Ascension Thursday Today!

Hello Everyone:
Happy Feast Day and it is one! This day brings great hope in a world that looks quite hopeless against the Tech Giants trying to control the world. But the mystery of this feast directs our eyes heavenwards. We are to lift up our hearts to that place where Christ, our Savior, is in full possession of His glory after His labors and sufferings on earth, to that place, where we, having carried out our earthly tasks, will enjoy never-ending happiness, safe for all eternity in our heavenly home! What a hope and joy!

Christ ascended into Heaven in order to prepare a place, a home for us in the house of His Father, in His own fatherland. When we too have finished our earthly tasks, He will take us home to Himself. We are to be with Him, to dwell in the splendor of His glory. He has merely gone before us, and soon we are to follow Him.

Let us today turn our hope and our longing once more to our eternal home in Heaven! “Seek the things that are above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God!” Yet this hopeful longing must find us zealous in laboring and strong in suffering. Only if we do this will we share in the Kingdom of Heaven.......

This wholehearted surrender to Christ is the only spirit which will conquer the world today. It seems Communism is the only philosophy today with this zeal to labor and suffer for their ideals. This is a problem. Burning with zeal for their cause, they are filled with a hatred of Capitalism, with the doctrine of class struggle and the spirit of revolution. It is in our politicians, our university professors, and now in their students willing to vote for a Bernie Sanders (who we still may get if Biden is thrown out – the Democratic Socialist Party has grown in memberships in the last two years by 500%!!). Such zeal can be met with opposing zeal, such courage only with courage, and such sacrifice only with sacrifice. Christians who will not sacrifice themselves for the things of God cannot meet the new challenge. It will take a great faith in Christ to put down faith in the anti-Christ; it will take nothing less than the sacrifice of the Cross to conquer the sacrifice of those who crucify.

God seems to be already sifting the wheat of apostolic souls from the chaff of indifference. Persecutions are on the rise all over the world, even through this plandemic. It looks as though God is preparing the Church for the future battle or future peace by a spiritual purification in which only the strong will walk with Him. What was true in the days of Gideon is true in our own day. Gideon fought against an enemy army far greater in number but God gave the victory only after sifting His people for the truly zealous to fight the fight! Let this be our inspiration to be zealous for Christ and create a hope in us in a world where we feel swallowed up by the enemy. We must remember that our world’s problem now -- and has always been -- a spiritual one. “Seek ye therefore first the Kingdom of God and His Justice, and all these things will be added unto you.”Matt 6:33

The social order we should help build will depend upon how we answer the question: “What is the purpose of living?” If life has no other goal than to return to dust, then we will build an order either of individual selfishness, or a collective selfishness – for if this life is all there is, then why should we not have all? But if life is moral, and the way we live in charity, justice, peace and sacrificing determines our existence in the next world, then what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and to lose his immortal soul?

Bishop Fulton Sheen says this: “ There are two philosophies of life – one Communistic and the other is Christian; one material, the other spiritual. Communists have only one word in their vocabulary and that is the word down – “Down with Capitalism! Down with the Rich! Down with the bourgeoisie! Down with the Wealthy! Down with the Government! Down with the Classes! Down with Religion! Down with God!

Heaven is above! Is there not another word in our vocabulary upon which we can build a true social order? Can one build anything down? Must not everything that is build be built upward? Let there be another order constructed upon the word UP! Up from Class-struggle! Up from Hate! Up from Revolution! Up from the material! Up from the dust! Up beyond the earth, beyond the stars, up to the “hid battlements of eternity” – Up – Up to God!”

Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament - pray for us!
All ye holy angels and saints - pray for us!

---

Story of Gideon