Lord Jesus, Good Pelican,
clean me, the unclean, with Your Blood,
One drop of which can heal
the entire world of all its sins.
Adoro te devote hymn
Since the early years, the pelican has been one of the symbols used by the first Christians to refer to Jesus. One of the reasons, and perhaps the most relevant, was the belief that adult pelicans, if they had not managed to catch any fish, they would sacrifice themselves or at least tore their skin and gave their own meat and their own blood to feed their young.
In a similar way, Jesus allows himself to be caught and crucified for the Redemption of all of us. Saint Isidore of Seville, in his work "Etymologies” states the wide dissemination of this belief at that time.
The fact of feeding his children with his own flesh and his own blood, also linked the pelican with the Eucharist itself. The bread and wine, through transubstantiation, really and truly become the Body and Blood of Jesus, food for the soul of Christians.
Just as baby pelicans could not survive without the food their mother gives them, so Christians must worthily eat and drink (that is, in SANCTIFYING grace, after going to Confession) the Body and Blood of Christ present, together with his Soul and Divinity, in the Eucharist.
"The ruler should be discreet in keeping silence, profitable in speech; lest he either utter what ought to be suppressed or suppress what he ought to utter. For, as incautious speaking leads into error, so indiscreet silence leaves in error those who might have been instructed. For often improvident rulers, fearing to lose human favour, shrink timidly from speaking freely the things that are right; and, according to the voice of the Truth, serve unto the custody of the flock by no means with the zeal of shepherds, but in the way of hirelings; since they fly when the wolf comes if they hide themselves under silence."
Saint Gregory the Great
What do I desire, my Jesus? I want to love you.
With all that is in me, I want give myself to you,
With no other joy than pleasing you,
With no other fear than offending you.
I want to forget everything and recognize you,
I want to leave everything behind to search for you,
I want to lose everything in order to find you,
I want to not know anything in order to know you.
I want, dear Jesus, to go deep into your sweet wound,
And be consumed in your divine flames,
In the end, I desire to be transformed in you.
Die to myself to live your life.
Lose myself in you, Jesus, and not find myself again.
Pedro Calderón de la Barca
Even before my mother died, the usual silly practice of canonizing those we love was starting. Friends from our parish visited her, and attempted to comfort her by telling her what a good person she was, and of course my mother protested. It is an odd trap when you receive compliments you don’t deserve as a Catholic. If you tell them you are not so virtuous as they think, then they just have one more reason to praise you: you are so humble you don’t see your own virtues! My mother told me later that she really didn’t understand why they said such things to her. I told her to ignore their remarks, because she knew the truth about herself, and they did not. My mother knew she was not a saint. She could have honestly listed her sins if anyone had asked her to do so.
After she died I was on the receiving end of condolences from many at her parish, and far too often I heard some remark that assumed she was already in Heaven because of her personal goodness. One good woman even told me that I had a new intercessor in Heaven. It astounds me how far this false teaching has spread, because although this was coming from traditional Catholics, I even heard a traditional priest make the same sort of remark at a funeral sermon within the last few years. This misplaced praise and this misunderstanding of God’s mercy have to stop. I am most of all troubled by the fact that such remarks sweep away all motivation to pray for the deceased. When my grandmother died, the priest addressed all of her grieving relatives and friends with words that I now paraphrase: I am sure that God sees all the prayers that have been said and will be said for her, and because of them she is now in Heaven.
The problem with that sermon, and the sermon I heard a traditional priest preach, and the problem with all those who are so sure my mother is in Heaven, is that they are completely ignorant of basic Catholic teaching. The problematic result is that they assure themselves and others that someone is in Heaven, and therefore, logically, there is no reason to pray for the deceased or to have Masses said for them. It is this sort of silly thinking that causes us to have funeral Masses wearing white vestments. White, in Western culture, is the color of joy and celebration. It is not appropriate for funerals. This is why, in his encyclical Mediator Dei, Pope Pius XII warned against the then beginning trend to have funeral Masses in white vestments. His warnings were ignored. The “everyone goes to Heaven” thinking took over the Church. Black vestments, by contrast, show mourning at the loss of a friend or relative, and rightly show forth a Church which begs God to have mercy on His departed servant.
In the Catechism of the Catholic Church, we find this teaching on Purgatory: “All who die in God’s grace and friendship, but still imperfectly purified, are indeed assured of their eternal salvation; but after death they undergo purification, so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven.” What people are saying when they claim that my mother was so good that she went to Heaven immediately or very soon after she died is that my mother died in or very near the state of perfection. They have no idea what they are talking about. First, let’s recall the life of a very holy woman who lived a life of heroic virtue for years, St. John Bosco’s mother. She had a difficult life, losing her husband early and living in poverty as she raised her sons. Then, when her son John became a priest and began to care for boys by the dozens and then by the hundreds, she was at his side cooking, cleaning, mending, and that right to the end. Her life was one of work and sacrifice, and she did it all with a deep spirit of faith. When she died, St. John Bosco was praying for hours that she would go straight to Heaven, and was there to give her the sacraments of the Church.
