Sunday Meditation: Everyone Has a Heart to Love With

My spiritual reading yesterday kept leading me to the "heart" of the matter starting with the daily devotional from the SSPX which examined "purity of intention." A good question for each of us is this. Does my action come from a heart filled with love for God or other lesser motives? People can perform the same external actions with very different results in the eyes of God:

We can go to Mass out of routine or out of obligation, or else simply to see a particular person. We can also go to Mass out of love of God. Externally, the actions are the same, but in the eyes of God they are each very different. The same external act will be meritorious for some, not for others, depending on the purity of their intention. It is the same for our duty of state. We can set to work out of obligation, out of pleasure or out of love of God. The same action is meritorious for some and not for others. [Source]

I'm Curious: How Do You Deal with Trolls?

Anyone on the internet blogging or using social media deals with trolls. Facebook? It's filled with creatures from Grimm's Fairy Tales! 

Usually trolls are anonymous and cast their aspersion from underneath a rock or hiding behind a silly fake name. Often their comments are personal attacks along with name-calling and sometimes profanity. I have a few trolls and my way of dealing with them nowadays is to delete their comments as soon as I recognize the source. That usually takes reading about ten words then into the circular file they go.

So How Will You Vote in the Midterms?

The TDS crowd is in full rage mode going into the midterms. Even though Trump isn't on the ballot, he's being used to claim that the only moral choice is to vote Democrat. One young person with whom I engaged claimed she cares about character and Democrats obviously show much more character than Republicans who only care about giving tax breaks to the rich. She would never have an abortion herself, but doesn't want to limit "health care" for other women. Oh, and ICE is "killing many Americans" (32 in 2025). How many babies were killed in 2025? The Guttmacher Institute, research arm of Planned Parenthood estimates 1,124,000 clinic abortions and tens of thousands of others by tel-med where women abort alone without medical supervision.  But hey! That's reproductive health care!

Stay Faithful: Good Advice When You Feel Overwhelmed

I recently told my spiritual director how overwhelmed I feel. Our house and property are a black hole with constant needs. Right now we need to close up the pool, get the bees ready for winter, take down some dead trees and do general clean up. I enjoyed gardening at our home in Alexandria, but with three acres it's a never-ending chore these days. The circle garden out front is a jungle. And then there's the house. The spiders have taken over the basement and the fruit flies are propagating in the kitchen. The dust bunnies own the upstairs. The to-do list keeps growing and I'm drowning in clutter. 

The Autumn Ember Days are This Week; Will You Keep Them?

This week begins one of the quarterly periods observed by the Catholic Church called "Ember Days." I remember them growing up. Our Catholic calendar showed a half fish meaning that on those days (Wednesday and Saturday) meat could only be eaten at the main meal. Friday, of course, was a day of complete abstinence. All three days were fast days (one main meal and two smaller meals that did not add up to a full meal).

The purpose of the ember days was to sanctify the coming season. Catholic Answers quotes from the Catholic Encyclopedia describing them this way:

The Insanity Continues! This Video from the Prayerful Posse Says it All!

There was a time when I thought the insanity was coming to an end. The rainbow vestments seemed to be in the closet. The holy water fonts weren't filled with sand during Lent, etc. Turns out the reprieve was short lived and the aftermath is worse than ever! Watch this video from the Prayerful Posse. Fr. Murray has criticized the SSPX, but what he says and what is described in this episode illustrates the crisis and the state of necessity big time! And isn't it interesting that the scandals described here are ignored by Rome as they keep the magnifying glass and all the discipline for those who keep the faith of our fathers and refuse to engage in the blasphemy and scandal of the modern Church. Have mercy on us, Lord Jesus. 

A Journey of Hope? Or the Path of Indifference?

Yesterday I wrote introducing the new Vatican document, A Journey of Hope (JOH), commemorating the 60th anniversary of Nostra Aetate (ND), the Vatican II document on ecumenism. The new document was written by three Vatican dicasteries and approved by Pope Leo. As things have progressed since Vatican II, it's clear that ND was just the first down in the game of indifferentism. What's the score after 60 years? JOH gives us a clear look at the scoreboard.

The Road to Indifferentism: Nostra Aetate and Its Child, A Journey of Hope Part 1

What would pre-Vatican II popes say about the Vatican's latest document celebrating the 60th anniversary of Nostra Aetate (NA), the council's ecumenism document. I re-read it yesterday and, of course, it includes Catholic truth:

A Chicken in Every Pot, A Teacher in Every Family

My mom was a smart woman. If home schooling had been in vogue when she reared ten children, perhaps I would have been blessed growing up in a one-room family school house. I still often hear her voice in my head and thank God for everything she taught me: my prayers, how to follow the Mass, how to sew, how to bake. One phrase often comes back to me. "An educated man is an educated man, but an educated woman is an educated family."

Mom was certainly well educated. Adopted by a Cleveland lawyer and his wife, a fact she only learned as an adult, she attended law school at Western Reserve University (later Case Western Reserve), the only woman in her class. She dropped out in 1940 after two years to fly to California and marry my dad, a recent graduate of the Naval Academy. She followed him to Pearl Harbor where they lived through the Japanese attack that got the U.S. into World War II. She was pregnant with my oldest brother when she was evacuated from the island.

Lindsay Clancy Holdout Juror Finally Speaks Out

The attack on the holdout juror has been going on for over a week since the hung jury in the murder trial of Lindsay Clancy. The angry women jurors have been attacking him relentlessly and presenting a picture of an unstable, brooding man who couldn't defend his refusal to go along with the majority group and "inappropriately" demonstrated the murder of the children with a band fastened around a water bottle. [How is that inappropriate? Or were they just uncomfortable and angry because someone defended the children?]