Wave Of Parish Closures Make International News For The Worst Reasons

Cardinal Ted McCarrick really is the gift that keeps on giving. Meanwhile, Secretary of State Marco Rubio will meet with Pope Leo XIV to help smooth over US/Vatican relations.

Archeologists Investigate New Discoveries About The Origins Of The Vikings

From Chronicle – Medieval History Documentaries

Through new discoveries in science and archaeology, this episode explores the origins of the Vikings and how a great Viking dynasty changed history. It investigates who the Vikings were and why they left Scandinavia to plunder far-off lands. New scientific research suggests they were driven by an unstoppable force: climate change. In Norway, experts build replica Viking ships and explain the sailing technology that enabled long distance voyages. The Vikings continued raiding for decades. But eventually they began to establish more permanent settlements in Britain and Ireland, and in 2020 archaeologists discovered Dublin’s massive Viking harbour. A mighty king named Ivarr controlled this port, and he and his descendants built an empire in Britain and Ireland.

Traditional Catholic Morning Prayers in English | May

Traditional Catholic morning prayers to help start your day in a godly way! The month of May is dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary. May our devotion to the Blessed Mother increase more and more and help us to love her divine Son, Jesus, more and more. We've included the Memorare, the litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and a Spiritual Communion. Begin your May with daily morning prayer. This video is a compilation of many traditional morning prayers Catholics say, and should not be considered a replacement for those who have an obligation to pray the Divine Office morning prayers.

Why "Saved by Grace Alone" Requires Catholic Sacraments

From Totus Catholica

What if salvation by grace alone isn’t just a one-time decision but a lifelong journey of encountering God through the sacraments? In this transformative video, we explore the Catholic understanding of grace and how the sacraments are not optional rituals but essential encounters with Christ’s saving power. From baptism to the Eucharist, confession to anointing of the sick, these sacred acts are the ordinary means by which God pours His grace into our lives. 📌 Watch until the end to discover how living sacramentally transforms your faith and draws you closer to Christ in everyday life. ✨ What You’ll Learn in This Video: 📖 How grace is God’s life entering your soul, not a vague blessing 🌟 Why the sacraments are necessary for salvation according to Scripture and Tradition 👑 The difference between earning salvation and cooperating with God’s grace 🙏 Practical steps to embrace the sacraments and let them shape your daily life ⏳ Chapters: 0:00 - Introduction: Saved by Grace Alone—But What Does That Mean? 1:18 - The Tension Between Grace and Sacraments 2:41 - Grace Works Through the Sacraments 4:14 - Why the Sacraments Are Essential, Not Optional 5:41 - How Your Disposition Affects the Fruitfulness of the Sacraments 7:23 - Living Sacramentally: Letting Grace Transform Daily Life 9:03 - Addressing Common Objections About the Sacraments 10:00 - Key Takeaways and Practical Steps to Embrace the Sacraments 📖 Key Scripture & References: Ephesians 2:8,9 – “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.” John 3:5 – Jesus says, “No one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and the Spirit.” James 2:26 – “Faith without works is dead.” CCC 1129 – The sacraments of the New Covenant are necessary for salvation. John 20:23 – Jesus grants the apostles authority to forgive sins. 🔗 Additional Resources: 📖 Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC 1129): The sacraments are necessary for believers. 📖 St. Augustine: “God who created you without you will not save you without you.” 📖 Pope John Paul II: Confession as a tribunal of mercy, not condemnation. 📖 St. Cyprian: “You cannot have God as your Father if you do not have the Church as your Mother.” Have you ever struggled to understand the role of the sacraments in salvation? How does viewing them as encounters with Christ’s grace deepen your appreciation for their necessity?

St Monica: A 4th Century Supermom Who Had Her Priorities Straight

Today is the Feast of St Monica, mother of St Augustine, who was a Manichaean until his mother literally prayed him into the Faith. She also prayed her pagan husband, Patricius, into converting on his deathbed.

From Aleteia

By Sr M. Michele Jascenia, SCMC

Her family’s salvation was her singular goal and she never relented in her efforts to make that happen.What we know of St. Monica, whose feast is celebrated on August 27, comes almost entirely from the Confessions  of St. Augustine, her son. And how fitting it is that her memorial precedes his feast by one day.

