True Devotion or Idol
Worship
Feast of Mary, Mother of God, Father Paul Weinberger, Pastor
St. William the Confessor Catholic Church, Greenville, Texas, January 1, 2008
http://www.semperficatholic.com/
When eight days were completed for His
circumcision He was named Jesus, the Name given Him by the angel before He was
conceived in the womb.
In the Name of the Father and the
Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen
Yesterday I was listening to 910 AM
Radio; you can listen to it during the day; after the sun goes down, forget it
unless you have a computer. The man was telling a story that happened to a
friend of his, who bought a house and moved into a new neighborhood.
As a new neighbor, he was taking
things off the truck and he had a statue of St. Francis that he took to the
back yard and placed in the garden. As he continued to unload the truck his
neighbor came over and welcomed him. The neighbor identified himself as his next-door
neighbor and a “bible Christian.” This neighbor asked the man moving in if he
would do him a favor. The new neighbor agreed to do so. The man asked him,
“Would
you please take away that idol you have in the back yard?”
The man moving in asked,
“ You
mean St. Francis? St. Francis loved all God’s creation, the birds and the
flowers etc.”
The neighbor was unmoved and
insisted he move the statue. Wanting to be neighborly, the new neighbor said he
would move the statue to a place where it would not be seen by his neighbor,
the bible Christian.
Some weeks and months passed and as
Christmas was approaching, the new neighbor heard the bible Christian making
preparations next door. He was making a lot of preparations evidentially
because an elaborate platform was produced and had a manger scene complete with
donkey, ox, sheep, shepherds, the Three kings, a star
and angels. It was very elaborate.
The new neighbor went over to the
bible Christian and said,
“This is
great; do you do this every year?”
The bible Christian said,
“Oh yes!
I have been doing it for years!”
The new neighbor replied,
“Well, I
really like your collection of idols!”
When it comes to speaking about the
Blessed Virgin Mary, it is amazing how timid Catholics are, and regrettably ignorant
of the teachings of the Church concerning Our Lady. Today is not the feast of
New Year. The Chinese have a pagan feast called “The Chinese New Year”, but we
don’t celebrate the New Year; we celebrate this Solemnity, Mary Mother of God. This Solemnity, Mary the Mother of
God used to be the Feast of the Circumcision. You can see that in the last part
of the Gospel today, mentioned is the eighth day along with the Circumcision of
baby Jesus and that He was given His name; the name that the angel had given
Him before He was conceived in the womb.
The Circumcision of Jesus is
considered by some to be something we would like to forget, but it was a point
of Jewish law and in fact, it still is. You may have sent or received Christmas
cards of the Baby Jesus portrayed without a stitch of clothing. In fact, it has
only been a recent addition to a crucifix to have a cloth placed around the
waist of Jesus for the same reason. You see, you only have to go back as far as
the Da Vinci Code when so many so-called non-Catholic
Christians and Catholic Christians threw away good money to buy the book or go
to the movie, and have their faith unduly tested by what are obvious lies and
distortions about Jesus, His mother, and St. Mary Magdalene, just to name a
few. How many Catholics participated in making Dan Brown richer? It is to their
shame!
It was not long after the Birth of
Christ, His Life, Death, and Resurrection, that people began to spread lies
about Him. For example, that He really didn’t take flesh from the Blessed
Virgin Mary, but rather He appeared
to have flesh; kind of like a ghost. If you remember on Easter Sunday evening
Jesus addressed His Disciples and Apostles, save
The mark of the circumcision shows
also that He has flesh and that He doesn’t appear to have flesh. Were He not in fleshed could He be nailed
to the Cross later on? This is not a small detail that some would like to
assign it, and what the Church teaches and has taught for centuries is that
Jesus is True God and True Man. The Church has taught this over 2000 years from
the beginning. You have to go no further than the Letter of St. Paul to the
Colossians; just look at chapter two, it is not long. In chapter two you will
hear these words,
In Christ the fullness of Deity
(fullness of God, of Divinity) resides in bodily form. Yours is a share of this
fullness of Him, Who is the Head of every principality and power.
How do you have a share? You have a
share through Baptism! Christ is True God and True Man and not 50/50. He is
100% God, if you will, and 100% man.
“Well,
how is that possible?”
It is called “The Mystery of the
Incarnation”, which is what we celebrate at Christmas and this Feast of Mary
the Mother of God helps us to understand another aspect of that Mystery. We can
understand some things about the mystery but we can never understand it all. In
fact, the bishops in Ecumenical Councils as early as 431 in
“Tsk, tsk, tsk,
tsk!”
