Prayer for the Beatification of the Servant of God Sister Lucia
“Most Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, I adore you profoundly and I thank you for the Apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Fatima, that revealed to the world the riches of her Immaculate Heart. By the infinite merits of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and through the intercession of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, I implore You, if it should be for Your greater glory and the good of our souls, to glorify Sr. Lucy, one of the Shepherds of Fatima, by granting us the grace which we implore through her intercession, the miraculous healing of Yvonne Cheryl Ann. Amen. Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be.”
Bald Eagle, a frequent sight, for me symbolic of Saint John the Evangelist, but, here in America, also a symbol of patriotism, a virtue of piety if truth be told, as described as a virtue of justice by Saint Thomas Aquinas. Lots of those in the parish.
Wild Turkey, which always reminds of our forefathers and Thanksgiving. Quiet foragers, stately. I’ve counted as many as 90 together at the right time and place.
Turkey vultures with their red-heads and huge wingspans taking over roadways over roadkill and sailing effortlessly in their “kettles” as they spy for more to scavenge. Necessary. Helpful.
Humming bird, smallest, meanest, most violent, most beautiful, fastest, noisiest, most helpful in their own way with pollination and such.
Then their are the song-birds, the varieties of finches and chickadees and sparrows.
There are crows and ravens, and the waaaaay too opinionated blue-jays.
You thought I was talking about birds. Them too. But I was talking about parishioners. All good.
You know, one kind of bird we do not at all have in the parish are ostriches. Nobody is wanting to escape reality. We look to our Risen Jesus, and by the power of the Holy Spirit, we see His wounds. And then everything is right with the world again, because we have our souls pointed to the heavens.
Saint Peter didn’t take the Keys of the Kingdom with him when he gave his life in witness to the Lord.
Saint Peter left those Keys with his successors, who provide them to bishops and to priests.
They use them especially in Sacramental Confession.
If you want the Pearly Gates of Heaven opened for you by those Keys: Go to Confession!
Meanwhile, our Confessional at Prince of Peace got an upgrade. I hope it lasts for a little while anyway.
I took off the old “megaphone” hollow closet door, bought a new door, circular-sawed it down to size (the width of blade along the side and the top), then bought and set about cutting up heavy ceiling tiles and attaching those to the door with washered-screws, adding a “bumper” in the front of the door over against smash-everything-in-sight-vacuum-cleaners, and then also an under-door sweep in the back, all of this making the Confessional rather sound-proof. Finally.
Then an appropriate San Damiano Crucifix image dear to my heart went up on the door to assist people in choosing not to lean against the soft ceiling tiles on the door should there be standing room only (very rare, that). The image is from a friend who died decades ago, who helped me with my thesis. He was great with cuneiform mud-writing of very many millennia ago.
Let’s take a look at the bottom:
Ready to go! People are better at going to Confession when they see that the priest doesn’t use the Confessional as a broom closet, but rather spruces it up in honor of the Sacred Mysteries of our Lord’s Mercy being applied therein. And in helps really, really a lot if the priest preaches up Confession and talks about how much he himself loves going to Confession.
There’s much more I’d like to do as time goes on. Right away after I came to the parish, we added an interior wall and Confessional screen. It used to be – I’m not kidding – a shower curtain hung on a window curtain rod by wires from the ceiling. We have to choose to get over the catastrophe post-Vatican II, and start getting back to the basics. We gotta make it to heaven.
In these days of chaos and anarchy of people getting paid to be violent by arbiters of societal experimentation akin to Josef Mengele experimentation on Jews in extermination camps, it’s good to see the other side of law enforcement.
That might be a crime for the Department of Justice, which is part and parcel of the chaos, holding that the real terrorists are Catholics kneeling at Holy Mass being said in Latin. But, I don’t care about the hypocrisy of those who think they are the powers-that-be. The Lord is always the Lord of History. Part of what the Good Lord wants is the good cops being good cops.
If we have a “Bleeding Out” tribute, we have to have the “This Is How You Bring Me Back to Life” tribute:
Claire (Girardin) Dion, 84, of Bridgton, ME, died Wednesday April 24, 2024 after a courageous battle with cancer. Born in Lynn to the late Arthur and Doris (Therrien) Girardin. Claire had lived in Lynn for many years, as well as Beverly, MA, and most recently in Bridgton, Maine with her husband of 23 years Ronald Guthenberg. Claire’s faith was strong and she was very active in the Catholic community and loved the connections she made over the years through her church and its extended community.
