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A quick Google search finds this quote all over sedevacantist sites accusing the Pope of being an heretic. It supposedly was written in 1966. No context is given. Is this an actual quote of the then, Joseph Ratzinger, or is it a quote of someone else that he refutes? Without context, who knows?

However, I did find a more recent and reliable quote of Joseph Cardinal Razinger.

“God is near. God knows us. God is waiting for us in Jesus Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. Let us not leave him waiting in vain! Let us not, through distraction and lethargy, pass by the greatest and most important thing life offers us. We should let ourselves be reminded, by today’s reading, of the wonderful mystery kept close within the walls of our churches. Let us not pass it heedlessly by. Let us take time, in the course of the week, in passing, to go in and spend a moment with the Lord who is so near. During the day our churches should not be allowed to be dead houses, standing empty and seemingly useless. Jesus Christ’s invitation is always being proffered from them. This sacred proximity to us is always alive in them. It is always calling us and inviting us in. This is what is lovely about Catholic churches, that within them there is, as it were, always worship, because the eucharistic presence of the Lord dwells always within them. (Ratzinger, God is Near Us [San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2003], p. 103)

Thank you. I can not agree with you more.

I have, over time, come to question the motivation of those posters who do not use the caucus designation. Why do they “cast pearls before swine” when they know full well that the pearls will be trampled. Is this not being an accessory to sin, when it causes others to blaspheme holy things?

It is something that all should consider before posting.

Thanks again.

Matthew 10:5-6 concerns the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. At the end of Chapter 9, Jesus sees that the multitudes have increased, coming to him to be healed of their infirmities. Seeing that the “harvest is great but the laborers are few”, in chapter 10, he “deputizes” the 12 Apostles and sends them forth to preach, to heal the sick and to cast out demons. He does limit their preaching, etc., to the lost sheep of the House of Israel.

However, this was only a temporary command, as Matthew 28:16-20 supercedes the command of Matthew 10:5-6.

***16 And the eleven disciples went into Galilee, unto the mountain where Jesus had appointed them. 17 And seeing them they adored: but some doubted. 18 And Jesus coming, spoke to them, saying: All power is given to me in heaven and in earth. 19 Going therefore, teach ye all nations; baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. 20 Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world.***

We now see that Jesus has commanded the Apostles to teach all nations, not just the Israelites.

I also refer you to Acts 10 and 11:1-18. Peter is convinced through the vision given him and the subsequent events concerning Cornelius, that God had commanded that the Gentiles be evangelized. Through the vision, God again commands that all nations be taught the Gospel, superceding Matthew 10:5-6.

No, it goes back even further. It is the laws that medical personnel must work under.

Most states have laws that require licensed medical personnel to report any cases of suspected child abuse to the authorities. Failure to do so results in the loss of one's license and livelihood, plus fines and the very likely possibility of getting sued.

Unfortunately, common sense gets thrown out the window with the result being that innocent people get harmed.

Easy, the rules of grammar require that the feminine noun be changed to the masculine case when applied to a male. Genders must match. masculine to masculine; feminine to feminine; neuter to neuter.

If the Holy Spirit and St. Matthew had written the feminine form, it would have been ascribing to Peter female qualities. This would be an insult to Peter, as it is the equivalent of calling him a sissie, a homo, or other derogatory names.

It appears that the Holy Spirit and St. Matthew knew what they were doing.

What is truly and sadly amazing is how you spit upon God by rejecting the many gifts He has given to us to help us attain salvation.

This is the one that I used.

http://www.download.com/Ad-Aware-2007/3000-8022_4-10731194.html?tag=pop.software

I have only used the free version of it. It cleared out all of the spyware, etc., from both my personal PC and my Mother’s PC. I had to run a scan 3 times on each computer to completely remove all of the spyware, but what a difference it made. I try to scan at least monthly, if not more frequently.

