by
Thomas A. Droleskey
Let it be established beyond any question that the naturalists of the "left" who are ensconced in power at this power in the executive branch of the Federal government of the United States of America are power-hungry liars who specialize in using legislative initiatives as veritable Trojan horses into which they can stuff whatever odious, evil regulations they desire to advance their policy objectives without bothering to adhere to the provisions of Sections 7 and 8 of Article I of the Constitution of the United States that concern law-making and the enumerated powers (and the necessary and proper clause) that can be exercised constitutionally.
Let it be established further that this current administration's usurpation of legislative powers and the deceptive practices used to expand executive prerogatives that are without foundation in Article II of the Constitution of the United States is nothing new. The Congress of the United States of America has long been in the business of abdicating its legislative responsibilities to the executive branch of the Federal government, a phenomenon that began in earnest during the Great Depression and World War II under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who served as president from Saturday, March 4, 1933, to Thursday, April 12, 1945), and was institutionalized during most of the first three decades of the Cold War under Democratic and Republican presidential administrations alike.
President Lyndon Baines Johnson, who served as president from Friday, November 22, 1963, to Monday, January 20, 1969, benefited from an almost total surrender of legislative responsibility to pursue the goals of his statist War on Poverty and Great Society programs while at the same time pursuing a massive ground and air war in southeast Asia that he had promised in his 1964 campaign against United States Senator Barry Goldwater (R-Arizona) not to wage, doing so without any policy to achieve victory. Johnson's successor, President Richard Milhous Nixon, who served from Monday, January 20, 1969, to Friday, August 9, 1974, took full advantage of the precedents established in the preceding thirty-six years prior to his first inauguration to push the scope of executive power to and beyond the breaking point. Ironically, Nixon's own well-documented abuses of executive power and efforts by the overwhelming Democratic majorities elected to both Houses of Congress in 1974 and 1976 boomeranged on President James Earl Carter, Jr., who was, quite arguably, the singularly most Congressionally-checked president in the past seventy-eight years.
As noted in
Selective Use of Executive Power thirty-nine months ago, the administrations of former Presidents George Herbert Walker Bush (whose term ran from Friday, January 20, 1989, to Monday, Wednesday, January 20, 1993) and George Walker Bush (who served as president from Saturday, January 20, 2001, to Tuesday, January 20, 2009) went to great lengths to bend and twist executive powers to their liking, something that was done in a particular egregious manner by Bush the Lesser and his minions in the name of "national security," you understand.
That the current administration of President Barack Hussein Obama and Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., a pro-abort who has maintained his "good standing" in the structures of the counterfeit church of conciliarism, enabled by the likes of United States Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) and current United States House of Representatives Minority Leader and former Speaker Nancy Patricia D'Alesandro Pelosi (D-California), another pro-abort who has maintained her own "good standing" in the conciliar church, pushed and pushed and pushed and pushed to get all manner of legislation passed to permit their political appointees to issue regulations without full Congressional consideration is really nothing new.
Officials of the Obama administration assured us that there were no "death panels" in ObamaCare. There are (see Hush, Hush! Don't Tell the People.)
Officials of the Obama administration assured us that elective surgical abortions would not be covered in ObamaCare. They are (see Front Men For The New World Order and Still Utterly Defenseless Against Itself).
Officials of the Obama administration are currently considering a provision buried in the over two thousand pages of the "Affordable Health Care Act" (ObamaCare), sponsored as an amendment by United States Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-Maryland), yet another pro-abort who has maintained her own good standing in the conciliar structures, that would enable the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, yes, another pro-abort Catholic, albeit one who, while maintaining her good standing in the false conciliar church, has been "warned" by the conciliar "archbishop" of Kansas City, Kansas, Joseph Naumann, not to receive what purports to be Holy Communion in the Protestant and Masonic Novus Ordo worship service, to authorize insurance companies to provide full coverage, without any co-payments, for birth control pills and devices in the name of "preventive medicine" to maintain a woman's health:
Congress left it to the administration to define the preventive care benefit and adopted an amendment by Senator Barbara A. Mikulski, Democrat of Maryland, requiring officials to pay special attention to the “unique health needs of women.” (Obamacare Could Require Insurers To Cover Birth Control.)
