Signs Signs, Everywhere Are Signs

One Way to Answer an Atheist

"Dear Mom, I Have Some Difficult News to Share With You . . ."

January 22, 2023

Dear Mom:

Can you believe it is already the year 2023? I'm still writing '22 on everything! It seems like only yesterday that I was sitting in the first grade and celebrating the change to a new century.

I know we really haven't chatted since Christmas, Mom, and I'm sorry. Anyway, I have some difficult news to share with you and, to be honest, I really didn't want to call or talk about this face to face.

But before I get to that, let me report that Ted just got a big promotion, and I should be up for a hefty raise this year if I keep putting in all those crazy hours. You know how I work at it. (Yes, we're still struggling to pay the bills.)

Little Timmy's been okay at kindergarten, although he complains about going. But then, he wasn't happy about the day-care center either. So what can we do?

He's been a real problem, Mom. He's a good kid, but quite honestly, he's an unfair burden on us at this time in our lives.

Ted and I have talked this through, and we have finally made a choice. Plenty of other families have made the same choice and are really better off today.

Our pastor is supportive of our choice. He pointed out the family is a system, and the demands of one member shouldn't be allowed to ruin the whole. The pastor told us to be prayerful and to consider all the factors as to what is right to make our family work. He says that even though he probably wouldn't do it himself, the choice really is ours. He was kind enough to refer us to a children's clinic near here, so at least that part is easy.

Don't get me wrong, Mom. I'm not an uncaring mother. I do feel sorry for the little guy. I think he heard Ted and me talking about this the other night. I turned and saw him standing at the bottom of the stairs in his PJ's with his little teddy bear that you gave him under his arm, and his eyes were sort of welled up with tears.

Mom, the way he looked at me just about broke my heart, but I honestly believe this is better for Timmy, too. It's just not fair to force him to live in a family that can't give him the time and attention he deserves.

And please, Mom, don't give me the kind of grief that grandma gave you over your abortions. It's the same thing, you know. There's really no difference.

We've told Timmy he's just going in for a "vaccination." Anyway, they say the termination procedure is painless. I guess it's just as well that you haven't seen that much of little Timmy lately.

Please give my love to Dad.

Your daughter.

(Author unknown)

Was the Divine Mercy Revelation a Harbinger of the End Times?

I've be been reading the entire diary of St. Faustina these past couple of weeks and discovered, to my surprise, how very apocalyptic the messages are. The Lord repeatedly told her (over 70 years ago, keep in mind) that the Divine Mercy revelation was specifically given to prepare mankind of the 2nd Coming and the end of the world. It's a theme that reappears frequently.

Here are a couple of examples of what I'm talking about:

Write down these words, my daughter. Speak to the world about My mercy; let all mankind recognize My unfathomable mercy. It is a sign for the end times; after it will come the day of justice. While there is still time let them have recourse to the fount of My mercy (Diary 429).

You have to speak to the world about His great mercy and prepare the world for the Second Coming of Him who will come, not as a merciful Savior, but as a just Judge. Oh how terrible is that day! Determined is the day of justice, the day of divine wrath. The angels tremble before it. Speak to souls about this great mercy while it is still the time for granting mercy (Diary 635).

Tell souls about this great mercy of Mine, because the awful day, the day of My justice, is near (Diary 965).

Write this: before I come as the Just Judge, I am coming first as the King of Mercy. Before the day of justice arrives, there will be given to people a sign in the heavens of this sort: All light in the heavens will be extinguished, and there will be great darkness over the whole earth. Then the sign of the cross will be seen in the sky, and from the openings where the hands and the feet of the Savior were nailed will come forth great lights which will light up the earth for a period of time. This will take place shortly before the last day. (Diary 83).

Here's a link to an article that has some of the pertinent quotes displayed in bold font. There's more to it than what's discussed here, but this should give you a sense of what I'm talking about.

 

http://thedivinemercy.org/news/story.php?NID=3034&PLID=75 Also, check out this section at the EWTN website: http://www.ewtn.com/devotionals/mercy/coming.htm

Did you know a solar flare can make your toilet stop working?

