The Great Unraveling

September 15, 2014 by Eric Sanders in Random Thoughts and tagged beheadings, catholic, catholic church, crimea, islam, pray, repent, repentance, roger cohen, rosarium, rosary, russia, the great unraveling | Leave a comment

The Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows

Roger Cohen wrote an Op-ed piece in the New York Times that describes quite well what the world is going through right now. Wars, rumors of war, the rumbles of far away conflicts that we could hear in our own backyards if only we were listening. But most of us really aren’t listening are we? Too many of us can’t seem to lift our eyes from our iPhones or Androids or Samsung Galaxies long enough to notice the ripples in the air. But things are changing; the world is changing and we want desperately to sleep and not to be bothered by such things.

But of course, since he is writing in the New York Times, Mr. Cohen does not go into the root cause of the decay that we are living through. Why does the sand shift under our feet so? Why does the earth itself quake under our feet? One could make an argument, a well founded argument, about the tides of history and history’s Lord and how these things happen. But doesn’t the answer really lie in a deeper and darker place in our heart? We have completely rejected the law of God, the law that God gave us in his wisdom and his charity to teach us how to be his sons. Our ancestors rejected the Church because they could no longer bear anyone having authority over them, they wanted to follow their own designs. The generations following them rejected Jesus Christ: declaring Him to be a good guy, a wise philosopher, or a clever teacher of morals who employed witty sayings to bring in the people. But to those generations, or at least to a large part of those generations in their inmost heart, He was not divine. No He could never be divine. Such things just didn’t happen, God was too distant for that and besides, these things just didn’t happen. In the twentieth century what was once the Catholic world rejected God entirely; flocking to the atheistic ideologies of communism, capitalism, and fascism that all promised to make this world a wonderful and prosperous place because, after all there is nothing beyond this, right? And in the twenty-first century we reject even the natural law: men marry men and women marry women because it makes everybody feel good and nobody is offended, nobody in this world at least. We see men in black masks sawing off the heads of young men in orange jumpsuits and call them barbarians, safely ensconced behind the walls of a civilizations where mothers murder their own children in their own wombs while the fathers act as accessories to the crime because of their own indifference and a desire to remain adolescents for the whole scope of their lives. Tell me who are the real barbarians? Yes the world is failing and we all need to repent. While this may not be the end of the world and the Son of Man may not be coming on the clouds anytime soon (though who can say?) we are definitely at the end of something. We need to repent and we need to be converted and we need to pray.

Pray the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary on Monday for the See of Constantinople, the Sorrowful Mysteries on Tuesday for the See of Antioch, the Glorious Mysteries on Wednesday for the See of Jerusalem, the Luminous Mysteries on Thursday for the See of Alexandria, and the Sorrowful Mysteries on Friday for the See of Carthage; for their liberty and their salvation and the restoration of their ancient position as pillars of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church in communion with the See of Peter in Rome; for the conversion of the Jewish people and the conversion of the Muslim peoples. And join the Rosary Confraternity!

The strange fate of Ukraine

August 28, 2014 by Eric Sanders in Catholic Church, Random Thoughts and tagged catholic church, gospel of matthew, matthew 24, rosarium, rosary, russia, stay awake, thief in the night, ukraine | Leave a comment

The Feast of Saint Augustine

Today’s Gospel (Mt. 24: 42-51) in the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite comes at the time of year when we in the northern hemisphere are drunk and sleepy with summer. The air has been warm and the trees have been green for a long time now; the fields are ripe for the harvest and the fruit is being plucked from the tree. The days are growing shorter but no one really notices yet because the gloom of winter is long forgotten. And the Liturgical calendar is roughly at the midpoint of the long march of the second section of Ordinary Time between the glory of Pentecost and the end of the year and the Advent renewal, so the Church gives us this warning:

Jesus said to his disciples: “Stay awake! For you do not know on which day your Lord will come. Be sure of this: if the master of the house had known the hour of night when the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and not let his house be broken into. So too, you also must be prepared, for at an hour you do not expect the Son of Man will come.