Concerning the pop-up, what I learned when researching how to remove the adware, was that some spyware programs will disable pop-up blockers. (I would enable my pop-up blockers and the next time that I would log on online, I would find the pop-up blockers disabled.) Once I removed the spyware, and reset the pop-up blockers, surfing the net has become a virtual joy.

It was also recommended that I delete all cookies. This I did and I reset the security setting for the 2nd highest setting. Warning, if you delete the cookies, be sure that you know your username(s) and password(s) to any websites that require them.

Finally, be sure that your firewall is enabled. I found that the Windows firewall works much better than my Norton firewall.

I hope this if of some use.

“It’s kind of hurtful,” Knuckles said. “It’s our mission to help people who need help.”

However, the posted article reveals the true motivation:

FOTF’s involvement stemmed from an AIDS project volunteer who is a Christian heterosexual who has AIDS. He approached FOTF for help in the race and to try to get the two groups to move beyond stereotypes about the disease.

In other words, FOTF would not have shown their lily-white faces among the riff-raff had it not been for a "Christian heterosexual with AIDS."

That is the general rule. I understand though that the Bishop can make an exception to the rule.

The Precious Blood is never allowed to be reserved from a previous Mass.

That is true, and I found that the possibility that the Precious Blood may have been reserved to be shocking. Again, being charitable, perhaps too much wine was consecrated at a previous Mass to be consumed by the priest and EMHC's that the priest elected to reserve It for the following Mass. It is not right, but perhaps he thought it the better part of valor? Though it makes no sense to me to consecrate even more wine.

To knowingly distribute or receive unconsecrated bread or wine seems to me like idolatry.

To knowingly do so is idolatry, no if, ands, or buts about it.

Yes, you are correct. A couple of years ago, I asked my former TLM priest a similar question. We have both the TLM and the NO at our parish. We have a couple of TLM attendees who question the validity of the consecration of the NO Hosts reserved in the tabernacle. I asked my priest that if for any reason that unconsecrated hosts were in the tabernacle, would they be consecrated when he said the words of consecration? His reply was no, the hosts must be on the altar in front of him for the consecration to occur.

Since none of these 6 cups was removed from the Tabernacle, then they are not left over from a previous Mass ... correct? What the heck!!!

It is hard to say one way or the other. Some parishes have another tabernacle in the sacristy or a side chapel. Though usually the tabernacle in the sanctuary is not used if another tabernacle is being used elsewhere.

The only charitable explaination that I can think of is that there was so many Hosts and so much Wine consecrated at a previous Mass that it could not be contained in the main tabernacle. Therefore the consecrated Elements were reserved in another tabernacle or someplace safe and under lock and key.

I know of a parish that has a Perpetual Adoration Chapel. At the Sunday Masses (5) just before Holy Communion either the Deacon or the EMHC would go to the chapel to obtain the ciborium of Hosts. After Holy Communion, the ciborium would be returned to the chapel and placed, exposed next to the monstrance, under the watch of the adorers present. At the final Mass of the day, after Holy Communion, the remaining consecrated Hosts would be placed in the tabernacle for Viaticum.

Finally, there is the kooky idea that the stupid laity get very confused and disturbed because Christ is present on the Altar, present in the Word, present in our song and present in the assembly. And if He is present in the tabernacle, well the laity can't handle that. Why the poor dears will be so addled due to the confusion of playing Where's Waldo, er , I mean where's Christ that they will be permanently brain damaged.

BTW, welcome to the club of religious fanatacism. My parents think the same of me.

The article in question, is an advertisement to Catholics. It is targeted to Catholics who take their Faith seriously and who would be well versed in their Faith. Therefore, there was no need to address the finer theological details.

This piece completely portrays the MEDAL as the key to protection and casting demons out of people.

The article does not say that the medal is the key to protection. It does say that ”the medal will serve as the walls of a castle in defense of those who honor her (Mary) in the public square.”The analogy of the castle is important, as the walls are not the only part of the castle’s defense. There is also the moat, the draw bridge, the battlements, etc. Thus the medal is just one of the tools in defense of the enemy.

