By Matthew Plese  fatima.org

Yes, in fact, we should pray for the Holy Father’s intentions?

Catholic Apologetics #9

“St. Clement Mary Hofbauer once said:  ” A Christian who does not pray for the pope is like a child who does not pray for his father”  Yet in our age when the Faith is under attack, when the Pope himself seems to be advancing heresy, and when the Church allows the scandal of the sexual abuse of children to advance, how can we possibly pray “for the intentions of the Holy Father?”

By offering our prayers for the intentions of the Holy Father we are not praying for the personal intentions of Pope Francis, but rather for the six objectives of the Holy Father as the Church Herself teaches.

There are 6 objective intentions of the Holy Father, and, they are:

1.  The Exaltation of the Church
2.  The Propagation of the Faith
3.  The Extirpation of Heresy
4. 4 The Conversion of sinners
5. The Concord between Christian Princes
6. 6 The Further Welfare of the Christian Peoples

Exaltation of the Church

It is not an exaggeration that the Church Herself is in a great tempest as She is under assault from both the liberal, modernist forces within Her as well as from the secular atheistic external forces that beset Her from outside.  With immoral and scandalous priests within and with corrupt governments and politicians assaulting Her rights, it is imperative that we pray for the exaltation of the holy Catholic Faith, without which it is not possible to be saved.

Propagation of the Faith

We have before our eyes the example of St. Francis Xavier, among others, who labored for years in great trials and sufferings to save souls and propagate the saving Faith to all peoples.  St. Francis converted more people in his life than anyone since St. Paul.  He baptized over 50,000 in 10 years, converted the entire town of Goa in India, and he labored long in Japan.  Where are our missionaries today?  Have they vanished in large parts because we no longer pray for then?

Extirpation of Heresy

We live in dangerous times when error is advanced as progress. The average Catholic today is exposed to more heresies and errors than arguably ever before in our history.  Modernism, the synthesis of all heresies, along with relativism, subjectivism, religious liberty, and false ecumenism poisons the mind of many in the Church.  And this disease of heresy is so pervasive it has infected many clergy as well.  What are we doing to stop it?  What are we doing to help counter this heresy?  Do we prya for God, through Our Lady, to crush heresy?

Conversion of Sinners

Our Blessed Mother at Fatima said that many souls go to Hellbecause there is no one to pray for them.  What are we doing to counsel fht doubtful, to correct the erring in charity, and pray Rosaries of reparation, or offer up all our daily prayers and actions for this intention.

Concord between Christian Princes

Only 100 years ago the world was plunged into the “war to end all wars” as Catholic nations fought and annihilated each other.  As the faith has further been eroded within society especially in Europe, we have seen the rise of democratic, atheistic nations.  God is no longer the King of all ages.  Nations claim to receive their power from the governed and there is no room for God.  But what would our world look like today if the kings of old – the King of France, the King of Bavaria, the King of Belgium – were to reign today as true sovereigns who advanced the rights of God and restored true charity to all?  Do we pray for truly Catholic governments to return like France of old or Ecuador under Garcia Moreno?

Further Welfare of the Christian People

The Holy Father,the Servant of the Servants of God can teach us by example how to love our neighbor and perform both the corporal as well as the spiritual works of mercy. If you have read How the Catholic Church Built western Civilization by Thomas Woods, you will recall how Dr. Woods relates the varied, countless achievements from monasticism.  

Among them we have not only the preservation of literacy but priceless books of antiquity … but countless  works of charity, the first wide scale use of water power, the cultivation of agriculture the clearing of immense areas of previously uninhabitable land, the creation of complex astronomical clocks and the creation of champagne!  May we one day see the happy return of monasteries and convents blanketing our lands and these holy souls pray to God day and night for their fellow Christians

Conclusion

Alas, if we have fallen from the habit of praying for the intentions of the Holy Father out of despair or sadness for what has been occurring in ourchurch, let us renew our rigor to say our prayers for the intentions fo the Holy Father.

As we do do so, we should keep these six intentions at the forefront of our minds.