She preceded him to sainthood (even if hers was recognized only later) and, more than any human, was instrumental in bringing him to the Church and heaven. St. Ambrose deserves credit for Augustine’s intellectual conversion, but it was certainly Monica’s years of prayer, holy example, suffering and sacrifices, along with her bold pursuit of Augustine to Milan, that brought her elder son to the faith. He was by far the most troublesome of her three children—all of whom embraced the faith sooner or later. Her daughter, Perpetua, was head of a monastery near Hippo. Monica’s younger son, Navigius, who was with her in her final suffering and death, produced a child who was later a deacon of the Catholic Church in North Africa.
  
The life of every saint presents us with examples we’d do well to emulate and Monica is no exception. A Catholic from birth, she patiently endured a very difficult marriage to Patricius, a pagan landowner and minor Roman official who was reportedly hot-tempered, arrogant, serially unfaithful, and who even objected to her works of charity and piety. It has been said that he “respected” her, at least to the point that he didn’t beat her as his contemporaries were wont to do to their wives.

Monica endured living in a household with a pagan mother-in-law who shared some of her son’s worst traits. But through her prayers and humble example of Christian love and service, she was able to win over them both to the faith and see them baptized.  

Augustine was her toughest challenge, however. Patricius consented to Augustine’s baptism once, when the child was gravely ill, but withdrew consent when he regained his health. Augustine was dissolute in his youth, acquired a concubine at 17 and bought into the Manichaean heresy while away from home, studying in Carthage.   

How many mothers can relate to this scene? Home from school, Augustine starts spouting the tenets of Manichaeanism at the dinner table and Monica, appalled by her son’s heretical talk, commands him to leave the house immediately, for good. Later, inspired by a holy vision, she allows him back. He repays her by running off to Rome with his concubine, with whom he has a son, Adeodatus.

Through unflagging hope, unceasing prayer and probably many tears, Monica followed Augustine to Rome, and finding him no longer there, to Milan.

Monica knew that God hears our prayers and desires the salvation of all. Like every good mother, nothing mattered more to her than the salvation of her family and she was determined to spare no effort in enlisting God’s help toward that goal. 

Her trust and determination in pursuing the one thing that, after her husband’s death, mattered most to her–leading her lost son back to God and baptism, so that they could be united in Christ and in eternity—is a magnificent lesson on the priorities and single-minded dedication all mothers should have in aiding in the salvation of their children.   

In the face of rejection and setbacks, how many of us fail to persevere in prayer, figuring that God would have answered our prayers by now if they were in accord with his will?

Do we ever ask God: How much longer must I wait for you to intervene?

Are we sometimes at the point of giving in to despair when, for example, we’re praying that others be relieved of great suffering–a young friend with inoperable cancer, the Christians in Iraq–and prayer is the only thing we can do to help, but it doesn’t seem to be helping at all?

We’d all do well to follow Monica’s example of perseverance in prayer and hope, and by making the salvation of loved ones a priority.

The Empty Convent: 8 Reasons Why Women Have Abandoned The Catholic Sisterhood (See Note)

From Purely Catholic

In 1965, there were 188,000 Catholic religious sisters in the USA. Today, that number has fallen by 82%. We already knew vocations were declining for priests and monks as well, but not nearly at the same level as nuns. So why is this? What has changed over the last 60 years to cause such a dramatic shift? Let’s find out in this video.

Note from the Old Curmudgeon ~ The exception is those Orders that still adhere to Tradition. They're not having a shortage of vocations; indeed, they're thriving.

Indisputable Evidence the Shroud of Turin is Real

Seringapatam 1799: Storming The Tiger's Fortress

Today is the 227th anniversary of the Battle of Seringapatam.

