• On July 13, 1917, Our Lady appeared for the second time to the three children of Fatima. She promised to work a miracle on October 13, so that everyone would believe. Then, she asked the children to sacrifice themselves for sinners and to pray the following prayer when doing so: “O Jesus, it is for love of you, for the conversion of sinners, and in reparation for the sins committed against the Immaculate Heart of Mary.”
• These three young children were already familiar with the conception of praying and making sacrifices in order to make up for sin.
• God had sent an angel to them the year before, to prepare them for the apparitions of Our Lady. This guardian angel of Portugal taught the children about their mission: it was for them to do prayer and penance for the conversion of sinners and in reparation for sin, to stop sin from being committed in the future and to repair for sin already committed in the past.
• Later, Our Lady came to ask for the practice of the five first Saturdays devotion. This is a devotion of reparation for the offenses committed against Our Lady’s Immaculate Heart. There are five first Saturdays because there are five types of blasphemies that are committed against Our Lady.
• The fourth type is the “blasphemies of those who seek openly to foster in the hearts of children indifference or contempt for this Immaculate Mother.”
• These facts about the message of Fatima show us that Heaven takes very seriously the offenses committed against the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Our Lady would not come down on earth, speak to the three children, and work incredible miracles for no reason.
• Another thing that we learn is that the work of reparation is very important. Every sin is a crime against God, an injustice. Every sin deserves a punishment to make up for the injustice.
• There are many sins being committed around the world all the time. God looks for souls who are willing to pay for the sins of mankind. Our Lord and Our Lady, of course, paid a great price for the sins of the world, enough to wipe them all away.
• However, God did not want to leave us with nothing to do in the supernatural order. Rather, God asks that we unite with the work of Our Lord and Our Lady to do something to pay for sin ourselves. He asks for the work of “reparation”, making up for sin by prayer and sacrifice.
• This is what the Sacred Heart asked of St. Margaret Mary and us. This is what the Immaculate Heart asked of the three children of Fatima and us.
• Doing this work is part of living a Catholic life.
• The most important sins for us to make reparation for are sins of blasphemy. St. Thomas says that blasphemy is “the disparagement of some surpassing goodness, especially that of God”.
• What Fr. Pagliarani and Fr. Fullerton are asking us to do is to make reparation for a sort of blasphemy against the Mother of God in the form of the document Mater Populi Fidelis of the Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Faith.
• This document disparages a surpassing goodness, namely, the roles of Our Lady as Co-Redemptrix and Mediatrix of All Graces.

#sspx #catholic #catholicchurch

• We have a special feast day today, the dedication of the archbasilica of St. John Lateran in Rome. It is interesting that the Church makes this a second class feast, while the feast of the dedication of St. Peter’s Basilica, which will take place next Tuesday, is only a third-class feast.
• The main reason for the special honor given to St. John Lateran is that it was the first official church of the Catholic Church. When you visit St. John Lateran in Rome, you see an inscription written on it: “the mother and head of all the churches in the world”.
• You know that Catholics were persecuted by the Roman Empire as soon as the Church was founded. Sts. Peter and Paul themselves were martyred in Rome.
• The persecutions continued for an extremely long time, for close to 300 years! Some Roman emperors were more aggressive than others in their attempt to destroy the Catholic Church but the fact is that the Catholic religion was more or less illegal for these 300 years.
• Imagine what it was like for the faithful during these difficult times. They knew that Our Lord was God; they knew that they belonged to the true faith. At the same time, they had a heavy price to pay for the practice of their faith.
• They could not use public buildings to practice their religion or build their own temples. They rather had to meet in secret, in their homes and in the catacombs. They had to be careful who they talked to. They had to be very discreet in telling people that they were Catholic.
• Think about how weary they must have been with this situation, when it continued decade after decade. The persecutions made it difficult to convert people to the faith, because everyone knew that the Empire did not like Catholicism. Everyone knew that they could be executed if they became a Catholic.
• Think of all the prayers that the Catholics of the first centuries lifted up to Heaven, to ask Our Lord to send them an emperor who would at least allow them to practice their Catholic faith in peace.
• Our Lord did not want to intervene right away to help these first Catholics. On the contrary, He wanted the first Catholics to be strong and sacrificial. He wanted them to have their life on the line at all times.
• For that reason, He waited! He waited not for 100 or 200 years, but for over 250 years. This is how we have the examples of all those martyr saints from the first centuries of the Church. This is why we have so many great saints to honor from those centuries.
• In due time, however, Our Lord decided that He would make His Church triumph. He decided that He would answer all of that blood that was shed and all of those prayers that were offered.
• He gave to the Catholics of the empire something they were always dreaming about but had never been given: an emperor who converted to the Catholic faith.

