petak, 30. prosinca 2022.

Taiwan za LGBTQ+... iili smrt

 

"Borimo se za prava LGBTQ+, feminizam, slobodu pobačaja, za prava žena i djevojčica."

 

Pravo bi bilo da zovete takve da vas brane.

Ciao. Nisam solidaran. Nemam zašto.

nedjelja, 3. srpnja 2022.

gab.com...

 Najbolje je koristiti gab.com 

Makar se ne identificiram sa Donald Trump0m, kad su mu usred kampanje dokinuli twitter račun, bilo je jasno da se sve te mreže ne mogu koristiti, odnosno da su pod apsolutnom kontrolom svjestkih moćnika: youtube, Facebook, Instagram, itd. Inače, početi napuštati google.

Treba tražiti alternativne medije, koji dopuštaju pravu slobodu izražavanja. Preporučujem dva: Gab i odysee (za video materijal).

Sigurno ćemo se naći na tim širinama.

Bog vas blagoslovio



Sermon for the 4th Sunday after Pentecost, July 3rd, 2022

 

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.

 

My dearly beloved in Our Lord,

 

"O Roma felix..." – "Oh lucky Rome, which has been consecrated by the glorious blood of the two Princes." (Hymn for Matins and Vespers)

 

      (Brief review of the feasts celebrated after Pentecost)

Our holy Mother, the Church, never stops harvesting the fruits of the Redemption. She is doing it also in the liturgy, celebrating a number of major feasts all throughout the weeks after Pentecost:

° The feast of Corpus Christi brings back to our pious memory the institution of the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar – the Sacrament of Divine Love, the most ingenuous invention that God has made on our behalf so that He could feed us with His own divine flesh and blood…

° The feast of the Sacred Heart,celebrated on the Friday after the Octave of Corpus Christi and which we remember on the first Friday of every month teaches us the godly desires of love; of divine charity (caritas) by which we anticipate the heavenly life which our Lord has promised us: "caritas non deficit" – charity will be essentially the same in Heaven, as it is now in our Christian hearts! Here on earth it is imperfect, in Heaven it will be perfect. "Quis sic amantem non redamet?" - "Who would not love again the One who has so loved us?"

° The feast of St John the Baptist is the only birthday of a Saint – besides Our Lord and Our Blessed Lady – which is celebrated by the Church. (His beheading is celebrated on August 29.) This is because his life and mission are so intimately connected with the mission of Our Lord: he is the precursor, the forerunner of the Messiah.

° The feast of the Most Precious Blood (July 1st) recalls the fact that "we have been bought back – redeemed – by a great prize" (1Petr; 1Cor) from the slavery of sin and the eternal punishment of Hell. The great heavenly treasure for our souls comes exclusively from the pierced side of Our dying Lord and the shedding of all of his blood.

° The feast of the Visitation of Our Lady with her cousin Elizabeth, the mother of St John the Baptist, celebrated on July 2nd, is a great example of the love of the Mother of God, not only of God, but also of her neighbor. One slight hint by the Angel at the Annunciation was enough to make her undertake a long journey in order to comfort her relative in her needs.

 

      (The Church founded by Christ is Apostolic)

All these feasts are held together by the feast of the holy Apostles Peter and Paul, the two princes of the Apostles (June 29th). This is so because the Church is the body to which Christ has entrusted His revelation, the deposit of the Faith, and the keys to His heavenly kingdom! Therefore there is no salvation outside the Church founded by Our Lord, the One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic and Roman Church.

Today we are beleaguered by people – so-called "theologians" – saying it is all about the "visibility" of the Church: They say that it is impossible that the hierarchy of bishops and the Pope be lacking to the Church because then the Church would not be "visible" anymore. - This is a tremendous aberration and an error full of consequences. The visibility of the Church consists precisely in her Oneness, Holiness, Apostolicity and Catholicity (and Romanity). This is how the Church founded by Christ can be and must be recognized by all men of good will. - In the Creed (Credo) we do not say: "I believe in the visible Church", but "I believe in the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church"and “I believe in the Holy Catholic Church, the Communion of Saints”.

