Category: Blog Posts

Dear Friends,

What a beautiful thing it is when God makes visibly manifest His careful ordering of all of our affairs – even our seemingly small, isolated, and unimportant decisions. Let us always be conscious of that and strive to do all that we do living In His Divine Will, and aware of His continual presence, never daring to suppose that even the smallest thing is indifferent.

Last year, I wrote a post regarding an interview of Pope Francis’ and how it affects the pro-life movement. In writing that post I desired to include a photograph of a devout person praying the Rosary outside a Planned Parenthood. I performed a Google Image search to this end, and felt immediately drawn by the Holy Spirit to one of the images that turned up in the first page of the results. I went with this image, and it is the one still included on that post. After publishing that post, my good friend Fr. James Mattaliano, a very special and holy Jesuit priest, emailed me to let me know that the picture was none other than a very good friend of his, Kyle Clement, from Texas. But the Providence does not stop there; this past Lent, my wife and I made a retreat at the center where Fr. Mattaliano resides (in Massachusetts), and lo and behold, it so happened to coincide with a time when Kyle was also up making a retreat there – all the way from Texas. It was a truly blessed few days, and I am especially thankful that during it I was able to get to know Kyle. Kyle shared with us an incredible story – one that he had told very few people – but I asked him, for God’s glory alone, if he would permit me to post it on my blog. He graciously permitted it, and so I would like to present it to you all now:

 

Monday morning, December 23, 2013, was cool and crisp here at the ranch as I took my two grandsons (ages 5 and 3) to check and feed cows after breakfast. After feeding and checking cows, we called a set of horses out of the “west” pasture into a large corral; one of the horses was a customer’s who had been here for training.

 

The horses went up a sorting alley to a catch pen. The sorting alley is 12 feet wide and leads to a “catch” pen, meaning a smaller corral where the horses are easier to catch and halter. The customer had requested that she be made ready to “ship,” meaning he was sending someone to pick her up and take her to new owners, and we were going to facilitate. My grandsons stayed in the pick-up out of the wind and watched through the front glass of the pick-up.

 

I remember that horse, the customer’s palomino filly, coming up the alley toward me. The next thing I remember is my son, Dunn, helping me to sit up in the sort alley as I choked on blood.

 

I was wearing brown (faded to tan) canvas coveralls and was mesmerized by the bright crimson blood sparkling in the sunlight, flowing down the tan folds of the coveralls. The blood dripped onto the dust and made tiny balls of mud at first, and then it began to puddle…”I wonder if the Blessed Mother saw Her Son’s blood do that?” I became aware that my son was asking me to speak to him. I could not speak past the broken jaw and split lips so I tried to turn in order to talk, but then darkness started to close in on my vision. I turned my head back straight and the darkness cleared up, so afterwards I tried to keep my head straight. My wife, Valerie, was there and told me she was taking me to the hospital; I stood up and they helped me to the 4Runner (I didn’t want to get blood in Valerie’s car.) We had to stop a couple of times on the way so I could spit out blood, but we made it in record time. At the hospital we took off my boots and coveralls before we went in the ER. They sent us straight in (no waiting – all I had to do was flash them a smile!). They did a CT scan and determined that I should be sent to a level 1 trauma unit in Ft. Worth, 120 air miles to the east. They started to suction the wound and realized that some of the pieces of my mouth were barely attached, and I was able to do my own suctionioning, since I could feel my way around my mouth with the suction machine. The nurses and staff at the Abilene hospital were very nice and concerned about getting me somewhere that could address the injury.