Who then is the faithful and prudent servant, whom the master has put in charge of his household to distribute to them their food at the proper time? Blessed is that servant whom his master on his arrival finds doing so. Amen, I say to you, he will put him in charge of all his property. But if that wicked servant says to himself, ‘My master is long delayed,’ and begins to beat his fellow servants, and eat and drink with drunkards, the servant’s master will come on an unexpected day and at an unknown hour and will punish him severely and assign him a place with the hypocrites where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth.

The Son of Man comes to us in many ways. He will come in glory at the end of time to judge the living and the dead, He will come for each of us individually when our time on this earth runs out, and as the Lord of history He comes to judge cities, nations, and civilizations. Sometimes these decay at a slow rate and just peter out but more often the Lord comes as a thief in the night when people are sleepy and/or drunk on their own prosperity.

Witness the strange fate of Ukraine. A year ago the citizens of Donetsk, Luhansk, Mariupol, and the surrounding towns and villages would all probably go out drinking together on a Saturday night and not think a thing of it. Today they are slaughtering each other. These once prosperous European cities are now under siege, being shelled, and being emptied out. They have become the pawn of world powers seeking to expand their influence in the brutal game of international politics.

As our Lord told Peter, James, and John before He entered Garden of Olives at Gethsemane: Vigilate, et orate! Keep watch and pray, and above all stay awake because the world can change in a minute! None of us know the hour or the day for us or for the world we live in.

Thanks be to God for… Russia: a historical meditation

July 30, 2014 by Eric Sanders in Random Thoughts and tagged avars, barbarian tribes, catholic, catholic church, catholic civilization, goths, islam, lombards, roman empire, rosarium, rosary, russia, slavs | Leave a comment

The Feast of Saint Peter Chrysologus

Russia has been in the news a lot lately, more so than in any time in the last two decades, and it caused me to think about the checkered history of that vast land. It occurred to me at some point that Catholic Europe as we knew it in the second millennium, the great saints of western Europe Thomas Aquinas, Dominic, and Francis of Assisi and the nations and cultures of France, Germany, Italy, England, and Spain likely never would have come into being without Russia.

To understand this it is necessary to compare the situation of Europe in the first millennium after Christ versus what it experienced in the second. At the time of the Incarnation and the beginning of the age of the Catholic Church the Roman Empire had just completed conquering the entire Mediterranean basin, a feat which has never been equaled before or since, and stretched from the British Isles to the Syrian desert. However the lands in the north beyond the Rhine and the Danube were largely an undiscovered country. In the third century of the Incarnation however the empire encountered the Goths, the first of the barbarian tribes that either were migrating or being pushed across the vast steppes north of the Black and Caspian Seas from Asia into Europe. This was the beginning of eight centuries of continuous migration and invasion that would sap the strength of the Roman Empire and eventually destroy it.

Into this came the Catholic Church with its message of salvation attempting to build a new civilization on the ruins of the classical world. In those first centuries after the fall of Rome she was continually harried on all sides however. The Huns, the Slavs, the Avars, the Lombards all came in on the heels of the Goths and Vandals along the highways of the steppes north of the Black Sea and continued to hammer Catholic civilization. There was very little political stability in these centuries with the borders of the post Roman barbarian kingdoms shifting constantly like amoebas and the entirety of Christian civilization was consistently under threat from the marauding tribes of Asia in the east and the newly expanding empire of Islam to the south that had shattered the old Mediterranean unity and the Vikings coming in from the north.

Around the year 1000 things began to change. The strength of Islam waned due to internal conflict, the Vikings slowly were converted from paganism into full membership in the Catholic Church and new state was being formed north of the Black Sea that would forever close the door on the highway from Asia into Europe. When Prince Vladimir accepted baptism and brought the new state of Kievan Rus with him that road was shut off. New and organized and united political entities were formed that stretched from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea and put up a permanent roadblock to any migration from Asia into Europe. The only power to breach this roadblock was the Mongols in the 13th century but they did not destroy Russia, they only occupied it and eventually withered away.

Once this new space opened up a new situation came into being in Europe. There was internecine and fratricidal warfare to be sure but there was no longer the constant threat of massive, culture destroying invasion from the east. The Church recovered her footing and launched the Crusades to save Constantinople from the Turkish threat and to recapture the Holy Land for a time. The nation of France came into being and rule from Paris became a fact of life for ever greater parts of what had been Roman Gaul. The kingdoms of Castille and Aragon accelerated the work of the reconquista and began to drive Islam out of western Europe and form the modern nation of Spain. There was a flowering of scholastic theology in Italy and a greater devotion to the religious life, and the first beginnings of the Rennaissance. The High Middle Ages were in full swing and the foundations of the modern world, with all of its glories and defects, were being laid. All thanks to the formation of a unified political entity that stretched from the Baltic to the Black Seas and cut off the highway of invasion from Asia. Thanks be to God for Russia.