For more Catholic Apologetics by Matthew Plese: 

http://www.fatima.org/news-views/catholic-apologetics-9/

Presenting a Dangerous Excuse For “story time” by Tony Perkins, President of the Family Research Council.  No wonder Home Schooling is in its biggest surge in twenty years..

It looked like your typical reading class.  Dozens of kindergarten students sat cross-legged on the floor watching their teacher turn to the first page.  It didn’t take long for the 5-year olds to realize:  This was no ordinary children’s book.  “I have a girl brain but a boy body,” Miss McBride started.  “This is called transgender.  I was born this way.”

Thanks to a new partnership between two radically liberal forces – the National Education Association and Human Rights Campaign – there’s no telling how many elementary school students heard the exact same message in their own classrooms.  That’s because Monday was ‘Read Across America Day’, and for the first time, the country’s biggest LGBT extremists were official sponsors.

The NEA, which has been a satellite office for the far-left wing of the Democratic Party for years, insisted that it was “urgent” to ally with HRC now that the president has rolled back Barack Obama’s bathroom mandate.  “The Trump administration has been openly hostile, said NEA President Lily Garcia, “whether or not you’re a transgender soldier or transgender little boy or girl.  It is more important than ever before that we speak out.”

In the Washington Post article about this new initiative, no one explains whether parents were warned.  Judging by both organizations’ track records, it’s safe to assume they weren’t.

After all, this is exactly the kind of outrageous indoctrination that’s caused millions of parents to putt their kids out of school and either move them to Christian campuses or teach them at home.

With radical sex ed around every corner – including first graders’ – and now this dangerous excuse for “story time”, it’s no wonder that U.S. homeschooling is in the middle of its biggest surge in 20 years.

Encouraging kids to accept – or worse, live out-this kind of genderlessness is not only destructive, it’s what the American College of Pediatricians calls “child abuse”

When an otherwise healthy biological boy believes he is a girl, or an otherwise health biological girl believes she is a boy, an objective psychological problem exists that lies in the mind not the body, and it should be treated as such,”  the American College of Pediatricians warns.

Not to mention, the physicians go on, that this type of confusion is a passing phase.  “As many as 98 percent of gender confused boys and 88 percent of gender confused girls eventually accept their biological sex after naturally passing though puberty.”

For years, LGBT activists wanted to keep the goal of luring children into sexual confusion under wraps.  Now that they’ve hoodwinked a lot of the country on their agenda, these extremists no longer have to hide.  In fact, they are increasingly bold – even boastful – about their real intentions of recruiting kids.  As the head of a Toronto publishing company famously said:  “I have come to indoctrinate your children (annd I’m not a bit sorry).”  It’s up to vigilant parents to make sure they don’t succeed.

The Daily Signal     https://dailysignal.com/2019/03/06/i-have-a-girl-brain-but-a-boy-body-virginia-kindergartners-are-read-transgender-story/#dear_reader

Dear Readers: 

Just two short years after the end of the Obama administration’s disastrous policies, America is once again thriving due to conservative solutions that have produced a historic surge in economic growth.

The Trump administration has embraced over 60 percent of The Heritage Foundations’ policy recommendations since his inauguration.  But with the House now firmly within the grip’s of the progressive left, the victories may come to a screeching halt.

Why?  Because the progressive left is determined to give the government more control over your lives.  Restoring your liberty and embracing freedom is the best thing for you and the country. And the best way you can partner with him is by becoming a member of his greatest ally in Washington:  The Heritage Foundation.

In December 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus of the French Army was convicted of treason on the grounds that he had given military secrets to France’s mortal enemy, Germany.  The charge was false.

Dreyfus, a Jew, was framed.

His trial was surrounded by mass hysteria and people with no grasp of the facts celebrated when Dreyfus was condemned to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island in French Guiana, the horrors of which were vividly captured in the film “Papillon.”

The Dreyfus affair roiled French politics for the better part of a generation, pitting “Dreyfusards” (mainly secularist and republican) against anti Dreyfusards (primarily royalist and Catholic.)

The stench of anti semitism hung over it all.

One Catholic who refused to succumb to that ancient psychosis was Pope Leo XIII, who told the editor of the Parish newspaper Figaro that Dreyfus’ suffering reminded him of Calvary.

