Saturday, August 13, 2005
MAY GOD'S ABUNDANT BLESSINGS
rain down on Melanie Scott and Domenico Bettinelli today as they make their wedding vows. May their life be filled with the joy of living in the love of Christ and each other. May their years be long together. May their children be a source of enduring happiness.
Congratulations, Dom and Melanie!
Friday, August 12, 2005
UN MILLENIUM CAMPAIGN AND WYD TEAM UP
Therefore it is no surprise that WYD Germany is partnering with the UN Millenium Campaign in Germany for one of its opening ceremonies which will take place in Bonn. Added incentives for the partnership include a video address to the WYD pilgrims gathered in Bonn for the opening ceremonies on August 15 by none other than UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, and a massive fireworks display. Annan strongly supports population control, abortion, same-sex 'marriage' and much more.
Nice. Who do we thank for this?
Read the rest of the story...
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When you're done with that one, take a look at this blog about a group at WYD.
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At least the rock band that trashed the Pope has been uninvited and the pro-condom campaign has been banished.
EWTN DROPS MSGR. CLARK RERUNS
A worldwide Catholic TV network based in Alabama has decided to drop a show hosted by a priest accused of having a sexual relationship with a married woman.
Monsignor Eugene V. Clark has denied the accusations but resigned Thursday as pastor of St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City.
He has a program called "Relationships" that has aired on Irondale-based EWTN since 1999.
"Relationships"??? Of all the possible titles...
Read the rest at the website...
Blogger credit to New Oxford Review.
SOVEREIGN ORDER OF THE TEMPLE OF CHRIST
Are the Templars a figment of imagination or a reality?
An article from the Malaysian Financial News, July 2003, claims they are real.
The Templars today as in the Middle Ages, dominate the international finances using discrete and not too notorious companies for the mass media. It is supposed that they participate in some important percentages in banking and insurance companies (their traditional business). It is truly know that they are behind almost all the worldwide insurance groups as in largest mutual funds, nevertheless its members, followers to their votes of poverty, purity and obedience, and to their specific priesthood of Melkisedek, live in an austere way and all the benefits are invested in the Temple Order's companies and social work and charity, they never have more than 30 or 40 percent of a corporation and always when it has a legal business purpose and according their spiritual and religious ideals.
From a good source is known that their 'main ship' is an important banking and insurance corporation where their executives are obligated to keep the secret about where the capital comes from, in a web of physical and juridical persons where the silence and discretion are the rules of the house.
Whether the article is accurate or not, there is a Sovereign Order of the Temple of Christ on the web where you can read:
"Let us give thanks to the Virgin Mary, Our Lady., since she is the chief of our Order, because Our Lady was the beginning of our Order, and for her and for her honor it has been the return of our Order, and it will be the end of our lives and the end of our Order, whenever God wants to be in that way". Amen
The Order is dedicated to an Alliance between Christianity and Islam. They teach the ecumenical way of "union of the two complementary branches of the abrahamic tree, Christianity and Islam" and use a Templar Service of Essenian origin. The website calls the Christians the "spiritual Jews of the New Alliance" and seems to present alchemy as the union of Islam and Christianity. They speak of "the Way" and the "coming of the Paraclitus." Joint prayer held reciprocally in both Christian and Muslim temples is to be the result, and "Love is the key" to bring this about.
The Templar Religious Service includes a Templar Officiant and his wife as deaconess, suggesting that "This is the way where we can find the only answer to the dramatical problem of the priest vocations in the Roman Church." They speak of La Salette and Fatima, of Jacques de Molay, and of Our Lady of the Holy Spirit.
In the Introduction to the Templar Religious Service, we are told that "There's not Temple Order without templar religious service, without templar priesthood, without templar sacrament." According to the website,
The Templar service remembers to the catholic, to the protestant, to the orthodoxian, to the muslim that they have the bases of a common piety and a faith for the returning to the origin of the real religion as it was manifested, in particular, in the essenian times, before a during the ministry of Jesus. In the present times as in the middle ages or in the eighth century in times of the round table, the templar knights were and are from this essenian filiation and the express themselves by this two levels in matters of sacramental life.
Externally (exoterically): The temple Order has a sacerdotal rite the Eucharist Mass tied to the celibate catholic priest.
Innerlly (esoterically): The temple order is united to essenian rite, reserved to the inner church, rite practiced by the templar officiant, lay, chosen from the knights and generally married.
Are they practicing sexual rites? It's hard to determine from this passage:
When an Officiant is not married or his wife is absent, he calls to one of his brothers to help him. The templar communion that in the temple has all the value of the communion doesn't demand from who participate a previous confession to a priest or an officiant, but they are hermetical confidant of all of these, templar or not, who want to tell them their own problems. To understand the templar communion, you have to know that the single or married officiant can't ask to other sister to help him as a deaconess, that will be deeply denaturalize the significance of the sacerdotal couple in its physical, animical and spiritual complementary polarities. Because the sacerdotal couple prefigures the restitution of the original adam-eve in its dignity before the fall, in the restored dignity of the final adam-eve.