 

The pain at his point was becoming severe…the image of the words “Jesus, I Trust in You,” appearing as they do on the Divine Mercy Image, seemed to float between my eyes and the world…I started thinking the words…I made a confession to the Divine Mercy image and at the act of contrition I was fearing of the fires of hell…I thanked the Lord for the injury – for the opportunity to do reparation for the vile things which had come out of my mouth in my life – and for His Divine Mercy which would allow me, a sinner, the chance to join my suffering to His to help atone for my sins…

 

I was not really aware of being loaded into the helicopter or of the first portion of the ride and came to in a situation hearing the nurse asking if i needed more pain medication in my IV….there was little to no pain at this point so i asked her to save it until we were ready to land. When we landed at John Peter Smith hospital the trauma team was ready for us and three oral/maxillofacial surgeons greeted us. We went for an MRI and more CT imaging, then back to a trauma suite where the surgeons explained that they would attempt to reassemble my lower jaw, suture my palate, and wire my lower jaw to the upper jaw, then finally suture my lips and chin. They explained that this would be under local anesthesia as they had to assess my bite and dental orientations throughout the procedure. I asked if I could keep running the suction and they agreed. The procedure lasted over 5 hours in total, with the jaw realignments and Novocaine injections being most painful. When the pain seemed to be too much I would think of someone I had at one time disliked (or worse), and would ask the Lord to apply my suffering to his healing. Most of the time doing this the pain would vanish…not just subside, but vanish. There were a few people I would think of and try this for, and it was clearly shown to me that if I still had unforgiveness or animosity toward them the pain did not vanish but would subside to some extent… I experimented with this and it was accurate… my pain would subside to the extent I wanted God’s love for them, and I truly loved them…enemies included. I can truly say that I have no human enemies today.

 

We were moved to a room by 10:00pm on Monday the 23rd – about 12 hours after the event …the first day.

Unclean lips

 

When Valerie and I arrived at the room, several nurses and other personnel came to do their various duties: get blood samples, take vital signs, etc. I was medicated for pain but was lucid and was observing almost as separated from myself. I became very aware of the spiritual world in that I knew I was surrounded by angels and the hospital was surrounded by angels – not just for me but for other people trying to trust in the Lord. I was prayerfully aware of the people ministering to me and I prayed for them in their lives, families, jobs and told them how much we appreciated them and their families. Valerie and I discussed how this event was working in the economy of God’s salvation and how we were being given the opportunity to affirm them in their Faith. Valerie relayed to me how, when we were waiting on the helicopter, she had called Fr. Fabian at the Carmelite monastery we frequent, and he said they would pray for healing but also that we would find the right doctors through which the Lord could work. Valerie went to sleep on a recliner in the room around 1am on the 24th and I prayed for everyone I had come in contact with that day; asking God to bless them and their families. Some of the people seemed to linger in my mind so I prayed an extra Ave for them.

 

Pain meds were dilaudid and morphine given on a rotating 2 hour basis, and I was unable to swallow and was using the suction almost constantly. At one point I poked a particularly tender spot on my jaw and saw lights swirling…then heard the Sanctus…then felt the Sanctus…smelled incense.  A Seraphim took form out of the swirling lights before me; it was huge and held a red-hot coal on a rod which looked like a branding iron. It touched the coal to my lip. The heat coming off the coal made the light distort and wave, but I felt no heat. I realized the nurse was speaking to me and wanted to take a blood sample. St. Raphael stood at her side. She inserted the needle for the blood sample and as I watched the blood flow out and fill the tubes it was as if something were flowing into me… warmth spread to my eyes then around my mouth then around my ears… I do not know if these are common side effects of these drugs (or maybe uncommon side effects), or if they had anything to do with the drugs at all. I was praying and giving thanks to God for His love for me and my family and the wonderful opportunity to offer and join my suffering to the suffering of Jesus.

 

I know that the beating our Lord’s Precious Body took was so much more painful than my small afflictions. I offered to give Him my pain to add to His. He looked at me, and with the slightest nod accepted it, and the joy immediately lifted me – at least felt like it lifted me – from the earth to the Throne room of heaven. I was aware of, somehow, the crucified Christ, the healing Christ, the child Christ, and more amazingly still, was aware of such bright living light that was itself somehow two lights now one moving from the other surrounded by a background or third light… I wanted to stay…

I came to myself choking and had to be about my constant job of suctioning.

