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However Difficult the Question, The Cross is the Answer

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In the comments on yesterday’s post on paragraph 298 of Amoris Laetitia, a reader named John asks:

However, could it be possible that Pope Francis is making a “last ditch attempt” at bringing souls closer to God?

If the Church is to take the “hardline” stance which you advocate, I genuinely belief it will not benefit many souls. The youth of today have been atrociously formed morally, by parents, social and Church authorities over the last 60 years.

For example, why did the Church marry so many couples, who were clearly unsuited to marriage?!

As Pope Francis pointed out; half of marriages could actually be invalid.

This has led to the problem we have today.

Could it be possible that this is the Father running out to the Prodigal son to meet him?

Take the Divine Mercy devotion for example. What the devotion promises, seems almost unbelievable. Apparently Christ said that he is giving humanity “it`s final chance”.

Could it be that if the Church maintains that rigidity regarding this problem, it will drive souls further away?

Basically the battle for the culture is lost. The people that created this problem are long dead. It is the children and grandchildren that are left with their moral compass pointing everywhere but True North. How do we help these people?

These people who were reared with the notion that all this immorality is fine. Pre marital sex, contraception, co habitation etc.
How do you explain to a young man, whose father and grandfather were divorced and remarried two or three times, about the indissolubility of marriage? Where do you start?

After getting some push back from other commenters about diluting the message of the Gospel, John responded in frustration:

I`m 34. I see it all around me. Speaking the truth (which is right and good) is not enough. What do we DO with the people who have been taught lies all their life, and are now living the effects of those lies?

What kind of pastoral care, to bring them back to the Church do we engage with?

How do we teach about the indissolubility of marriage to couple who are already on their 2nd and 3rd marriage?
Solutions, please people!!!!

I understand John’s feeling of helplessness. I’m not that much older than he is, and when I did my marriage prep, my now-wife and I had to go to a mandatory “engaged retreat.” As I recall, there were over 70 couples in attendance. And when the question was asked how many were already sleeping together, almost every hand went up. They weren’t shy about it. Some thought it was funny. It just was what it was. I remember looking around the room, and other than us, seeing only a small handful of couples who had their hands down.

Now that I have a daughter in college, I know how much worse it is for her generation. How dangerous the selfie culture is. How little commitment there is to real chastity. How even the boys from otherwise good Catholic families have the audacity to ask girls they’ve barely gotten to know for sexual favors other than “going all the way” — but even that’s not out of bounds for them.

Add the pervasiveness of pornography, and it’s a crisis that’s hard to fathom. But the answers were the same as they ever were. I responded to John in the comments, but I think this is a discussion that merits being brought to the fore. My response to John was this:

The problem — however overwhelming it may appear on the surface — actually does have a simple solution. The apparent complexity comes from the manifold dimensions of human sinfulness, which certainly does complicate people’s lives.

Still, God, despite being omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent, is ultimately simple. He IS truth. He IS goodness. He IS love. He embodies all virtues in their perfection; He anticipated all the problems His creatures would face since before the dawn of time.

In other words: God is never surprised. He saw this coming — all of it — and he has given us what we need to overcome it.

You are correct that people are steeped in sin. … You are correct that people have gone so far down the wrong road that they can’t find their way back.

The problem with your analysis is that you believe the only way to help these people is to give them something that makes it easier on them. The reality is, the only answer to any of our problems is the Cross.

C.S. Lewis is an example of a man who wrestled with this for much of his life. He wrote books like “The Problem of Pain” that showed he clearly understood the value of suffering, but he also couldn’t wrap his mind around the Church’s absolute prohibition against divorce and remarriage because he fell in love with a woman who had left an abusive husband. It seemed unjust to him. It seemed unfair that she could not be freed.

“What God has joined, let no man put asunder.”

The problem with all of this is that God’s laws are immutable. In what degree He holds us accountable to them is only His to know, but He has given us absolutes, and expects that we believe them.

When we find ourselves desperate, or hurt, or afraid, or exhausted by the problems in our lives, we want Him to lift the burden. Sometimes, He does. Sometimes, He pulls us close as He bears the beam, ragged and broken, on the ascent to Calvary.

“This,” He tells us, “is how you will attain salvation.”

There is no value in a crossless Christ, and it is up to us to become imitators of Him. But there is a freedom in doing so. A liberation. We come to Him with our excruciating pain and sorrow and He transforms it into something redemptive, and in so doing, transforms us.