#catholic #sspx #christtheking

• If we look at all the of the problems in the world and in the Catholic Church today, they all really boil down to one problem. It is a first commandment problem. The first commandment is hardly being honored and practiced today.
• Now, it may seem that the first commandment is the easiest one of all to practice. “I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt not have strange gods before Me.” We can understand this commandment too simplistically, thinking it just commands us not to worship false gods, not to be an idolater.
• In the Gospel, however, Our Lord shows us, as it were, the other side of this commandment: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind”. Our Lord tells us that the whole of the law and prophets rests on this one law.
• This commandment might be referred to as a declaration of the rights of God. God is our Creator, our Redeemer, and our final end. As such, He has a right to demand our love. He has a right to make a law for every single one of us that we love Him above everything else.
• The biggest question for each one of us in our lives is whether or not we will respect the rights of God over us, whether we will love Him above all things or not. If we do, then we will spend all eternity with our heavenly Father in a state of perfect happiness. If we do not, we will go to Hell, because we had a first commandment problem. We could not follow that commandment.
• As I say, this is precisely the problem with the world and the Church today: the first commandment is not being followed. The rights of Christ the King are not being respected.
• Who is the idol that has been put in the place of God and is being loved more than God? The idol is man. Man today is worshipping himself.

• By the design of God, the first second of our existence passes in a dark place, the womb of our mother. We remain in the darkness for three quarters of a year, growing, making the transition from an embryo to a fetus to an infant.
• Finally, the day comes when we emerge into this world and we get to see for the first time what sort of world we are born into. Our vision is at first very blurry and is limited to a range of about half a foot.
• The infant’s perception of reality, of the world that he has newly entered, in his narrow range of sight, is dominated by one figure: his mother. She is the one whom his feeble sight is most often able to perceive. She is the one who always seems to be around when he is awake: the one who feeding him, the one clothing him, the one speaking to him, the one holding and kissing him.
• This is how God designed things for His human beings: that, coming out of the well of nothingness, we should spend nine months in the womb of our mothers; and then, coming into the world, our whole perception of that world should be dominated by the face and contact of our mother.
• God made it to be that way for us. And He made us to need it to be that way.
• If such is the way it is in the natural world and with our natural life, it should not be surprising to us that God should want something similar to be true for the supernatural world and our supernatural life.
• God wants us to have a mother. At the moment of our baptism, the first moment that our souls lives a supernatural life, the first moment it exists in the supernatural order, we receive the Church as our mother (we become members of the Church) and we receive Our Lady as our Mother.
• We go to our Mother the Church to receive our supernatural life. We get the sacraments from her, which nourish our soul. Especially confession and Communion.
• But God also gives Our Lady, His own Mother, to be our mother. She is a human being like us, but she is a human being who has been given a crucial role for the human race, the role of being the New Eve, the new Mother of all the living.
• And just as we saw with the natural order, so too must we say of the supernatural order: God made it to be that way for us. God has made us a supernatural world where we have Holy Mother Church and we have a human mother, the Mother of God, to be our mother.
• God made it to be that way for us. And He made us to need it to be that way.

• God has created a law for the natural order such that what goes up must come down. God has made there to be the same law for the supernatural order: what goes up must come down, and what goes down must come up.
• If you are prideful in this life, if you make yourself out to be something greater than you are, if you despise others and are selfish, you will go down to hell after this life is over. If on the other hand, you are humble during this life, if you willingly accept corrections and humiliations, if you think well of others and poorly of yourself, if you are unselfish and sacrificial, then you will go up to Heaven after this life is over.
• This is the law of Divine Providence that Our Lord teaches us in today’s Gospel, and also in other places of the Gospel: “everyone who exalts himself shall be humbled, and he who humbles himself shall be exalted.”
• If we want to save our souls, we have to be humble. There is no other way. There are only prideful souls in hell and only humble souls in heaven.
• There is no one who has understood this plan of God better than the saints. For the saints, there are only two places: the first place and the last place. But the first place is already taken; it is occupied by God. Thus, the only other place available is the last place, and that is my place.
• The saints thought of Our Lord as speaking to them in today’s Gospel when He says, “Take the last place.”