Although Deirdre McQuade, who serves in the Pro-Life Secretariat of the so-called United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, has noted quite correctly that pregnancy is not a "disease" that needs to be prevented by contraceptive pills and devices, it is these very same conciliar "bishops" who have made it possible by their inaction to enable the careers of pro-aborts such as Joseph Biden, Nancy Pelosi and Kathleen Sebelius, among so many, many others. What good are reminders about basic truths of biology and of the Natural Law when supposed Catholics are permitted to keep their "good standing" while supporting one egregious evil after another under cover of the civil law?
Yes, of course, the conception of a child is what intended by God to occur as the natural fruit of the procreative powers He has given to man. It is a fundamental violation of His absolute and immutable sovereignty over the sanctity and fecundity of marriage to assert that any human being has a "right" to deliberately frustrate the natural ends of marriage or that anyone has a "right" to conceive a child by artificial means (in vitro fertilization). The binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law do not permit of exception. They cannot be circumvented by regulations issued by petty caesars or by legislative enactments or judicial decrees. No human being, whether acting individually or collectively with others in the institutions of civil governance, has any authority to transgress the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law. It is that simple.
For the pro-aborts, however, what is simple must be made complex and turned into a "difficulty" to be resolved. Caesar Barackus Obamus Ignoramus himself told us this in his now infamous commencement address given at the University of Notre Dame du Lac in Notre Dame, Indiana, on Sunday, May 17, 2011, a scandalous event about which "Father" John I. Jenkins, C.S.C., is as yet unrepentant as he permits Saint Joseph County, Indiana, prosecutors to put the "Notre Dame 88" on trial for "criminal trespass" without lifting a finger of mercy for his fellow Catholics, that many "difficult" decisions to make when faced with an "unwanted" pregnancy:
As I considered the controversy surrounding my visit here, I was reminded of an encounter I had during my Senate campaign, one that I describe in a book I wrote called The Audacity of Hope. A few days after I won the Democratic nomination, I received an email from a doctor who told me that while he voted for me in the primary, he had a serious concern that might prevent him from voting for me in the general election. He described himself as a Christian who was strongly pro-life, but that's not what was preventing him from voting for me.
What bothered the doctor was an entry that my campaign staff had posted on my website - an entry that said I would fight "right-wing ideologues who want to take away a woman's right to choose." The doctor said that he had assumed I was a reasonable person, but that if I truly believed that every pro-life individual was simply an ideologue who wanted to inflict suffering on women, then I was not very reasonable.
He wrote, "I do not ask at this point that you oppose abortion, only that you speak about this issue in fair-minded words."
Fair-minded words.
After I read the doctor's letter, I wrote back to him and thanked him. I didn't change my position, but I did tell my staff to change the words on my website. And I said a prayer that night that I might extend the same presumption of good faith to others that the doctor had extended to me. Because when we do that - when we open our hearts and our minds to those who may not think like we do or believe what we do - that's when we discover at least the possibility of common ground.
That's when we begin to say, "Maybe we won't agree on abortion, but we can still agree that this is a heart-wrenching decision for any woman to make, with both moral and spiritual dimensions.
So let's work together to reduce the number of women seeking abortions by reducing unintended pregnancies, and making adoption more available, and providing care and support for women who do carry their child to term. Let's honor the conscience of those who disagree with abortion, and draft a sensible conscience clause, and make sure that all of our health care policies are grounded in clear ethics and sound science, as well as respect for the equality of women."
Understand - I do not suggest that the debate surrounding abortion can or should go away. No matter how much we may want to fudge it - indeed, while we know that the views of most Americans on the subject are complex and even contradictory - the fact is that at some level, the views of the two camps are irreconcilable. Each side will continue to make its case to the public with passion and conviction. But surely we can do so without reducing those with differing views to caricature. ((Text of Obama Speech at the University of Notre Dame.)