They claim that "The templar religious service is truly the sacrament that gets its origin in the mother" and add that "the templar religious service is neither a replacement nor an imitation of the Mass. When the bread wet with wine, is consecrated by the officiant as he has the power, we participate in the exaltation of the Glorious Christ, the risen Christ, the Christ of the last times, the "Christus Victor" different to the suffering and crucified Christ that the priest officiating the Eucharist Mass sacrifice, identify himself to the sacrificed Christ, offering with him."
Defining their seal, they tell us that "Here it is what beautifullly illustrate the old templar seal, where two knights ride over the same mount. The time is near when nothing that singularize each church will subsist."
Since Vatican II we have focused on the resurrection at Mass as much as on the sacrifice. I wonder how it was decided to make this change? Did this Essenian theology influence Catholicism? Was there such as thing as Essenian theology at the time of Vatican II?
Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us!
VATICAN REPRESENTATIVE ENDORSES INTERNATIONAL GUN CONTROL
Sent in by a reader...
Gun law expert, author of book on terrorist battling Catholic saint, blasts Vatican UN observer
American gun law expert John Michael Snyder today blasted the Vatican’s permanent observer to the United Nations for public support of UN international gun control schemes.
Snyder, a practicing Catholic and former Jesuit seminarian, said that, “Archbishop Celestino Migliore’s public support for the proposed UN international arms control treaty is a direct attack on the God-given right of law-abiding citizens to self-defense. As such, it is an attack on the very right to life itself. Coming from an official of the world’s purportedly premier pro-life entity, it comes as a shocking example of public hypocrisy.”
Migliore last month endorsed the United Nations Program of Action to Prevent, Combat and Eradicate the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All Its Aspects. This program calls for actions that could abridge the individual Second Amendment rights of people in the United States. These include the establishment of (1) a comprehensive program for worldwide gun control, (2) an international tracking certificate which would be used to ensure United Nations monitoring control over the export, import, transit, stocking and storage of legal arms and light weapons, (3) worldwide record keeping, for an indefinite amount of time, on the manufacture, holding, and transfer of small arms and light weapons, and (4) national registries and tracking lists of all legal firearms.
Continue reading the story at the website...
Thursday, August 11, 2005
OUR LADY OF THE ANGELS ART GALLERY
LOOK!
It's a Cathedral. No, it's an art gallery! Shazam...it's both!!!!!!!!!
What is that thing? Does it bite? Does it materialize? Does it morph?
More gallery.
Blogger credit to a reader.
SCOBA ALARMED BY CHRISTIAN EXODUS FROM MID-EAST
We, the hierarchs of the Standing Conference of Canonical Orthodox Bishops
in the Americas (SCOBA), reflecting on the continuing Middle East crisis,
wish to express our concern and pain with regard to the violence and
threats of violence in the Middle East.
We are aware that for various people, the land Christians call the Holy
Land is simply a geography of holy places and holy sites to be visited in
memory of events described in the Holy Scriptures. Often, this reverence
for the holy places is not accompanied by knowledge of the continuous
Christian life in the Holy Land since the time of Christ. Paradoxically,
some Christian voices in the United States, expressing a factually
erroneous point of view, even deny the presence of living and historic
Christian communities in Israel and in the Palestinian Authority.
As a consequence of the violent confrontations and the poverty and economic
instability of the Palestinian population, emigration from the region
continues and accelerates. Thus, the entire Christian population, and
especially the Orthodox Christian population, is diminished month by month.
In demographic terms, within the foreseeable future the Holy Land will be a
land of holy sites and holy stones, with the Christian population reduced
to the status of mere custodians of these holy places, no longer able to
maintain a viable community life.
We appeal to all nations and persons engaged in this crisis to take into
account the concerns we have expressed as they seek to travel on the road
to peace and democracy in the Middle East.
In reflecting on the violence and threats of violence in the Middle East,
and about the rapidly decreasing Christian population, we read with
appreciation the report of the National Council of the Churches of Christ
in the USA (NCCC) delegation which visited the Middle East early this year.
Under the title "Barriers Do Not Bring Freedom," the delegation expressed
also the concerns we raise in this statement of the Standing Conference of
Canonical Orthodox Bishops in the Americas. We appreciate this _expression
of Christian solidarity. We appeal to all Christians in the US to be
mindful of all the living Christian communities in Israel, the Palestinian
Authority, and the whole Middle East, and to show this mindfulness in
prayer and in actions of solidarity.
Continue reading the story at the website...
