My Domestic Church Daily Clips 09/24/2009

• Padre Pio – The Mantags: Catholic, feasts, saints, padre, pio
• Saint Piotags: Catholic, feast, saints, padrepio
• Catholic Fire: St. Pio of Pietrelcina: Priest, Mystic, and Stigmatisttags: no_tag
  • Prayer is the best armor we have, it is the key which opens the heart of God.

    Pray, hope and don’t worry. Anxiety doesn’t help at all. Our Merciful Lord will listen to your prayer.

    Don’t spend your energies on things that generate worry, anxiety and anguish. Only one thing is necessary: Lift up your spirit, and love God.

    Our present life is given only to gain the eternal one and if we don’t think about it, we build our affections on what belongs to this world, where our life is transitory. When we have to leave it we are afraid and become agitated. Believe me, to live happily in this pilgrimage; we have to aim at the hope of arriving at our Homeland, where we will stay eternally. Meanwhile we have to believe firmly that God calls us to Himself and follows us along the path towards Him. He will never permit anything to happen to us that is not for our greater good. He knows who we are and He will hold out His paternal hand to us during difficulties, so that nothing prevents us from running to Him swiftly. But to enjoy this grace we must have complete trust in Him.

    Prayer is the oxygen of the soul.

• The Deacon’s Bench: Homily for January 18, 2009: Dedication of the St. Pio Chapeltags: Catholic, feast, Padrepio
  • But through it all, Padre Pio persevered. Quietly. Humbly. Prayerfully. After a lifetime of poor health and great pain, he died in 1968. He was proclaimed a saint in 2002. Stories of his miracles and wonders abound. His mysticism. His gift for prophecy. But his greatest work on this earth was profoundly humble.

    It came not only from how he lived, but how he listened.

    Because his most familiar home… was the confessional.

    Padre Pio spent hours hearing confessions each day. People would line up in the early morning and wait all day to tell him their sins, hear his penance, and whisper their acts of contrition. One of them was a priest from Poland, Karol Wojtyla, who heard Padre Pio tell him during confession that he would one day hold the highest office in the church. Fr. Wojtyla thought that meant he’d become a cardinal. He had no idea what Padre Pio really meant.

    And it began in confession – a sacrament that a lot of us, frankly, avoid.

• cause of our joy: The Decline of the big American Catholic familyLeticia describes the joy of a large family!tags: catholic, families, contraception, birth, control.
  • “The smaller Irish-American family has been attributed to many factors, but the one most often cited is a decline in willingness to defer to the Roman Catholic Church after the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. “The church’s guidance on all kinds of things, including family planning, doesn’t carry the weight it used to carry,” said Terry Golway, a writer who teaches American history at Kean University in New Jersey.
    In New York, the migration of the Irish middle class from the city to the suburbs contributed to the decline of the double-digit family, he said. “Their world was not defined by the parish as it once was, when they lived in the Bronx,” Professor Golway said. “They moved to the suburbs, where it really was a melting pot. Not everybody on your block was Irish anymore.”’
• Google Reader (1000+)tags: no_tag
  • “The smaller Irish-American family has been attributed to many factors, but the one most often cited is a decline in willingness to defer to the Roman Catholic Church after the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. “The church’s guidance on all kinds of things, including family planning, doesn’t carry the weight it used to carry,” said Terry Golway, a writer who teaches American history at Kean University in New Jersey.
    In New York, the migration of the Irish middle class from the city to the suburbs contributed to the decline of the double-digit family, he said. “Their world was not defined by the parish as it once was, when they lived in the Bronx,” Professor Golway said. “They moved to the suburbs, where it really was a melting pot. Not everybody on your block was Irish anymore.”’
• Happy Catholic: St. Pio’s Feast Day (amended)tags: Catholic, feast, saint, padrepio
  • One of my favorite stories about him happened during the early 1960s.

    Italy was in crisis. The Red Brigade was sparking violence in Rome, and it was considered dangerous to travel around the country. For protection, people began carrying pictures of Padre Pio.

    During this time, Padre Pio had to leave his village to visit Rome, and one of the other friars asked him, “Aren’t you worried about the Red Brigade?”

    “No,” he said. “I have a picture of Padre Pio.”

• Discover card making changes to their cardmember agreements soon « TWO A DAYNew changes to Discover card accounts- which is not good news for the consumers (I am paying mine down!). Also good advice on when to use debit and when to use credit. tags: finance
  • PS – don’t get sucked into believing that using your debit card (usually on Mastercard or Visa) will keep you out of hot water.  The consumer protections are DIFFERENT for purchases using debit cards versus credit cards (one is treated sorta like cash and the other is a de facto loan).  So, use debit cards for stuff under $250 and anything over that use the real deal to ensure you automatically gain the protections you deserve.
• A Catholic Mom in Hawaii: Documentary – “THE STORY OF SAINT DAMIEN OF MOLOKAI, SACRED HEARTS PRIEST”Father Damien is finally going to be canonized next month! Esther has the information for all of the EWTN programming for the event!tags: Catholic, saints, FatherDamien

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.