“IF WE see Job sitting on a dunghill, Joseph loaded with chains in a dungeon, David reviled by Semei, –in a word, if we see a just man suffering, we immediately cry out in astonishment. How unhappy, how much to be pitied is that man! Blind mortals as we are, we call those unhappy who suffer; whilst Jesus Christ says, ‘Blessed are they that mourn.’ (Matt, v, 5.) Where is our faith? If God afflicts the just man, it is because He loves him; for, if He loved him less, He would treat him as he does the fortunate men of this world: he would permit him to enjoy the pleasures of this world, to be deluded with the world, to be perverted with the world; and the day would come when He would judge, condemn, and punish him with the world. Sufferings are the mark of the elect. Whoever shall not be stamped with this sacred character shall never enter into that kingdom which Christ gained for us by His sufferings. We are all children of Calvary. (more…)

“BUT the couching of our spiritual sight is not the only operation which the senses of our soul undergo on Calvary. All souls are hard of hearing with respect to the sounds of the invisible world. The inner ear is opened upon Calvary. The sounds of Jerusalem travel up to us through the darkness, and perhaps the sounds of labour in the gardens near. But they rise up as admonitions rather than as distractions. They come to us softly and indistinctly, and do not jar with the silence of our endurance, or the low whisperings of prayer. Least of all do they muffle the clearness of our Saviour’s words when He vouchsafes to speak. Down below, how the world deafened us by its tumultuous noises, and jaded our spirits with its multiplicity of sounds! We knew that Jesus was at our sides, and yet we could not converse with Him. It was like trying to listen, when the loud wheels are rattling harshly along the streets, when listening is no better than an unsuccessful strain, or a perplexed misunderstanding. The mere noise the world makes in its going so amazes us that it hinders our feet upon the road to heaven. It is only on Calvary that earth is subdued enough to make music with heaven; for it is there only that God is heard distinctly, while the low-lying world murmurs like a wind, a sound which is discordant nowhere, because it is rather the accompaniment of a sound than a sound itself.”

Frederick William Faber, D.D., The Foot of the Cross (or the Sorrows of Mary) (TAN Books, 1956 edition); p. 281

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“[T]HE history of His Passion will reveal to us many sad secrets of the human heart and its perverse inclinations; for what happened in Jerusalem happens also in every sinner’s heart. His heart, according to the saying of St. Paul, is a Calvary, where Jesus is crucified. There is the same ingratitude, the same blindness, the same wild madness, with this difference: that the sinner who is enlightened by faith, knows Him whom he crucifies; whereas the Jews, as the same apostle tells us, knew not the Lord of glory.”

— Dom Prosper Guéranger, “Passion Sunday,” The Liturgical Year

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BE not emulous of evildoers; nor envy them that work iniquity.

For they shall shortly wither away as grass, and as the green herbs shall quickly fall.

Trust in the Lord, and do good, and dwell in the land, and thou shalt be fed with its riches.

Delight in the Lord, and he will give thee the requests of thy heart.

Psalm 36: 1-4

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THE housewife has gone from simply being demeaned and ridiculed to being viewed as a public enemy.

From America First Legal on Twitter:

Newly released CIA documents reveal the Biden Administration identified “motherhood” and “homemaking” as indicators of “white racially and ethnically motivated violent extremism” (REMVE).

The intelligence assessment reveals the top-to-bottom bias at Biden’s CIA. An agency with critical intelligence responsibilities was spending its resources targeting women promoting motherhood.

The now-retracted CIA intelligence assessment defines “white REMVE-sympathetic” actors as those who “may not openly advocate violence” but instead amplify “narratives” about “perceived threats” from multiculturalism and globalization.

What are these “narratives” that Biden’s CIA viewed as threats?  Promoting TRADITIONAL MOTHERHOOD and HOMEMAKING as “women’s most important responsibility.”

Motherhood and homemaking may be added to the list of other everyday behaviors that made everyday Americans “radicalization suspects” under the Biden Administration.

I have a hard time believing this project doesn’t continue within the intelligence agency today and that it hasn’t been going on for a while. After all, it is perfectly normal for a woman who defends traditional sex roles to care also about the extended family that is her nation and race. And the American government is committed to undermining both and creating a Communist hellhole under world government. So no wonder it views the housewife, with her common sense and natural attachment to the near and local, as radical extremist. Similarly, in the Soviet Union, the farmer, with his ineradicable common sense and his attachment to the land, was portrayed as a public enemy and millions of farmers after this campaign of defamation were “liquidated.”

Common sense is a threat to the Communist spirit, with its utopian fantasies, detachment from reality, inversion of nature and deep hatred for procreative life. How long will it be, do you think, before a “housewife” stars in a staged mass shooting? I’m sure the script is already written.

I can just see the average dupe eating this stuff up:

“Did you hear?”

“What!?”

“There’s a housewife down the street! I saw her myself and she was wearing an apron!”

