A few days ago I posted about my fondness for a prayer in the 1962 hand missal. The prayer is called “Subjects for Daily Meditation” and begins with the admonition: “Remember this day that thou hast…” The next dozen or so lines are intended to keep one focused on what is truly important in life.
One of the things on which we are to focus is that we have (potentially) Heaven to gain or hell to suffer
Fortunately for me, the Texas weather helped me in my daily meditation.
Hell to suffer…
Tomorrow is Trinity Sunday. Enjoy pondering the inner life of God until heaven you gain!
Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto! Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in saecula saeculorum! Amen!
It should come as no surprise to readers of this blog that I spend a decent portion of my online time scanning through the headlines on Frank Walker’s Canon 212 website. I first heard of Walker and Canon212 a few years ago. I had been in contact with writer George Neumayer (seriously not dropping names) and he mentioned the site as “the Catholic Drudge Report”. Having worked in news, I knew that the term had nothing to do with what has or has not become of Matt Drudge. Clearly he’s either sold out, been offed, or had a break with reality. No, about 20 years ago, I can attest that Drudge was THE homepage on every terminal in our New York City newsroom. If it was on Drudge today, it would be everywhere else soon enough.
So, first, a huge thanks to Mr. Walker! Ann Barnhardt, in one of her podcasts said of him, “the man has a work ethic beyond compare.” I’m paraphrasing but the sentiment is shared and it’s true.
This morning after I finished my workout in the blistering Texas sun – and it was only 10:30 AM – I opened the browser on my phone and looked at the top link. The headline read simply: “Crazy Tik Tok VirusChurch Francis Adoration“. Please only click that link if you want to be as nauseated as I was.
What the embedded video shows appears to be some hideous dance ritual performed with a priest and several vested girls. The priest is manhandling a monstrance. The monstrance has (what I must assume is) a consecrated Host in it. So again, that means Our Lord Himself was being gyrated, thrusted, and tossed about in some kind of bizarre pseudo-Bacchanalian routine for the social media camera phones.
Magdalene was despondent. “They have taken my Lord and I do not know where they have placed Him.
I’m just livid. They have taken my Lord and treated Him like garbage.
I showed this clip to my wife who asked why this in particular would upset me any more than any of the other myriad abuses we’ve witnessed throughout our lives. We’re in our 40’s. I still remember Sr. Marie and the altar girls when I was a kid. If it hadn’t been for the solid faith my parents transmitted to me and the formation they gave me, I probably would have bailed loooong ago.
The reason why this one made me sick is because the more time I spend with my Lord – at mass, His sacrifice; meditating on His passion; simply staring at a crucifix; and yes, at Adoration – the more I love Him and desire union with Him. And I want that for my family. And tradition helped me understand this better than anything ever has. Connecting with the ancient worship of my faith – the one, true, faith – opened my eyes.
Tabernacle, Our Lady of Good Counsel, Newark, NJ
You hear that Excellencies? For years we’ve heard you… “Who would want to attend this outdated ‘thing’ that they never even knew? We tried to kill it once before specifically for this purpose! Now go back to your Novus Ordo, V2 parishes with your dancers and bubbles and, and…” To that I say what I said to a priest who denied me Communion during the coof-o-rama simply because I knelt before him and stuck out my tongue. He demanded, “Stick out your hands! Your hands!!!” I replied softly…
“I can’t.”
My goodness… they pranced the Creator of the Universe around like He was a dime-a-dance burlesque showgirl. They tossed Him like He was a toy balloon at a county fair or Robert Preston’s baton in the final scene of The Music Man.
They treated my Lord like they just don’t care.
It’s almost as if they don’t really believe He’s Truly Present.
Lord Jesus Christ, King of Everlasting Glory, I desire to love Thee with all my heart. Please look upon me from Thy cross with mercy and love. Give me to atone for the abuses to Thy Sacred Body.
I watched Matt Walsh’s film last night (and again this evening). If you haven’t seen it, please do yourself the favor. Also, I don’t generally recommend viewing options so take that for what it’s worth.
Something haunted me as I watched this movie. That is the utter reality that we are living in a world which rejects ultimate reality. We’ve known this for some time.
A Woman… THE Woman
For me, that moment of truth came in 2017. I was finishing up a six year stint teaching theology in a large diocesan high school. My aim was always to teach Christ Crucified. The particular subject was moral theology. I had no problem convincing the kids that abortion is murder or that a well formed prayer life is essential to a virtuous life. But when we came to the very nature of man and we began with the simple exercise of reading through the beginning of Genesis I encountered the following from a student who soon after informed me that she was a lesbian.