For some people, this means the suffering of a chronic or fatal illness. For others, the ravages of poverty. For still more, the death of a child or a spouse. For more, enduring a marriage that is blisteringly painful.

And for some, the requirement is that they leave the bed of the person to whom they are not married, because it is worth what they receive in exchange.

Like the confession of a dark and shameful sin, removing onesself from a situation that is soul-killing brings with it peace and light. It will not be easy, but it will be better. It will be better because it is right, and things that are right are things we perceive in the very fiber of our being.

God gave us the natural law to lead us to the Divine law. He gave us the Magisterium to interpret and apply both. We may feel indicted or angry by being told that we are wrong, but on some level, we always know that we are wrong. And we know, if we are honest, how to make it right.

The only thing that Holy Mother Church can do is to stand fast. To not conceal herself in the tattered garments of a sinner, but to stand pure and spotless as a radiant queen. She calls sinners to herself that they may be washed clean in the blood of her Divine Spouse. She asks something extreme from them — a total emptying out of self. She cannot do this if she equivocates. Conversion — real conversion — gives no quarter to sin.

The truth is attractive. Even to those who have never heard it. Perhaps especially so. Think of the barbarism of pagan Rome. Think of the persecutions of Diocletian. The huddled men, women, and children who sang hymns to God as the hungry lions tore them asunder. Is it any wonder that Tertullian proclaimed, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church!”

Christ redeemed the world by His blood; so too do we. We live our faith. We die for our faith — if not through red martyrdom, then through white. It is only supreme sacrifice in the service of a greater cause that inspires people to change their lives. To see a man give everything for what he believes moves us to want to know what he has; to see a man compromise what he believes to gain the approval of others fills us with contempt.

It is only by holding the line, raising the bar, and proclaiming the “hard sayings” of Our Lord (at which even the people of His time “turned away” — and he did not stop them) that we can be the light of the world and the salt of the earth.

The other way leads only to temporal irrelevance and eternal death.

* * *

After reading my comment, another reader responded by email:

A comment you made … really struck me because it describes what I feel: “Like the confession of a dark and shameful sin, removing oneself from a situation that is soul-killing brings with it peace and light. It will not be easy, but it will be better. It will be better because it is right, and things that are right are things we perceive in the very fiber of our being.” You see I recently civilly divorced my legal husband. He and I were married civilly for 34 years – 5 years separated – 3 years living as brother and sister and 2 years separated. This happened after I had a re-conversion in 2010 after my father died. I left him because at the time he was married to his first wife’s in God’s eyes. I told him I wanted to go back to the Catholic Church to receive the sacraments. My parish priest said we could live as brother and sister. Being older, it was not an occasion of sin for me but awkward. After a while, I realized I was causing scandal because all our family and friends knew we were separated but still married. He wanted to have a girlfriend so I moved out. Last month, we finally made it legal. It was hard to do but like you said it is better. I pray for his soul. That’s all I can do.

That young man named John needs to be told that Jesus already had the final word on marriage. I see his point because I am the cause of my children not practicing the faith. You tell people the truth and then you pray for them. I think my re-conversion came because I prayed the rosary for years even though I was in mortal sin. I also read about purgatory and that planted a seed. I don’t think people nagging me about the truth about my sin would have helped me when I was in sin. By the grace of God, he pulled me at the right time. I ask him to give that same mercy to my children. Please keep me in your prayers as I face my life journey.

It can sound trite when we talk about “carrying the cross” or “offering things up,” but these are not just platitudes. Anyone who has lived or is currently living in a troubled marriage will tell you that it’s among the most excruciatingly painful experiences they’ve ever had. I’ve heard from people who would prefer death to another day suffering the cruel barbs from the person they love most in the world, and who is supposed to love them. Talk to the other spouse, and the pain is often equally deep, if for different reasons. I suspect many married people have experienced something like this at some point in their relationship. I know I have.

I’m certain that those in second “marriages” or other unions are no less susceptible to the pains and ravages of love. And if they are living in a sinful situation, they lack even the consolation of sanctifying grace.

But there is no way forward except through. There is no thing to do except the right thing. There is no path to heaven except by the cross.

It is the answer. It always was, it always is, and it always will be.

38 thoughts on “However Difficult the Question, The Cross is the Answer”

  1. “How do we teach about the indissolubility of marriage to couple who are already on their 2nd and 3rd marriage?”

