B. H. Obama's National Day of Prayer Proclamation for 2009: Not exactly perfect

Barack H. Obama did not hold a National Day of Prayer ceremony in the White House, but he did issue a proclamation (click on this post's title).

Obama did not mention God anywhere, except in the two obligatory boilerplate paragraphs at the end:

"...I call upon Americans to pray in thanksgiving for our freedoms and blessings and to ask for God's continued guidance, grace, and protection for this land that we love.

"IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this seventh day of May, in the year of our Lord..."

And leave it to Obama to say the following about a day of prayer:

"We celebrate their [our Armed Forces'] commitment to uphold our highest ideals, and we recognize that it is because of them that we continue to live in a Nation where people of all faiths can worship or not worship according to the dictates of their conscience."

We need to pray that more and more Americans will stop adulating the secular, statist, abortion-pushing "messiah."

Archbishop Chaput slams Fr. Jenkins for honoring pro-abortion Obama; Cardinal Mahony still silent

Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver has slammed Fr. John Jenkins of Notre Dame for honoring abortion zealot Barack Hussein Obama at commencement this past Sunday.

You can read the Archbishop's essay at: http://www.archden.org/index.cfm/ID/2081

Archbishop Chaput writes:

"We also have the duty to oppose him [Obama] when he’s wrong on foundational issues like abortion, embryonic stem cell research and similar matters. And we also have the duty to avoid prostituting our Catholic identity by appeals to phony dialogue that mask an abdication of our moral witness...

"...Notre Dame ignored the U.S. bishops’ guidance in their 2004 statement, Catholics in Political Life... There was no excuse – none, except intellectual vanity – for the university to persist in its course. And Father Jenkins compounded a bad original decision with evasive and disingenuous explanations to subsequently justify it."

Local resource sites for the Latin Mass

A very extensive, thorough Southern California site to visit for resources for the Latin Mass (the extraordinary form) is: http://unavocesb.org

Another very fine local site is: http://unavocela.org

Deo gratias for our Catholic brothers and sisters who compile and maintain these sites!

About Notre Dame's arrests of Catholic priests: Do we have two churches in this country, side by side?

Since earlier this week, Fr. John Jenkins, C.S.C., who heads the University of Notre Dame, has been having his campus police arrest and jail his fellow Catholics who are pro-life.

Fr. Jenkins evidently does not like it that some of his fellow Catholics oppose his having abortion zealot Obama receive an honorary degree and give the commencement address tomorrow.

It's on Fox TV News and CNN: The arrests of small groups of pro-life Catholics who ventured onto the campus in small pro-life presences while praying the Rosary.

The pro-lifers whom Fr. Jenkins had arrested (for "trespassing") include at least two Catholic priests. The one whose name I know is Fr. Norman Weslin. He is 79.

I think I have the following information correct: Fr. Weslin is a widower and a retired Army Lt. Col. who became a priest and since then has been arrested at abortion businesses many times for saving babies with his prayerful presence outside the abortion centers.

Commenting today at a post I did on April 5, 2007 (see also my follow-up on April 7, 2007), Leo McSherry has given this testimony: "I served under Fr. Weslin when he was Capt. Weslin in the NY Air Defense Command. He was the finest officer I served under and one of the finest I ever met. He was very compassionate then and is deserving of our compassion now."

Pro-life Fr. Norman Weslin would be a far better honoree and commencement speaker at Notre Dame or any Catholic college or university than would any abortion zealot.

Question: We have one Catholic priest arresting and jailing another -- an aged priest, at that, and his brother in the priesthood of Jesus Christ -- for holding a pro-life prayer demonstration. Does that show we have two churches existing side by side in this country?

After all, how could Fr. Jenkins now show his face and concelebrate Holy Mass with aged Fr. Weslin, whom he has had arrested, handcuffed, hauled off in a blanket, booked and jailed?

Not very collegial of Fr. Jenkins. Not very pastoral. Not very tolerant. Not very inclusive.

Fr. Jenkins has claimed Obama's visit is for "dialogue." Arrests are not dialogue.

We have one bunch in the Church who love, vote for and abase themselves toward pro-abortion politicians and who despise pro-life activists. Some of them are right here in Los Angeles.

We have another group in the Church who love preborn babies and their moms and seek to protect and help them -- and who follow our Popes' teachings against abortion, against pro-abortion politicians, and against all excuses for supporting pro-abortion politicians.

Let us hope and pray that now that Notre Dame is setting the precedent that a Catholic institution can honor an abortion-zealot chief executive, no one else in the Church will do the same.