It is like the bible Christian
objecting to St. Francis. It is interesting that in the 1200s St. Francis is
the one noted to have popularized the Manger scenes. Because people couldn’t go
to the holy Land, in a sense the Holy Lady would come to them; a memorial to
remember that birth in
The fact that the Blessed Virgin Mary is called the Mother of God would make
some people worry that Catholics have gone overboard. Again, listening to
Catholic radio I heard Fr. Corapi say that if Mary is
good enough for Jesus she is good enough for him. That statement kind of cuts
right through all of that clicking of tongues.
“Tsk, tsk, tsk,
tsk!”
It is amazing how when someone is
clicking their tongue at us we roll up into the fetal position as Catholics and
don’t defend the Blessed Virgin Mary or our faith. It is ignorance on our part.
But you see... she is the Mother of Jesus and if you merely read St. Luke’s
Gospel you find that it is by the Power of the Holy Spirit that she conceived.
The Blessed Virgin Mary did not conceive Jesus the way it happened so often
among the Greek and Roman gods and goddesses of the fables and myths. The gods
would come down and wreak havoc many times, raping along the way and children
were conceived. No, the Blessed Virgin Mary was not violated in any way but she
consented to be the Mother of God. She consented to be the Mother of Jesus.
“But how
can you call her the Mother of God?”
Jesus IS GOD! The
Father of Jesus is God the Father; by the Power of the Holy Spirit, and if Mary
is the Mother of Jesus she is the Mother
of God. I don’t need a blackboard; it is very direct and yet, this
Solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God is an embarrassment to many Catholics.
St. Leo the Great wrote in the Office yesterday about every Christian through
Baptism.
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Quote: |
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Henceforth, he is reckoned
to be of the stock, not of his earthly father but of Christ, who became Son
of Man precisely that men could become sons of God. For unless in humility he
had come down to us, none of us by our own merits could ever go up to Him. |
That is very succinct, very direct, and very helpful to us.
Today is a day of resolutions.
Resolutions for the New Year usually fail because too much is attempted all at once,
so what I am about to promote is to honor the Blessed Virgin Mary in two
apparently small and insignificant ways, but to honor Our Lady as Jesus no
doubt honored His mother.
I have visited the Missionaries of
Charity over the years; they are Blessed Mother Teresa’s sisters, who live
among the poorest of the poor. They have nothing in their convent except the
bear essentials. Can you imagine four women living in the same two-bedroom
house with no mirror? They have no air-conditioning in the summer but they do
have heating in the winter; they afford themselves no luxury. I have never been
to the Missionaries of Charity when I did not see in front of the statue of Our
Lady, a vase with at least one flower in it. They either get a flower from the
garden or someone has given them flowers. The vase may hold the same flower
from day to day but they change the water daily. The crystal vase is always
there in front of the statue of Our Lady.
What mother does not accept flowers
from her children with love and joy? I remember taking my mother some weeds
that were blooming in the field next to our house. My mother said,
“Oh, uh,
awe, thank you!”
Mothers understand that it is a
gift from a child; perhaps it is imperfect but it is a gift so it cannot be
refused. A flower in front of an image of Our Lady wouldn’t break your leg and
it would be something very dear to Our Lady, and I promise you that it will be
dear to her Son as well.
The second thing is kind of
presumed by the first thing and it is that you have an image of Our Lady in
your home and it is venerated, in a place of honor…maybe somewhere near the TV,
the highest of honors, right?
Father is being facetious
I remember being taught something
at one of the processions we had for Our Lady of Guadalupe. Over the years we
have had these processions and at the end the people would come up to the image
of Our lady of Guadalupe and with great tenderness would reach out to touch the
folded hands of Our Lady. I noticed they were all touching the same place. I am
sorry ladies; I am a man so it took me a while to figure out what they were
doing, which was reaching up and attempting to hold the hand of the Blessed
Virgin Mary.
So this is the other thing, the
other “baby step” if you will. At least one time a day and without anyone else
in the room if you so choose, reach up and tenderly touch the hands of Our
Lady. No, it is not tag, and if you have boys make sure that the image is
nailed down or tacked on the wall because it will end up on the floor. They
will say they don’t know how that happened. I was a boy so I know how these
things can happen.
We have to begin with baby steps.
