Your Intentions in France

Volume XXIII, Number 7 – August 9, 2019

Dear CatholiCity Citizen,

Hello again, my friends! I sometimes take a few weeks off in the summertime, so it's good to be napping in your inbox. (Yawn)

In early July, I returned from our annual CatholiCity pilgrimage with Father John O'Brien to offer Masses and bring your intentions to the holiest places in France, and I'm eager to share my experiences and impressions.

You will find Part One of my France photo-journal after my signature below, but first...

I Need Your Prayers

Message after message, I always ask you to pray with me and your fellow CatholiCity Citizens. For almost three decades, I have prayed for you every time I receive Holy Communion at daily Mass.

Yet I have rarely asked you to pray for something I need. I cannot remember ever asking, in fact, over the past 23 years. Probably because I am just too proud. From my heart, today, I need your help. Let me explain.

Last week, a major Catholic publishing house asked me to write an extremely controversial book outlining the disasters and confusion coming to the Church. (The corruption at the highest levels may be deeply and rightly disturbing now, yet we may be witnessing the mere beginning of an unprecedented and extended period of chaos.)

As a CatholiCity Citizen, you are destined to play your role if the Lord wants me to write this book. For now, I must decide whether to write this book--and decide soon. Will you pray for my decision? I trust in your prayers. Please, feel free to let me know you are praying for me, and if you want, share your gut reaction about whether I should write it.

Hard Realization

My seminarian son Xavier just returned from a two-month mission trip to El Salvador, where he improved his Spanish and spent his days serving some of our poorest Catholic brothers and sisters on the planet.

They live in tin shacks with dirt floors, sporadic running water, and perhaps one light bulb. Even so, they enjoy rich family bonds, an abiding faith, and little choice but to trust in the rewards of eternal life because this world provides them such paltry material treasure.

Caught up in our astounding wealth, Xavier told me he came to a hard realization that although he has been given the grace to believe in heaven, it is difficult in our culture of abundance to actually make decisions and sacrifice temporary goods (including the possibility of married life) on behalf of his belief in the hundredfold reward of the Eternal Good.

I Messed Up Right This Time

You surely recall how in February I confessed to messing up regarding our custom-made Holy Sepulchre rosaries from last year's annual appeal. We had 359 rosaries left, which seemed like an awful lot when I wrote to you.

Accidental Extras Only $50!

Your demand (and generosity) for the remaining rosaries freaked me out: it was obvious you wanted way more than 359--so in desperation we called the Ghirelli family in Italy.

It turns out they had mistakenly cast "extra" custom-made Holy Sepulchre crucifixes, so I ordered all of them to be hand-made into rosaries to make sure everyone who wanted this special rosary would receive one.

As our sincere thank you to those of you who perhaps could not afford the suggested $100 donation in February, any CatholiCity Citizen who donates $50 or more over the next few days can have as many as you want for $50 per rosary until we run out.

For months now I have been receiving your inspiring emails and letters witnessing to Our Lady's answered prayers of those who pray with this special rosary, including your friends and relatives who received it as a heartfelt gift from you.

I'm not surprised. Each jeweler-quality rosary features a leather tie I hand-carried to the holiest sites in the Holy Land and Rome and I personally touch each rosary to my first class relics of the True Cross, Saints Joseph, Maximilian Kolbe, Therese of Lisieux, Anthony, and Francis Xavier. All were blessed by a priest or a bishop.

What Do You See?

Please, the next time you visit your parish church (or any Catholic church), look around. If you don't see our CDs, booklets, and books, I warmly invite you to make a normal human effort to ensure that every table and entrance offers our life-changing materials?

Order Now

My responsibilities require me to travel all over the United States and Canada--and to attend Mass in numerous far-flung churches--and nothing is more thrilling than to see the fruits of your labors in the vineyard of souls!

Just imagine the real people in your area who will return to Confession, pray the Holy Rosary, and grow closer to Jesus in the Eucharist!

Quotations

"Store up for yourselves treasures in heaven..."
Jesus

"When we step into the family, by the act of being born, we do step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a world we have not made. In other words, when we step into the family we step into a fairy tale."
G.K. Chesterton

"What matters is not your outward appearance...but your inner disposition. Cultivate inner beauty, the gentle gracious kind that God delights in."
Saint Peter

"For one who does not practice mercy will have his judgment without mercy. Mercy triumphs over judgment."
Saint James

"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis."
Dante

Next 54 Day Novena Begins August 15

Did you know we have promoted five 54-Day Rosary Novenas every year? The next one begins on August 15 (Feast of the Assumption) and ends on October 7th, Feast of the Holy Rosary. Let's do it!

The Jesus Book

As you know, I am in the midst of writing the Jesus book--a powerful multi-format tool specially designed for you (with God's pure grace) to bring the fallen away, luke-warm, and completely unchurched to the true faith. It is on schedule and will be released by CatholiCity in spring 2020.

As always, it will be available free of charge for up to ten books and for a laughably low $1 per book donation in large quantities. $1 each! (Just think: $1 each was ridiculous twenty years ago!).

We Need Our Prayers

Please join me, and tens of thousands of your fellow CatholiCity Citizens, in a simple, powerful prayer to Our Lady... in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit...