“Oh no! What are we going to do?”

“Lock the doors! Keep the kids inside until the FBI gets here!”

“I hope they bring a SWAT team.”

Anyway, the view of domesticity as abnormal has been amplified in the media for years with white housewives portrayed as either decadent materialists or dangerously traditional. Well, it just goes to show: the institution of the housewife is so important and so critical for the survival of civilization, being based as it is on reality and common sense, that it needs to be abused and misrepresented by the forces, the barbaric forces, that seek to make every single woman a neutered and compliant slave of Big Business and Big Government.

Carry on, Mrs Smith!! Dust not your home only, but your country too!

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IN the supernatural, as in the moral and physical order, the infinite wisdom and power of God suit the means to the end. God gives grace and sanctity to His Saints to fulfill the office and rank for which His Divine Providence has destined them. The nearer a soul is destined to approach God, and the more intimately and largely she enters into the scheme of Redemption, the greater is her dignity, and in proportion is her sanctity. In the above principles we have the origin and the source of the sanctity, privileges, and choicest graces, showered, in all the plenitude of their abundance, upon the soul of St. Joseph by the Almighty. 

St. Joseph: His life, His virtues, His privileges, His power, Thomas H. Kinane

Prayers to St. Joseph can be found here, and meditations on his feast day here.

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ST. JOSEPH, the greatest of saints whose feast day is today, is depicted in many artworks as a gray-haired, bearded man of advanced age. Though these works often convey the wisdom, dignity, affectionate nature and profound sanctity of the man, they are most probably not realistic as to his age. There is good reason to believe Joseph was in the prime of life — about forty years old — at the time of his betrothal to Mary and had a physical appearance of noticeable manly beauty.

His relative youthfulness, compared to the common view, meant that he was fully able to fulfill his role as father, guardian and protector and be an appropriate spouse and companion in the eyes of the world to Mary. Marriages between old men and young women have always in all times suggested coercion, material motives or ambition, not mutual attraction. Though Mary and Joseph took vows of virginity, they were still husband and wife, filled with tenderness and deepest affection for each other.

More on this from The Life and Glories of St. Joseph by Edwin Healey Thompson (1888):

WE must pause here awhile to give a few words of consideration to the disputed question as to the age of Joseph at the time of his espousals with Mary. Three opinions have been held, one of which would make our saint far advanced in years. This opinion was accepted by some of the Fathers and ancient ecclesiastical writers, chiefly Greek; and in support of it has been urged the custom prevailing among painters of representing St. Joseph as an aged man, sometimes as almost decrepit. This view has, however, been strongly opposed, not only because it had no other ground to rest upon than the statements of Pseudo-Gospels which were current in the third and fourth centuries, and were coupled with the assertion that Joseph was a widower with many children, an assertion forcibly condemned by St. Jerome and a host of other Fathers and theological writers down to the present time, but also as in itself presenting insuperable difficulties. As we have already observed, these apocryphal writings, while probably recording some true traditionary facts, are entirely devoid of authority, and contain, moreover, much that we naturally reject as both improbable and unbefitting. (more…)

“I WANTED to know the truth–to see Jesus of Nazareth as He walked and talked in His native haunts. And then to give back to the millions of my fellow-Christians this real conception of the Founder of the Faith. If I spent ten years in the Holy Land, treading in the very footsteps of the Saviour, it was only that I myself might better realize all that He was, all that He did, before I give it to the world. Day by day, hour by hour, the facts grew dearer to me. I was moved by the consciousness that I was looking at the same rocks, the same trees that had been reflected in the eyes of the Saviour, and as I walked along those paths in which He must have trod, I could not always restrain the tears.

“I had studied the Gospels until I knew them by heart, and had located as nearly as I might every act of that Divine One who came on earth to save mankind. It was necessary for me to restore the Temple of Jerusalem in order that I might place the Child Jesus there. To do this properly, (more…)

“OUR actions have a tongue of their own; they have an eloquence of their own, even when the tongue is silent. For deeds prove the lover more than words.”

— St. Cyril of Jerusalem

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WHY do so many people who do not themselves engage in “homosexuality” approve of it?

We know one thing: It’s not about love. It’s not about loving the people who are caught up in this sin and who are scandalously applauded by the world as heroes and sacred victims. We know it’s not about love because this “lifestyle” is demonstrably the cause of such profound unhappiness in the long run and is demonstrably damaging to any society approving it. The record on that score is overwhelming, as anyone who is not detached from reality and who cares to look beyond sentimental fictions will see.

It really is more about confirming their own choices in life, than it is about any kind of true charity for others.

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Peccantem me quotidie by Carlo Gesualdo

I who sin every day
and am not penitent
the fear of death troubles me:

Responsum
For in hell there is no redemption.
Have mercy upon me, O God, and save me.

Versus
God, in your name save me,
and in your virtue set me free.