The night nurse came in and introduced and handed us over to the day nurse who was a prayerful lady who was sorrowful in being away from her family on Christmas eve. We told her how much we appreciated her and how we wished to be with our family on this day as well. Our son called to tell us that they would continue our traditional practice of getting the tree and decorations put up. We try to spend Christmas eve as a family decorating the house and tree. We tracked their progress through the day and missed them. I was able to hear the grandboys over Valerie’s cell phone, singing and wishing us a Merry Christmas. The Doctor had told us earlier in the morning that my white blood cell count was too high (22) to release me, and that I would have to stay another night. Our eldest grandson, Brody (age 5), was to receive his First Holy Communion at the midnight Mass. Valerie and I visited and prayed and talked about how the Blessed Mother and St. Joseph, far from home and with no other human companionship, settled down with the angels to await the coming of the Lord…

 

 

I do not do much crusading against the encroachment of our nation’s laws upon our religious freedom.

I recognize this is a serious issue, and that fighting it would constitute a noble endeavor, but I also must choose my battles wisely, and carefully decide how my time is spent. It would be a true tragedy to lose our civil rights to perform the corporal and spiritual works of mercy, and indeed there seems to be new occasions of this by the week, but a far greater tragedy — and not a hypothetical one, but an actual current epidemic — is the neglect, by Catholics, of the corresponding duty to perform them as we now have the right to.

Consider the following:

• We are legally entitled to pray and sidewalk counsel outside any abortion clinic in the country, and yet most Planned Parenthoods and other such “clinics” remain unattended by prayer warriors for the majority of their hours of operation, despite the fact (proven by the testimony of former abortion clinic workers) that the mere presence of one person praying outside a clinic usually causes a substantial amount of the women who go in to quietly choose not to have the abortion.

• Our Churches enjoy near-total freedom of operation; Mass can be held whenever, the doors can be opened whenever, and we can have any sort of event we please in them, and usually even outside them. Despite this, most Churches have: horribly chosen daily Mass times seemingly to ensure that only retirees can make them (e.g. 9am), doors locked almost all the time so that no one can get in to pray (footnote 1), no attempt to start up perpetual adoration, no effort whatsoever to reach out to the poor of the surrounding areas and invite them in for prayer, no Eucharistic processions throughout the city streets, and no door-to-door or city-center evangelization efforts — all of which should be expected norms for each Catholic parish, which must be both a monastery and a mission in the heart of a world now perishing for lack of what the Church has.

• Catholics can worship and pray whenever and wherever they please, and we all know the heartbreaking statistics about how few nominal Catholics attend Mass each Sunday, but neglect to consider how very sad it is that so few actually practicing Catholics take advantage of our freedom and our modern conveniences to attend daily Mass, regular Confession, weekly Adoration hours, etc. Our freedoms and conveniences give us opportunities of grace that could turn us all into great saints, but instead most Catholics are far too laden with hobbies, business, laziness, or worldly ambition to bother applying that great virtue of magnanimity to the universal call to holiness.

• We are permitted to bear any external sign of the Faith wherever we please, and yet most Catholics seem to have blending in as their modus operandi. Despite the enormous channel of grace for lost sheep that the sight of a crucifix, Divine Mercy Image, image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, pro-life message, or Scripture quote can be, most Catholics’ personal appearance, external appearance of cars, and external appearance of homes are indistinguishable from that of any secular person’s.

• We enjoy a great freedom of association, and can have anyone we so please over to our homes, and can do whatever we please inside these doors. Despite this, it seems that most Catholics’ social gatherings remain limited to a small, “safe,” and perfectly trustworthy self-enclosed group of friends and family — as if we were a formally outlawed underground secret community —  instead of reaching out to the needy and lonely as Our Lord demands (cf Matthew 5:46, Luke 14:12-14), and that even as the gatherings are, we seem to be too embarrassed about prayer to do anything more than say grace before meals together, with even faithful Catholic families wasting entire days just “hanging out.”

• We do not suffer from child-limitation policies that hundreds of millions in our world today do, and yet so few married Catholic couples choose the path of fruitfulness. Whether by the intrinsic evil of contraception, or the intrinsic good of NFP — that, when abused and used at the subjective whim of personal preference instead of only being used to avoid conception for serious reasons (as the Magisterium has insisted upon on multiple occasions), becomes an evil — most Catholics choose to seek first the Kingdom of Mammon and only have as many kids as their financial planner deems “reasonable.”