Claire was passionate about caring for others and while raising her family, she followed her dreams and attended Bunker Hill Community College and obtained her degree in nursing. She spent many years working with patients and caregivers helping them through their times in need. From labor and delivery to end-of-life, she brought the care and understanding that graced all those who had the privilege of her support.
Claire was also an avid volunteer and gave her time freely to programs such as Greater Lynn Mental Health, where she once served as president of the board. She was also known for taking in those in need, whether an elderly relative or young adult that needed a safe place, her home was always filled with love. Her volunteerism led to her being selected as a torch bearer for the 1996 Olympics. Her caring spirit also extended to animals, whether pets or wild, she loved them all and never missed an opportunity to contribute to their welfare. […]
Funeral Mass: Monday, April 29, 2024, 10:30AM – St. Pius V Church, Maple Street; Lynn, MA
In the picture at the top you see Claire visiting with Pornchai Maximilian Moontri, who were, are both friends of Father Gordon MacRae, Claire helping the both of them through the years. God speed, Claire. Hail Mary…
LifeSiteNews reports that the unanimous legislation “mandates a minimum of life imprisonment for first-time offenders over 19 who are found guilty of trafficking a minor in the state. Those who are under 18 will be charged with a Class A felony, which carries with it at least 20 years in prison.” […] Alabama Daily News relates that the Sound of Freedom Act “does not require that the perpetrator be aware of their victim’s age to be given a life sentence, nor is mistaking the victim’s age a legitimate legal defense.”
“Mandates a minimum of life imprisonment” — “minimum” — Trump said that the minimum sentence should be immediate execution.
Just a question for those who know who they are: Do you really wanna go that route?
This was posted five years ago [now seven years in 2024]. A good day to bring this to light once again. Outside of Saint Philomena – the veracity of whose existence as a virgin and martyr of the early Church has recently been sustained by exhaustive scientific evaluations of the evidence – outside of her… there is perhaps no saint more scorned as being no more than a figment of pious imagination than Saint George, who, however, boasts of more archaeological and historical evidence than most any other saint in the history not only of the early Church, but for some lesser known saints, right into our own day. Churches dedicated to Saint George sprang up in their dozens throughout the ancient world immediately after news of his martyrdom on 23 April 303.
Liberal warning: The most obnoxious denial of the existence of Saint George that I’ve come across comes from a super liberal professor of “ecumenism” (which I put in quotes because he had no idea what true ecumenism is). Many of my fellow priests today have had Father XXX as a professor in the various countries, seminaries and universities where he’s misled people. He had the idea that Saint George couldn’t possibly have existed because of the iconography of him slaying a dragon. This priest-professor’s arrogant idea was that we’re very smart today, and people of the past were so very gullible and stupid. He laughed his nervous, cowardly, mocking laugh when I tried to explain a few things about the iconography:
Those in the first centuries, who were suffering under the severe persecutions of the dragon of the Apocalypse, namely, the possessed-by-Satan pre-Constantinian Roman Empire, understood the dragon to be the Roman Empire. Even so, such depictions only came later, but for this very reason.
The white horse, similarly, is the white horse of the Apocalypse 6:2, whose rider goes out conquering and to further his conquering.
In the early fourth century, after George was martyred, it is interesting to note that all martyrs in the Montefiascone/Bolsano region of Tuscany, whether male or female, with no regard to how they met their deaths, were all depicted as riding on the white horse of the Apocalypse.
The woman who is to be saved in the background of some Renaissance paintings is, similarly, Holy Mother Church, who is represented by her saints.
The point of all this wonderful triumphalism in the iconography is not that Saint George or the other martyrs successfully fought their way out of being martyred. The point is not that they slew the dragon by, for instance, assassinating the Emperor of the time. It’s that they conquered the demonically controlled world by witnessing to Christ Jesus’ goodness and kindness and truth right unto their deaths, so hated is goodness and kindness and truth by the demonically controlled world. Saint George and the other martyrs slew the dragon by continuing in faithfulness while being slain.
By the way, the dragon, the ancient serpent, the devil and Satan, of Genesis 2:4-3:24, is, in the ancient usage of the word, an Oracle from God on behalf of man, a spirit, an angel, now a fallen angel. There are no talking snakes in Genesis. We’re talking about Satan here. The ancients knew this. Why is it that we don’t in all our clever self-congratulation?
