"You Knit Me Together In My Mother's Womb"

PSALM 139

A psalm of David.

O LORD, you have searched me and known me.
You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
.....you discern my thoughts from far away.
You search out my path and my lying down,
.....and are acquainted with all my ways.
Even before a word is on my tongue,
.....O LORD, you know it completely.
You hem me in, behind and before,
.....and lay your hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;
.....it is so high that I cannot attain it.

Where can I go from your spirit?
.....Or where can I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there;
.....if I make by bed in Sheol, you are there,
If I take the wings of the morning
.....and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me,
.....and your right hand shall hold me fast.
If I say, "Surely the darkness shall cover me,
.....and the light around me become night,"
even the darkness is not dark to you;
.....the night is as bright as the day,
.....for darkness is as light to you.

For it was you who formed my inward parts;
.....you knit me together in my mother's womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
.....Wonderful are your works;
that I know very well.
.....My frame was not hidden from you,
when I was being made in secret,
.....intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes beheld my unformed substance.
In your book were written
.....all the days that were formed for me,
.....when none of them as yet existed.

How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God!
.....How vast is the sum of them!
I try to count them--they are more than the sand;
.....I come to the end--I am still with you.

O that you would kill the wicked, O God,
.....and that the bloodthirsty would depart from me--
those who speak of you maliciously,
.....and lift themselves up against you for evil!
Do I not hate those who hate you, O LORD?
.....And do I not loathe those who rise up against you?
I hate them with perfect hatred;

.....I count them my enemies.
Search me, O God, and know my heart;

.....test me and know my thoughts.

See if there is any wicked way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting.

Sociologist Compares Today's Crisis To Nazi Smear Campaign

WARNING:  The National Catholic Reporter online news service has links to Web sites promoting ideas directly in conflict with Church documents* and the Magisterium (e.g., New Age, such as those of Fr. Thomas Keating). This article is provided only due to the importance of the topic.
  
*See links to some of these Church documents here.

Update, November 14, 2010: The NCR has a Danger (Red) fidelity rating from CatholicCulture.org. Read why here.
 

The following excerpt is from the National Catholic Reporter online news service.

By John L. Allen, Jr.
April 17, 201

PERHAPS THE MOST remarkable defense of Benedict XVI and the Catholic Church vis-à-vis the sexual abuse crisis to appear in recent weeks ironically never mentions the current pope, and it comes not from a senior Vatican official but a lay Italian sociologist of religion. In a nutshell, the suggestion – never made explicit, but clear nonetheless – is that today’s drumbeat of criticism of the church over “pedophile priests” amounts to a replay of a Nazi smear campaign.

Massimo Introvigne, who directs the international Center for Studies on New Religions, published an essay in the April 16 edition of L’Avvenire, the official newspaper of the Italian bishops, about a Nazi campaign in 1937 led by Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels to discredit the Catholic Church following Pope Pius XI’s anti-Nazi encyclical Mit brennender Sorge. Introvigne argues that Goebbels created what sociologists would later call a “moral panic,” based on real facts, but facts which are distorted and amplified.

In the end, Introvigne says, the plan backfired – Goebbels’ attempt to smear the church generated more outrage than actual cases of sexual abuse in 1930s-era German Catholicism, which were reported in the German media and tried in German courts. 

Read entire article  >>

Lutheran Defends Pope Benedict XVI

The following article appeared on the blog of the Web site "LOGIA: A Journal of Lutheran Theology," on March 31, 2010:


THE DICTATORSHIP OF RELATIVISM STRIKES BACK--AND GOES NUCLEAR


Some ecumenical thoughts at Holy Week 2010 from John Stephenson


The secular press has had it in for Joseph Ratzinger for going on three decades. Before his election as Pope in the spring of 2005, he was routinely derided in his homeland as the Panzerkardinal (“tank cardinal”) and caricatured in North America as the “Enforcer” or even the “Rottweiler.” The roots of this negative reputation stretch back at least as far as the book-length interview he granted to the Italian journalist Vittorio Messori that catapulted him to global fame when published as The Ratzinger Report in 1985. Prior to that juncture, as a heavyweight German academic who had leapfrogged over a major episcopal see (Munich-Freising) to become a leading official in the Roman curia (as cardinal prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) under the still new John Paul II, Ratzinger’s was hardly a household name.