St. Louis de Montfort, who was much prized by both Pope John Paul II and
Blessed Mother Teresa, wrote “True Devotion to Mary.” False devotion to Mary…I
have not time for it! True devotion, YES! St. Louis de Montfort wrote in his
True Devotion to Mary in paragraph 36,
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When the Holy Spirit, her
spouse, finds Mary in a soul, he hastens there and enters fully into it. He
gives himself generously to that soul according to the place it has given to
his spouse. One of the main reasons why the Holy Spirit does not work
striking wonders in souls is that he fails to find in them a sufficiently
close union with his faithful and inseparable spouse. |
These resolutions will serve us “now and at the hour of our death, Amen”, as we
say in the Hail Mary.
When eight days were completed for
His circumcision He was named Jesus, the Name given Him by the angel before He
was conceived in the womb.
In the Name of the Father and the
Son and the Holy Spirit
Amen
Announcement to the parishioners
of St. William, the Confessor:
After offering the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass on the
Solemnity of the Mother of God, Fr. Paul recited, along with the congregation,
the Prayer to St. Michael for an end to abortion, then moved to the lectern to
make an announcement, which was as follows.
Today is January 1st and I need to
make an apology to you but more importantly to Our Lady and Our Lord. On
January 10th I will be finishing four years here as Pastor of
Over the last four years I have not
spoken out, either by cowardice or sloth, often enough about the false devotion to our Lady under the
title “Lady of Medjugorje”. There is no such person. I went once to visit a
man, who was dying and as he was dying I gave him the Last Sacraments and then
he asked me to bless his room. He had religious pictures around his room and
there was a picture of this “thing”,
which is called “Lady of Medjugorje.”
It is not the Blessed Virgin Mary. I told the man I wouldn’t bless the room
until he did something with that image.
The next day I arrived to bless the
room and he had glued a picture of his dog over the other image. I said, “Well,
that is very fitting.”
If you have statues or pictures of this image and you do
not wish to discard them, bring them to me and I will see that they are
destroyed. You know for a fact that I am
not against statues. (Father turns
and points to the statues around the Altar.) I think we can safely
say that.
When I was assigned to my first
parish as a young priest, just a half mile down the road there was a woman that
said Our Lady was appearing on the bark of her tree. I never went down to see
it until we were ordered to go by the bishop, Bishop Thomas Tschoepe.
I went once and that was it; of course everyone else had to pay admission. In
the background you could hear, “cha-ching cha-ching.”
I am telling you this because if you have any kind of
devotion, book, statue, or anything connected with Our Lady of Medjugorje, she
doesn’t exist. The bishop of that place
has written about it extensively, the Bishop of Mostar,
and so I am telling you as your Pastor to cease and desist if you have any of
that. Perhaps you have done this through misguidance or perhaps I haven’t
mentioned it enough. It has been very rare that I have done it, but I thought
how fitting on this Feast Day, Feast of Mary the Mother of God, that True Devotion to Mary should only be
promoted.
Please do not give me stories about
how your rosary was silver and then turned to gold or even how so many miracles
have happened by going and visiting there. Sure, God can write straight with a
crooked line. Miracles happened at Auschwitz during World War II, but we don’t
promote
Again, all of this is based on the
fact that, as your Pastor…and I am only speaking to you, my parishioners, as
your pastor I have to promote True Devotion to Mary and these false apparitions
for my parishioners can lead you astray like that man, who was getting ready
for death. I didn’t want him turning to a false apparition and being led
astray.
To listen to the above sermon see below:
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Feast of Mary, Mother of
God and an Announcement |
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PLEASE LISTEN TO THE ANNOUNCEMENT
AFTER THE PRAYER TO SAINT MICHAEL...The Catechism of the Catholic Church
says, #495 Called in the Gospels "the Mother of Jesus," Mary is
acclaimed by |
LISTEN
For those who have never read True Devotion to Mary by
Saint Louis de Montfort, you can access it
online free.
http://www.semperficatholic.com/
Editing Medjugorje Messages
Spirit Daily,
Michael Brown’s Medjugorje web site posted a message board conversation where
Medjugorje followers were arguing over the different English translations of
the messages. It came to light that some alterations were made by the
Medjugorje parish priests. Folks were
upset.
http://www.medjugorje-online.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6293
By the time I had a chance to read the above, Michael Brown removed it and the message board. One follower claimed to be in contact with a Medjugorje insider, someone very close to the visionaries. This Insider told him or her that the last Medjugorje message really contained a phrase that said "Time is running out," while the official message said something totally different. Also, it claimed that Our Lady said "Thank you for responding to my call," three times, instead of once. There was also something about Our Lady being with us "a little longer," to comfort us through the holidays? None of these were in the published message. The poster said the Parish edited it. People got a little upset. Some attributed the huge difference to the difficulty in translating the message to English. Others remarked that, though translation is difficult, it was shocking that the original message and the published one were so "starkly" different, as one poster put it.