There is no "common ground" between truth and error, between good and evil. The precepts of the Fifth Commandment make it clear that it is never permissible to directly intend to kill an innocent human being as the first end of a moral act.
An expectant mother has no "decision" to make when she discovers that she is carrying a child in her womb. She has a baby to nurture unto birth and then to bring to the Baptismal font to be made a spiritual child by adoption of the Most Blessed Trinity, Whose very inner life is flooded into that baby's soul as the Original Sin and that soul's captivity to the devil is flooded out of it. There is no "decision" to be made. There is no "choice" to be made. There is God's Holy Will to fulfill with love and with perfection, made possible by the supernatural helps won for us by the shedding of every single drop of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ's Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross and that flow into human hearts and souls through the loving hands of Our Lady, she who is the Mediatrix of all Graces.
Although I have written (and taught) this repeatedly throughout the course of my professional life as a college professor and speaker and writer, let me reiterate this simple truth once again: Every abortion in an attack mystically on the preborn Baby Jesus in the person of an innocent preborn baby in his mother's womb. No one--and I mean no one--can say that he "loves" Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and support as a matter of public law and/or participate in actively the act of dismembering or burning or poisoning Him mystically in the persons of innocent preborn children by chemical or surgical means.
Relativists are people who absolutely deny the existence of absolute moral truths, contradicting their contention that that there is no such thing as absolute truth, that the morality of an action is determined by the relative circumstances of time and place and the motive of the individual making a decision. If there is no absolute truth, then how is it possible for it to be absolutely true that there are no absolute truths? This is a variation of the conundrum posed by Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI's philosophically absurd and dogmatically condemned "hermeneutic of continuity and discontinuity" that makes a mockery of the immutability of God and the Deposit of Faith as there is no reason for anyone to pay any attention to his, Ratzinger/Benedict's, teaching now if some future "pope" can apply the same condemned principles as he has used to dismiss the teachings of our true popes about religious liberty, separation of Church and State and false ecumenism, among many other things.
Relativists, be they moral relativists or theological relativists, must ever live in the murkiness of instability and chaos wrought by their denial of the very nature of truth (something that I point out in Audio Lecture: Living in the Shadow of the Cross, part 1 and Audio Lecture: Living in the Shadow of the Cross, part 2, presentations that have been accessed by over four hundred freeloaders and about thirty persons who offer non-tax-deductible financial gifts to support the work of this site--smile, please, and send a check if possible). What is simple must be made complex. Relativists cannot believe that there is a God Who has revealed definite, knowable truths that bind the consciences of all men at all times and in circumstances, no less that He has entrusted those truths to the eternal safekeeping and infallible explication of the Catholic Church, outside of which there is no salvation and without which there is no social order.
Relativists cannot believe that God made man and woman to enter into the marriage bond until death do them part and that the natural fruit of their love is the conception of a child.
Relativists cannot believe that God means for a married couple to accept as many or as few children as He sees fits to bestow upon them or that the first end of marriage is indeed the procreation and the education of children.
Relativists believe that the most important vocation for a woman is to fulfill her career interests first and foremost, meaning that the conception of children, whether in or out of marriage or by natural or artificial means, is a matter of personal "choice" that must be tailored to their career and/or financial or family goals at a particular time.
Relativists believe that individual human beings, each of whom is a contingent being whose body is destined one day for the corruption of the grave under the General Resurrection of the Dead on the Last Day, is a moral automaton who is like unto God, deciding all things unto himself with almost no regard for anything other than personal self-interest.
This is what is believed by the statists of the Obama administration. Ah, this is what is believed also by most "libertarians."
