Changing the History of the World
Volume XXIV, Number 15 – July 11, 2020
Dear CatholiCity Citizen,
I have a major announcement that will affect the history of America. I do not exaggerate. And you can be a part of it:
THE MANTLE OF MARY PROJECT!
CatholiCity is sponsoring four Holy Masses to be offered at the four corners of the contiguous United States calling upon Our All-Powerful Father in Heaven to grant the graces for a Great Religious Awakening in America!
Supported by the prayers of Catholics all over the world, the first two Masses were successfully offered on July 23rd in the town of Blaine in the northwest corner of Washington State and on July 25th at Imperial Beach in the southwest corner of California.
Concelebrated by Father John Anthony Boughton and his fellow Franciscan Friars of the Renewal (Father Innocent and Father Malachi), these Masses are preceded by powerful (minor) exorcism prayers for the United States and conclude after an hour of Eucharistic Adoration, followed by the permanent placing of blocks of blessed holy salt on-site to spiritually "pin down" the mantle of Our Lady at every corner of the country.
Instead of our traditional CatholiCity pilgrimage to holy shrines around the world, we will bring your intentions on an encrypted flash drives to all four Masses.
Your intentions will placed on the altar, then permanently buried along with the blocks of blessed salt, Miraculous Medals, and Saint Benedict medals touched to my Relic of the True Cross and to first class relics of Saints Joseph, Jude, Thérèse, Anthony, Benedict, Maximilian, and Francis Xavier!
Your completely optional offering will help pay the Friars' airfare, travel expenses, and stipend.
The idea for calling upon God to grant a Great Awakening came from my dear friend, Father John Anthony Boughton, a strapping Texan convert to Catholicism who joined the CFRs (who serve the poorest of the poor in the Bronx and elsewhere). He asked for our help and believed it was important to get something done before the election.
Offering the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass at the four corners of the United States was my contribution.
Our travel schedule was and will be brutal and we expect the spiritual warfare to be intense.
Father John Anthony and I are asking Catholics everywhere to participate on the 6th and 12th during the final two Masses by fasting, praying the rosary, and if possible, receiving Holy Communion for the intention of a Great Religious Awakening to be granted.
No matter where you live in the United States, or if you live outside of the United States, please arrange for a Catholic Mass to be offered for a Great Awakening in your country on or close to those dates.
List of What You Can DoPlease take a moment to print out the following.
- Submit your personal intentions for the Masses as soon as possible.
- Share this Message far and wide.
- Fast as much as medically prudent.
- Pray your very best rosary.
- Offer your entire day, all of your joys and sufferings.
- Receive Holy Communion (if possible).
- We encourage you to pray Archbishop Vigano's beautiful prayer for America with us (found at the bottom of this message).
- If you are a priest, please offer your own Masses for the Great Awakening.
- Canadians and overseas readers: please have Masses arranged in your own country.
- If you know a bishop, ask him to offer a Mass.
- (Optional) Help cover the airfare and travel costs for Father John Anthony and Father Innocent (due to their charism of poverty, CFRs cannot afford this).
These will be private Masses offered with the permission of the local bishops in each state.
God is the God of HistoryAll history is the history of salvation through Jesus Christ. It is not "more" than that. Without grace, you and I do not have the wherewithal to change history in alignment with the Divine Will. "With God all things are possible."
The world and our country and the Church are in a grave crisis, facing unprecedented dangers from within and without. Do I really need to provide details? You know it.
You know it in your bones.
Something big, and perhaps something sinister beyond comprehension, is approaching a climax in the coming months and years. (I will share my thoughts about this next week.)
As layman we are perfectly free to ask for a Great Awakening based upon the profoundly simple advice of Jesus, namely:
"Ask and you shall receive."
Because of Father John Anthony's inspiration, and his request for our help, we indeed are going to ask, and we are going to ask the Father through the Ultimate Reality of Jesus Christ, body, blood, soul, and divinity, in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.
I ardently desire for you to ask with us.
Heaven will receive our request. If what we ask is within God's divine will, it shall be granted. History will change. You will witness this happen, and you will remark to yourself, "I was a part of that."
I offer you, humbly, as a consecrated son of Immaculate Mary, the following true story, to inspire you to play your crucial role.
