The living out of "Liberty"

False Liberty by Joseph Sheppard  originally found at this site

It is most revealing to discover what modern man’s search for “liberty” or human rights has accomplished. At last we have arrived at utopia on Earth. We have established a society in Europe and North America that affords everyone freedom to pretty much do anything they please. In our contemporary man-made “heaven” on Earth we have the freedom to kill our own children before birth (and in some case, partially born). We can do away with those troublesome folks on any kind of life support, be it oxygen or a feeding tube (they are so expensive!) We have the freedom to be engaged in any kind of “relationship” with anyone, regardless if it be morally degrading and unhealthy. We have liberated millions of our “dumb animal friends” from a primitive, outdoor life and given them the privileges of children. We have freedom of speech, which has come to mean the right of anyone to be as obnoxious and foul-mouthed as they desire. We have the freedom to be “married” as many times as we fancy, and to someone of the same gender. In short, due to the enlightened and compassionate wisdom of the modern judicial system, man can commit almost any sin imaginable without fear of reprimand, at least in this life. In the religious sphere, we have freed ourselves from all intolerance by proclaiming a new world religion. Credit for this breakthrough must be given to the leadership of the Church over the past forty-plus years. This new world religion recognizes the legitimacy of all religions and their equality and commonality. Hindus are encouraged to become better Hindus. Buddhists are encouraged to become better Buddhists. There is an exception. Traditional Catholics are encouraged to become … members of the new world religion. Of course, the result of this new world accord regarding belief will result in the end to all religious wars. Notwithstanding, the so-called Orthodox church is hardly very tolerant of Catholics. Nor is there much love of late for Christians poured out by our Muslim “brothers." Ah.... such liberty! Such fraternity! Such equality among the world’s religions! How can so many be blind to the true liberty we have lost and are losing. Man has simply allowed himself to become a slave of Satan. While demanding tolerance for all, only evil seems to be tolerated. The right of witches to “pray” in a public forum is upheld, while another Ten Commandments monument [in Caspar, Wyoming] must be removed. It is no coincidence that as judges and laws favor moral decadence, the courts are forbidding public displays of God’s Laws. A society whose laws are not based on God’s laws is a society of evil. On the eve of the 20th century, Frs. Spirago and Clarke described this false notion of liberty in The Catechism Explained: "5. God’s Commandments do not deprive men in any way of true freedom. They rather serve to make him independent of creatures. It is the sinner who falls under the yoke of an ignominious servitude. 'Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty' (2 Cor 3:17). Besides, liberty does not consist in the right to do whatever we will, but whatever is permitted. The word is much abused in the present day; many consider it to mean license, and they call the restraint which the laws impose on their evil work tyranny and despotism. Others think it signifies liberty for themselves and servitude for others. Hence we often find so-called liberals the most intolerant of mankind." (1) (1) The Catechism Explained (Rockford, IL: TAN, 1993), p. 284. Indeed, today liberty has clearly been defined as license. Man is free to sin, and even encouraged in some cases to do so, by our legal and judicial systems. And yes, any opposition to such license is labeled tyranny. For this reason, reminders of God’s law and true liberty must be obliterated. It is also true that liberty (or license) for many today has come to mean our servitude. Some members of the Hierarchy who continue to call themselves Catholic have already enslaved themselves to the Masonic dream of a universal false religion that has Satan as its spiritual head. Many will follow these false shepherds. While judges remove the Decalogue from public places, these apostates are doing the same in a more subtle way. They have ignored God’s First Commandment and have publicly insulted Our Lady. They seek to liberate themselves from what they view as an anachronistic, medieval Church. They believe that such liberation will bring peace and freedom to all men. Those who are lovers of true liberty, those friends of the Cross and slaves of Our Lady, are called to be saints in these times of apostasy and impurity. To quote St. Louis de Montfort: "'Be brave,' they keep saying to each other, 'be brave, for if God is for us and leading us, who dare be against us? The One Who is dwelling within us is stronger than the one who is in the world; no servant is above his master; one moment of light tribulation works an eternal weight of glory. There are fewer elect than man may think; only the brave and daring take heaven by storm; the crown is given only to those who strive lawfully according to the Gospel, not according to the fashion of the world. Let us pour all our strength into the fight, and run very fast to reach the goal and win the crown.'” (2) (2) St. Louis Marie Grignon de Montfort, Friends of the Cross (Bay Shore, NY: Montfort Publications, 1950), pp. 9-10.

