Holy Week

This week is Holy Week. Starting with Palm Sunday and culminating with the 3 most important days on the calendar. On Palm Sunday we celebrate Our Lord's triumphant journey into Jerusalem where he was treated as a King. But Our Lord knew this wasn't His purpose for making the journey to Jerusalem. In a few short days He would be beaten, spat upon, crucified and even his own Apostle, Peter, who was the Rock, would deny he even knew Jesus three times. He would be nailed to a tree and left to die. Then on Easter Sunday, Our Lord would win our redemption from sin and Hell by rising from the dead.

The first day of the Easter Triduum is called Holy Thursday or Maundy Thursday. This is the celebration of the institution of the Holy Eucharist at the Last Supper. After the Mass the Altar is stripped, the bells are silenced, and the Blessed Sacrament is removed from the tabernacle. Some places will have a period of adoration throughout the night or for a few hours after Mass. This is also the beginning of the Lord's passion.

Then on Good Friday, we spend the day meditating on the Lord's passion and death. Usually around 3pm the Mass of the Presanctified takes place. This day should be held in as much silence as possible, particularly from the hours of 1:00-3:00PM. We should spend time to consider all our sins and to have a true sorrow for the many times we have offended Our Lord and to consider all the pain and agony Our Lord went through because of our sins. The sorrow we feel for our sins should be used to relieve the agonies Our Lord felt on the first Good Friday.

Many people have asked why it's called "Good" Friday if it's the day Jesus died on the cross. The reason for this is simple, it's because on this day, on Good Friday, Our Lord took our sins upon the Cross and opened the door for us poor sinners to have a share in Heavenly glory. Jesus turned the worst evil in the history of the world, and turned it into the greatest good that ever happened to mankind.

On Holy Saturday we reflect and meditate on Christ resting in the tomb. It is another day to consider our sins and to draw up contrition and compunction for the many sins we commit against Our Lord. Then, after sunset, the greatest Mass of the entire year happens, the Easter Vigil.

The Easter Vigil starts with the blessing of the fire and water. There are many deeply impressive ceremonies during the Vigil Mass. It is a night of joyful expectation until the Alleluia proclaims the triumphant message of the Resurrection of Our Lord! This leads us into the glorious celebration of Easter in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass!

Then on Easter Sunday the joyful cries of Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia are sounded and as Saint Gregory Nazianzen said, “On this day salvation is given to the world both visible and invisible. Christ is risen from the dead; arise ye with Him! Christ has resumed His Body; return to the state of happiness which you had forfeited. Christ has left the grave; break the bonds of your sins. The gates of Hell are broken down; death is vanquished; the old Adam is destroyed, and the new Adam formed; be ye made a new creature in Christ!”

In a word, Holy Week is the summation of our Faith. Without the passion, death and resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ, we would have no hope of salvation. May the Almighty God grant you all a Blessed Holy Week and a Glorious Easter Sunday. God Bless you all.

How Abortion and Immorality Will Destroy the USA

You don’t have to be an economist or a politician to know that the United States is in the middle of an economic disaster that could very well go from bad to worse. The government is spending money like drunken sailors despite increasing budget deficits. Unemployment is barely above 10%, the housing market is collapsing and people are angry.

People are looking for answers to the problems this country is going through and no one seems to have any. The country is divided into left and right. The left feels that big government programs and more money is the answer to all the problems while the right believes that the private sector and small government along with tax cuts are the answer. Both sides may have some good ideas that may be worth looking at but the problems this country is having I don’t believe has anything to do with left and right or Democrat and Republican. I believe most, if not all of our country’s problems can be solved by making Jesus Christ the King of ourselves, of our families, of our cities and towns, of our states, and of out nation and indeed Jesus Christ needs to be the King of the entire World. In short, the social Kingship of Jesus Christ is the only answer to the impending disaster this country and indeed the world is about to face.