This piece completely portrays the MEDAL as the key to protection and casting demons out of people.

This is what the article says: IT is exorcistic and strengthens souls who are tempted.and ANF hopes THEY (the medals) will protect Public Square Rosary participants from attacks of the devil."

Note that the article says that the medals “strengthens souls who are tempted,” and ”THEY (the medals) will protect … participants from attacks of the devil."This in no way says that the medals cast out demons from the possessed. What is does say is that the medal will strengthen and protect Christian souls. Again, as the article is directed at Catholics, it is understood that the strength and protection come from none other than God Himself.

However, I can see where the word “exorcistic” could lead one to think of the exorcism of the possessed. What the word means is “like an exorcism.” When we are tempted/attacked by the devil, we can perform minor exorcisms that send the devil packing. Thes can be simple prayers, the Sign of the Cross, invoking the Holy Name of Jesus, and the use of sacramentals (medals, etc.) When this is done, we are asking God to come to our defense. We are not “casting out” demons, but we are, with the help of God, “casting away” demons, saying, “by the power of God, get thee behind me, Satan.”

Second, the premise that some special object is going to simply do something for us all by itself is questionable.

Catholics who know their Faith agree with that statement. The object cannot, on its own, do anything. It is only through the power of God, working through the object, that grace is delivered to the recipient.

If we truly have faith in God, and we as His children, have direct access to Him in prayer, and are able to rightly call Him Father, and that we believe His Word that He is able to hear our prayers and is faithful to us, why do we need a medal then? As sons and daughters of God, we are under His protection.

Yes, that is true. The wearing of a medal does not deny any of this. What is does do is remind us that we are under God’s protection. It reminds us to pray asking for God’s help and protection both when we are tempted and when we are not. It reminds us that we are Christians and that we have a calling to be Christians and to resist the wiles of the devil. It is a way in which God says to us that He is with us constantly and will help us if we ask for His help. That is the grace that He gives us through the medal and other sacramentals. It is one of many aids He has given us on our journey to heaven.

Well, if you prefer to get the "truth" from an atheist website, more power to you. As for me, I'll continue to receive the Truth from the Catholic Church, the pillar of Truth, established by Jesus Christ.

Good day!

I stopped reading here...

See post #59.

LOLOLOLOL indeed!!!

http://www.positiveatheism.org/tocapox4.htm#9-96

Would this satisfy as coming from the period of the apparations thenselves?

"The following account of the five apparitions in three days is based on the oldest written record of the miracle of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Nican Mopohua, written in Nahuatl about 1540 by Don Antonio Valeriano, one of the first Aztec Indians educated by the Franciscans at the Bishop's Colegio de la Santa Cruz."

source: http://www.maryourmother.net/Guadalupe.html

From the same source: "He (Juan Diego) died peacefully on May 30, 1548 and was buried at Tepeyac. Bishop Zumarrage died only three days after Juan Diego."

Appears that Don Antonio Valeriano wrote of the apparations while Juan Diego and Bishop Zumarrage were still among the living. Yet we accept the accounts of Jesus eventhough the New testament was written some 30+ years after He ascended into Heaven.

There are, for instance, no references to any apparitions occurring at Tepeyac in the writings of Bishop Zumarraga, even though he was supposed to have been a central participant in the drama."

So that proves that Guadalupe did not occur? Doesn't this college professor know that an argument from silence is useless and proves nothing. All he has is conjecture.

"The greatest stumbling block to anyone searching for the psychological origins of the Tepeyac apparitions"

No, the greatest stumbling block is searching for psychological origins rather than searching for the spiritual origins, or better yet, having faith that God deigned, through the Virgin Mary, to manifest Himself to the Indian people of Mexico.