Why Beauty Matters....

A must see!

On Interpretation of the Faith

Just read an awesome awesome excerpt from J.J. Espinosa.....so relevant to hear in our current moment in time with the problems of false theology among modern Christian 'theologians' .....enjoy!

"No Matter how necessary the role of theologians may be, it is not to the learned that God has entrusted the mission of interpreting the faith of the Church. This faith rests on the life of the people, whose responsibility before God is borne by the bishops; it is they who must teach the people what God wants the faithful to believe"
One of the tragedies of our times is that certain pseudo-theologians have chosen to ignore this clear and unequivocal teaching of the Church. They and their followers have formed themselves into "select" groups and skillfully manipulating the press-both Catholic and secular, have imposed a minority opinion on an unsuspecting public. Typical of their methods is the self-righteous fashion in which they purport to have discovered "grave errors" in the traditional practices of Christian devotion.  With the ostensible purpose of bringing this subject into the open, they have analyzed it almost to death.
The influence of these false theologians of our time has been sadly effective.  If many of the faithful today no longer know what to believe, the blame lies squarely on the shoulders of these "false prophets" (Mt 7:15). For, no matter how much they proclaim a true "evangelical spirit," it is quite obvious that they have forgotten that being a Christian means going to God along the path shown to us by Christ: a path which requires that all become as little children -including those who are doctors in sacred theology; a path that cannot be traveled by the conceited, nor by those who lack faith, no matter how learned they may be. Nor is it a path that can be trodden by those who feel ashamed of believing the same things that are believed by the illiterate, by old women, by children who can hardly recite from memory the Lord's Prayer or the Hail Mary.
If believing in Christ and loving Christ were to be something as confused and ambiguous as some theologians describe, many would think Christ had revealed himself for the exclusive benefit of sophisticated groups of specialists who, by methodic doubt, arrive at the explanations far above the heads of ordinary people. Yet the Gospel was written in simple language intelligible to the less endowed, to men from all backgrounds, to children, and to the old.
The teaching of the Church cannot be identified with the isolated opinions of an "elite" bent on distorting (purifying they will say) her doctrine and her customs. This is a point to be insisted upon, in order to avoid deceptions. Both piety and theology are essential elements of Christian life. If some are found lacking in doctrinal formation, they should be given proper instruction; but nobody has the right to take their devotional practices away from them. Should some others be still unaware of the importance of the exercise of piety, let them be encouraged to practice them without neglecting their theological instruction. That is why there cannot possibly be any misunderstanding or incompatibility between theology and popular devotions, as they both take their origin from the faith transmitted by the Church."