Although the recrudescence of relativism in Renaissance (which had various phases from the late-Fourteenth Century through the end of the Sixteenth Centuries) certainly played a key role in giving a veritable "rebirth," especially in intellectual and artistic circles to the Sophist belief that man is the measure of all things, it was not the Protestant Revolution against the Divine Plan that God Himself instituted to effect man's return to Him through the Catholic Church that moral relativism, combined with theological relativism, could emerge fully triumphant in the lives of men and their nations. This is a point that Pope Leo XIII made in Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885:
But that harmful and deplorable passion for innovation which was aroused in the sixteenth century threw first of all into confusion the Christian religion, and next, by natural sequence, invaded the precincts of philosophy, whence it spread amongst all classes of society. From this source, as from a fountain-head, burst forth all those later tenets of unbridled license which, in the midst of the terrible upheavals of the last century, were wildly conceived and boldly proclaimed as the principles and foundation of that new conception of law which was not merely previously unknown, but was at variance on many points with not only the Christian, but even the natural law. (Pope Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885.)
Opposition to the Obama-Biden administration's consideration of mandating that insurance companies provide full coverage for contraceptive pills and devices under ObamaCare's "preventive health care" provision must be based on the simple truth that contraception is in se morally evil, that it is a denial of the sovereignty of God over the sanctity and fecundity of marriage, that no one has the "right" to practice contraception and no pharmaceutical company has the "right" to manufacture conception and no physician has any "right" to prescribe it and no pharmacist has any "right" to dispense it. We must oppose grave moral evils on God's terms, not according to the false lights of some naturalistic strategy.
Contraception is evil. Those who promote it are doing the devil's work, not God's, and it is this simple truth (truth is simple, after all) that has invalidated the entirety of the "work" of Planned Parenthood from its inception by Margaret Sanger as the American Birth Control League in 1921 (the name became Planned Parenthood in 1942 after several organizational changes in the late-1930s). We do not need "sting" videos by people representing themselves falsely as operators of criminal rings that employ women for immoral purposes to know that Planned Parenthood not only does not deserve a single penny of taxpayer funding from any level of government (Federal, state, local) but has not right to exist at all as its very goals are hideous in the sight of the true God of Divine Revelation and thus undermine the very fabric of social order, starting with the stability of the family unit.
The statists of the "left" and many on the "right" believe that contraception and abortion are matters of personal judgment about which the civil state may not interfere. Such relativists are not only oblivious to the simple moral truths enunciated briefly above, they are also oblivious to how the ready availability of contraception and abortion have decimated the indigenous populations of the formerly Catholic countries of Europe to such an extent that Mohammedans stand on the precipice of becoming the majority of the population in many of these nations by the middle of this century, barring some unforeseen development. The very social fabric of Western nations that has been torn apart by contraception and abortion have created a cradle-to-the-grave reliance upon entitlement programs offered by the civil state that have bankrupted various nations in Europe and led to major protests in others merely because there is talk of cutting back the statist goodies. Or, perhaps more to the point, this is precisely what the statists desire to order to augment their control over us, who they consider to be the mere creatures of the state.
Let it be established the naturalists of the false opposites of the "left" and of the "right" are as one in rejecting the simple, clear words of Catholic truth as provided us by the late Louis-Edouard-François-Desiré Cardinal Pie, contained in the following passages from Selected Writings of Cardinal Pie of Poitiers (which is available from Mr. Hugh Akin's Catholic Action Resource Center):
"If Jesus Christ," proclaims Msgr. Pie in a magnificent pastoral instruction, "if Jesus Christ Who is our light whereby we are drawn out of the seat of darkness and from the shadow of death, and Who has given to the world the treasure of truth and grace, if He has not enriched the world, I mean to say the social and political world itself, from the great evils which prevail in the heart of paganism, then it is to say that the work of Jesus Christ is not a divine work. Even more so: if the Gospel which would save men is incapable of procuring the actual progress of peoples, if the revealed light which is profitable to individuals is detrimental to society at large, if the scepter of Christ, sweet and beneficial to souls, and perhaps to families, is harmful and unacceptable for cities and empires; in other words, if Jesus Christ to whom the Prophets had promised and to Whom His Father had given the nations as a heritage, is not able to exercise His authority over them for it would be to their detriment and temporal disadvantage, it would have to be concluded that Jesus Christ is not God". . . .