Shock and Awe 11 years on: a meditation

June 19, 2014 by Eric Sanders in Random Thoughts and tagged 2003, baghdad, baghdad 2003, carthage, catholic, catholic church, decline of the united states, fall of carthage, iraq war, islam, polyibius, rome, rosarium, rosary, scipio aemilianus, shock and awe | Leave a comment

A personal moment here: I have been musing on Iraq a lot lately and, forgive me, I am a Catholic and Catholics who choose to study and learn the Faith and its history have an annoying habit of developing very long memories. Looking at this video of the ferocious start to the United States’ military campaign in Iraq almost a dozen years ago now along with all of the hoohah that went along with it and pondering the state of Iraq and the entire Middle East today I cannot help but recall Polybius’ rendering of Scipio Aemilianus’ words in what should have been his moment of supreme triumph as he watched Rome’s great enemy Carthage being destroyed on his own order:

1 Scipio, when he looked upon the city as it was utterly perishing and in the last throes of its complete destruction, is said to have shed tears and wept openly for his enemies. 2 After being wrapped in thought for long, and realizing that all cities, nations, and authorities must, like men, meet their doom; that this happened to Ilium, once a prosperous city, to the empires of Assyria, Media, and Persia, the greatest of their time, and to Macedonia itself, the brilliance of which was so recent, either deliberately or the verses escaping him, he said:

A day will come when sacred Troy shall perish,

And Priam and his people shall be slain.1

3 And when Polybius speaking with freedom to him, for he was his teacher, asked him what he meant by the words, they say that without any attempt at concealment he named his own country, for which he feared when he reflected on the fate of all things human. Polybius actually heard him and recalls it in his history.

All nations and all peoples come to ruin, most by their own hand in some form or another. Only the Catholic Church will still remain at the end. Aemilianus’ thoughts about Rome’s future proved accurate enough in time, and I do not think that the authors of the attack on Baghdad will have to wait nearly so many centuries to have the same fate visited on our cities as this:

ἔσσεται ἧμαρ ὅτ’ ἄν ποτ’ ὀλώλῃ Ἴλιος ἱρὴ
καὶ Πρίαμος καὶ λαὸς ἐῠμμελίω Πριάμοιο

Pray the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary on Monday for the See of Constantinople, the Sorrowful Mysteries on Tuesday for the See of Antioch, the Glorious Mysteries on Wednesday for the See of Antioch, the Luminous Mysteries on Thursday for the See of Alexandria, and the Sorrowful Mysteries on Friday for the See of Carthage; for their liberty and their salvation and the restoration of their ancient status as pillars of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church in communion with the See of Peter in Rome; for the conversion of the Jewish people and the conversion of the Muslim peoples.

The Vexilla Regis in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre

May 28, 2014 by Eric Sanders in Random Thoughts, The Rosary and tagged alexandria, antioch, bartholomew, bishop of rome, carthage, catholic, catholic church, church of the holy sepulchre, constantinople, francis, jerusalem, one holy catholic and apostolic church, orthodox, our lady of victory, patriarch, pope, rome, rosarium, rosary, vexilla regis | Leave a comment

The great ancient Latin hymn Vexilla Regis that exults in the Cross as the banner of Christ the King sung in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre by the Magnificat Custody Choir at the close of the prayer service conducted by the Holy Father Pope Francis and the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople Bartholomew:

Pray the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary on Monday for the See of Constantinople, the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary on Tuesday for the See of Antioch, the Glorious Mysteries on Thursday for the See of Alexandria, and the Sorrowful Mysteries on Friday for the See of Carthage; for their liberty and their salvation and the restoration of their ancient position as pillars of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church in communion with the See of Peter in Rome; for the conversion of the Jewish people and the conversion of the Muslim peoples.

