Abp. Viganò: We must do penance for our sins this Lent and beg God to protect His Church

From Passion Week until the Easter Vigil, the crosses and sacred images in the churches are veiled, to remind us of our unworthiness as sinners and the silence of God, a silence that Our Lord also experienced in the Garden of Gethsemane and on the Cross.



Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò

Quote:Ecce ejicimini vos hodie a liminibus sanctæ matris Ecclesiæ propter peccata, et scelera vestra, sicut Adam primus homo ejectus est de paradiso propter transgressionem suam.

We cast you out of the enclosure of holy mother Church because of your sins and crimes, just as the first man Adam was cast out of Paradise because of his transgression. (Pont. Rom., De expulsione publice Pœnitentium).

Quote:Restore in them, Apostolic Pontiff, what the seductions of the devil have corrupted; by the merits of your prayers and by the grace of reconciliation, bring these men close to God, so that those who were previously ashamed of their sins may now rejoice in pleasing the Lord in the land of the living, after defeating the author of their own ruin (Pont. Rom., De reconciliatione Pœnitentium).

Quote:Forty more days, and Nineveh will be destroyed! (Jon 3:2), announces the prophet Jonah. The Ninevites believed God, proclaimed a fast, and clothed themselves in sackcloth, all of them, from the greatest to the smallest. And when the news had reached the king of Nineveh, he arose from his throne, took off his cloak, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat on ashes.

Then, by decree of the king and his great officers, an order of this kind was made known in Nineveh: ‘Men and animals, herds and flocks, let them taste nothing; do not go to pasture and do not drink water; let men and animals cover themselves with sackcloth and cry out to God with strength; Let each one be converted from his wickedness and from the violence wrought by his hands. Perhaps God will change his mind, repent, and extinguish his burning wrath, so that we may not perish’ (Jon 3:5-9).

The following was taken from the TIA website. While The Catacombs does not support every position taken by TIA with regard to the crisis in the Church, they post many good articles. From a recent Q&A there:

1. We do not give credit to the theory which imagines that Benedict XVI was coerced to abdicate by a group of Cardinals. He himself denied this possibility several times. His secretary, Arch. Georg Ganswein, who knew him quite well, also has denied it.
   
2. In order to continue to sustain this theory after Benedict XVI's formal denial, one must imagine that he was also obliged to deny it later. Now then, this is tantamount to admitting that either he lost his mental faculties, that is, he did not know what he was talking when he denied the coercion, or to imagine that those Cardinals continued to exercise that same pressure over him until he died. If this last possibility were accepted, then any document he wrote after his abdication and any verbal declaration he made should also be denied for the same reason. Since he had many opportunities to let other persons know about this supposed pressure and never did, this hypothesis lacks common sense.
   
3. Besides, on this topic the motto applies: Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur, "what is freely asserted is freely dismissed," or paraphrased, "What is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."
   
4. We also do not give credit to the theory that pretends Pope Francis was not duly elected while Pope Benedict XVI was. Both Popes were elected by the College of Cardinals obeying the same rules established for the Papal Election.
   
5. We do not think the Seat of Peter is vacant. We sustain that since the death of Pius XII it has been usurped by partisans of Progressivism.
   
6. We do not consider Pope Francis as an anti-pope. However, he may be an Anti-Christ, to use the words of Our Lady of La Salette: “Rome will become the seat of the Anti-Christ.”
   

Ebook:

St. Joseph, an Undervalued Saint
by Venerable Mary of Agreda - taken from here



St. Joseph as royal, in the Jesuit Church in Quito, Ecuador

St. Thomas Aquinas on Fasting
Taken from here.



The Temptation of St. Thomas Aquinas

Quote:Fasting is practiced for a threefold purpose:

• First, in order to bridle the lusts of the flesh, wherefore the Apostle says (2 Corinthians 6:5-6): "In fasting, in chastity," since fasting is the guardian of chastity. For, according to Jerome, "Venus is cold when Ceres and Bacchus are not there," that is to say, lust is cooled by abstinence in meat and drink.
  