"To say Jesus Christ is the God of individuals and of families, but not the God of peoples and of societies, is to say that He is not God. To say that Christianity is the law of individual man and is not the law of collective man, is to say that Christianity is not divine. To say that the Church is the judge of private morality, but has nothing to do with public and political morality, is to say that the Church is not divine."
In fine, Cardinal Pie insists:
"Christianity would not be divine if it were to have existence within individuals but not with regard to societies."
Fr. de St. Just asks, in conclusion:
"Could it be proven in clearer terms that social atheism conduces to individualistic atheism?"
Any questions?
Let it be established further that pro-aborts in public life are not to going to be able to advert to their own "brilliance" and their own sense of false "compassion" to escape from the reality of these words, written by Pope Pius XI in Casti Connubii, December 31, 1930, at the moment of their Particular Judgments if they do not repent of their crimes against God and men and convert to the true Faith before they die, choosing to Baptized, if necessary, which washes away Original Sin and Actual Sins (and all of the temporal punishment due to one's Actual Sins), or to return to the true Faith by making a good, integral auricular Confession of their sins to a true bishop or a true priest and publicly abjuring their former crimes against God and men:
"Those who hold the reins of government should not forget that it is the duty of public authority by appropriate laws and sanctions to defend the lives of the innocent, and this all the more so since those whose lives are endangered and assailed cannot defend themselves. Among whom we must mention in the first place infants hidden in the mother's womb. And if the public magistrates not only do not defend them, but by their laws and ordinances betray them to death at the hands of doctors or of others, let them remember that God is the Judge and Avenger of innocent blood which cried from earth to Heaven." (Pope Pius XI, Casti Connubii, December 30, 1930.)
Let it be established once again, my good and vanishing readership, that Catholicism is the one and only foundation of personal and social order:
Here we have, founded by Catholics, an inter-denominational association that is to work for the reform of civilization, an undertaking which is above all religious in character; for there is no true civilization without a moral civilization, and no true moral civilization without the true religion: it is a proven truth, a historical fact. (Pope Saint Pius X, Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910.)
Saint Agatha, whose feast we celebrate today, refused to compromise on any point of the Faith. Unlike the conciliarists, many of whom have bowed down before the images of false gods and/or have permitted their "ministers" to conduct services in once Catholic churches, including the Chapel of the Apparitions at the Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima, and unlike the lords of Modernity, who believe themselves to be "gods" who can control us, their minions, Saint Agatha condemned the false gods when praising them could have saved her very life
S. Agatha the virgin was right fair, noble body and of heart, and was rich of goods. This glorious virgin served God in the city of Catania, leading a pure and holy life. Quintianus the provost of Sicily, being of a low lineage, was lecherous, avaricious, and a miscreant and paynim, and for to accomplish his evil desires fleshly, and to have riches, did do take S. Agatha to be presented and brought tofore him, and began to behold her with a lecherous sight; and for to have her himself, he would have induced her to make sacrifice unto the idols. And when he saw her firm in her purpose, he put her in the keeping of a woman named Aphrodisia, which had nine daughters, over foul, like unto the mother. This did he for to induce S. Agatha to do his will within thirty days. Aphrodisia and her daughters entreated the holy virgin to consent to the will of the provost, and sometime they made to her great promises of temporal goods and of great eases, and sometimes they made to her menaces of grievous torments for to suffer, and great pains, to which S. Agatha answered freely: My courage and my thought be so firmly founded upon the firm stone of Jesus Christ, that for no pain it may not be changed; your words be but wind, your promises be but rain, and your menaces be as rivers that pass, and how well that all these things hurtle at the foundement of my courage, yet for that it shall not move. In this manner answered she, and always wept in making her prayers, and much great desire had she to come to Jesus Christ by martyrdom and by torments. When Aphrodisia saw well that in no wise she would be moved, she went to the provost Quintianus, and said to him: Sooner should the stones wax soft, and iron turn to soft lead, than turn the courage of this maid, or to take from her the christian faith. I and my daughters have done none other thing night ne day, one after another, but to labour how we might turn her heart to your consenting. I have promised her in your name your precious adornments, clothes of gold, houses, lands, towns, servants, and great