Cardinal Mahony, maybe you would never think of inviting Obama anywhere in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. I sincerely hope not.

But if by some chance you are thinking of that or if you already have invited him, please disinvite him. Think of aged Fr. Weslin in jail for the babies.

May 13 -- Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us!

Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us sinners who have recourse to Thee!

A great thing to do today on the Feast Day of Our Lady of Fatima is to visit the web site (click on this post's title) of the World Apostolate of Fatima, U.S.A. / The Blue Army of Our Lady of Fatima and soak up everything there.

If no one has ever taught you about Our Lady of Fatima and her essential message of prayer, repentance, and reparation for sins personal and worldwide, here is your chance to learn.

You can read all about the Message of Fatima and find out about the First Fridays and the First Saturdays.

And be sure to sign up for Soul magazine, a tremendous spiritual resource.

The photo above is from the WAF web site. May every Catholic child have the chance, like these children, to learn about and imitate the virtues of the holy shepherd children of Fatima.

The Mother of Christ is powerful, and we sinners need to seek refuge in her. Prayer is powerful, and we sinners need to turn to God in prayer without ceasing.

Everyone should realize that Catholics' decades of prayers and penance in response to Our Lady of Fatima's request in 1917 are the reason that the Iron Curtain fell in 1989-1991 and that hundreds of millions of Christians may now practice their faith in freedom.

The Blessed Mother is powerful. It is no accident that a Marian Holy Father, Pope John Paul II, and a lover of liberty and enemy of atheistic Communism, President Ronald Reagan, came upon the world scene at the same time and then worked together to bring down the supposedly invincible Soviet evil empire.

President Reagan even mentioned the children of Fatima, and the power of prayer, when he addressed the parliament of Portugal on May 9, 1985. You can access that historic address here:
http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1985/50985b.htm

So let's you and me keep repenting, praying, doing penance, and spreading the Blessed Mother's timeless Message of Fatima.

Our tired old city of Los Angeles and the whole world desperately need holiness and prayer, and Our Lady of Fatima will help.

Catholic Lobby Day is really "Catholic Flabby Day"

This week's issue of the archdiocesan newspaper The Tidings has an article (click on this post's title) about the California Catholic Conference's 11th annual Catholic Lobby Day, which was held April 28 in Sacramento.

The California Catholic Conference, as you probably know, is the California bishops' lobbying organization. On the "lobby days," Catholics buttonhole state legislators and their staffs about selected pieces of pending legislation.

Here is what the article says:

"This year a total of 650 people participated, including six bishops, 14 seminarians from St. John Seminary, deacons, priests and parishioners of all ages. The Los Angeles contingent [of 80 people] was led by Auxiliary Bishop Oscar Solis, director of the Office of Justice and Peace, and San Gabriel Region Auxiliary Bishop Gabino Zavala."

The article says they lobbied for three pending bills:

* to allow "the review of cases and resentencing of youth who have been incarcerated for more than 10 years and were sentenced to life without parole before the age of 18"

* to "expand existing law so that the newborn eligible for surrender can be up to 30 days old, rather than the current 72 hours"

* to "simplify the food stamp process by moving the frequency of reports to every six months instead of once a quarter."

You are right: There is no mention of any lobbying the state legislators on behalf of preborn babies and their right to life. Would it hurt the lobbyists to add that to their list?

As we know, the liberals always tell pro-lifers, "Oh, you can't be truly pro-life unless you adopt our liberal agenda." Well, we should point out to our Catholic Lobby Day folk, "You can't be truly pro-life unless you become actively anti-abortion."

The CCC and its Catholic lobbyists need to realize that they can lobby against legislation as well as for it -- they can lobby legislators to repeal pro-abortion laws, such as the ones that use California taxpayers' money to pay abortionists for each baby they kill.

Until the CCC's "Lobby Days" include actively lobbying to save preborn babies' lives and protect them from the abortionists, they are really only "Catholic Flabby Days."

Toledo Bishop Leonard Blair nixes sisters' "New Ways Ministry" workshop

Good news!

The Toledo Blade reported (click on this post's title) on May 1 that Bishop Leonard Blair of Toledo wrote the head of the Sisters of St. Francis, Sister Jacquelyn Doepker, to tell her to cancel a New Ways Ministry three-day workshop she had scheduled to begin on May 1 at the sisters' campus in Tiffin.

The news story noted that New Ways Ministry describes itself as "a gay-positive ministry of advocacy and justice for lesbian and gay Catholics."