FUNGIBLE HONESTY
In the occult world of Alice Bailey and the Lucis Trust, honesty would appear to be interpreted in a way that encompasses adding to her books to suit the occasion. All of Bailey's books are channeled through the entity Djwhal Khul. Bailey died in 1949.
In PROBLEMS OF HUMANITY, there is a passage cited in the Alice Bailey data base (quoted below) as appearing in "Chapter V - The Problem of the Churches."
According to the data base index, this book was published in 1947, and one would assume that it is the 1947 edition that is being quoted in the data base. The book was republished in 1964 according to the Lucis Trust website, at which time it was "revised and edited to eliminate all out-of-date facts and information." Elimination is one thing. Addition is another.
Here is the passage:
The Roman Catholic Church stands entrenched and unified against any new and evolutionary presentation of truth to the people; its roots are in the past but it is not growing into the light; its vast financial resources enable it to menace the future enlightenment of mankind under the cloak of paternalism and a colorful outer appearance which hides a crystallization and an intellectual stupidity which must inevitably spell its eventual doom, unless the faint stirrings of new life following the advent of Pope John XXIII can be nourished and developed.
Notice that in the data base that passage is cited as appearing on page 131.
How did Pope John XXIII get into a channeled book which was channeled prior to 1949?
Through interlibrary loan, I have been able to obtain a first edition copy of the book. In the first edition, the passage appears on page 198, "Chapter VI - The Problem of the Churches," and reads as follows:
The Roman Catholic Church stands entrenched and univied against any new and evolutionary presentation of truth to the people; its roots are in the past but it is not growing into the light; its vast financial resources enable it to menace the future enlightenment of mankind under the cloak of a paternalism and a colorful outer appearance which hides a crystallization and intellectual stupidity which must inevitably spell its eventual doom.(p. 198)
The reference to Pope John XXIII is missing. It has been added to the later edition, and the data base is passing it off as though it had been in the earlier edition.
One wonders why it was added.
Bailey's animus toward the Roman Catholic Church is blatant in the passage just preceding that one:
I. The Roman Catholic Church is distinguished by three things which are all contrary to the spirit of Christ:--
a. An intensely materialistic attitude. The Church of Rome stands for great stone structures--cathedrals, churches, institutions, convents, monasteries. In order to build them, the policy down the centuries has been to drain the money out of the pockets of rich and poor alike. The God of the Roman Catholic Church is money. It is a strictly capitalistic church and is potent in the more Fascist countries. The money gathered into its coffers supports a powerful ecclesiastical hierarchy and provides for its many institutions and schools.
b. A far-reaching and far-sighted political program in which temporal power is the goal and not the welfare of the little people. The present program of the Catholic Church has definite political implications; their attitude to communism has in it the seeds of another world war. The political activities of the Catholic Church at this time do not build for peace, no matter under what guise they are presented.
c. A planned policy whereby the mass of the people are kept in intellectual ignorance and, through this ignorance, are naturally to be found among the reactionary and conservative forces which are so powerfully at work resisting the new age with its new civilization and more enlightened culture. Blind faith and complete confidence in the priest and in the Vatican are regarded as spiritual duties.
LEVADA WILL GIVE TESTIMONY
Archbishop William Levada agreed Wednesday to waive diplomatic immunity and answer questions about sex abuse by Roman Catholic priests after he takes over as the church's guardian on doctrine - the Vatican post formerly held by Pope Benedict XVI.
Levada, 69, who officially steps down as archbishop of San Francisco next week, is heading to Rome to take over as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger held the post for 24 years before he became pope in April; he appointed Levada to his old job a month later.
During a farewell Mass last Sunday in San Francisco, Levada was served with a subpoena to be deposed on Friday. But with his agreement to accept the jurisdiction of U.S. courts - amounting to a waiver of diplomatic immunity - Levada will now be deposed in January. He had previously refused to agree to jurisdiction and other conditions.
Continue reading the story...
Wednesday, August 10, 2005
WHAT IS HAPPENING TO THE CATHOLIC RELIGIOUS LANDSCAPE ?
Shepherds of Christ Ministries is an umbrella group for Our Lady of the Holy Spirit/Our Lady of Light. Rita Ring and Fr. Edward Carter (now deceased) are the visionaries at the foundation of this apostolate. The books and messages come through the two of them. There are many pictures in the linked website of the image on the Clearwater, Florida bank building, and the story behind it. Shepherds of Christ Ministries bought the bank building for more than two million dollars and operate out of it a sort of shrine. They also operate a shrine in China, Illinois, as well as the Morrow, Ohio facility, and presumably Our Lady of the Holy Spirit Center.
It looks solidly Roman Catholic. They are saying all the right things about Eucharistic Adoration, the Mass, the Blessed Virgin, prayer for priests. But there are those Gnostic Jesus eyes. There is the priest accused of sexual abuse and forbidden to minister whose spiritual books are nevertheless being distributed at the Center website. There are those troubadour love songs. There is the triteness, and the plethora of visionaries seeing a multitude of things including a shapeshifting Mary.
