May 13, 2013 / Maria News

Gosnell Convicted of Murder on Fatima Day! Coincidence?

Maria News- Each year on May 13, Catholics from around the world venerate Our Lady of Fatima.  On May 13, 1917 three children – Lucia, Jacinta and Francisco began witnessing apparitions of the Virgin Mary.  The apparitions took place on the thirteenth day for 6 consecutive months, followed by numerous documented miracles.

On Sunday, May 13, 1917, towards noon, a flash of lightning drew the attention of the children, and they saw a brilliant figure appearing over the trees of the Cova da Iria. The “Lady” asked them to pray for the conversion of sinners and an end to World War One, and to come back every month, on the 13th.

On July 13, Mary promised that “in the end my Immaculate Heart will triumph.”

The triumph of Mary will come when evil is destroyed forever. When this happens Christ will have judged the living and dead.

Those who have special devotions to Our Lady believe that she has been given a special grace from God to appear on earth in order to bring souls into closer union with her son, Jesus Christ.  She comes for the conversion of sinners. Because of Mary many will find (or have already found) Christ.

The world is clearly upside down. Vice is praised as virtue. Authentic virtue is discarded as being politically incorrect or worse – radical. We destroy in the womb the least among us. Our culture assaults the family, motherhood, fatherhood, brotherhood and sisterhood. Our culture is attempting to re-define the meaning of manhood and womanhood. Our world values the material with very little public acknowledgment of eternity.

Before God’s Kingdom comes there will be a battle for souls, but good will ultimetly prevail over evil. Our Lady’s Immaculate Heart will triumph. Christ will come to judge the living and the dead and the Kingdom of God will reign forever.

This brings us to Kermit Gosnell. The abortionist who delivered babies only to cut their spinal cords with scissors. Today, on May 13 a Jury in Pennsylvania has convicted Gosnell of murdering three of four babies in his capital murder trial. He is also guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the 2009 abortion death of Karnamaya Mongar, a 41 year-old who died when Gosnell’s untrained staff administered an overdose of sedatives.(1)

The connection?

The mainstream media in the US has largely ignored the Gosnell trial.  Rows of seats in the courtroom reserved for the press were empty until the day that the Defense for Gosnell gave its testimony.

Likewise, we have a sitting President in the US that supports the very same practices that Gosnell provided (i.e. partial birth and late term abortion).  Obama has never mentioned the deaths of the babies killed by Gosnell, but he did attend the annual Planned Parenthood Gala and gave them praise for their work. “You’ve … got a president who is going to be right there with you, fighting every step of the way,” the president told some 1,000 attendees at a meeting of the Planned Parenthood Federation in Washington.”

Today however the pro-life movement and all those who value the sanctity of human life can breath a little easier. Gosnell has been convicted of murder. In my opinion this is a small taste of the triumph of good over evil.  No doubt Gosnells defense lawyer will appeal the verdict. But for now the media and pro-abortion politicians alike should take note that life matters. For us Catholics with Marian devotions, we believe that the Immaculate Heart of Our Lady will triumph over evil. Today is a taste of that Triumph. Perhaps a sign to all of us that justice will prevail.

Let us all pray for the intercession of Our Lady of Fatima for the conversion of sinners. Let us pray for the conversion of hearts for all those who support abortion, who administer abortion and who have been harmed by abortion. Finally we pray for the peace of those innocent babies who have died from abortion. In Christ’s name we pray.

“Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for the least of your brothers, you did for me.” Matthew 25:40

Related: The Triumph Film

(1) http://www.lifesitenews.com/breaking-kermit-gosnell-convicted-on-3-of-4-counts-of-murdering-babies.html

*Featured Image from: http://www.discerninghearts.com/?page_id=4653
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May 12, 2013 / Maria News

The Virtues of Mary
By Deacon Antonio Sandoval

A virtue is a permanent predisposition of our will towards good. Virtues can be infused by God, or they can be acquired by habitual acts proper to each virtue. However, even the infused virtues require acts proper to that virtue on the part of the recipient in order to remain a permanent disposition. That is why it says in James 2: 26, that faith, (an infused virtue), without works is dead.