The news report quoted this from Bishop Blair's letter to the sisters:

"...the positions of New Ways Ministry are not at all in accord with the guidelines for pastoral care which the bishops of the United States issued in 2006 regarding 'Ministry to Persons with a Homosexual Inclination.' Nor does New Ways Ministry present the full, authentic teaching of the Catholic Church on homosexuality."

The newspaper also noted this:

"Bishop Blair recently was named by the Vatican to assess the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, an organization representing 95 percent of the nation's 67,000 Catholic nuns, including the Tiffin Franciscans."

(I learned about the news story from today's New Oxford Review Daily Feed.)

Fr. McBrien tells people to "'take a vacation' from the Church" -- and The Tidings publishes that!

This week's issue of our L.A. Cardinal Roger Mahony's archdiocesan newspaper, The Tidings, came out two days before Good Shepherd Sunday.

It carries a column (click on this post's title) by the arch-liberal Fr. Richard McBrien that blasts a good shepherd of souls -- and that advises people to "'take a vacation' from the Church" if he displeases them.

Fr. McBrien wrote about what he says was a message to him in which a "lay Catholic pastoral associate" complained about the new pastor of his parish. Fr. McBrien summarizes:

"The pastor has done away with all contemporary music at Mass, and has restored pre-conciliar devotions along with auricular confession. He even gives the impression that confession is the greatest of the sacraments...

"Under the pastor's control, the parish has no youth ministry, no parish council, nor any other consultative body. According to my correspondent, 'consultative is not in his vocabulary.' He also gave vocal support to the minority of U.S. Catholic bishops who proclaimed in effect that 'Catholics could burn in hell' if they voted Democratic in the recent presidential election."

Fr. McBrien also says the pastor says in his homilies "what sinners the parishioners are, and why it is so necessary for them to 'go to confession.'"

Other crimes of the shepherd: "old-fashioned church music, all the statues covered in purple as they were before Vatican II, and the usual severe words in the homily..."

Also, the pastor "had taken the parish back to a Church that she [another parishioner] knows nothing about and in a manner that showed no understanding of others' feelings."

Fr. McBrien says the "pastoral associate" asked him, "Are we expected just to get used to it?" and Fr. McBrien advised him:

"No, you are not simply to 'get used to it.' Parishioners need to go elsewhere, like the woman [the other parishioner above] who left Mass in tears" -- and "If there are no parishes or other worshipping communities in the vicinity where the pastoral leadership is healthy rather than driven by a narrow ideology, then one simply has to 'take a vacation' from the Church until the skies finally clear and we are bathed in sunlight once again."

Well, there you have it. Is not Fr. McBrien advising liberals to miss Mass?!!! And just because they can't stand their conservative pastor?!!!

Fr. McBrien and his fellow liberals should, but will not, reflect on the faithfulness of the many conservative Catholics who for the past 45 years of liberal sermons, liturgical abuse and outright hostility to pro-lifers and lovers of the Latin Mass have kept going to Mass and never "taken a vacation" from the Holy Sacrifice and the Eucharist.

Why would Cardinal Mahony publish a column in his archdiocesan newspaper in which a priest undermines "auricular Confession" and advises Catholics to "'take a vacation' from the Church?"

Commenter Mark says the Latin Mass at St. Victor was "ABSOLUTELY BEAUTIFUL!"

Today I was wishing that someone would write in with a report on how the Latin Extraordinary Form Mass at St. Victor in West Hollywood yesterday (Friday) went.

And someone has! Many, many thanks to commenter Mark, who wrote early this morning:

"I just got back from St. Victor's. The Mass was ABSOLUTELY BEAUTIFUL! The priest, deacon, and subdeacon (thank you Norbertines!) did a magnificent job offering St. Victor's first Solemn High Mass in who-knows-how-long-since-when! The choir was professional and sang ever so gloriously. Many people were there; the church was packed with old and young & avid TLM'ers and rookies.

"I would just like to say that tonight's Solemn High Mass was perhaps one of the most beautiful Mass I have ever assisted in. God truly blessed all of us there! Many people were at loss with words when trying to describe what was experienced there. I'm still feeling the graces from the Mass as I type this up! May there be MORE Solemn High Masses in L.A.!! 1:36 AM"

May the powers that be in our Archdiocese of Los Angeles open their hearts and minds to us, the people, who love the Extraordinary Form Latin Mass, and spiritually profit from it, on the currently rare occasions when we are allowed to attend it.

By the way, the "Low" Extraordinary Form Mass, the daily Mass, which has no singing, is beautiful and spiritually profitable, too, of course.