Since this blog is about “Conversion, Prayer, Fasting, Repentance, and Penance,” amongst other things, Lent is a natural time to blog a lot since those ‘abouts’ correspond to the season. I have often in previous Lents blogged daily, or at least a few times a week, taking inspiration from the daily Mass readings or the …
St. Mark Ji Tianxiang was born in Hebei, China on 1834 into a Catholic family where he was raised in the Faith. He was a doctor, and in his early thirties he suffered from a stomach ailment for which he treated himself with opium. This cured him, but he developed an addiction to it. In …
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I received an email from the Militia of the Immaculata this morning announcing a new apostolic initiative of theirs! Here’s the email (I copied it.) Join the Militia of the Immaculata for a 31 Day Rosary Challenge set to begin on October 1st!!! The idea is to pray the Rosary at different hours and different places, …
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I wrote in my last post, “Today is my Twentieth Soberversary” that I had last attended an AA meeting as a regular member in 2004, and that I left it in anger. I thought that I had posted about it before, but couldn’t find it. If it exists, then finding it is taking more time …
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This morning’s Office of Readings for Saturday, 34th Week on Ordinary Time has a sermon by Saint Augustine which I take the following excerpt: “Let us sing Alleluia to God, who is good and frees us from evil”: “O! what a happy alleluia there, how carefree, how safe from all opposition, where nobody will be …
I am in the process of transferring old posts from “The Four Last Things,” a blog I ran until 2016 on ‘Death, Judgement, Heaven (& Purgatory) and Hell.’ This process of migrating was started quite some time ago, but for no reason aside from laziness and forgetfulness was never completed until today. By ‘completed,’ I mean the posts …
The First Reading for the Mass for the 19th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year B) is from 1st Book of Kings Chapter 19, verses 4-8; Elijah went a day’s journey into the desert,until he came to a broom tree and sat beneath it. He prayed for death saying:“This is enough, O LORD! Take my life, for I am …
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St. Rita, whose feast day is today, May 22nd, is the patroness of ‘impossible cases,’ as well as women in abusive marriages, mothers and those with serious illnesses and especially of wounds. A lot of that is appropriate for anyone in recovery, since we’ve experienced abuse and have given it, as well as succumbing to …
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If you have been reading this blog for the past several years and retain a good memory for certain oddities, then you would know that I hold an obsession regarding the film “The Way.” It is a film directed by Emilio Estevez and starred his father, Martin Sheen. It is about a man (Sheen) who’s son …
Last year I began a new devotion, the “Work of Reparation,” also known as the Devotion to the Holy Face of Jesus. I initially wrote about it here, but to quote from that post for a refresher: “During the late 1840’s. Our Lord Jesus Christ appeared to a Carmelite nun in Tours, France, and revealed …