Author: Mark Docherty

Divine Intimacy #374, The Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary:

https://www.baronius.com/divine-intimacy.html

MEDITATION

Let us try, through the inspired narrative of St. Luke (Gospel:1: 26-38), to enter into the dispositions of Mary’s soul at the time of the Annunciation.

The Angel sent by God finds the Virgin recollected in solitude, and “being come in,” says to her: “Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women.” At these words, according to the sacred text, Mary is “troubled”; we must not, however, take this phrase to mean real disturbance, which destroys the peace of the spirit; it means rather a profound astonishment at this unusual greeting, an astonishment so great as to cause a kind of fear. This is Mary’s first reaction to the angelical message, a reaction arising from her deep humility, which makes her think this extraordinary eulogy very strange.

Meanwhile, the Angel communicates to her his great message: God wishes her to become the Mother of the Redeemer. Mary had always lived under the continual direction of the Holy Spirit and under His inspiration had made a vow of virginity; therefore, she was convinced that she should remain a virgin and that this was God’s will. But now God lets her know that He has chosen her to be the Mother of His Son, and she, humble handmaid that she is, is ready to adhere to the divine plan. However, she does not yet understand how she can be at the same time a mother and a virgin, and she questions the Angel on this point: “How shall this be done?” The Angel explains: “The Holy Spirit shall come upon thee and the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee.” Her maternity will be the direct work of the Holy Spirit and will respect her virginity.

The will of God is then entirely clear to Mary, and she, who during her whole life has always been moved by the divine will alone, accepts it immediately, with an entire adherence and a most intense pure love: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it done to me according to Thy word.” The total acceptance is accompanied by a total donation: Mary accepts by offering herself, and she offers herself by giving herself. She offers herself as a servant, or rather, as a slave, if we take the word in the full sense of the Greek text; she gives herself by abandoning herself as a prey to the divine will, accepting by anticipation everything that God may ask of her. Her adherence to Him is both active and passive: Mary wills all that God wills, and she accepts all that He does. Thus Mary appears as the model of a soul completely united to God, fully given up to His divine will.

COLLOQUY

“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee! Not only is God the Son with you, to whom you gave your blood, but also God the Holy Spirit, by means of whose operation you conceived, and also God the Father, who generated from all eternity Him whom you conceived. The Father, who gives you His Son, is with you; the Son is with you, who, wishing to accomplish a prodigious mystery, conceals Himself in your maternal bosom without violating your virginal integrity; the Holy Spirit is with you, who, together with the Father and the Son, sanctifies you. God is truly with you” (St. Bernard).

“O Mary, Mary, temple of the Trinity … O Mary, vessel of humility, you were pleasing to the eternal Father, and in His own singular love, He has captivated you and drawn you to Him. By the fire of your charity, by the unction of your humility, you have drawn the Divinity to come within you.

“Did fear disturb you at the Angel’s word, O Mary? It does not seem that it did, although you were astonished. At what, then, were you astonished? At the great goodness of God, when, considering yourself, you knew you were unworthy of so great a grace. You wondered at the sight of your unworthiness, your weakness and at God’s ineffable grace … and thus you showed profound humility. But there also appears today in you, O Mary, the dignity and liberty of man, for before the Word was made incarnate, the Angel was sent to ask your consent. The Son of God did not descend into your bosom before you had consented; He waited at the door of your will which you opened to Him, for although He wanted to come to you, He would never have entered if you had not opened to Him saying: ‘Behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it done unto me according to Thy word ….’

“O Mary, my sweet love, you opened to the eternal Divinity the door of your will, and the Word immediately became incarnate within you. By this you teach me that God, who created me without my help, will not save me without it … but knocks at the door of my will and waits for me to open it to Him” (St. Catherine of Siena).