The World is Changing Part 2

May 22, 2014 by Eric Sanders in Random Thoughts and tagged catholic, catholic church, donetsk, donetsk oblast, our lady of victory, rosarium, rosary, russia, the world is changing, ukraine, volnovakha | Leave a comment

Sorry for the long absence. Imagine sitting in your house in a quiet town on a nice warm day in late spring and watching this:

From the village of Volnovakha, 12 miles south of Donetsk in the east of Ukraine. Six months ago a scene like that would have seemed absurd to those sitting there watching it in the east of Ukraine and even six weeks ago it would have seemed highly unlikely. The world can change and it can happen fast; history is replete with examples of human beings going to bed in one world so to speak and waking up in another that operates by far different rules. Do not be attached to this world and all of its charms. Do not love this world. And never fall into the trap of worshiping this world. The world that we live in, our so called advanced Western societies, our presently ludicrous way of life; it could all be gone tomorrow and very likely will be gone some day in the not too distant future. Viglate et orate! Pray and keep watch!

Pray the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary on Monday for the See of Constantinople, the Sorrowful Mysteries on Tuesday for the See of Antioch, the Glorious Mysteries on Wednesday for the See of Jerusalem, the Luminous Mysteries on Thursday for the See of Alexandria, and the Sorrowful Mysteries on Friday for the See of Carthage; for their liberty and their salvation and the restoration of their ancient position as pillars of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church in communion with the See of Peter in Rome and for the conversion of the Jewish people and the conversion of the Muslim peoples.

The World Is Changing

March 18, 2014 by Eric Sanders in Random Thoughts and tagged alexandria, antioch, carthage, catholic, catholic church, constantinople, crimea, five lost sees, geopolitical change, glorious mysteries, jerusalem, joyful mysteries, luminous mysteries, our lady of victory, rosarium, rosary, russia, sorrowful mysteries, the world is changing, ukraine | Leave a comment

The world is changing. Russia’s annexation of Crimea is the first time since 1945 that the armies of a major world power have crossed an international border and seized territory with the intent of keeping that territory for itself. A revolution in world affairs has just occurred; the passing shadow of this world that we have known for the entire life span of most of the people reading these words has ended. Many are still putting their heads in the sand about this fact but doubtless it will not be too many more days, weeks, or months (I very much doubt that it will be years) before that is no longer an option. The Western world’s morality sunk into the toilet two generations ago and is now flushing itself into the sewer, so it would be ridiculous to think that they could keep up their geopolitical domination of the planet in their present moral state. The world is changing so we must pray. Pray the Rosary every day.

Pray the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary on Monday for the See of Constantinople, the Sorrowful Mysteries on Tuesday for the See of Antioch, the Glorious Mysteries on Wednesday for the See of Jerusalem, the Luminous Mysteries on Thursday for the See of Alexandria, and the Sorrowful Mysteries on Friday for the See of Carthage; for their liberty and their salvation and the restoration of their ancient position as pillars of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church in communion with the See of Peter in Rome and for the conversion of the Jewish people and the conversion of the Muslim peoples.

The Lands of Zabulon and Nephtali

January 31, 2014 by Eric Sanders in Random Thoughts, The Five Lost Sees and tagged alexandria, antioch, carthage, catholic, catholic church, constantinople, five lost sees, galilee, isaiah, islam, israel, jerusalem, jesus christ, middle east, nephtali, north africa, northern kingdom, our lady of the rosary, our lady of victory, prophet, rosarium, rosary, zabulon | Leave a comment

Populus qui ambulabat in tenebris, vidit lucem magnam. “The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light (Is. 9: 3).” This great messianic prophecy from the prophet Isaiah was included in last Sunday’s (January 26, 2014) first reading for the Third Sunday in Ordinary Time in the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite. The entire passage that forms the reading was an extraordinary prophetic utterance at a time when the ancient Kingdom of Israel was experiencing one of its darkest moments and it seems to possess an equally extraordinary relevance for our own time. Let’s just take a look at it (Is. 9: 1-2) and see what there is to see here. First the Greek from the ancient translation of the Septuagint:

Τοῦτο πρῶτον ποίει, ταχὺ ποίει, χώρα Ζαβυλων, ἡ γῆ Νεφθαλιμ ὁδὸν θαλάσσης καὶ οἱ λοιποὶ οἱ τὴν παραλίαν κατοικοῦντες καὶ πέραν τοῦ Ιορδάνου, Γαλιλαία τῶν ἐθνῶν, τὰ μέρη τῆς Ιουδαίας ὁ λαὸς ὁ πορευόμενος ἐν σκότει, ἴδετε φῶς μέγα – οἱ καταοικοῦντες ἐν χώρα καὶ σκιᾶ θανατοῦ, φῶς λάμψει ἐφ’ ὑμᾶς.

