Novenas

Prayers for the intersession of the Saints and our Lady are abundant, and when said as a novena they are very powerful. Here are three that have been of great help to me. 

Saint Jude

Saint Joseph

Infant Baby Jesus of Prague

Saint Jude - The patron saint of lost causes. Say this novena for nine consecutive days. Publication must be promised. 

The Holy Saint Jude, Apostle and Martyr, great in virtue and rich in miracles, near kinsman of Jesus Christ, faithful intercessor of all who invoke your special patronage in time of need. To you I have recourse from the depths of my heart and humbly beg to whom God has given such great power to come to my assistance. Help me in my present and urgent petition, in return I promise to make your name known and cause you to be invoked. (Say 3 Our Fathers, 3 Hail Marys and 3 Glory Be to the Father) Saint Jude, pray for us and all who invoke your aid. Amen . 

Saint Joseph - Terror of Demons , Patron of departing souls, head of the Holy Family. Say this prayer for Nine consecutive mornings. After the ninth day publish your thanks and share the prayers. 

Oh, St. Joseph,
whose protection is so great, so strong, so prompt,
before the throne of God,
I place in you all my interests and desires.
Oh, St. Joseph,
do assist me by your powerful intercession,
and obtain for me from your Divine Son
all spiritual blessings, through Jesus Christ, our Lord.
So that, having engaged here below your heavenly power,
I may offer my thanksgiving and homage to thee most Loving of Fathers.
Oh, St. Joseph,
I never weary contemplating you and Jesus asleep in your arms;
I dare not approach while He reposes near your heart.
Press Him in my name and kiss His fine Head for me and
Ask Him to return the Kiss when I draw my dying breath.
St. Joseph, Patron of departed souls - pray for me.
Amen. ( we always add at the end of this one. "Please pray for our priests and religious and obtain for us many more worthy ones.") 

Novena to the Infant Baby Jesus of Prague - This novena is for urgent assistance and can be used for any urgent need. This novena can be said for the traditional 9 days, or it can be said as a Storm Novena. Where urgent assistance is needed it can be said at the top of every hour for 9 consecutive hours. As with the others public thanks in the form of publication and sharing the novena is necessary. 

Jesus, You said, "Ask and you shall receive, seek and you shall find, knock and it shall be opened to you." Through the intercession of Mary, Your holy Mother, I knock, I seek. I ask that my prayer be granted. (state your specific request or intention here!)
Jesus, You said, "All that you ask of the Father in My name, He will grant you." Through the intercession of Mary, Your holy Mother, I humbly and urgently ask Your Father in Your name that my prayer be granted. (state your specific request or intention here!)
Jesus, You said. "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My word shall not pass." Through the intercession of Mary, Your holy Mother, I feel confident that my prayer will be granted. (state your specific request or intention here!)
I prostrate myself before Thy Holy Image, O most gracious Infant Jesus, to offer thee my most fervant thanks for the blessings Thou hast bestowed upon me. I shall incessantly praise Thine ineffable mercy and confess that Thou alone art my God, my Helper and my Protector. Henceforth, my entire confidence shall be placed in Thee! Everywhere, I shall proclaim aloud Thy mercy and generosity, so that Thy great Love and the great deeds which Thou dost perform through this miraculous image may be acknowledged by all. May devotion to Thy Holy Infancy increase more and more in the hearts of all Christians, and may all who experience Thine assistance persevere with me in showing unceasing gratitude to Thy Most Holy Infancy, to which be praise and glory forever. Amen
Thank you, Infant Baby Jesus of Prague and the Sacred Heart of Jesus for granting my request. I will always be dedicated to You Dear Jesus and have faith that You will always be by my side. Your faithful servant (state your name).

The Missing Ingredient in Today’s Catholic Evangelization

This from One Peter Five today.

http://www.onepeterfive.com/the-missing-ingredient-in-todays-catholic-evangelization/

admitting defeat

Is allowing divorced and civilly remarried people to the reception of Holy Communion essentially just admitting defeat? The message it sends to us lay Catholics is, "The teaching of the Church is essentially not important, it is what you feel that really matters."

