Boże, który chciałeś wszystkich ze ziemi do Syna Twego pociągnąć, spraw, abyśmy przez zasługi i za przykładem Seraficznego Wyznawcy Twego Józefa, ponad wszelką żądzę tego świata wzniesieni a rozmyślaniu rzeczy bożych oddani, dojść do Ciebie zasłużyli. Przez Chrystusa Pana naszego. Amen.
Since we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens,
Jesus, the Son of God,
let us hold fast to our confession.
Holding fast to our confession, that is, to our faith, is exceedingly difficult.
I could say it is difficult in the face of the world and the ways of the world, but today I would rather focus on the problem of religious indifferentism.
What is indifferentism?
Indifferentism is a term applied to the theory that one religion is just as good as the next, that you can get God just about anywhere in equal shares. It is a theory that denies our duty to worship God by believing and practicing the one true religion.
And, what do we mean by one true religion?
By one true religion we mean the religion that Jesus Christ established on earth, the Holy Catholic faith.
But deacon, isn’t Christianity the outward expression of God’s teaching?
I would reply that Christianity is indeed superior to all other faiths, while at the same time telling you that other expressions of Christianity, outside the Polish National Catholic Church, do not contain, or they corrupt, the essential aspects of faith in Jesus Christ.
Bishop Hodur, in writing the Eleven Great Principals of the Polish National Catholic Church stated:
Christ our Lord established the Church for this purpose: that His believers might carry on the work begun by Him, the work of human salvation. The apostles and disciples, as well as their successors, were to prepare and lead humanity into the Kingdom of God; assured that if they fulfilled this task, He would be with them, lo, to the close of the age.” (Matt. 28:20)
…
This presence of His, however, He made conditional. Christ would be with His disciples if they would gather together and work in His Name, for His purposes, according to the plan indicated by Him.
As Bishop Hodur wrote, this promise is conditional, conditional upon our personal acceptance of Christ, our common gathering in the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church, and our common work.
He went on to outline Jesus’ promises, namely:
Therefore, if the members of the National Church will live according to these teachings of the Divine Master, and will propagate the democratic principles of Christ, they may be assured of His presence, help and cooperation.
To be a member of the Polish National Catholic Church is to be consciously aware of your decision for Christ and the true teachings of His Church. To be a member shows your cooperation in and with the work of Jesus. To be a member of the Holy Church makes you a participant in the victory of Christ to come.
Being a member imposes upon you an obligation of faithfulness. It imposes on you an obligation to follow-through on the choice you have made. It imposes on you an obligation to study and understand your faith.
Here are a few simple questions:
- How many sacraments do you receive in the course of the Holy Mass?
- What is the Church’s teaching on the devil?
- What is the Church’s teaching on eternal life?
- Did Jesus redeem the world or regenerate it, and what’s the difference?
- How many sacraments are recognized by the Church, and what are they?
- Why are our clergy married? Is it just a convenience?
- Why are we democratic and what does that mean?
- When is it permissible to attend mass in a Roman church?
- What is the Church’s position on birth control, abortion, stem cell research?
- Have your read the Confession of Faith and the Eleven Great Principals you say you believe in?
Can you answer them?
When you enter a Roman or Episcopal church you may very well recognize things that appear, at least outwardly, to resemble what occurs here. You may say to yourself, ‘It looks, sounds, and smells the same.’ What’s the difference?
I tell you that the difference is great. I tell you that your presence in another church tells all who see you there that your foundation is weak and that you adhere to whatever rules you run across. It says to the world: ‘Faith – hey I’m flexible.’
Do not be indifferent to Christ and to your faith, to what the Holy Church proclaims and teaches.
If coming to church is an exercise, if repeating responses during the Holy Mass is simply an act of mimicry, just as good here as it is there; if you really think that a pope or a lot of money give you power, give you gravitas, give you the truth; then you are sadly mistaken and you are missing the point. What you are seeking is not Christ, but convenience.
James and John made an infamous mistake. They put their selfish desires before Jesus.
James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came to Jesus and said to him,
“Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.”
…and Jesus gave them that which would save them, not necessarily that which they wanted.
When you consider your faith, your choice of Christ and His Holy Church, when you ask yourself that all important question, ‘What do I believe?’ Consider James and John. Consider whether you are asking Jesus for a church that gives you what you want, or the Holy Church which gives you what you need.
Robert Fisk writing in The Independent takes a stand against Holocaust deniers in Turkey. He’s ready to stand-up for the truth.
This has been a bad week for Holocaust deniers. I’m talking about those who wilfully lie about the 1915 genocide of 1.5 million Armenian Christians by the Ottoman Turks. On Thursday, France’s lower house of parliament approved a Bill making it a crime to deny that Armenians suffered genocide. And, within an hour, Turkey’s most celebrated writer, Orhan Pamuk – only recently cleared by a Turkish court for insulting “Turkishness” (sic) by telling a Swiss newspaper that nobody in Turkey dared mention the Armenian massacres – won the Nobel Prize for Literature. In the mass graves below the deserts of Syria and beneath the soil of southern Turkey, a few souls may have been comforted.