That's the surprising conclusion of a NASA-funded study by the National Academy of Sciences entitledSevere Space Weather Events—Understanding Societal and Economic Impacts. In the 132-page report, experts detailed what might happen to our modern, high-tech society in the event of a "super solar flare" followed by an extreme geomagnetic storm. They found that almost nothing is immune from space weather—not even the water in your bathroom.

Photo: Auroras over Blair, Nebraska, during a geomagnetic storm in May 2005. Photo credit: Mike Hollingshead/Spaceweather.com.

The problem begins with the electric power grid. "Electric power is modern society's cornerstone technology on which virtually all other infrastructures and services depend," the report notes. Yet it is particularly vulnerable to bad space weather. Ground currents induced during geomagnetic storms can actually melt the copper windings of transformers at the heart of many power distribution systems. Sprawling power lines act like antennas, picking up the currents and spreading the problem over a wide area. The most famous geomagnetic power outage happened during a space storm in March 1989 when six million people in Quebec lost power for 9 hours: image.

According to the report, power grids may be more vulnerable than ever. The problem is interconnectedness. In recent years, utilities have joined grids together to allow long-distance transmission of low-cost power to areas of sudden demand. On a hot summer day in California, for instance, people in Los Angeles might be running their air conditioners on power routed from Oregon. It makes economic sense—but not necessarily geomagnetic sense. Interconnectedness makes the system susceptible to wide-ranging "cascade failures."

To estimate the scale of such a failure, report co-author John Kappenmann of the Metatech Corporation looked at the great geomagnetic storm of May 1921, which produced ground currents as much as ten times stronger than the 1989 Quebec storm, and modeled its effect on the modern power grid. He found more than 350 transformers at risk of permanent damage and 130 million people without power. The loss of electricity would ripple across the social infrastructure with "water distribution affected within several hours; perishable foods and medications lost in 12-24 hours; loss of heating/air conditioning, sewage disposal, phone service, fuel re-supply and so on."

"The concept of interdependency," the report notes, "is evident in the unavailability of water due to long-term outage of electric power--and the inability to restart an electric generator without water on site." . . . (continue reading)

 

De Labore Solis

NASA has issued a solar storm warning. 

It's official: Solar minimum has arrived. Sunspots have all but vanished. Solar flares are nonexistent. The sun is utterly quiet.

Like the quiet before a storm.

This week researchers announced that a storm is coming--the most intense solar maximum in fifty years. The prediction comes from a team led by Mausumi Dikpati of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). "The next sunspot cycle will be 30% to 50% stronger than the previous one," she says. If correct, the years ahead could produce a burst of solar activity second only to the historic Solar Max of 1958.

That was a solar maximum. The Space Age was just beginning: Sputnik was launched in Oct. 1957 and Explorer 1 (the first US satellite) in Jan. 1958. In 1958 you couldn't tell that a solar storm was underway by looking at the bars on your cell phone; cell phones didn't exist. Even so, people knew something big was happening when Northern Lights were sighted three times in Mexico. A similar maximum now would be noticed by its effect on cell phones, GPS, weather satellites and many other modern technologies. (continue reading)

Related: Here's another NASA article predicting the next solar cycle.

Rev. Cutié takes his toys and goes home (with a warning to the future Mrs. Cutie)

Brian Saint-Paul offers quick, pithy insight into the circus down in Miami.

Two of My New DVDs Now Available

You Might Be a Redneck if . . . You Own One of These

The White Man's Burden: A Look Back at a Catholic/Protestant Debate

James White loves to argue. He’s a Fundamentalist [Calvinist] who runs an anti-Catholic ministry, so you’d expect him to be no stranger to controversy, but his appetite for in-your-face confrontation goes way beyond typical anti-Catholic zealotry.

Alpha & Omega Ministries, the organization White runs, has carved a modest niche for itself in the Fundamentalist countercult marketplace, producing tracts and tapes attacking Oneness Pentecostals,

Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and, of course, Catholics. He and his followers pride themselves on their adversarial methods of witnessing to “cultists.”