None of this – or the archaeological proofs – made any impression on the super-liberal priest to whom I was speaking, for the last thing he wanted to hear was faithfulness to the Church unto death. That’s not what his own life was about. He was against all doctrine, all morality, all Sacred Revelation. Since he couldn’t answer in any reasonable way, he merely laughed his nervous, cowardly, mocking laugh once again. I was to see the “spirit” of that priest in so many other priests throughout my whole priesthood. Such adversity is an occasion by which friendship with Christ Jesus and the Saints can flourish.
This icon was given to me by Cardinal […]. It’s from the Mount Zion crowd just outside the wall of the Old City of Jerusalem. There is great devotion to Saint George in Palestine until today, with about every third boy being named after Saint George.
George’s father, Gerontius, was well known to the Emperor Diocletian as one of his very best soldiers. When Gerontius’ son George applied to Diocletian to be in the military service of the Emperor, Diocletian quickly made him part of the Imperial Guard and gave him the rank of Tribune. These positions taken together made young George, perhaps in his early twenties, almost as powerful as the Emperor himself. Very few people would have ever had such power, both military and political, and at such a young age. George was an instant phenomenon. Everyone would have known exactly who he was in the entire ancient world.
Diocletian was persuaded by the might-makes-right Galerius to have all his soldiers offer sacrifice to the Roman gods. George, with the zeal of the saints, loudly and with great reason proclaimed his worship of Christ Jesus, so that he couldn’t possibly offer sacrifice to any Roman gods. Diocletian, distraught – for he had never intended this – offered George all sorts of bribes, all of which were scorned by our Saint. Diocletian then set out to make an example of him, first attaching him to a wheel of swords and then having him decapitated.
Saint George and Saint Michael the Archangel sometimes meld into one presentation with wings being granted to Saint George on his white horse. That’s O.K. I’m sure they were great friends!
By the way, George is the Name of God the Father: ὁ πατήρ μου ὁ γεωργός ἐστιν (John 15:1). “My Father is George.” O.K., so, a pedantic translation would be “My Father is the Farmer” or “My Father is the Tiller of the Ground.” Some translations have “Vinedresser.” Truth be told, it’s γεωργός, that is, George!
Just to be insistent about this: “Adam” means “Tiller of the Ground.” “Adam” = “George.” Jesus is the New Adam. Jesus is the New George. Yours truly is merely the old George, the old Adam. But Christ has conquered and goes out to conquer still. Thanks be to God our Father that Jesus sets about slaying me so that, dead to myself, I live for Him alone. Yikes!
By the way, my parish, which takes in the most outrageously beautiful mountains of the Great Smoky Mountains, boasts, of course, of being at one end of “The Dragon’s Tail”, which is an extremely dangerous curvy road that every motorcycle enthusiast in North America loves to ride. They all come here! There are hotels just for two-wheelers throughout the area. There are all sort of motorcycle fix-it shops. I invite all cyclers to to make a weekend of this, slaying the dragon by the tail, and stopping in for Mass at 8:30 Sunday morning at Prince of Peace Catholic Church in Robbinsville, NC, or 11:00 Mass Sunday morning at Holy Redeemer Catholic Church in Andrews, N.C. If you’re not afraid of heights or gravel roads, come to Andrews from Robbinsville over Tatham Gap Road. If you’ve never once said “Yikes!” in your life, you will when you ride this one. I say that in solidarity, as most all my broken bones in life (really very many) have come from riding on two wheels with a motor.
There is no other saint I know of who is more archeologically established than Saint George. We have found the ruins of early centuries church buildings built in his honor at the very time of his death throughout the still anti-Catholic Roman Empire, from throughout Europe to throughout the Near and Middle East and everything in between.
Saint George is trashed because of Renaissance paintings of Saint George on a white horse slaying a dragon so as to save a maiden. “All fiction!” it is shrieked. “Don’t be a martyr! Be a man-of-consensus with the world!” That’s the brow-beating, bullying insistence which the soft and self-absorbed readily accept.
But the white horse is that of Jesus in the Apocalypse. In that Apocalypse the dragon is the great Serpent and Satan who is possessing the Caesars of the day. In that Apocalypse the maiden is the Church and the Mother of God. In the Apocalypse those who are killed in witness to Christ Jesus are the victors by their faithfulness right through death. The renaissance paintings are not original to those painters: They were merely representing frescoes in catacombs which depicted all martyrs like Saint George and at the time of Saint George in this fashion. Men who were martyred, women who were martyred, all depicted riding on white horses slaying the dragon, victorious over Satan by being faithful right through death.
