The media sensation created by the HHS mandate is causing many Christians of good will to honestly reexamine this issue, and it will bring about a conversion of many hearts, not only to renewed openness to God's Providence and new Life, but also to the Church.
Among those genuinely seeking the Truth and eager to do the Lord's Will, this subject has never been a "losing" battle.
It has brought many home to Christ's Church, and will bring many more, not thanks to the USCCB but, paradoxically, to Obama.
Please, continue to pray for the conversion or the confounding of the enemies of God and His Church.
QUAERITUR: Why pray to “confuse” enemies rather than “convert”?
From a reader:
Sometimes you write that we should pray for strength for the Pope but confusion for his enemies. Shouldn’t you pray for the conversion the his enemies?
Okay. Pray for conversion. By all means.
Perhaps I have read 19th century English novels, Patrick O’Brien, and both the King James and Douay versions of the Bible enough that some of turns of phrase stick in my head.
“Confusion to one’s enemies” is a constant prayer in the Scriptures and it is what God inflicts on those who are doing something in defiance of His will. It also came to be a standard expression in English, probably because of the KJV.
“Confusion” and the related “confound” are both from Latin, of course. Confundo means basically “to pour, mingle, or mix together”. By extension it means that, when things are poured together they become jumbled and confused, disordered. Thus there is a moral notion of dissaray, intellectual confusion, ineffectiveness. Someone who has been “confounded” has been thwarted in his scheme, has been demonstrated to be wrong.
This is what God did to the people who built the Tower of Babel: he confused them and their wicked goal by scrambling their speech. In English, “confound” concerns making someone confused or defeating them, or even refuting a bad argument.
In the Psalms we have myriad references to confusion and confounding.
Thus, in Psalms 70:13 in the older numbering we find: “Let them be confounded and come to nothing that detract my soul; let them be covered with confusion and blame that seek my hurt.”
In Jeremiah 8:12 we have this confounded confusion: “They are confounded, because they have committed abomination: yea rather they are not confounded with confusion, and they have not known how to blush: therefore shall they fall among them that fall; in the time of their visitation they shall fall, saith the Lord.”
In Acts 9:22 St. Paul gets to confuse people: “But Saul increased much more in strength and confounded the Jews who dwelt at Damascus, affirming that this is the Christ.”
And to the Corinthians Paul wrote (1 Cor 1:27): “But the foolish things of the world hath God chosen, that he may confound the wise: and the weak things of the world hath God chosen, that he may confound the strong.”
In the Douay Bible you can find all sorts of uses of confound.
So, in sum, sometimes I use archaic language.
But by all means, pray that the Pope’s enemies, after being confounded, be converted as well.
In response to confounding our enemies as opposed to conversion, there is the Chaplet of the Holy Face or Chaplet of Reparation which addresses this. Here is a portion of the prayer:
“Eternal Father I offer You the cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ and all the other instruments of His Holy Passion, that you may put division in the camp of your enemies; for as Your Beloved Son has said, “ A kindgom divided against itself shall fall”
Then later it says: “May God arise and let His enemies be scattered and let those who hate Him flee before His Face. May the thrice Holy Name of God overthrow all their Plans. May the Holy Name of the Living God split them up by disagreements” and so on.
I found this prayer on www.holyfacedevotion.com