The CatholiCity Message

Volume XVII, Number 3 – April 10, 2013

Dear CatholiCity Citizen,

If you have been receiving this Message for a while, then you know that we usually avoid interjecting ourselves into your inbox right before the big Catholic feasts such as Easter. I certainly hope yours was filled with grace. I was praying for you.

POPE FRANCIS THE UNIQUE
Regarding our intriguing new pope, we think George Weigel is correct in his belief that that a reform-minded Francis is in continuity with the papacies to John Paul II and Benedict XIV, marking the complete historical reorientation of the Church towards the New Evangelization which began at the Second Vatican Council. I predicted an extraordinary leader, and in terms of humility and poverty, our new pope is such a man. I also see a saint who has a knack for transcending cultures and languages by his actions. Do you not sense that he has a way of touching your heart from afar? Considering his early penchant for unselfconsciously exposing his person to crowds, I think we should all pray that he is not assassinated.

"GAY" MARRIAGE IN A NUTSHELL
I believe Pope Francis best summarized the dangers of defining civil marriage as other than between one man and one woman while he was a bishop in Argentina: "At stake is the identity and survival of the family: father, mother and children. At stake are the lives of many children who will be discriminated against in advance, and deprived of their human development given by a father and a mother and willed by God. At stake is the total rejection of God's law engraved in our hearts."

THE BENEFITS OF SMILING
You may have heard of TED Talks, an organization that has sponsored hundreds of brief talks (usually less than 17 minutes) by experts on a variety of subjects, available online and on Netflix. The philosophical perspective and assumptions of the great majority speakers is often annoyingly liberal, secular, and sometimes outright hostile to religious belief, so any given talk must be taken with a grain of salt. As an exercise, my sons and I enjoy deconstructing errors while sifting out the interesting ideas and facts.

Even so, at the link below you will find a seven-minute talk on the benefits of smiling, based on scientific and sociological research. For about a year now, inspired by this particular presentation, I have been smiling up a storm, initiating smiles with others before and after Mass, with strangers as I walk down the street, with other parents at sporting events, at Jesus in the tabernacle or during adoration, with family members, when I hear something interesting on the radio, or even at characters who smile on televisions shows. I am smiling right now.

I have experienced that sharing a smile with anyone, especially a stranger, has a wonderful effect of filtering away superficial characteristics. When I receive a reciprocal smile from another person, he or she ceases to be old or young, rich or poor, well or poorly dressed, this race or that, heavy or thin, and handsome or pretty. Each becomes simply another human being sharing a pure goodness. Here is a link to the talk. Many of you are seven minutes away from changing your life:

http://www.ted.com/talks/ron_gutman_the_hidden_power_of_smiling.html

BASEBALL SEASON HAS BEGUN
(Big smile.)

DAMNING STATISTICS
New cases every year of sexually transmitted diseases in the U.S. now stand at an astounding 20 million, including nearly 10 million new cases for Americans under the age under 24, adding to the 110 million cases of STDs nationwide out of an overall population of 313 million. It is now estimated that 50% of the current generation of 15-24 year olds will contract STDs.

Digging deeper, 70% of high school-aged children graduate as virgins and are virtually free of STDs. By age 21, only 25% remain virgins. Only 10% are virgins by age 24, while only 9% of Americans are married before age 24 as of 2010. In short, every few years tens of millions of STDs are now primarily contracted by unmarried college-aged men and women despite numerous years of "Sex Ed" propaganda warning them to avoid STDs by using condoms. One of the consequences of STDs is the dramatic rise of infertility in recent decades, which now plagues one out of eight married couples.

It is no longer a question that a great majority of nominal Christians, including many of the 20% of baptized Catholics who attend weekly Mass with their families before college, stop practicing their faith during college while simultaneously being introduced to an all-encompassing ethos and atmosphere of sexual license.

The traditional religious custom of chaste virgins marrying virgins is a simple and cost-free social and medical remedy to this staggering pandemic caused almost exclusively by the widespread cultural acceptance of sexuality immorality--a solution that will never be embraced by secular liberal media and political progressives. Meanwhile, the Federal government tramples of the religious freedom of Catholic and Christian employers in order to force them to offer free contraceptives, abortifacients, and sterilizations.

