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Whenever the Roman Canon of the Mass is celebrated, there is also a celebration of the saints, dozens of whom are invoked by the priest at the altar. Among these saints are seven women: Felicity, Perpetua, Agatha, Lucy, Cecilia, Agnes, and Anastasia. These holy women were martyred during the third and fourth centuries and are justly celebrated by the Church during the holy sacrifice of the Mass.

When the two disciples who encountered the Risen Lord on the road to Emmaus rushed back to Jerusalem to tell the others of their astounding experience, they heard the words: “Yes, it is true, Jesus has risen from the dead.” That is the very foundation of our faith. If, as one inane clergyman said many years ago, the Resurrection was merely a “conjuring trick with bones,” then we should all eat, drink, and be merry and, perhaps, become Hare Krishna devotees. Yes, it is true: Christ is risen, and all has changed.

There is another consideration. The peculiar nature of the gesture—kneeling to receive Communion—enters the memory as specifically bound up with the act of the Sacrament and with the place where you receive. Again, it is not like anything else we do during the week. To kneel at the rail is to be at a certain place, not for a mere moment, but perhaps for a minute or so, long enough to say a prayer, long enough to think of something you ought to have done, or something you ought not to have done, long enough—and if it is every Sunday, frequent enough—to make that place, that rail and no other, filled with significance. I mean the word in its precise sense: the place becomes a sign.

The only way to evangelize the modern pagan world today would be once again through the family. If we do not realize this, then our enemies do—and that is why they are trying to undermine and destroy the family which stands in the way of the neo-pagan world they want to reconstitute. Here, selflessness is replaced by selfishness, love is replaced by lust, and doing God’s will is replaced by doing your own will: doing whatever you want, in whatever way you want, whenever you want. It may be too late for the wild geese to save Rome this time round, for the barbarians are already within the gates! But it is not too late for the families who once transformed a pagan world into a Catholic world to do so once more—and this time to make sure that the forces of evil do not reemerge to destroy it, or at least distort and disunite what once had been one in Christ.

What’s happened to our first freedom, especially the rights of morally traditional believers who have given so much to our nation? Their religious beliefs are portrayed as hateful, and their religious freedom as a front for bigots, racists, and theocrats. This slander has been embedded in all our institutions – our schools, the media, Big Tech, the sports and entertainment industry, the medical profession, our foreign policy, and even our military. This is a threat not only to the religious, but to the Constitution, and to America’s singular role in the world. The recent election results may blunt this threat, but political change alone cannot defeat it. It’s too deeply rooted in our cultural institutions.

The only question that matters this Advent is whether Jesus Christ is really who the Epistle of James claims he is: the center of history, the Lord of creation, the God of life who warrants the passion of our hearts. In the time we’ve been given, are we living in AD 2024 or 2024 CE; in Anno Domini, “the year of Our Lord,” or just another 12 months in a morally vacant “Common Era.” We each get to choose – and to act accordingly.

We must be under no illusions as Christians. It is not business as usual, keeping quiet, keeping our heads down, hoping none of the encroaching darkness will overwhelm us. What if you are a doctor, or nurse, or some other kind of medical professional, and you are expected to participate in this? What if you get sick or incapacitated and your relatives decide it’s time for you to go? It won’t happen, we are told. But something has happened that is very bad. When we need roaring bishops, like lions, all we get are meows from kittens.

Humility, humility, humility, humility.

It begrudges life. And, to extrapolate to a theological level, I add an observation once shared with me by the Rev. Paul Scalia. He pointed out that angels (including fallen angels) cannot procreate. There are no “baby angels.” The angelic choirs are what and as many as God created them. And it is perhaps not accidental that Satan’s first target for sin was the woman, not because she is supposedly weak or gullible, but because she could give more life, something the Evil One hates. Is it not telling that, when Christ defines him, he speaks of the devil as “a murderer from the beginning” (Jn 8:44)?

Religious believers may or may not agree with Trump about immigration or trade. And they may have diverse views about how to respond to our society’s confusions about what it means to be a man or a woman. But they should welcome the general erosion of the open society consensus and its ready accusations of fascism and authoritarianism. In that regard, whatever one thinks of the man or his platform, Trump’s electoral success is good news for those of us who think that the highest, noblest, and most liberating act is to surrender ourselves, heart, mind, and soul, to God.

