Prayer and the Peace of Christ Today – “The Catholic tradition proposes that the only adequate answer to the social horror we are witnessing is the peace of Christ, and the saints and martyrs of this tradition discovered this peace through a return to contemplative prayer. Contemplative prayer as an encounter with the saving mystery of Christ is America’s only real hope.” Contemplative Prayer and Hope for America (What We Need Now)
Shifting Gears on the Synodal Church? – “Let’s not forget that the structures of ‘synodality’ were imposed – at least attempted – on the universal Church.” MetaSynodosis (Charlotte Was Both – WordPress)
A Modern Socrates – “Charlie Kirk’s method, which he practiced on college campuses all over the country, was to invite into a public dialogue people who disagreed with him.” He Died with a Microphone in His Hand (First Things)
Gay Marriage Did That – “For the sake of the least of these, we must either restore the heavens or answer for the hell we’ve unleashed on children.” Gay Marriage Harms Kids. It’s Time To End It (And Here’s How) (The Federalist)
Catholic Teaching and Writing – “Just as one Catholic left the White House … another returned as Donald Trump was re-elected with JD Vance as his vice-president and a cabinet filled with conservatives who wear their faith on their sleeves.” Special US Report: Catholics at the forefront of thought and authorship in 2025 (The Catholic Herald)
Remembering Jane Greer – “She wrote of love, food, wine, sex, cities, art, conversation, and religious devotion in ways that made you wonder how she was able to bear so much reality, so much totality, so much fullness, all the time.” A Tribute to Jane Greer: Poets and Friends Remember Jane Greer (1953-2025) (New Verse Review: A Journal of Lyric and Narrative Poetry)
Essential Truths of Humanity – “The assassination of Charlie Kirk was not just the killing of a brilliant young mind, a husband, and a father; it was an attempt to kill the truth.” Truth Cannot Be Killed: A Tribute to Charlie Kirk (The Catholic Thing)
Trans Activists – “Recent events indicate that the struggle against the dehumanization represented by trans ideology is far from over.” Silencing Dissent, Affirming Delusion (First Things)
The Last Three Nuns – “Three Austrian nuns in their 80s have run away from the retirement home where they were placed and gone back to their former convent.” Defiant nuns flee care home for their abandoned convent in the Alps (BBC)
Duchess of Kent – “Far from a routine telegram, Pope Leo’s condolence drew attention to the qualities that defined the Duchess’s life.” Pope’s message of condolence for Catholic royal speaks volumes to all (Aleteia)
(*The posting of any particular news item or essay is not an endorsement of the content and perspective of said news item or essay.)
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“Gay Marriage Did That – “For the sake of the least of these, we must either restore the heavens or answer for the hell we’ve unleashed on children.” Gay Marriage Harms Kids. It’s Time To End It (And Here’s How) (The Federalist)”
The floodgates opened in the 1960’s giving us rampant hedonism, narcissism and libidos out of control because the usual restraints (religion, God) were removed and man took his place among the gods of Olympus.
Than came feminism whose cuktural icon was the burning of bras. “Streaking” became the rage in the late 60’s on campuses across the country. The young (my generation) lived wholly in their “id.”
In the early 70’s, wife-swapping (exchanging marital partners) became the favored activity among neighbors and cocktail party associates. Feminism was catching on like wildfire and women thought it culturally forward-thinking to murder their own children in the womb (who got there on account of uncontrolled sexual activity). Then the feckless and godless Supreme Court enshrined the killing of babies into law.
And then we got the total unleashing of homosexuality after the Stonewall riots in the 70’s. The American Psychiatric Assn (under the leadership of homosexual psychiatrists) removed Homosexuality from the Diagnostic Manual which began the process of homosexuality being normalized. Homosexuals paraded their wares openly on our public streets for all to see. The result was predictable: AIDs and the deaths of tens of thousands.
Then came the push to further normalize homosexuality by the State’s granting homosexual liaisons marital status, thereby weakening the notion of marriage and family. Male politicians in such arrangements on the Federal level even went so far as to believe they could breast feed their adopted babies.
Then things really sped up with the advent of the internet. It gave us all the pornographic material we wanted at our fingertips. Pornography became a major industry . Men became consumed with it and sought sexual satisfaction not in marriage but in the privacy of their bedrooms and bathrooms. The result was predictable in that men became rapacious and women the easy targets. Men needed ever more potent sources of sexual satisfaction because, like all drugs, after awhile the satiation threshold keeps moving higher and higher. Children then became an acceptable target for sexual gratification. Even our Church was not immune from this cultural downslide. Our clergy thought it alright to prey upon adolescent boys (for the most part) leaving tens of thousands of their young victims devastated and falling themselves into drug addiction, depression and suicide. Just recently a notorious priest-proponent of homosexuality was cordially received by our newly-elected Vicar of Christ.
Further compounding all of these developments over the past 60 years was the use of drugs which worsened the disinhibition of impulses. In the 60’s, marijuana and hallucinogens were added to the menu of mood-altering substances that previously was pretty much restricted to alcohol. Then we had the influx of cocaine use in the late 70’s and 80’s. More recently the drug cartels and countries like Mexico, Venezuela and China provided us with other drugs to enhance our lives – drugs like Fentanyl. The pharmaceutical industry did their part and we laughingly referred to it as “Better living through chemistry.”
Of course much could be added to this cultural chronicalling. Here, I mention a further breakdown of the natural order with transgenderism – the idea that sex is fungible, men can become women and vice versa. The adults, at this point, have totally “left the proverbial room.” Doctors think it good medical practice to remove the sexual organs and ply underage children with hormonal concoctions that render them neutered.
And so we arrive at today -2025- when a husband and father opens a public forum to respectfully discuss our moral, spiritual and cultural landscape with young people and who, for his efforts to hold up a mirror and offer a different version of life, is murdered. And we’re wondering how we got here? Really?
And this murdered man had but one central message: Jesus Christ can heal all if we but turn to him and ask him. Will we as Catholics openly and courageously carry that same message out into the world? Or will we sit by and watch the downward spiral just get worse?
Might want to look at today’s Power Line Blog which has an article on the Annuciation shootings in Min.
@ Prayer and the Peace of Christ Today
“Prayer in the Catholic Tradition is about facing the swamp, facing even the social horror that it engenders, and answering it with the peace of Christ” Prof Anthony Lilles’ bottom line is a wanted premise in a world becoming increasingly intolerant and violent.
His discussion on contemplation revolves around Charlie Kirk’s witness to truth within the swamp. A politico spiritual premise that begs the question whether Charlie, to wit all who possess that gift of wisdom are contemplatives? Man, all of us are called to contemplation of God. It may be assumed that there is an interior link within the purveyor of goodness with the God who is good itself. Although, it remains questionable whether faith is contemplation in the stricter sense of the word.
Contemplation in its strict meaning is a commitment to God in prayer and act that finds its end in the act itself, a communicative relation of love with God. Of itself it produces within the willingness to offer oneself entirely to pleasing God, and assumption of the cross for the salvation of others. A prayer that draws God’s grace into the community that would produce a man committed to truth like Charlie Kirk.