But shrewd observers must wonder about the startling disproportion between the enormous hue and cry artificially whipped up by the media and the softly spoken real life figure who seems always to have avoided hyperbole like the plague. Even though the curial department over which he presided for almost a quarter century is the direct heir to the 16^th-century Inquisition, the disciplinary measures dealt out by Ratzinger against barely a score of wildly Modernist (actually mostly apostate) theologians over more than two decades add up to a string of fairly mild censures, gentle slaps on the wrist in most cases. Hans Küng lost the right to teach theology as an accredited representative of the magisterium (as his missio canonica was stripped from him), but (despite his clear disavowal of the divinity of Christ!) retained his status as an incardinated (=rostered) Roman Catholic priest, and he has, well, greatly profited in fame and fortune from his much trumpeted role as Rome’s chief dissident. Had he rather than Ratzinger landed in the chair of cardinal prefect back in the early 1980s, the media would have shown no sympathy for the advocates of traditional Christianity that a totalitarian liberal such as Küng would have hounded to the remotest margins of Church life; ironically, there is no more illiberal force on earth than a liberal with his hands on the levers of power.


Moreover, when someone takes the trouble to examine Ratzinger’s huge opus over close to six decades as a professional theologian, they make the discovery that he occupies a centrist position in the constellation of modern Roman Catholic theology; he is at most mildly “conservative”, the “ultra-conservative” label routinely affixed to him by most sections of the press being sheerly laughable.


[...]


By the way, the world still hates, loathes, & detests Christ and His Church!


In addition to the unremitting hostility directed at him from the Modernist wing of his own Communion, even prior to his election as Pope, Ratzinger was a favourite target of the unbelieving world’s impassioned hatred for Christ Jesus our Lord and the members of His mystical body. Some years ago, the British Daily Telegraph (which at one time had the reputation of being a “quality” newspaper) reported that the then cardinal had committed a terrible “gaffe” by publicly expressing hope for the conversion of the Jews. Fancy that, a Christian wishing salvation for a sizeable group of his neighbours, a faux pas indeed! A Google search has confirmed my memory that British journalists were likewise incensed by the then cardinal’s comparison of Buddhism with spiritual autoeroticism. How scandalous that a Christian spokesman should speak candidly of religions that offer a spurious salvation!


The Canadian mainstream media were frenziedly sharpening their knives against Joseph Ratzinger in the weeks when he was a strong candidate to succeed John Paul II. His papacy was barely a few hours old when the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) evening news ran a segment on an aged Italian woman (a “good Catholic”, of course) who stood crestfallen amid a jubilant crowd as Benedict XVI appeared on the balcony of St. Peter’s, walking dejectedly away as she realized that women’s ordination, contraception, sexual licence, abortion on demand, and all that good stuff would still be denied the papal seal of approval. That bloody hatchet job had been carefully prepared way ahead of a cardinal’s booming “Habemus papam—reverendissimum dominum Josephum Cardinalem Ratzinger” from the balcony!


Remarkably, when the press manufactured further storms of outrage on his lifting of the excommunications still hanging over the four remaining SSPX bishops in January 2009, one of the strongest defences made of Benedict XVI in his homeland came from the word processor of Germany’s leading orthodox Lutheran theologian. Gottfried Martens [....] Dr. Martens pointed out in his parish newsletter that the Pope had simply smoothed the way for talks between the SSPX and the CDF by graciously lifting the excommunication of the four renegade bishops; he had not granted them a recognized public ministry in the Roman Catholic Church—they remain unrostered, to use our terminology; and least of all did he knowingly “rehabilitate” a Holocaust denier. But instead of surfing in search of better information to <http://www.logia.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=79&catid=39:web-forum&Itemid=18>, the mainstream media take every opportunity to add the charge of “rehabilitating a Holocaust denier” to their already lengthy list of Ratzinger’s many sins. The day after his election to the papacy, the headline of a British tabloid read, “From Hitler Youth to Papa Ratzi!” For as is well known, conscripted teenagers forced into the collapsing armies of the Third Reich shared all the guilt of the worst war criminals, especially if these young men happened to be German nationals.