In 1906, the Dreyfusards saw their man vindicated but the wounds in French society caused by the Dreyfus affair remained open and festering long after Dreyfus had returned to the army and served honorably in World War I.

The conviction of Cardinal George Pell in December 2019 (on charges of “historic sexual abuse” is this generation’s Dreyfus affair.

Ever since those charges were laid a year and a half ago, an atmosphere of public hysteria, fueled by secularist anti-Catholicism, has surrounded the case.  That hysteria was intensified by the global Catholic sex abuse crisis, despite the fact that Cardinal Pell had been the leading Australian Bishop fighting sex abuse.  It is conceivable that this Dreyfus-like public atmosphere did not have a distorting effect on Cardinal Pell’s two trials.  Though the trials were held under an Australian media blackout, irrationality and venom, stoked by media bias, had already done their work.

The Cardinals’s first trial last fall ended in a hung jury that voted 10-2 for acquittal.

The jury foreman wept on reporting the dead lock.

The second trial, amazingly, ended with a 12-0 verdict for conviction, even though the accuser’s charges were never corroborated by anyone;  even though police incompetence in investigating the alleged scene of the crime was fully demonstrated;  and even though the cardinal”s defense showed that 10 implausible things would have had to occur simultaneously, within a carefully controlled space of Melbourne’s St. Mary’s Cathedral, for the charges to be true.

There are obvious dissimilarities between the Dreyfuss affair and the Pell case.  Dreyfuss was defended by secular people, while the attacks on George Pell, over the past quarter century, have come in the main from aggressive secularists.

The unhinged loathing of French royalists and anti-Semites for the Jewish bogeyman Alfred Dreyfus is, however ominously similar to the unhinged loathing of secular progressives for the bogeyman George Pell.  Dreyfuss embodied the fears and hatreds of royalist Frenchmen still fighting against the French Revolution;  Cardinal Pell embodies what the cultural and political left in Australia fears and hates:  Christian doctrinal and moral orthodoxy, including the robust defense of the right to life from conception until natural death and a commitment to marriage rightly understood.

Further, Pell compounded his offenses in the eyes of his enemies by relishing public debates in which he challenged the shibboleths of the politically correct on everything from climate change to the new atheism.

To the anti-Dreyfusards, Captain Alfred Dreyfus had no business in the French Army and was unfit to participate in a properly ordered French society; so he had to be destroyed.

According to those who created a rancid public atmosphere in Australia in which a 10-2 verdict for acquittal could be flipped to a unanimous verdict for conviction on uncorroborated and unproven charges, Cardinal George Pell must be destroyed so that Australias revolution of lifestyle liberation can proceed, unimpeded.

Cardinal Pell is now in jail awaiting sentencing.

After this he will appeal his unwarranted and unjust conviction.  Anyone who cares about justice, be they religious or not, must hope that the appellate panel of judges concludes that Pell’s conviction was what the Australian law calls an “unsafe verdict” – one the jury could not have rationally reached on the evidence.  Yet, even if justice is done and Cardinal Pell is freed, Australia, and the rest of the West, is going to have to think long and hard about how this travesty could have happened.

Just as France did after the Dreyfus affair.

George Weigel is Distinguished Senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

Boston Pilot                                                                                                                                              March 8, 2019  p18

The False Prophet must be in place  … as the First Seal in the Final Battle.

Catholic believe that by the will and teaching of Christ,the Magisterium of the Church is protected with the charism of infallibility such that , by the power of the Holy spirit, the Pope cannot ever err in official teaching on matters of faith and morals.  The true Church will never err in her official teaching of faith and morals.  

As Catholics, we know this is true.  So, let no one tamper or interfere with the Word of God.