From the Clementine Vulgate:

Primo tmepore alleviata est terra Zabulon et terra Nephthali: et novissimo aggravata est via maris trans Jordanem Galilaeae gentium. Populus qui ambulabat in tenebris, vidit lucem magnam,; habitantibus in terione umbrae mortis, lux orta est eis.

And finally the Douay-Rheims English translation:

“At the first time the land of Zabulon, and the land of Nephtali was lightly touched: and at last the way of the sea beyond the Jordan of the Galilee of the Gentiles was heavily loaded. The people that walked in darkness, have seen a great light: to them that dwelt in the region of the shadow of death, light is risen (Is. 9: 1-2).”

A rich prophetic utterance from Isaiah here. First it is necessary to look at the situation of the lands of Zabulon and Nephtali during the prophet’s lifetime. They were part of the northern kingdom of Israel. This kingdom had its capital at Samaria about 75 miles north of Jerusalem and was composed of the ten tribes who separated from their southern neighbors after the death of David’s son King Solomon some two centuries before. Isaiah was a southerner and the southerners generally regarded the northern kingdom as less pure in terms of religion. The northern kingdom covered a larger area and was closer in proximity to the population centers of the pagan kingdoms such as Tyre, Sidon, and Damascus that surrounded it than the more isolated southern kingdom of Judah was. Pagan ideas crept into the life of the northerners and all throughout the history of that kingdom it was continually reproached by God’s prophets (Elijah was based in the north and had continual confrontations with the northern king Ahab and his pagan wife Jezebel) for their lack of fidelity to the Covenant and their worship of foreign gods. Then during Isaiah’s lifetime catastrophe struck. The Assyrian army struck and annihilated the northern kingdom in 721 B.C. The kingdom was destroyed and the ten tribes, following the general policy of the Assyrian empire at that time, were deported from their land and scattered among the nations. These are the celebrated ‘ten lost tribes’ that every crackpot archaeologist worth his salt has claimed to have found everywhere from Zimbabwe to Minnesota. But in truth they disappeared and lost their identity as the People of God. This was the reward for their constant and unrepentant infidelity The land though was resettled completely by pagans and plunged into darkness.

This is what Isaiah saw in his lifetime. To prophesy that a great light would come from the lands of Zabulon and Nephtali, the Galilee as it was starting to be called, was courageous indeed, and would have seemed absolutely ludicrous to any of Isaiah’s hearers. But, many centuries later, such a thing did happen. The greatest Light that has ever come into the world walked through these lands. Our Lord, God Himself, would come into the lands of Zabulon and Nephtali and proclaim that the Redemption of mankind was at hand. It is a lesson in how history and human memory work that during his life on earth our Lord was continually excoriated by the Jewish leadership of his day that he could not be a prophet because no prophet ever came from those lands. Those lands that had been plunged into darkness first by the treason and infidelity of the northern kingdom and then by its dissolution and the permanent destruction of its inhabitants. But Light did shine in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it. This is the way God works, is it not? And it is a passage that can in fact not only be applied to geopolitical circumstances but to our own individual lives as well. All of us walk in darkness and into our lives we must let the Light shine.

But let’s come back to the idea of lands that were long ago plunged into darkness. Might a great Light not shine once more in them? Is it impossible? As we have seen it has happened before. Fifteen centuries ago the Middle East and North Africa were solidly Christian, but they being were ripped apart by schism and controversy and division that would not heal. Then in the seventh century the armies of Islam emerged from Arabia and cut off the Middle East and North Africa. Over the long centuries that followed the greatest apostasy in Christian history occurred with the Church diminishing greatly in strength and numbers in the Middle East and in Egypt and disappearing completely in North Africa. Darkness fell upon those lands with the advance of Islam. Might a great Light shine again there in the future, at some hour known only to God?