It essentially strips our Catholic faith to nothing and leaves us nothing to stand on. If we remove the letter of the law, and disregard the teachings of Christ it will not matter if we bring one person or a million into the reception of Holy Communion because we will have led people to falsely accept a human vision of Christ and not Christ himself. It cannot be called mercy to feed someone sand and tell them it is a steak. Even if you can trick the person to believe the sand is actually a steak, because they desperately want it to be a steak, it still will not nourish them. You will have given them good feelings, made them confident in their eating, but still ultimately led them to certain death.

Mercy is not about making people comfortable in their sin, it is welcoming them as sinner so that they may be lead to Christ. What about the serial killer that works 6 days a week in the soup kitchen, helping feed countless hungry? The 7th day he murders one of them, but helps hundreds more. He does not see anything wrong with his sin, he picks the worst of the lot, he helps hundreds and eliminates one evil person a week. Should he be told that is ok? That he is doing more good than evil? God will not mind if you are unrepentant of that one evil.We could tell him that. He could feel good and come and receive Christ, but in so doing we would be defiling Christ by making an empty promise that cannot possibly be fulfilled.

The serial killer might be an extreme example, but giving people, or a priest the freedom to make the call as to whether an action they commit is sin or not does not to me seem like a good idea. How do you draw people to the confessional, when at the same time you are telling them, no need to repent?

Telling people that their sin is ok, is not a pastoral approach. It is a lazy way out. It encourages people to turn their intellect inward to themselves rather than upward to God. The way of Christ is not meant to be easy. It wasn't easy for the Apostles it wasn't easy for Christ himself. The times cannot change Christ, or the will of God. If this were true, God would have had no need to purge the world with the flood. Couldn't he have just said, "hey I need to get with the times, the people want this. so its all good." Moses wouldn't have needed the 10 commandments at all, the times and the people had already decided to worship the golden calf. Christ died for our sins to be forgiven not to tell us they are ok. He called us to "go forth and sin no more". The Church does need to change with the times, but the times are tough right now for faith. The times, in my opinion, are calling the Church back to tradition, so as to lead people to Christ vs leaving them to their own devices.

Hard views of Pope Francis from Spectators

Hard views of Pope Francis from Spectators

Fr. Chad Ripperger - Spiritual Warfare - Rochester, NH 10-5-2015

The world needs real freedom, liberation from sin, says Romanian doctor at the synod

The voice of the family blog has posted an excellent speech given by a Romanian Doctor to the synod Fathers.
The world needs real freedom, liberation from sin, says Romanian doctor at the synod

The New Evgengilization

Brian Williams, AKA "The Liturgy Guy" has another excellent recap and analysis of the talk, “The Old Mass and the New Evangelization: Beyond the Long Winter of Rationalism” that I recently linked to here.

In his recap is a wonderful quote by Bishop Athanasius Schneider presents an excellent expression of what I and others have been attempting to say.

"Only on the basis of adoring and glorifying God can the Church adequately proclaim the word of truth, that is, evangelize. … Everything about the liturgy of the Holy Mass must therefore serve to express clearly the reality of Christ’s sacrifice, namely the prayers of adoration, of thanks, of expiation, and of impetration that the eternal High Priest presented to His Father. … How can we call others to convert while, among those doing the calling, no convincing conversion towards God has yet occurred, internally or externally?"

 You can read Brian's full post here: http://liturgyguy.com/2015/09/12/evangelization-and-the-need-for-the-latin-mass/

Lex Orandi, LexCredendi

The Law of Prayer is The Law of Belief. This phrase was used by the Prosper of Aquitaine in the fifth century and the original version goes, "ut legem credendi lex statuat supplicandi" or "that the law of praying establishes the law of believing. [1]

Some of this may mirror what I have already said in a previous post but I have been reflecting a lot lately on the importance of how I pray, how I teach my kids to pray. Particularly in how I approach the Holy Eucharist and the liturgy. There is no doubt in recent years there has been a lack of good Catholic education in the church. I am not only talking about Sunday school classes, but a whole generation of parents and even priests that have failed to pass on to their children and parishioners even a basic understanding of their Catholic faith. It seems that the bar has been getting people to agree to the True Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, but even that effort has failed for many.

This is why our focus needs to be bringing Catholics back to the true faith. The way to do that is to return sacredness to the liturgy and demand respect for Christ's Presence in the Eucharist. It starts with the priest and bleeds down to the lay person in the pew. The way we pray, is the way we will believe. When the liturgy is approached in a haphazard lighthearted manner, people believe in a haphazard lighthearted manner. The priest at the alter has very specific, careful words and actions that represent the sacrifice of Our Lord on the Cross. The same precision does not seem to be required of the people in the pews.