The QuestionBefore there even was an Internet, soon after Our Lady infused into me the guiding principles of CatholiCity, I prayed the best rosary of my life while driving home from one of many hundreds of long trips I would make for the foundation over the next three decades.
I concentrated almost perfectly on every word. In retrospect I am certain I was receiving a special grace. Typically, I am probably just like most of you: distracted and often racing through the prayers. Not this time. I was transfixed. I gave this rosary everything there was within in me to give, even though it was not much more than my basic human effort. I bet every Poor Clare in every convent prays a better rosary every time out.
And I received something a bit odd in return for cooperating with grace. It came in the form of a question. Here is the question I asked myself:
"What does the Holy Trinity want?"
Before I tell you the answer, which seemed obvious to me, consider for yourself how you would answer...
Every SoulThe obvious answer to me was that the Holy Trinity desires for every soul conceived on this fallen earth, from Adam and Eve until the return of Christ, to choose eternity in heaven. What followed from that obvious answer was a less obvious implication.
Namely, everything that I do during my brief time on this planet should be oriented toward helping the Holy Trinity receive as many souls as possible, even if it appears, according to the tragic truth given to us by Jesus, that because of free will, the road to hell is wide, easy, and well traveled.
Jesus is God, therefore He cannot teach error.
The parable of the talents opens before us because of this implication; bringing souls to God is the return on our talents.
A Problem Arises...A further implication that struck me immediately, as these thoughts cascaded into my mind after the Best Rosary, was a major problem. Given I am a limited, almost boring sinner, I am not particularly suited to this task. I mean, seriously, me?
I concluded, thusly, that the only way I would be able to help every soul on earth go to heaven was to ask, cajole, convince, and make it easier for other people to join me in bringing souls to the one, true, holy and Catholic apostolic faith, and thus, to God's Mystical Body.
Everyone quotes the first part of Jesus' scary truism: "The harvest is great but the workers are few." I like the second part because it flows so well with the Holy Trinity Question. "So ask the Harvest Master to send more workers."
Every day since asking the Holy Trinity Question, when I make my daily reconsecration to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, I beg God to allow me to be a human cause in millions if not billions of souls going to heaven. I do this with utter childlike sincerity.
Since then, because of your sacrifices and hard work, we have touched tens of millions of lives, in small ways and in big, big ways. You are the harvest workers in the vineyard of souls the Harvest Master has sent.
My friend, the Mantle of Mary initiative is all about asking for what we want, and crucially, about wanting the right thing. We should want what the Holy Trinity wants: souls in heaven for all eternity!
Seven Billion SoulsI have many concerns in this life, from the mundane (fixing my broken air conditioner during this humid heatwave was big priority today) to the profound (my sweetheart, my family, my friends), yet I can write to you today without hesitation that what I care about most of all is helping the Holy Trinity receive souls.
There are seven and a half billion souls on this planet (probably two billion more souls than existed in all of history before 1950). An all-powerful and all-just and all-merciful God can indeed grant a Great Awakening, a divine outpouring of the Holy Spirit, to every person in America and beyond.
My closest friends know I have a very aggressive temperament by God's design. For me, and for Father John Anthony, this crisis we are all experiencing is not a time for hand wringing and complaining. It is an opportunity to go after these billions of souls.
It is now time to take the battle to the evil one with the Eucharist and the Rosary as our armor and weapons.
God, in His providential will, made us Americans, so you, Father John Anthony and Father Innocent and I are engaging the battle here at home, knowing the United States has a significant impact on world events.
Saint Thomas Aquinas taught that God appoints angels to countries, cities, and institutions. The United States must, therefore, have a very powerful, very high order angel. Personally, at the four-corners Masses, I am going to ask this Angel to be unleashed and to manifest the Almighty Power of God.
Relic Prayer Medal of the WeekI'll keep this brief. Please consider ordering the Miraculous Medal of Saint Maximilian Kolbe (touched to his ultra-rare first class "beard hair" relic along with my True Cross and other saint relics).
Featuring a traditional Consecration to Immaculate Mary prayer card, this medal truly is a way to evangelize the total consecration to which he dedicated his life. This medal is a gift that is always welcome.
Just look at this guy! Ask him right now if he wants you to get this special relic medal and prayer card.