O Mary, by the ineffable mystery which was accomplished in you I beg you to teach me and help me always to open wide the door of my soul to every divine appeal, to every solicitation of grace. At each manifestation of the divine will, may I repeat with you a humble, prompt, “Ecce, fiat!”

https://www.baronius.com/divine-intimacy.html

(Reworked from a reflection posted in 2019)

It’s a pretty good sign that you don’t really even believe in God if you think He can be deceived. There are few things God is incapable of… being deceived is one of them. The Four Last Things are reality for everyone. If you need to kickstart your Lent, read on.

Your Particular Judgment will not be a negotiation. In fact, your Particular Judgment won’t even be a dialogue in the normal sense. To the extent that any back-and-forth does take place, there certainly won’t be any sort of quid pro quo, bargaining, splainin, whining, rationalizing, or blame gaming. There will be zero deceit or falsehood. It will be pure Truth, pure facts, pure and perfect Judgment. You won’t be able to lie anymore, not to God, not to yourself, nor to anyone else. You shall be shown what you have done, and you shall respond, “Yes.”

Our Lord will be there, pointing to Himself on Calvary while he plays back your life choices, and then you will nod, saying, “Yes. I know you did that for me, and yes, I chose to do what I did anyway.” The only participation you will have is admission of guilt. It’s not a trial, nor a negotiation. Your life was the trial. You will literally have nothing up your sleeve at that point. No lawyer to get you out of it. Your Guardian Angel will be by your side, and on your side, but you’ve really put him through the wringer too, haven’t you?

If you look at anything in scripture and it makes you uncomfortable, it’s for your own good. And if you see something that makes you think you just can’t go on living your life unless the words must mean something other than the plain meaning of the words, go look in the mirror. Those are God’s words, and the problem is never with God, it’s always with you.

Lest you think that you’ll be due some disproportionate show of mercy at your own Particular Judgment, because all the good that you’ve done will surely make you totally irresistible in the eyes of God at that moment, cover all your sins, think again. Every ounce of good you have ever done was merited by responding properly and proportionally to the graces being offered to you. “Doing good” is simply you acting the way God designed you to act, ordered toward your own spiritual gain. Yes, these good behaviors are meritorious, but also what is expected of you. No one can earn Heaven on their own. It was already earned for you, ransomed for you by the Cross and Resurrection. The time to beg for mercy isn’t at your Particular Judgment, it’s now. Repent, beg for mercy, and start making better choices.

Does that sound harsh? Depressing? Unfair?

On the contrary, this is exactly the Good News. Your eternal reward has already been purchased for you. Someone else accomplished that for you. Your role is to admit that you are powerless to get there on your own, be sorry for your sinfulness, promise to try to do better, and really mean it. REALLY. MEAN. IT. You have to actually do something about it. You have to participate as a member of the Mystical Body of Christ through EFFORT and MERIT. It is by rooting out sin and conforming your life to the Will of God that your personal relationship with Jesus Christ is founded and fostered. He doesn’t give us rules to be a jerk or to make it hard. Yes, some of the rules are harder to live out than others, but all of it is there for our own good, because He loves us. Everything has been done for you out of love, and He desires your love in return.

“Yes, I know that You died for me, brutally, so that I might live, and yes, I chose to make those terrible choices anyway.” Every human being is going to have to say these words.

The thing you want to be really sure about, I mean really, really sure, is that you can count yourself among those who will be able to add:

“But You know that I am truly sorry, not just here at the end, but every time I failed you. It was I who betrayed you in the Garden, it was I who scourged you at the pillar, it was I who crowned you with thorns, it was I who nailed you to the Cross. But I am truly sorry. Through your grace, I learned to know, love, and serve you in this world, and I desire to be with you forever in the next. I detest all my sins, I love You with all my heart, all my soul, until my dying breath and unto now, and You know I always did EVERYTHING I could to conform my will to Yours. ‘I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.’ (2 Tim 4:7)”

Kickstart your Lent, folks.

God, graciously hear us.