In today's crisis we have to look closely at the meaning of the words which people are using. Often enough they do not mean anything, they are without sense, they are misleading our understanding and the Faith...

The Church is, among all other characteristics, Apostolic.

She is founded on a solid ground, an everlasting foundation: that of the Apostles among whom Sts Peter and Paul are the "princes", i.e. the chiefs, the principal Apostles. Why? Because St Peter is the personal representative of Christ ("Tu es Petrus..."), and his successors as bishops of Rome have a universal primate and jurisdiction, they are the Vicars of Christ.

St Paul is the "Apostle of the Gentiles". He was chosen in a particular way, after the other Apostles, after Christ’s Ascension. And he had been a fervent Jew, a Pharisee, a disciple of Gamaliel, a doctor of the law; he had the particular vocation to make it very clear to everyone that not only the Jews were to receive the Redemption through Christ, but also all the other nations (the gentiles). This was very difficult to accept for the Jews, and it took all the tenacity of St Paul to convince them that this was indeed the will of God.

The Church is Apostolic. That also means that Our Lord has given to the world the entire deposit of the Faith and all the essential components of the life of the Church through the Apostles, and through them alone. They were to transmit the truth to their successors – which they faithfully did – and so forth, with the assistance of the Holy Ghost.

The Apostles all had universal jurisdiction: Each of them set up the Church wherever he went to preach. But only the successors of St Peter in Rome (St Peter has first been bishop in Antioch and then bishop of Rome) inherit this universal jurisdiction. The successors of the other Apostles only lead a certain portion of the Church in dependence from the bishop of Rome.

It is very clear that the four notes of the Church (that she is One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic) are intimately connected with each other. The teaching authority which comes first ("Go and teach all nations...") must not be disconnected from the sanctifying and governing power ("... baptizing them [...] and teaching them to keep everything I told you").

What is a bishop? What is a Pope?

- They all are successors of the Apostles if they are validly consecrated bishops. (There is no sacramental "consecration" of the Pope or a Cardinal; sacramentally speaking the Pope is 'just' a bishop, the bishop of Rome.)

- They are the teachers who have to guarantee the integrity of the Faith, without which it is impossible to please God (cf. Hebr 6). This teaching of the Faith is the first prerogative of the Church, of her bishops. Without the teaching of the true Faith everything else is void; with it everything receives its sanctifying sense: The priestly power is then exercised fruitfully. (Someone who is validly baptized outside the true Church receives the baptismal character, but not the grace of the Sacrament...) The governing power (authority in the strict sense of the word) is then exercised lawfully, since the Church is dealing with men who are social creatures, and need to be governed and directed by superiors, who again have superiors.

But only in this theological order does it make sense.

Since today we live in a world that puts everything upside down, we must be careful to get our ideas straight, especially when the teaching of the Church and theology are concerned. And underlying to theology is philosophy, which is the love of wisdom, i.e. the manner of thinking according to the truth.

The Church was founded by Christ on the solid foundation of the Apostles. They received the deposit of the Faith in their brave, but still weak hearts. Once they had been strengthened by the coming of the Holy Ghost, who was to remind them all that Christ had taught them previously, they preached and defended the revealed Truth, the Word of God, unfailingly, and even gave their life in order to attest to the truth. They left the spiritual treasures to their successors, and thus we still can be worthy children of God in the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. This possibility of salvation exists until the end of times, according to the promise made by Christ; it cannot cease or disappear.

Our devotion for the holy Apostles should grow every day to be as strong as it has always been in the hearts of Catholics. Through the Apostles we have received what we have; they, guided and strengthened by the Blessed Virgin Mary, have established the Church throughout the world.

Let us faithfully hold on to what they have transmitted us.

Pray for us, Holy Mother of God. - That we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.

Queen of Apostles, pray for us.

