The CatholiCity Message

Volume XI, Number 11 – November 20, 2007

Dear CatholiCity Citizen,

Happy Thanksgiving! May yours be blessed and holy. Over the next several weeks most of us will visit with extended family during dinners and parties celebrating Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year. Cool. We've got several items for you this month, including a prayer of Thanksgiving at the end.

1. THANKING YOU
We're truly grateful to all of you who ordered our brand new CD, Vinny Flynn's superb "Healing and Holiness." Thank you. If you somehow missed the offer, you can find out more and order free copies here:

http://www.catholicity.com/cds/healing.html

2. HELP US HELP OTHERS
If your life has been touched in a special way by Mary Foundation CDs, especially "Healing and Holiness" or "Seven Secrets of the Eucharist," we encourage you to post your reactions online so the countless "seekers and searchers" who surf into our website can benefit from your experience:

http://www.catholicity.com/cds/comment.html

3. DIFFERENT SOURCES
As most of you know, we often provide quotes from the saints, Church fathers, and famous writers. This month, for your edification, we are posting passages from contemporary publications. Here goes...

From "First Things" Magazine:
Remember the Kosovo War of 1996-1999? It turns out that, in the Albanian-dominated areas of the Balkans that had been conquered by the Ottoman Empire, there were, going back to the seventeenth century, thousands of Catholic Christians who nominally "converted" to Islam but continued to practice their faith surreptitiously. Now these crypto-Catholics, as they are called, are out in the open and building, or rebuilding, the churches in their villages. For a long time, people visited priests secretly, and their baptisms were recorded in closely guarded registries, sincere there were severe penalties for Muslims receiving Christian sacraments.
Fr. Richard John Neuhaus

From the Orange County Register:
But Americans aren't novelty junkies on the important things. The New World is one of the oldest settled constitutional democracies on Earth, to a degree the Old World can barely comprehend. Where it counts, Americans are traditionalists. We know Eastern Europe was a totalitarian prison until the Nineties, but we forget that Mediterranean Europe (Greece, Spain, Portugal) has democratic roots going all the way back until, oh, the mid-Seventies; France and Germany's constitutions date back barely half a century, Italy's only to the 1940s, and Belgium's goes back about 20 minutes, and currently it's not clear whether even that latest rewrite remains operative. The U.S. Constitution is not only older than France's, Germany's, Italy's or Spain's constitution, it's older than all of them put together.
Mark Steyn

From The Catholic World Report:
As he celebrated Mass in the parish church of Castelgandolfo... the Holy Father offered a meditation on the image found in the Book of Revelation, of the "woman clothed in the sun" who prevails over the frightening power of the dragon. During the 20th Century, the Pope said, the power of the dragon was embodied in the totalitarian Nazi and Communist regimes, which threatened to wipe out Christian faith. Despite the brutal campaigns those regimes launched against religion, he observed, "in this case love proved stronger than hatred." Today, the Pontiff continued, the powerful forces of materialism, "the dragon", are found most prominently in materialist ideologies that encourage "consumerism, selfishness, and pleasure-seeking," denigrating the importance of faith and scoffing at the "absurdity of thinking about God." Faced with these real dangers, Christians should follow the example of the Virgin, the Pope said, remaining faithful and serenely confident in God. Mary suffers, the Pope continued, like the woman in Revelation. The Church suffers, too, from the persecutions of the dragon. However, he added, "the Church wins by suffering."

From The Coming Home Network newsletter:
To often, people wrongly think that believing in something requires emotional acceptance: that eventually we must feel "in our gut" that something is true to really believe in it. We sometimes make the same mistakes about loving and forgiving: We don't really love someone or forgive someone unless we feel we love or forgive them. This, however, is not what Jesus means by loving, forgiving, or believing. These, all three, consist primarily of work of the conscience, intellect, and will, and only secondarily the emotions or even the understanding. Our conscience is essentially the hidden depository of how and what we ought to love, forgive, and believe. Contrary to many modern views, however, our consciences are not infallible or penultimate voices of authority: They must be formed by infallible, authoritative voices so they can be deemed reliable. For this reason, Christ gave us the Church, guided by the Spirit, to preach, preserve, and pass on the truth.
Marcus Grodi

Let us all, tens of thousands of us together, pray the following Thanksgiving prayer together, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit...

"Our Father,

Help calm the distracting thoughts swirling around our minds so we can pray peacefully. Remind us that words alone are not gratitude. We open our hearts... as we remember that You know us infinitely better than we can ever know ourselves. We are struck dumb, wordless, humbled, yet comforted by the faith you placed in our souls at our baptism, the friendship of your saints, the utterly reliable embrace of Mary, the protection of Joseph... yet we have nothing to offer but our silence as we wait for your word. O Father, what should we pray?

Our prayer of thanksgiving is one word, one way, one truth, one life, one priest, one king, one man carrying us in His arms, bringing us into the very depths of the Holy Trinity. Our word of thanksgiving is: Jesus. Jesus, we whisper. Jesus, we long for You. Jesus, the tears well in our eyes. Jesus. You are our prayer. Thank you, Father. Amen."

If you are in the armed services or in a family with a relative in the armed services, know that we will be praying for you.

With Christ,

Your Friends at CatholiCity