#sspx #catholic #catholicism #priesthood

• Fr. James Chipperfield is a strange man. He is only 26 years old and he is already a priest. That is a strange and rare thing in today’s world. It is what we call the young vocation.
• The average age of a newly ordained priest in the USA today is 34 years old, but Fr. Chipperfield was ordained when he was still 25 years old. The other Australian who was ordained with him was also 25 and the priests ordained for the SSPX are usually in their 20s.
• These young vocations are a consolation and a blessing because it means that young person has found his path early in life and been willing to commit himself to it. We know how Our Lord tells us in the Gospel that those who hear the call of God should answer right away, that they should drop everything to follow Him.
• His words even seem shocking. Here is the vocational direction He gave to someone approaching Him: “I will follow thee, Lord; but let me first take my leave of them that are at my house. Jesus said to him: No man putting his hand to the plow, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.” (Lk. 9:61-62)
• For those who become His priests, Our Lord wants generous hearts. He wants young men who are willing to leave behind a career in the world, leave behind a family, and offer all of their youth and talents to Him unreservedly.
• When they do that, when they become priests at a young age, it typically means that they will be able to minister to the salvation of souls for a long time.
• It also provides a powerful example to the world, for the world, which is so enamored with youth and is trying to remain forever young, to see a young man who has turned his back on the world.

#sspx #suffering #cross #catholic

• “The two persons in the world whom God loved best were Jesus and Mary, and the advantages which they possessed over all creatures on account of their virtue were that they suffered more than all. No two persons were ever so tried as they. Let us console ourselves then in sorrow, for the more of it we have, the more like shall we be to Jesus and to His Blessed Mother.”
• By this quotation from a saint, the Jesuit brother St. Alphonsus Rodriguez, we are taught the Catholic spirit in the face of suffering: suffering is the greatest and best way for us to imitate God and His holy Mother.
• Does this mean that we have to be unhappy our entire lives, if we want to live as good Catholics and become saints? No!
• The word “suffering” is different from the word “unhappiness”. We have many words to indicate unhappiness, such as “sadness”, “sorrow”, and “depression”, but none of these means the same thing as suffering. What this means is that while suffering can cause unhappiness, it can also be borne without unhappiness. You can suffer and be happy at the same time.
• You know that each person has a different measure of suffering in his life, but nobody is without suffering in this life. Everyone has suffering but suffering is not a condemnation to unhappiness.
• What our Catholic faith offers us is the possibility of enduring the sufferings of our life while at the same time being happy. How is this the case?

• In a relay race, there are typically four runners who have the job of passing a baton to one another until they get to the finish line. If any one of the runners drops the baton, his team is disqualified.
• The first runner begins the race with the baton; he does not receive the baton, but owns it. The other runners do not start the race with the baton. Rather, their job is to receive it from the runner behind them and then pass it on to the runner in front of them.
• This is exactly how it works with the Catholic faith. The human race is, as it were, running towards the end of time, which is the finishing of human history. That is when each of the runners will receive their reward through the resurrection of their bodies, which will rise in either a glorious state or a damned state.
• The baton that has to be passed on is the Catholic faith. The baton contains the beliefs of the Catholic faith, but it also contains the practices that enshrine and protect those beliefs.
• The first runner in the faith is Our Lord Jesus Christ. He owns the baton and puts in it all that we need to save our souls, that is, to reach the finish line and win the race. His role was only to give the faith, not to receive it. Our role is to both receive and give. We receive the faith from those who have gone before us and we give it to those who come after us.
• Already, in the first generation of Christianity, St. Paul is talking about this process of receiving and handing on. He tells the Corinthians that he received the faith from Our Lord and he handed that same faith on to them. He says, “I delivered to you a faith. You received it and are standing in it and it is saving you. I also received that same faith.”
• This is the very nature of our faith. We are traditional Catholics because our faith is a traditional faith. It is a handed-on faith, a received faith. Our faith works by way of a relay, a receiving from one and a handing on to another.