 

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.

P. Arnold Trauner (paterarnold@hotmail.com), njemački i engleski.

subota, 18. lipnja 2022.

Sermon for Corpus Christi, Sunday, June 19th, 2022 – The unknown Sacrament

 

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

 

My dearly beloved in Our Lord,

 

Last Sunday we have explained how the Feast of the Most Holy Trinity has become impossible for the moderns and the modernists. The false concept of radical agnosticism leads to fundamental religious indifferentism. If we cannot know anything for sure, how could we ever pretend to know that God is one in substance and three in Persons…! Let us pretend that “the three monotheistic religions adore the same one true God.”

Moving closer to home, to ourselves as Catholics, we will today briefly consider another great ‘unknown’ reality, that of the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar. This is most appropriate on the day of the solemnity of Corpus Christi.

On the afternoon of Easter two of Our Lord’s disciples went from Jerusalem to their dwelling place Emmaus. Our Lord joined them, but they did not recognize him. They had been close to him, though. One of them was presumably Cleophas, the owner of the Cenacle and whose wife was one of the pious and courageous women, Maria Cleophae, the sister of Our Lady (cf Jn 19:25), persevering at the foot of the Cross. The disciples of Emmaus did not recognize Our Lord because having been close to him through the bonds of blood and fellowship, they had not yet made the great leap to become truly intimate with who he really is.

It is similar for the Catholic. He starts his quest of Heaven, drawn towards the Son by the Father (cf Jn 6:44), pushed by divine grace. But almost infallibly this person of good will becomes entangled and ensnared on the surface of the Christian life withits technicalities, modalities, rules, devotions. He may be fervent to some degree. But at some point the first fervor and love of Our Lord will give way to routine and superficiality. The Christian life will be considered as something rather outward than inward with regards to the human personality.

Thus a person who admired the saintly bishop of Geneva, Francis de Sales, wanted to imitate him in order to become holy. He observed the holy priest and thought he had found the secret of his holy conduct: the manner in which he inclined his head while he prayed. Of course this is blunder. Pious blunder, but still blunder.

The secret of a good, perfect and holy Catholic life lies not in any outward observance. The outward observances, like a decent bodily composure for prayer which favors devotion and recollection, or the ceremonies and usages of the Church are important because we consist of body and soul. We are not simple animals, bodies with a perishable principle of life. We are not Angels, pure spirits without bodies. We are rational animals, animal rationale as philosophy puts it. But clearly the soul is more important than the body, and we have to respect the right order, the right reason.

The heart and center of the Catholic life is Holy Mass, the Holy Eucharist, Holy Communion.

The big question is: Why does Holy Communion, frequent Communion together with regular Confession, make such a relatively minor impact on most Catholics’ life? - Why have millions of Catholics accepted receiving Communion in their hand when papa Montini introduced his ‘new Mass’? Certainly there have been number of priests and faithful who have never accepted such a sacrilegious practice; some have sacrificed their career and their life in defense of the venerable practice of receiving Holy Communion on the tongue, not on the hand. But they remained a minority. This happened after the cult of the Holy Eucharist, devotion to the Blessed Sacrament had constantly developed over the centuries. The 4th Lateran Council has defined the dogma of the Transubstantiation in 1215. In 1264 Pope Urban IV established Corpus Christi as a Feast for the entire Church and had St Thomas Aquinas compose its Mass and Divine Office. After more vicious attacks in the 16th century the Holy Council of Trent has taught more elaborately still about the Mass as a Sacrifice and Holy Communion. The long fight against false reform was crowned by the cult of the Sacred Heart of Jesus propagated in the entire Catholic world. Pope St Pius X resumed all this in his decrees about early and frequent Communion at the dawn of the 20th century.