• Parents still have the right to educate their children however they see fit, and yet most Catholic parents send their children to schools that they must know will only indoctrinate them – unless their heads are so far buried in the sand as to pierce Earth’s crust – instead of diligently researching to see if there is a faithful local Catholic school, or homeschooling their children (despite the sacrifices this may entail).

• We do not live under a regime of censorship, which has been the case for so many Christians throughout history and today. Despite this, most Catholics’ reading does not consist primarily of Scripture, Encyclicals, and writings of the saints (even if these aesthetically adorn their bookshelves), but of secular news, whatever work of fiction is found on the NY Times Bestseller list, whatever diet and nutrition fad research they feel will give them perfect health, whatever vain magazine is available in a waiting room, or worse than bad reading: sitting in front of a television.

Dear friends, I am no cynic. I recognize there are enormous forces for good active today, and growing (what first comes to mind is 40 Days for Life, the continued expansion of perpetual adoration, the boom of vocations in orthodox religious orders and the great work with the poor that many of the inner city ones are doing, etc.), but what I present to you here is a sort of an Examination of Conscience. Let us be sure that, before we dare complain about our rights being violated (and again, we indeed ought to fight for our rights), we are fulfilling the duties that correspond to the rights we now have – let us above all remember that this is what we will have to give an account of on Judgment Day, not whether or not we were born in a society friendly to our good deeds. It is up to us whether He says to us, on That Day, “Come, O blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world” or “Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels,” and know that the latter response is reserved for the lukewarm, the indifferent, the apathetic.

“But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first. Remember then from what you have fallen, repent and do the works you did at first. If not, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place, unless you repent.”

— Our Lord to the Church in Ephesus. Revelation 2.

Footnotes:

1: I would like to draw special attention to this point. This was point #2 in my “Plea to Pastors” from two years ago. I have long spoken against the practice of locking Churches, and was usually rebuked for doing so; “Things could be stolen! Liabilities! Dangerous! You are insisting upon something very imprudent!” people would say. But now the very Vicar of Christ himself has spoken against locked Churches, calling all of those types of responses “excuses.” See also Evangelii Gaudium Paragraph 47. Dear Pastors: unlock your Churches. Seek first the Kingdom. God is not outdone in generosity.

I often love “The Vortex” videos. I also often think they’re inadequately thought or prayed through first. But in this case it is neither; Michael Voris is simply dead wrong and misleading the faithful.

Let me begin by saying that I regard Michael highly. Having spoken to him personally, I know him to be far more than the simple merciless ranter that some regard him as. I wish he chose the path of trusting the Church to denounce the apparition herself, if it is truly a danger to the Faith, and if that is what the Holy Spirit desires.

I have been urged to watch the 48 minute “mic’d up” episode in which Michael Voris discusses Medjugorje. I refuse to do so. Not due to laziness, but on principle: within the first 30 seconds he sarcastically refers to the apparitions as having been going on for “600 years,” and then he next (despite the existence of a plethora of real theologian-experts and an official Vatican commission dedicated to analyzing and discerning Medjugorje) introduces E Michael Jones – a man with a stated vendetta against Medjugorje and whose PhD is in American Literature – as perhaps the world’s “leading expert” on it. But the bigger reason I will not watch it is the nature of his 5 minute summary of it.

This summary is the aforementioned 5 minute Vortex , which amounts to the following:

1. Seriously erroneous theology. at 2:43, Michael implies that rulings on apparitions are matters of faith and morals. This is false. The very reason that a Catholic never owes the submission of Faith to any private revelation is because they, by their very nature, are never matters of Catholic Faith. They are only matters of simple human belief. Church rulings on apparitions (as differentiated from rulings on particular theological statements contained in an alleged apparition) pertain to her judicial, temporal duty, and are never infallible or even irreformable because they never comprise rulings on faith and morals. (Remember that the Divine Mercy devotion was once condemned). We must obey, yes! Always. But it is a dangerous lie and a serious error to assert that such rulings are matters of faith and morals.