When you click on the button, make sure you read the astounding true story I wrote concerning Uncle Max's final resting place.
And, while you're at it, orders have been slow lately, and our summer interns (Clete and Anthony) are running out of work before they go back to college! In addition to relic prayer medals, order books, booklets, and CDs for your newly reopened parishes and businesses.
Keep these Catholic dudes busy!
Quotations
"It is one of the most pernicious modern illusions to think that there can be no sovereignty, liberty, or independence which is not absolute. If such were the case, no man would be free or a king unless he were God."
-Jacques Maritain
"The philosopher thinks that the spiritual lies very far beyond the material, like a remote landmark behind a plain. The mystic thinks that the spiritual is very close behind the material, like a brigand hiding behind a bush. Science is always saying that the other world, if it exists, is too distant to be seen. Religion is always saying that it is too close to be seen. The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand."
-G.K. Chesterton
"Nothing is so hard that it does not yield to that which is harder."
-Saint Bernard
"I despise cowardice, in myself more than anyone. Men, be prudent and fight, yet fight. Women, endure and suffer, and do not discourage your fathers, husbands, and sons into cowardice, otherwise you shall weep. Cowards burn in hell forever."
-Joseph Wood
"In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world."
-Jesus Christ
"The instance cannot be found in the history of mankind, in which an anti-Christian power could long abstain from persecution."
-Saint John Cardinal Newman
"Minds in our day are to be governed by respecting their freedom, not by restraining it, and men in authority must be more ready to convince than to command."
-Orestes Brownson
"You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it."
-Jesus Christ
Father John Anthony and I chose Archbishop Vigano's beautiful prayer for the United States to be recited after each Mantle of Mary Mass, so let us together, tens of thousands of us, raise our hearts and minds to heaven, in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit...
Almighty and Eternal God, King of Kings and Lord of Lords,
graciously turn your gaze to us who invoke you in confidence.
Bless us, citizens of the United States of America;
grant peace and prosperity to our Nation;
illuminate those who govern us so that
they may commit themselves to the common good
in respect for Your holy Law.
Protect those who, defending the inviolable principles
of the Natural Law and Your Commandments,
must face the repeated assaults of the Enemy of the human race.
Keep in the hearts of Your children courage for the truth,
love for virtue, and perseverance in the midst of trials.
Make our families grow in the example that Our Lord has given us,
together with His Most Holy Mother and Saint Joseph
in the home of Nazareth;
give to our fathers and mothers the gift of strength
to educate wisely the children with which you have blessed them.
Give courage to those who, in spiritual combat, fight the good fight
as soldiers of Christ against the furious forces of the children of darkness.
Keep each one of us, O Lord, in your Most Sacred Heart,
and above all He whom Your Providence
has placed at the head of our Nation.
Bless the President of the United States of America,
so that aware of his responsibility and his duties,
he may be a knight of justice,
a defender of the oppressed,
a firm bulwark against Your enemies,
and a proud supporter of the children of the light.
Place the United States of America and the whole world
under mantle of the Queen of Victories,
our Unconquered Leader in battle, the Immaculate Conception.
It is thanks to her, and through your mercy,
that the hymn of praise rises to you, O Lord,
from the children whom you have redeemed
in the Most Precious Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
Amen.
Oh, I meant to tell you in our last CatholiCity Message (the one about the Sacred Heart) that I rarely write anything that is new to most readers. For a quarter century I have primarily reflected upon what you already know.
I have great confidence in you. I trust that you understand the need for the Great Awakening because Our Lady sent you to us, and that you already know that we do not need a big production or a new organization or lots of money or a gigantic marketing blitz.
You already know that all we must do is ask. You have known since the first time (as a child most likely) you heard Jesus assure you, "Ask and you shall receive."
The Mantle of Mary project is just a guy from New Jersey and a couple priests offering Masses in four particularly strategic places, burying powerful medals touched to saints and the True Cross along with your intentions, and hopefully, thousands of you participating wherever you happen to live.
God love us all. Thanks for reading and being a part of our work. I welcome your reactions, as always.
With Saint Boniface,
Bud Macfarlane,
Founder
P.S. If you want to get to know Father John Anthony a little better, here is a video of him teaching about Confession. He is not a famous priest. He is merely a worker in the vineyard of souls who asked us for help.