I am going to focus on the Unites States in this article but many of the points I made could be made on a world wide basis. Look at what has happened in this country in the last 50 years or so. Talk to many of our senior citizens and they will tell you about how life prior to the 1960s was a lot different. People had respect for each other. Television programs were wholesome family shows that weren’t 24 hour sex and violence. Families were celebrated and life was simpler and better. Yes, there was still sin and crime was present, but it wasn’t like it was today.

Since about the 1960s and the “sexual revolution” that took place during those years we have had increasing immorality, increasing crime, and the beginning of the destruction of this great country. We started seeing more sex on television and more and more programs and advertisers were pushing the envelope more and more. The family was starting to break down.

There are a few other events that happened in the 60s that I believe contributed in a big way to the breakdown of morality in the United States. Those events were the Vietnam war and the subsequent protests and rock n roll groups like the Beatles and later on the Rolling Stones and that generation of music that sprung up. Then Woodstock happened and people were using drugs more and more. The people of the United States started turning away from Jesus Christ and started propping up other gods like rock music stars, drugs, and sex.

Another event that happened during the 1960s that I haven’t mentioned was the Second Vatican Council. This was the beginning of the liberalization of the Catholic Church. Now Vatican II and all the problems that resulted in the Church because of it is a topic for a different blog, but I do believe that at the very least, the false interpretation of the documents of the second Vatican Council contributed in no small part to the downfall of the United States. As I will discuss later I believe it’s because the ambiguous documents of Vatican II that we now have a majority of Catholics that do not believe in the Real Presence of Our Lord, they believe it’s OK to vote for a pro abortion politician, they believe that it’s OK for other people to have abortions as long as they don’t and even some Catholics believe it’s OK for them to have abortions themselves. We also have an increasing number of Catholics who believe it’s OK to support homosexual marriage and to use birth control including condoms and a lot of people today see nothing wrong with shacking up with their boyfriend and girlfriend without being married.

Then the next big blow to the United States was in 1973 when we had the devastating Roe v Wade ruling. This began the new holocaust that has snuffed out millions and millions of the most innocent of people, the unborn. When we as a society are willing to brutally and cruelly snuff out a little innocent baby in its own mother’s womb, we have completely turned away from Jesus Christ and made Satan our new King. Once you are willing to support the cruel murder of an innocent baby in the womb of its mother, you are willing to do anything. There is nothing more evil and nothing that goes completely against the moral fiber of this country than slaughtering millions of innocent babies.

Once we are willing to murder unborn babies then the next target becomes the elderly and the handicapped. No one but God has a right to decide when a person dies. We are willing to kill our elderly and handicapped and call it a “mercy killing.” How morally bankrupt have we become!! There is no mercy in taking the life of another innocent person. Some may say “What about a person that is suffering? Isn’t it more humane to put them out of their misery?” I would answer, Are you God? Is a human being now as disposable as a pet or farm animal?

Let’s look at suffering. Why does God allow people to suffer some may ask. I answer this question with a simple answer…because of man’s sin!! It’s called redemptive suffering. In the post Vatican II Church a lot of people do not know about redemptive suffering. If you want to know all you need to know about suffering, meditate on the life, passion, and death of our Lord Jesus Christ. I don’t know of any human being that experienced more suffering than Our Lord. Our Lord suffered as much as he did because of every one of our sins. How much should we be willing to suffer for Him!

We have a choice, we can suffer here in this life or we can suffer much greater and much longer in purgatory or at worst we can suffer indescribable pain for eternity in Hell! I would rather suffer for a little while down here on Earth than to suffer much greater pains in Purgatory or for eternity in Hell. Any pain we suffer down here will give us a much greater reward in the after life. We must offer all our pain up to Our Lord and not take the “easy way out” by “pulling the plug.”

Then we have people who would like to force abortions and put down people who have disabilities and those who are deemed to be “unproductive” members of our society. What gives any one of us the right to decide who has a right to live or die in this world? Again I say it is God and God alone who has a right to decide who lives and who dies. We do not have that authority.

