French Priest Martyred

The first French priest to be martyred since the French Revolution:

Pope Francis speaks about "Catholic violence..."

However, what is interesting is the Muslim response to the martyrdom of Fr. Hamel.

Fontana di Trevi Dyed Red

Scott and Katie Windsor at Fontana di Trevi in 2010

The famous Fountain of Trevi, according to an article referred to by Steve Ray, will be dyed red to commemorate Christian martyrs throughout history and even today.  This event will take place on April 29, 2016.

This has happened before, back in 2007, when an "artist" used the fountain to make a statement, so the above is a sneak peak at what it will look like on the 29th.

Addendum 4/30/2016
I did not check on the 29th, but here on the 30th I am having difficulty finding any article reporting the changing of the color of the Fountain of Trevi in Rome.  I did find several more articles reporting it WOULD happen in the days prior to the 29th, but not finding anything since that time.  Now I did find a "live webcam" of Trevi, and looking at it today - if there was a color change yesterday, it's back to normal today.  Here's that link:
https://www.skylinewebcams.com/en/webcam/italia/lazio/roma/fontana-di-trevi.html

Addendum 5/4/2016
OK, they DID turn the Fontana di Trevi red on April 29th!  They did not use red dye, like the "artist" in 2007 did (shown above), rather they used red lighting.  I happened to check the live webcam again and they had a link to a time-lapse from 4/29 - and while all day long there was no change, after sunset, the red lights came on.  It also appeared they projected something on the building behind the fountain, but I could not make that out.  Here's a snip I captured from the time-lapse:

And here's another picture I found in Google:

And here is a video from the AFP (you have to click on the video to load it in YouTube due to copyright protection):

We Are Nun

The letter "nun" (the first letter in "Nazarene") is being painted on the homes of Christians in Iraq so that terrorists can easily identify them.  This symbol has been going all around the Internet as a sign of solidarity with the Christians of Iraq, most of whom are Catholics (Chaldean Catholics) and/or Orthodox.

Solidarity with Catholic Christians in Iraq:

Christian Unity

In this week’s leaflet I thought I’d reflect on John 17 which was last Sunday’s Gospel reading.  The reading was pointing out Jesus’ prayer of unity for all believers in Him.  Namely that we all be “one as [Jesus and the Father] are one.” (v.11)

 

Up until this moment of the chapter we see that Jesus is praying for unity of His disciples, ie the apostles, but the context also shows us that Jesus wasn’t praying for them alone, He also prayed “for those who will believe in me through their message” (v.20) Jesus prayed that all Christian believers be one as Jesus and the Father are one.  Did Jesus believe in infant baptism but the Father did not?  They believed in the truths of heavenly things. They believed the same doctrines.  The same truths.  Therefore Jesus prayed that we all believe in the same doctrines as He and the Father believed the same.

 

Was Jesus’ prayer effective?  Did it come true or are we to wait until His return that He may unite all Christian denominations who believe differently now but no longer when He comes back at the end of time?  The answer to this question can be found in the context of these verses where Jesus prays not only for these apostles to remain one, or simply at His return. Jesus plainly speaks of praying for the unity of not only the apostles but also “Those who will believe in [Him] through [the apostles] message.”

 

Scripture is also pretty plain that “[t]he prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective.” (James 5:16)  Is anyone more righteous than Jesus?  Jesus is the pinnacle of righteousness and therefore His prayer is very powerful and effective.  Putting these verse together we can see that Jesus prayed for unity of all Christians who believed through the Apostles message.  Now, to the extent that a Christian believes some of what Jesus and the Apostles taught he is a member of His Church though imperfectly.  The more one is in union with His teachings, ie the Truth, the more in union he is with His Body, the Church.

 

We know that Jesus’ prayer of unity is very effective therefore there must be a group of believers that believe in unison all that He and the Apostles taught, and this throughout Christian history.   Where do we find a group of believers whose teachings can be traced back through history from today to 2,000 years ago?  This group can only be found the Catholic Church and Her doctrinal teachings.  The Church not only claim this but have historical documents supporting it.

 

God Bless

Nathan

ISIS Monsters Beheading Children

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, aka ISIS, is taking "terror" to new heights.  They are beheading children simply because they are Christian.  I had thought about posting the picture of a Syrian father holding the lifeless body of his headless daughter for the shock value, but I have decided against it.  Or how about group crucifixions of Christians?  If you really want to see that morbidity, it's not hard to find in Google or Yahoo searches.  This is beyond terror, it is horror.

Meanwhile, many Americans sit at home and ponder the upcoming NFL season and/or speculate on what is in store for the NBA and NHL seasons which are not much further away.  Should the world stop and put an end to these monsters who claim to be fighting for Allah?  Or, should we just carry on as if nothing is happening, after all, it's not happening in our backyard?  How is this genocide any less horrific than Hitler's treatment of the Jews?  What is it going to take to get the world to take action against ISIS?  I know the USA is still recovering from many years at war in the region - but our pull-out was ill-timed and left a vacuum which was filled by radical factions of Islam.

Don't get me wrong here... most Muslims are not like ISIS.  I also do not support the errors of Islam, but ISIS is not representative of a majority of Islam.  While we can peacefully debate between Christianity and Islam - there is no "debating" with these radical elements.  All they know is violence and hatred of anything or anyone not like themselves.  The only thing which will end their horror will be their complete defeat in this game of war they have actively engaged themselves within.

I urge everyone reading this to pray and fast over these current events.  If an article like this is not enough to convince you, then do a Google or Yahoo images search for "beheaded children" and if that doesn't get your attention, I don't know what will... perhaps just letting the forces of ISIS continue until they really are doing these acts in your own backyard?