    This one is easy:

    “Jesus saith to her: Go, call thy husband, and come hither. The woman answered, and said: I have no husband. Jesus said to her: Thou hast said well, I have no husband: For thou hast had five husbands: and he whom thou now hast, is not thy husband. This thou hast said truly.” John 4:16-18

    You tell them the truth. Will it hurt them? Yes. Will they hate you? Likely. Will they leave the Church? Probably. So did just about everyone who heard the hard teaching of Jesus on the Eucharist. But maybe, just maybe – like the woman at the well – they’ll recognize the words of a prophet, repent, and seek to worship in spirit and truth.

    Reply
      • Then you will suffer from cognitive dissonance when God’s Word instructs you that religion is a good thing:

        James 1,27 “Religion, pure and immaculate with God and the Father, is this: To visit the fatherless and widows in their tribulation, and to keep one’s self unstained by this world.”

        (Bible believer for 31 years and Catholic for the last 29 of them.)

        Reply
          • A New Testament letter written by and for non-Christians? That’ll be a hard sell. That’s Protestantism for you. Sola Scriptura becomes Throw Away Scriptura just as soon as it interferes with your personal magisterium.

          • Okay, that leaves us with some options.

            This is the option that you lay out: James was an ethnic and cultural Jew who was a follower of Christ writing for other ethnic and cultural Jews who were followers of Jesus. His teaching about religion was intended only for this audience (as they had belonged to the Jewish religion), and can be easily disregarded at the discernment of the individual.

            Applying this principal consistently, we can safely disregard any New Testament teaching that smacks of a first century Jewish cultural context. It is virtually impossible to extract teaching of universal value to Christians from the Jewish cultural context of the New Testament with any accuracy (is the prohibition against homosexuality culturally based or not?), so in reality all New Testament teaching is up for grabs.

            Here’s reality: the teachings of the Book of James are in continuity with the entirety of New Testament teaching and are therefore universally applicable to every follower of Christ. Correct me if you meant something different.

          • No, I made no claim that what James urged upon his audience was not good or not important for believers today. My intent is to say the religions of today cannot solve the questions that exist, but that the scriptures, rightly understood, can. Believing the gospel of Christ today doesn’t “sign up” one in a religious organization, but makes one a member of the Body of Christ.

          • Which would prove quite the surprise to the apostles. While only some of them wrote, all of them immediately went to work of setting and strengthening an organized and visible body of believers with a definite hierarchy and shared beliefs and practices. It was from this Church that the Sacred Scriptures were written, disseminated, organized, and preserved to the present day. If you were to speak with them today, they would not tell you that the Bible alone is enough or that it can solve all of your problems by itself. That notion is itself nowhere to be found in the Bible.

            There is no tension between belonging to a “religious organization” and belonging to the Body of Christ. To be incorporated into his Body is to belong to His Church.

          • It seems we “talk past one another.” I didn’t say or mean one couldn’t be at once a member of the Body of Christ and be in a church denomination.
            As to the other:I find no reason to assume the 12 apostles of Israel ever rescinded their Holy Spirit inspired decision of Acts 15/Gal.2 to go only “to the circumcision” while agreeing with the Spirit that Christ was sending Paul to the world of Gentiles and unbelieving Jews with the gospel of grace and “one new man” whom is neither Jew nor Gentile.(Gal. 3:28)

  2. It is emotionally n sexually hard to leave a sinful relationship BUT it is spiritually harder to stay in it as your soul will NEVER BE AT PEACE!

    Reply
  3. This generation certainly has been handed a difficult hand to play; The deck is stacked against them far worse than it was for earlier generations. I believe a simple question for each to consider might be a starting point. It is something like:

    Do you understand that no matter how many sins you have committed in your life, if today you honestly turn your heart and will to start today at working to know and believe whatever God wants everyone to know and believe, honestly trying to do what you know you should do, God will be pleased with you as long as you are doing the absolute best you can, today and every day, from where you are?
    People have so little faith and therefore no real hope, so therefore, many give up trying. If we can help them focus on the infinite goodness of God who can only require the best we can do with what we have, today, many, by God’s grace will feel some hope that they may yet get to heaven because of God’s infinite mercy, as long as they honestly try to be as holy as possible.