[...]


Read the full article here.

AP guilty of bad journalism in Oakland abuse reporting, says Ignatius Press founder :: Catholic News Agency (CNA)

The Reformation Project (A Sneak Peek!)

This is a sample of the upcoming ten-part series by renowned Scripture scholar Fr. Mitch Pacwa, S.J.

Visit Fr. Mitch on YouTube or Facebook, or visit Ignatius Publications.

The Rosary Is A Powerful Weapon

[The mother of the King was the Queen Mother.] "Then Adonijah...came to Bathsheba, Solomon's mother....Then he said....'I have one request to make of you; do not refuse me....Please ask King Solomon - he will not refuse you - to give me Abishag the Shunammite as my wife.' Bathsheba said, 'Very well; I will speak to the king on your behalf.' So Bathsheba went to King Solomon, to speak to him on behalf of Adonijah. The king rose to meet her and bowed down to her; then he sat on his throne, and had a throne brought for the king's mother, and she sat on his right. Then she said, 'I have one small request to make of you; do not refuse me.' And the king said to her 'Make your request, my mother, for I will not refuse you.' " ~ 1 Kings 2:13-20

"At a certain point the wine ran out, and Jesus' mother told him, 'They have no more wine.' ...His mother said to the servants, 'Do whatever he tells you.' " ~ John 2:3-5 

"....The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective."  ~ James 5:16

"One day through the Rosary and Scapular I will save the world."  ~ the Blessed Virgin Mary to St. Dominic

"Say the Rosary every day, to obtain peace for the world."  ~ Our Lady of Fatima, 1917

Rosary Resources:

Pray with the Family Rosary on 101.7 FM (Buffalo), weeknights at 7 p.m. 

Ainglkiss.com - download free eBook on the Rosary - for children and adults - to your computer or USB key for easy viewing without having to go online. E-Books for youth are also available on topics such as 'Examining Your Conscience,' 'The Stations of the Cross,' etc. [Admin. note Dec. 3, 2010: this seems to no longer be available.]

A Scriptural Rosary - is good for anyone, children to seniors, wanting to gain a deeper understanding of the scriptural roots of the Mysteries of the Rosary.

Vatican Online Rosary - a text from Sacred Scripture and from the Catechism of the Catholic Church is included with each Mystery.

Online Rosary - not yet updated with Luminous Mysteries, but has pictures, Bible verses and commentaries on Mysteries, beautiful music, and your choice of English or Latin versions.

Rosarium Virginis Mariae - Pope John Paul II's Apostolic Letter on the Rosary. (This is also linked in our sidebar under "Church Documents.)

 

Divine Mercy Flood My Soul

The first Sunday after Easter is Divine Mercy Sunday.

The video below has the instructions Jesus gave to St. Faustina for the Chaplet of Divine Mercy. The song, "Divine Mercy Flood My Soul," is by Catholic singer, songwriter, and inspirational speaker Annie Karto. See our sidebar for the link to her Web site.

"O blood and water which gushed forth
from the heart of Jesus
as a font of mercy for us, I trust in you.
Jesus, I trust in you."

Happy Belated Birthday Gianna Jessen (April 6)

On April 6, her thirty-third birthday, Gianna was a guest on the radio program Catholic Connection With Teresa Tomeo. Listen online via the Ave Maria Radio audio archives.

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Burned alive for 18 hours, she was supposed to be dead. She is alive. Doctors said she would never walk. She runs in marathons. Think that's all that is amazing about this woman? Think again.

 

"If abortion is merely about women's rights, where were mine?"
~ Gianna Jessen

Gianna Jessen: Abortion Survivor - Part 1

Gianna Jessen: Abortion Survivor - Part 2