Shaking her head in disgust, she said to me, “Male and female He created them? Really?”
Where does one even go with that?
Another student a few days later cried – literally cried in distress – while talking with me after class. She could not understand something I had said. It was something along the lines of “only women can give birth.” When I asked why this troubled her, she looked at me and said, in totally sincerity, “What about trans men?” Or it might have been trans women or the Trans Siberian Orchestra for all I care. I was done. I knew at that moment that Satan had gotten hold of this corner of the world and it would ultimately fall to me to homeschool my kids rather than ever subject them to this diabolical filth.
This was a Catholic high school.
These were baptized and confirmed teenagers.
Satan HATES the image of God in man and Satan HATES the Mother of God in particular.
More to come.
Pray your rosaries. Every decade. Every day.
Virgin Most Powerful, Fairest of our race, pray for us!
Someone asked me recently about the header image on this page. I assume you’re looking at it now. If not, go ahead. I’ll wait…
I’ve written this blog since 2008. True, most of my older posts have been archived. They were more for my kids to read one day and learn about their early life and all the fun things we did as a family. I’m very proud of that writing and I hope one day my kids will look with as much fondness on those time as I had when writing about them. Recently the focus of my writing shifted a bit. My life has shifted a bit. Prior to a few weeks ago the header was a funny picture of my Jack Russell Terrier. He was sitting in my lap in stopped traffic on an interstate in Texas. He had his paws on the steering wheel as though he was driving the car. Now, that image has been replaced with what you see above. And what you see is a home altar set for the Traditional Latin Mass. Believe me, I prefer mass in a church; but you see there was this snowstorm in Texas that knocked out power for a few days. When a flurry falls in the Lone Star State all roads become impassable. We happened to have a priest-friend visiting. All flights were cancelled so he stayed and said mass for us every day. If you look carefully you’ll see the altar cards (printed from my laptop and framed in the kids’ old piano recital frames), a statue of the Blessed Mother, crucifix, paintings of St. Joseph and the Christ Child and (again) of the Blessed Mother, two candles (low mass) made of beeswax and blessed using the traditional forms, and my favorite, an old copy of the 1970’s-era Worship hymnal used to prop up the Canon of the mass. How’s that for irony? Couple it with the clearly-visible snow out the window and it’s not a bad picture.
So, not to sound like one of those crazy traddy conspiracy nuts but… shhh… *Are you prepared for home mass? It’s not hard to get your home ready. Thanks to Bergoglio and “TC” it may become more of a thing down the road than you think. It may not either. Either way, it’s not a bad idea to be prepared.
2) He’s Still Not Pope, Just in Case You Forgot
In the epistle at mass this morning we heard this:
“And the multitude of men and women who believed in the Lord increased still more, so that they carried the sick into the streets and laid them on beds and pallets that, when Peter passed, his shadow at least might fall on some of them.”
Acts 5
My source in Rome tells me (though any quick image search tells you all you need to know) that crowds gathered in St. Peter’s Square or the serpentine audience hall nearby are simply not what they used to be. Imagine that the early Christians hoped simply that Peter’s shadow might fall on them. Today people just don’t seem interested. Could it be they know this guy ain’t Peter? Oh for the days of on unimpeded see!
3) What to Ponder Daily
Also in the missal is a prayer entitled “Subjects for Daily Meditation”. I love this one because it’s short and to the point. The prayer begins “Remember Christian that today thous hast…” and then lists off a dozen or so subjects for daily meditation. God to worship, the angels and saints to invoke, etc. The most striking, to me, is the line “judgment to face”. This is certainly very true and not something most of us want to think about. But how necessary it is TO think about it.
This past Sunday morning, while driving along a quiet stretch of I-20 in Alabama, I noticed a yellow Ryder moving truck parked perpendicular to the travel lanes. The truck was in that triangular area between where the highway continues and an exit ramp splits off. In New Jersey we used to refer to it as the “zebra stripes” but I think the Federal Highway Administration calls it the “gore”. As I got within 1/8 mile of this truck, the driver did something I was not expecting. He gunned his engine and darted straight onto the highway. It appears he had come the wrong way down the ramp, realized his (incredibly obvious) mistake, and decided the through lanes were the ideal spot for a giant U-turn. It also appears he did NOT see me barreling toward him in a Yukon at 85 MPH. No flex, it was a rental. A calm came over me as I said, “Honey, brace yourself,” to my wife seated beside me. And then, I promise you, my best friend, my guardian angel took the wheel and fishtailed me through that yellow blur. I just remember almost going off the road into a ditch and coming right back into the lane I was in as if nothing had happened. My niece from the back seat asked if I had taking tactical driving lessons from the FBI.
