spills over into society in unforeseen and unintended ways. 

When all is said and done, it is only the united Christian church, expressed most completely in the authority of the Catholic Church, that has the spiritual resources to end the cul­ture of death; a work which it could accomplish overnight if it were to ever fully “consecrate itself” to the mission of driving out the demon of child sacrifice from our land. It is painfully evident to any objective observer that the Church has not yet fully taken up this mission. In fact, the lack of unity of Catholics in this country is largely responsible for the prolongation and inten­sification of the culture of death since the 70s. When Catholic bishops publicly contradict each other on the appropriateness of the nation’s Abortionist-in-Chief receiving an honorary degree at a prestigious Catholic university; when 54% of so-called Catholics vote for the most pro-abortion President and elect the most radical Congress in American history; when Catholic doc­tors prescribe abortifacient birth control, and Catholic hospitals look the other way with a wink and a nod at sterilization and abortion referrals from within their walls; when Catholic women pour into killing centers at the same rate as the pagan genera­tion we are immersed in; when alleged Catholic politicians and public figures use their high-profile positions to aid and abet the prevailing evils or our day-the Church has clearly become part of the problem instead of being the solution to these evils. The Church at all levels, from the bishops to the people, has clearly failed to under­stand the demonic nature of the industry that practices its evil right down the street from many Catholic churches. It has also failed to marshal the spiritual resources at its disposal to stop it.  

To this cause, the Church must revitalize its essential iden­tity as Church Militant. All believers in Jesus Christ must be on guard and prays in the spiritual Garden of Gethsemane in which every child in this land is conceived. Unlike our Master who freely chose to suffer before them, babies have no choice about whether they will be allowed to be born or not, and that Garden of Decision (“choice”) could be followed by a remorse­less Golgotha administered by the devil and his minions, at any point during all nine months of pregnancy. Unless the disciples of Christ truly awake from their slumber and unite in opposition to the heinous crime, the collective guilt of this industry will fall upon us all as a people, and Jesus will say to us, like He said to the weeping women of Jerusalem on His Way to Calvary, “Do not weep for me. Weep for yourselves and for your children. Catholics will not be held accountable if they fail to stop such an immense evil, but we will receive a withering judgment if we live amidst the evil and do nothing about it. The Medieval poet, Dante Alleghieri (1265-1321), is supposed to have said that “the hottest places of hell are reserved for those who in times of great moral crises maintain their neutrality,”  

Even though the battle is difficult, we must nevertheless re­member the words of St. Paul that, “Despite the increase of sin, grace has far surpassed it.” Our Hope in Christ tells us that what we look forward to is an abortion-free society at some point in the future. We are not so naive as to believe that we could elimi­nate abortion from the world entirely. That would be tantamount to eliminating sin from men’s hearts, but man’s heart of darkness is  the one thing that has shown itself to be a constant reality throughout all human history. Sin and the works of the devil will be brought to an end on the day when Christ our King returns “to judge both the living and the dead and the world by fire,” as has been traditionally said of Him. Our hope is not in an end to sin in the world of space and time, but in an end to the evil of abortion as an institution and as an acceptable “choice” for men and women anywhere. To this end, Christ will use the hearts that are ready to pray and the hands that are ready to work, and He will, through His Church Militant, drive out the evil of abortion from our midst. 

The Church’s Spiritual Warfare Against Abortion  

The pro-life movement has an immense amount of resource material on issues and activities related to the effort to restore legal protection to the unborn child, but the present work is not meant to be an analysis of the pro-life issues per se. It is rather a spiritual commentary about the abortion industry and its evil spawn, the culture of death. Nor does it intend to analyze pro­-life issues from a moral point of view, except indirectly. That is all done effectively in other places and by more capable minds. Here I examine the spiritual power that the Church can marshal in the defense of the most innocent of God’s children, the unborn-and their mothers-from abortion. I will also relate this effort to the need to repulse other demonic attacks against the sacred institutions of marriage and the family. 

Let us never forget how powerful Christian spiritual strength is when marshaled against the institutionalized power of the devil. I distinctly remember praying a private prayer of exorcism at an abortion mill one day when a very angry woman drove into the parking lot and cursed me while she stomped defiantly into the clinic. I and the sidewalk counselors just continued our prayer, only to see this same woman almost run out of the killing center some short while later with a smile on her face! We wondered what happened. With tears in her eyes, she apologized for her behavior and was particularly sad that she had spoken such vulgar words against a priest. She said that she was very pleased that we had stayed to pray for her and remarked that she could feel the prayer literally “penetrating the walls of the clinic” that day! In fact she said that the prayer also penetrated her heart. She felt as if God had come into her heart. Soon afterward she went across the street to the pregnancy care center and was choosing a name for her baby to whom she ultimately gave birth. The prayer softened heart, but more importantly, it drove away whatever spirit of anger, fear or hatred that was coercing her that day. 

May the Lord Jesus enlighten all who read these pages and the holy angels equip us “against the principalities and power­”, the rulers of this world of darkness” (Gal 6:12) in the battle for babies, souls and, indeed, our very civilization. 

Fr. Thomas J. Euteneuer   ( from the Introduction to his book Demonic Abortion)

Face of Pro-Life #78 – ( 29min) >>> Play

Ave Maria!

Fra Isaac Haas, FI outlines his experience in the battle for marriage while he worked with National Organization for Marriage (NOM) before he became a friar. He covers the reason for NOM being created, how it counters the very well funded machine that is advocating for the radical changes in the definition of marriage which has far ranging consequences in regard to religious freedom and the ill effects on family and children.

Ave Maria!

Audio (MP3)