O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee, and for those who do not have recourse to thee, especially for the enemies of the Church. Amen.

And Amen. Along with Looney Tunes, er, that's all folks! No, wait--there's more below--Part One of the France Diaries!

Thank you for being a part of our work and our lives, and for your prayers to help me decide about writing that book.

With Saint Bernadette,

Bud Macfarlane
Founder

FRANCE PHOTO DIARY

Part One: "My Burden is Light"

A hearty band of eleven pilgrims joined me in France for ten days in late June during a record-breaking heatwave. We began in Lourdes, spent four days in Lyon, and a day and a half in Paris. Father John O'Brien, assisted by Deacon Mike Koile, offered Mass every day for your intentions.

I have taken over a month to "digest" the events. I brought the many thousands of your intentions on nine encrypted flash drives and successfully hid them (usually permanently) at just about every major site. I'll even list these below.

It would take too long (and be a mite bit dull) to share a blow-by-blow diary of daily events. Nor do I want to gloss over the spiritual high points, of which there were many. Instead, this year, I have decided to write a few themes regarding what struck my heart, here and there. Except for one time, wen we walked through a thick "wall" of the scent of roses (a sure sign of the presence of Our Lady) in Lourdes, nothing extraordinary occurred.

Theme: The Cross of Your Intentions

Since 2015 I have carried your intentions on paper and now flash drives to Fatima, Rome, the Holy Land, the Oratory of Saint Joseph and Basilica of Saint Anne in Canada, and now to Lourdes and several holy sites in France, including to the glass coffins of incorrupt saints such as Margaret Mary, John Vianney, Vincent de Paul, and Catherine Laboure.

I have to admit: I do not generally "enjoy" these pilgrimages. I do not like the long flights one little bit. I miss my family and the familiarity of America. Yes, once arrived, it is wonderful to see the sites and quite humbling to see beautiful churches and so forth. If it wasn't for the mission of bringing your petitions to these places, I would probably never go on an overseas pilgrimage.

Christ's presence in a tabernacle in any Catholic church right here is enough for me, and believe me, for nearly three decades I have been bringing your intentions in my heart directly to Jesus at every daily Mass when I receive His body and blood.

Yet, immediately or over time, we have all sensed or experienced Jesus honoring these pilgrimage intentions. Miracles occur. Graces flow.

In other words, carrying your intentions on those flash drives is a yoke that is made easy. I am a confident person--most people who have met me personally are struck by my weird temperamental combination of Italian passion and an utterly Scottish lack of nerves. Although I do not read your intentions, I know they contain, well, your problems: so much suffering, emotional pain, desire for conversions, and difficult financial and family situations.

Your intentions are why I go--because, for 99.9% of you, you will never be able to go in any practical sense. I am not "spiritually happy" until I have found a place for those flash drives.

Here is Where I Hid Your Intentions in France:

1. In the moss between the cracks of the stones at the grotto in Lourdes where our Immaculate Mother appeared to Saint Bernadette!

2. Carefully jammed into the metal workings of the glass coffin of Saint John Vianney in Ars, just before Father John offered Mass in front of his incorrupt body.

3. On the very Feast of the Sacred of Heart of Jesus, behind the glass coffin of Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque in Paray Le Monial where Jesus appeared to her in the late 1600s and gave her the Sacred Heart devotion!

4. In the altar of the Saint Joseph Chapel in the Basilica Sacre Coeur on Montmartre in Paris. Here my fellow pilgrim, Hali, who picked out the spot, is inserting it behind a carved marble grating. (Your intentions will remain there as long as that amazing basilica remains standing.)

5. As my fellow pilgrims and I shed tears of sorrow while Father John read a first-hand account of the horrors on the very ground where almost two hundred early martyrs in Lyon in the late second century spilled blood while being tortured and humiliated for days on end.

6. On the high altar in perhaps the most beautiful church on the planet, the amazing Sainte-Chapelle in Paris. The altar is elevated a story above the floor of the chapel, so with Deacon Mike cloaking me, I had one chance to "throw a fastball" thirty feet up. Strike!

7. Permanently, behind the glass coffin of the incorrupt Saint Vincent de Paul in Paris. Remember to ask him to intercede for your intentions.

8. Cleverly placed behind a fixture in the tiny Church of the Martyrdom of Saint Denis in Paris, where Saints Ignatius of Loyola, Frances Xavier, and Peter Faber made their perpetual vows, essentially founding the Society of Jesus in the year 1534 (in the painting behind Father John below). In 250 AD, after he was beheaded, Saint Denis, still alive by God's power, carried his head up the hillside of Montmartre from downtown Paris to the place where this church stands today. I was told in college by a professor that an original wall from this church is incorporated into the later structure--the oldest in Europe.

9. On the final day, in Paris, moments after going to Confession, and minutes after receiving Holy Communion from Father John, hidden on the golden tabernacle in the little church on Rue de Bac where Our Lady gave Saint Catherine the Miraculous Medal, just paces away from her incorrupt body (behind Father's shoulder on the left).

End of Part One. Remember to pray with me for all of our intentions, now, and daily, as they rest in these inspiring holy places. I'll have more at the end of my next CatholiCity Message. You guys are the best!