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Sunday, August 15, 2010

PERFECTION AND IMMORTALITY: Mary's Fidelity to God

by Sally Govea

Aug. 15, 2010 --When God created man he was perfect and when something is perfect it does not corrupt. Therefore, man was immortal in body and soul. When Eve came along she was perfect as well, that is, before sin came into the picture and everything changed. Perfection is a perfect blending of our will with God’s We abuse our free will when we pull away from God’s will to do our own will; thus our free will is corrupted and this deterioration seeps into our life and our body is no longer immortal.

When Christ took on a human body, though He is perfect, He allowed His Body to die so it could live in a most mysterious manner in the Holy Eucharist.

Next to Christ, Mary was the most perfect in body and soul. She lived on earth, not in an earthly paradise, but in a spiritual paradise. Even before the Annunciation her soul welcomed the life of God within it and her soul never lost that Life—God’s will was Mary’s will. Because of this, Pope Pius XII proclaimed the bodily Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into heaven by his infallible pronouncement in these words: “After frequently praying to God and invoking the light of the Spirit of truth, to the glory of Almighty God Who enriched the Virgin Mary with special favor, to the honor of her Son, the immortal King of ages and victor over death and sin, to the increase of the glory of His august Mother, to the joy and exultation of the whole Church, by the authority of our Lord Jesus Christ and of the holy Apostles Peter and Paul and by Our own authority, We declare and define as a revealed dogma that the immaculate Mary ever Virgin, Mother of God, when she had finished the course of her earthly life, was taken up body and soul into the glory of heaven.”

By Mary’s fidelity to God she remained perfect and therefore, God granted her, according to His creation of the perfect man, immortality of both body and soul.

Saturday, August 14, 2010

The Loss of Hope in an Obama Era

by Lawrence Fox
Hope is the Theological Virtue of Expectation; an expectation rooted in a Promise. For the Christian, Hope is rooted in the Promises of Christ, such as the promises found within the Sermon on the Mount. Hope as a virtue is like a muscle, and the exercise for this muscle is fidelity to one's calling in life. Hope brings about the freedom from self. The opposite of Hope is despair which is rooted in self and self desecration and self destruction.
Despair (spiritual not chemical) is the opposite of Hope, and is the fruit of presumption and lack of fidelity. Lucifer exists in absolute despair...something to be grasped. A person of Hope gives of themselves. A person in despair demands things for themselves, like entitlement on steroids or like pundits who demand and call people bigots for seeing the wisdom and natural and created reality of male-female marriage for which there is the potential of real giving.
Soren Kierkegaard (Danish Philosopher) wrote a gifted essay titled: "Sickness unto Death." In this essay he describes hope and despair in relation with promise and fidelity. Pagan society (before Christianity) lived in a form of despair as evidenced by the practice of suicide so often clothed under a cultural virtue of dignity, and abhorrence for suffering.
But pagan society was searching for a promise.
With the Gospel and the promise of Redemption and Resurrection, the culture changed and Hope entered the vocabulary as a Theological Virtue. 400 years after the confusion stemming from the "Reformation" things have reversed. Society is in a worse state; now advocating for a culture of bareness, a promise of wealth without children, and commitments which cannot produce children naturally, and of course the promise of a safer planet which will be populated by people living in despair and demanding entitlement provided by the STATE which will be a tyrant run by leaders in greater despair.
Despair inflames fear which so often leads to violence. Violence let it be known is the modern cultural method for preventing and spacing the birth of children.
Sounds like HELL.

Monday, August 9, 2010

From Ground Zero to the Supreme Court Bench

By Lawrence Fox
America got hit with three (3) punches this week from New York, San Francisco, and Washington DC. NYC leadership demonstrated no sense of remorse over 9/11 by supporting the building of a Mosque to near Ground Zero – which was made possible by multiplicity of persons who attended Mosques; A Fellow Practicing Judge in San Francisco rules that 7 million people who supported Proposition 8 in CA did so solely upon “Moral and Religious Sentiments” and therefore their actions were Unconstitutional even if the process was Constitutional; and the U.S. Senate gave a pass to an unqualified professor, who will now sit on the Supreme Court for Life and shows every sentiment to Rule with the Judge in SF Against Prop 8.

NY Mayor Bloomberg - who know for certain that a Tea Party Member upset with Obama Care was responsible for leaving a car loaded with explosives in a car in Times Square - is in desperate need of jobs and money and for sure the money will come pouring in from Saudi Arabia.

Oh yes Saudi Arabia that bastion of religious freedom unless of course if you are a jew, christian, bahia, sufi,and shiite muslim.

This Mosque has nothing to do with Mayor Bloomberg’s sense of religious freedom, the 1st Amendment and the sentiments of religious. No! the ever shameless Mayor Bloomberg attempted to legislate (maybe successfully)in NY the law that persons of moral pro-life faith who want to practice OBGYN in NY must first be educated in the finer practice of fetal removal from a woman’s womb. How the fetal (“Latin for little person”) got into the woman's womb no one knows. Yes, so much for religious and moral sentiments.

On the other side of the Country, the CA Court legislated the same sort of Bloomberg-ian sentiments (did I say legislate) when the court ruled that a doctor and pharmacist could not refuse to provide contraception to a minor nor refuse to perform in-vitro on non-married couples based upon their moral and religious sentiments. The one thing the CA Court did do right was identify “Catholic Charities” as a Secular Institution. To bad the CA Court has not ruled that the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB) is a Secular Institution. Can someone please tear up those worthless “Faithful Citizenship” pamphlets!

Image someone deciding something based upon moral and religious grounds? Not surprised by this decay of logic since U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun while deciding “Roe vs. Wade”, pontificated that since previous cultures - which were not impeded by moral and religious convictions - allowed abortion, there was room under the penumbra of the 14 Amendment to strike down State Laws which addressed moral issues based upon moral and religious sentiments. And besides, as he muses in his memoirs: “It was regrettable that my daughter while in College did not have the freedom to abort my grandchild [sic].”

Elana Kagan, who never sat on a Bench – except a park bench while eating Chinese Food on Christmas Eve will work hand and hand with U.S. Federal District Judge Vaughn R. Walker on the demise of Prop 8 and the 20+ states who have amended their State Constitutions and DOMA. Why? They are based upon "moral and religious sentiments."

I have been asked to FAST and make reparation for the things in my life which contributed to this demise of common sense and sensibilities.