My life did not “flash before my eyes”. I had just been to mass. I try to make use of weekly confession. But in the time after that near-death experience I thought to myself, “Was I truly prepared?” I think the answer for all of us should be to live as though we could stand before the Just Judge at any moment. I’ve been trying to incorporate more devotional practices into my daily life and particularly for my family. I kiss the feet of Our Lord’s corpus on the crucifix in my bedroom before I leave in the morning. I carry my rosaries with me at all times. On that point, believe it or not, that practice had actually been beaten out of me as a young seminarian many years ago. See my last post and you’ll know why. But I want to have a greater intimacy with Our Lord and His Mother and the saints and my angel. I want to know that if I were suddenly standing before the cross, which is the “throne of judgment”, I would advance toward my bleeding, disfigured Savior and not run away in terror and shame.
That’s one reason why I go to mass every day – to prepare for Calvary by going to Calvary.
As near as I can tell, the nitwits running this parish “participated” in the synodal gay way by gathering a sampling of young people from the parish to trash the Catholic faith, about which they know absolutely nothing because they were taught in Catholic schools.
With me so far?
Deacon Tom (Paul VI really laid a number on us with the perma-deacons, none of whom observe clerical continence) lays out the bullet points from the “listening sessions”. I’ve chosen three at random for your reading pleasure.
1.) “We need to create an atmosphere whereby the LGTBQ community feels welcomed and loved.”
-Or we could really be charitable and tell them to stop calling themselves by a bunch of letters, stop committing physically harmful and spiritually abhorrent acts of sodomy, and straighten up because God wills their eternal salvation not damnation. Let’s welcome them by teaching the Catholic faith!
2.) “Our young people commented… can’t women be priests?”
-No. in like manner, I, a man, can never be a mother. Man gives. Woman receives. Seed. Field. Do any of you twits ever observe nature or are you so glued to your phones you speak in meme?
3.) “We need more programs for… 18-25 year olds to better understand their faith”
Good God! Does anyone remember midnight basketball? What we need is solid catechesis from solid, manly priests. I’m talking priests who aren’t inclined toward post-pubescent boys and who wear their cassocks like a tomb enclosing their earthly frames. Teach the faith. Live the faith. Want a “program”? Try daily mass and fifteen decades of the rosary every day.
Call me when the Church has completely imploded. I’ll be sipping on my gin and tonic.
“Devout” Catholic Joe Biden just said today that anyone who owns an AR-15 is “sick”.
Forgive me for laughing.
By the way, mine is a-maze-ing. Customized to my liking. The next thing for her is to have Psalm 42 etched in Latin onto the stock. “Judica me, Deus…”
This reminds me of the time my then-bishop said I was a “vigilante” for even owning a handgun, let alone ever training with it regularly, following every safety precaution, etc. He said I couldn’t carry it onto diocesan property. Sorry, Your Grace, but Texas law says otherwise. In conscience I had to weigh those two dictates and I chose the better part.
Can you believe this man once blocked me? Really?
Look, purple piping, the safety of my family will ALWAYS come first.
That bishop, by the way, is now Cardinal Farrell. I know. I was shocked. Shocked…
Look, prelates and presidents , I’ve been called worse by better men. I’ve been blocked on Twitter by the best of the worst. You can try your best but I simply do not care anymore. You do you, as the kids say. Preach your synodal gay way.. Me? I’ll be over here defending my family. It’s my God-given obligation and my right.
And as long as you’re calling people sick and vigilantes, just remember I survived Uncle Ted. I know your kind. I will not be cowed nor will I be silenced.
Folks, I got off all that social media nonsense a while ago. Sorry but I'm not on Twitbook, Facepalm, YouHu, WingWang or any of the others. Maybe an event will happen to make me change my mind like Peter and Paul coming down with flaming swords and commanding it be so. Until then, read the blog and if you feel a comment is in order or you feel like sharing a tip or suggestion for a topic, email me at harvey@harveymillican.com.
Harvey Millican's Blog: Musings of a Trad Dad 