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“TO righteousness it belongs to be ready to distribute according to desert, and to preserve ancestral customs and traditions and the established laws, and to tell the truth when interest is at stake, and to keep agreements. First among the claims of righteousness are our duties to the gods, then our duties to the spirits, then those to country and parents, then those to the departed; and among these claims is piety, which is either a part of righteousness or a concomitant of it. Righteousness is also accompanied by holiness and truth and loyalty and hatred of wickedness”.

— Aristotle, Virtues and Vices, Loeb Edition

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St. Patrick’s Day

All praise to Saint Patrick, who brought to our mountains
The gift of God’s faith, the sweet light of His love!
All praise to the shepherd who showed us the fountains
That rise in the heart of the Saviour above!
For hundreds of years, in smiles and in tears,
Our Saint has been with us, our shield and our stay;
All else may have gone, Saint Patrick alone,
He hath been to us light when earth’s lights were all set,
For the glories of Faith they can never decay;
And the best of our glories is bright with us yet,
In the faith and the feast of Saint Patrick’s Day.

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St. Patrick’s Confessio

“MY NAME IS PATRICK. I am a sinner, a simple country person, and the least of all believers. I am looked down upon by many. My father was Calpornius. He was a deacon; his father was Potitus, a [pagan] priest, who lived at Bannavem Taburniae. His home was near there, and that is where I was taken prisoner. I was about sixteen at the time. At that time, I did not know the true God. I was taken into captivity in Ireland, along with thousands of others. We deserved this, because we had gone away from God, and did not keep his commandments. We would not listen to our priests, who advised us about how we could be saved. The Lord brought his strong anger upon us, and scattered us among many nations even to the ends of the earth. It was among foreigners that it was seen how little I was.

“It was there that the Lord opened up my awareness of my lack of faith. Even though it came about late, I recognised my failings. So I turned with all my heart to the Lord my God, and he looked down on my lowliness and had mercy on my youthful ignorance. He guarded me before I knew him, and before I came to wisdom and could distinguish between good and evil. He protected me and consoled me as a father does for his son.

“That is why I cannot be silent – nor would it be good to do so – about such great blessings and such a gift that the Lord so kindly bestowed in the land of my captivity. This is how we can repay such blessings, when our lives change and we come to know God, to praise and bear witness to his great wonders before every nation under heaven. (more…)

ST. Patrick’s Day means not much more than green beer and drunken reveling for many today, but in late-19th century America it was — believe it or not — a day to honor moderation and total abstinence from alcohol.

In the Philadelphia St. Patrick’s Day parade of 1875, some 10,000 people marched and “the majority parading walked with the thirty-nine marching units of the [Catholic] Total Abstinence Brotherhood, an organization with strong religious backing and a missionary zeal for temperance crusading.,” according to Dennis Clark.

 It was after the Civil War that parades of all kinds became a sort of national craze. Veterans of the conflict turned out and, in Philadelphia, General St. Clair Mulholland and other heroes of the war stepped smartly along on St. Patrick’s Day each year. Temperance organizations became a big component of the March 17th parades from 1870 through the turn of the century.

Father Matthew of County Tyrone (above) was the popular founder in Ireland of organized temperance earlier in the century. It spread to this country with the creation of state groups and then the national Brotherhood in 1871. On July 4, 1876, the Catholic Total Abstinence Centennial Fountain was dedicated in Fairmount Park, Philadelphia, featuring a marble statue of of Fr. Matthew.

From the May 1887 edition of Catholic World: (more…)

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FROM Apostasy in America by Solange Hertz:

Like the Civil War a century later, the Revolutionary War never enjoyed popular support, but was engineered by the proverbial active, well organized minority intent on its peculiar agenda, who “while men were asleep” or otherwise occupied in earning a living, “oversowed cockle among the wheat” (Matt. 13:25). On January 30, 1648, when Charles I of England was “put to death by the severing of his head from his body” as ordained by the Death Warrant issued by Oliver Cromwell and his Republicans, the assembled multitude:

…far from accepting the executioner’s invitation to ‘rejoice at the death of a traitor,’ uttered a dismal universal groan such as one hearer had never heard before nor desired to hear again. She was only twenty when she heard it, and she never forgot the sound.”[15]

A similar reaction on the part of the people would occur at the execution of Louis XVI of France in 1789, so firmly is monarchy rooted in natural law and so ingrained in Catholic hearts is love for their anointed kings.

Had Maryland’s political elite kept the Faith in its integrity, one cannot help wondering whether they might not have been able to check, or even withstand the onslaught of the Revolution as did the French Catholics of Canada, who so indignantly refused the seditious overtures of Benjamin Franklin and the future Bishop John Carroll. Had Maryland followed their example, an effective counter-revolutionary base for royalist sentiment – which actually predominated throughout the Colonies before large numbers of loyalists took flight for Canadian Ontario – might have taken shape in what became the United States. (more…)