2. Deceitful accusations. At 2:10 Michael brings up the two negative statements issued by Bishops against Medjugorje in order to accuse those who now make personal pilgrimages to Medjugorje or believe in it as disobedient to the Church. He completely ignores the fact that this does not bind the faithful, as the matter has been explicitly taken out of the local ordinary’s hands and placed in the care of the Vatican alone, as the CDF has made abundantly clear. “[The local Bishop’s opposition to Medjugorje] should be considered the expression of the personal conviction of the Bishop of Mostar which he has the right to express as Ordinary of the place, but which is and remains his personal opinion…Finally, as regards pilgrimages to Medjugorje which are conducted privately, this Congregation points out that they are permitted on condition that they are not regarded as an authentication of events still taking place and which still call for an examination by the Church” – Cardinal Bertone, speaking as secretary to the CDF, in 1998, after the statements Michael refers to. I pray Michael did not know of this, and therefore did not intentionally withhold such glaringly necessary information, which would be a serious injustice and lie of omission.

3. Slander. At Medjugorje, Our Lady is relayed as saying “Members of all faiths are equal before God. In the world, all religions are not the same…” Michael summarizes that as her having said “all religions are the same.” If I were the one who had said that, and not Our Lady, I would sue Michael Voris for slander, and I’d win.

   1. I have no idea where Michael found the alleged quotes from Our Lady on hell. If you’d like to see what she actually did say about hell, click here.

   2. (Michael does validly point out that she said she does not dispose of all grace, but he says this is in contradiction to her title as Mediatrix of all grace. First of all, the Church has not yet extraordinarily defined that latter as doctrine. That being said, I do strongly believe and promote it, and I hope it is soon proclaimed dogma; but I also do not see a contradiction. I think it highly probable that she does not dispense of all graces but does mediate all graces.)

4. Straw men. Michael implies that the visions must be fake, because in one case, during a vision, a visionary flinches (barely even noticeably) when someone nearly punches her in the face. The Church does not teach that a valid ecstasy must be utterly complete and absolutely free from any possibility of being affected by external events. Partial ecstasy is a perfectly valid form of ecstasy. St. Teresa of Avila makes it clear that the suspension of the senses “may be incomplete, thereby allowing the ecstatic to dictate the revelations received.” Further, the miniscule amount which she flinched and the aggressive nature of the hand’s movement indicate to me validity far moreso than invalidity.

This particular Vortex links to ChurchMilitant.TV’s faq page on Medjugorje. A brief look through that reveals similar errors as the ones contained in the Vortex episode, in addition to another glaring one: it bluntly states  that fruits are categorically NOT valid arguments for the validity of an apparition. This is in direct contradiction to the teaching of the Magisterium in the 1978 document from the CDF entitled “Norms regarding the manner of proceeding in the discernment of presumed apparitions or revelations” paragraph 2)c. Not only are fruits valid, it teaches, but they are due “special regard” in judging the authenticity of an apparition. The majority of this faq page on ChurchMilitantTV is actually dedicated to opposing this particular Magisterial teaching.

Do I know that Medjugorje is true? Of course not! I don’t know of any Medjugorje supporter who claims to “know” that it is (although I have stumbled upon some venomous Medjugorje detractors who claim to “know” it is false), neither do I know of any Medjugorje supporter who plans to disobey the Church when she rules on it. But I do know that when Our Lady does choose to appear for her last time on Earth, to prepare all of her children for her Son’s final coming (which I believe is the case now at Medjugorje), that there will be plenty of problems pertaining to the human element of the phenomena at that time; problems that will give the Voris of that day more than enough to rant about. Let us not be like that, my friends.

At this post’s publication, the Vortex episode I here mention has received over 16,000 views. Please forward this to anyone you think may have seen it or may in the future see it.

In Christ, through Mary,

Daniel

Note: There has indeed been a recent letter from the CDF telling the faithful not to attend events that take the validity of the apparitions of Medjugorje for granted. This I will – and admonish you all to – fully adhere to. But it is absolutely not a ruling on the validity of the apparitions. See the theologian and Mariologist Dr. Mark Miravalle’s article on that here. If, by the way, you are looking for a real expert on these matters- a theologian, and one who has served on official Vatican commissions to study apparitions, look no further than him.