(For reference, nearly all of the terrible Disney remakes of the past 7-8 years have opened around $100 million. A couple did close to $200 million opening weekend. Already knowing that woke expired on November 5th, and went absolutely rancid January 20th, Disney laughably pegged $50 million as the “success” metric for Snow Woke. Too bad she only managed $43 million. -nvp)

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Snow White box office results land after devastating reviews

Disney remake has a long way to go before turning a profit

By Ellie Muir

Snow White had a mediocre opening day at the US box office amid the ongoing controversy surrounding the film, while Robert De Niro’s mob drama The Alto Knights has completely tanked.

The Disney live-action remake, which stars Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot, took $16m across Friday and preview screenings from 4,200 venues across the US. Variety reports that this figure puts the film on track to land a projected opening weekend north of $45m.

Snow White has a steep climb ahead – it carries a production cost of more than $250m, meaning it will have to have a successful theatrical run to reach profitability.

By comparison, 2023’s The Little Mermaid, which had a similar budget of $240m, made $95m on its opening weekend, more than double what Snow White is projected to make…

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/snow-white-box-office-first-week-rachel-zegler-b2720068.html

Imagine waking up to this. Showing up in the *high school auditorium* for the big reveal of the New Mass. They told you it would be groovy, man. But you had no idea just how groovy. 55 years ago today.

(NewsNation) — Steve Bannon, who served as White House chief strategist, said in an interview on NewsNation that he and others are working on ways for President Donald Trump to seek a third term despite constitutional term limits.

“We’re working on it. I think we’ll have a couple of alternatives,” Bannon told NewsNation’s “CUOMO” when asked how Trump could overcome term limits. “We’ll see what the definition of term limit is.”

Bannon expressed confidence in this effort, comparing it to Trump’s 2024 comeback.

“I’m a firm believer that President Trump will run and win again in 2028,” Bannon said. “We’ve had greater long shots than Trump 2028.” He added that they’re “not prepared to talk about it publicly, but in a couple of months, I think we will be.”

When pressed on whether he was suggesting revolution or overthrow, Bannon rejected that characterization, describing himself as a “huge believer in democracy” while claiming the country is experiencing a “1932-type realignment” comparable to the FDR era.

“We’re in the middle of a 1932-type realignment if we can continue to have populist nationalist policies,” Bannon said. “We have African-Americans coming to our side. We have Hispanics coming to our side.”

He described the current administration’s actions as a “revolution of common sense to deconstruct the administrative state” and claimed anti-democratic forces are working through the courts to “obstruct a sitting president” from fulfilling his executive mandate.

 

Please pray for the mentally ill, as their numbers grow Legion by the day…

White glamour model Martina Big, after having tanning injections announces plan to ‘move to Africa’

A white woman who ‘identifies as black’ has revealed she is planning to ‘move to Africa’.

Martina Big, 36, who is from Germany, and her husband Michael Eurwen, 38, both inject Melanotan, a synthetic hormone to darken their skin, and have faced fierce backlash over the years from those who insist they’ll ‘never be black’.

But the glamour model, who has 32T breasts after operations to enhance them, has since claimed she’s ‘received invitations from fans in many African countries’.

‘We have received invitations from fans in many African countries and so it hasn’t been easy to choose,’ Big said. ‘Currently, we have Kenya and Namibia on our shortlist.

The glamour model – who goes by the name of Malaika Kubwa, meaning Big Angel in Swahili, after a baptism ceremony – claims to have the largest breasts in Europe. As well, she has undergone lip augmentations and plans to undergo a butt augmentation and surgery to ‘widen her nose’ before heading to Africa.

Despite being right about everything, those of us who pushed back against lockdowns from the outset are not redeemed. Many of us remained “cancelled.”

By Jennifer Sey

I’ve been a bit grumpy and on edge this week. It’s the 5 year anniversary of lockdowns. I’m still mourning the loss of my life as it was. I love my new life. But it’s harder. And I’m 56 and I guess I was hoping for easier at this point.