There is another apostolate dedicated to the Holy Spirit in Cincinnati, Ohio. Recently at Mass I happened to notice a supply of free booklets titled "Novena to the Holy Spirit: Help me to know you" written by George E. Schulhoff A.H.S. This booklet is published by the Apostles of the Holy Spirit, 2709 Woodburn Ave., Cincinnati. As you can see by clicking the "Holy Spirit Chapel" link on the left at this webpage, they operate a chapel out of the same facility as Our Lady of Light/Our Lady of the Holy Spirit. George Schulhoff was not a priest. He founded and ran Schulhoff Rental Equipment and Sales, devoting spare time to the founding of the Apostles of the Holy Spirit beginning in 1948.
Some of the statements in the booklet cause me to hesitate. On day two George writes "Wake me up" as Gurdjieff, founder of the Enneagram, would also desire. On day four Schulhoff asks the Holy Spirit to "take possession of me." On day six the gift of piety "will bring you to ecstasy in My intimacy." His day eight reference to "Love - Fear" brings James Twyman's talk on the same two subjects immediately to mind. Twyman's source according to some was "A Course in Miracles". Interesting that Apostles of the Holy Spirit and Jesus are mentioned in this index to a book presented by the Foundation for a Course in Miracles. They are not necessarily talking about the same thing, of course, but the love gospel is very much a part of "A Course in Miracles" if this index is any indication. It is certainly not Catholic.
OUR LADY OF LIGHT PUBLICATIONS
Within the website of Our Lady of the Holy Spirit Center is the webpage for Our Lady of Light Publications. I could not find a separate address for this publishing house.
There is an organization out of Sante Fe, New Mexico which is titled Our Lady of Light Publications, where you can also read Mary's messages, including this Letter of Love, delivered through the writings of visionary Michelle Rios Rice Hennelly.
Hennelly receives messages from Mary in the form of dictated letters which she disperses via her website. The letter of love linked above is an interesting example of this. In that letter you can learn that Mary is the Divine Cosmic Mother, Queen of Heaven and Earth. Her messages are primarily about love, including love-making, and about higher knowing, meditation, spiritual practices and prayer.
Hennelly assures us that Mary is a divine being who is not about religion, dogma or division; and that in essence we are exactly like God and that we too are divine love. She tells us that we are in the end times and that the "Age of God" is approaching.
Hennelly describes contemplation as "a process of examining what is in the mind and how it affects us, while meditation takes us beyond the mind. Contemplation is important to come to know what is in the mind and how it influences our perception of and our experiences of the world." I think I can hear St. John of the Cross groaning!
In an elaboration on love-making, Hennelly tells us that
During love-making this life-force is unleashed and in orgasm, for a moment, we experience God. The small self is left behind, and we experience our essence joined with God. So the energy of love-making is a sacred gift, and love-making itself is an opening to light, love, and God. his (sic) is a complex topic, as are many of the topics Mary has taught me. Love-making is not sex. It is not lust. It is really not of the flesh. It is about the Spirit coming into and filling one. Mary describes the energy of love-making as sacred and love-making itself as a blessing. She says that the joining of two souls in love-making is a miracle that few people understand.
Mary wants to dispel our confusion about the true nature and purpose of love-making. She wants to restore it to its proper place in God's plan for us as a way to experience the divine and a path to God....
Love-making occurs when two souls, who are joined in love and whose hearts are open, come together in a bond of intimacy and mutual commitment. In love-making the sacred life-force comes alive and joins with the divine energy of love in the heart. The joining of these energies brings the lovers to a higher level of consciousness and opens them to an experience of the divine....
...the body becomes the temple in which the divine comes to life as God created it to be. The energy created in love-making can be used to expand our light, to heal ourselves and others, and to create as God creates. It can be used to change water into wine, multiply loaves and fishes, and calm the waters. This is part of the miracle of love-making and the energies related to it that Mary says few people understand.
What Hennelly is describing in those passages is sex-magic promoted by occultism--magical sacred sex--the alchemical wedding. Ritualized it is the Hieros Gamos brought to the attention of the world in THE DA VINCI CODE. Occultists believe that sexual energy can be harnessed to bring about the will of the participator.
The second part of Hennelly's letter discusses the need to "awaken." If you have read any of the material of Russian occultists G. I. Gurdjieff and P. S. Ouspensky, that term will be very familiar. Awakening is a major component of their occultism. Their idea of being awake is to learn to know clairvoyant, parapsychological, occult worlds.
Hennelly suggests that we turn to Christ, Buddha, Krishna, and Mary in the midst of the coming wars and confusions which will usher in the antichrist.