On 4th May 1799, four thousand British and sepoy troops stormed Seringapatam, the fortress capital of Tipu Sultan - the Tiger of Mysore. In four brutal hours, over 1,500 British and sepoys were killed or wounded in one of the bloodiest assaults in the history of the British army in India. This is the story of the Battle of Seringapatam 1799, the climactic battle of the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War. Tipu Sultan was possibly the most formidable opponent the British ever faced in India. Unlike other Indian rulers, he understood that British expansion was fundamentally different - every treaty, every alliance was a step toward total control. After the humiliation of the Third Anglo-Mysore War, Tipu rebuilt his forces and sought allies, even corresponding with Napoleon in Egypt. When the British intercepted that correspondence, Governor-General Richard Wellesley had his pretext for war. The assault was spearheaded by the forlorn hope - a near-suicidal charge led by Sergeant Graham, who was shot dead as he crested the breach calling out his promised promotion: "Lieutenant Graham!" Behind him came Major-General David Baird, a man bent on revenge after spending 44 months in Tipu's dungeons, and a young Colonel Arthur Wellesley - the future Duke of Wellington. The breach wasn't a convenient gateway - it was a steep mound of rubble where men climbed over their own dead. British regiments including the 73rd and 74th Highlanders, the 12th Foot, and Swiss mercenaries of the de Meuron Regiment stormed the walls in the hottest part of the day. Tipu Sultan himself fought to the end with dual hunting rifles before falling near the Water Gate. Bernard Cornwell fans will recognize this as the climax of Sharpe's Tiger, though our story sticks to the historical facts. From Tipu's mechanical tiger (now in the V&A Museum) to the rockets that inspired "the rockets' red glare" in the American national anthem, discover how the storming of the Tiger's fortress changed the course of British India forever. Chapters: 0:00 Introduction 0:57 Tipu Sultan 3:40 The French 5:31 Richard Wellesley 6:53 4th Anglo-Mysore War 9:18 Seringapatam 11:17 Siege begins 11:56 Arthur Wellesley's Defeat 13:13 Tipu's Rockets 14:48 British Bombardment 16:10 A Bold Plan 17:27 General David Baird 19:24 Assault Plan 20:24 The Forlorn Hope 21:47 Battle of Seringapatam 25:18 Death of Tipu Sultan 27:16 Looting 28:35 Congreve Rockets 29:36 Aftermath

Why Being Rather Than Nothingness? Part XI

Dr Martin continues his series on time and reality, discussing how we make the mistake of paying attention to atheists, who refuse to accept the existence of the spiritual realm.

From Crisis

By Regis Martin, STD

Why do we pay attention to atheists when they condescend to tell us the truth about God, which is that He does not exist? Or anything at all touching on matters of the spirit, when they make no provision for it in their system?

"When I hear the word culture," bristled Hermann Göring, "I reach for my revolver." Since he was, after Adolf Hitler, the second most powerful man in the Third Reich, attention must be paid. And while he almost certainly lifted the line from a hack Nazi playwright named Hanns Johst, it would not have been wise back then to accuse Hitler’s Air Marshall of plagiarism. Take away his pistol and all his airplanes, however, and see how fast his standing as a culture critic goes down in flames—like so many of his fighter planes blown out of the skies by a belatedly aroused Europe.

The point is, we shouldn’t ask the very people who despise our culture, who are determined on its destruction, to instruct us on all that is noble and good—and therefore worth preserving—any more than a hospital patient suffering from rickets qualifies as an expert on matters of diet and health or a nihilist armed with a Ph.D. is qualified for a chair in philosophy at any university in the land.  

So, why do we pay attention to atheists when they condescend to tell us the truth about God, which is that He does not exist? Or anything at all touching on matters of the spirit, when they make no provision for it in their system? A system so claustrophobically closed that it leaves its victims gasping for air—for the very oxygen without which the soul cannot breathe—has less than zero to offer anyone. “Spiritual asphyxiation,” writes Jean Daniélou, “is the condition of man, left to himself, deprived of the energies of God.” The air of atheism is too toxic to allow the life of the spirit to thrive. s

Atheists, therefore, are the least competent of all when it comes to weighing the evidence for or against God. And they can no more eliminate God’s existence by their refusal to believe than a blind man can, by his inability to see, cancel the sun. Besides, how reliable can a judgment about God be coming from someone whose consuming ambition of life is the abolition of God? 

If I wish to know something about sanctity, does it make sense to talk to people who hate holiness? I might as well seek out a Satanist. No, in order to learn anything at all about the love of God, I shall simply go and ask a saint—or at least an honest sinner, who, despite repeated failures to become one, nevertheless soldiers on, fortified by the conviction that in the end the only sadness will be his not having become a saint.

