Fr. Nix: Where is the Ark of the Covenant?

Padre Peregrino knows:

http://padreperegrino.org/2018/04/17/ark/

Matt Walsh Calls Out Christian America

Prager U: The World's Most Persecuted Minority: Christians

MLB Pitcher Cole Hamels and Wife Donate their 9.75 million dollar Mansion and Land to Christian Camp for Kids with Special Needs

Major League Pitcher Cole Hamels and his wife have donated their 9.75 million dollar mansion and land to a Christian Camp for Special Needs Kids.  The story was posted at The Blaze, on December 18, 2017.

https://www.theblaze.com/news/2017/12/18/star-pitcher-gives-away-9-75-million-mansion-land-to-christian-camp-for-kids-with-special-needs

Be sure to watch the video.

Fr. Rutler's Weekly Column: February 18, 2018

Father Rutler's Weekly Column
February 18, 2018


An engineer in Alexandria named Ctesibius is said to have invented the pipe organ around 265 B.C., originally an “hydraulis” using water to raise air pressure. Although there was a “water organ” in the narthex of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople for heralding the Emperor, one theory holds that organs are not commonly used in the Byzantine rite because they are reminders of the horrors endured by the holy martyrs as pagan entertainment. There were many places in the various circuses and amphitheaters throughout the Empire where these spectacles took place. Possibly the first to be sentenced to the damnatio ad bestias, or being fed to wild beasts, in the Flavian amphitheater of the Colosseum of Rome, was Ignatius, bishop of Antioch.

   On February 24, that Colosseum will be floodlit red, along with churches in Syria and Iraq, to publicize the persecution of Christians in our own day. The sponsoring organization, Aid to the Church in Need, reports that in a dozen countries, conspicuously in Egypt and Turkey, anti-Christian persecution has reached a new peak. The situation has worsened in Nepal since new “blasphemy” laws were introduced. While crowds applaud the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang to the sound of music, around 70,000 Christians are languishing in North Korean labor camps. There is a faint echo here of the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, but at least they had Jesse Owens.

   Floodlighting may be one vivid way to awaken the attention of people in more comfortable lands to what is happening. Much of our media, as they either willfully or uncomprehendingly ignore the persecution, are like the idols that “have mouths but cannot speak; eyes, but cannot see; ears, but cannot hear” (Psalm 115:5-6). Looking the other way can become a habit. For instance, much of the world ignored the deportations by the Nazis in 1942 from Lyons, France, when those marked for death were herded into the same Colosseum where the saints Blandina, Ponthinius, Epidodius and Alexander were brutalized in the second century.

   The modest abstinences and disciplines of Lent should awaken the senses to perceive things of God more clearly. They can also alert somnolent consciences to harsh realities in other parts of the Church. In Holy Week the Church will remember how Christ awakened the three apostles as they slept through his agony. Pascal said, “Jesus will be in agony until the end of the world.” It was the triumphant risen Lord who asked Paul, “Why are you persecuting me?”—for heaven does not ignore earth: “… to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of mine, even the least of them, you did it to me” (Matthew 25:40). The Resurrection acclamation, “Christus vincit! Christus regnat! Christus imperat! – Christ conquers! Christ reigns! Christ commands!” was inscribed on the obelisk that is now in St. Peter’s Square, but that once stood in the Circus of Nero and cast its shadow on the suffering martyrs.


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The Gathering Testimony: Joanna Gaines

This was on My Favorite Catholic Things Blog a few days ago:

https://myfavoritecatholicthings.com/blog/2018/2/7/what-is-it-about-these-two

Poland Takes A Stand: "Jesus Christ Is Lord Of Our Country"

Fr. Rutler's Weekly Column: December 3, 2017

Father Rutler's Weekly Column

December 3rd, 2017

The explanation for your sense of expectation is that you have an imagination. Unlike animals guided by instinct, we can imagine past and future. Advent is the time of expectation. Since Christ is not limited by time, he can be born again in our lives at every Christmas.

  

Expectation requires thinking about the four most important matters of existence: Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell. These are the primary mysteries that arrest the attention of minds awake, more compelling than holiday shopping and attempts at partying before Christmas begins.