But people are already asking how they should respond to the possibility that Pope Francis might be the False Prophet.  Here are six ways:

1. Remain Vigilant and Obedient:  In conscience, heart, mind, and will – remain obedient to Pope Francis …  for now … read on  Know that the Church’s Magisterium shall remain infallible … But  not in the False Prophet (Pope) and his lies. Anyone who supports gay unions, birth control/contraception, abortion, euthanasia, women priests, watered-down doctrine and other heresies must be avoided.  And given Pope Francis’ track record in light of the growing evidence of prophecy, we should stop praising him and his troubling actions, ask for clarification, pray for him … while remaining vigilant for the good of souls and the Church.  We must also see our way through this moment with solid reasoning and faith.
2. Remain Alert and Investigative:  Don’t bury your head in the sand and hope it will all blow over.  Given both the prophecies and the Pope’s track record of troubling statements, it is permitted and even proper, given these circumstances to be evaluative and even somewhat critical of Pope francis’ actions and teachings.  As Catholics, it is permitted to consider the possibility that he may be the False Prophet, while not yet concluding it.   Saint Augustine says “The truth is like a lion.  You don’t have to defend it.  Just let it loose,  It will defend itself.  So be watch men of the Church’s morals and doctrine and ambassadors of these heavenly prophecies.  For a time still, even if things get worse, do not be surprised if even good Bishops and theologians are confused and misdirected in their learnings and enthusiasms.  Soon enough, if things are happening,   as prophesy indicates,  all  will become clearer.
3. Remain United in the truth of Christ:  What happened to ‘let your yes be yes and your no be no?  We will no allow our faith to be tampered with;  we know our doctrines and morals are irrefutable and unchangeable.  Even if some of the leaders of the Church want to change us (and Christ) by wanting to split us and divide us.  All that we need to do is stay right where we’ve always been … in the truth of the Church’s faith and doctrine …  here the true Church will be.
4. Remain Charitable:  God does not give His prophecy to the few open-minded people only, but to all the faithful.  He wants His revelation shared and spread, to anyone who will listen and respond.  Realize that many, especially at this point, will not agree about this.  They will not be able to see or consider this situation, yet.  Do not try to argue your perspective.  Present the information.  Pray for discernment.  Pray for the Pope and the Church, for true mercy, compassion, and unity.  Let us pray for one another and for unity in the truth.  Time will make things more clear one way or another.  Pope Francis is either the False Prophet, which is a real possibility, or he is not, and someone else is.  It is either going in this direction,or it is not, and criticism of this message won’t change it.  If it is going in this direction, you will be glad God informed you through His prophecies beforehand anyway, even if you initially rejected them.
5. 5.Remain Hopeful:  God is in control, and the events of these times are in His Providence.  Remember that God brings good out of all things for those who Love Him (Romans 8:28).  God foretold these things through Daniel and St. John in the Bible and through many heavenly prophecies, so that we would have courage as the events unfold and so that we would recognize that He wants us to respond with hope and faith in Him.  Fear is not from the Lord  Make our own Psalm 91:  I will say of the Lord “He is my refuge and my fortress, my God in whom I trust … I will not fear the terror of the night nor the arrow that flies by day.  Christ shall take care of us and our loved ones, and know that He has sent his Mother to assist us in a special way in these times.
6. Remain prayerful:  Prayer is the only way to victory and peace.  The prophecies about the False Prophet are close to fulfillment.  According to the Book of Revelation, and, other prophecies, the False Prophet must be in place as the first seal in the Final Battle.  The False Prophet will be the false Elijah, the false John the Baptist, who validates the rising anti-christ.  Through his religious authority and global influence, he will help solidify the authority of the Antichrist.  But, we in turn will assist in the defeat of the evil one.  And to do this we must pray, Pray, pray, pray!

It seems the last Pope of Malachy’s prophecy may be in place and the great apostasy is commencing soon.  For those who have eyes to see, the final storm is rising.  We must bear witness to the Truth of the prophecies foretold, even as painful as they are.

One thing about prophecy – it is never easy to hear, much less accept.  But the fruits of prophecy are alway what the Church needs and what God wills.  Thus, John Paul II is encouraging us from above:  “This is no time to be ashamed of the Gospel…It is the time to preach it from the rooftops.”

Whether Francis is the False Prophet as various prophecy indicates specifically and much other prophecy alludes to, this is both plausible and possible.  Time will tell.  We must pray for the Catholic Church, including Pope Francis.

Couragio!  For more information on the prophecies of our times go to:

http://www.TwoHeartsPress.com