It is perfectly natural, therefore, and totally normal, that we should be thinking about God, ruminating on the question of His existence and how we can shore up the most convincing case for it. He is, after all, as Maurice Blondel puts it in his great work L’Action, “at the center of what I think and of what I do. …To go from myself to myself, I pass through him constantly.” There can be no instance of human thought or action, in other words, in which God is ever absent.

And while it is certainly true, as Fr. John Courtney Murray has pointed out, that while “God’s essence does indeed lie beyond the scope of intelligence, His existence does not.” Not to know that, he adds, “is to nullify oneself as a man, a creature of intelligence.”   

And why is that? Because belief in God is, quite simply, the bedrock truth upon which everything else depends. To dare to think otherwise, Murray insists, amounts to

a miserably flat denouement to the great intellectual drama in whose opening scene Plato appeared with the astonishing announcement that launched the high action of philosophy—his insight that there is an order of transcendent reality, higher than the order of human intelligence and the measure of it, to which access is available to the mind of man.

What other question is there, after all, to which there can be only one answer? Why does anything at all exist in the world, why is there rather not nothing? The answer can only be God, who, in speaking His Word, brought it all out of nothing. It is certainly not Atlas who holds up the world, inasmuch as there is nothing in Atlas to uphold him. So, perhaps all those pious old nuns who told us as young children about why we were made were not lying after all. That we really were put here on planet Earth in order to know and to love God and thus to be happy in Heaven with Him forever.

It cannot be the least bit unreasonable to ask such a question. Why else have we got a brain if we can’t exercise it before the ultimate mystery? How else are we to account for our existence? If the mind’s most basic need is to know all that we do not know, then the refusal even to ask the question amounts to a most wanton betrayal of the human intelligence. Indeed, to turn away from the question, abandoning the search for ultimate meaning, would be both irrational and inhuman.      

To quote the irrepressible Chesterton, “If there were no God, there would be no atheists.” Unplug God from the world He made and there would be no world, much less one filled with busy little atheists endlessly arguing the point. There would be only nothing, an endless and everlasting expanse of nonbeing. One to which Pascal has given unforgettable expression in his unfinished masterpiece in defense of the Christian faith, the Pensées. “When I consider the brief span of my life,” he writes, putting his finger on the most fearful contingency of all, which is that of a world wholly without God,  

absorbed into the eternity which comes before and after—as the remembrance of a guest that tarrieth but a day—the small space I occupy and which I see swallowed up in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me, I take fright and am amazed to see myself here rather than there: there is no reason for me to be here rather than there, now rather than then. Who put me here? By whose command and act were this time and place allotted to me?

Not a question so different from the one poor Hamlet was forced to wrestle with on seeing the ghost of his murdered father. Or his friend Horatio, who, on seeing the same ghost, will cry out in the most abject terror: “It harrows me with fear and wonder.”

Of the two days of a man’s life that matter most, the first being the day you were born, the second when you find out why, there is nothing to be done about the former while everything impinges on the latter. And the great sadness, of course, is that many never do find out. Sandwiched between two eternities of before and after—swallowed up by spaces of which they know nothing and which know nothing of them—they remain clueless right to the end.

Why not just see your life as a gift, an astonishment even, that God had been planning to surprise you with from all eternity, thus conferring an imperishable importance that can never be taken away? So uniquely special are you that your absence would leave a gaping hole in the fabric of being, your life miraculously grounded in a God who, from moment to moment, sends tender mercies your way—of which the most precious and unrepeatable is the fact that you exist. Because He is, you are.

But you’ve got to choose, that’s the catch. Either you’re no better than a piece of toast, however thick the butter and jam; or you are a treasured child of your Father, destined to live amid the precincts of eternal felicity. Either we find ourselves at this moment and in this place mere accidents that happened to happen, possessed of no greater worth than a pork chop; or we get to shine like the sun, our being destined to bask in the light of Christ, who, as Pure Act, remains more present to us than we are to ourselves.

“Every creature is, in itself,” declares Henri de Lubac in The Discovery God, “a theophany. Everywhere we find traces, imprints, vestiges, enigmas; and the rays of the divinity pierce through everywhere. Everything is drenched in that unique Presence. Everything becomes transparent…”