At least once yearly, White and his friends descend on Salt Lake City during the Mormon Church’s biannual

General Conference. Armed with anti-Mormon tracts, they station themselves at each entrance to

Temple Square and hand out literature telling Mormons why they are going to hell. But leafleting is one of

the tamer methods White employs in preaching his gospel. . . . (continue reading)

You Call This "Maturity"?

I respond here to a letter-to-the-editor from a Catholic priest which appeared in the Daily Pilot. The letter's headline is: "Mature Catholics Welcome Obama," referring to the recent controversy over the University of Notre Dame's decision to confer an honorary doctorate on the President of the United States, who just happens to be an implacable foe of the Catholic Church's teaching that abortion is a grave moral evil.

The obvious implication of the headline [most likely chosen by the Pilot editors] is that Catholics who did not approve of this stunt are "immature." That would include, of course, the 70+ U.S. bishops and 350,000+ other Catholics who publicly denounced the Notre Dame debacle. According to the Pilot and, presumably, the priest who wrote the following letter, they are the immature ones, and those who laud Notre Dame's actions are the ones exhibiting "maturity."

The author of the letter to the editor is a Monsignor Wilbur Davis, a priest in Southern California. His original letter is in black, my comments are in red.

I write in reference to the three viewpoints expressed in the Daily Pilot column regarding the visit of President Barack Obama to the University of Notre Dame [“In Theory: Fightin’ Obama’s grad speech,” May 8]. 

The diverse positions expressed in the Daily Pilot by local Jewish, Protestant and Catholic religious leaders regarding the visit of Obama to the University of Notre Dame as a speaker and honoree reveal the complexity of this question and the legitimacy of varied viewpoints. [Notice his invocation of the "complexity" of this issue. Prescinding from the  anterior question of whether it is morally permissible to kill an unborn child through abortion — not a complex question at all — apparently, Monsignor Davis feels it is a "complex" question as to whether it is appropriate for a Catholic university to confer an honorary doctorate on a politician who is leading the fight against the Catholic Church's foundational moral teaching that abortion is always and everywhere murder.]

This variance is found not only between diverse faith communities but also within the community of Roman Catholics [True, but this variance among Catholics on abortion is a scandal, not something worthy of approval].

As a Catholic priest, I can tell you that our clergy engage in passionate debates about this without reaching a consensus. And this is fine. [No, Monsignor, this is not fine. How is it that Catholic priests can have "passionate debates" about whether Catholic universities should sell their birthright for a mess of pottage by publicly heaping honors on pro-abortion politicians? For there to be a debate on this issue, at least one of the priests must argue that what happened at Notre Dame is a good thing. I have no doubt that in the coterie of which Monsignor Davis speaks some priests do argue that point, but that is not fine. It is a sign of bad formation, or a willful dissent from clear and unequivocal Catholic teaching, or both.

Do Roman Catholics agree with the president on everything? No. Have we ever agreed with any president on everything? No. [Here we see the fallacy of Ignoratio Elenchi, commonly called "a red herring." It is entirely irrelevant whether any given Catholic agrees with any given president on everything. The relevant issues are 1) whether Catholics can agree with this president on the issue of abortion and, 2) whether Notre Dame should have conferred honors on someone who promotes abortion as vociferously as this president does. ]

But the fact is that Obama would not have been elected president without the Catholic vote. [Yes, this is a fact, but it's a sad fact,  a tragedy and a scandal — not something for a Catholic priest to take satisfaction in.]

American Catholics, in large, judged him to be one who stands with most — though not all — of the major issues of social concern that are integral to Catholic social teaching. [Not exactly. It's true that most American Catholics who voted in the last election voted for the candidate who actively fights against the Catholic teaching on life issues, but in doing so, those Catholics exhibited poor, immature judgment. They made an egregious error by voting for candidate Obama.]

Yet some critical life issues do place us in a tension with him and much of his party. [Tension? I guess you could call it "tension." And if the "critical life issue" were, say, slavery or racism or the belief that it should be legal to kill Hispanics, I wonder if Monsignor would refer to this as "tension."  