In a nutshell we can say that modern so-called spirituality has blocked the way to true intimacy of the soul with its Creator and Redeemer. Similarly modern so-called science has blocked the way to true knowledge which must be ‘cognitio certa per causas – sure knowledge through causes’. True philosophy, true spirituality and true science search for that which is inmost in God’s Creation. False ‘modern’ science looks at the outside of things, the phenomena, and ‘drowns the fish’ by the sheer number of studies and pages without getting to the core of any problem. The look for ‘aliens’ in the supposed infinity of the universe; but they forget about the Divine Spirit who desires to live in the innermost chamber of the human soul.

Modernity consists in going along with sensuality which is perverted through our many sinful inclinations. ‘Modern man’ takes pride in that which is shameful and sinful, as we see in ‘the month of pride’ which he celebrates in June.

The Catholic is in constant danger to succumb to such superficiality and outward-ism.

The Catholic life consists in going against the weakened and badly-inclined sensuality by the means of abnegation, mortification and grace. Each page of the Gospel talks about just that.

Holy Communion and the Holy Eucharist are the dividing line between true and false spirituality and sensuality. We receive Our Lord in the form and manner of food. Nothing becomes more a part of us than food and drink. It is totally absorbed into our body. But the Eucharistic food is solely intended for our soul, the Sacred Host is only the Sacramental vehicle or instrument through which our soul receives Our Lord’s grace. While the Sacrament is received in our body, its effect is in the soul.

We must always receive Holy Communion in a state of grace, not in a state of mortal sin. The Church explicitly prescribes that if someone’s conscience reproaches himwith a mortal sin, he needs to go to Sacramental Confession before receiving Holy Communion. An act of perfect contrition is not enough in this case although in itself it is sufficient to restore sanctifying grace to the soul. In view of the great dignity of the Holy Eucharistic the Church insists that every precaution be taken.

The Holy Eucharist not only gives us God’s grace, like any other Sacrament. It contains substantially the author of grace himself, Our Lord Jesus-Christ, true God and true man. Therefore it contains an infinitude of grace. One single Holy Communion; each Holy Communion has the power to make a soul perfectly holy. There is no limitation on the side of him who gives himself totally to us, his Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity!

He is undivided – we are not. The reception of Holy Communion is, so to say, the choice terrain of application for the Great Commandment: “And thou shalt love the Lord thy God, with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind, and with thy whole strength.” (Mk 12:30; Dt 6:5) Like any good parent or educator God demands nothing of His creatures what He himself is not prepared to do. God has created all things in a perfect manner and order. Our Lord showed us the perfect example of all virtues. He had put into practice whatever he then taught. He has shed not a little bit of his Precious Blood, but every last drop of it. In this we need to imitate him ever better, ever more perfectly. Similarly we need to get ourselves to serve God wholeheartedly. We need to always grant him the best of what we are and what we have.

Doing this we progress in true intimacy with Our Lord and God. Our knowing God must become more and more intimate, deeper and more heartfelt. Our love of God must become a true and unfailing adhesion to God who is infinitely worthy of our love, and who is jealous of our love. True love wants to always better know, embrace and possess its object. We need to be more curious to know God, like St Thomas Aquinas who kept asking his teachers at Monte Cassino: “Who is God?” We also need to have a great desire to possess God. We need to convince ourselves ever more of God’s goodness, His will to do us good: “O taste, and see that the Lord is sweet: blessed is the man that hopeth in him.” (Ps 33:9) God wills our sanctification and salvation, and we need to catch up on this matter. Through the Prophet Isaias God says: “Can a woman forget her infant, so as not to have pity on the son of her womb? and if she should forget, yet will not I forget thee.” (Is 49:15) What greater, what more tender expression of love could there be?

Right after the Octave of Corpus Christi Holy Church celebrates the Feast and the Octave of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. It is simply the continuation of the same formal object of our Faith and devotion. Let us pay back Our Lord not with indifference and neglect, but with love for the great love he has shown and is still showing us: “Heart of Jesus, glowing furnace of charity; vessel of justice and love; full of goodness and love – have mercy on us!” (Litany of the Sacred Heart)

 

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

P. Arnold Trauner (paterarnold@hotmail.com), njemački i engleski.

srijeda, 15. lipnja 2022.