So, getting back to the time line here, as the 1970s and 1980s went on we had more and more sex, drugs and rock n roll. Once abortion was legalized then the war against Jesus and the war against morality was in full swing. Even though people considered the United States a “Christian Nation,” in reality we were anything but. People maybe went to church but church was just a Sunday thing and the rest of the week it’s back to the sex, drugs and rock n roll.

Another thing I haven’t talked about is what I consider the great Satan, and that’s money. I guess the reason I haven’t focused on this is because this has been the cause of a lot of sin since the beginning of time. It was the pursuit of money that caused Jesus to chase the money changers out of the temple, it was money that motivated Judas to betray Jesus, and money to this day keeps us from fully giving ourselves to Jesus.

The immorality of this country has been growing at an astonishing rate especially during the 1990s and into the 2000s. In fact I dare say we have become numb to immorality. You watch television and you have sex glaring at you at every moment of the day. You have things on daytime soap operas that 20 or 30 years ago wouldn’t be allowed on late night programming. The Blessed Virgin Mary lamented sexual sins at Fatima and even went as far as saying that more people go to Hell because of sins of the flesh than any other sin. Television has done most of the work to get society to believe that there is nothing wrong with homosexuality, nothing wrong with abortions, nothing wrong with embracing all kinds of sin and immorality.

I could go on and on about the immorality that has exploded in this country but the big question is what do we do about it? What can we do about it? How do we institute the Social Kingship of Jesus Christ in our Country?

Well, the first thing we have to do is evaluate our own lives. Look at our own lives and ask ourselves…Are we setting a good example for those around us? Are we watching impure movies and shows on television? Are we engaging in sins of the flesh? Are we encouraging others to sin? The first step to instituting the Social Kingship of Jesus Christ in the country is by bringing Him into our lives. If Jesus is not King of our hearts than how can we bring Jesus into the country?

We need to start praying like we have never prayed before. Pray the Rosary. Our Blessed Mother will hear our prayers and if every Catholic started praying the Rosary every day you would see a miraculous transformation in this country. If you have kids, teach them the Faith. Teach them at a young age to pray, as soon as they can start teaching them to pray the Rosary every day! Start living your Faith! The Catholic Faith isn’t just something that we do on Sunday’s and then the rest of the week worry about our secular lives. We need to live our Faith 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and 365 days a year! Pray that abortion will end!

If someone were to ask me what I thought the biggest threat to the security of this nation is I would say without hesitation ABORTION! Abortion is such a crime against God that if it continues as it has then I can’t help think that the impending chastisement of this country is going to be unbearable! If you think 9/11/2001 was a bad day for America then keep up the abortions and you will soon witness the full wrath of God. The blood of millions and millions of unborn children are crying out to God for justice and the wrath of God will not be spared forever unless we turn back to Him and repent for our sins.

Getting back to what we can do about bringing the Social Kingship of Jesus Christ into the country, I would say that we need to do penance! Since Vatican II Catholics don’t do much penance. I am no exception. It wasn’t until I started discovering Traditionalism that I learned that Fridays during the year are still supposed to be meatless Fridays. It is true that Vatican II allows you to substitute another form of penance instead of abstinence from meat but you must do some form of penance on all Fridays but the Church strongly recommends all Fridays during the year to be meatless Fridays.

But even if you currently keep the Friday abstinence we need to do more penance. I am not saying we have to do heroic acts of penance as the Saints did. But if you are called to that then you should. Simply living your Catholic Faith as you should will give you a great opportunity to suffer in the world.

A few things I recommend are shutting off the television. Instead of watching hours and hours of mainly sinful content on the tube, spend time with your family. Pray the Rosary. Go outside and do something. Even better yet, if you can try living without your television! This is also something the author of this article needs to practice!

If we are going to bring sanity and morality back to this nation we need to immediately turn to Jesus Christ instead of doing everything we can to eradicate Him from our lives. Over the last 50 years or so we have taken God out of our schools, out of our court houses, out of the workplace, and out of the country. In some places we can’t even mention Christ’s name on Christmas or Easter!! We need to be the Church militant!