• Secondly, we have recourse to fasting in order that the mind may arise more freely to the contemplation of heavenly things: hence it is related (Daniel 10) of Daniel that he received a revelation from God after fasting for three weeks.
  
• Thirdly, in order to satisfy for sins: wherefore it is written (Joel 2:12): "Be converted to Me with all your heart, in fasting and in weeping and in mourning." The same is declared by Augustine in a sermon: "Fasting cleanses the soul, raises the mind, subjects one's flesh to the spirit, renders the heart contrite and humble, scatters the clouds of concupiscence, quenches the fire of lust, kindles the true light of chastity."

Quote:During Lent, Catholics are called to observe a gas fast to avoid fuelling the war and against the consumption of fossil fuels.

Paul VI At Vatican II

• the present anaphora [the Roman Canon] is to be left untouched; two or three other anaphoras should be composed, or sought in existing texts, that could be used during certain defined seasons.
  
• the Kyrie should be retained when the Gloria is not said; when the liturgy prescribes the Gloria, however, the Kyrie should be replaced with another penitential prayer.
  

Quote:Between the indiscriminately archeologizing fanatics who wanted to banish the Sanctus and the intercessions from the Eucharistic Prayer by taking Hippolytus’s Eucharist as is, and those others who could not have cared less about his alleged Apostolic Tradition and wanted a slapdash Mass, Dom Botte and I were commissioned to patch up its text with a view to inserting these elements, which are certainly quite ancient—by the next morning! Luckily, I discovered, if not in a text by Hippolytus himself certainly in one in his style, a felicitous formula on the Holy Ghost that could provide a transition of the Vere Sanctus type to the short epiclesis. For his part Botte produced an intercession worthier of Paul Reboux’s “In the manner of…” than of his actual scholarship. Still, I cannot reread that improbable composition without recalling the Trastevere café terrace where we had to put the finishing touches to our assignment in order to show up with it at the Bronze Gate by the time our masters had set!

Quote:This results at times even in conferences of bishops going too far on their own initiative in liturgical matters. Another result is arbitrary experimentation in the introduction of rites that are flagrantly in conflict with the norms established by the Church. Anyone can see that this way of acting not only scandalizes the conscience of the faithful but does harm to the orderly accomplishment of liturgical reform, which demands of all concerned prudence, vigilance, and above all discipline.

Quote:Wherever the contrary practice, that is, of communion in the hand, has already come into use, the Apostolic See entrusts to the same conferences of bishops the duty and task of evaluating any possible special circumstances. This, however, is with the proviso both that they prevent any possible lack of reverence or false ideas about the Eucharist from being engendered in the attitudes of the people and that they carefully eliminate anything else unacceptable.

Quote:The aberrant liturgies invading our churches—now as bare as Protestant houses of worship—are having a disastrous effect. Communion in the hand, often distributed in baskets to all takers, represents the nadir of the innumerable profanations spreading in progressive parishes because of the multiplying sacrilegious communions of the “faithful” who never go to confession. In this climate, the new “Ordo Missae” is received not as a step forward but as the herald of further degradations, since the clergy, which is badly formed and badly taught in wayward seminaries, is open to any and all experiments.

Quote:The Council did not ask for any such revolution. The liturgical reform was done, the pope approved it, and that’s enough: I take the position of obedience, which is always owed to the pope. If he had asked me, I think I might have made some observations—several. But once a law has been approved, there is only one thing left to do: obey.

Guigues du Chastel (also known as "Guigo de Castro" or "Guigo II"), A.D. 1083/4 - 27 July 1136-8, was a Carthusian monk who became the fifth prior of the Grande Chartreuse. He formally outlined the classic method of Lectio Divina in his letter to Brother Gervase.

This letter, below, is also known as Scala Claustralium or Scala Paradisi.