meinys, and all this she despiseth and reputeth them at no value. When Quintianus heard this, anon he made her to come tofore him in judgment, and demanded her of her lineage, and at the last he would constrain her to make sacrifice unto the idols. And S. Agatha answered that they were no gods, but were devils that were in the idols made of marble and of wood, and overgilt. Quintianus said: Choose one of two; or do sacrifice to our gods, or thou shalt suffer pain and torments. S. Agatha said: Thou sayst that they be gods because thy wife was such an one as was Venus, thy goddess, and thou thyself as Jupiter, which was an homicide and evil. Quintianus said: It appeareth well that thou wilt suffer torments, in that thou sayst to me villainy. S. Agatha said: I marvel much that so wise a man is become such a fool, that thou sayest of them to be thy gods, whose life thou ne thy wife will follow. If they be good I would that thy life were like unto theirs; and if thou refusest their life, then art thou of one accord with me. Say then that they be evil and so foul, and forsake their living, and be not of such life as thy gods were. Quintianus said: What goest thou thus vainly speaking? make sacrifice unto the gods, or if thou do not I shall make thee to die by divers torments. S. Agatha abode firm and stable in the faith. Then Quintianus did do put her in a dark prison, and she went also gladly, and with as good will as she had been prayed to go to a wedding. (The Life of S. Agatha.)
May Saint Agatha help us to remain steadfast in the Holy Faith as we pray for the day when the Social Reign of Christ the King will be established in our beloved land, that day when the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary will take place upon the faithful fulfillment of her Fatima Message by a true pope with all of the world's true bishops.
Every Rosary we pray can be used as a powerful spiritual weapon to ward off the influences of the world, the flesh and the devil in our own lives and in that of the world around us.
What are we waiting for?
Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?
Immaculate Heart of Mary, triumph soon!
Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us now and at the hour of our death.
Saint Joseph, pray for us.
Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.
Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.
Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.
Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.
Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us, especially on your feast day today!
Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.
Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.
Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, pray for us.
Saint Agatha, pray for us.
See also: A Litany of Saints
One Hour in the Life of the Droleskeys
February 4, 2011
Each of us is called to live a life of penance. It is God's great mercy to us that He permits us to suffer in this life so that we might be able to pay back here the debt that we owe for our forgiven Mortal Sins and our Venial Sins and our general attachment to sin. We must embrace penance and suffering with joy and gratitude, coming to recognize that the more gladly we accept penance as coming from the loving hand of God to chastise us so that He might right straight with the crooked lines that we are. A failure to do this will lead us into despair or anger against God's Holy Providence, which are tricks of the devil to keep us focused on ourselves and our own desires rather than a serene acceptance of the fact that God has known from all eternity each circumstance that would befall us and that each circumstance is a moment to glorify Him through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary without any kind of complaint or murmuring.
Thus it was yesterday morning, February 4, 2011, the Feast of Saint Andrew Corsini and the First Friday of the month of February, that we attempted to exit the door of our manufactured house in Connecticut, only to discover that the door was iced solid to to the floor. It would not budge. I pulled and pulled and pulled with what little physical might is mine to muster. It did not budge.
This had happened four days before, on Monday January 31, 2011, the Feast of Saint John Bosco. The door did budge then, opening immediately after I started the opening of the Novena to Saint John Bosco, "Saint John Bosco, father and teacher of young. . . " Well, that prayer was not within the Providence of God to work yesterday. The door was frozen solid.
Also frozen was a window that we have to keep shut with a tension bar because it has the tendency to spring open unexpectedly. We did get another window open after a bit of effort. It was my plan to try to get out that window and fall into the icy snowbank below it in order to attempt to push the door of house from the outside.
I made several attempts to get into the window. I got one leg through. The other leg turned out to be a problem. Although very thin now, I have not shrunk in height as of yet, still standing at six feet, two inches tall. I could not fit through the window. Sharon offered. I insisted that she could not even consider such a thing given the recent recurrence of her sciatica that will require a chiropractic visit this morning.