Sermon for Corpus Christi, June 16th, 2022 – The unknown Sacrament

 

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

 

My dearly beloved in Our Lord,

 

Last Sunday we have explained how the Feast of the Most Holy Trinity has become impossible for the moderns and the modernists. The false concept of radical agnosticism leads to fundamental religious indifferentism. If we cannot know anything for sure, how could we ever pretend to know that God is one in substance and three in Persons…! Let us pretend that “the three monotheistic religions adore the same one true God.”

Moving closer to home, to ourselves as Catholics, we will today briefly consider another great ‘unknown’ reality, that of the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar. This is most appropriate on the day of the solemnity of Corpus Christi.

On the afternoon of Easter two of Our Lord’s disciples went from Jerusalem to their dwelling place Emmaus. Our Lord joined them, but they did not recognize him. They had been close to him, though. One of them was presumably Cleophas, the owner of the Cenacle and whose wife was one of the pious and courageous women, Maria Cleophae, the sister of Our Lady (cf Jn 19:25), persevering at the foot of the Cross. The disciples of Emmaus did not recognize Our Lord because having been close to him through the bonds of blood and fellowship, they had not yet made the great leap to become truly intimate with who he really is.

It is similar for the Catholic. He starts his quest of Heaven, drawn towards the Son by the Father (cf Jn 6:44), pushed by divine grace. But almost infallibly this person of good will becomes entangled and ensnared on the surface of the Christian life withits technicalities, modalities, rules, devotions. He may be fervent to some degree. But at some point the first fervor and love of Our Lord will give way to routine and superficiality. The Christian life will be considered as something rather outward than inward with regards to the human personality.

Thus a person who admired the saintly bishop of Geneva, Francis de Sales, wanted to imitate him in order to become holy. He observed the holy priest and thought he had found the secret of his holy conduct: the manner in which he inclined his head while he prayed. Of course this is blunder. Pious blunder, but still blunder.

The secret of a good, perfect and holy Catholic life lies not in any outward observance. The outward observances, like a decent bodily composure for prayer which favors devotion and recollection, or the ceremonies and usages of the Church are important because we consist of body and soul. We are not simple animals, bodies with a perishable principle of life. We are not Angels, pure spirits without bodies. We are rational animals, animal rationale as philosophy puts it. But clearly the soul is more important than the body, and we have to respect the right order, the right reason.

The heart and center of the Catholic life is Holy Mass, the Holy Eucharist, Holy Communion.

The big question is: Why does Holy Communion, frequent Communion together with regular Confession, make such a relatively minor impact on most Catholics’ life? - Why have millions of Catholics accepted receiving Communion in their hand when papa Montini introduced his ‘new Mass’? Certainly there have been number of priests and faithful who have never accepted such a sacrilegious practice; some have sacrificed their career and their life in defense of the venerable practice of receiving Holy Communion on the tongue, not on the hand. But they remained a minority. This happened after the cult of the Holy Eucharist, devotion to the Blessed Sacrament had constantly developed over the centuries. The 4th Lateran Council has defined the dogma of the Transubstantiation in 1215. In 1264 Pope Urban IV established Corpus Christi as a Feast for the entire Church and had St Thomas Aquinas compose its Mass and Divine Office. After more vicious attacks in the 16th century the Holy Council of Trent has taught more elaborately still about the Mass as a Sacrifice and Holy Communion. The long fight against false reform was crowned by the cult of the Sacred Heart of Jesus propagated in the entire Catholic world. Pope St Pius X resumed all this in his decrees about early and frequent Communion at the dawn of the 20th century.

