Mortification

“I will be to them as one that taketh off the yoke.” -Osee 11:4 I shall now speak of those means that may help us to render this necessary practice of mortification not only easy, but pleasant. The first means is the grace of God, with which all things become easy. St. Paul supplies us…

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Penance and Mortification

Penance and Mortification The modern world has made a mockery of penance and mortification. One of the direct results of the Protestant Reformation was the implicit rejection of an incarnational faith, with notions of “faith alone,” and the explicit rejection of indulgences. The skeptic, or the overly spiritualized Protestant, cannot fathom earthly actions, in the…

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May 13th and the Consecration of Russia

THE STORY OF FATIMA On a cool spring day in 1916, Lucy dos Santos, age 9, and her cousins, Francisco and Jacinta Marto, ages 8 and 6 respectively, took their parents’ sheep to pasture in a place not far from their homes in the mountain village of Fatima, Portugal, about 90 miles north of Lisbon.…

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Putting the Peace Plan of Our Lady into Action

History has recorded as already having taken place many of the terrible disasters predicted by the Mother of God in 1917. These things cannot be undone. But we still have the future ahead of us. It can be a happy future, filled with peace, if we live our lives according to Our Lady’s requests. These…

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St. Francis de Sales Sermon for Ash Wednesday

Sermon for Ash Wednesday, February 9, 1622, concerning the spiritual fruits of fasting and the conditions which make fasting pleasing to God: fasting universally, that is, with all the senses and with the understanding, memory, and the appetites of the will; how completely the primitive Christians fasted, fasting through humility rather than through vanity, fasting…

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