    Reply
    • Yes, exactly. I do believe in walking with people who have lost their way, BUT…….not to confirm them in their sin,….. to help them to convert and to see the error and danger of their ways. To help them see the glorious peace and love offered to them through complete conversion to Christ in His Church. This Papacy does NONE of this!! AL offers NO conversion to the truth, but in fact does ‘confirm them in their sin.’ AL and this Papacy in general is an ATROCITY! I see NO call to conversion in this law of ‘gradualness’ and ‘walking with people’. What I see is ‘walking with people’ and accepting them in their sin, and allowing them to stay there.

      Reply
      • Yes, as I said, “as long as they honestly try to be as holy as possible.” which means honestly asking if God wants them to change their behavior. I believe the elephant in the room in all of this is that most priests have been silent on the absolute need for all peoples, including Catholics, “to accept the love of truth so that they may be saved” (2 Thes. 2:10). If this scripture were preached and explained, luke warm Catholics would be made uncomfortable. What does “accept the love of truth mean” other than to work our entire lives at trying to know and believe whatever it is that God wants everyone to know and believe and to help others make the same choice to love, to seek the whole truth, and let God lead them wherever He Wills?
        I have a proposed “Poster and slip of paper idea to help all parents, of all faiths” do exactly that and I believe all ministers of all faiths should support it in the sure faith that God will lead all to the one faith that HE wants all to have. So far, no one has supported it, not even one priest. Is it heresy to consider the possibility that God has allowed all ministers of all faiths to be in the devil’s influence on this most basic element of all faiths, to accept the love of truth? Do all ministers implicitly want their followers to follow them, rejecting Jeremiah 17:5, “cursed is the man who places his trust in men or their institutions”?

        Reply
    • Agreed.

      And the key, as so many saints have told us, is prayer. Pray, even when you don’t feel like it.

      The Rosary is the answer to all the world’s problems.

      Reply
  4. Douglas, I appreciate what you say but I think we are mistaken to think only recent generations experience such a hard time within marriage. Human nature has not changed, marriage has not changed, the difficulties are the same. What’s different is that in the past stuck was stuck. Now we are offered an ‘out’ and we take it.

    Reply
    • “Human nature has not changed, marriage has not changed, the difficulties are the same.”

      Bingo! That is the only answer to these modernists who think that history is a vehicle for revelation and that the Gospel must be adapted to today’s world. Times have changed, technology has changed, but human beings haven’t. We commit exactly the same sins that they did back in Genesis – we just tend to be more efficient at sinning these days.

      Reply
  5. Steve, how I wish THAT is what we heard in AL!!!!! It would have strengthened those who are trying so hard to live faithfully and perhaps encouraged those who were not to see the road ahead more clearly and take action to renew themselves within the Sacrament of Confession.

    Reply
    • Thank you. It was a disservice — even an insult — to all of us who have worked so hard on our marriages and endured many trials.

      We do not need coddling; we need encouragement and inspiration.

      Reply
      • I agree – it was a disservice and insult, but also it was a reckless endangerment of souls which will lead to the destruction of many marriages and even more children being the unwilling victims of divorce.

        Think for a moment of all the marriages which are currently undergoing trials and on the verge of one of the spouses throwing in the towel. It nearly happened to me and my wife many years ago. At one point, the only thing which kept us together was the Church’s clear teaching on the indissolubility of marriage and the impossibility of divorce. The knowledge of potential exclusion from the sacramental life of the Church, not to mention the thought of offending God in such a grave way, made us stick at it and work through the problems. It was painful and it hurt like hell at times, but we came through it and our marriage became stronger than it had ever been before the problems began. God brought grace and blessing out of the trial and suffering.

        The problem is that once that holy dam of the Church’s doctrine is breached, once the option of least resistance and “tolerable” sin is placed before couples who are struggling, how many will throw in the towel who otherwise would have come through it? Every marriage goes through trials and difficulties. I dread to think, at any one point in time, how many might be struggling. As soon as that voice of the bishop clad in white whispers “Did he really say that you may not eat of any tree in the garden…?”, there will be those who respond: “Well maybe it isn’t worth fighting it any more, the oh-so-merciful god of surprises has given us a get-out clause after all.”

        Who will be accountable for the cost in souls?

        Reply
        • The Synod[s] ought to have been about marriages and families like yours, yet adulterous and sinful unions [= AL’s people who live in ‘irregular’ situations] got center stage.