I believe it is an honor for a Catholic university to receive the president of the United States. [Ordinarily, it would be an honor. But given the specific circumstances  of this president's visit, it is in reality a serious dishonor for Notre Dame.]

Through the years our presidents have spoken at the University of Notre Dame, even though Catholics would have disagreements with each of them over certain significant matters. This is in no way surprising. A Catholic university that is mature in its identity can well accommodate disagreements in the pursuit of deeper understanding. [Would Monsignor Davis "accommodate disagreement" with a president who believed that slavery should be legal (many presidents with that very conviction have held office before, don't forget), and would he be in favor of that president speaking at a Catholic university's commencement address and being awarded an honorary doctorate? I doubt it. Would Monsignor see a Catholic university honoring a president who believed in legalized slavery to be a "mature" decision?  

In disputed questions it is incumbent upon us Catholics to argue our positions in the public forum in language that is intelligible and appealing to those who hold other positions. [This is exactly what the Catholic Church has been doing for decades now. And to confer honors on an politician who promotes pro-abortion extremism, as this president does, is the opposite of speaking intelligibly and appealingly. What  Notre Dame's president, Father Jenkins, did was to obfuscate the issue and distort to the point of negating, at least in the minds of many confused onlookers, the clear teaching of the Catholic Church that abortion is murder.

This is the rich complexity of America. [No, this is the fractious, foolhardy hubris of a deeply misguided university president.]

To exclude those who hold positions different from ours divides the American fabric and ultimately broadens the gulfs that sadly continue to divide our national and faith communities. [What's truly sad is how Catholics, especially Catholic priests, can be a party to such nonsense. It is they who foment division in the name of "accommodating" disagreement.   

— Wilbur Davis is a monsignor at Our Lady Queen of Angels Church in Newport Beach.

St. John Vianney: Do You Have Religion In Your Heart?

Alas, my dear brethren, what have we become even since our conversion? Instead of going always forward and increasing in holiness, what laziness and what indifference we display! God cannot endure this perpetual inconstancy with which we pass from virtue to vice and from vice to virtue. Tell me, my children, is not this the very pattern of the way you live? Are your poor lives anything other than a succession of good deeds and bad deeds? Is it not true that you go to Confession and the very next day you fall again — or perhaps the very same day?. . .

How can this be, unless the religion you have is unreal, a religion of habit, a religion of long-standing custom, and not a religion rooted in the heart? Carry on, my friend; you are only a waverer! Carry on, my poor man; in everything you do, you are just a hypocrite and nothing else! God has not the first place in your heart; that is reserved for the world and the devil. How many people there are, my dear children, who seem to love God in real earnest for a little while and then abandon Him! What do you find, then, so hard and so unpleasant in the service of God that it has repelled you so strangely and caused you to change over to the side of the world? Yet at the time when God showed you the state of your soul, you actually wept for it and realized how much you had been mistaken in your lives. If you have persevered so little, the reason for this misfortune is that the devil must have been greatly grieved to have lost you because he has done so much to get you back. He hopes now to keep you altogether. How many apostates there are, indeed, who have renounced their religion and who are Christians in name only!

But, you will say to me, how can we know that we have religion in our hearts, this religion which is consistent?

My dear brethren, this is how: listen well and you will understand if you have religion as God wants you to have it in order to lead you to Heaven. If a person has true virtue, nothing whatever can change him; he is like a rock in the midst of a tempestuous sea. If anyone scorns you, or calumniates you, if someone mocks at you or calls you a hypocrite or a sanctimonious fraud, none of this will have the least effect upon your peace of soul. You will love him just as much as you loved him when he was saying good things about you. You will not fail to do him a good turn and to help him, even if he speaks badly of your assistance. You will say your prayers, go to Confession, to Holy Communion, you will go to Mass, all according to your general custom.