  

To look at death at the start of Advent is what we do on a small scale when we look at the end of anything, whether it be the end of the day or the end of some project we have been working on, or even the end of a movie or a song. The question is: Does the end of life have a purpose? C.S. Lewis answered that in a typically lucid way: “It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for a bird to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.”

  

Along with the sense of expectation is the intuition that what is expected is more vital than what we now have. On the day after Christmas in 1941, Winston Churchill stood before the joint houses of Congress and spoke of “. . . my life, which is already long, and has not been entirely uneventful.” Then a full twenty-four years later, his dying words were: “I’m bored with it all.” That was really wonderful because, though skeptical about the Gospel, he knew that things as they are, are not enough. He was a bit like Benjamin Franklin who, while far from an orthodox Christian, playfully wrote his own epitaph as a printer, comparing himself to a worn old book: “For it will, as he believ’d, appear once more, In a new and more perfect Edition, Corrected and amended, By the Author.”

  

There is a worthy movement now to rebuild the lamented old Pennsylvania Station, constructed on the site of our original church. That church was destroyed in 1963, in the arrogant period when many classical churches were wrecked by misguided liturgical experts who shared the modern contempt for anything old. The restoration of the old station would cost about $3.5 billion, an immense amount but small change compared to the $20 billion of innocuous glass boxes rising around us in the Hudson Yards development.

  

Jesus spoke of rebuilding the Herodian Temple in three days (John 2:19). That was at the price of his own blood, for he was speaking of his body. He did raise it. And he can do the same for us.

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FR. Schall on Sad Songs at "The Catholic Thing Blog"

https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2017/11/19/on-sad-songs/

Yet all sad songs have this “remembering Zion” about them, this sense of how things might have been but were not. The Man of Sorrows’ love was and still is rejected by many. He did not abolish sadness. He redeemed us through it. It is not the greatest evil. This awareness of what is at stake is what we learn from listening to the sad songs of our kind, songs from the streams of Babylon to the waltzes danced in Tennessee.

Bishop Barron on Reaching the iGens

Bishop Barron on Grace and Karma

Christopher Akers: Moral Progress?

From The Catholic Thing Blog today:

It hasn’t helped that the way in which we perceive morality has undergone a major shift. In a world of NGOs and Twitter, the idea of individual moral improvement – or moral decline –has been almost completely eclipsed and replaced by abstract gestures. Our moral standing is now thought to be assured if we make anti-Trump statements on social media or agitate about boycotting Israel

Monsignor Alfred Newman Gilbey, the one-time Catholic chaplain to Cambridge University, understood this change well. He once remarked to the British philosopher Roger Scruton that “we are not led to undo the work of creation or to rectify the Fall. The duty of the Christian is not to leave the world a better place. His duty is to leave this world a better man.” Most of us may still hope that what we do will benefit those whose lives we touch, but the internal struggle is already a heavy enough task.

To read the whole essay click on the link below;

https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2017/10/21/moral-progress/

KILLING STATUES: Christophobic Mobocracy in America

Matt Walsh: Keeping Children in a Christian Bubble

Matt Walsh writing today at The Blaze:

http://www.theblaze.com/contributions/if-protecting-my-childs-innocence-means-im-keeping-him-in-a-christian-bubble-so-be-it/

The funny thing is that the people who would never put their child in the Bubble where he’s prevented from learning about transgenderism and masturbation at the age of 8, are often the most inclined to put him in the Bubble where he isn’t allowed to play dodge ball.

The End Of Prayer Shaming

Bishop Barron on Catholicism and the Reformation

Bishop Barron on “The Case for Christ”

King's College Choir - Jesus Christ is risen today

Matt Walsh at Notre Dame: Church Militant

Matt Walsh, who writes at The Blaze, was interviewed at Church Militant prior to his speech at Notre Dame.  Click below to read the interview:

http://www.churchmilitant.com/news/article/matt-walsh-speaks-at-notre-dame-on-how-the-left-corrupts-catholicism

Revelation 12:1 Sign Will Appear In 2017!