#advent #catholic #sspx

• Advent is a holy season of waiting. We learn how to wait for God.
• Waiting well is an important spiritual skill, because God often moves slowly. When we look at the history of the world and of the human race, we see that God is never in a hurry.
• God is outside of time. All of time is like a single moment for Him. He sees all of human history from the highest perspective.
• When we interact with God, we have to be willing for Him to act slowly. We have to be willing to wait. “Show, O Lord, thy ways to me. Teach me thy paths”, we say in today’s Introit. His ways are slow.
• Abraham: God first appears to him when he is 75 years old, and promises that he will make a great nation of him. But his wife is not able to have any children. After 25 years, God appears to Abraham, when he is 100 years old, and promises that he will have a child by Sara, who is 90 years old. She has Isaac and the whole race of the Chosen People comes from him.
• Moses: the Israelites are being oppressed by the Pharaoh. He is telling the midwives to put their male children to death. Moses is saved from the water and raised by Pharaoh’s daughter in the Egyptian court. When he is 40 years old, he flees to the desert. Only after 40 years more does God appear to Moses and ask him to go back to Egypt to deliver the Israelite people. They had been in slavery for 80 years at that point.
• Coming of Our Lord: God waits a number of centuries after Adam. When Our Lord comes onto this earth, He is not rushed. Rather, He spends 30 years living a hidden and unknown life. Only then does He come out into the public.
• Bottom line: God often waits a long time before acting. (same will be true of end of world!)
• We find this characteristic of our God difficult because we are naturally impatient as human beings. We are willful and we want control. We want things to happen when we want them to happen. We find it humbling to be forced to wait.

#endtimes #catholic #ourlady

• Today is the last Sunday of the liturgical year and it represents the end of time. That is why the Church gives us a Gospel passage of Our Lord speaking about the Last Judgment.
• Whenever Our Lord speaks of the Last Judgment, He wants to give us certain means by which we may identify it, while at the same time He does not want to tell us when it will happen. Rather, He wants us to always watch and be ready for His coming.
• Today, I would like to speak about some other general information about the Last Judgment and the End Times. We do not have this information from the Gospels but from a saint.
• This information comes from St. Louis de Montfort and it concerns the role of Our Lady in the End Times.
• We have to understand St. Louis’ perspective on the Providence of God. It is that God the Trinity desired to make use of Our Lady in every aspect of the work of the Redemption and salvation of mankind.
• This was a free choice on the part of God because of the fact that He is almighty and does not need anyone. It is not that He needs to make use of Our Lady; it is that He wills to do so out of His goodness.
• Think of a situation in the home where the father is fixing a door. He is the most capable member of the family to do it and he does not need anyone’s help. But he chooses to ask his daughter to help him, for her sake. He wants to spend time with her, he wants her to learn, and he wants her to be a part of the upkeep of the house.
• Something similar goes on with our salvation. It’s like the door into Heaven was broken and could not be used any more. The heavenly Father is going to fix it. He does not need anyone to help Him to do so. But He chooses to ask one of the members of the human race, the ones who broke the door, to help Him in fixing the door.
• He asks Our Lady for her help and she consents. By her consent, one of the members of the human race that is being redeemed and saved participates in the work to save us.
• We all know what this meant for Our Lady during her lifetime. She consented to become the Mother of Our Lord. She took care of Him during His hidden life. She requested Him to perform His first miracle. She accompanied Him during His public life and was with Him at the foot of the Cross.
• During the first centuries of the Church, Marian devotion was present but was not very strong. As the centuries go by, Our Lady becomes more and more known. She becomes more honored. Catholics understand better the role that God gave her. They start to make more use of devotions to her, like the Office of Our Lady and the Rosary that she revealed to St. Dominic.
• Our Lady herself begins to reveal herself more through apparitions: her apparitions to St. Dominic, St. Simon Stock, the founders of the Servite Order—all these in the Middle Ages.
• Then, the more modern apparitions to St. Bernadette in Lourdes, to St. Catherine Laboure in Paris, and to the three children of Fatima.
• St. Louis de Montfort notices these two things and he applies them to the end times: a) God wants to make use of Our Lady in the whole of the work of our Redemption and salvation; b) God wants Our Lady to become more and more known over time.
• From the realization of this plan of divine Providence, he draws a conclusion: “It was through Mary that the salvation of the world was begun, and it is through Mary that it must be consummated… In the second coming of Jesus Christ, Mary has to be made known and revealed by the Holy Ghost in order that, through her, Jesus Christ may be known, loved and served… God wishes to reveal and make known Mary, the masterpiece of His hands, in these latter times” (True Devotion, par. 49-50).

• On July 13, 1917, Our Lady appeared for the second time to the three children of Fatima. She promised to work a miracle on October 13, so that everyone would believe. Then, she asked the children to sacrifice themselves for sinners and to pray the following prayer when doing so: “O Jesus, it is for love of you, for the conversion of sinners, and in reparation for the sins committed against the Immaculate Heart of Mary.”
• These three young children were already familiar with the conception of praying and making sacrifices in order to make up for sin.
• God had sent an angel to them the year before, to prepare them for the apparitions of Our Lady. This guardian angel of Portugal taught the children about their mission: it was for them to do prayer and penance for the conversion of sinners and in reparation for sin, to stop sin from being committed in the future and to repair for sin already committed in the past.
• Later, Our Lady came to ask for the practice of the five first Saturdays devotion. This is a devotion of reparation for the offenses committed against Our Lady’s Immaculate Heart. There are five first Saturdays because there are five types of blasphemies that are committed against Our Lady.
• The fourth type is the “blasphemies of those who seek openly to foster in the hearts of children indifference or contempt for this Immaculate Mother.”
• These facts about the message of Fatima show us that Heaven takes very seriously the offenses committed against the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Our Lady would not come down on earth, speak to the three children, and work incredible miracles for no reason.
• Another thing that we learn is that the work of reparation is very important. Every sin is a crime against God, an injustice. Every sin deserves a punishment to make up for the injustice.
• There are many sins being committed around the world all the time. God looks for souls who are willing to pay for the sins of mankind. Our Lord and Our Lady, of course, paid a great price for the sins of the world, enough to wipe them all away.
• However, God did not want to leave us with nothing to do in the supernatural order. Rather, God asks that we unite with the work of Our Lord and Our Lady to do something to pay for sin ourselves. He asks for the work of “reparation”, making up for sin by prayer and sacrifice.
• This is what the Sacred Heart asked of St. Margaret Mary and us. This is what the Immaculate Heart asked of the three children of Fatima and us.
• Doing this work is part of living a Catholic life.
• The most important sins for us to make reparation for are sins of blasphemy. St. Thomas says that blasphemy is “the disparagement of some surpassing goodness, especially that of God”.
• What Fr. Pagliarani and Fr. Fullerton are asking us to do is to make reparation for a sort of blasphemy against the Mother of God in the form of the document Mater Populi Fidelis of the Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Faith.
• This document disparages a surpassing goodness, namely, the roles of Our Lady as Co-Redemptrix and Mediatrix of All Graces.