Father, hear our prayer that lives be spared and property damage be minimized.  Grant swift recovery from this disaster.  Mother Mary, pray for all affected by this. We ask all this through Christ our Lord

My best friend is in dire straits. He’s a college student studying meteorology in Dekalb, IL, and is less than a month away from losing his apartment. He lost his job a couple months back, he needs to come up with $3,000 by June 16th. He’s a;ready applied for loans, and has been turned down. Please pray, and if you or any of your readers have suggestions or solutions, please give them.

Father, hear our prayer for your provision for your servant. Sustain him with your providence through Christ our Lord that he may finish his studies and get a good job. Mother Mary and St. Joseph, pray for him!

Hey you good and awesome troops. If you know anybody in the vicinity of DeKalb who is looking to hire a college student guaranteed to work hard out of intense gratitude, could you refer them to my reader?

And, in the meantime, dear reader, what if you or your friend set up a fundraising page? There are lots of sites that do this? Or if he has Paypal, provide the link so people can donate to him. That seems like a start.

As they walked on the way, Jesus looked ahead and saw Jacob’s well.  And behold, there was a woman of Samaria carrying a jar to fill with water.  And Jesus, knowing in his spirit who she was, said to Matthew, “Come here.”

Matthew said, “Here I am, Lord.”

Jesus said, “Matthew, go ahead of me and hide behind that bush near the well.  And whatsoever you hear pass between me and that woman, take down in writing.”  And Matthew did as Jesus said.

Then Jesus commanded his disciples to stay where they were and approached the woman at the well.  Now the woman was an adulteress.  She had had five husbands and the one she was with now was not her husband.  Moreover, she was now with child by that man. And the woman’s name was Abigail, daughter of Johanan.

And Jesus said to her, “My name is Jacob, and I perceive that you find me attractive.  Come and lie with me and I will be your husband and provide you a dwelling place all the days of your life.  Only this I ask: that you destroy the child in your womb that I need not give my inheritance to another man’s son.”

The woman was troubled in her spirit. She had lived a sinful life and destroyed five of her children. Moreover, she had learned pharmakeia from the herbalists and had given potions to many other women and destroyed their children as well, so that the anger of the Lord was heavy on her and she wrestled greatly in her heart about these things. But she feared she would soon be of the age when men do not love women, and even that day her husband had threatened to put her away. So seeing that Jesus was young and handsome, and had promised her a dwelling place all the days of her life, she agreed to meet Jesus at a certain place, that she might lie with him.  And she promised that before the Sabbath, she would destroy her child as Jesus commanded her to do.  Then she departed from that place to await Jesus at the appointed hour.

But Jesus, taking Matthew with him, did not go to meet her.  Instead, he went into the woman’s village and gathered all the townspeople together, including the man with whom she had conceived her child, and read aloud to them all that had passed between them, that he might expose the evil of adultery and the great crime of child murder to which she had agreed. And he told them of all the other children she had helped to slay.

And some in the village were troubled and said, “Did you not speak falsely to her?”

But Jesus answered them saying, “I was not lying but acting, even as the Greeks do in their theatres.  Moreover, because my purpose was to expose to daylight the great evil this woman was doing, what I did not was not a lie but the truth.”

And another person asked, “But did you not tempt her to do great evil in the eyes of the Lord?”

And Jesus said, “As long as I did not lie with her, I did not tempt her or do anything wrong. The evil was all in her heart and not in my words, which are truth. In the same way, when I persuaded her to kill her child, this was not evil on my part since she had already killed five other children and was hardened in her heart or she would not have given her consent. Therefore, it was an act of righteousness to persuade her to kill her sixth.  My word only exposed the evil in her heart.  I am without sin.”

And saying that, he took up a stone and said to the crowd. “Do thou likewise and follow me.”  And then he led them to where the Samaritan Woman was waiting and together they stoned her to death, even as the law of Moses prescribed.

Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Blessed is the man who is not afraid to get his hands dirty in the fight against evil.  And cursed is the man afraid to oppose evil by any means necessary. That one is a Pharisee and will not see the kingdom of heaven. For just as the Hebrew midwives lied to save lives and Tamar lay with Judah for the greater good, so you must also speak falsely to sinners and draw them more deeply into sin, as their sin deserves, that the righteous may expose and destroy them.  As I have done, so must you also do.”

Moorings Press just launched the Catholic Controversies Video Library which is a wonderful FREE resource for Catholic catechetics and apologetics.  This new website provides the best available video presentations addressing many of the more controversial Church teachings and historical events. The videos strive to provide explanations of Church doctrine that are faithful to the Magisterium of the Catholic Church. The material covering historical events is meant to provide fact-based insights into what actually occurred and a proper historical perspective which, in most cases, sheds a new and more accurate light on the Church’s role.

Here is a partial list of some of the featured experts:

Stephen Barr, Father Robert Barron, J. Budziszewski , Jeff Cavins, David Dalin, Robert George, Scott Hahn, Peter Kreeft, Thomas Madden, Father Tad Pacholczyk, Mark Shea, Janet Smith, Father Robert J. Spitzer, and Thomas Woods

I recommend that you bookmark the website or save it to your favorites for easy reference.  You’ll want to go back to it time and time again.

Also, please consider forwarding this email to your family, friends and other contacts so they can have access to this information as well.  You may also consider posting a link to the Catholic Controversies Video Library to your Facebook page.