Likewise, the virgin martyrs are dismissed as those to whom modern teenagers cannot relate. The first to be cancelled is Saint Philomena. In recent scientific studies, it is established absolutely that her catacomb stone reads: “Pax tecum Philomena” with no other possibility, and that the small glass vase found in that place contains the blood of a girl carbon-dated to the time of Philomena. Yep.
A priest working in the Holy See at the time I attended the presentations of these scientific studies actually hunted me down in Rome and insisted that it cannot be that I, a student at the Pontifical Biblical Institute, could promote the viability of placing Saint Philomena in the liturgical calendar once again. He was frantic, as if possessed. Yep.
The problem is both virginity and martyrdom, and martyrdom because of the virginity because of giving oneself over to Christ Jesus, to be “hidden with Christ in God” as Saint Paul says. We can’t have that today, shriek the inverted.
But that’s all years ago. Now what we have presented to us is that Jesus and His dear mother are irrelevant in every way. We must ignore them; we must obey the fallen world, we must worship Satan, Pachamama. Yep.
I will worship our Heavenly Father through, with, and in Jesus by the Holy Ghost and I will thank our dearest Immaculate Virgin Mary for interceding even for me as advocate, mediatrix, co-redemptrix. Thank you Jesus. Thank you Mary.
Translations of this are as poetic as the vocabulary. None of them fail. All are glorious. We could say that all the translations struggle, as would any attempt of mine. But poetry is all about “triggering”, to use a modern poetic descriptive. You yourself have to bring your whole life to any poetry as an occasion to hope to unlock a smidgeon of what, as Hopkins said, is inscaped therein. Take his description of the Holy Spirit as Manley speaks directly to Christ Jesus, Divine Son of the Immaculate Conception:
THE WINDHOVER — by Gerard Manley Hopkins —
To Christ our Lord…
I caught this morning morning’s minion, kingdom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind.
My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.
Speaking, repeating… such words to Christ Jesus, the Son of His Maid-Servant, words spoken to the Risen Jesus still bearing His wounds – that Heart! – King of kings, Lord of lords, Prince of the Most Profound Peace, I weep as “deep calls to deep.”
Who am I to interpret such things? I am very much afraid, of myself, my lack, my ineptitude, my nothingness. Do people want my death consequent upon the hubris of my claiming such a pulpit, the angels desirous of sundering me with mighty swords for not rendering justice to the Scriptures inspired by that fiery Holy Spirit? I fear that everything I might say will be an insult, not that it would be wrong, or malicious, but that it would be devastatingly inadequate…
Wisdom, chapter 9, comes to mind:
“God of my ancestors, Lord of mercy, you who have made all things by your word, and in your wisdom have established mankind to rule the creatures produced by you, and to govern the world in holiness and righteousness, and to render judgment in integrity of heart: Give me Wisdom, the consort at your throne, and do not reject me from among your children; for I am your servant, the child of your maidservant, a man weak and short-lived and lacking in comprehension of judgment and of laws. Indeed, though one be perfect among mortals, if Wisdom, who comes from you, be lacking, that one will count for nothing.”
Some months ago while preaching on the glories of Sacramental Confession, I waxed poetic on my fear of hearing the words at the end of my life, called before Jesus for my judgment: “Get away from me you evildoer: I never knew you.” I rhetorically asked in my homily about how it is that we can be certain that Jesus will know us as His friends, as part of His Holy Family. I again spoke of Sacramental Confession where we hear the words of Jesus commanding His Father to forgive us: “Father! Forgive them!”
To hear those words, we have to be there, on Calvary, returning, like John, accompanying Mary accompanying Jesus (back to the images at the top of this post). That’s where we are when we go to Sacramental Confession.
Well, well… we can speak of such things as poetically as we might, but it is not a matter of us inscaping everything we are into the facts at hand, but of dying to ourselves and being drawn into the reality of what is happening there, where heart speaks to heart. The yearning of my heart, crying out to Jesus, wanting to explain to His Little Flock such Mysteries of the Kingdom, was this deep speaking to deep, heart speaking to heart?
I am nothing. But the Lord Jesus had pity on me, right then, right there, while I was preaching away. I went silent, standing there not saying a word for what seemed an eternity, self-conscious that the homily was delayed and someone would try to help me because of thinking that I was suffering a stroke.
