Writer Meg Greenfield on why she chose St. Mary Magdelene as her patron saint

Amici,

A most excellent and expressive – not to mention a very personal, indeed – essay by a first-rate writer on St. Mary Magdelene, and why the author chose her as her patron saint. This article was published a year ago at OnePeterFive. Just perfecto.

(Of course, some holier-than-though types take offence, if you read the Comments. Such will always be with us.)

An excerpt (but do yourself a favor and read the whole thing):

You loved Him for it, this man; the man you loved after all other men, the man you loved before all other men. You loved Him for telling you to stop surrendering to it all. You loved the man who would never be your lover more than you had ever loved any other man, and He saved you for it. You loved him all the more.

Christ gave you the gift of His divine grace and completely transformed you. He gave the generations to follow, sinners like me, the gift of your example. He gave us the story of you, the woman with all the demons, to teach us of His infinite mercy. To show us that no matter how wicked we are, we can be saved through Him, and with Him, and in Him.

To be totally honest with you, I get a little jealous of that. I wish that Christ would let my life be the lesson sometimes. That I could teach a little more and learn a little less.

I get jealous because I keep doing it again, Mary Magdalene, and you didn’t. I might bear your name, in spirit, as an alter Magdalene, but I am not worthy of this name, so beautiful and triumphant. I know that you went and sinned no more; you did penance and amended your life. But I keep doing it again, even though he commands me not to. I am contrite, and I am full of sorrow for offending our God. But our God didn’t give you this German soul of fire and this Irish spirit of gasoline. Talk about a hypostatic union.

Sometimes, I think that maybe if I didn’t have these kids, as you didn’t, and I didn’t have this mortgage and this Mormon husband, as you didn’t, and if I didn’t have these two coonhounds and these student loans, completely unlike you, that maybe when He judged me, maybe I could be a saint, too. Maybe even I could be a saint if all I had to do was to sit and listen to Jesus all day.

You listened to Him, and you learned from Him, and you followed Him. You wept for your Lord because you knew of His horrifying destiny. You washed His holy feet with your tears, with so many tears. You wiped those holy feet with your hair, with all that hair. You anointed those holy feet with that perfume, with all of that expensive perfume. You showed Him great love, and your sins were forgiven. For the love of God, the forgiveness of sins. By the love of God, the forgiveness of sins.

Cardinal Kasper Making Noise About the Next Pope

An important article at OnePeterFive. He's saying the next conclave will elect another pope like Francis.

No, because this one has about destroyed the Vatican II Church, so what's a new "Francis" going to do? Sow salt?

The next pope? Honestly. We have no idea how Bergoglio is going to leave the office: A, whether the Catholic Church will be on fire, split up into factions, collapsed into multi-language chaos, or just under indictment by district attorneys around the world. Or maybe "dead" of utter boredom. B, Nor do we know what the "terrain" in the world will be by those days in terms of organized ecclesiastical rebellion against the Lavender Mafia currently in control of the Church's center. C, If they do try another "Francis", look for a split in the conclave; a "minority report". The main factions of cardinals will themselves be divided into language-church blocks -- leaving a rather tight minority to "opt out". Also a strong possibility, now that the 'Lavenders' have shown the world how they 'elect' a pope, the Conservatives and Trads (if any are left) will know just who they're planning to put in place and will be prepared with arguments why they won't support him.

Kasper may sound rational, but he – and the Progressive/Modernist 'Catholics' in general – have been running on high-octane emotion for too long to notice the "game" is over. They think they've got it all in the bag, and that their long-running "long march" through the Catholic institutions has put them in the cat-bird driver's seat. Forever.

Unfortunately, they've revealed for all the world just what and who they are and what their 'Catholicism' is. It is, in a word: unappealing. It's not attractive or worthy of devotion by the poor souls who actually support the church with their pennies, prayers, and penance: in other words, the "Catholic base". And a 'Church' like the German one, a simoniac abomination before the Lord, is materially wealthy but empty of believers, and the same will be true of the "American Church" whenever the U.S. Federalis stop giving it tens of millions for "refugees".

I pray I live long enough to see it. But that is a minor aspiration of mine. As in all things, all I can truly say is "Deus vult!"

An Préachán

Recommended Article: "Why Heretics Hate Mary and We Should Love Her More"

Amici,

I'd like to recommend this article at OnePeterFive, "Why Heretics Hate Mary and We Should Love Her More", by Timothy Flanders. 

I wrote the following Comment to it. 

Thank you, THANK YOU, Mr. Flanders for this essay and for highlighting: "But it is even more disturbing when we read how the Rhine group at Vatican II successfully suppressed the document on the Mother of God, relegating it, by a narrow vote, to the final section in (against the protests from Eastern Catholic bishops and others)..." and noting Ratzinger's Marian "weakness". ALL those reformers, the hard core (Schillebeeckx, Rahner, Küng) and the milder revolutionaries (de Lubac, Balthasar and Ratzinger), were together weak on her. And thank you for pointing out that "Gay Blade" James Martin ignores her, as well. (True women bring out true men, after all.)

They were weak on her or ignore her because of pride, among a host of reasons, but perhaps mainly because they just didn't get it: that through the young peasant teen's freely-given Fiat, the Jewish girl Miriam's name became known throughout the Catholic world beyond, resonating down two millennia now; an utterly obscure girl from a stunningly obscure time and impossible-to-be-more obscure place became the most famous woman -- indeed, the most famous purely human being -- since Eve; and more famous than Eve, really -- because Miriam is the New Eve, and through her we have Salvation, Salvation Incarnated, which is then, through the Most Holy Eucharist, Incarnated in us.