Pray the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary on Monday for the See of Constantinople, the Sorrowful Mysteries on Tuesday for the See of Antioch, the Glorious Mysteries on Wednesday for the See of Jerusalem, the Luminous Mysteries on Thursday for the See of Alexandria, and the Sorrowful Mysteries on Friday for the See of Carthage; for their liberty and for their salvation and the restoration of their ancient position as pillars of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church in communion with the See of Peter in Rome; for the conversion of the Jewish people and the conversion of the Muslim peoples.

A New Caliphate or a Publicity Stunt?

January 4, 2014 by Eric Sanders in Random Thoughts and tagged al qaeda, caliphate, catholic, catholic church, falluja, iraq, islamic militants, islamic state in iraq and the levant, muslim, mustafa kemal, our lady of victory, radical islam, ramadi, rosarium, rosary, syria | 1 Comment

For anyone interested in the future of the Middle East and the restoration of the Catholic Church to its ancient position there this should be a subject of interest.

A new caliphate was declared as al-Qaeda militants took control of the city of Falluja in western Iraq. They subsequently declared the restoration of the Islamic caliphate which has been dormant since Mustafa Kemal deposed the last Ottoman Sultan in 1924. This may only be a publicity stunt as no particular individual was named as the new khalifa but the military position of these men seems stronger than it ever has been.

In any case these militants have bases in both western Iraq and eastern Syria and if they remain unchecked they possess the potential to redraw the borders of the Middle East. Time will tell and the will of God is a mysterious thing to us mortal men. The world is changing however and we all must continue to pray. Pray the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary on Monday for the See of Constantinople, the Sorrowful Mysteries on Tuesday for the See of Antioch, the Glorious Mysteries on Wednesday for the See of Jerusalem, the Luminous Mysteries on Thursday for the See of Alexandria, and the Sorrowful Mysteries on Friday for the See of Carthage: for their liberty and their salvation and the restoration of their ancient position as pillars of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church in communion with the See of Peter in Rome; for the conversion of the Jewish people and the conversion of the Muslim peoples.

Our Lady of Guadalupe and the Memory of a Mass Conversion

December 12, 2013 by Eric Sanders in Feast Days, Random Thoughts and tagged alexandria, antioch, carthage, catholic, catholic church, constantinople, islam, jerusalem, juan diego, marian apparition, mass conversion, mexico, our lady of guadalupe, our lady of victory, rosarium, rosary | Leave a comment

December 12 is the Feast Day in the dioceses of the Americas of Our Lady of Guadalupe. The apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary to the peasant boy Juan Diego in 1531 changed the course of history. This was a signal moment of grace for the world and for the Western Hemisphere. In the decades after the apparition of the Blessed Mother the pagan gods native to this continent were banished to the darkness from which they came, and the Church was triumphant from the Rio Grande to the Tierra del Fuego.

The increasing secularization of the Americas in our own time should not blind us to what an achievement this was half a millennium ago. And it should also remind us that mass conversions are a historical fact and they are just as possible in our own time as they were in the 16th century or in the 4th century. The whole of the Mediterranean basin was converted by the power of the Holy Spirit working through the early Church in the days of Rome. The barbarian tribes who overwhelmed the Western portion of the Empire in the succeeding centuries were then also converted by the same Spirit and the same Church. As were the Americas following the intervention of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

And yes, there was the mass apostasy of the eastern and southern shores of the Mediterranean to Islam, but that need not be permanent. If there have been mass conversions in the past then it is reasonable to believe, despite the darkening skies of our own day and time, that there will be mass conversions in the future. And mass conversions begin first and foremost with prayer.

Pray the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary on Monday for the See of Constantinople, the Sorrowful Mysteries on Tuesday for the See of Antioch, the Glorious Mysteries on Wednesday for the See of Jerusalem, the Luminous Mysteries on Thursday for the See of Alexandria, and the Sorrowful Mysteries on Friday for the See of Carthage: for their liberty and their salvation and the restoration of their ancient position as pillars of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church in communion with the See of Peter in Rome; for the conversion of the Jewish people and the conversion of the Muslim peoples. Our Lady of Guadalupe pray for us!

To Repair the Broken Net

Category Archives: Random Thoughts