“Every act of this saint was first an act of the love of God.”

“At the heart of love is the sorrow of love, or contrition. The Magdalene is the model of contrition. She knows her sin and refuses to call it anything but sin.”

“Nothing could be better than the God given opportunity to show Him heroic fidelity. To be present, as we watch Our Lord show us what He meant when he proclaimed, ‘Behold I make all things new.’”

The feast of Christ the King trumpets a robust and sanguine Catholicism that brooks no compromise. It presents Christ as triumphant over the world, sin, and death. It proclaims Christ, Who mandates: “Go ye therefore and teach all nations” (Matthew 28:19) and, “So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth” (Revelation 3:16).

We desperately crave heaven, and this world is simply not it. Doesn’t St. John of the Cross write in the Spiritual Canticle, “Outside of God, everything is small.”? To be sure, Catholics will make of this world what God wants it to be, each one of us carefully honing all the powers with which he has blessed us. But we can never expect from this world what we can only expect from the next.

The Holy Gospel tells us that Peter kept a distance when Christ was taken in Gethsemane to face Pilate. Like Peter, we too keep our distance from Christ. We dread not fitting in. We fear the sacrifices of fidelity. We don’t want to commit the faux pas of appearing too closely associated with a Church so clearly out of step with the times.

Most certainly, in matters of this sort a sharp clarity and careful delicacy is required. No man is without sin, or its inclinations. Priests are no different. Struggles against our sins is the arena of sanctity, priests not excepted.

Education is truly liberal when it looses man bondage to self and allows him to soar. It unfetters man so that he moves easily amongst his dreams. It swells man’s soul so that he can burst with aspiration and ordered commitment. Education is properly liberal precisely when it makes smugness an embarrassment and wonder a prize.

Speaking of charity always involves great risk. Especially these days. Modernity run amuck has so bruised the word charity, or love, that its original meaning is barely recognizable. It must first be noted that the very term charity (caritas, in Latin; xaris, in Greek) is the love that God has for man, and him for God. So demarcated, its privileged status raises it far above the parodies given it by our sensate culture. In the Catholic economy the term has nothing to do with feeling, sentiment, subjective judgment, common friendship or bonhomie.

Every Catholic sanctuary should be a fortress against modernity’s mendacities. Not so any longer. With great enthusiasm not a few priests have permitted marriage’s solemnity to be debased into a billboard for modernity’s beguilements. Absent is the ancient Catholic marriage ritual’s exhortatio, “you are about to enter into a union which is most sacred and most serious, a union which was established by God Himself.”

The seal of the Confessional is the Church’s pledge that she is the privileged encounter between man and God, where no other men will ever trespass. So sacred is this protection that the priest is committed to die, rather than divulge secrets told him in the confessional.

NCR’s operating assumption, as well as a majority of the reigning apparatchiks in the Church, is that the successful understanding and transmission of the Gospel has been impeded by two thousand years of the Church’s cadaverous ‘tradition’ and ‘scholastic theology’. It deems these things ‘accretions’. For them, devotion to eternal truths has mutated into a devotion to the zeitgeist.

Counterfeit Christianity always delights in showing the heart of Christ, but not His pierced heart. From that seemingly harmless symbolism tumbles the inverted creed of Counterfeit Christianity. It centers not on sacrificial love but on sentimental luv, a perennial temptation for all the fallen children of Adam and Eve.

The Third Person is not only the blessed sweetness of light but also the arm of heavenly power. His indwelling is transformative. Before His arrival, the Apostles are rent with fear, uncertainty, ambivalence, confusion, hesitancy, and abandonment. After He comes, all that melts away. Before Pentecost, the eleven were simpering fishermen; after Pentecost, they are Apostolic giants.

Human dignity is only achieved when man is allowed to reach for the highest excellence that conforms to God’s plan. Permitting every man that opportunity is the mark of the just society. Since excellences will vary upon native born abilities, there will be differences of accomplishment and reward. The natural placements in society result from that free pursuit of excellence. This is the definition of true diversity.

No, not everyone is going to heaven. That is not an insouciant judgment, but the Holy Spirit speaking through the teaching of the Church…Our Savior did not die on the Cross so that the ‘well-meaning' could gain heaven. He died so that every man would have the opportunity to hail the Blood He shed on the Cross. That Precious Blood is only touched through His Holy Catholic Church.

“Creating Wonderlands will always be a human temptation. As Eliot wrote in The Four Quartets, “Humankind/cannot bear/too much reality.” It is easier to create worlds within worlds out of the whole cloth of our ideas than to live in the sometime unsettling world of the real.”

“Catholicism is the Mexican Father Pro blessing his Marxist firing squad in Mexico with the stumps of his arms after the barbarians had finished cutting them off. It is Spanish soldiers charging Communist trenches with fixed bayonets and rosaries. Catholicism is about an army marching through history chanting the Te Deum. Catholicism is about swords.”

“Not only from the time of Christ but from that of Abel, the Church has gone forth on pilgrimage, amid both the persecutions of the world and the consolations of God, and so it will be till the end of time….“

“St. Peter Claver can never be called a humanitarian. Humanitarians are moved by their feelings; saints are moved by their love of Christ. Humanitarians see only victims, saints see souls for whom Christ shed his Precious Blood. “