That's the Catholic Faith, the Incarnation Incarnated in us. It's the Faith of the Historical Church down through the millennia. Protestants reject it, formally rejecting the Real Presence, legalistically denying it in their founding documents: rejecting God's Incarnation in us (and insisting God's grace is only imputed to us, not infused into us), and naturally the Muslims went them one better 1,000 years before Luther was even hatched by rejecting the Incarnation in itself, in its First Instance.

When we participate in the Most Holy Eucharist, as you-all know here, we partake of the Divine Nature of Christ AND His Human Nature; through this Real Presence, we ourselves now have the elevated Incarnated Nature of Christ in us (no matter how small and yet fragile) as well as His Human Nature, which He inherited from His Mother. We literally ARE the Blessed Mother's children. Through Our Lord, we have her DNA. And as all Jews are Jews because they inherit it from their mothers, so now do we inherit the blessings and participation in the Covenants, all through the New Covenant. For to be The People of God (a Vat II favorite phrase) we need to be literally in and of the Body of Christ, and we have that status and true condition through Mary's Fiat.

This should humble us; it should not make us prideful. Well and truly you write, Mr Flanders, that: "True devotion to Mary keeps us safe from the excesses of pride." Amen to that!

Thanks again!

An P

Importance of Laughter Against Progressive Persecution: a reply to Brian!

This is a comment I replied with to BrianW at OnePeterFive about how we ought to laugh at our ecclesiastical persecutors. BrianW pointed out that those who are stuck in a region w/o the TLM are not in a laughing mood. He's quite right, of course. Here's my response:

Raghn Crow Brian W • an hour ago

Oh, I agree, Brian W. I spent what was it? Thirty years in Purgatory, otherwise known as the modern N.O. Mass. That no doubt sounds wicked to many but it WAS a purgatory. A misery. Suffering. (Only in Purgatory your suffering is part of your cleansing. So perhaps to some extent I've been a bit cleansed myself.)

And I remember, my friend, when the priest at that parish I grew up in stopped using the beautiful marble altar rail. Like it was yesterday. He must have told people to line up instead of using the rail, and receive standing. But this one family kept going to the rail. Others did at first but they fell away and this one family stayed. I could tell you their names (wasn't me; I kept losing myself in the beautiful windows of that church, which I wandered in since I first noticed them in childhood; but after what happened, I was ashamed that I didn't protest).

So this family, they kept going to the rail and the priest – I assume the moderators wouldn't like me using his name, but this occurred in the Columbus, Ohio, diocese – kept this family till last: he wouldn't give them Holy Communion till everyone else had theirs. And finally, I remember the day the priest just stopped giving them Holy Communion. He left them at the altar rail. Yes, he did.

He ended up rewarded for his services by getting a plum assignment in Columbus itself, (in a ritzy suburb) and the next priest, who acted the gay blade (whether he was or not) tore out the altar rail.

I grew up with that altar rail. It was a beautiful, subtle mottled grey-greenish (the Irish word is "glas" as in Dubhglas, the name) marble with sweet, humble, really, highlights of various colors. The new priest remodeled the entire sanctuary area, in fact, Tore out the side altars (same marble as the rail) and either used pieces of the rail or the old altars to make a new Vat2 altar. When people complained, he'd say, "Talk to the bishop! Talk to bishop!" We should have revolted. Pitchforks. Tar. Feathers. For the bishop and his "queen". Actually, this guy was accused after all this was done with having an affair with a woman! He got shunted off into oblivion and the bishop retired back to Cleveland or from wherever he came.

I left that church. I took my mother to the old school gym to Mass until the church was open again, and that was it. My brothers thereafter had to take her. (Mother and one brother now have died, and the remaining brothers no longer go to Mass at all.) It was a church in a county seat about a half an hour from Columbus, and my drive to Columbus was only 45-some minutes (too long for my mother). There in "the big city" I hung out at a conservative parish (which I formally joined) but spent my time with the Melkites in their heavenly liturgy. (I wish, I wish, I wish I were rich, for I'd have built them a proper church.) Then a TLM started up at an old downtown parish, started by a truly orthodox priest who saved that parish from extinction. The TLM was full every Sunday. I would have transferred to it but ended up leaving for Europe, where I've been living since. (The priest was not allowed to stay at the parish he saved, but the TLM continues there, at 8:30 a.m., though, an awkward time for a number of people, the older ones and families.)

So, you are right, my good sir. Nothing to laugh about.

Then again, what would have happened it we all had laughed out loud at the priest insisting on everyone lining up like lemmings? We should have stopped that then and there. Just sat there and laughed, and then all of us go to the rail! But we didn't. It might seem cruel to laugh but it would have been cruel, far more so, to show what we really felt.

I don't normally (as in never) watch Michael Voris but a good friend insisted I observe this one episode he liked. i did, and Voris was talking about the coming collapse of the Church in the U.S., population-wise, and how not only parishes but entire dioceses will be closing, with archdiocese becoming mere dioceses, and so on.

From my own experiences in the Vat2 Church, I know why that is happening. Exactly why.

You know your own situation, of course, and I'm sure you've tried to organize a TLM in your area. Keep at it. The Vat2 Church is doing us the favor of burying itself. "Far-stretching, endless time reveals all hidden things and buries that which once did shine," as Sophocles wrote long ago. (The Greeks knew everything.)

RC/An Préachán