Several authors have compiled lists of the most important virtues of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Compiling such lists is a matter of judgment, since everything in the Blessed Virgin Mary, whether in thought, word, or deed was a predisposition towards the highest good, namely, God.

The permanent disposition of Mary towards God was a consequence of her fullness of grace and her divine purity. This insured that every movement emanating from her soul began from the inviolate purity of her relationship with God and returned to that same center.

The Venerable Mary of Agreda, in her monumental work consisting of private revelations given to her by the Blessed Virgin Mary entitled, The City of God, lists the theological virtues and the infused cardinal virtues supplemented by the gifts and of the Spirit as the most important virtues of Mary.

The theological virtues of faith, hope and charity cannot be acquired by human effort. They are infused gifts of God. However, we can prayerfully request these gifts from God and practice them when we receive them. Faith is the virtue that allows us to ascent to divine truths that cannot be acquired by reason alone. The virtue of hope directs our desires towards things of heaven and gives us the certitude that what God promises will be fulfilled. Charity gives us the ability to love God in the way that God desires to be loved and to love our neighbor as Christ has loved us.

The cardinal virtues, sometimes also called the moral virtues, are justice, prudence, fortitude, and temperance. Justice directs us to give to God what is due to God and to give to our neighbor what is due to our neighbor. Prudence is the virtue that enables us to judge correctly the attitude that we must have and the action that we must follow in any given situation. Fortitude is the virtue that gives us the strength to act in accordance with a well formed conscience, no matter how difficult the required action may be. Temperance is the virtue that directs us to the proper and moderate use of temporal goods.

Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange in his book, The Mother of the Savior and our Interior Life, lists the principal virtues of the Blessed Virgin Mary as the theological virtues, the cardinal virtues, as well as humility and meekness. He says that her virtues were aided by all the gifts of the Holy Ghost. He also says that the cardinal virtues are infused and are present in any soul in the state of grace. But he mentions that there are acquired moral virtues with same name, (justice, prudence, fortitude, and temperance) which facilitate the exercise of the corresponding infused virtues.

St. Alphonsus Liguori in his book The Glories of Mary gives the following as the ten most important virtues of Mary: humility, love of God, love of neighbor, Faith, Hope, chastity, poverty, obedience, patience, and the spirit of prayer.

St. Louis De Montfort’s list of the ten most important virtues of the Blessed Virgin Mary includes: profound humility, continual prayer, prompt obedience, lively faith, ardent charity, heroic patience, universal mortification, divine purity, angelic sweetness, and divine wisdom.

The list of important Marian virtues given by Venerable Mary of Agreda and that given by Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange are very similar. Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange includes meekness which could be another name for the virtue that St. Louis de Montfort calls angelic sweetness.

St. Alphonsus Liguori divides Charity into the love of God and the love of neighbor and includes the virtues of chastity and poverty which the other authors do not mention. Chastity may the virtue that St. Louis de Montfort calls divine purity. Although Mary of Agreda does not mention poverty as an important virtue of the Blessed Virgin Mary, in her writings she describes Jesus, Mary, and Joseph living a life of poverty.

In our devotion to Mary we must pray that our own lives be rooted in the virtues of the Mother of our Lord.

Read More from Deacon Antonio here

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May 10, 2013 / Maria News

Numerous Tea Party chapters claim IRS attempts to sabotage nonprofit status

Fox News -Tea Party chapters around the nation are blasting the Internal Revenue Service after the federal agency sent them letters demanding information about their politics, contributors and even family members.

In letters sent from IRS offices in Cincinnati earlier this month, chapters including the Waco (Texas) Tea Party and the Ohio Liberty Council were asked to provide a list of donors, identify volunteers, financial support for and relationships with political candidates and parties, and even printed copies of their Facebook pages.

