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Vilano Beach begins North of St. Augustine Inlet and runs to South Ponte Vedra. There are large deposits of Coquina clam shells, the main ingredient in Coquina rock, the material used for the Spanish forts here. On the white sand areas there are black streaks of Titanium ore. Ponte Vedra was once home to a Titanium mining operation. The "red shell" has been a traditional place to test beach buggies and 4WD vehicles, it is easy to bury your wheels up to the hubs if you get off the hard pack.

St. Augustine of Hippo Rome, Italy, Sep 4, 2009 / 10:08 am (CNA).- In a letter he sent Thursday to Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity,  Pope Benedict XVI has underscored that the teachings of St. Augustine are a path seeking unity with the Orthodox. The message from the Pope was sent to Cardinal Kasper as the 11th Inter-Christian Symposium gathered in Rome. The meeting was organized by the Franciscan Institute of Spirituality of the Pontifical University Antonianum and the Aristotle Orthodox Theological Faculty of Thessalonica.In his message, the Holy Father expressed his gratitude...

Castel Gandolfo, Italy, Aug 30, 2009 / 11:14 am (CNA).- At Sunday’s Angelus prayer in the courtyard of Castel Gandolfo’s apostolic palace, Pope Benedict XVI recalled the previous week’s liturgical memorial of St. Monica, mother of St. Augustine of Hippo and model and patron of Christian mothers. “Much is recounted about her in her son’s autobiography ‘The Confessions,’ a masterpiece among the most read works of all time,” Pope Benedict said. “There, we understand that St. Augustine imbibed the name of Jesus with maternal milk and was educated in the Christian religion by his mother, the principles of which...

We had a nice turnout, I don't have a count yet, but it has to be over 1000, if most signed in. I left at about 4 PM, too hot for an old man, LOL. I got to meet a couple of other Freepers, there may have been more of us there. Maybe we need some Freeper hats or Tee shirts! Click on the SWAMPSNIPERPRESS link for pics!

TAKE UP YOUR SWORD AND FIGHT THE GOOD FIGHT Dr. Paul L. Williams SUNDAY MEDITATION: “For this people’s heart has grown dull, and their ears are heavy of hearing, and their eyes they have closed, lest they should perceive with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and turn for me to heal them.’ But blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear. Truly, I say to you, many prophets and righteous men longed to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear,...

Marco Rubio will appear and speak at the St. Augustine Tea Party on July 5th. We are looking forward to a huge turnout, with patriots from a wide surrounding area. The event will be on the green of the old Spanish fort, Castillo De San Marcos, just North of downtown St. Augustine. Y'ALL COME!

Great turnout, I estimate 1000, some folks had to go back to work, people coming and going all afternoon. We will have accurate figures later. The press, with the exception of the local radio station, came late. I don't know what they will do with whatever they collected. I got to make a very short pro 2nd amendment statement, I just said that Mexico and the ghettos aren't my fault, and I won't register or surrender diddly squat! The crowd agreed! Let's plan a big Fourth of July, all over America, the ball is rolling, let's keep it going! Pictures...

On St. Augustine's Conversion "A Journey That Remains a True Example for Each One of Us" VATICAN CITY, FEB. 26, 2008 (Zenit.org).- Here is a translation of the greetings Benedict XVI gave today at St. Peter's Basilica to those who could not be accommodated in Paul VI Hall for the general audience, and a translation of the catechesis he delivered in the Vatican auditorium. This is the fifth and final address the Pope has dedicated to the figure of St. Augustine. * * * [Greetings at St. Peter's Basilica in English] Dear Brothers and Sisters, I am pleased to welcome...

On the Writings of St. Augustine "He Truly Lives in His Works, He Is Present With Us" VATICAN CITY, FEB. 20, 2008 (Zenit.org).- Here is a translation of the greetings Benedict XVI gave today at St. Peter's Basilica to those who could not be accommodated in Paul VI Hall for the general audience, and a translation of the catechesis he delivered in the Vatican auditorium. This is the fourth address the Pope has dedicated to the figure of St. Augustine. * * * [Greetings at St. Peter's Basilica in English] I am pleased to greet all the English-speaking pilgrims gathered...