To access the Catholic Controversies Video Libraryclick here.

Check thou it out!

As I have noted previously, there is the actual teaching of the Church on the death penalty, and then there are two basic ways of trying to distort and ignore it.  Progressives try to say that the DP is just as immoral as abortion.  Meanwhile, reactionaries try lots of different strategies to blow off the Church’s teaching and plead for death penalty maximalism.  In the course of doing so, they make lots of incredibly bad arguments (see the link).  However, at the time I wrote the above, I had not run across this particular embarrassing act of intellectual prostitution:

A lot of jails and prisons in the US are barbaric.  Death would be  preferred by just about anyone entering them.  These liberals think they  have a clean conscience but the murder, gang rape and other acts of savagery  against inmates is something I could never sentence anyone to.  I would  have no problem sentencing a first degree murderer to death at all.   I  would never want to be responsible for knowing a prisoner would face grave acts  of torture, humiliation, rape  murdered or even sentenced to a life as a sex  slave. If this is Catholic Mercy, you can keep it.  I prefer Catholic  Justice.

Wow.  Fascinating to watch allegedly “prolife” Catholics now resorting to the language  of mercy killing in order to defy the Church’s teaching on the death penalty.  The notion of making prisons safer rather than putting prisoners  to death doesn’t even enter the mental universe of this commenter.  Now we are to believe  that killing prisoners is not vengeance or defiance of the Church’s teaching,  but just an expression of tender mercy for lives unworthy of life.  Why not just use the German term “lebens unwertes leben”?  And  if “prolife” people are going to start trotting out that language, why stop with prisoners  who have miserable lives?  There are a lot of miserable people our culture wants to kill in order to save itself the hassle of putting up with them save them from suffering.

Dear “pro-choice” supporter.  This, this, this is what you’ve chosen.  You own this.  It is on you.  How can you sleep at night?  Do you not fear God before whom you shall one day most certainly stand?  Repent and receive the mercy before it is too late.

“Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.” – Thomas Jefferson

So here’s the thing: “Shem” means “Name”.  So when the sons of Ham set about to build Babel, the subtext is that by doing this mighty work of arrogance, they will somehow manage to lay claim to the birthright Shem has received.  It’s a story we hear again and again in the struggles between Ishmael and Isaac, Jacob and Esau, and the struggles for the throne of David.  The confusion of tongues is the judgment against the arrogance of Babel and confusion remains the pattern of judgment the arrogant bring down on their heads throughout Scripture. Make a grab for worldly power in the face of the Almighty and you stand a good chance of having life dissolve in chaos.

Okay, so when we get to the reading from Acts, of course, what we find is that the curse of Babel is undone by the gift of the Spirit of Pentecost.  Luke notes the irony by mentioning that the Jews visiting Jerusalem were “confused” by the event and by the strange spectacle of hearing the gospel proclaimed in their own languages.  But instead of it resulting in chaos, it results in unity-in-diversity.  Luke does a little “sacred geography” by listing off the foreigners visiting Jerusalem from east to west, ending in Rome.  By so doing, he makes a subtle reference to the prophetic word of Malachi 1:11: “My name will be great among the nations, from where the sun rises to where it sets. In every place incense and pure offerings will be brought to me, because my name will be great among the nations,” says the LORD Almighty.”  And so, Luke’s book will take us, in the end, to Rome.

Now with this vision of unity in diversity, Paul speaks in 1 Corinthians 12 of the body of Christ, with each member have different gift, yet all coming from the one Spirit and working together for the common good.  This is the basic Catholic vision of the social order.  The strong exist to protect the weak, the chosen are chosen for the sake of the unchosen.  Each have gifts and each gift is for the sake of those who do not have that gift.

Now compare that vision of things with what is commonly called “liberalism”.  Of course, liberals know how mean, selfish and evil conservatives are and how little they care for the common good.  So it’s only natural that they should come up with this exculpatory graphic

Compare this with the gospel vision described above.  It illustrates everything that is most repulsive about the Left’s Pharisaic self-congratulation and remoteness from the gospel by this attempt to cover up the IRS’ bullying.

Some will argue that the charges preferred against the Tea Parties here are false.  That’s not relevant.  True or not, at the end of the day, the Tea Parties are entitled to free speech whether Lefties like it or not. It’s not up the to IRS to decide who needs to be punished for Incorrect Views. “They had it coming” is a massively stupid thing for any American of any persuasion to embrace, because the next time it will be the creators of this graphic and their fellow ideologues who are being punished for Ungoodthink by some administration that has designated them the enemy.

Dudes, when the IRS is asking for the freaking *content of people’s prayers* they are way the hell out of line. So stop making excuses for it simply because it’s being done to somebody you dislike. Snobbily trying to shift the focus from the perps to the victims by saying, in effect, “Ew!  *Those* kind of people are complaining, so it’s no problem” is just begging to make the IRS a permanent protection racket used by the Imperial Presidency to punish political enemies.  And you’ll be next as soon as your tribe is out of power.

What that graphic boils down to is a celebration of seizing the One Ring.  It’s as far from loving the common good as you can get.  I’ll take Pentecost over this kind of partisanship any day.

[E]every time a gun in the home was used in a self-defense or legally justifiable shooting, there were four unintentional shootings, seven criminal assaults or homicides, and 11 attempted or completed suicides.