Sharon then began to attempt to pry open the main door with a kitchen knife. She poked at the top and on the sides. Nothing substantial occurred.
It was only after my dear wife stuck the knife into the slit between the door and the floor that it began to give, finally opening as Sharon pulled on the door knob. We still had nine minutes to drive the 3.75 miles to Holy Mass. We were up early enough. We had intended to leave early enough. God had other plans for us from all eternity.
No, our adventures were not over.
As soon as we turned onto the state road that leads to the chapel where Holy Mass is offered, we noticed that traffic was barely moving up a huge hill, the same hill on which we had gotten stuck in our motor home in a flash snowstorm on Friday, December 7, 2007. We crawled and crawled and crawled, not even reaching the crest of the hill before hearing the sound of sirens blazing from a fire truck. Something had happened to block traffic, perhaps an accident, perhaps a downed power line caused by the ice storm we had here on Wednesday, February 2, 2011, the Feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary, that kept us from getting to Mass then. I do not know. We're not attuned to any local news stations around here. I'm not even aware that such stations exist, relying upon WCBS Newsradio 880 from Manhattan sixty-five miles away for the few minutes of traffic and weather that are provided on the "eights." We did not get to Mass, having to turn around only about a half mile from our house. Indeed, that line of traffic was heavy for the next hour, backing up way north of the mobile home park where we live as proud members of the "trailer trash" brigade (we have been disparaged regularly by many and sundry people as trailer trash--Deo gratias).
Sharon quoted our friends Miss Lee and Miss Linda from Vicksburg, Mississippi, when he said in a southern dialect, "This is hill--arious, hill--arious!" That is, God's will is not ours. We must accept it with joy and with gratitude. As I told Sharon, quoting Father X in one of the sermons he gave in the retreat that I have linked to many times on this site, "Our Guardian Angels see us as lovable, bumbling idiots." Indeed.
We returned home, noticing the line of cars was getting increasingly longer in the southbound lanes of traffic. Upon returning home, I took Chase, our beagle, for a walk. It was while Chase was walking on the frosted surface of about two feet of snow (a pile of plowed snow over ten feet tall has cordoned off a field where I walk him in good weather, something that we have not had a whole lot of in the past two months now) that my feet went out from under me. I landed with great force right on the area of my spinal fusion (L5-S1) surgery on Wednesday, February 14, 1968, at the Hospital for Special Surgery, which is located at East 70th Street and the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Drive along the East River in Manhattan.
"Jesus, Mary and Joseph, I love you, save souls!" I exclaimed although I was quite stunned and cut on the backs of my fingers from falling on the ground (as opposed to being cut on the tips of my fingers from the cold weather and, evidently, dry skin that exists even though I drink gobs and gobs of water every day without fail). Chase was thoroughly uninterested, following his beagle nose, which was on the scent of something interesting as I held onto him with a leash that extends up to twenty-six feet.
A woman who saw me fall asked me from her automobile if I needed help. I was still on the ground, sitting in a stunned daze, seeing orange spots and physically shaken. The woman got out of the car to help me, by which point I was up but very sore. I thanked her for her kindness in seeking to assist me.
"I saw you fall," she said. "That was quite a serious fall."
"All within God's Holy Providence," I assured her. "It's better this than Purgatory or worse. We must offer up these things with joy and gratitude to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary." The Good Samaritan agreed and then got back into her car. I walked Chase back to the house, informing Sharon and Lucy of what happened. I was still seeing orange spots and felt quite dizzy as I sat down in my recliner chair. "All to thee, Blessed Mother. All to thy Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, we love you. Save souls!"
We may not have been on the road in our motor home in the past year, although I did get it out of storage on Thursday, February 3, 2011, to take it on a somewhat adventurous journey so that it can be serviced. However, we still have adventures, though, and we are grateful for each one of them as they are gifts given us by the good God to glorify Him and to sanctify our souls by offering up to Him through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary whatever merit we might earn by our patient endurance of our crosses.
The end.
