19 Friday Feb 2010
Posted in Catholic America, Lives of the Saints
Blessed Brother André — not to be confused with the not-so-blessed Brother André (yours truly) — is to be canonized in Rome on October 17. See the Press Release from St. Joseph’s Oratory. I, for one, will call him, “Saint André of Mount Royal.” Perhaps readers will help to make this a trend.
Deo Gratias et Mariae atque Joseph!
22 Friday Jan 2010
Posted in Catholic America, Lives of the Saints
Today, January 22, is the feast of Saint Vincent Pallotti. It is also the day in the Chair of Unity Octave during which we pray for the conversion of America. Lastly, it is the anniversary of the infamous Supreme Court decision of 1973 decriminalizing abortion.
Noteworthy coincidences: Saint Vincent had a great devotion to the Holy Infant. The lovely Bambino Gesù with which he blessed the crowds during the Octave of the Epiphany is still in the Church of San Salvatore in Onda, its silver foot protruding out of the grate behind which His Majesty is locked. The faithful may still reverently kiss this foot as they did in the days of Saint Vincent. Devotion to the Holy Infant Jesus is a powerful way to repair for the crime of abortion, and to petition for the reversal of Roe v. Wade and all the wicked statutory laws which perpetrate this outrage against God and man.
Father Paul of Graymoor, about a generation before Roe, set aside this day of the Chair of Unity Octave to pray for the conversion of America. Our national infanticide is a terrible sign that the U.S.A. badly needs conversion. Only Christ the King can save us!
19 Tuesday Jan 2010
Posted in Catholic America, Ecclesiology, Lives of the Saints
During this Chair of Unity Octave, let’s pray for REAL Christian unity — Catholic unity under the Supreme Pontiff — not amorphous irenicism! To appreciate this exhortation, it would behove us to study the life of the very author of the Church Unity Octave, Father Paul Wattson, founder of the Society of the Atonement.
Dishonestly promoted now as the precursor to modern false ecumenism, Father Paul was an apostolic soul who knew that the only real Christian unity is Catholic unity under the Sovereign Pontiff.
09 Saturday Jan 2010
Writing for The New American, Jack Kenny has compared and contrasted the Boston-College career of recently deceased pagan-lesbian-radical-feminist* “theologian,” Mary Daly and the phenomenon of my own dear founders, who were treated harshly by that same institution in the 1940s. Unlike Daly, the four professors (including Dr. Fakhri Maluf) were neither witches, nor sexual deviants, nor dissenters from the Church’s magisterium, nor advocates of the non-extant “right” of a woman to butcher her unborn offspring. No, they simply defended a defined doctrine, one the Church has bound us to, which teaches that there is no salvation outside the Catholic Church. Continue reading
25 Saturday Apr 2009
Posted in Catholic America, Lives of the Saints
In the city of Montreal, Province of Quebec, Canada, on a rise of earth known as Mount Royal, there stands a religious edifice of staggering proportions. It is three hundred and sixty-one feet high, taller than either Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York or the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. Its girth is so massive that it could hold within itself any one of most of the world’s great shrines, including Saint Anne de Beaupré and Saint Paul of London. The cross atop its domed roof can be seen for miles around, guiding the millions of pilgrims who come there each year. It is the Oratory of Saint Joseph, a worthy tribute to him who is the head of the Holy Family and the Patron of the Universal Church. Continue reading
25 Saturday Apr 2009
Posted in Catholic America, Church History, Lives of the Saints
Note: This article was originally published in December of 1998. Father Seelos was beatified Sunday, April 9, 2000. Deo Gratias! For books about the Blessed, go here.
Blessed Francis Xavier Seelos, Pray for us!
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October in New Orleans. The Crescent City is getting its first annual breath of relief from the seemingly endless summer. Though the calendar says fall has started, September is still really summer in this city on the Mississippi. It’s 1867, and the relief is more welcome this year than most, for the Gulf-coast summer has brought something besides sunny, sweltering days and steamy, sticky nights. Continue reading
31 Wednesday Dec 2008
Posted in Catholic America, Church History
Having an aversion to serialized articles on the Internet, I have opted not to call this “Father Arnold Damen, Chicago’s Jesuit Apostle: Part II.” A clunky name, that. This is, nonetheless, a second article on Father Damen, but a “free-standing” one. Whereas Chicago’s Jesuit Apostle focused on our subject’s Windy-City work, here, we will consider Father Damen the missionary and, for your edification and/or amusement, Father Damen the ghost; for, according to some, the departed Dutch Jesuit still has an affinity for his old haunts in Chicago. Continue reading