Cardinal Newman: To believe in a Church is to believe in the Pope

"I say the Pope is the heir of the Ecumenical Hierarchy of the fourth century, as being, what I may call, heir by default. No one else claims or exercises its rights or its duties. Is it possible to consider the Patriarch of Moscow or of Constantinople, heir to the historical pretensions of St. Ambrose or St. Martin? Does any Anglican Bishop for the last 300 years recall to our minds the image of St. Basil? Well, then, has all that ecclesiastical power, which makes such a show in the Christian Empire, simply vanished, or, if not, where is it to be found?
I wish Protestants would throw themselves into our minds upon this point; I am not holding an argument with them; I am only wishing them to understand where we stand and how we look at things. There is this great difference of belief between us and them: they do not believe that Christ set up a visible society, or rather kingdom, for the propagation and maintenance of His religion, for a necessary home and a refuge for His people; but we do.
We know the kingdom is still on earth: where is it? If all that can be found of it is what can be discerned at Constantinople or Canterbury, I say, it has disappeared; and either there was a radical corruption of Christianity from the first, or Christianity came to an end, in proportion as the type of the Nicene Church faded out of the world: for all that we know of Christianity, in ancient history, as a concrete fact, is the Church of Athanasius and his fellow Bishops: it is nothing else historically but that bundle of phenomena, that combination of claims, prerogatives, and corresponding acts, some of which I have recounted above. There is no help for it then; we cannot take as much as we please, and no more, of an institution which has a monadic existence. We must either give up the belief in the Church as a divine institution altogether, or we must recognize it at this day in that communion of which the Pope is the head. With him alone and round about him are found the claims, the prerogatives, and duties which we identify with the kingdom set up by Christ. We must take things as they are; to believe in a Church, is to believe in the Pope. And thus this belief in the Pope and his attributes, which seems so monstrous to Protestants, is bound up with our being Catholics at all; as our Catholicism is bound up with our Christianity. There is nothing then of wanton opposition to the powers that be, no dinning of novelties in their startled ears in what is often unjustly called Ultramontane doctrine; there is no pernicious servility to the Pope in our admission of his pretensions."

   Bl. John Henry Newman 

           Letter to the Duke of Norfolk 

           1875

Clarifying what is true and unmasking what is untrue about the HHS Mandate

...lets clarify this debate:

1) This is not about access to contraception, which is ubiquitous and inexpensive, even when it is not provided by the Church's hand and with the Church's funds 

2) This is not about the religious freedom of Catholics only, but also of those who recognize that their cherished beliefs may be next on the block.  

3) This is not about the Bishops somehow 'banning contraception,' the U.S. Supreme Court took that issue off the table two generations ago. 

 4) Indeed, this is not about the Church wanting to force anybody to do anything...

Instead

It is  about the federal government forcing the Church-consisting of its faithful and all but a few of its institutions-to act against Church teachings.  

5) This is not a matter of opposition to universal healthcare, which has been a concern of the Bishops' Conference since 1919, virtually at its founding. 

 6) This is not a fight we want or asked for, but one forced upon us by government on its own timing. 

 7) Finally, this is not a Republican or Democratic, a conservative or liberal issue; it is an American issue.

(excerpt from Timothy Cardinal Dolan)

DID YOU KNOW?six things everyone should know about the HHS Mandate

 A clarification regarding the Health and Human Services regulations on mandatory coverage of abortion-inducing drugs, contraceptives, and sterilization


1. The mandate does not exempt Catholic charities, schools, universities, religoius communities or hospitals.
2. The mandate forces these institutions and others, against their conscience, to pay for things they consider immoral.
3. The mandate forces coverage of sterilization and abortion inducing drugs and devices as well as contraception. 
4. Catholics of all political persuasions are unified in their opposition to the mandate (that is, all those who are faithful)
5. Many other religious and secular people and groups have spoken out strongly against the mandate.
6. The federal mandate is much stricter than existing state mandates.

Young women need justice not drugs

Contraceptives are classified as Class-1 carcinogens...
Distributing contraceptives is the dark scandal of this age....

In Defense of Baby Worship...

Excerpt from GK Chesterton's "The Defendant" 