Many take a very hedonistic approach to their faith, words like joy and thanksgiving, overshadow words like reverence and sacrifice. I am not downplaying the importance of joy and thanksgiving, but when those words and phrases are used almost exclusively it brings one to believe that their faith is based on what they get from it and has very little to do with what they give to it. It overshadows the great sacrifice of the Mass and makes us more protestant than Catholic.

I saw this this past weekend. Our family attended a Eucharistic Procession for the 125th anniversary of our diocese. It was a beautiful event and our family was very blessed to be able to participate. I was rather surprised however at how many people (and I include myself here) did not know the proper way to act during the procession, and especially at the benediction that followed. Because so many of us Catholics did not know the proper gestures, when to stand, when to kneel, to enter the room quietly and reverently while the Body of our Lord is on display, the room was generally lost with many people visiting loudly and having to be repeatedly reminded to have respect for Our Lord. The hedonistic approach to faith led many to treat the procession as a skip in the park with Jesus, rather than a solemn possession with Our Lord.

Catholics have almost universally lost their Catechism. While efforts are being made outside of mass to try to draw people back. the truth is that Sunday Mass is the only chance we get to catechize most Catholics. If we use the liturgy to insist on reverence and demand respect in the tone of the Mass, the music, the way Holy Communion is distributed, and insist on adherence to basic etiquette then we will all believe more deeply and reverently.

As a Catholic who was not brought up with strong Catholic teaching (by the time I hit Sunday school it varied very little from what the Lutheran church was teaching up the road) I personally long to be instructed in my faith. I want to hear what I am doing right, but more importantly to hear what I am doing wrong. Christ in the Eucharist is the objective truth of our faith, because of that we need to be strong in defending Him. If we insist on a reverent attitude we are not insulting but instructing.

That is one of the things that I love about the Traditional Latin Mass. The structure of that liturgy is such that it insists on reverence, and focuses on sacrifice. It brings unity to the faith not by hand holding but by standing together with the priest looking to the Lord. There is very little room for self interpretation and for me is a perfect example of lex orandi, lex credendi. When you look at those families that almost exclusively attend that form of the Mass you notice something right away. There is a definite difference in the way they live the rest of their lives outside of church. The way they pray permeates into the way they believe and becomes the way they live. If we wonder how we can bring that kind of faith back into our Catholic Church we only need to look as far as those churches that have successfully done it. It isn't by allowing peoples' personal beliefs about God and happiness to dictate the Catechism of the Church but by allowing the Catechism of the Church to permeate peoples beliefs. When we stand up for Christ the King and insist on proper prayer, then those actions manifest in a stronger belief, and that belief then spreads beyond the walls of the church.




1. http://www.usccb.org/beliefs-and-teachings/how-we-teach/catechesis/catechetical-sunday/word-of-god/upload/lex-orandi-lex-credendi.pdf

The Old Mass and the New Evangelization

Peter Kwasniewski has a good article over at OnePeterFive titled 'The Old Mass and the New Evangelization'. The Title immediately caught my eye. To me sometimes when I hear the word evangelization in the Church, the people saying it tend to lean toward attempting to evangelize outsiders into the Church by making the Church seem more protestant and less Catholic. By attempting to change the image of the Church to one of agreeing with the common social ideas that they perceive as being the reason why people are staying away from the Church. These are the same people within the Church that applaud any hint at the idea of the Church accepting gay marriage, divorce, birth control and abortion. This style of evangelization aims to bring people to a church that has lost her core.

I have often thought the best place to start evangelization is within the walls of the Church. Let's first evangelize Catholics and bring them back to the Catholic faith. The current statistic is something like 70% of Catholics do not believe in the True Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, many Catholics have looked to loose teaching through the years to decide their own definition of what is sin and what is not. For example; how many Catholics know it is a mortal sin to miss Church on Sunday? And, if those Catholics are told that, how many know that you are not supposed to take Holy Communion if you are in a state of mortal sin? And, of those, how many actually care? 