But here’s my experience of heart speaking to heart, deep calling to deep, and this has nothing to do with me bringing anything, inscaping anything into the situation:
All of a sudden my perspective, my heart, my depths [if any], were those of Jesus on the Cross, no longer looking to Him but instead one with Him, He sharing with my continuing nothingness and continuing blindness and continuing weakness and continuing ineptitude… He sharing the solidarity He had with His Immaculate Mother, the depths of those Hearts crying out to each other.
It’s not philology speaking to philology, exegesis speaking to exegesis. Instead, deep calling deep, heart speaking to heart, is the consequence of the fulfillment of Jesus’ prophesy: When I am lifted up [on the Cross], I will draw all to myself. When we are there, one with Him on the Cross, we see Mary’s heart from within Jesus Heart… we’re drawn into the calling out of those depths…
The images, the sounds, that come to mind, so banal, I’m so sorry, are those of whales, mother and calf, in the deep, calling out to each other in the deep, obviously heart speaking to heart…
I feel like running away, thinking I could speak to such ineffable, unspeakable calling, crying out…
I beg the Lord that I not to fall asleep again in this Gethsemane of today, oblivious that the betrayer is at hand, oblivious of Sacred Heart speaking to Immaculate Heart, of such Deep calling to Deep.
It is not a matter of our nothing-love that we stay awake and not run away into the dark, a matter of our hearts speaking, our depths crying out, but a matter of His love, His Mother’s love, those Hearts, those Depths into which we are drawn so as to be one with the two Hearts of Jesus and Mary. I know who you are! Come into the kingdom prepared for you!
We must wake up now in the Gethsemane of today:
Arise! Let us be going! Behold! My betrayer is at hand!
/// This waking up was moments after Jesus was sweating blood, after Jesus’ Heart was sundered in concern for His Mother’s heart… Back to the poetry of those images up top…
“But Father George! Father George! You’re an ol’ meanie! You’re wrong, Father George! You gotta retract and apologize to the writers of Dignitas infinita! They made a distinction between ontological evil, which is NEVER LOST, and moral evil, which they admit can be really really bad Father George! So they’re right and you’re wrong! We’re all going to be saints in heaven! Get with the program, Father George ! ! ! ! ! ! “
No matter how many exclamation points are used, it’s actually that distinction between moral evil and ontological evil that is wrong, heretical, and is the attempted destruction of the Catholic Church, the divinity of Christ, the fact of sin, the fact of any forgiveness of sin, etc.
The consequences of sin are also and deeply ontological. The consequences of grace are also and deeply ontological. Sanctifying grace transforms the very being of the individual, turning to glory in heaven. There’s nothing more ontological than that, being transformed to see God in the Face. But sin, mortal sin, wrecks destructions upon the very being of the individual, the mere shell of which, in all hatred and rebellion, goes to hell for eternity, never to see God in the Face.
The ontological fact of redemption, of salvation, is that we are ontologically fit to be and are tabernacles of the Most Holy Trinity (the indwelling of the Most Holy Trinity as the saints call it), tabernacles of the fiery Holy Spirit, as Saint Paul says. God radiates from our very being, all ontological.
Martin Luther rejected the beauty of our Redemption and said that we remain forever a pile of bull s*** in eternity in heaven; it’s just that, he said, Christ covers that pile of s*** like a blanket of snow, the glistening of which is what the eyes of God the Father are dazzled by, God the Father being deceitfully tricked by God the Son. Though God the Father is so gullible, we are nevertheless nothing more ontologically than s*** forever. This insult to our redemption by the Divine Son of the Immaculate Conception (also a terrible insult to her) is what is embraced wholly by Dignitas infinita. What an irony: each person has infinite dignity by being, ontologically, a pile of s*** in eternity.
I reject all that s***.
I accept the forgiveness of my sin wrought not by a mere external decree, but by the flooding into my soul of the life of the Most Holy Trinity. No more room for sin and guilt in this re-creation in the Body of Christ. This is the difference between heaven vs hell, grace vs s***, truth vs Dignitas infinita.
Hier stehe ich. Ich kann nicht anders. Gott helfe mir.
P.S. If I notice this kind of thing, it’s not because I’m especially smart, but because I’ve seen it all before as a seminarian. This was all the rage after Vatican II amongst the heretics. The writers of Dignitas infinita are altogether unoriginal, stuck in the late 1960s and early 1970s. With the publication of this kind of Lutheran s***, their time has now come to an end.
Maranatha! Come, Lord Jesus!
P.S. Again, these guys tried to blame all this on JPII. That’s a lie. That’s for another post.
ARISE! LET US BE GOING! 