source link: click

The two facts which attract almost every normal person to children are, first, that they are very serious, and, secondly, that they are in consequence very happy. They are jolly with the completeness which is possible only in the absence of humour. The most unfathomable schools and sages have never attained to the gravity which dwells in the eyes of a baby of three months old. It is the gravity of astonishment at the universe, and astonishment at the universe is not mysticism, but a transcendent common-sense. The fascination of children lies in this: that with each of them all things are remade, and the universe is put again upon its trial. As we walk the streets and see below us those delightful bulbous heads, three times too big for the body, which mark these human mushrooms, we ought always primarily to remember that within every one of these heads there is a new universe, as new as it was on the seventh day of creation. In each of those orbs there is a new system of stars, new grass, new cities, a new sea.
There is always in the healthy mind an obscure prompting that religion teaches us rather to dig than to climb; that if we could once understand the common clay of earth we should understand everything. Similarly, we have the sentiment that if we could destroy custom at a blow and see the stars as a child sees them, we should need no other apocalypse. This is the great truth which has always lain at the back of baby-worship, and which will support it to the end. Maturity, with its endless energies and aspirations, may easily be convinced that it will find new things to appreciate; but it will never be convinced, at bottom, that it has properly appreciated what it has got. We may scale the heavens and find new stars innumerable, but there is still the new star we have not found--that on which we were born.
But the influence of children goes further than its first trifling effort of remaking heaven and earth. It forces us actually to remodel our conduct in accordance with this revolutionary theory of the marvellousness of all things. We do (even when we are perfectly simple or ignorant)--we do actually treat talking in children as marvellous, walking in children as marvellous, common intelligence in children as marvellous. The cynical philosopher fancies he has a victory in this matter--that he can laugh when he shows that the words or antics of the child, so much admired by its worshippers, are common enough. The fact is that this is precisely where baby-worship is so profoundly right. Any words and any antics in a lump of clay are wonderful, the child's words and antics are wonderful, and it is only fair to say that the philosopher's words and antics are equally wonderful.
The truth is that it is our attitude towards children that is right, and our attitude towards grown-up people that is wrong. Our attitude towards our equals in age consists in a servile solemnity, overlying a considerable degree of indifference or disdain. Our attitude towards children consists in a condescending indulgence, overlying an unfathomable respect. We bow to grown people, take off our hats to them, refrain from contradicting them flatly, but we do not appreciate them properly. We make puppets of children, lecture them, pull their hair, and reverence, love, and fear them. When we reverence anything in the mature, it is their virtues or their wisdom, and this is an easy matter. But we reverence the faults and follies of children.
We should probably come considerably nearer to the true conception of things if we treated all grown-up persons, of all titles and types, with precisely that dark affection and dazed respect with which we treat the infantile limitations. A child has a difficulty in achieving the miracle of speech, consequently we find his blunders almost as marvellous as his accuracy. If we only adopted the same attitude towards Premiers and Chancellors of the Exchequer, if we genially encouraged their stammering and delightful attempts at human speech, we should be in a far more wise and tolerant temper. A child has a knack of making experiments in life, generally healthy in motive, but often intolerable in a domestic commonwealth. If we only treated all commercial buccaneers and bumptious tyrants on the same terms, if we gently chided their brutalities as rather quaint mistakes in the conduct of life, if we simply told them that they would 'understand when they were older,' we should probably be adopting the best and most crushing attitude towards the weaknesses of humanity. In our relations to children we prove that the paradox is entirely true, that it is possible to combine an amnesty that verges on contempt with a worship that verges upon terror. We forgive children with the same kind of blasphemous gentleness with which Omar Khayyam forgave the Omnipotent.
The essential rectitude of our view of children lies in the fact that we feel them and their ways to be supernatural while, for some mysterious reason, we do not feel ourselves or our own ways to be supernatural. The very smallness of children makes it possible to regard them as marvels; we seem to be dealing with a new race, only to be seen through a microscope. I doubt if anyone of any tenderness or imagination can see the hand of a child and not be a little frightened of it. It is awful to think of the essential human energy moving so tiny a thing; it is like imagining that human nature could live in the wing of a butterfly or the leaf of a tree. When we look upon lives so human and yet so small, we feel as if we ourselves were enlarged to an embarrassing bigness of stature. We feel the same kind of obligation to these creatures that a deity might feel if he had created something that he could not understand.
But the humorous look of children is perhaps the most endearing of all the bonds that hold the Cosmos together. Their top-heavy dignity is more touching than any humility; their solemnity gives us more hope for all things than a thousand carnivals of optimism; their large and lustrous eyes seem to hold all the stars in their astonishment; their fascinating absence of nose seems to give to us the most perfect hint of the humour that awaits us in the kingdom of heaven.