          Reply
  6. Fr. MacRae, the unjustly accused and still imprisoned priest, recently wrote something on his blog ‘These Stone Walls’ that in my view, is pertinent to this discussion. Here’s my paraphrase of what he said: “Suffering comes to us…at times not of our own making. We can either let the pain of this suffering deform us, or we can allow Christ to use that suffering to transform us”.

    Reply
    • EXCELLENT!! This is EXACTLY how to handle suffering. No, it isn’t at all ‘easy’ to do, but the way to glory is thru the cross. ‘No cross, no glory’. Prayer and trust that God has allowed the suffering for our own eternal good. Unite your suffering to the cross and you are good to go, and besides that, it lightens your load!

      Reply
    • Father MacRae is a priest worth listening to. He always has wise words to share. And, his words bear the mark of truth because he, himself, has suffered immensely over all these long years in prison.

      Reply
  7. I’ve only skimmed your article but what sprang to my mind on reading John’s “frustration” is this: get thee to an SSPX chapel without delay – so I apologise if you have pointed this out. That is where the young are seeing and hearing the truth, and receiving the grace to live the way of the Cross, as you rightly exhort. Anyone who is still bent on attending the novus ordo – created explicitly to strip Catholic prayers from the Mass – will never be able to turn away from the sinful culture in which we are all steeped. Served by half-baked priests (which Amoris Laetitia is highlighting for us) the downward spiral will continue. Where I live, in Glasgow, in Scotland, one priest that I know of, spoke out to correct the errors in AL and half a dozen members of the congregation walked out. So, there is a manifest loss of Catholic Faith in the souls of the alleged faithful, but that requires MORE “hardline” preaching – not less. And those who reject it, must be told that they do so on the basis that they are rejecting Christ Himself.

    When He preached about His Real Presence in the Blessed Sacrament, St John’s Gospel tells us that Our Lord did not dilute His teaching in order to keep the dissenters in the fold. Far from it. He turned to his closest followers and asked if they, too, would go. So, the scandalous dilution of Christ’s teaching on marriage is not the way forward. In any case, it’s a false reasoning, since those “churches” where divorce and “remarriage” is permitted and even encouraged, are not exactly bursting at the seams. It’s not true charity to preach Catholicism Light. It doesn’t work and can’t work because there is no grace is replacing Christ’s truths of Faith with a more “acceptable” (to youth or anyone else) version.

    Christ is THE way, the truth and the life. We won’t get to the Father, He tells us, except by obeying His commands. End of.

    Reply
  8. John has referred to all the “blessings” conferred on us by Vatican II. To wit, many Catholics have become fully Protestantized and thus paganized over the last 50 years which, let’s face it, was the whole point of the thing in the first place. The devil is dancing. So, of course, John is certainly correct about problem. But not the solution.

    What we are dealing with now is pretty much what the apostles dealt with in their time: paganism. The solution is to preach the truth which is the Cross. The Cross means giving up sinning and following Christ. There is really no other way. It worked before, it can work now. And it is not that hard with God helping you. “For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
    Matthew 11:30

    I will pray that John gets the picture and acts accordingly.

    Reply
  9. The 4th paragraph in No. 84 of Familiaris Consortio (November 22, 1981), the paragraph [and the one that follows] that Pope Francis & The Synod on the Family 2015 failed to reaffirm and teach states:

    However, the Church reaffirms her practice, which is based upon Sacred Scripture, of not admitting to Eucharistic Communion divorced persons who have remarried. They are unable to be admitted thereto from the fact that their state and condition of life objectively contradict that union of love between Christ and the Church which is signified and effected by the Eucharist. Besides this, there is another special pastoral reason: if these people were admitted to the Eucharist, the faithful would be led into error and confusion regarding the Church’s teaching about the indissolubility of marriage. (My emphasis)

    When the LORD, the simple Being who IS, and IS TRUTH, and IS GOODNESS [the Trinity in Unity and Unity in Trinity], states and teaches that:

    9 What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder.” – Mk 10:9 (RSVCE)

    he is calling us, who are made in his image, and called to be recreated in the image of the Son by the Spirit, and to be perfect as the Father is, to live and do as he himself has done, because out of all the innumerable creatures he had made or could make, only the human nature he assumed [He … chose … us! … he chose us in [Christ] before the foundation of the world (Eph 1:4)], uniting the divine and the human natures in the divine person of the Son. And he went ahead with that plan despite devil and his angels who refused to serve/adore God-made-man, and he went ahead [remained faithful] even when man was seduced by the envious renegade angel and went on to play the whore with demons, and he remained faithful not only as God, but as man, and his faithfulness first to his Father and in obedience to his Father’s will to his bride, his Body, the Church, was even to death, death on the cross [yes the cross has and is the answer], when we were still sinners [unfaithful]. God is not asking us to live and do what he himself has not done, and even if a husband or wife cheats from the very day of the wedding, and the innocent spouse remains faithful, no matter how much they suffer, they will never suffer as the Bridegroom suffered [for them], but how great their reward will be for imitating the Bridegroom and being obedient to him.