You see, I loved my old life and I’d spent more than 3 decades building it and it was taken from me because I dared say “open the public schools.” Yes, it was taken from me by a bunch of psychotic covid alarmists and authoritarian censors. Which was almost everyone. I’ll never forgive them. I don’t care what they say about letting go of anger and how it poisons you to hold it. Those who targeted and cancelled dissenters deserve for our rage to be trained on them. They deserve it and I hold it in a place, I make room for it to exist, while building joy around it with my family, my new city, my new start up, my new friends. But it’s there, make no mistake.

I don’t really know what to say about it all. I’ve written extensively on the subject, even a book — about what it was like to dissent from the outset. I feel tinges of rage at prominent “heterodox-ers” who now, or perhaps 2-3 years into it all, pretend at dissent. We needed you then.

There is broad recognition that school closures went on too long, and even some acknowledgement that lockdowns were ineffective and terrible human rights violations.

The Boston Globe published a review of the book “In Covid’s Wake” about a week ago. The book, while being praised as redemptive for those of us who pushed back early and often, provides no such redemption. While I’ll admit I haven’t read it, I’ve read the review several times now. It allows for “it was early we didn’t know” and seems to scapegoat Fauci and even other public health officials without excoriating EVERYONE who went along with the hysteria, turning in neighbors to police and targeting colleagues for firing.

Originally posted March 19, 2022

Do you know St. Joseph? It’s a really good idea to befriend him, stay close to him. You will be very glad you did, because he is very generous. Let us pray, for ourselves, for our intentions, for the Church and impending circumstances. Happy feast!

Litany of St. Joseph

Lord, have mercy on us.
Christ have mercy on us.
Lord, have mercy on us.
Christ, hear us.
Christ, graciously hear us.

God the Father of Heaven, have mercy on us.
God the Son, Redeemer of the world, have mercy on us.
God the Holy Ghost, have mercy on us.
Holy Trinity, One God, have mercy on us.

Holy Mary, pray for us

St. Joseph, pray for us
Noble son of David,
Light of the Patriarchs,
Spouse of the Mother of God,
Chaste Guardian of the Virgin,
Foster-father of the Son of God,
Sedulous Defender of Christ,
Head of the Holy Family,
Joseph most just,
Joseph most chaste,
Joseph most prudent,
Joseph most valiant,
Joseph most obedient,
Joseph most faithful,
Mirror of patience,
Lover of poverty,
Model of all who labor,
Glory of family life,
Protector of virgins,
Pillar of families,
Consolation of the afflicted,
Hope of the sick,
Patron of the dying,
Terror of the demons,
Protector of Holy Church,

Lamb of God, Who takes away the sins of the world, spare us, O Lord.
Lamb of God, Who takes away the sins of the world, graciously hear us, O Lord.
Lamb of God, Who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.

V. He made him the lord of his household.
R. And prince over all his possessions.

Let us pray. God, Who, in Thine ineffable Providence didst vouchsafe to choose blessed Joseph to be the Spouse of Thy most holy Mother; grant, we beseech Thee, that we may be worthy to have him for our intercessor in Heaven whom, on earth, we venerate as our protector. Who livest and reignest world without end. Amen.

Look closely. I think it’s his phone. Was he texting Langley during Mass? If that’s even him, yet living. Also, they couldn’t remove the glass of water with the straw in it from the altar, sitting between the still-lit candles? Is that stole just really plain, or did they put it on him upside down?

(Dr Briggs is already all over this, in long form substack reply to yesterday’s NYT op/ed by a certified Full Covidian. He quotes from the Times article and offers counterclaims and assorted truths. Most importantly, that all of the actual truth was knowable in real time, and many of us reported it in real time. Also, no one “forced” you to get the vaxx. Not one person was strapped down, kicking and screaming. If you got it, that was your choice. -nvp)

Excerpt from Briggs:

Yesterday the New York Times, the written order-of-the-day for the old school left, put out an op-ed admitting, in so many words, the covid lab-leak theory. Check the revealing title: “We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives“. Some were surprised about this.