On St. Augustine's Search for Truth "Faith and Reason Are the Two Forces That Lead Us to Knowledge " VATICAN CITY, JAN. 30, 2008 (Zenit.org).- Here is a translation of the address Benedict XVI delivered today at the general audience in Paul VI Hall. The reflection is the third in a series on St. Augustine, bishop of Hippo. * * * Dear friends, After the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, we return today to the great figure of St. Augustine. In 1986, on the 1,600th anniversary of his conversion, my beloved predecessor John Paul II dedicated a long and...

St. Augustine's Last Days "Though the World Grows Old, Christ Is Forever Young" VATICAN CITY, JAN. 16, 2007 JAN. 16, 2007 (Zenit.org).- Here is a translation of the address Benedict XVI delivered today at the general audience in Paul VI Hall. The reflection is the second in a series on St. Augustine, bishop of Hippo. * * * Dear brothers and sisters, Today, as I did last Wednesday, I would like to discuss the great bishop of Hippo, St. Augustine. Four years before he died, he wanted to nominate his successor. To this end, on Sept. 26, 426, he gathered...

On St. Augustine "All the Roads of Christian Latin Literature Lead to Hippo" VATICAN CITY, JAN. 9, 2007 (Zenit.org).- Here is a translation of the address Benedict XVI delivered today at the general audience in Paul VI Hall. The reflection is the first in a series on St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo. * * * Dear brothers and sisters, After the Christmas holidays I would like to turn to the meditations on the Fathers of the Church and speak today of the greatest Father of the Latin Church, St. Augustine: a man of passion and faith, of high intelligence and...

VILANO BEACH, Fla. -- A 9-year-old St. Johns County girl is recovering after being attacked by a shark on Sunday. It's not yet known where she was bitten, but authorities said the girl was taken to the hospital after the attack. Her condition has not been released. Fire rescue officials said the girl had been surfing off Vilano Beach.

If today’s Catholic bishops lived during the Nuremberg trials, they would have condemned the execution of nine of the defendants – including Ernst Kaltenbrunner and Hans Frank. Kaltenbrunner was responsible for mass executions of civilians and prisoners of war as Heinrich Himmler’s chief SS lieutenant; Frank oversaw the Nazis’ numerous atrocities as the governor of occupied Poland. Such a presumptuous proposition seems plausible given two Vatican officials’ opposition to Saddam Hussein’s death sentence – and the Catholic Church’s moral revisionism concerning capital punishment. Iraq’s High Tribunal convicted Saddam of committing crimes against humanity and sentenced him to death on Nov....

If you believe what you like in the gospels, and reject what you don't like, it is not the gospel you believe, but yourself. St. Augustine of Hippo Sermons?

by Fr. William Saunders Other Articles by Fr. William Saunders The Disposition of Priests 07/15/05 If an ordained priest does not believe in transubstantiation, do the communicants receive the Body and Blood of Christ? In answering this question, one has to wonder, "How could a priest not believe in transubstantiation?" Of course, the point here is not simply the word "transubstantiation," which the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 officially used in its Creed and which the Council of Trent repeated in its Decree on the Most Holy Eucharist in 1551. Rather, the important point is believing what the word transubstantiation signifies:...

 AGOSTINO ZHAO RONG (+ 1815)AND 119 COMPANIONS, MARTYRS IN CHINA (+ 1648 – 1930)1st. October 2000From the earliest beginnings of the Chinese people (sometime about the middle of the third millennium before Christ)  religious sentiment towards the Supreme Being and diligent filial piety towards ancestors were the most conspicuous characteristics of their culture, which had existed for thousands of years. This note of distinct religiousness is found to a greater or lesser extent in the Chinese people of all centuries up to our own time, when, under the influence of western atheism, some intellectuals, especially those educated in foreign...