    Reply
  10. Barbara, true enough, but there once was social support for seeking to know and believe what God wanted everyone to know and believe, to seek the truth. There was disagreement as to where that lead, but agreement that one should search. Today, because of the liberal media and the ministers of all faiths failing to publicly unite in the one thing they should all agree upon, that each person should be seen working their entire life trying to know and believe whatever it is that God wants everyone to know and believe, following the Spirit of Truth and letting the chips fall wherever He leads, because people are focusing on the grey, unknowables rather than the knowable black and whites that prove there is an all-powerful Creator, because of these and other factors, this generation needs those who do have the right faith to help them take the absolutely essential, all-important first step of

    acknowledging that if it is POSSIBLE that there is an infinite Creator God, who has created all space and time and the absolute, objective, moral order that we see and acknowledging that IF THAT CREATOR DOES EXIST we absolutely need God’s help to believe in Him, that person, if they really want to believe whatever is true, should perseveringly pray,”God, Creator of all things, IF YOU EXIST, I need your help to believe in you and to always try to believe everything you want everyone to believe. Please, IF YOU EXIST, because you must be infinite goodness you must want all to believe in you, please give me the help I need, when it is best for me.”

    Think if all ministers of all faiths publicly united to help all take this essential first step. Would your minister support, or lead, such a public witness? If not, why not? Do you believe God is so infinitely powerful that He can turn the whole world right side up, to God, even if almost all ministers of all faiths are in the devil’s pocket (not that they all are)?

    Reply
  11. “It is only supreme sacrifice in the service of a greater cause that inspires people to change their lives.”

    I think of Bernard Nathanson, the atheist abortionist turned atheist pro-life activist. Ultrasound images converted him to the pro-life cause, but he remained an atheist for many years afterward. Until…. years later, when he watched an elderly nun who was quietly praying the rosary outside an abortion clinic get manhandled, roughed up, and forcibly dragged away by the cops, then thrown into jail. And through it all, she remained serene and loving. In his book “The Hand of God,” Nathanson describes how this scene touched him to the core: Maybe there was something to this God business after all. It was that nun’s quiet witness to the truth that finally brought an aging Bernard Nathanson into the Church.

    Reply
    • I saw him in the flesh at an Operation Rescue clinic shut down back in the 80’s or 90’s with his 3rd or 4th wife, he was looking at our faces intently and seemed traumatized by the whole thing.

      Reply
  12. Sometimes… and it must be said… when we ask “Can’t we make it easier for them?” what we are really asking is, “Can’t we make it easier for us?”

    Imagine what the first disciples and missionaries had to face when they had to go out in the world amongst alien cultures where sin and error were the engrained norm!

    Technically our culture has regressed, but the solution remains the same, albeit, it is true that nowadays people are so far gone that they lack even the logical consistency and understanding of the pagans of old.

    We must also face another truth – sometimes it does get so bad that the only solution is destruction – See the Flood of Noah for example. St. Peter says we are due for another one by fire. As do many prophecies and apparitions speaking of just such a chastisement.

    In this case, we need to work on ourselves and realize that a harsh weight to be carried will be the loss of nearly everyone else around us. So I say, within our own means, let’s concentrate less on what progress we are capable of having on the world at large outside of our control, and scale things to our level to just focusing on those immediate members beside us.

    Forget about altering the laws, government and court systems of America, and just try to open the eyes of the guy beside you. All those other things are of men and shall pass away and destroy themselves. We must prepare for the suffering and death that will occur in due time. Starting with embracing that fact that we may live long enough to see it, and knowing that it is just.

    Reply
  13. Steve this is one of the best posts I have ever read among all the blogs I frequent. It spoke to me in my personal situation and it challenges me. God bless you for your gift.
    I shared it with a friend who is civilly divorced but has chosen the path of heroic virtuous chastity and was quite impressed with it and was going to share it with others. You are touching people Steve.

    Reply

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