We have a crisis of faith inside of our Catholic Church, one that is going to require strong leaders who are willing to stand up and tell us we are wrong. To lead us like sheep and tell us how we should act, what is pleasing to God. To let us know when we do something that in any way questions our reverence to Christ in the Eucharist. That is the type of evengelization that I believe we need. Evangelization back to what it means to be Catholic. What it means to be moral, and why the Church will always accept the sinner, but can never ever accept the sin. 

That is why this article caught my eye, as the Latin Mass becomes more prevalent, as our Priests start demanding a more reverent approach to regular Sunday mass, people in my opinion will respond by standing up. We all want to please God, but due to a lack of good Catholic teaching over the last fifty years many of us don't know how to properly. We are losing what it is to be Catholic to a more protestant  approach to our faith. It seems that many worry that too strict approach to the "rules" of the church will drive away those Catholics that do still attend mass. If we ignore those "rules" though, what do those remaining Catholics have to hold on to? 

The full article can be read here; 'The Old Mass and the New 

Evangelization'

Being lead by the machine

Who are we allowing to lead our thoughts and motivate our actions? We are surrounded by media, we have 24/7 access to more TV shows and movies than we can possible watch in a lifetime. The new fad in TV is the idea of binge watching. The act of sitting in front of the television for a day at a time and watching every episode of a TV show. I can admit that I enjoy this habit very much. To just sit and turn off the brain and be entertained. I wonder though when I do it what it costs my mind and my intellect? At the same time we all sit and absorb massive amounts of media, we are telling ourselves that we, as a society, as a planet, as humans, are smarter, more refined and tolerant than we ever have been in the past.

The problem with that belief is that it isn't actually true. The majority of the planet sits and absorbs information told to them by invisible people behind the media. We do not know their values, their beliefs, their qualifications, well wait, we do know their beliefs and values and we know they are not ours, but we sit and watch anyway because they present to us a compelling story. They are story tellers of the finest caliber. They present a story to us so entertaining that we ignore the fact that it is wrapped in sin and speaks against what God would want for our lives.

What are the primary qualities that make for a good television show or movie? Pride, Greed, Lust, Anger, Gluttony, Envy, Sloth. How many shows have you seen that present their main characters with these qualities and yet somehow simultaneously present them as enduring and lovable. Their sin is a personality quirk that makes for entertaining TV. Also how often are their Contrary virtues Humility, Liberality, Chastity, Meekness, Temperance, Brotherly Love, Diligence, presented as the punchline?

We have come to the point where most people have given up on intellect and reason all together. We are all to happy to be lead down whatever road the media chooses to lead us. The more we immerse ourselves in the media the faster we allow ourselves to be lead. The recent turmoil over gay marriage and the rapid public opinion shift is further evidence or this. In just a few short years we have gone from the the majority of Americans disagreeing with gay marriage, to the the majority supporting it. In fact in the same time those of us who do oppose it have been painted as ignorant and bigots standing in the way of true love. If we continue on this road it is my prediction that within a couple of years at most we will have seen the supreme court call the Catholic church a promoter of hate crimes for opposing the practice.

We need to hold fast to our intellect and that will mean disconnecting ourselves from the constant stream of information that is contrary to basic thought. It is time to go out and look for ourselves. I am not suggesting total abstinence from things like the internet. Certainly it can be a valuable tool for acquiring needed information. For example all of the documents published directly by the Vatican. What we need to be cautious of however is allowing others to interpret the source information and feed us fiction as fact. Even in regard to TV shows, which we should know are obvious fiction, we find that the facts they present, as to how family life should be lived, how men and women should interact, what we should consider important, all slowly erode away our intellect until we are left thinking that those things seem logical.

Eventually what this leads to is a desire to learn more but the process has become to tedious, we are too accustomed to the news outlets, sit coms, dramatic TV series, internet sites; all providing our ideas for us. So it becomes more and more difficult to abandon those things that have so long kept our minds at a minimal functioning level, and convinced us because we are mass consumers of false information that we are in fact brilliant with an IQ far and above the average person.

It is time to stick our heads above the water and look around. In the constant onslaught of information, TV, internet there is one prevalent theme, it is mostly, very, anti-Christian and anti-Catholic. It is cleverly disguised, and the stories they tell are very entertaining, but how much are we willing to sacrifice for the sake of a good story? How much are we willing to let go of?