Episodes
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If you want to listen to the message of Fatima, and you believe that it provides a roadmap for salvation in our difficult times, there are two things you must do to honor Our Lady: recite the Rosary daily and make reparation on the first Saturdays of the month.Our Lady of Fatima asked for the daily recitation of the Rosary each of the six times that she appeared there. She stresses the daily Rosary so much because God has willed to communicate so much power and grace to the Rosary.Pope Leo XIII said, “The rosary is the most excellent form of prayer and the most efficacious means of attaining eternal life. It is the remedy for all our evils, the root of all our blessings.”
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In 1978, four businessmen pooled their resources to found the home improvement chain Home Depot. The point of the store was to provide a place where homeowners could go to buy tools and parts to renovate or repair their house. One of the slogans over the years was, “You can do it. We can help.”Home Depot represents something of the American spirit. We have a go-getter, do it yourself attitude. Why hire someone when you can just figure things out, buy the parts and do it on your own. Doesn’t that save a lot of trouble?What I want to point out in this sermon is that such a spirit is not proper in the realm of religion; it must not be translated to the religious sphere such that we become Home Depot Catholics, such that we pursue a do it yourself salvation.What do I mean by a Home Depot Catholicism or a Do It Yourself Catholicism?Home Depot Catholics come to church merely to acquire the material parts they need to keep their souls going and so attain salvation. Get Mass. Get confession. Get Communion. Throw some money in the collection basket. Go home. Save my soul.This is not the way that Our Lord established His religion, His Mystical Body. He established it in such a way that the members of the Catholic faith are not only united with Him, but they are also united with one another through Him. They all live the same life; they form one body together. And they are meant to live that reality by associating themselves with one another.
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I would like to focus on the parable of today’s Mass and explain what it means in relation to our salvation. The parable tells the story of a day of hiring.“Day” in this parable, as far as the story goes, refers only to a 12 hour period, or that part of the day that is in daylight. But the Fathers have understood this 12 hour period to be a symbol of two different longer periods of time, namely, the time before Christ, and the duration of our life.If we take the “day” of the parable as the time before Christ, following Origen, we can understand the various calls at the different hours as missions given to the great figures of the Old Testament by God to accomplish His work. They are to work in His vineyard, which represents the field of labor in which a person is living for Heaven and is trying to get as many people as possible to follow him on that path to Heaven.The second sense of the “day” is the span of the lifetime of each individual. Each person is called to work for the kingdom of Heaven, that is, for his own salvation.Some are fortunate enough to be called in the morning of their life, by being born into a Catholic family. Others convert as teenagers, others as young adults, others as mature men, others as old men. For each of these is reserved the denarius of salvation or eternal life.But there is a condition. Each one must remain working in the vineyard, once they are called. It is only when evening comes that the payment is given. Those who are not present at the evening, or the end of their life, will not receive payment from the householder. We must remain in the state of grace if we are to receive the reward of Heaven.
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Modern society hates families. It is directed to pleasure and wealth and families are an obstacle to that. Even the Church today seems to be joining in on the attack against families by approving the blessing of same-sex couples.To attack families, you have to attack the components that make up families: men and women.Since men are the heads of families, there is a special attack directed against them.There is an effort today to make men anything but what they need to be in order to fulfill their God-given mission to be good husbands and fathers.The typical man that today’s society creates is soft, pleasure-seeking, selfish, emasculated.This is why society so desperately needs good Catholic families today. This is why we pray, “Lord, grant us many holy Catholic families”. But to have good Catholic families, we must have good Catholic men, men of faith who have as their model not some football player, not some womanizing politician, not this Hollywood star or this MMA fighter, but Our Lord Jesus Christ.What society needs is men who dedicate their lives to the service of Our Lord Jesus Christ, to the service of His name, to the service of His Kingship, to the service of His Church.
