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The three brothers are together in Algeria in the French Foreign Legion for the next FIVE years. The valuable stone, the Blue Water has not turned up yet and no one even considers that someone besides the young people could have stolen it.

The attacks against the Church, appearing on many different fronts, including those internal to her earthly existence, must stir those who love Our Lord to greater knowledge of Him, greater love of Him, and greater dedication to His glory and the salvation of souls. Our Lord said, “With God, all things are possible.”

Yes, that’s what I want you to give me, your keys. It is your keys that keep you from sleeping. Each one of them is a little demon, and each one of those little demons alone is heavier than a mountain. With such a weight, my poor Granny, even the angels, even if they tried all of them together, couldn’t carry you to Paradise.

But as Jesus stood before him, Pilate had no idea that his name would forever be remembered and that this little trial would become the most famous trial in world history. ... For now, he simply attempted to extricate himself from the pressure being applied by the Jewish leaders to execute Jesus. He would try to pass the problem off to another ruler: Herod.

A powerful way to pray for the Holy Souls is to enlist the help of the Blessed Mother, asking her to pour the Precious Blood on them.

Let the soul understand the teaching of the saint; let it make an energetic resolution; and it will find itself already in the second Mansions.

One of the reasons so many people are drifting off into the occult, she said, is the absence of the power of Christianity in the world. “There’s a spiritual vacuum now,” she said, “You can thank the Church for that. So, people are seeking other things.”

The cloister is what it is because there men and women learn how to keep silence.

Day 254: Judgement of Nations, Father quoted Billy Graham today as saying that if God doesn't bring judgement upon the United States, He owes a huge apology to Sodom and Gomorrah. 😧😟😭

Please, please, God of my father, God of the heritage of Israel, Master of heaven and earth, Creator of the waters, King of all you have created, hear my prayer! Make every nation & every tribe know clearly that you are God, the God of all power & might, & that there is no other who shields the people of Israel but you alone.” Judith's prayer before battle

In position in the Bible, book of Judith comes earlier.

Pope Francis announced that he was replacing the staunchly pro-life, pro-family Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted of the Diocese of Phoenix with the militant pro-homosexuality Bishop John P. Dolan, auxiliary bishop of San Diego. As parish priest of a ‘scandalously pro-LGBT parish’ Bishop Dolan employed an openly homosexual man ....

This is truly sad, as Bishop Olmsted did so much good for his diocese.

When the devil was asked by an exorcist why he feared the Blessed Virgin Mary more than God Himself, Fr. Amorth says the devil responded, “I feel more humiliated being conquered by a simple creature than by God Himself.” According to St. Louis de Montfort, it is the humility of Mary which humiliates the devil more than the power of God, which is why the devil fears her “in a certain sense more than God himself.”

This is excellent. Clear and straightforward, easy to follow and understand.

For the most part, I've stopped highlighting or I'd end up highlighting the entire book... It's an endless repetition of the same errors. (sigh)

Through all this economic and biological decline ran political decay: aristocrats who could administer but could not rule; businessmen too absorbed in personal gain to save the peninsula; generals who won by bribery more than they could win by arms; and a bureaucracy ruinously expensive and irremediably corrupt. The majestic tree had rotted in its trunk, and was ripe for a fall.

The cross is our redemption, not because the Father demanded or required someone to pay the price for our sins, but because sin had its roots in Adam’s assertion of his self-will. The voluntary death of Christ reversed what Adam caused. Christ did not have to die; he chose to die, not to pay a price but to destroy death by death.

Dante has not had a Damascene experience. His is a correction or adjustment, which John works by telling Dante to focus on his soul’s desire. Look inward, the apostle says. It is the most reliable of spiritual instructions: if in doubt, seek to know yourself further, because there you will find God and that which blocks your awareness of God.

Jesus told St. Catherine of Siena that our neighbor's help us when they test the various virtues in us, i.e., justice by the unjust, compassion by the cruel, gentleness by the cruel, faith by the unfaithful, etc. Ask the Holy Souls to help you determine a specific virtue you need to develop in honor of them.

Chapter 13 in the book of Daniel - Susanna's Virtue

The leaders had failed to bear fruit or even to recognize the work of God being done among them by John the Forerunner and Jesus. They rejected Christ and planned to put him to death—he who is the Cornerstone, the foundation and most important stone in the building. But they would be defeated, broken to pieces, and crushed by the Stone they rejected.

Bonaventure continues, Dominicans in Dante’s time, 100 years on, are becoming less attuned. They are growing like tares not wheat, he remarks, in a reference to Jesus’s parable about the weeds that threaten to choke the crop. Criticism is not withheld in paradise. It is spoken with deliberate clarity. But it is not persecutory, like the crusades. The aim is conversion of heart, not the subjugation of populations.

Have gotten to the Dubia, where the Cardinals sent it to Pope Francis, then released the public statement because he ignored it. Then they followed up with a request to see him. He ignored all of their efforts but made a number of snide remarks which were obviously directed at them.

Some Christians believe that when Jesus entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, he ascended the Temple Mount from that staircase and entered through the Golden Gate because of a prophecy. Ezekiel was shown the East Gate in a vision and was told that it would remain shut and only the Lord would enter through it (Ezek. 44:1–3).

Recounting the episode in the Gospel of our Lord’s conversation with the woman caught in adultery, Pope Francis also told the delegates Jesus ‘plays the fool a bit’ and that he ‘was scant on morality’. He also said, incomprehensibly, that Jesus was not ‘a clean one’. The official Vatican transcript changed Pope Francis’ statement that Jesus ‘plays the fool a bit’ to ‘pretended not to understand’.

The canto (Purgatorio 32) closes with the devastation brought to the natural world and the human soul. It is a tragedy, one that Dante has known well, when he wandered lost in the forest. The seven visions are moments of history, moments in the collapse of the human spirit, and moments he himself now fully understands.

Jesus was not a prophet and never presented himself as such. The authority behind prophecy was God himself, and the prophets always prefaced their messages with a specific statement: “Thus says the Lord.” Jesus never said “Thus says the Lord” because he never claimed to be a prophet; he was the Lord. He never claimed to speak on behalf of God since he was God. His Jewish critics would have considered this blasphemy.

...dreams can be like that: they can offset delusions, correct assumptions. There is a part of him, a dark part of him, that needs to be known and exposed. It is purgatory’s work. No matter how painful, he must see into his confused heart so it can approach the brilliant heart of the cosmos.

Just as he had foretold, Jesus was betrayed, arrested, and condemned to the cross.