“Some of what they (the IRS) asked was reasonable, but there were some requests on there that were strange,” Toby Marie Walker, president of the Waco Tea Party told FoxNews.com. “It makes you wonder if they do this to groups like ACORN or other left-leaning groups.”

May 9, 2013 / Maria News

Headlines from Apollo: Senior Vatican Official condemns Mexican Death Saint as “Blasphemous”

BBC - The president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Culture, Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, said worshipping Santa Muerte was a “degeneration of religion”.

Cardinal Ravasi spoke at a series of events for believers and non-believers in Mexico City.

The cult, which reveres death, has been growing rapidly in Mexico.

It is represented by a cloaked female skeleton clutching a scythe.

It is particularly popular in areas of Mexico that have suffered from extreme violence carried out by the country’s drug cartels.

The cult is believed to date back to colonial times.

It merges indigenous beliefs with the tradition of venerating saints introduced by Christian missionaries after the Spanish conquest of Mexico.

Devotees pray to the saint at home-made altars and often offer votive candles, fruit and tequila in the hope Santa Muerte will grant their wishes.

Cardinal Ravasi said the practice was “anti-religious”. “Religion celebrates life, but here you have death,” he said.

“It’s not religion just because it’s dressed up like religion; it’s a blasphemy against religion”, he said.

The cardinal also referred to the fact that the cult is particularly popular among members of Mexico’s drug cartels and accused “criminals” of invoking it.

Read More: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-22462181

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May 6, 2013 / Maria News

Last chance to pre-order Angels and Saints at Ephesus

Maria News – The highly anticipated new album from the Benedictine Sisters of Mary is scheduled to be released tomorrow, May 7. Tonight is your last change to pre-order the album before it becomes widely available.

Why pre-order? The Sister’s have secured international distribution through the Decca Label which is owned by Universal Music Group. The reason to pre-order the album is because if the secular music label sees that there is a big demand for the album (i.e. sacred music), the label will invest more money into promoting and distributing the album.

Angels and Saints at Ephesus is the follow up to the chart topping Advent at Ephesus, the debut album that topped number one on the billboard charts.

Help us show the world that beautiful, wholesome music can sell and support the Sisters!

Order your copy here

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May 6, 2013 / Maria News

Marian Devotion Antidote for Heresy
By Deacon Antonio Sandoval

Maria News – Denying either the Divinity or humanity of Jesus is heresy, for Jesus is True God and True Man. Both his Divinity and his humanity must be affirmed and accepted as equally important elements of the true identity of Jesus. Down-playing either the Divinity or the humanity of Jesus distorts within our minds the identity of Jesus and borders on heresy.

Holy Scripture speaks to us clearly about the Divinity of Jesus. The prologue of the Gospel of John states, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He (a person) was in the beginning with God. All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be. What came to be through him was life, and the life was the light of the human race…” (John 1: 1-4) Then it says. “And the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us…” (John 1: 14).

We also know that Jesus is God not only by his miracles, but also by his ability to forgive sins. St. Luke relates an incident that occurred when Jesus was teaching in a house. Four men brought a paralytic, but because of the crowd they could not enter into the house where Jesus was. So they removed part of the roof and lowered the paralytic through the opening in front of Jesus. Jesus said to the paralytic, “Your sins are forgiven”. The scribes and the Pharisees present began to think, “Who is this who speaks blasphemies? Who but God alone can forgive sins?” (Luke 5:21) They were right, only God can forgive sin. Then so they would know that he was God, Jesus said to the paralytic, “I say to you, rise, pick up your stretcher and go home. He stood up immediately before them, picked up what he had been lying on and went home glorifying God” (Luke 5 24b-25).