Some may think that the major and Church confirmed apparations of the Blessed Virgin Mary are rooted in psychosis. Fine, go ahead. Just don't be suprised when we get the following scholarly study:

The Cult of the Jesus, and on page 183 it states:

The greatest stumbling block to anyone searching for the psychological origins of the life of Jesus is the fact that there are no accounts of his life that date from the period of his life. There are, for instance, no references to his life in the writings of his mother Mary, even though she was supposed to have been a central participant in the drama."

Sorry, but all that your author proves is that he is wacky.

From your source: This is the story of Our Lady of Guadalupe as recorded by Luis Lasso de la Vega in 1649, a translation from the Nahuatl indian dialect. This was written 118 years after the event.

Though your source is good, it is the third and later telling of the story of Guadalupe. The following is taken from the first and oldest account, written about 1540, nine years after the events occurred.

http://www.maryourmother.net/Guadalupe.html

The following account of the five apparitions in three days is based on the oldest written record of the miracle of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Nican Mopohua, written in Nahuatl about 1540 by Don Antonio Valeriano, one of the first Aztec Indians educated by the Franciscans at the Bishop's Colegio de la Santa Cruz.

"I am the Virgin Mary, Mother of the one true God, of Him who gives life. He is Lord and Creator of heaven and of earth.

I desire that there be built a temple at this place where I want to manifest Him, make him known, give Him to all people through my love, my compassion, my help, and my protection.

I truly am your merciful Mother, your Mother and the Mother of all who dwell in this land, and of all mankind, of all those who love me, of those who cry to me, and of those who seek and place their trust in me. Here I shall listen to their weeping and their sorrows. I shall take them all to my heart, and I shall cure their many sufferings, afflictions, and sorrows.

So run now to Tenochtitlan and tell the Lord Bishop all that you have seen and heard."

Notice the bolded section. It is not recounted in the later source. Most importantly, notice that Our Lady does not request that a temple be built in her honor but that she desires to "manifest Him, make him known, give Him to all people". Also take note that she does so "through my love, my compassion, my help, and my protection".

The story of Guadalupe is much more than Mary's appearance to Juan Diego and the events that followed. Fifteen hundred years earlier, Mary said yes to the angel Gabriel and 9 months later brought forth her first-born son. She did this through her love, compassion, help and protection to manifest Him, make Him known and give Him to all the people. In 1531, she brought Christmas to the New World again desiring to manifest Him, make Him known, give Him to all people through her love, compassion, help, and protection. Thus she brought glory to God by bringing Him to the New World.

They are Scriptural references, taken from the first chapter of Genesis:

11 And he said: Let the earth bring forth the green herb, and such as may seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after its kind, which may have seed in itself upon the earth. And it was so done. 12 And the earth brought forth the green herb, and such as yieldeth seed according to its kind, and the tree that beareth fruit, having seed each one according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. 13 And the evening and the morning were the third day.

20 God also said: Let the waters bring forth the creeping creature having life, and the fowl that may fly over the earth under the firmament of heaven. 21 And God created the great whales, and every living and moving creature, which the waters brought forth, according to their kinds, and every winged fowl according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. 22 And he blessed them, saying: Increase and multiply, and fill the waters of the sea: and let the birds be multiplied upon the earth. 23 And the evening and morning were the fifth day.

24 And God said: Let the earth bring forth the living creature in its kind, cattle and creeping things, and beasts of the earth, according to their kinds. And it was so done. 25 And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds, and cattle, and every thing that creepeth on the earth after its kind. And God saw that it was good.

So, yes, the Bible does teach us that God commanded the earth and waters to bring forth and that the earth and waters brought forth as God commanded.

To determine the line, we have to define what is worship. Is worship the act of praying and singing psalms and hymns? Or is worship something more? We Catholics would say that worship is something more, much, much more.

To worship God requires a sacrifice. This sacrifice is the Holy Mass. The Levitical priesthood and sacrifices, which were imperfect, prefigures the Perfect Sacrifice of Jesus upon the Cross. Our Lord, the night before He died, instituted the Mass so that this same, perfect Sacrifice could be re-presented to the Father through all ages.

