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Grow in love, mature in your fear of the Lord, and reap the abundant riches of a faithful servant and child of God…..
The past few Sundays have featured the November theme of the Four Last Things: Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell. In today’s Gospel we are reminded that we will one day have to account for our use of the gifts and resources that God has given us. But today’s readings do more than that; they also set forth a virtue that helps us to use God’s gifts well. That virtue is the fear of the Lord. It is a foundational disposition of the wise, but not the foolish. Scripture says, The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom (Prov 9:10). In today’s first reading contains this nugget: Charm is deceitful, beauty is fleeting, but the woman who fears the Lord is to be praised (Prov 31:30). Today’s Psalm says, Blessed are you who fear the Lord (Psalm 128:1). “Fear” of the Lord can be understood in two ...
Soccer fan with Down syndrome gets huge surprise during COVID lockdown…
The sweet moment was captured on video for all to enjoy. There’s no doubt that COVID-19 has turned life upside down for most people. Yet for those more vulnerable members of society, the changes have impacted their lives in a way we might not really appreciate. Thankfully, there are some out there who making sure those in need get a little boost. This was the case for one huge soccer fan, Dave, from Northumberland in England, who has Down syndrome. Dave is a regular at his local football team, Ashington AFC, where he spends a lot of time helping out in the supporters’ club collecting donations. Yet, with soccer cancelled due to COVID, Dave has been left at home, without his beloved team to cheer on. Since Ashington AFC is a local team there is a strong sense of community within the club, w...
Pope’s Sunday Angelus: ‘Reach out your hand to the poor person: it is Christ’…
Vatican City, Nov 15, 2020 / 06:20 am MT (CNA).- Jesus is telling us today to stretch out our hand to the poor, Pope Francis said in his Angelus address Sunday. Speaking from a window overlooking St. Peter’s Square Nov. 15, the fourth World Day of the Poor, the pope urged Christians to discover Jesus in the needy. He said: “At times, we think that to be Christian means not to do harm. And not doing harm is good. But not doing good is not good. We must do good, to come out of ourselves and look, look at those who have more need.” “There is so much hunger, even in the heart of our cities; and many times we enter into that logic of indifference: the poor person is there, and we look the other way. Reach out your hand to the poor person: it is Christ.” The pope noted tha...
Was there more than one “Team Ted” that helped McCarrick stay in power?
“Team Ted.” You may be familiar with this term, if you are a longtime follower (several decades, perhaps) of the hellish soap opera surrounding the life and career of fallen cardinal Theodore “Uncle Ted” McCarrick. But if you followed the McCarrick story in the mainstream press, this is not a term that you would know — for logical reasons. The same is true if you read media reports about the Vatican’s long-awaited investigation of the sins and crimes of McCarrick (click here for a .pdf file of the 450-page report). “Team Ted,” you see, was a nickname give to a circle of journalists who depended on McCarrick as one of their prime doors into life in the American Catholic church and Vatican affairs, in general. Especially during his heady years as the archbishop of Washington, D.C., McCarrick...
An open letter to the men and women of ‘Courage’…
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ: There are many exemplars of the cardinal virtue of courage in the Catholic Church today: Catholics in Hong Kong who risk their lives and livelihoods in defense of religious liberty, free speech, and freedom of association; French Catholics who brave Islamist murderers to practice the faith; young men preparing for a priestly vocation that may land them in jail for “hate crimes” because they preach the Gospel; campus ministers who push back against political correctness in order to evangelize; parents who insist that Catholic schools be “Catholic” in more than name; teenagers who won’t be bullied into denying Christ by their peers. We are truly surrounded by a “great…cloud of witnesses” (Heb. 12:1). And among them, there are no more courageous Cath...
Here’s a fascinating visualization of the largest cities around the world, compared to Vatican City and each other…
[embedded content] This video shows the sizes of some cities by urban area, not just city proper (administrative) or metropolitan area… Join Our Telegram Group : Salvation & Prosperity
3 lessons to be learned from the McCarrick Report…
> Italiano> English> Español> Français > All the articles of Settimo Cielo in English * There are at least three lessons to be drawn from the 461 pages of the “Report” on the case of former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick published on November 10 by the Vatican secretariat of state: > RAPPORTO … > REPORT … The first lesson is the inadequacy of the response from Church authorities – including the last three popes – to the buildup of accusations against McCarrick. These are accusations that cover a span of decades. But it was only in June 2017, with the first public charge of having abused a minor, that the canonical process and sentence were triggered. All the previous accusations concerned sexual acts with youths and adults, all of them ...