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Right before Our Lord left the Apostles on the day of His Ascension, He said to them, “All power in heaven and on earth has been given to Me”. He also said to them, “I will be with you all days, even to the consummation of the world”.We believe that Our Lord is omnipotent. We believe that He rules this world. But how often are we also not tempted to think the opposite, to think that Our Lord is powerless?How often are we not tempted to say: “Lord, where is your power? Evil is triumphant today! How can you let things go so far? How can you let things get so bad? If you have all power.”How can you allow there to be such a crisis in the Church? How can you allow the Conciliar Popes to do so many scandalous things? How can you allow there to be a fake Catholic as President of the United States?Lord, if you have all power, when are you going to arise and use it?When Our Lord said that all power on Heaven and earth has been given to Him, He did not say how He would use that power. He certainly did not bind Himself to step in and consume with fires or floods anyone who commits evil.What we all have to understand is that there are two ways of exercising power, not one way. One way is certainly the way of exercising force on people and things. We compel them to do our will or we simply remove them from our way.God is able to exercise His power in another way than nuclear destruction. God can exercise His power by building up rather than destroying. He can compel people by love rather than fear. He can conquer by relinquishing power.
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The crisis of today’s world is a crisis of leadership. God has so created human beings and human society that it is absolutely necessary that there be leaders if the common good is to be fostered.There need to be good parents to direct and instruct children; there need to be good mayors and presidents to organize cities and countries and work for the welfare of its citizens; there need to be good bishops who labor unceasingly for the spiritual welfare of their diocese and all of its parishes.But authority is failing at every level today. Parents no longer want to tell their children what to do and take responsibility for their upbringing. Mayors no longer want to stop crime and enforce laws. Bishops no longer want to excommunicate egregious offenders against the faith, enforce the dogmas of the faith, and stand up against the world for the rights of Christ the King.St. Pius X was an incredible leader and, as a result, his eleven-year pontificate was one of the most fruitful in the 2000 year history of the Church.One of the bishops who knew him, Monsignor Baudrillart, identified in St. Pius X the three qualities that many modern leaders lack: “His look, his word, his whole being express three things: goodness, firmness, faith. Goodness was the man himself; firmness was the leader; faith was the Christian, the priest, the pontiff, the man of God.”
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The life of God is greater than the death of men. God came upon this earth and men put Him to death. But God cannot die. This is what the Cristeros told the Communists who were trying to destroy Catholicism in Mexico. You may kill us and we will die. But God never dies. Dios nunca muereThe life of God exists before our life, during our life, after our life. The life of God is the existence that is at the basis of all reality. The life of God is the basis for our life. It is not so much that God lives; He is life itself.Our Lord died in His humanity, but He lived on in His eternal divinity. Nature was not dying but was being renewed by the death of Our Lord.The life of God is greater than the death of men, and the death of God is the life of men. By the death of Our Lord, we will all live again.
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Discouragement kills hope. And “when hope dies, there is very little chance for faith and charity.” Hope is directly tied to the final end; it makes us believe that the end is attainable. When this belief is lost, we have no reason to go on.Why does discouragement have such a power over us? Dom Zeller compares it to the cockle which chokes out the good seed. The good plants are continually having to struggle against the weeds and that is what we do not like. We get tired of the struggle. Discouragement is tied to weariness and fatigue. Everything seems too difficult.In the end, discouragement is an “excuse to go on falling.” It tells us that we are justified in giving up the fight. This problem is rampant today in the realm of morals; we live in an age of ‘easy defeat’.In the end, the temptation to discouragement is necessary for our perfection. We need to prove our love. Our perseverance must be tried; our courage must be tried.“Courage is not courage until it has experienced fear: courage is not the absence of fear but the sublimation of fear. In the same way perseverance has to be tried by the temptation to give up, by the sense of failure, by an inability to feel the support of grace.”Dom Zeller points out the difference between the way the Catholic faces discouragement and the Stoic and the Buddhist do. The Stoic feels interior pain, but refuses to issue an external complaint with his voice. The Buddhist faces discouragement by trying not to feel anything at all.The Catholic, on the other hand, faces discouragement, shoulders it, and moves forward in the midst of it. “A man cannot deny discouragement any more than he can deny his existence. It is part of his existence. All he can do is to deny himself the luxury of discouragement; he can mortify his tendency to self-pity.”
