Wednesday, June 22, 2016

Luke, Chapter 18, Verse 1-8

¹ Then he told them a parable about the necessity for them to pray always without becoming weary. He said, ² “There was a judge in a certain town who neither feared God nor respected any human being. ³ And a widow in that town used to come to him and say, ‘Render a just decision for me against my adversary.’ ⁴ For a long time the judge was unwilling, but eventually he thought, ‘While it is true that I neither fear God nor respect any human being, ⁵ because this widow keeps bothering me I shall deliver a just decision for her lest she finally come and strike me.’” ⁶ The Lord said, “Pay attention to what the dishonest judge says. ⁷ Will not God then secure the rights of his chosen ones who call out to him day and night? Will he be slow to answer them? ⁸ I tell you, he will see to it that justice is done for them speedily. But when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”

Will the Son of Man find faith on earth when he comes? We must remain faithful to the gospel of Christ and stand with the Holy Catholic Church. We must continue to ask Him to come to our assistance against the Philistines of our age. We must not fail to call out to Him night and day to save us from the wicked and to pray for their conversion and for the souls of the Martyrs of freedom that they have made. Our enemy is not men but the devil and those are in his control. We must never become to weary or afraid to take the gospel to those places that are most devoid of faith, hope and love.

“Only those that see the invisible can do the impossible.” Tyrese

Amoris Lætitia[1] Looking to Jesus: The Vocation of the Family- The sacrament of Matrimony (71-75)

The truth of the love of man and woman is fully illuminated only in the love of the crucified Christ. He stressed that ‘marriage based on an exclusive and definitive love becomes an icon of the relationship between God and his people, and vice versa.

 The family is the image of God, who is a communion of persons. Jesus, who reconciled all things in himself and redeemed us from sin, not only returned marriage and the family to their original form, but also raised marriage to the sacramental sign of his love for the Church. In the human family, gathered by Christ, ‘the image and likeness’ of the Most Holy Trinity has been restored, the mystery from which all true love flows.

 The sacrament of marriage is not a social convention, an empty ritual or merely the outward sign of a commitment. The sacrament is a gift given for the sanctification and salvation of the spouses, since “their mutual belonging is a real representation, through the sacramental sign, of the same relationship between Christ and the Church.

 In accepting each other, and with Christ’s grace, the engaged couple promise each other total self-giving, faithfulness and openness to new life. The sacrament is not a “thing” or a “power”, for in it Christ himself “now encounters Christian spouses... He dwells with them, gives them the strength to take up their crosses.

 Sexual union, lovingly experienced and sanctified by the sacrament, is in turn a path of growth in the life of grace for the couple. The sacrament of marriage flows from the incarnation and the paschal mystery, whereby God showed the fullness of his love for humanity by becoming one with us.

 In the Church’s Latin tradition, the ministers of the sacrament of marriage are the man and the woman who marry; by manifesting their consent and expressing it physically, they receive a great gift. Their consent and their bodily union are the divinely appointed means whereby they become “one flesh”.

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[1] Pope Francis, Encyclical on Love.