Some time after she died, she appeared in a dream to him and spoke with him. He asked her if she had gone straight to Heaven. She replied very directly, “No.” After telling him that she sang a hymn in praise of God. You may need to read that over again to grasp the full import of it. She lived a heroic and difficult life, she poured herself out for years for poor needy boys, she was accompanied by the sacraments of the Church and the prayers of her saintly son, a priest, and she went to Purgatory. Now take all your pious ideas about good people going straight to Heaven and throw them right in the trash. The Church has never taught this.
What has the Church taught? That only those who are completely perfect go straight to Heaven. That is why the Catechism of the Catholic Church says that all who are “still imperfectly purified, are indeed assured of their eternal salvation, but after death they undergo purification.” (...)
My mother was sensible Catholic woman, and she knew full well that her deceased relatives and friends, no matter how much she loved them and how dear they were to her, were to be prayed for. I have never met anyone who had Masses offered for the dead like my mother. I remember that a common item in the parish bulletin for many years was “Mass for the poor souls in Purgatory, requested by the Portzer family.” Portzer family = my mother. One day I was looking through an old book and found a parish bulletin from the 1960’s, and I wondered if I would find it, and there it was, “Mass for the poor souls, requested by the Portzer family.” In her last weeks my mother left a message for all of us in the family, but also for everyone else, through my brother. He wrote her words down faithfully, and they are as follows: Please live your life well so we may meet again in Heaven. Strong Catholic words, those. But do not assume that she thought that she was going straight to Heaven. My mother was quite resistant to such foolishness, for she knew that, like all of us, she was a sinner. And that is why she said to me and to a few others who were in the room with her, just days before she died, “I don’t want a bunch of flowers. I want Masses.”
So if you are one of those people who tried to canonize my mother (or other victims of modern un-Christian thinking) even though you do not have the power to do so, it’s time to take off your papal tiara, consider the teaching of the Catechism of the Catholic Church and that of St. John of the Cross, and pray. Now you are doing what my mother would approve of wholeheartedly. If you keep thinking like a Catholic, you might find yourself doing what she did, requesting Masses for the poor souls in Purgatory.
By Reverend Joseph Portzer
To keep it in mind 24 hours a day, 365 days a year!
O Most Holy Virgin, who wast pleasing to God and didst become His Mother. Immaculate in your body, in your soul, in your faith and in your love, we beseech thee to look graciously upon the wretched who implore thy powerful protection.
The wicked serpent, against whom the primal curse was hurled, continues none the less to wage war and to lay snares for the unhappy children of Eve.
Ah, do thou, our blessed Mother, our Queen and Advocate, who from the first instant of thy conception didst crush the head of our enemy, receive the prayers that we unite single-heartedly to thine and conjure thee to offer at the throne of God, that we may never fall into the snares that are laid for us, in such wise that we may all come to the haven of salvation; and in the midst of so many dangers may holy Church and the fellowship of Christians everywhere sing once more the hymn of deliverance, victory and peace. Amen.
Prayer of Saint Pius X to the Immaculate Virgin
I had gone down one day with two other girls to the bank of the river Gave when suddenly I heard a kind of rustling sound. I turned my head toward the field by the side of the river but the trees seemed quite still and the noise was evidently not from them. Then I looked up and caught sight of the cave where I saw a lady wearing a lovely white dress with a bright belt. On top of each of her feet was a pale yellow rose, the same color as her rosary beads.
At this I rubbed my eyes, thinking I was seeing things, and I put my hands into the fold of my dress where my rosary was. I wanted to make the sign of the cross but for the life of me I couldn’t manage it and my hand just fell down. Then the lady made the sign of the cross herself and at the second attempt I managed to do the same, though my hands were trembling. Then I began to say the rosary while the lady let her beads slip through her fingers, without moving her lips.
When I stopped saying the Hail Mary, she immediately vanished.
I asked my two companions if they had noticed anything, but they said no. Of course they wanted to know what I was doing and I told them that I had seen a lady wearing a nice white dress, though I didn’t know who she was. I told them not to say anything about it, and they said I was silly to have anything to do with it. I said they were wrong and I came back next Sunday, feeling myself drawn to the place….