ST. AUGUSTINE -- For the next six days, 49 rainbow flags will flutter on the Bridge of Lions after a three-year battle by gay rights organizations. U.S. District Judge Henry Lee Adams Jr. ruled Tuesday against the city in a suit filed by the Rev. Ruth Jensen and Vicki Waldon of the St. Augustine Pride Committee, Equality Florida and the National Center for Lesbian Rights. The city rejected a request last month to fly the flags for a week of gay-pride events.

When speaking of firsts in U.S. history, the place should be Florida's St. Augustine, not Plymouth, Mass; the first settlers should be Spanish, not British; and the religion should be Catholicism, not Puritanism. "It's about time that we corrected our brethren in the northern climes," Michael Gannon told an audience of Catholic journalists during a May 27 workshop at the Catholic Press Association's annual convention in Orlando. "By the time the pilgrims came to Plymouth, St. Augustine was up for urban renewal."

Once upon a time, not too awfully long ago, America was known as the ‘shining city on the hill.’ America, the most radical experiment in the history of the world, was the only nation to which people oppressed and repressed by old world systems of social classes and castes could be free of the stifling bindings engendered by those man created constraints. She was a Judao-Christian nation where God of the bible, and not an elite ruling class, was sovereign over all. America was the land of hope, promise and opportunity, where not only all men were equal before God’s...

May 27, 2005Friday of the Eighth Week in Ordinary Time Psalm: Friday 24 Reading ISir 44:1, 9-13 Now will I praise those godly men,our ancestors, each in his own time.But of others there is no memory,for when they ceased, they ceased.And they are as though they had not lived,they and their children after them.Yet these also were godly menwhose virtues have not been forgotten;Their wealth remains in their families,their heritage with their descendants;Through God's covenant with them their family endures,their posterity, for their sake. And for all time their progeny will endure,their glory will never be blotted out. Responsorial PsalmPs...

August 28, 2004 Memorial of Saint Augustine, bishop and doctor of the Church Psalm: Saturday 37 Reading I Responsorial Psalm Gospel Reading I1 Cor 1:26-31 Consider your own calling, brothers and sisters. Not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. Rather, God chose the foolish of the world to shame the wise, and God chose the weak of the world to shame the strong, and God chose the lowly and despised of the world, those who count for nothing, to reduce to nothing those who are something, so...

May 27, 2004 Thursday of Seventh Week of Easter Psalm: Thursday 24 Reading I Responsorial Psalm Gospel Reading IActs 22:30; 23:6-11 Wishing to determine the truth about why Paul was being accused by the Jews, the commander freed him and ordered the chief priests and the whole Sanhedrin to convene. Then he brought Paul down and made him stand before them. Paul was aware that some were Sadducees and some Pharisees, so he called out before the Sanhedrin, "My brothers, I am a Pharisee, the son of Pharisees; I am on trial for hope in the resurrection of the...

Augustine's "just war" theory continues to guide the West.The fall of Rome in 410 was a calamity of staggering proportions to the citizens of the Roman Empire. Civilization itself had been shaken to its foundations. So it was viewed by Augustine, from his vantage point on the North African coast. But he worried not so much about the empire as about the threat of a backlash to Christianity. Hadn't critics warned for years that Christians' pacifism would weaken the empire? Didn't this confirm the fears that Christianity was too other-worldly for its followers to be responsible citizens of the state?...

A Few of FR's Finest....Every Day Free Republic made its debut in September, 1996, and the forum was added in early 1997.   Over 100,000 people have registered for posting privileges on Free Republic, and the forum is read daily by tens of thousands of concerned citizens and patriots from all around the country and the world. A Few of FR's Finest....Every Day was introduced on June 24, 2002. It's only a small room in JimRob's house where we can get to know one another a little better; salute and support our military and our leaders; pray for those in...