For all the indifference that we think we face, and which we use for our excuse, the heroic prospect of evangelism remains. For as the Saints have already attested, the road goes ever on into peril and hazard.

Significant pockets of the clergy and laity, however, have remained faithful to the Church. The intellectual and spiritual legacies of Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI influenced a new generation of young priests in America. A highly educated, doctrinally orthodox laity has also emerged. Catechetical materials, Catholic publishing, and Catholic websites testify to widespread orthodoxy among the lay intelligentsia and thoughtful Catholics.

When Catholics go fuzzy about sin, when we obfuscate about what leads us away from God rather than toward Him, when we try to subjectivize moral action out of some misguided notion of mercy, we’re not making things easier for ourselves or for anyone else. We’re only succeeding in diminishing the urgency and freshness of the Good News itself. As the Synod continues to consider how to better proclaim the Gospel, it would do well to remember: If sin is not a big deal, then neither is our being saved from it. And if salvation is not a big deal, what’s so good about the Gospel?

Other Catholics are founding publishing houses (such as Sophia Institute Press, Ignatius Press, Os Justi Press, Emmaus Press, Cluny Press, and Angelico Press, to name a few), online magazines (like Crisis, LifeSiteNews and OnePeterFive), creating routine podcasts and daily radio shows (like The Catholic Current with the imitable Fr. Robert McTeigue)—all of whom can be likened to the pre-Soviet era Radio Free Europe. With skill and ingenuity, they are broadcasting the message of Doctrinal Catholicism over the heads of the cadaverous ecclesial bureaucracy that sits like a massive beached whale on the Mystical Body of Christ. These dynamic New Catholics have become the lean and diminutive David, slinging the tiny polished stones of the Victorious Christ against the massive and dollar-bloated Goliath of the conventional leadership.

We must get it into our heads that sin is real just as diseases of the body are real. I walked about for nearly a month with a blood clot in my leg, not wanting to believe it was really there. But the clot was under no obligation to respect my wishes.

Just as the same Chesterton spoke of the five resurrections of the Church, in his memorable The Everlasting Man, we are on the cusp of a sixth. Or, to borrow from the First Letter of the first-century Pope Clement, the Church is like the phoenix rising from the ashes. Look carefully, and you will see it. And it’s happening today. Before our very eyes. With the headwinds of crisis still whipping against our faces, many might miss it. Moreover, its beginnings are small, like all great things. But it possesses remarkable strength. It is showing itself on every continent—but, surprisingly, strongest in America.

Full article here: https://www.firstthings.com/article/2024/10/the-way-forward-after-dobbs Two data points illustrate the real economic factor. Consider who gets aborted and who gets an abortion: Four percent of babies conceived in marriage will be aborted, compared to 40 percent of children conceived outside of marriage. Meanwhile, 13 percent of women who have abortions are married, and 87 percent are unmarried. Nonmarital sex is the main cause of abortion. Marriage is the best protector of unborn human life. It wasn’t just the pedagogical impact of Roe in teaching about abortion that corrupted our nation; Roe exacerbated multiple generations of a sexual culture that incentivizes abortion.

But as in so much that our atheist reader finds unfair and a personal animus towards Francis, for a Catholic, dubia arise when words don’t match up. And since Rome won’t resolve them in ways that seem coherent, whether we want to or not, we’re forced to try doing it ourselves.

Western culture is experiencing a void because we lack conviction. The Void is waiting to be filled. The answer should be that Christianity will once more seek to lead people to Christ, but too many of us lack conviction. Our leadership has abandoned us for their own lack of conviction. Any member of the clergy who refuses to rock the boat and call us to do the same has misunderstood the calling of the Gospel and has chosen a counterfeit. Christianity without conviction and sacrifice is not Christianity. It is a counterfeit, a fraud.

Winters leads by example, and he leads – at the front of the battle, not eating in the frozen woods of Bastogne, so that his men can. And critically, he defends his men from weak and incompetent superiors. Dick Winters exhibited the two key attributes of what is needed in a good shepherd in the Church, as in a good officer. In the first place, he was willing to lay down his life for his men – or his sheep. The sheep are, in fact, his vocation. He does not run away at the approach of the wolf: that is the work of the hireling, military or episcopal.