Jesus also testified to his own Divinity when he told the Pharisees, “When you lift up the Son of Man, then you will realize that I AM” (John 8:28). In doing this he identified himself with God who appeared to Moses at the burning bush on Mount Horeb and told Moses that his name was I AM. (Exodus 3: 14)

Holy Scripture also tells us that Jesus is True Man. The Gospel according to Matthew begins with the genealogy of Jesus tracing his human ancestors back to Abraham (Matthew 1: 1-16). The Gospel of Luke traces the ancestors of Jesus to Adam and Eve (Luke 3: 23-38). St. Paul in his letter to the Galatians says, “But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son born of a woman, born under the law, to ransom those under the law, so that we might receive adoption” (Galatians 4: 4-5).
Jesus himself made it clear that he was True Man. More than twenty times in the New Testament, he refers to himself as the “Son of Man”. He received his humanity remotely from all his human ancestors and proximately from the flesh of Mary.

Marian devotion is an affirmation of both the Divinity and the humanity of Jesus. Our worship of Christ is our recognition that he is God, the Eternal Son of the Father. Our veneration of Mary is our recognition that he is human, the Son of Mary. (He is a Divine person with both a Divine nature and a human nature united in what theologians call the hypostatic union.) We give equal importance to both his being truly human and his being truly Devine. Our goal in the practice of devotion to Mary is to love Jesus as much as Mary loves him, and to love Mary as much as Jesus loves her. This balance in our worship of Jesus and our veneration of Mary, Mother of God, insures that our relationship with Jesus will be free of even the slightest trace of heresy.

Read More from Deacon Antonio here: http://marianews.com/wordpress/category/deacon-antonio/

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May 4, 2013 / Maria News

The Triumph Premiere Live from Chicago!

Maria News – Live from Chicago, I am writing this report from the Official U.S. Premiere of The Triumph, a documentary that explores the mysteries of Medjugorje.

From Award Winning Director Sean Bloomfield and Executive Producer Zaid Jazrawi, comes a film over 2-years in the making. Filmed primarily in the heart of Bosnia-Herzegovina, The Triumph investigates a modern-day miracle that, if proven authentic, has global implications.

The producers of the film are expected to launch a new crowd-funding initiative live from the Premiere. The goal: to host 1000 screenings of The Triumph world-wide.

“This film has been created as a tool for evangilization,” said Producer Zaid Jazrawi. “Through the Grace of Our Lady we can bring this film to the world and show people the Divine Love of Jesus Christ.”

“There is a huge buzz around this film,” said Director Sean Bloomfield. “From Australia, to the UK and here in the US, we are launching screenings around the world in hopes of inspiring a generation to return to God.”

The film accomplishes the producer’s goal of evangelization by illustrating the love of Christ, the hope for reconciliation, the grace of Our Lady and the power of God’s love. No matter how grave our Sin, the film illustrates that God’s love for us is greater. No matter how lost we are, the film gives us examples of how we can find our way home. This is a must see film.

Nearly 200 invited guests are expected to attend the Premiere in Chicago, being held at the landmark Gene Siskel Film Center.

Learn more about The Triumph at thetriumph.org.

I’ll be tweeting live from the Premiere @RoyceHood. Join me!

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May 3, 2013 / Maria News

Pope Francis welcomes home Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI

news.va – Pope Francis had words of welcome today as he greeted Benedict XVI, now Pope Emeritus, who returned to take up residence inside Vatican city.
Linda Bordoni reports…

In style with his own personal manner, Pope Francis left the formalities of a welcoming ceremony to Vatican authorities, who awaited the arrival of the Pope Emeritus at the Vatican heliport. These included Cardinals Bertello – President of the Governatorate, Bertone – Secretary of State, and Sodano – the deacon of the College of Cardinals as well as some bishops.

But Pope Francis was awaiting his predecessor at the entrance to the “Mater Ecclesiae” Monastery in the Vatican Gardens where Benedict will be residing. Together they preceded to the chapel for a brief moment of prayer.

