Our Lady's Lamp

What is the worst thing that can happen to the Church? Not torture, murder, threats, persecution, or even the whole world conspiring to exterminate her from the face of the earth. That already happened once, and the result was the greatest growth the Church has ever seen. The worst thing that can happen to the Church is what is happening to the Church now in the West, namely that the Church is deliberately conforming to the world. This is a betrayal of her primary task, which is to conform the world to Christ. The leader has become a follower. The Lion of Judah has become tame. Nowhere has this deadly process been more apparent than in the very thought processes and categories that modern Christians use. They are the categories of the world. What categories? The modern world politicizes everything and imposes the political categories of Right and Left on everything. They are the two knee-jerk categories that save us from the awful necessity of  thinking through issues on their o...

Today is the Feast of the Visitation - when Mary, newly gifted with the miracle of the God-child, goes to visit her elderly cousin, Elizabeth who was also miraculously pregnant. From the moment of Mary's Fiat , Jesus was within her, the Word was flesh - growing flesh, true, but flesh. The God that made the universe was living and being fashioned a human body inside of a young Jewish girl.  Mary, filled with joy (and probably a bit scared too), goes to see her cousin and help her through the last trimester, which, for an older woman would be difficult even in our current day of comfort. Mary went and greeted her cousin, and as soon as she did, the Child growing in her womb was made known to the still young John, and he - as David did hundreds of years before - leaped for joy at being in the presence of God. The very first person to ever leap for joy, to worship Jesus (besides His Mother by offering her life) was an unborn child. That unborn child was the first missionary - he to...