The third time I went the lady spoke to me and asked me to come every day for fifteen days. I said I would and then she said that she wanted me to tell the priests to build a chapel there. She also told me to drink from the stream. I went to the Gave, the only stream I could see. Then she made me realise she was not speaking of the Gave and she indicated a little trickle of water close by. When I got to it I could only find a few drops, mostly mud. I cupped my hands to catch some liquid without success and then I started to scrape the ground. I managed to find a few drops of water but only at the fourth attempt was there a sufficient amount for any kind of drink. The lady then vanished and I went back home.
I went back each day for two weeks and each time, except one Monday and one Friday, the lady appeared and told me to look for a stream and wash in it and to see that the priests build a chapel there. I must also pray, she said, for the conversion of sinners. I asked her many times what she meant by that, but she only smiled. Finally with outstretched arms and eyes looking up to heaven she told me she was the Immaculate Conception.
During the two weeks she told me three secrets but I was not to speak about them to anyone and so far I have not.
(From a letter from Saint Bernadette Soubirous to Father Gondrand, in 1861)
For a blasphemy, for a bad thought, for a bottle of wine, for two minutes of pleasure!... For two minutes of pleasure to lose God, one's soul, Heaven… forever! My children, if you saw a man prepare a great pile of wood, heaping up fagots one upon another, and when you asked him what he was doing, he were to answer you, "I am preparing the fire that is to burn me, " what would you think? And if you saw this same man set fire to the pile, and when it was lighted throw himself upon it, what would you say? This is what we do when we commit sin. It is not God who casts us into Hell; we cast ourselves into it by our sins. The lost souls will say, "I have lost God, my soul, and Heaven; it is through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault!" Pray, make your spiritual meditation, frequent the Sacraments daily, have good friends, flee from occasion of sin, read spiritual books... Lead a holy life in the eyes of God.
From the homilies of Saint John Mary Vianney
Parents should always set an example for their children, so that they in turn transmit it, in the future, to theirs.
Be sure to do it in restaurants, too. Whoever bears witness to Christ publicly, Christ will bear witness to him before his Father.
AN EXAMPLE OF PRAYER:
Lord God, Heavenly Father, bless us and these Thy gifts which we receive from Thy bountiful goodness, through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.
We ask you to feed those who do not have food.
Amen.
Before I was not and now I am!
And I could have not been!
But my heart makes me see
That, if I am here present,
And before I was not the being that I am,
Someone, before, in his mind,
Saw me possible existing;
And by giving me the existence by his power,
Just because He wanted it to be that way,
I am a being here present.
"Sovereign Catholic inflexibility is sovereign Catholic charity. Because in our times there are so few true inflexibles in the love of God, so also are there few uncompromisers in the order of charity. Liberal charity is condescending, affectionate, even tender in appearance, but at bottom it is an essential contempt for the true good of men, of the supreme interests of truth and [ultimately] of God."
Don Félix Sardá y Salvany, 'Liberalism is a Sin'
In Spain as a result of the so-called Aido Law of 2010, free abortion is allowed at 14 weeks of pregnancy. This law is contrary to the decisions of the Spanish Constitutional Court, which has said that the unborn child embodies a fundamental value: that of human life, constitutionally protected. But that is irrelevant to the electoral calculations of the abundant politicians and henchmen of an alienated, ignorant, hedonistic and consuming citizenry.
Very recently, a case occurred in Spain that eloquently illustrates such a fashion that challenges the truth. The rulers of the Spanish autonomous community of Castilla y Leon issued a protocol to offer mothers the possibility of hearing the heartbeats and seeing echosonogram images of their unborn children, before making the decision to abort in light of the so-called Aido Law that, we insist on, violates the Spanish constitutional principles that protect all human life, including that of the unborn.
When the content of the Castilla y Leon protocol became known, the furies of those who challenged the truth were unleashed, and after unprecedented pressure, the protocol was repealed. It must be clear that said protocol did not impose on mothers listening to said heartbeats and seeing such images, but simply offered them the possibility of doing so as the last opportunity for reflection, discernment, and prudential deliberation, typical of all rational and free human beings.
Hearing the heartbeat of an unborn child, of a human being who lives in the mother’s womb patiently waiting to see the light of day, awakens consciences numbed by perverse ideologies and propaganda, enemies of the truth of things, as was well said recently by a Spanish wise scholar
Seeing images, not of a mass, not of a clot, but of a human person in «transit towards birth», cures blindness and pettiness camouflaged with a legal and moral absurdity: the slogan of a supposed «right» to abort, that is, to murder defenseless human beings, the most vulnerable, as said by a wise man from Spain.
The challengers of the truth at all costs prevent that truth from emerging in the conscience of mothers by listening to the diastole and systole of the little hearts of those who inhabit their blessed wombs, so that the ideology of legalized crime prevails: totalitarianism without precedents. But those same Spanish enemies of life applaud, like seals, that images of blackened lungs, decomposed by smoking, which are reproduced on cigarette packs, in order to discourage smokers in view of the terrible damage to their lungs caused by tobacco.