The Kalaam cosmological argument and the first-and-last fallacy…
The Kalaam cosmological argument for God’s existence has been around for centuries. It hasn’t been that popular historically, with authors such as St. Thomas Aquinas pointing out problems with it. However, it has been popular in recent years, due principally to the advocacy of William Lane Craig. I’ve written and spoken about it on a number of occasions, and I won’t review all that here, but I’d like to point out some problems with some recent defenses that involve a logical fallacy. Stating the Argument Briefly One way of putting the Kalaam argument is: Everything with a beginning has a cause. The universe has a beginning. Therefore, the universe has a cause. The cause of the universe, by definition, is God. Therefore, God exists. In this article, the premise we’re interested in is line 2...
Gualtiero Cardinal Bassetti moved out of ICU, remains in critical condition with COVID-19…
CNA Staff, Nov 13, 2020 / 03:23 pm MT (CNA).- Cardinal Gualtiero Bassetti, president of the Italian Bishops Conference, has slightly improved and was moved out of the ICU, but remains in critical condition since contracting COVID-19, his auxiliary bishop said on Friday afternoon. “We welcome the news that our Cardinal Archbishop Gualtiero Bassetti has left the intensive care unit” at the hospital of Santa Maria della Misericordia, said Auxiliary Bishop Marco Salvi of Perugia, in northern Italy. However, he warned that the cardinal’s condition “is still serious and requires a chorus of prayers.” Earlier on Friday, the hospital’s daily bulletin reported a “slight improvement” on Bassetti’s condition, but warned that the “clinical picture remains serious and the cardinal needs con...
From coast to coast, the shrines to Mother Cabrini testify to her miracles and deep impact on America…
Not far from the St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Shrine where Mother Cabrini is buried, New York state put up a statue where “Mother Cabrini” looks out from Manhattan’s Battery Park toward the Statue of Liberty standing tall, holding her torch aloft, at the mouth of the harbor where many immigrants had first entered the U.S. St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, born in 1850, founded a missionary order, the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and 67 institutions, including orphanages, schools and health-care facilities, from New York to Burbank, California, before her death in 1917. Her canonization in 1946 made her the first naturalized U.S. citizen-saint. Accordingly, U.S. Americans are increasingly honoring this Catholic religious as a woman who showed in her life the best of the country’...
The McCarrick Report is so breathtaking that one wonders if anyone in the Vatican actually understands the magnitude of the precedent they just set…..
ROME – When I took Western Civ in college, our professor once read aloud to the class an excerpt from the diary of a Roman senator written on Sept. 4, 476 AD. The senator described his efforts to suck up to 16-year-old Emperor Romulus Augustulus in hopes of being appointed to some high office, perhaps a tribune or magistrate. On that same day, Romulus Augustulus, the last emperor in the West, was deposed by the barbarian warlord Odoacer, marking what historians now conventionally identify as the fall of the Roman Empire. My professor’s point was that quite often, people living through moments that change history fail to recognize them at the time. The point arises with respect to Tuesday’s release of the Vatican’s long-awaited report on the case of ex-cardinal and ex-priest Theodore McCarr...
On the lost art of “pairing ’em up” and its effects on marriage today…
One of the more common concerns that young adults express to me is the difficulty in meeting and dating. Once adulthood is reached, of course, the purpose of dating is to look for a spouse. Hence their problem is a problem for all of us since marriage and family are so central to the life of the Church and is the foundation of our culture and nation. When I was a young priest, more than thirty years ago I had numerous weddings to celebrate and most of the couples were in their early twenties. Today I have far fewer weddings and the average age of the couples is in their early thirties. In 1990 there 326,079 weddings in Catholic parishes. Last year there were 137,885, a 58% drop. While there are many reasons for the delay of marriage, (college debt, longer time in college, the rise of the v...