While Turkey continues to blather on about its innocence – the systematic killing of hundreds of thousands of male Armenians and of their gang-raped women is supposed to be the sad result of “civil war” – Armenian historians such as Vahakn Dadrian continue to unearth new evidence of the premeditated Holocaust (and, yes, it will deserve its capital H since it was the direct precursor of the Jewish Holocaust, some of whose Nazi architects were in Turkey in 1915) with all the energy of a gravedigger…
A thank you to Serge, the original blogging Young Fogey (ref. here) for pointing to this.
Fr. Jim Tucker is away for a couple weeks and it looks like he will not be doing his weekly call out for an iPod shuffle. In Fr. Jim’s honor, I’ll carry on.
- Zakwitła rutka —“ Promni, A witajcie przyjaciele
- Dance Away —“ Roxette, Look Sharp!
- Don’t Ask Me No Questions —“ Lynyrd Skynyrd, Second Helping
- Katmandu —“ Bob Seger, Beautiful Loser
- Venite, exultemus Domino —“ Taizé, Venite Exultemus
- La Grange —“ ZZ Top, The Best of ZZ Top
- Desbocado – Bruno Battisti D´Amario, Samba para Ti & More
- Take Me —“ George Jones & Tammy Wynette, Love Songs
- O Holy Night —“ Sufjan Stevens, Hark! Songs for Christmas
- Na Końcu Mapy —“ Pod Budą, Kraków, Piwna 7
As Fr. Jim would say:
The rules, for bloggers who want to play: Get your iPod or media-player of choice, select your whole music collection, set the thing to shuffle (i.e., randomized playback), then post the first ten songs that come out. No cheating, no matter how stupid it makes you feel! Maybe link the songs to online music stores for readers’ convenience.
Dozwól nam wszechmogący Boże obchodzić uroczyście dzień tryumfu i narodzin dla nieba św. Urszuli i jej towarzyszek, a jeżeli godnie naśladować jej nie możemy, abyśmy cnotę jej należycie czcili. Przez Chrystusa Pana naszego. Amen.
Per Wikipedia regarding the Virgin Islands: Christopher Columbus named the islands Santa Ursula y las Once Mil Vírgenes (shortened to Las Vírgenes), after Saint Ursula and her 11,000 virgins. The number of 11,000 is acknowledged to be in error. While there was a tradition of virgin martyrs in Cologne by the 5th century, this was limited to a small number between two and eleven according to different sources. The 11,000 were first mentioned in the 9th century; suggestions as to where this came from have included reading the name “Undecimillia” or “Ximillia” as a number, or reading the abbreviation “XI. M. V.” as eleven thousand (in Roman numerals) virgins rather than eleven martyred virgins.
Monsters and Critics is carrying a story on the Iraq situation. See Eye on Iraq: What is going wrong in Iraq? which includes the following statement:
For it was those elections so eagerly pushed and hyped by the White House that gave the Sunni insurgents in central Iraq the great strategic goal for which they had previously been striving in vain for more than two-and-a-half years. It was those elections that transformed the Iraq conflict from a limited insurgency supported by a relatively small minority within an ethnic minority of only 5 million Sunni Iraqis — less than 20 percent of the total population — into a burgeoning full scale civil war between the two largest religious groups in the country comprising 80 percent of the population, or 22.4 million people between them.
For the elections led to a consolidation of Shiite political power in Baghdad and then to the empowering of Shiite militias by Shiite political parties dominating the new parliament. Shiite militia influence within the new Iraqi police and army rapidly grew.
Well today, the Shiite insurgency captured and took over an entire city, a provincial capital nonetheless. The NY Times reports on the situation in Attack on Iraqi City Shows Militia’s Power.
What’s wrong in Iraq is that we are there. What’s wrong is that we are powerless to stop the on-going civil war. What’s wrong is that the British, the national police, and the U.S. cannot stop a militia from doing these sorts of things.
It cannot be fixed, nor will it be right, so the very least we can do is to extricate ourselves, the sooner the better.
Vietnam again indeed… Another war skillfully avoided by George W. Bush.
Lorelle VanFossen writes on Blogging Gear: Start With a Good Blogging Program. He points to several articles and reviews on blogging programs (well worth a read if you’re serious about what you do). In the post he asks:
So where is your list of things you love about WordPress, huh?
Here’s mine:
- WordPress is self contained. I don’t need a separate text editor, uploading software, FrontPage, ColdFusion, Dreamweaver, nothin’ else.
- WordPress is community software 1. It has a rock solid foundation based on what people need to get the job done.
- WordPress is community software 2. Members of the WordPress community extend and amplify its functionality with plugins and themes that make a great tool spectacular.