The Pope Emeritus left the Vatican on February 28th after his resignation, and had been staying at the Apostolic Palace in Castel Gandolfo in the Alban Hills.

He chose to leave the Vatican immediately after his resignation to physically remove himself from the process of electing his successor.

His absence also gave workers time to finish up renovations on the monastery on the edge of the Vatican gardens that until last year housed groups of cloistered nuns who were invited for a few years at a time to live inside the Vatican to pray for the Pontiff and Church at large.

In the small building, with a chapel attached, Benedict will live with his personal secretary, Monsignor Georg Gaenswein, and the four consecrated women who do the housekeeping and prepare his meals. Inside the building, Benedict has at his disposal a small library and a study. A guest room is available for when his brother, Monsignor Georg Ratzinger, comes to visit.

Today’s was not the first meeting between the Pope and the Pope Emeritus. In fact Francis visited Benedict in March in Castel Gandolfo, and they have spoken by telephone.

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April 27, 2013 / Maria News

Husband and Wife United Forever

By Deacon Antonio Sandoval

In a television program on EWTN featuring a priest and couples discussing marriage, the question was asked whether husband and wife would be married in heaven.  The priest answered and said, “Yes, they will be, but not to each other.”  Then it was said that all of us would be the bride of Christ.

I was very dissatisfied with this answer because there is a lot more that needs to be said about the relationship of husband and wife in eternity.  To me, it is unthinkable that the love that husband and wife have for each other on earth will be diminished or their unity disrupted in heaven.  We may not call their relationship in heaven a marriage, but I believe that their love and unity is eternal if they remain faithful to each other while on earth.

At the beginning of her illness, my wife, Maud, who is now in a long-term care facility, would often ask me, “Are we going to be together in heaven?”  I would always say, “Yes, we will be.”, because in the liturgy for the Vigil for the Deceased it says, ‘We believe that all the ties of friendship and affection which knit us as one throughout our lives do not unravel with death’.  Then in a prayer addressed to the Lord our God it says, “But for those who believe in your love, death is not the end, nor does it destroy the bonds that you forge in our lives.”  From these two examples from these prayers it seems clear to me that the love between husband and wife, which has God as its origin, is eternal and that husband and wife will be united forever.

St. John Chrysostom who lived in the fourth century would tell young married couples, “Be united in this life so that you will not be separated in the life that has been promised.”

The unity of husband and wife on earth is based on the complementarity of gender and ordered for the procreation of children.  This will not be the case in heaven, for Jesus said, “At the resurrection they neither marry or are given in marriage, but are like the angels in heaven” (Matthew 22: 30).  This, however, does not preclude the love and unity of husband and wife in heaven because nuptial love will be transformed into angelic-like love, that is, spiritual love.

St. Thomas Aquinas said that love of neighbor would be made perfect only in heaven.  Since for married persons, their nearest neighbor is their spouse, this means that their love for each other will be perfected in heaven.  It then follows that their love and unity in heaven will be far more perfect than it ever could have been on earth.

The more perfect love and unity between husband and wife in heaven is the result of their being purified of all sin and its consequences.  This in turn allows them to abide more fully in God and God in them.  Abiding in God is the key to unity.   Jesus essentially said this in his Last Supper discourse when he prayed for those who would come to believe in him saying, “That they may all be one, as you Father are in me and I am in you, that they also may be one in us…” (John 17:21)

The difference between the love and unity of husband and wife on earth and that in heaven is that on earth spousal love and unity are exclusive. In heaven, on the other hand, husband and wife together and individually will include all others in their sphere of spiritual love.  We will all be united to each other as Bride of Christ in his Mystical Body.

Fellow married couples, let us look forward to our heavenly future with joy, because what God has joined together no human being must separate (Mark 10: 9) and neither will God.  With the “love that never fails” (1 Corinthians 13: 8), we will be more closely united with our beloved spouse in heaven and with Christ than we have been on earth.

Read More by Deacon Antonio

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