Francis Houle: A middle-class husband and father from Michigan … and a stigmatic

By Larry Peterson

Our Lord told him, "I am taking away your hands and giving you mine ... touch them."

(Aleteia) A number of saints and holy people have been known to share in the suffering of Christ in a special way: by literally having his wounds in their own flesh. Among this group are such beloved saints as Francis of Assisi, Catherine of Siena and, closer to our own times, Padre Pio.

Then there is Irving “Francis” Houle, just a regular guy from Michigan...

Francis was 67 years old when, on Good Friday, April 9, 1993, the stigmata first began to show itself. Francis told his brother and a priest, Father Robert Fox (who would go on to write a book about him), how Jesus appeared to him when Lent began on Ash Wednesday. He told them Jesus said to him, “I am taking away your hands and giving you mine … touch them...”

It is estimated that Francis prayed individually over 100,000 people while he was still alive. Folks would wait for hours on end to see the elderly grandpa who bore the stigmata and would lay his hands on them. People would be crying and would touch him and kiss his hands... (continued)

Read More at Aleteia (click here)

Link:

• Francis Houle: A middle-class husband and father from Michigan … and a stigmatic

Judas and Hell

The Vortex

(Church Militant) Monday, we showed the voice of Scripture on Judas being in Hell; yesterday we showed constant witness of the Fathers of the Church.

Today: the witness of the saints in approved private revelation, and specifically, the Church-approved revelations of God the Father to St. Catherine of Siena.

In her famous Dialogue, St. Catherine reveals the following that was told to her by God the Father:

So the despair of Judas displeased Me more and was a greater insult to My Son than his betrayal had been. Therefore, such as these are reproved for this false judgment of considering their sin to be greater than My mercy, and for this they are punished with the demons and tortured eternally with them.

Notice again the sin of Judas betraying Our Blessed Lord is not the one for which he is damned, but the despair of God’s mercy. But whatever the sin, he is damned.

From Scriptures, from Doctors and Fathers of the Church, from Church-approved private revelations of the saints — nowhere in 2000 years is there a voice in the Church declaring that Judas was saved.
And if you include Church-approved private revelations as credible sources, then there is actually a three-fold revelation of Judas being damned from each of the Persons of the Blessed Trinity: God the Father to St. Catherine; God the Son as related by the Gospel writers; and the Holy Spirit as revealed to St. Peter and recounted through inspiration in the Acts of the Apostles. Add to this the deep reflection and meditations by Popes, Doctors, and Fathers, and it is simply UN-Catholic to try and hold that Judas was saved.

And as to the objection that the Church does not teach that Judas is damned as part of official teaching — that’s a pointless objection. There are many things the Church holds that are not part of declared dogmatic teaching. Something doesn’t have to be officially declared to be true; it’s just that whatever is declared definitively is true.

Moreover, we should never look to the Church to declare anything definitively that does not bear directly on our salvation. The declaring of someone as being damned does not bear on your or my salvation.

And switching gears here to the question of private revelation, it can never contradict official Church teaching. This is one of the ways that so many fraudulent apparitions are discovered. Our Lady, or whoever the supposed vision is of, says some oddball thing, or in other cases simply never seems to say anything related to Church teaching. It’s one of the biggest reasons for totally dismissing the supposed revelations of Our Lady of Medjugorje.

Having allegedly appeared every day now for over 30 years — including many multiple appearances in the same day to some of the various seers — this means if that apparition is true, that Our Lady has appeared more than 12,000 times, day after day, with no end in sight.

In all those appearances (more than 12,000) she has never, ever —  not once — breathed a word about the worldwide slaughter of over one billion children in the womb. She has never said a word about the evil of sodomy and its quickly growing acceptance by even many Catholics. She has never breathed a word about the increase in sin, homosexuality in the clergy and so forth.

But according to the visionaries, she has said things like the differences in world religions don’t matter to God.

That is a fake apparition, regardless of how many people who have gone their have felt about it. Feelings do not make something true. The truth makes something true. The supposed visions at Medjugorje are the perfect apparition for a Church drowning in feel-good emotions. They appeal to Catholics on an emotional level, not an intellectual level, that is to say, an authentically spiritual level.

This is a fake private revelation, especially when you consider that nothing has really been revealed.

But in cases like real apparitions and private revelations such as that of God the Father to St. Catherine of Siena, not only is nothing revealed contrary to Church teaching or tradition — it all agrees with and supports already-existing tradition and teaching.

When it comes to the question of Judas, there can be no private revelation revealing he is saved because such a private revelation would stand in contradiction to close to 2000 years of well-grounded (including Scripture) belief that he is damned.

Even the early fourth-century saint of the East Ephraim said, "Judas was the treasurer of his poison [referring to Satan]; And although Satan’s form is hidden, in Judas he is totally visible. Though Satan’s history is a long one, it is summed up in the Iscariot."

The Holy Spirit inspired the prophets a thousand years before Our Lord to speak of this; Our Blessed Lord Himself spoke of this; the first Pope spoke of it; later Popes spoke of it; the Early Fathers spoke of it; later Doctors of the Church spoke of it; the saints down through the ages spoke it; private revelation spoke of it.

And of it there can be no doubt: Judas is damned.

But the effort to “say it isn’t so” still continues, with feeble attempts to deny it. One in particular has created much much confusion in people’s minds in understanding some fundamental truths of the Faith. It is the subject of tomorrow’s Vortex, and it is the attempt to say Judas had to betray Jesus in order for us to be redeemed. Not a word of truth to that.

Link:

• The Vortex: Judas and Hell

Saint Catherine of Siena Besieged by Demons

Saint Catherine of Siena besieged by demons, circa 1500,  Anonymous

h/t The Tenth Crusade

So you want to surrender on Sodomite Marriage?