I am deliberately NOT "linking" the URL below so that you may be fairly warned of the graphic images you will see if you copy and paste it into your browser.
http://www.catholic.org/news/international/middle_east/story.php?id=56481

Oh, and lest any have forgotten... it HAS happened in our backyard...

Freedom of Conscience

Two recent court cases illustrate the incoherence and remarkable intolerance of “liberal” views regarding conscience.

One involves the bottomless pockets of the atheist Michael Newdow, who most recently joined several plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the U.S. Treasury Department demanding the words “In God We Trust” be scrubbed from U.S. currency. Newdow advocates what Richard John Neuhaus called the “naked public square,” a public life stripped of all references to God or to the duties we owe to Him. The “Constitution” is invoked, that document granting jurists ultimate authority over the local customs of citizens a thousand miles away. The courts have been as wary of religion approaching the minds of impressionable children as an epidemiologist is wary of meningitis. A child in a public school must never have to endure even the vicinity of any common, publicly acknowledged prayer, lest it wound him in his feelings, and lest it undermine a parent’s conscientious objection to giving homage to the Guarantor of conscience.

That supersensitive concern must puzzle a young Christian couple in New Mexico, the Hugenins. They run a small photography business, and they were sued, not for doing anything, but for begging to decline from doing something. They cannot in good conscience take pictures for a celebration of sodomitical relations. They are not saying, like Melville’s Bartleby, that they should prefer not to. They are saying that they must not. They have no choice in the matter—unless they wish to betray all that they hold most dearly. And, with stunning insouciance and callousness, the New Mexico Supreme Court has ruled that such betrayal is the price you must pay to live in a civil society.

Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s like saying that one must cease to be fully human in order to attain to the human flourishing which civil society is for. That is a contradiction in terms. That the court does not see it as such suggests that it has not considered the nature of religious faith, the claims that the worship of God makes, and the centrality of conscience to the human person.

Think of the violence the state wishes to wreak upon that young couple. Their involvement in the celebration would not be incidental. Unlike people attending a graduation ceremony, they would not be merely present while others did something ordinary, something that even the atheist would not call indecent. If you’re going to take successful photos of the groom and groom, you have to enter into the spirit of the occasion. You have to ask them to kiss one another. You have to photograph their embraces. You have to be a participant.

Alter the terms of the situation. Suppose the Hugenins were asked to shoot photographs at a party thrown to celebrate a friend’s divorce. Would they be required by law to participate in that? Suppose it was a celebration of a porn magazine’s jubilee. Must they assist in that, if the editor comes a-calling? Why should they be compelled to stifle their consciences and be less than human, just to run a business? Aren’t business and politics meant to serve the flourishing of human persons, and not the other way around? Why should running a business expose you to what Jefferson called tyranny upon the mind of man?

Conscience-forcers will argue that the Hugenins are like a racist restaurateur who turns away a black customer. I wonder whether Americans have lost the capacity for rational thought, so feeble are their powers of analogy. First, the restaurateur is in the position of Bartleby, not in the position of Daniel, who refused to do homage to the statue of the emperor. He would prefer not to serve the black customer; but his objections are not moral. It is not his conscience speaking, but his self-will. He does not say that it is wrong for a person to eat. If he believed that, he’d not have gone into the business in the first place. He’d be six feet underground. He simply does not want to serve the man his dinner. But that won’t do, not for someone whose business is to serve the bodily needs we all share in common. It is wrong not to feed the hungry, and people do not digest food through the skin! But the Hugenins most certainly believe that two men or two women celebrating a mimic-marriage are engaging in behavior that is gravely wrong. It’s the behavior and not the persons that they cannot in conscience serve. If one of them were to ask them to photograph her brother’s graduation, there would be no problem.

Second, the restaurateur is not being asked to cooperate in a deed. What the man at the lunch counter does when he leaves the diner is not his business. A bad man may show up at your stationery shop to buy paper. What he does with that paper is not your business. But it’s another matter entirely if the chef or the stationer is asked to take action to support something he believes to be evil. Suppose a Kleagle from the Ku Klux Klan shows up at your bakery and wishes to order a cake with a flagrantly racist decoration—are you required to make that cake? Why? Keep the law out of it for the moment. Consider only the demands of conscience. What would we call the chef who gives in, who knows that what the Kleagle is ordering is wrong, and whose conscience tells him that to comply is evil? We call him a coward, that’s what.

The real question is not whether the Hugenins have a duty to obey their consciences, but why any lover not merely of freedom but of humanity would want to compel them to disobey. Here it’s not just that a Hugh Hefner claims a supposed right to produce pornography. He is claiming the right to make you look at it, to be a part of it, knowing full well that you believe it is evil. He wants you to be either a coward or a hypocrite. What is going on? What kinds of people want to leave the souls of their fellow human beings a twisted mess, by forcing them to violate their consciences? Who would want to make Quakers shoot to kill, not because they need the Quakers to do that, but just because they revile their pacifism and want to rub it out?

One way to blunt your own consciousness of wrongdoing is to bully as many people as possible into it, to compromise them, to wear down their defenses, to entice them if possible, to badger or threaten them if necessary. The homosexuals in question cannot tolerate dissent. If even one person is allowed to decline to manifest a tacit approval of sodomy, that is a punishable offense. You must be suborned or silenced. A child may not be made to endure the proximity of prayer, but he may be required, in some of our schools, to say “I am gay,” or to imagine it, regardless of his conscience or his parents’ moral directives; and if he doesn’t, he will be castigated for his intolerance.

What we see here is the imposition of a religion—the religion of the sexual revolution, as bizarre and incoherent and dehumanizing as it proves to be. The state has become the church, and hearkens to no commandments but those of its own devising.

Article from Crisis Magazine located at:
http://www.crisismagazine.com/2013/conscience-freedoms-denied-by-liberal-courts

God Bless
Nathan