To help you to understand this better, I will give you an example. It is related that in a certain parish there was a young man who was a model of virtue. He went to Mass almost every day and to Holy Communion often. It happened that another was jealous of the esteem in which this young man was held, and one day, when they were both in the company of a neighbor, who possessed a lovely gold snuffbox, the jealous one took it from its owner's pocket and placed it, unobserved, in the pocket of the young man. After he had done this, without pretending anything, he asked to see the snuffbox.

The owner expected to find it in his pocket and was astonished when he discovered that it was missing. No one was allowed to leave the room until everyone had been searched, and the snuffbox was found, of course, on the young man who was a model of goodness. Naturally, everyone immediately called him a thief and attacked his religious professions, denouncing him as a hypocrite and a sanctimonious fraud. He could not defend himself, since the box had been found in his pocket. He said nothing. He suffered it all as something which had come from the hand of God. When he was walking along the street, when he was coming from the church, or from Mass or Holy Communion, everyone who saw him jeered at him and called him a hypocrite, a fraud, a thief. This went on for quite a long time, but in spite of it, he continued with all of his religious exercises, his Confessions, his Communions, and all of his prayers, just as if everyone were treating him with the utmost respect.

After some years, the man who had been the cause of it all fell ill. To those who were with him he confessed that he had been the origin of all the evil things which had been said about this young man, who was a saint, and that through jealousy of him, so that he might destroy his good name, he himself had put the snuffbox in the young man's pocket. . . . (continue reading)

How Google Chrome Is Not Like Other Browsers

The Notre Dame commencement is history, but the Catholic identity battle continues

Colleen Carroll Campbell does a superb job of outlining some key implications of the recent Notre Dame scandal and what we should be watching for in its aftermath:

The brouhaha over President Barack Obama's appearance at the University of 
Notre Dame culminated Sunday with apparent defeat for pro-life Catholics. The 
university's hotly contested plan to bestow an honorary degree on Obama, a 
staunch supporter of legalized abortion and embryonic stem cell research, went 
off without a hitch. 

The president entered the university's Joyce Center arena to robust applause 
and enjoyed several standing ovations in the course of the commencement 
ceremony. Reporters contrasted Obama's well-received plea for transcending 
differences on abortion and embryonic research with the demonstrations of a few 
anti-Obama hecklers in the arena and several hundred vocal protesters on the 
edge of campus. Scant press was given to the much larger, more decorous 
gathering of Notre Dame students and faculty and other Catholics who filled the 
campus' main quad that day for an open-air pro-life Mass and peaceful protest 
rally, or to the coalition of pro-life students who gathered the evening before 
for an all-night campus prayer vigil. 

The dominant story line that emerged from South Bend on Sunday was that of a 
short-lived struggle that came to a swift, tidy resolution. A moderate 
president and enlightened university administrators took on a small band of 
anti-abortion extremists. And the forces of progress prevailed. 

Comforting as that story line may be to Notre Dame administrators and the 
Catholics who supported their decision to honor Obama, it ignores the true 
novelty of this controversy, which has been in national headlines for months.

That novelty has nothing to do with Notre Dame's willingness to fete a 
politician who publicly opposes fundamental moral teachings of the Catholic 
Church. That's par for the course at a university that long ago opted to put 
secular prestige before fidelity to Catholic doctrine, and for the many other 
Catholic universities that have followed suit.

Nor was there anything original about Obama's answer to America's abortion 
debate — let's agree to disagree — and the fact that it was applauded by a 
crowd of Catholics more wedded to the post-modern doctrine of moral relativism 
than to Catholic teaching about the sanctity of unborn human life. Cafeteria 
Catholicism is old news in America. So is the idea that endless dialogue 
constitutes a morally sufficient response to the systematic denial of basic 
human rights to an entire class of human beings. Slaveholders and segregation 
supporters spent centuries making the same claim. 

What was unusual about the Notre Dame controversy was that it sparked . . . (continue reading)

Mark Shea Perfectly Describes the Kind of Protestant Spam I Also Receive

Behold the Spam of God!