Then there was some back and forth discussion about contacting the visionaries and asking them to post on the board. One poster said that they would not be allowed to do so. The "time is running out" phrase spurred some discussion of the coming "great sign." One poster said she was planning to use the Sign as proof of God's existence to convert her Atheist friends. (It's sad that people are doing this. God will not prove His existence. If he did, there would be no faith).
The topic is back online, closed to responses this time. It's linked here:
http://www.medjugorje-online.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6293
Editing is not new.
See: http://www.unitypublishing.com/newswire/compose.html
Emails:
Happy new
year to you and to your loved ones!
Hi Rick,
I have read your latest newsletter and believe is very good. On the
last paragraph where you mentioned about the editing of the Medjugorje messages
I can tell you that it is true. I have browse around through that site
and you are right, they had a mess by having posted a different translation of
the message you’ve mentioned.
Not only
but if you go on that very site you will find that the administrator has
deleted the version of the message given to him by his friend and changed it
with the version from the parish. He explains that in the web site as
well. But before changing the versions he had stated that his own version
was the original one from the seer and that the parish had edited theirs but
later he decided to keep the one from the parish rather than his version.
(?) I wonder how many versions of those thousands of messages have
had been edited to suit the Catholic eye of theologians?
They go
to the extremes that one has posted a thread trying to fix the mess that this
had created by giving a vague explanation of it in that site.
As I have
been browsing these issue, another issue caught my eye
in the same Medjugorje online forum site. A thread was made with a
question regarding Vicka the seer having an interview on the internet which is
said that she was told by the supposed apparition of Mary that unborn babies
who are killed by abortion become angels in heaven. The issue got heated
and a few intercepted this heresy and wrote against it. This made the
administrator come into the thread and leave a disturbing argument. He
agreed with what the seer was saying and he also noted that he did not know
about the issue. Rather than confirming the teachings of the Church he let
this one pass. But, there were more threads after his, and one of them
really confronted this heresy by stating that it was absurd to accept the idea
that the aborted babies became angels in heaven. A person also
mentioned that issues like this are the issues that give ammunition to anti-Medjugorjeans to attack followers.
All of
the sudden, the entire thread got deleted from the forum. (?) The
administrator made a choice to delete it ,and I don’t
really know why, but I think that it was the last comment in the above
paragraph that made him/her do it, otherwise he would had done it before
that comment because if it were to defend the Church from heresies such
as that one, he would had deleted it or correct the heresy after the first post
and he did not. In fact, he agreed with it.
It is
amazing how many innocent people who go to that site are being indoctrinated
the wrong way just to keep Medjugorje alive. This particular site hates
Unity Publishing. They attack the authority of the bishops and
especially Bishop Peric’s. It is filled with
people who don’t like to question the truth ,so that
they don’t find the real truth about Medjugorje. The site does not
welcome people who speak the truth.
Best
regards,
http://www.medjugorje.ws/en/articles/video/vicka-her-story/?page=11
Since believers so often claim the miracles and the
conversions because of Medjugorje, I think the following answer is an EXCELLENT
one! :>)
A Parish priest gives a sermon on the false devotion to Mary, so,
talking about Medjugorje, he says:
"Please do not give me stories about
how your rosary was silver and then turned to gold or even how so many miracles
have happened by going and visiting there. Sure, God can write straight with a
crooked line. Miracles happened at Auschwitz during World War II, but we don’t
promote
We have to remember that one:>)
Hi, Rick,
Great article.
You've inspired me to read True Devotion after I get done with
In regards to the whole Medjuorje thing about aborted babies becoming angels.......I agree, its complete nonsense. Our Lady, I don't think, would EVER say something as ridiculous as that.
Wow -
great stuff! I wish our Pastor would set the record straight like
that. There is so much bad information floating around down here about
Medjugorje (and Garabandal). Some of the most devout, holy people I know
are caught up in it all.
And
I just recently talked to a woman who told me about Luisa P. and the
Divine Will. She is very convinced that it is all real and she has
read many of the "volumes". I had never heard of it
before, but it sounded strange to me, so I looked it up on your site and got
the facts. Thank you. This poor woman is now suffering from severe
depression.
Off the subject, I have a
question for you. I have a rosary which I really treasure that my
friend brought me from