CATHOLIC QUOTATIONS

"Homosexuality refers to relations between men or between women who experience an exclusive or predominant sexual attraction toward persons of the same sex. It has taken a great variety of forms through the centuries and in different cultures. Its psychological genesis remains largely unexplained. Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that 'homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.' They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved. The number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible. This inclination, which is objectively disordered, constitutes for most of them a trial. They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided. These persons are called to fulfill God's will in their lives and, if they are Christians, to unite to the sacrifice of the Lord's Cross the difficulties they may encounter from their condition. Homosexual persons are called to chastity. By the virtues of self-mastery that teach them inner freedom, at times by the support of disinterested friendship, by prayer and sacramental grace, they can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection."
Catechism of the Catholic Church, Canons 2357-2347

"Holiness rather than peace."
One of Cardinal Newman's Mottos

"A gift is freely given, and expects no return. Its reason is love. What is first given is love, that is the first gift. The Holy Spirit comes forth as the substance of love, and Gift is His proper name."
Saint Thomas Aquinas

"Whatever we are, we are by divine goodness, and this goodness is specially attributed to the Holy Spirit."
Pope Leo XIII

"By common consent human will can institute juridical rights so long as they are not contrary to natural justice."
Saint Thomas Aquinas

"And the actual catastrophes we have suffered, including those we are now suffering, have not in historical fact been due to the prosaic practical people who are supposed to know nothing, but almost invariably to the highly theoretical people who knew that they knew everything. The world may learn by it mistakes, but they are mostly the mistakes of the learned."
G.K. Chesterton

"The power of the Roman Pontiff is supreme, universal, and absolutely independent, whereas the power of the bishops is fixed within definite limits and is not absolutely independent."
Pope Leo XIII

"Where Peter is, there is the Church."
Saint Ambrose

"Dear me, how strange it would be to have someone guessing infallibly."
Cardinal Gasquet, in 1914, when asked if the next pope might be an American

"The humble man receives praise the way a clean window takes the light of the sun. The truer and more intense the light is, the less you see of the glass."
Thomas Merton

"We meet in gathering and congregation to approach God in prayer, massing our forces to surround him. This violence that we do pleases God."
Tertullian

"He prays best who does not know he is praying."
Saint Anthony (Fourth Century)

"Pray as you can and do not try to pray as you cannot."
Dom Chapman

"Because 99% of our fellow citizens contracept and self-sterilize, we are losing the capacity as a society to grasp human reality and a growing number consider any acts of sexual gratification, specifically those acts not open to life, as natural or normal. In this context, abortion is the ultimate contraceptive. More importantly, families who embrace life and welcome children in larger numbers are now considered irresponsible. The norm for two thousands years, that the purpose of marriage is, as the Church teaches, the begetting and formation of children, typically in larger families, no longer exists in Western societies, and faces extinction elsewhere.

The seemingly inexorable result of Protestant Americans embracing what the Church has termed the 'contraceptive mentality' in the 1920s through 1950s, with Catholic Americans following suit in the 1960s, is the growing acceptance of the insanity that it is a positive moral good to separate Life (children) from Love (marriage). For two generations only a tiny minority of Catholic children have experienced in their families, much less witnessed with their eyes in everyday parish life, the miracle and proof of divine providence that is the normality of large families. We now have the tragedy of Americans under the age of sixty having difficulty grasping what a Christian society is because they have never lived in one, individually or collectively. One cannot imitate or embrace what one does not experience or see. Therefore, the growing acceptance of so-called same-sex civil marriage is a symptom and sad result of the loss of the practice of authentic Christian marriage."
Joseph Wood

TENS OF THOUSANDS OF US PRAYING TOGETHER
Well, my friend: you, me, and the tens of thousands of CatholiCity Citizens reading this message, each of us has particular issues, problems, or challenges. Illnesses, conflicts, relationships difficulties, finances, issues with children, employment, deep worries about the present and eternal fates of people we love, practical problems with our homes--rarely in the life of any person can it be said that everything is okay.

Your burdens are always, always on my mind when I write to you. A wise priest I know once shared his habit of pointing to the sky when his problems started to bother him in the pit of his stomach. He was symbolically pointing to Jesus, effectively asking, "Jesus, take this burden from me." So on this day let us all point to the sky together, tens of thousands of us, and ask Our Lord, whose death and resurrection and mercy we just celebrated, to share our crosses, and do so in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit:

"Dear Jesus, O Jesus. I imagine you standing in front of me. You know the problems and sufferings of my heart, my family, my situation, my life. I reach out my hand. Please, I beg you, take my hand. Then pull me close, up onto the cross, because everyone willing to join you on the cross is your friend. Thank you. Amen."

SAVING YOU MONEY
Many years ago, I wrote down a one-page, 18-point article on negotiating, and many of your fellow CatholiCity Citizens have benefited financially and otherwise from following its principles. (I did not create the course; I attained permission from the man who did to summarize it in writing.) You can read it here:

http://www.catholicity.com/commentary/macfarlane/negotiating.html

SOME UPCOMING FEASTDAYS
Monday, April 29, Saint Catherine of Sienna
Wednesday, May 1, Saint Joseph the Worker
Thursday, May 9, Ascension of Our Lord
Wednesday, May 13, Our Lady of Fatima
Sunday, May 19, Pentecost
Sunday, May 26, The Holy Trinity
Friday, May 31, The Visitation of Mary

Thank you so much for being a part of our work. Please pray daily for everyone who hears or reads Mary Foundation materials. I will be back soon.

With Joseph and Mary,

Bud Macfarlane
Founder