August 28, 2003Memorial of Saint Augustine, bishop and doctor of the Church Psalm: Thursday 37 Reading I Responsorial Psalm Gospel Reading I1 Thes 3:7-13 We have been reassured about you, brothers and sisters,in our every distress and affliction, through your faith.For we now live, if you stand firm in the Lord.What thanksgiving, then, can we render to God for you,for all the joy we feel on your account before our God?Night and day we pray beyond measure to see you in personand to remedy the deficiencies of your faith.Now may God himself, our Father, and our Lord Jesusdirect our way...

Civil Disobedience Is Consistent With Christian Conduct And With American History By Chuck Baldwin Food For Thought From The Chuck Wagon August 26, 2003 While Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore's refusal to remove a Ten Commandments display from the Alabama Judicial Building in Montgomery is not, in strict terms, civil disobedience, many people see it that way. Actually, the federal judge who ordered the monument's removal, Myron Thompson, and those who support him are guilty of breaking the law! The U.S. Constitution prohibits the federal government from interfering with the state's or the individual's right to express or...

May 27, 2003Tuesday of the Sixth Week of Easter Psalm: Tuesday Week 24 Reading I Responsorial Psalm Gospel Reading IActs 16:22-34 The crowd in Philippi joined in the attack on Paul and Silas,and the magistrates had them strippedand ordered them to be beaten with rods.After inflicting many blows on them,they threw them into prisonand instructed the jailer to guard them securely.When he received these instructions, he put them in the innermost celland secured their feet to a stake. About midnight, while Paul and Silas were prayingand singing hymns to God as the prisoners listened,there was suddenly such a severe earthquakethat...

Identity Crisis By John R. Dunlap Published 4/18/2003 12:05:00 AM Near the end of the past winter quarter, one of the courses I'd been teaching for the classics department was taking its usual, peculiar toll. The course is titled "The World of Augustine." It's about St. Augustine of Hippo (A.D. 354-430), the most influential and prolific of the Church Fathers, who wrote during a tumultuous era broadly similar to our own: the dissolute century issuing in the collapse of the western Roman Empire. In some ways, it's my favorite course. It draws above-average students who don't flake out under a...

Already in the fifth century St. Augustine observed, "On no point does the Christian faith encounter more opposition than on the resurrection of the body." Indeed, the world may permit us our belief in His resurrection as a curious opinion about a man 2,000 years ago. But the belief in our own resurrection strikes the world as absurd. Yet this is precisely what we believe...

March 29, 2003 Haunting Thoughts After a BattleBy STEVEN LEE MYERS ITH THE THIRD INFANTRY DIVISION, in central Iraq, March 28 — It troubles him, now that the battle is over. Sgt. Mark N. Redmond remembers shouting "qiff," Arabic for halt, but they did not halt. The Iraqi fighters just kept coming. Sergeant Redmond's unit spent three days and nights fighting for the bridge at Kifl, a village on the Euphrates River about 75 miles south of Baghdad. By any military definition — the territory seized, the number of enemy killed, the mission accomplished — the unit's fight ended in...

MESSAGE OF HIS HOLINESS JOHN PAUL II FOR LENT 2003 Dear Brothers and Sisters!1. Lent is a season of intense prayer, fasting and concern for those in need. It offers all Christians an opportunity to prepare for Easter by serious discernment about their lives, with particular attention to the word of God which enlightens the daily journey of all who believe.This year, as a guide for our Lenten meditation, I would offer a phrase taken from the Acts of the Apostles: "It is more blessed to give than to receive" (Acts 20:35). What we have here is not simply...

August 28, 2002Memorial of Saint Augustine, bishop and doctor of the Church Psalm: Wednesday Week 38 Reading I Responsorial Psalm Gospel Reading I2 Thes 3:6-10, 16-18 We instruct you, brothers and sisters,in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ,to shun any brotherwho walks in a disorderly wayand not according to the tradition they received from us.For you know how one must imitate us.For we did not act in a disorderly way among you,nor did we eat food received free from anyone.On the contrary, in toil and drudgery, night and day we worked,so as not to burden any of you.Not that...