More can be read about Hennelly and her husband R. Kevin Hennelly at this page in their website.
Michelle Hennelly is a "gifted mystic, visionary, healer, and spiritual counselor." R. Kevin Hennelly "received a BA in Economics from University of Notre Dame and a MS in Foreign Service and a Law degree from Georgetown University. After practicing international law for several years, he entered the field of psychology, earning a MA in Counseling Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute and a MS in Clinical Psychology from The Fielding Institute. He spent a number of years as a psychotherapist and college professor before devoting himself full-time to writing and publishing.
You can see the books they have published here, among them MARY'S WAY: ROMANTIC LOVE AS A PATH TO GOD.
The Notre Dame Magazine website promotes this book, calling it "A perspective on love and marriage and how intimacy can be a path to God." What does it say about the University that they are promoting this book, described on Hennelly's website as a disclosure of "the sacredness of sexual energy, and the power of the feminine as embodied in Mary [which] has been intentionally concealed since the early days of Christianity. It culminates in stunning revelations about Jesus and Mary Magdalene, the passion of Jesus, love and suffering, the last Fatima message, the demise of institutional religion, and the momentous changes currently facing our world"? Perhaps it says that Notre Dame University is no longer Catholic?
The Blessed Virgin Mary was--well--a Virgin. Attributing this sexual message to her is offensive in the extreme.
There is an abstract online also at the Notre Dame website (scroll down) of R. Kevin Hennelly's "Working Paper #95 - July 1987" titled "The Psychological Roots of Political and Ideological Violence: A Jungian Perspective."
Access: New Age Esoteric Web Link Index webpage devoted to channeling provides a link to Hennelly's book A TIME OF FIRE. You can read endorsements of the book here, including one by Robert Powell, Ph.D., Co-founder of the Sophia Foundation and author of The Sophia Teachings. Powell, you may recall, is the translator and promoter for Valentin Tomberg's book MEDITATIONS ON THE TAROT.
One last installment of the Hennelly's love gospel can be read here. It's pure New Age rhetoric.
Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us!
Tuesday, August 09, 2005
APARITIONS
Approved and unapproved. Lots and lots and lots of apparitions. Something from the spiritual world is leaking into our visible world in increasing events. There are only three possibilities. God, angels, and man. Too many appear to be ungodly. Mankind and the visible world is not likely the source unless the visionaries are seeing people who have passed beyond the grave, such as the Blessed Virgin and the saints or those souls who will spend eternity in hell. In Catholic cosmology, angels, both good and bad, are all that is left to appear.
Unity Publishing has investigated apparitions and has this to offer from Fr. Peter Joseph in regard to discerning what people may be seeing.
Matt C. Abbott reports on an apparition that turned out to be false, proven false by prophecies that did not come true.
Several times in recent blogs I've linked the false apparition that provided the impetus for Paris occultist Jules Doinel's Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica, or as he calls it in his first homily "the Church of the Paraclete". This homily was given August 18, 1890, "in the ninth year of Our Lady of the Holy Spirit."
In Covington, Kentucky, an area of the country out of which the EarthSpirit Rising Conferences originated, there is a center called "Our Lady of the Holy Spirit Center." This center arose in response to the so-called "Batavia Visionary" to whom "the Blessed Mother of God began appearing as Our Lady of Light" according to their website. This apparition gave her permission to change the name of the facility established to commemorate the apparition to "Our Lady of the Holy Spirit Center," located in Norwood, Ohio.
Father Joseph tells us that in discerning spirits, "God is never the cause of things that are useless, futile, frivolous, or impertinent. When his spirit moves a soul it is always for something serious and beneficial." He tells us that "there is nothing of precipitation, lightness, exaggeration, or impetuosity; all is well balanced, edifying, serious, and full of calmness and peace."
Look at the picture of Our Lady of Light. It is almost child-like. As I compare it with the picture of Our Lady of Fatima that hangs above my computer, I find that the picture lacks gravity, and is full of "lightness" and "frivolity." But more to the point look at the prayer. It's a jingle for a 3-year-old. There is simply nothing speaking of the gravity of heaven in that prayer. Compare the wording to the Magnificat. By comparison it is shallow and trite to the extreme. Additionally there is that rainbow circling the flaming heart that is so reminiscent of the ouroboros for anyone who has studied the occult.
It would appear the apparition has not been approved, judging by the statement of permission to publish on the website.
A detailed chronology of the apparition's history can be read here, where you can read that Fr. Donald Rinfret, Fr. Leroy Smith, Fr. Lawrence Sweeney, Fr. Frank Kenney, and Fr. Edward Carter have all been involved in promoting this apparition and Center. Fr. Joseph Bruemmer is President of the Center according to their July 2005 Newsletter.
