Marriage Woes

Many entertainment personalities are into their second marriages and often, it would be officiated by a protestant pastor. It always make me wonder whether the pastor had any qualms about it at all. The first marriages were usually officiated in a Catholic Church, have they rationalized it as invalid? Any Bible-faithful pastor would surely be uneasy to go against "what God had put together, no man can put asunder". Martin Luther had succumbed to such, too, when a powerful Duke was involved. He rationalized it with the Old Testament, Moses had allowed it.



Debates in the Catholic Church had been centered on giving Holy Communion to couples in a second marriage. Two Sacraments of the Church are put into a quandary for pastoral (?) reason. Cardinal Kasper had been in the forefront addressing the Bishops for the Synod on family. The talks had intensified with the news of Pope Francis calling an Argentine woman married to a divorcee.

Sexual sins are private; Thus, there is always an element of presumption. Abortion and artificial contraception are widely accepted and propagated because they hide sexual sins. Why is God so strict about it?

Again, we go back to the Truth that God is our Creator and it is in the sexual act where God manifests Himself as the Creator of human life. It is also in the marital relationship that also reflects our eternal union with God.

What is happening, then, with this "pastoral" compromises is an UNDERMINING of MAN's BEGINNING and END.

Anthony Esolen's Let Order Die

Excerpt from writer Anthony Esolen Let Order Die


When an ordinary person walks into a church whose most prominent features are the rivets in the joists overhead, whose Stations of the Cross are so small and so far away from the pews as to be specks, and whose sanctuary has been replaced by a clearing for getting to the back doors (I have seen many such churches), he’s apt to say, “I don’t like it, but maybe there’s something to it that I don’t understand.”

It doesn’t occur to him that anyone would want to build a church to stifle the sense of the holy. He can no more imagine that than he can imagine wishing that there were no God, and no meaning to human life.

When an ordinary person sees a lad and lass holding hands, it cheers him. He cannot imagine why anybody would not be cheered. When an ordinary person meets a young wife and her three children running and hollering across the playground, he smiles. He cannot imagine why anybody would wish there were fewer of those children, or none.

When an ordinary person sees someone saying grace at a restaurant, it embarrasses him, not because they’re saying grace, but because he forgot to. He cannot imagine anyone being offended by it. An ordinary person sees the cross of iron girders left in the destruction of the World Trade Center, and feels a shiver of awe. He cannot imagine why anyone would hate it, and want it destroyed.

The ordinary healthy person cannot imagine what it is to be sick. He cannot imagine wanting to destroy for the sake of destroying. He thinks he can reason with the destroyers.

Well, maybe so; it depends on the destroyer and the extent of the sickness. But ultimately that ordinary person will have to peer into the darkness, and admit that he is fighting against powers and principalities. “Evil be thou my good,” says Milton’s Satan. Let order die.

The entire essay at the Catholic thing.

Holy Father's Prayer Intention for May

Karol and Joseph

Karol and Joseph Alois... the Jesus and Mary team.

It was a difficult period wherein the adults were still suffering from the wounds of war; While a new generation that was being brought up in technology. Nations are being borne politically and geographically; While a global governance was being formed.



Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger brought back the Catholic Faith into being Catholic again- universal as desired by Jesus. There were still a lot of Catholics during JP2's pontificate but unaware of the universal church. The bishop, the parish priest, or a favorite priest can stand as the pope (very much like protestants whose pastor is their pope).

John Paul II was the charming and holy prince of the Church while Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger became the humble and holy spiritual janitor of the Church. Both jobs were difficult but they do what God asked of them. The House could not withstand the rising tide of the times, everyone in the household was important. Unfortunately, the termite was doing its destruction, often not visible but the walls have become hollow. Threatening the House to crumble. That was the environment for which John Paul II and Joseph Ratzinger had to work on and work with.

Canonization Sidelights

Another Lightning





Future pope?

A Sensible Reality Check

When we look around at the things happening around and the trend it's heading for, it would seem that we lost "reason". We live in a world of clouded minds. In spite of the adulation given to John Paul II, it is more an adulation of his image and charisma, in the same way we idolize media personalities. If John Paul II and Benedict XVI were listened to, our world would have gained much. We can be more in touch with reality as we focus and move toward Truth. With truth, we can really learn to love.

Another beautiful mind is Fr. James Schall S.J. who talks about our world today in an interview.

The modern world is a “rights” world. This comes largely from Hobbes. The logic of a “rights” world is curious. It basically means that what we “ought” to be by “right” is owed to us. If we do not have what we ought to have, we are victims. Someone has the “duty” to give us our “rights.” This “rights” world is a world in which the notion of gift can no longer exist. Christianity is rooted in gift, not rights. If I do not have what is my “right,” then, when it is supplied to me, it is because of someone else’s “duty.” In a way, such a world bears out the problem that I have always associated with justice, namely, that it is the most terrible of the virtues. When we treat someone “justly,” we return what is “due.” It does not depend on that person’s charm or character. He can be the worst of men and, if we “owe” him something, we must return it. A thoroughly “just” world is a world of cold impersonality. The great things of life—friendship, honor, sacrifice, love, praise—are beyond justice. Aquinas thus said that the world was created in mercy, not justice.In a paradoxical sense, in a completely “just” world, Christianity itself would have no place to exist. It could not really talk about “giving” or “sacrificing” because what is given is “due.” This is the classical problem with socialism and such forms of “rights”-oriented systems. In the name of justice, they get rid of all the real institutions of love and sacrifice that really deal with individual people in their particularity. The greatest things are beyond justice. When we politicize all the human activities, we really end up with a world in which no one can possibly love another because everything is already “owed".

But here the word “liberty” means precisely that no standards or norms exist. Freedom does not mean follow reason, but follow whatever we want. Each person chooses his own definition of happiness or the good, as one of our Supreme Court justices is fond of telling us. No one agrees on anything except that no good requires human beings to live according to reason, a reason that is found in human nature itself as expressive of its good.

The purpose of the ruling principle is to guarantee that this form of “liberty” be protected and expanded. Equality means that no criterion of excellence or good exists. The regime then comes to be a systematic dismantling of any residue of a claim in nature that a proper way of man to live can be found. The institutions and virtues that were needed to protect family and personal integrity are now overturned. In Aristotle’s sense, out of this moral chaos we would see a leader arise who could manipulate this moral chaos of the citizens into his own arbitrary power. He would no longer see any reason not to put his own ideas about what was good into effect.

More at: http://claremont.org/index.php?act=basicPageArticle&id=162&bpId=122#sthash.pbyEsYqU.dpuf