Almost every other day it seems, I will (like thousands of other Catholics) open my email and get something like this specimen (culled from my “delete” file):

Dear Mark, just came from your Website and have some questions. It sounds like you were a “Protestant” before becoming a Catholic? I don’t know which church you were in but I have to question whether you were ever taught the Word of God there? If you had been in a church which taught the truth concerning Baptism according to the Word of GOD and not the “traditions of men” you would have learned that not only does baptism NOT save nor “grant justification” but it is ONLY for those who ARE BORN-AGAIN by the SPIRIT of GOD by placing their faith in the LORD JESUS CHRIST! It is to be symbolic of the new birth ALREADY ACCOMPLISHED by GOD as Romans 6 clearly teaches! PLEASE READ the Gospel of John and pray asking GOD to show you HIS TRUTH - HE LOVES THE WORLD and DESIRES TO SAVE the LOST - which we all are apart from the New Birth which IS FREELY offered to ALL ! Please read and be saved! I will be praying for you in JESUS Name. Carolyn

You have to wonder what is going through the minds of people who write such stuff. What do they think they are accomplishing?

One is terribly tempted to reply:

The Word of God? What’s that? Never heard of such a thing. Is that, like, the Bible? We used to read something called a “Bible”, I think, at our old Church. But that was an awfully long time ago.

Boy, thanks for setting me straight. I have never ever ever heard before that Jesus Christ loves me and desires to save the lost with his free gift of grace! I always thought that I had to perform magical rituals to make God love me. But now that you have so thoughtfully set me straight, I see clearly that when that big black book we used to read in my old church-that-never-taught-me-the-Bible says “Baptism now saves you” (1 Peter 3:21) what it means is “Baptism does not save you.”

And thanks also for explaining that when Romans 6 says, “All of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death” and “We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life” this absolutely has nothing whatever to do with Baptism. I really appreciate you setting me straight on that as well.

And finally, thanks for making me see that all that stuff in John 3 about being born again of water and the Spirit really means water and the Spirit are complete opposites.

Golly. It is so good to finally —after all these years—have somebody who really teaches the Word of God clue me in. Who would have thought that all those years of studying…. what’s that big black book called again? Ah! Yes! “The Bible”.

Anyway, who would have thought that all those years of studying the Bible could have left me so totally ignorant of what Scripture really means? Thanks ever so for enlightening me.

Do these people who write Evangelical converts to the Catholic faith honestly believe that they are the first people in the universe to ever suggest reading the Bible? If not, then what are they thinking?

I wonder this even more when I get Godspam from people who assure me they are “writing in Christian love” and then proceed to send me a farrago of raving nonsense and/or documentable lies about what the Church teaches. When you write them back and refer them to biblical and catechetical sources which show a) the fact that Catholic teaching comports with biblical teaching and b) their lies about Catholic teaching (”Mary worship!” “The Pope is sinless!” “The Mass re-sacrifices Jesus!”) are bunk, they write you back with that gooey smile of condescending “Christian love” and inform you (and I quote) “I am not interested in discussing truth issues with Catholic apologists.”

The sheer hermetically-sealed Pride is both astonishing and (as is the doom of Pride) hilariously funny. And the pride is very widespread in the ranks of anti-Catholic types who write in “Christian love”. I discovered this when I posted “Carolyn’s” note. One Catholic reader commented with his tongue firmly planted in cheek:

When I converted to Catholicism, it was the statue worship that appealed to me the most, but banner worship has its appeal as well. Historians have been able to show that pagans also worshipped primitive banners so either one has authentic Catholic-pagan connections.

I also liked that I didn’t have to read the Bible any more and that I would have to earn my way to Heaven. Besides that, I really appreciated the fact that I could check my brain at the door and blindly follow the leaders.

A really cool part of Catholicism is that now I can commit all of my favorite sins and then go to Confession right before I go out and do them again!! Actually, while I was Protestant, I guess I did that too, but without the Confession part. But sitting in that little room just feels so holy, especially with the statues nearby.

The cannibalism aspect, I have to admit, grosses me out a little, but I comfort myself by knowing that it is a false doctrine anyway and so it is only really bread. . . . (continue reading)