I am not. I’ll tell you exactly why these prevaricating no-good slime-pushing would-be tyrants are admitting what the rest of us have been saying for years. Because they are scared for their jobs, their funding, their money, their slipping prestige.

Good. Be afraid. We should take it all away. All of it.

Now you’ve heard me many times call for the ending of government having a direct, and the direct, hand in funding science. But it sounds strange to hear. It doesn’t sound sensible. It sounds impossible. But let the NYT itself convince you.

Gain-of-function is the euphemism. Gain-of-lethality is the truth. Scientists, funded by you, dear reader, monkey with bugs to see if they can make them deadlier. To you. Which you pay for. They do this out of morbid curiosity, from the fiction that having created Frankenstein bugs they’ll be able to find cures for their own creations, cures which they wouldn’t need if they didn’t invent Accelerated Death, and because they have money to spend and prestige to seek. Your money.

They made the covid bug in a Chinese lab, which you partly paid for, and they were sloppy and it got out. That story has been told so many times you’re sick of it. But one item I don’t always emphasize. Why did they panic, when it was obvious to the sober there wasn’t any need?

Because of their Uranus-sized egos, egos pumped to colossal size, funded by you. They said to themselves, “We, being credentialed geniuses, made this terror. It must therefore be the Mother of All Bugs. It will kill everybody. The only thing to do is panic. And lie. Lie our asses off.”

So that’s what they did. And yesterday, the most prominent of the guilty was thrown under the Greyhound. All in an effort, I say, to save what’s left of the crippled system.

We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story.

Op-eds don’t just find their way into the main propaganda source of the old regime. They put this here, now, for a reason.

Read this whole quotation (my emphasis):

The first was a March 2020 paper in the journal Nature Medicine, which was written by five prominent scientists, and which declared that no “laboratory-based scenario” for the pandemic virus was plausible. But we later learned through congressional subpoenas of their Slack conversations that while the scientists publicly said the scenario was implausible, privately, many of its authors considered the scenario to be not just plausible but likely. One of the authors of that paper, the evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen, wrote in the Slack messages, “The lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.”

Spooked, the co-authors reached out for advice to Jeremy Farrar, now the chief scientist at the World Health Organization. In his own book, Farrar reveals he acquired a burner phone and arranged meetings for them with high-ranking officials, including Francis Collins, then the director of the National Institutes of Health, and Anthony Fauci. Documents obtained through public records requests by the nonprofit U.S. Right to Know show that the scientists ultimately decided to move ahead with a paper on the topic.

Operating behind the scenes, Farrar reviewed their draft and suggested to the authors that they rule out the lab leak even more directly. They complied. Andersen later testified to Congress that he had simply become convinced that a lab leak, while theoretically possible, was not plausible. Later chat logs obtained by Congress show the paper’s lead authors discussing how to mislead Donald G. McNeil Jr., who was reporting on the pandemic’s origin for The Times, so as to throw him off track about the plausibility of a lab leak.

Government scientists in charge of handing out NIH science grants conspired. The NIH controls almost all medical research, directly or indirectly.

It is worse (again my emphasis):

Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. And when a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology — research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world — no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization.

So, the Wuhan research was totally safe and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transmission: It certainly seemed like consensus.

Consensus in science is a long-running joke, or used to be. And should be on any question of policy, because that is very definition of scientism. There is a “consensus” in “climate change” being the end of the world, too. The worship of Nobel prizes must also end. Having one has not proven to confer immunity from idiocy. What value is some “laureate” spouting off on subjects like this? Not one of the “laureates” had a “degree” in lying to the public.

Again, you’re tired of hearing it, but it wasn’t only these eminences being loosey goosey or being ignorant-but-opining on the facts, it was also officials like the CDC, ours and others, spitting lies about how you couldn’t get sick or pass on the bug if you got the shot, or it couldn’t possibly have any side effect, this being the first in the history of all medicine of achieving a perfect drug. I’m nauseous having to tell it over and over…

GO READ IT ALL!