Category Archives: Christianity

Svellerella writes,

I’m the parent who’s informed her children that Santa Claus is St. Nicholas, a Catholic Bishop who secretly gave to the poor. That St. Nicholas no longer lives on earth, but in heaven, with the Triune God, and that he prays with us and for us to Jesus. That the true meaning of Christmas is to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, and not a fat, unaffiliated man in red sneaking into our house with his flying reindeer to bestow either gifts or lumps of coal depending on if my children are “naughty or nice”.

I’m a harsh B, I know’t.

I particularly wanted to raise my children this way because little girl Carolyn was not only devastated when she learned that Santa Claus was a farce, she later experienced a period of extreme doubt in the existence of God. Santa was a Lie. The Tooth Fairy was a lie. So how on earth was I supposed to think that God isn’t just the same as Santa Claus? That we “have to be good because God is watching us”? Ffft.

…

But the reason I’m writing isn’t to discuss whether its good or bad to let my children believe in Santa or the Easter Bunny. To me it’s one of those parenting choices that each parent makes out of love and good intentions and I’m not about to argue with that, ever. The above reasons are ours, and I’m learning that parenting has a funny way of making me eat my words so bad.

But there’s the issue of fairy tales. Of course our boys read fairy tales. But if we’re teaching them the truth about Santa, how are we supposed to approach fairy tales? Where’s the line to be drawn when letting our children grow in their wonder over fictional, magical characters? Is there a line to be drawn?

Read the rest of this EXCELLENT BLOG @ http://www.svellerella.com/on-fairy-tales-and-letting-my-children-believe/.

And when you’re done, scroll down for my two cents in the comments.

John 3:16

Rome’s exorcist finding Bl. John Paul II effective against Satan

“The devil and demons are many and they have two powers, the ordinary and the extraordinary,” says the official exorcist for the Diocese of Rome.

“The so-called ordinary power is that of tempting man to distance himself from God and take him to Hell. This action is exercised against all men and women of all places and religions.”

As for the extraordinary powers used by Satan, Fr. Amorth explained it as how the Devil acts when he focuses his attention more specifically on a person. He categorized the expression of that attention into four types: diabolical possession; diabolical vexation like in the case of Padre Pio, who was beaten by the Devil; obsessions which are able to lead a person to desperation and infestation, and when the Devil occupies a space, an animal or even an object.”

Fr. Amorth says such extraordinary occurrences are rare but on the rise. He’s particularly worried by the number of young people being affected by Satan through sects, séances and drugs. He never despairs though.

“With Jesus Christ and Mary, God has promised us that he will never allow temptations greater than our strengths.”

Read the rest @
http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/romes-exorcist-finding-bl.-john-paul-ii-effective-against-satan

Source:
http://www.medjugorje.hr/en/

I believe we do not have political or racial problems in this country; I believe we have heart problems. The article below says it better than I ever have, so here it is in its entirety.

Turning Politics Inside-Out By Marc – May 22, 2015

Turning Politics Inside-Out

Candidates are about to spend billions of dollars carving out the time to tell us how great they are, and there’s no one we can assassinate to change the fact. So before it really starts, I want to get a solid Catholic critique of the entire scene: Our basic mode of bettering the world is backwards.

Justice is not the state of the city or nation. Justice is a virtue, the interior disposition of a particular person to give each other his due. Charity is not primarily a social activity, a non-profit institution, or an annual giving. Charity is a virtue, a mode of being, an interior disposition of a particular human being which enables him to love his neighbor. The reversal which sees charity as an institution and justice as an exterior state of affairs long before either are a way of the heart is bogus. The world is changed if hearts are changed.

It’s been said that this sort of talk suppresses action, that if the Christian were less concerned with the state of his “interior life,” with doctrine, prayer, moral quibbles, and church attendance; if he were instead concerned about the injustice outside his front door, then he would change the world, opening himself to the radical call of the Gospel. But where on earth do we think action comes from, if not from the interior person? Where does the free choice to do some good come from, if not from the will? Action bursts forth from the person like seedlings from the cool, dark earth, and it is only by plunging into this darkness of the interior life — through prayer, contemplation, and keeping the divine law — that we become effective sources of action, springs of justice, centers of right political activity and a betterment to our community. The city is restored to the precise extent that the soul, through boring-ass things like discipline, restores itself. The nation is made just to the extent that his quiet, uneventful decisions to do good and avoid evil take root and make the person just.

The Church presents man as a joke — a strange creature for whom being inside-out is the right way round. The Cosmos around us reacts to exterior realities. Atoms hit atoms and change occurs, the environment lights up the animal consciousness, and off it trots, duly effected by the outside. Man, alone in the universe, determines the outside through the inside. He decides and acts, changing the world by the externalization of what first ferments inside.

So it is no “call to action,” to diminish the personal cultivation of virtue in favor of exterior acts. It is a crappy anthropology, one which thinks it can have action while diminishing its source, exalting “change” without its cause. It is a perversion of effective action performed by a world which externalizes the responsibilities of the interior life, absolving us from being charitable and being just by contenting us with making charities and promoting justice. We are content with expecting from our politicians the exterior acts of goodwill and justice, which can be faked, at the expense of actual justice dwelling in the soul, which cannot be faked. Then we are surprised when they crumble under the dichotomy of their interior and exterior lives and perform this or that evil. We have developed a politics of hypocrisy, because we have separated the person from his acts and indulged the quaint, secular notion that on can “change the world for the better” without changing oneself.

So I am skeptical of any revolution that is not first a revolution of the heart, cynical of any reformation that is not directed against the only corrupted institution undoubtedly given to us to reform — our soul. Catholic social teaching starts at the locus of personality which is given to us to work on, and does not indulge the lazy, ineffective delusion that the heart is changed from the outside in.

What is true for the person in general is doubly true for the Christian. “The Christian is the soul of the world,” the animating principle, the leaven that fluffs up the whole lump. It is his duty to give the world its flavor, to be the type of seed which bears much fruit, to spread goodness, justice, and mercy wherever he is planted. The Christian is the soul of the world — the world is not the soul of the Christian. To save the world, save the Christian. To kill the world, reform it without reforming the Christian, its soul.