Ironically, the Center is located in what once was the diocesan seminary building, the place where priests once were, but no longer are trained. I find that especially ironic. The "new priests" of Roman Catholicism have taken over the real estate.
The Center offers "Our Lady of Light Books" through "Our Lady of Light Publications." There you can purchase books by additional visionaries who, one would presume, are also connected with the Center.
You can also purchase tapes and CDs. I was particularly surprised to find this priest's offerings. Fr. Kenneth J. Roberts is best known for his book PLAYBOY TO PRIEST. That autobiography is offered on six audio tapes (click his name to see the offerings). Some of you will remember Fr. Roberts from this DallasNews.com story by Brooks Edgerton, where you can read that
He reached out-0f-court deals this spring with victims of four priests: Mr. Kos, the Rev. Kenneth Roberts, the Rev. Michael T. Flanagan and the Rev. Patrick J. Lynch.
And
The Rev. Kenneth Roberts
Two brothers have litigation pending. They are from the St. Louis area, where the Dallas Diocese sent Father Roberts in the late 1960s after concluding that he had abused a boy here. Another claim, from a Dallas-area man who did not file suit, was settled recently. Earlier, at least three other men were compensated. All allege child abuse except one, a young cleric who said he was abused as a young adult when he consulted Father Roberts about entering the priesthood. A spokeswoman has said Father Roberts denies some charges and can't respond to others, because they date to a time when he suffered alcohol-related blackouts. Medical records show that he has acknowledged at least one incident of abuse; he has not been criminally charged. Father Roberts is now affiliated with Our Lady of the Holy Spirit Center in the Cincinnati suburb of Norwood, where officials say he helps with nonministerial tasks. Bishop Grahmann has suspended him from ministry but not sought to remove him from the priesthood.
If he has been suspended from ministry and is to help with "nonministerial tasks," why are his books and tapes being promoted by a ministry that wants to be seen as Catholic and holy?
Remember one of Fr. Peter Joseph's cautions in the article linked above for discerning apparitions? Under the subheading "Signs of the diabolical spirit", Fr. Joseph cites Fr. Aumann's "other signs" including "Uncontrolled passions and strong inclination to sensuality, usually under the guise of mystical union".There is more of interest in this movement. Fr. Carter, who is pictured on the Center's website, and who has since died, is said in his biography to have been ordained a Jesuit, received his doctorate in theology from Catholic University of America, taught theology at Xavier University, authored 14 books on spirituality and gave numerous retreats and talks on the spiritual life. He was a lifelong devotee of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and founded and edited Shepherds of Christ Newsletter directed to all the priests of the United States and the English speaking world. He was theological consultant to Our Lady of Light Foundation and Shepherds of Christ Ministries, a movement he founded which is dedicated to the renewal of the spiritual life. He was one of the original members of the board of trustees of Our Lady of the Holy Spirit Center.
"Fr. Carter and Rita Ring are the only messengers for the Shepherds of Christ Movement." It appears from the website that the movement is associated with the image on the side of a building in Clearwater, Florida. Scroll down and look at the picture of Jesus on the cover of the "Blue Book." I have seen those same eyes in occult websites. Those are the eyes of the Gnostic Jesus.
Apparently Jesus is into songwriting for the Shepherds of Christ Ministries. And such songs--troubadour songs about love and sentimentality--and the visionary is told to "Sing My songs of love" at this website. One of them was written for singing at Our Lady of the Holy Spirit Center.
It came as no surprise at all to find Our Lady of the Holy Spirit Center discussed favorably at Yoganandaji.org. The Gnostic Jesus would be appropriate for such a website which is dedicated to love and brotherhood in an Oriental tradition. But what is one to make of the statement about the Center here: "We are a Service Organization, Interfaith, Nonreligious"? Do they market themselves as Catholic in Catholic circles, and as nondenominational/nonreligious in noncatholic circles?
Calving Patterson also got messages from Mary at Our Lady of the Holy Spirit Center in Norwood. And there are more visionaries, including Ellen Sartori and Mary Rettig. According to the descriptions the Holy Spirit appears, as does St. Michael the Archangel, the Miracle of the Sun, Mary, Jesus and Joseph. Heaven, it would seem, is providing a plethora of phenomena. On March 20, 1997 Mary appeared as the Sorrowful Mother and as Our Lady of Fatima. On another day she appeared as Our Lady of the Rosary. And again Our Lady of Light turned into Our Lady of Fatima. This Mary of the Holy Spirit Center, it would seem, is a shapeshifter. We even learn at this website that Mary has blonde hair.
On September 18, 1993, Medjugorje is mentioned.
The history of the founding of the Norwood center is given in the obituary for Gerald Ross, who was its founder, another visionary who began his visionary career in Medjugorje. His books were published through Our Lady of Light Foundation.
There is a forest of red flags associated with this ministry. It lacks Church approval. Why, then, is the Diocese of Souix City promoting it on their website?
Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us!
ANOTHER REPORT OF THE NEW CATHOLIC CHAPLAIN OF THE ITALIAN LODGE
at Catholic News Agency.
Blogger credit to Spirit Daily.
ATTEMPTED FIREBOMBING OF A CHURCH IN NEW JERSEY
fails when wick separates from the bottle of flammable liquid. The incident happened an hour before the first Sunday Mass was scheduled to begin.
Hat tip to New Oxford Review.
PRACTICING CATHOLICS DON'T GET AIDS
except in the most rare of circumstances where the spouse has the disease.
U.S. Newswire, however, has a different interpretation. An article promoting the voice of Francis Kissling (who else?) reports on the posters being displayed for World Youth Day, telling good Catholics to use condoms for the purpose of "promoting life." Ah yes, "promote" life so that you can abort it. I see the logic!
There is freedom in the real promotion of life. There is little but slavery to sin in this one.
Hat tip to New Oxford Review.
Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us!
Monday, August 08, 2005
DA VINCI CODE MAY BE REWRITTEN FOR MOVIE
New Oxford Review links this story:
THE film version of The Da Vinci Code is attempting to reduce the offence that the best-selling book caused to Roman Catholics.
Sony Pictures, the studio behind the film starring Tom Hanks and Sir Ian McKellen, is reported to have been so concerned that it has consulted Catholic and other Christian specialists on how it might alter the plot of the novel to avoid offending the devout.
Film officials have held talks with Catholic groups and other organisations despite Dan Brown, the author, insisting that “it’s only a novel and therefore a work of fiction”, The New York Times reported yesterday.
The Catholic League is calling for Ron Howard, the film’s Oscar-winning director, to include a disclaimer acknowledging that the movie is fiction.
The Da Vinci Code, which is being filmed this summer with locations including Winchester Cathedral and Rosslyn Chapel, near Edinburgh, is based on a novel that has sold 25 million copies worldwide. Among its more controversial claims is that Jesus married Mary Magdalene, a former prostitute, and that she bore him a child. This has been denounced as virulently anti-Catholic and a risible hoax.
Opus Dei, the Catholic organisation, is particularly concerned about its own depiction, because it is a central villain in the book. Its members are depicted acting unethically for the sake of God, the Church or Opus Dei, whereas the organisation is a Roman Catholic institution that adheres to Catholic doctrine and condemns immoral behaviour.
EVOLUTION
The controversy rages. Discussion in Amy's blog was interesting, but I think not entirely on target for a Catholic.
It matters less to faith whether God chose to populate the earth through a method of Darwinian evolution or a method of Intelligent Design, than it matters whether God is also evolving.
If we argue that beings evolve, how will God be exempted from the category? That He must be exempted is a given within Catholic theology. God--an evolving God--must by necessity be an imperfect God. The idea is untenable. If God, Himself, is evolving, of what possible good would He be, since He would also be full of the imperfections which cause so much difficulty for mankind. God, to be a God worthy of worship, must be static.
The discussion will, of course, come down to ultimate truth. A static God can provide ultimate truth. An evolving God can provide only relative truth--a truth relative to His particular development at this particular time in salvation history.
The Catholic detractors want an evolving God in the worst way, so they can morph doctrine into something more congenial to their own way of thinking. That, I suspect, is what fuels the debate. Can relativism be justified and thus enforced?
A reader sent in a link to an interesting Introduction to Thomas J. J. Altizer's book, published in 1966, titled THE GOSPEL OF CHRISTIAN ATHEISM. Altizer claims that
the Christian, and the Christian alone, can speak of God in our time; but the message the Christian is now called to proclaim is the gospel, the good news or the glad tidings, of the death of God....theology in our time can only refuse to speak of the death of God by ceasing to speak.
And further
Christian theology cannot survive apart from a dialogue with the world, it is increasingly being recognized that dialogue is a mutual encounter: faith cannot speak to the world unless it is prepared to be affected by that world with which it speaks. Moreover, the new theologian is confessing that the Word has ceased to be truly or decisively present in the established and traditional forms of faith.
It's a familiar argument for relativism. Shades of the argument would appear to have permeated the thinking of Pope John XXIII and his decision to open the windows of faith to the winds of the world.
Altizer goes further:
Once and for all the Christian must abandon the idea that theology is a continual elucidation of an eternal and unchanging Word....Only a dead or dying theology could rest upon the principle that the Christian Word is fully or finally present in the past, and surely no Christian could be wholly bound to the past who is open to the presence of a living or eschatological Word. We must not imagine that there is a single essence of Christianity, or an inner core of unchanging faith, or a form of faith meaning all things to all men....a theology that merely speaks a word of the past is not engaged in the true task of Christian theology. Only a theology unveiling a new form of the Word, a form that is present or dawning, in the immediate and contemporary life of faith, can be judged to be uniquely an authentically Christian.