Domenico Beccafumi (Domenico di Giovanni di Pace). 1486 - 1551

Saint Catherine of Siena Receiving the Stigmata 1513-5

From Ann Barnhardt:

Saint Catherine of Siena, a religious mystic of the 14th century, relays words of Our Lord Jesus Christ about the vice against nature, which contaminated part of the clergy in her time. Referring to sacred ministers, He says: "They not only fail from resisting this frailty [of fallen human nature] . . . but do even worse as they commit the cursed sin against nature. Like the blind and stupid, having dimmed the light of their understanding, they do not recognize the disease and misery in which they find themselves. For this not only causes Me nausea, but displeases even the demons themselves, whom these miserable creatures have chosen as their lords. For Me, this sin against nature is so abominable that, for it alone, five cities were submersed, by virtue of the judgment of My Divine Justice, which could no longer bear them. . . . It is disagreeable to the demons, not because evil displeases them and they find pleasure in good, but because their nature is angelic and thus is repulsed upon seeing such an enormous sin being committed. It is true that it is the demon who hits the sinner with the poisoned arrow of lust, but when a man carries out such a sinful act, the demon leaves."

HERE IS THE FULL COLLECTION OF QUOTES - DEFINITELY WORTH A BOOKMARK.

Link:

• So you want to surrender on Sodomite Marriage?

On Loudmouthed Tough Guys in the Church

By Ann Barnhardt at Barnhardt.biz:

To open this post I wrote up this whole brilliant allegory about how sometimes you gotta be Paul Scofield, and sometimes you gotta be Ernest Borgnine, and if you put the two together you get Marty, but then I realized that all of three people reading this would have any idea who or what I was talking about, so I skipped it. But trust me, it was brilliant.

Here is Voris, clearly edified and energized by his new digs and new name, ChurchMilitant.tv, knocking it out of the park. I have pasted the key quotations he cites below, in case you want to copy and paste them into a file for future reference.

Since, in order that the deceits of the enemy may be avoided, it is necessary first of all that they be laid bare; since much is to be gained by denouncing these fallacies for the sake of the unwary, even though We prefer not to name these iniquities "as becometh saints," yet for the welfare of souls We cannot remain altogether silent. - Pope Pius XI

We’ve had enough of exhortations to be silent! Cry out with a hundred thousand tongues. I see that the world is rotten because of silence! -  St. Catherine of Siena

If people are scandalized at the Truth, it is better to allow the birth of scandal, than to abandon the Truth.  - Pope St. Gregory the Great

Let me add two more from the Church Fathers:

Everyone who can speak the Truth, yet speaks it not, will be judged by God. - St. Justin Martyr, died A.D. 165

Anyone who conceals the Truth for fear of some authority calls down the wrath of God upon himself, because he fears men more than God... Both are guilty: he who conceals the Truth and he who speaks falsehood, because the former does not wish to make the Truth known and the latter desires not to refute it. -  St. Augustine, died A.D. 430

I have heard a priest relate an anecdote regarding "prudence" that makes my flesh crawl. It goes something like this:

During World War II, the priests and bishops in Italy kept fairly quiet, and did not preach with fire and zeal against Mussolini or Hitler - their efforts against the Axis were more clandestine and underground. In the Netherlands (correction here: I originally said Denmark - I was wrong), by comparison, the priests and bishops were vociferous in their preaching against the Reich. As a result, nearly the entire Jewish population of the Netherlands was exterminated, while a far higher percentage of the Jews in Italy survived the war.

This argument is specious. It sounds good on the surface, but it is terribly flawed. The Dutch clergy did the right thing - they were the truly PRUDENT actors. They did what was right in those circumstances, which is to preach the Truth without hesitation, and with as much zeal and fire as they could muster. The failing in prudence was on the part of the other clergy in Europe. Had the clergy of the entire Church stood tall and railed without ceasing against Hitler, Mussolini, and the rest of the players, had they made clear that ANY cooperation with these governments was a mortal sin, and thus laetae sententiae excommunication, which means automatic by virtue of committing the sinful action itself, and not requiring any official juridical action of a bishop; if they had told the people of Europe that it was either friendship with Christ, which meant the total rejection of the Reich and the Fascist Italian regime, or eternal hellfire, perhaps a war which killed 70 million human beings could have been avoided, or drastically reduced in scale. Comparing survival rates of Jews in one country versus another makes the terrible assumption that the situation in Europe could not have been any better, and could ONLY have been worse. Considering that 70 million people were killed in World War II, it is lunacy to argue that "it couldn't possibly have been any better."

This is why I am doing what I am doing now with regards to Obama. I have, for my entire life, marveled at the people of Germany, in particular. Why didn't anyone say anything? Why didn't anyone do anything? If you had the chance and ability to rhetorically destroy Adolf Hitler in the early 1930s, if you had the capacity to reveal Hitler's insanity, homosexuality and unspeakable fetishes and perversions, and also the lies of National Socialism, wouldn't you do it? Wouldn't you do everything you could to rhetorically destroy Adolf Hitler? Wouldn't you expose his depraved homosexuality in order to utterly discredit him in the eyes of the German people so that they would never come to regard him as some sort of savior in the first place? Wouldn't you try to derail the train before it caused a war that killed tens of millions of human beings?
If not, WHY NOT?

How is NOT speaking the truth in any way prudent, much less charitable?

Expect God's wrath all you who fear MEN more than you fear God, and thus willfully conceal and stifle the Truth through silence and passivity. And don't you dare call it prudence.

Links:

• On Loudmouthed Tough Guys in the Church 
• ChurchMilitant.tv