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Our goal is to develop a supernatural outlook on failure. When we do this, “the flaws which inevitably attend a created order which has known original sin no longer have the power to daunt utterly: they are judged materially no longer. When supernatural values are substituted for earthly values, a complete reversal takes place and the things which menaced before are now so many evidences of God’s loving providence.”First principle: Failure is necessary for our self-knowledge. We are incomplete without failure. We have to die before we can live; we have to be weak in order to be strong; we have to be crucified before we can rise up.Second principle: Our failures teach us God’s love for us.Our failure is always a failure “of a kind that can be explained by love, and which will therefore not destroy but perfect … without failure, the soul’s experience of love is incomplete.” We do not properly understand the depth of God’s love for us until we have been lifted up by Him in the midst of our failure, instead of being ‘lifted up’ by impurity, drink, power, success, or any of the other artificial stimulants of the world.Third principle: Christ failed in order to show us how to fail.Christ came to redeem a race of mortals in a state of rebellion against God and suffering all the consequences of that rebellion. Our Lord had to choose a means of redemption that would not only satisfy the justice of God, but would also indicate for us the way to overcome the rebellion within us and around us. He had to be our model as well as our redeemer. This is why He chose to redeem us through failure.
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Recollection based on Dom Hubert van Zeller's Approach to the Crucified
First principle: “God tells man what is needed for happiness.” God has constructed us; He has constructed us perfectly. He made us for happiness, but He made us for a happiness that can only be achieved on His terms. We have no power to change our user’s manual.Second principle: “God does not condemn man to suffering; man condemns himself to suffering.” “In refusing God’s terms man condemns himself to unhappiness.” We humans have introduced a new element into God’s order, an element of opposition, an element of conflict, an element of rebellion.Third principle: Man’s disorder cannot defeat God’s goodness. God can both allow men to be evil and use their evil for good. It is not the will of God to get rid of suffering, because He cannot eliminate it without eliminating free will. What He does is enable those who wish to follow His order to be happy in suffering. This is the happiness to which we are called. -
I do not know if we are in the end times or when the end of the world is going to be. I have no idea. It could be tomorrow. It could be a 1000 years from now.What I do know and what we have to recognize is that there is a triple iniquity in our time that makes it harder for us to save our souls.Firstly, the crisis in the Church, where churchmen in the highest positions of the Church have betrayed the teaching of Christ, adulterated the liturgy, and given terrible scandal by their actions. Consider how much more difficult it has become to live a true Catholic life today than during the pontificate of Pope Pius XII. Back then, everyone was going to the TLM, there was not radical religious indifferentism all throughout the church, and there were not incessant scandals going on.Secondly, there is the crisis in society. The Christian ideals that used to inform society are now gone. Immorality is fostered; families are attacked; political institutions have become corrupted. We find it hard to imagine a world where birth control, abortion, divorce, homosexuality, adultery, drug use and so on were against the law. It was easier for people to save their souls then because the law was encouraging them to be moral.Thirdly, there is the crisis of a new way of life that has been made possible through technology. Technology is not evil in itself but it can be used for evil. The more powerful technology becomes, the harder it is for us to use it virtuously, for the good. The human race is now living in a very different way from the rest of mankind in the history of the world, through the smartphone, through the Internet, through our rapid transportation. Because it takes more effort on our part to use these things well, we are becoming more selfish, more superficial, more sensual. Charity is growing cold.
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We must make this effort today: to set aside revolutionary man and give way to redeemed man. We must somehow put away the atmosphere of our modern world, so that we can joyfully proclaim Our Lord Jesus Christ as our King. How do we do this?We do it first of all by hating the revolution because it gives us terrible leaders. The revolution has destroyed leaders by destroying authority and it has left us very unsatisfied. Deep down, we all desire to have clear and firm direction. The revolution can destroy kings, but it cannot destroy our nature. Our nature pines after good leaders.Then, we must realize that Our Lord is the perfect leader. He will not compromise our happiness for any reason whatsoever; He will always do what is most perfect for our good. He will always stand by the truth.And He is a King. A King rules for life; his office is not a job, it is a way of life. It is not for four years or six years; it is for life. How tired we become of the constant swings of power in our democratic nations. One party institutes policies that they like and we may like them as well. Then another party comes into power and everything is overturned.But this is not the way it is for Our Lord. How many times does Scripture not say that His reign is forever? How many times do we repeat in the Mass “Through Our Lord Jesus Christ Who lives and reigns with thee forever and ever?” He cannot be thrown out of office! The Allelluia of today’s Mass says that Our Lord’s kingdom will never be corrupted. It will never fall.We have a perfect leader who has all power and reigns forever. What a blessing! What a joy!