In a nutshell we can say that modern so-called spirituality has blocked the way to true intimacy of the soul with its Creator and Redeemer. Similarly modern so-called science has blocked the way to true knowledge which must be ‘cognitio certa per causas – sure knowledge through causes’. True philosophy, true spirituality and true science search for that which is inmost in God’s Creation. False ‘modern’ science looks at the outside of things, the phenomena, and ‘drowns the fish’ by the sheer number of studies and pages without getting to the core of any problem. The look for ‘aliens’ in the supposed infinity of the universe; but they forget about the Divine Spirit who desires to live in the innermost chamber of the human soul.

Modernity consists in going along with sensuality which is perverted through our many sinful inclinations. ‘Modern man’ takes pride in that which is shameful and sinful, as we see in ‘the month of pride’ which he celebrates in June.

The Catholic is in constant danger to succumb to such superficiality and outward-ism.

The Catholic life consists in going against the weakened and badly-inclined sensuality by the means of abnegation, mortification and grace. Each page of the Gospel talks about just that.

Holy Communion and the Holy Eucharist are the dividing line between true and false spirituality and sensuality. We receive Our Lord in the form and manner of food. Nothing becomes more a part of us than food and drink. It is totally absorbed into our body. But the Eucharistic food is solely intended for our soul, the Sacred Host is only the Sacramental vehicle or instrument through which our soul receives Our Lord’s grace. While the Sacrament is received in our body, its effect is in the soul.

We must always receive Holy Communion in a state of grace, not in a state of mortal sin. The Church explicitly prescribes that if someone’s conscience reproaches him with a mortal sin, he needs to go to Sacramental Confession before receiving Holy Communion. An act of perfect contrition is not enough in this case although in itself it is sufficient to restore sanctifying grace to the soul. In view of the great dignity of the Holy Eucharistic the Church insists that every precaution be taken.

The Holy Eucharist not only gives us God’s grace, like any other Sacrament. It contains substantially the author of grace himself, Our Lord Jesus-Christ, true God and true man. Therefore it contains an infinitude of grace. One single Holy Communion; each Holy Communion has the power to make a soul perfectly holy. There is no limitation on the side of him who gives himself totally to us, his Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity!

He is undivided – we are not. The reception of Holy Communion is, so to say, the choice terrain of application for the Great Commandment: “And thou shalt love the Lord thy God, with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind, and with thy whole strength.” (Mk 12:30; Dt 6:5) Like any good parent or educator God demands nothing of His creatures what He himself is not prepared to do. God has created all things in a perfect manner and order. Our Lord showed us the perfect example of all virtues. He had put into practice whatever he then taught. He has shed not a little bit of his Precious Blood, but every last drop of it. In this we need to imitate him ever better, ever more perfectly. Similarly we need to get ourselves to serve God wholeheartedly. We need to always grant him the best of what we are and what we have.

Doing this we progress in true intimacy with Our Lord and God. Our knowing God must become more and more intimate, deeper and more heartfelt. Our love of God must become a true and unfailing adhesion to God who is infinitely worthy of our love, and who is jealous of our love. True love wants to always better know, embrace and possess its object. We need to be more curious to know God, like St Thomas Aquinas who kept asking his teachers at Monte Cassino: “Who is God?” We also need to have a great desire to possess God. We need to convince ourselves ever more of God’s goodness, His will to do us good: “O taste, and see that the Lord is sweet: blessed is the man that hopeth in him.” (Ps 33:9) God wills our sanctification and salvation, and we need to catch up on this matter. Through the Prophet Isaias God says: “Can a woman forget her infant, so as not to have pity on the son of her womb? and if she should forget, yet will not I forget thee.” (Is 49:15) What greater, what more tender expression of love could there be?

Right after the Octave of Corpus Christi Holy Church celebrates the Feast and the Octave of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. It is simply the continuation of the same formal object of our Faith and devotion. Let us pay back Our Lord not with indifference and neglect, but with love for the great love he has shown and is still showing us: “Heart of Jesus, glowing furnace of charity; vessel of justice and love; full of goodness and love – have mercy on us!” (Litany of the Sacred Heart)

 

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

 P. Arnold Trauner (paterarnold@hotmail.com), njemački i engleski.