- The WordPress ‘motto’ Code is Poetry. As a religion blogger I tend to look at the deeper metaphysical meaning of things. When you connect with your Creator you connect with His theme —“ which is the beauty of that which He created. WordPress connects.
- WordPress does widgets. As a person with an accounting degree I’ve heard about widgets in all my coursework and I use the word regularly to define concepts. Widgets represent something —“ ‘Hey look, I’ve produced 1,000 widgets today.’ Well, WordPress (via Automattic) brought widgets to life. Widgets let you add all that neat stuff to your sidebars without a Herculean coding effort. A nice touch —“ making software useful and easy.
- WordPress means dressed-for-success. Words, and their use in expressing thoughts, feelings, and concepts, are part of the picture. To get you message across you need a medium. WordPress is the cathedral that gives some gravitas to the words the preacher preaches. The medium might not be the message, but it helps to have a medium that acknowledges the fact that people’s thoughts carry a part of their innate human dignity.
- WordPress plus Akismet. Stopping evil —“ hey, gotta like that.
- WordPress lets you play. You can hack, play, modify, break, and rebuild to your hearts content. Change this, modify that. It is software that allows you to be in charge of your art, to the extent you wish.
There’s more of course, but that’s the highlights for me.
Najwyższy Boże, Ojcze, źródło wiecznej sprawiedliwości, prowadź mię przez nieobjęte miłosierdzie Twoje, przez zasługi i mękę najmilszego Syna Twego, do Siebie, lubom dla grzechów moich niegodny, abym Cię w królestwie Twojem wychwalał na wieki. Amen.
From Yahoo News: Top US general says Rumsfeld is inspired by God
MIAMI (AFP) – The top US general defended the leadership of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, saying it is inspired by God.
“He leads in a way that the good Lord tells him is best for our country,” said Marine General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff…
The ‘good’ Lord: Get Saddam.
Rumsfeld: Why?
The ‘good’ Lord: He dissed your boss’ dad. Remember, Honor Thy father…
Rumsfeld: What will we tell the people?
The ‘good’ Lord: Lie.
Rumsfeld: What?
The ‘good’ Lord: Lie! Make up a story, Saddam is evil.
Rumsfeld: You mean do an evil to achieve a good?
The ‘good’ Lord: Sure.
Rumsfeld: OK
The REAL Word of God tells us:
Therefore, God is sending them a deceiving power so that they may believe the lie,
that all who have not believed the truth but have approved wrongdoing may be condemned.
(2 Thessalonians 2:11-12)
Do you get the feeling that one day Keith Olbermann will suddenly disappear from MSNBC? Of course, with the President’s signing of the Military Commissions Act and with the commensurate loss of our Habeas Corpus rights there would be little if any chance of ever seeing or hearing from him again if he did disappear.
Maybe the President’s evangelical friends would assume he was taken up in the rapture?
A transcript from Crooks and Liars of Keith Olbermann’s commentary on the Death of Habeas Corpus: —Your words are lies, Sir.—
…
We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who has said it is unacceptable to compare anything this country has ever done, to anything the terrorists have ever done.
We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who has insisted again that “the United States does not torture. It’s against our laws and it’s against our values” and who has said it with a straight face while the pictures from Abu Ghraib Prison and the stories of Waterboarding figuratively fade in and out, around him.
We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who may now, if he so decides, declare not merely any non-American citizens “Unlawful Enemy Combatants” and ship them somewhere —” anywhere —” but may now, if he so decides, declare you an “Unlawful Enemy Combatant” and ship you somewhere – anywhere.
And if you think this, hyperbole or hysteria… ask the newspaper editors when John Adams was President, or the pacifists when Woodrow Wilson was President, or the Japanese at Manzanar when Franklin Roosevelt was President.
And if you somehow think Habeas Corpus has not been suspended for American citizens but only for everybody else, ask yourself this: If you are pulled off the street tomorrow, and they call you an alien or an undocumented immigrant or an “unlawful enemy combatant” —” exactly how are you going to convince them to give you a court hearing to prove you are not? Do you think this Attorney General is going to help you?
…
Habeas Corpus? Gone.
The Geneva Conventions? Optional.
The Moral Force we shined outwards to the world as an eternal beacon, and inwards at ourselves as an eternal protection? Snuffed out.
These things you have done, Mr. Bush… they would be “the beginning of the end of America.”
And did it even occur to you once sir —” somewhere in amidst those eight separate, gruesome, intentional, terroristic invocations of the horrors of 9/11 —” that with only a little further shift in this world we now know —” just a touch more repudiation of all of that for which our patriots died —”
Did it ever occur to you once, that in just 27 months and two days from now when you leave office, some irresponsible future President and a “competent tribunal” of lackeys would be entitled, by the actions of your own hand, to declare the status of “Unlawful Enemy Combatant” for… and convene a Military Commission to try… not John Walker Lindh, but George Walker Bush?
…