But the fact that mothers are discouraged from having an abortion when accepting the cited offer, from turning off the heartbeat of a human being forever, is not acceptable, it is something intolerable for the challengers of truth. Pure hypocrisy of those individuals who use double standards at convenience. One defends lungs, the other promotes the annihilation of human hearts that beat defenseless against the evil of the necrophilous world.
It is unfortunate that politicians and followers of the left, center and right in Spain, in Europe as general rule, betray the Christian values that one day gave life and strength to that Europe, to the first parliaments -the first one in Huesca, Spain, before that in England-, later emulated by the nations of the world; that gave life to the first universities, Gothic cathedrals, divine comedies and theological sums, in glorious centuries, the XI, XII and XIII, which encompass the «highest and best civilization of all that history remembers», in words of the brilliant historian Hilaire Belloc, a friend of G. K. Chesterton with whom he fought intellectual struggles in favour of Catholic, universal values in modern England.
Brilliant centuries those of Dante, Thomas Aquinas, Albert the Great, Louis IX of France, Ferdinand III of Castile, Francis of Assisi, Anthony of Padua, Clare of Assisi. Today Europe is a vile divestiture at the service of the Yankee government, of the imperial hegemony of arms, money, abortion, gender ideology that is ignorant of the truth of the nature of things.
I hope that fresh winds will soon blow from other latitudes to restore Europe, the West, the aging, out-of-date, decadent civilization, with scientific and technological advances that amaze but which at the same time, with unusual frequency, dehumanize, terrify in terms of weapons and eugenic tests to calculatingly supply some of the millions of aborted human beings. It is time to challenge the enemies of the truth with the noble weapons of the spirit, aware that in the end the truth will win the battle.
La Gironda
The one only reason which men have for not obeying is when anything is demanded of them which is openly repugnant to the natural or the divine law, for it is equally unlawful to command to do anything in which the law of nature or the will of God is violated. If, therefore, it should happen to any one to be compelled to prefer one or the other, viz., to disregard either the commands of God or those of rulers, he must obey Jesus Christ, who commands us to "give to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's.
After the example of the Apostles: "We ought to obey God rather than men." And yet there is no reason why those who so behave themselves should be accused of refusing obedience; for, if the will of rulers is opposed to the will and the laws of God, they themselves exceed the bounds of their own power and pervert justice; nor can their authority then be valid, which, when there is no justice, is null.”
H.H. Leo XIII
Encyclical letter Diuturnum illud by Leo XIII, June 29, 1881
“The underlying principle of these new opinions is that, in order to more easily attract those who differ from her, the Church should shape her teachings more in accord with the spirit of the age and relax some of her ancient severity and make some concessions to new opinions. Many think that these concessions should be made not only in regard to ways of living, but even in regard to doctrines which belong to the ‘deposit of the faith’. They contend that it would be opportune, in order to gain those who differ from us, to omit certain points of her teaching which are of lesser importance, and to tone down the meaning which the Church has always attached to them. […] Such a policy would tend rather to separate Catholics from the Church than to bring in those who differ. There is nothing closer to our heart than to have those who are separated from the fold of Christ return to it, but in no other way than the way pointed out by Christ. […] History proves clearly that the Apostolic See, to which has been entrusted the mission not only of teaching but of governing the whole Church, has continued "in one and the same doctrine, one and the same sense, and one and the same judgment," -- Const. de fide, Chapter iv. -- In this matter the Church must be the judge, not private men who are often deceived by the appearance of right."
(Leo XIII. Letter Testem Benevolentiae to Card. James Gibbons, January 22, 1899).
.jpeg)
“Behold me, O my most loving God, loaded with the general and particular benefits which Thou hast bestowed, and wilt bestow upon me, in time and eternity. I know that Thy mercies to me have been and are infinite. But I am ready to pay Thee for all, even to the last farthing. Behold the tribute of my gratitude. The payment which I offer for all Thy goodness is this divine blood, this most precious body, this innocent victim, which I present to Thee by the hands of thy priest. I am certain that this oblation is sufficient to pay for all the gifts Thou hast conferred upon me; this gift of infinite value, is an equivalent for all the favors I have ever received, or now receive from Thee.
Ah! ye holy angels, and all ye blessed spirits, help me to thank my God; and in thanksgiving for His great benefits, offer to Him not only this Mass, but all the Masses that are now being celebrated throughout the whole world, that His loving goodness may be fully recompensed for all the graces which He has bestowed, and is to bestow upon me now and for eternity. Amen.”
Saint Leonard of Port Maurice, The Hidden Treasure of the Holy Mass
Posts
All Comments