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Purgatory really exists and we must want to reflect on the doctrine of Purgatory, thinking about why it exists and what it is like to be there.Scripture tells us that “nothing defiled can enter Heaven” (Apoc. 21:27). Our Lord also tells us that “every idle word that men shall speak, they shall render an account for it in the day of judgment” (Matt. 12:36)These two quotations indicate to us why there is a Purgatory. First of all, nothing defiled can enter Heaven. If we pass from this life and we are in the state of grace, yet we still have habits of sin, we have a soul tainted with self-love, then we are not ready to go to Heaven. Our soul needs to be purified; it needs to be purged. And so we go to Purgatory.Secondly, we are going to be judged when we die. Our Lord may say to us on that day, “You have died a friend of God, with the love of God in your soul. At the same time, you have done evil things in your life that you still have to make up for. You still have to satisfy justice for the things that you have done in your life. Thus, you have to go to purgatory.”Purification and payment: these are the two reasons why Purgatory exists; these are the two things that take place in Purgatory.
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I don’t hate rock ‘n’ roll with my lower nature, the side of my emotions and passions. I am a human being just like everyone else. As human beings, we have an animal side and a spiritual side, a side on which we are like the animals and a side on which we are like God.Rock ‘n’ roll speaks to our animal side, it appeals to it, and our animal side is incapable of resisting that appeal. Anyone who is human will be attracted to rock ‘n’ roll by his lower nature.Thus, anyone hating rock ‘n’ roll, like myself, is not able to hate it with his lower nature; it can only be hated by our higher nature, with our mind and will, and with the grace of God working in us.The reason why my mind and will have an aversion for rock ‘n’ roll is simple: rock ‘n’ roll is toxic for the soul. I am not saying that listening to it is a sin in itself, though sometimes it certainly is. It is mainly that rock ‘n’ roll is permeated with a spirit of sin; it has a loving and committed relationship with the world, the flesh and the devil.
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God asked St. Joseph to take care of Him when God can take care of Himself. “He made him ruler of his household and prince over all his possessions.”This imposed a great burden on St. Joseph because it was a difficult role. Our Lord was hated and hunted down. Think of a life where you have to flee to a different country and keep a low profile, where you are wondering each day if you are going to be found out.Wasn’t all of this unnecessary? If God has no problem taking care of Himself, why did He ask St. Joseph to take on this role? Wouldn’t life have been easier and more comfortable for St. Joseph if he did not have to be the foster-father of the God man?
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The most common thing that humans do when they are in a state that is not pleasant or in a mood that they cannot control is to seek some escape. They say to themselves: I will binge on movies; I will binge on video games; I will binge on alcohol or drugs.These things act like a reset for the soul. We drown the state of mind that was bothering us by overwhelming our senses or overwhelming our system.But, just like putting lotion on a leprosy sore, the problem with the body that is causing the pain is still there.The same is true when we treat unwanted states of soul by seeking an escape. We make the pain of our soul go away. But the cause of the pain is still there.What is that cause? The cause is sin. Sin is the cause of all the troubles of our soul. By sin, I mean all of the disorders that exist in our soul, its diseases: our pride, our selfishness, our laziness, our lust, our materialism, our greed.
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Our Lord was always thinking about the Cross. Our Lord loved the Cross. Our Lord longed to die on the Cross.If we do not understand this, we cannot understand Him. If we do not understand Him, we cannot understand His teaching. If we do not understand His teaching, we cannot follow Him.I want to share with you some of the rules that St. Louis de Montfort gave in his “Letter to friends of the Cross”.
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