When we talk about the Church Militant, that has a military/war kind of connotation to it. That’s because it is! We indeed are in a war, a spiritual war against Satan and his devils! We need to fight against people who want to allow abortions everywhere and anywhere. We need to fight against those people who want to destroy the family by legitimizing homosexual “marriage.” We need to fight against those people promoting the “right to die” and euthanasia. We need to fight against those who promote pre-marital sex!

Think for a moment about how accepting this country has become towards sex outside of marriage. Compare that to the words of Our Savior when He said in the Gospel of Matthew, (Chapter 5, 27-28,) “27 You have heard that it was said to them of old: Thou shalt not commit adultery. 28 But I say to you, that whosoever shall look on a woman to lust after her, hath already committed adultery with her in his heart.”

How many of us have been guilty of this? But if you follow the way of the world you would think this has been all but forgotten. Indeed it has been forgotten by the world. But as the Church militant we cannot be of the world. We must deny ourselves and take up our cross.

If every single Catholic in this country would start following their faith in word and deed how much of a difference could we make in this world! I will go as far as saying that if every Catholic in the world started praying the Rosary every day we would see the Reign of Jesus Christ begin to work in our country immediately! But unfortunately, most Catholics today are at the very least ignorant of the Faith and at worst, they reject it.

We have so-called Catholic politicians that think nothing about voting for abortions, voting for stem cell research, voting for euthanasia, condoning all kinds of immorality and yet still go up and approach the Altar and receive Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament adding sacrilege on top of the rest of their sins. We have Priests and Bishops who don’t have the courage to defend Our Lord from this sacrilege by denying people living in open mortal sin Holy Communion. There have been many priests and Bishops who have stood up against this grave scandal and they are heroes.

Let me just say one thing and make it perfectly clear. Any Catholic who votes for abortion laws, who encourages people to have abortions, who votes for someone who will promote abortion laws, and who is unrepentant after procuring abortions, as well as the “doctors” who perform abortions as well as people who work in careers that promote and carry out abortions are in grave sin and must not go to Holy Communion until you repent and go to confessions and in most cases you have automatically ex-communicated yourself from the Church. This would be an ex-communication that does not require the act of a bishop.

Now people might come back and say “It’s a free country, I can do what I want!” Others may say “God gives us a free will.” Or “Vatican II allows us to form our own conscience.” This is wrong. We must form our conscience in accordance to Catholic teaching. Anything else isn’t freedom but licentiousness. Freedom, from a Catholic standpoint doesn’t mean being able to do anything we wish. It means choosing what we should be choosing according to God’s law. Some may disagree with this. But I would say to them if freedom means being able to choose to do evil then God isn’t free because it’s impossible for God to choose to do evil. True freedom means doing all things according to God’s laws and Commandments.

God’s laws and Commandments don’t change just because the world is changing. God’s laws and commandments are the same yesterday as they are today, and as they will be tomorrow. The farther and farther away this country gets from Jesus Christ the closer and closer we get to Satan and Hell. If we want to bring peace and security to this country, then we need to bring Jesus Christ back to this country. This starts by bringing Jesus Christ into your homes and lives. It won’t be easy. You will be looked at as an outcast, you will be hated by your friends and indeed even by your families possibly. People will call you all kinds of names. You will be called a radical and even worse. But look at all the calumny’s that Jesus endured.

If you bring Jesus Christ into your life you will be on the Cross with Jesus, but that’s where we need to be. No cross, no crown, no pain, no gain. Jesus had to suffer and die before he entered into the glory of His Father’s Kingdom. But I can promise you one thing. If you live your life for Jesus Christ, people will notice and you will begin to change the world.

The answer to the problems in this country isn’t with a political party or a politician, but the answer to the troubles we are going through is to institute the Social Kingship of Jesus Christ. Until Christ is the true King of the country, nothing good will happen in this country. The more and more we reject Jesus Christ, the closer we come to the destruction of the United States of America. May the Almighty God bless you all.