...Such a faith can never identify itself with an ecclesiastical tradition or with a given doctrinal or ritual form.
In other words, folks, we must reject what Christ taught and become instead our own god to ourselves, making it up as we go along. And what is this source to be cited to justify our invention?
No radical Christian believes in the possibility of returning to either the word or the person of the original Jesus of Nazareth. Consequently, the radical Christian rejects both the literal and the historical interpretation of the Bible, demanding instead a pneumatic or spiritual understanding of the Word. Above all, the radical Christian seeks a total union with the Word, a union abolishing the priestly, legalistic, and dogmatic norms of the churches...
Yes. It was proclaimed in the 60s. Seek the Spirit. Abandon the Tradition. Visionary events define the Gospel for the present age.
Perhaps the deepest obstacle to the realization of this new vocation of theology is the priestly convinction that the canon of Scripture is closed, revelation is finished and complete, the Word of God has already been fully and finally spoken...The radical Christian also inherits both the ancient prophetic belief that revelation continues in history and the eschatological belief of the tradition following Joachim of Floris. This tradition maintains that we are now living in the third and final age of the Spirit, that a new revelation is breaking into this age, and that this revelation will differ as much from the New Testament as the New Testament itself does from its Old Testament counterpart....the movment of the Spirit has passed beyond the revelation of the canonical Bible and is now revealing itself in such a way as to demand a whole new form of faith. To refuse such a new revelation of the Spirit would be to repudiate the activity of the Word which is present and to bind oneself to a now empty and lifeless form of the Word. Nor can we expect the new revelation to be in apparent continuity with the old. Now that historical scholarship has demonstrated the chasm existing between the Old Testament and the Christian visions of Paul and the Gospel of John, might we not expect a comparable chasm to exist between the New Testament and a new revelation?
That is the heart of the evolution debate for a Catholic. Can God evolve? Because if He can evolve, doctrine can become a lot more compatible with what I want to do this afternoon.
The problem, of course, is that nasty inconvenient Catholic Church which claims that revelation is closed:
CCC 65: "In many and various ways God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son." Christ, the Son of God made man, is the Father's one, perfect, and unsurpassable Word. In him he has said everything; there will be no other word than this one.
In short, Joachim of Fiore and his followers got it wrong. There is going to be no New Age of the Holy Spirit--of Sophia--as Ted Meisner and James Twyman propose. There will be no new revelation which will permit the morphing of doctrine into a feminine God. Contemplation growing out of centering prayer as it is being practiced today will simply step the Catholic out of the faith on the roadway of private revelation.
CCC 67: Throughout the ages, there have been so-called "private" relelations, some of which have been recognized by the authority of the Church. They do not belong, however, to the deposit of faith. It is not their role to improve or complete Christ's definitive Revelation, but to help live more fully by it in a certain period of history. Guided by the magisterium of the Church, thesensus fidelium knows how to discern and welcome in these revelations whatever constitutes an authentic call of Christ or his saints to the Church.
Christian faith cannot accept "revelations" that claim to surpass or correct the Revelation of which Christ is the fulfillment, as is the case in certain non-Chiristian religions and also in certain recent sects which base themselves on such "revelations."
The Atheistic Christians don't want to hear it. Those who chase after visions of Mary in tree bark don't want to hear it either. Toronto Blessing rejects it. We have signs and wonders movements overwhelming the faith in too many places. Most of them are antinomian. Discernment of spirits is gravely lacking even in interreligious dialogue circles promoted by Catholic monks. Correction is long overdue.
CCC 66: "The Christian economy, therefore, since it is the new and definitive Covenant, will never pass away; and no new public revelation is to be expected before the glorious manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ."
Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us!
YESTERDAY'S NOON MASS
I have never seen the pews so empty. Many had one or two people in them. Some had none.
Possible explanations:
1. August vacations.
2. Recreational activities that necessitated an earlier Mass.
3. The choir doesn't sing during the summer months.
4. The scandal and continuing heresy in our midst.
I hope it isn't the last.
Lord have mercy on Your Church!
THE OTHER GOSPEL
will make its presence known at World Youth Day in the form of a band from Argentina that rejects the Pope and posits a direct relationship with Christ apart from priesthood.
Just what the youth need--an introduction to Sophia. If the organizers of this event have even a modicum of Catholic sensibility left, they will trash this band and find one that is Catholic.
Blogger credit to NOR.
Novus Ordo Watch offers a picture of WYD 2002. Picnic Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Sigh.
Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us.
Sunday, August 07, 2005
HIT COUNTER HAS RESET ITSELF AGAIN
Activity to date:
Total hits to Running off at the Keyboard (April 27, 2004 to Oct. 21, 2004) - 29,010
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