Veneration on the other hand, is the giving of honor and love to the one who is venerated. Thus we may perform many and various acts which honor and love the one venerated.

We venerate not only the Blessed Virgin Mary, but we may also venerate any of the cannonized Saints. But there is also One whom we venerate above all, and that is God, whether as the Triune God or the three Persons individually. We venerate the Father by saying the Lord's Prayer; the Son by processions of the Blessed Sacrament; the Holy Ghost by asking for His counsel, to give a few examples.

And here is where the rub is. When the Protestant Reformers denied the sacrifical nature of the Mass, they downgraded worship to the level of veneration. So then they had a problem. Worship of God and veneration of the Saints were now the same thing and gave the appearance that the Saints were on the same level as God. So the solution was to drastically downplay or eliminate the veneration of the Saints. So, today, Protestants and other Non-Catholic/Non-Orthodox Christians see the veneration of the Saints as if it were the same as the worship of God. The Catholic POV however, is that Protestants, etal., are only able to venerate God due to the absence of the sacrificial nature of the Mass.

So what would constitute the worship of Mary or any of the Saints? Well, it would be extremely difficult to cross that line. One would have to offer the Sacrifice of Jesus to the particular Saint rather than to the Father. This person would likely automatically excommunicate himself.

What does happen occassionally, is that a person may become "over devoted" to Mary or a Saint and begin to imagine that Saint as God rather than a creature of God. This is, of course, a grave error. This person would need to be charitably corrected, as it is likely a case of over-zealousness. If he should persist in his error, he would automatically excommunicate himself.

However, the Church, in her goodness, has safeguards in place to keep us from straying outside the bounds of orthodoxy. The first of course, is that the worship of God is on a much higher plane than is veneration. The second is the many formula prayers, especially those in honor of the Blessed Virgin Mary, help to keep us from straying outside these bounds. Though we may and are encouraged to use our own thoughts and words, these formula prayers keep us on an even keel.

I would like to clarify this statement. Solesmes did not invent the neumes. This is a common misunderstanding of what Solesmes did. As the article from Wikipedia below indicates, the square note system was in use by the 13th century.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neume

In the early 11th century, Beneventan neumes (from the churches of Benevento in southern Italy) were written at varying distances from the text to indicate the overall shape of the melody; such neumes are called heightened or diastematic neumes, which showed the relative pitches between neumes. Shortly after this, one to four staff lines clarified the exact relationship between pitches, an innovation traditionally ascribed to Guido d'Arezzo. One line was marked as representing a particular pitch, usually C or F. These neumes resembled the same thin, scripty style of the chironomic notation. In 13th-century England, Sarum chant was notated using square noteheads, a practice which subsequently spread throughout Europe; in Germany, a variant called Gothic neumes continued to be used until the 16th century.

By the 13th century, the neumes of Gregorian chant were usually written in square notation on a staff with four lines and three spaces and a clef marker

It should be noted that our present form of modern musical notation developed from the square note notation and the 4 line staff.

What Solesmes did was to indicate the accent and rhythm of the music, that had not been done before. This is known as the Solesmes Method.

Using In Paradisum, in post 7, we can see the accent and rhythmic markings added by Solesmes. Notice the little tic marks under the notes that are over the syllables “pa” and “di” of paradisum. These are each called an ictus. This indicates that these notes receive the accent. In modern measured music, this would be the equivalent of the first note of each measure.

Notice too, the syllables “di” and “sum”. These have a line above the notes. This line, the episema, indicates that the note is lengthened, altering the otherwise monotonous rhythm of continuous eighth notes.

So, Solesmes gave us a method for interpreting chant that aids the singer(s) in singing with rhythm and vitality. Without these markings, it is anyone’s guess as to the interpretation, and often times leads to uninspired droning.

A quick example is the Easter hymn, O Filii et Filiae. Though it is pseudo-chant, it is found in square notation. When sung indifferently, it becomes a funeral dirge. But when the rythmic markings are followed, it becomes a jig, a dance for the soul.