The usual open thread rules apply. Be concise, be charitable and, above all, be amusing!
New Year Open Thread
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 41 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
Bliadhna Mhath Ùr dhuibh uile! as they say in the Western Isles – A happy New Year to all!
Best wishes to all for a grace-filled, healthy, joyful, peaceful year.
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I’m old (66 going on 16!) enough to remember the feast day for New Years Day was The Circumcision.
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I do not make resolutions.
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Each day I meditate on the pertinent Mysteries of the Holy Rosary. Tomorrow, in addition to the Glorious Mysteries, I will think of the Fourth Joyful Mystery, The Presentation, and ponder the Blessed Virgin Mary’s obedience to the law of God and desire a spirit of sacrifice.
God bless you one and all.
Today’s Epistle Reading for the 7th Day in the Octave of Christmas is 1st John 2:18-21. Nothing more need be said:
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Children, it is the last hour;
and just as you heard that the antichrist was coming,
so now many antichrists have appeared.
Thus we know this is the last hour.
They went out from us, but they were not really of our number;
if they had been, they would have remained with us.
Their desertion shows that none of them was of our number.
But you have the anointing that comes from the Holy One,
and you all have knowledge.
I write to you not because you do not know the truth
but because you do, and because every lie is alien to the truth.
To Don the Kiwi.
Happy 2017!
Your always living in the future compared to us Yanks.
To all TAC.
Blessings for a remarkable 2017 to come.
Peace to each of your households.
Love from God rest gentle in your souls.
btw… CNN & Westworld bit….Too close to call. Life imatate’s art?…Hummm. In this case, absolutely.
There was a rather sour note on which our household has had to end the year. I really can’t say anymore about it.
Let’s hope the New Year turns out better than 2016. It isn’t that all of 2016 has been bad. Hillary lost. Pennsylvania made it happen. The Penguins won the Stanley Cup. My oldest son made his First Communion. Yet, it’s time to turn the page.
Happy New Year, everyone. Sto Lat!
IS Westworld the thing we’re all supposed to be talking about now? I guess it’s not Game of Thrones any more. Or did Hamilton count?
Overall, 2016 was a Happy Year: Republican sweep, more folks began to see Pope Francis for what he is and is not.
Hopefully, 2017 will fulfill the promises of 2016.
Happy New Year and Happy 100th Anniversary of Our Lady of Fatima. Maybe she will arrange a little help for our Pope situation.
May God bless y’all and keep y’all in 2017 and always hold you and those you cherish safe in the palm of His hand. Guy McClung, San Antonio TX
T-Shaw-there you go again! a la the democrat/totalitarian principle of nonnon-contradiction, a thing can at the same time be and not be. You have created the “resolution paradox,” not unlike the liar paradox: My resolution it not to make any resolutions. My resolution: I resolve not to tell anyone my resolutions.
“My resolution: I resolve not to tell anyone my resolutions.”
That might not be a paradox. You could just be terrible at not telling resolutions. Sounds like the kind of person who should make a resolution to not tell resolutions.
Reaching back into the past, thank you Philip for your kind thought (you may be surprised at what other things NZ leads the world 😉 – I’ll publish a list some day )
To all at TAC I wish you all a happy, successful and blessed new year.
2016 wasn’t so bad – Trump won Hillary lost, Obama is almost gone, Trump won, All Blacks continued their reign as the world’s greatest rugby team, Ireland beat the All Blacks in Chigago at Soldiers Field, for the first time in 109 years (didn’t mind though – something special about the Irish) ISIS is on the run thanks to Vlad the oppressor, and Obama’s going – and did I mention Trump won? 🙂 Oh – and God bless Cdl. Bourke and his supporters, and all pray for the conversion of Pope Francis.
God bless all, Dcn. Don Beckett.
“To all at TAC I wish you all a happy, successful and blessed new year.”
I share that wish Don for all our contributors, commenters and readers! I will miss 2016. It was a unique experience living through the year when the improbable so frequently became the probable.
Re: Our Lady of Fatima…my wife’s dad, who was 14 years old in 1917, saw the Miracle of the Sun from his residence on Madiera Island (a Portugese possession in the Atlantic off the African coast). We have a small plaque in Portugese commemorating the apparition.
PF
I’ve shared this book, Meet the Witnesses by John M. Haffert, and have had tremendous response from the sceptical that have considered Fatima high fiction.
Have you read this one?
Originally published in the year of my birth, 1961.
Did he write an account PF? If he did, I would like to run it on TAC.
I will ask the missus what she remembers of what her father told her. Senhor DeAndrade was just 14 years old in 1917. His view of the Miracle was from Madiera, which is hundreds of miles from mainland Portugal. I have not read the book Meet the Witnesses.
For reasons I shall not disclose, I have good reason to belive fully in the approved apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Peace on earth to men of good will. Peace on earth and good will to men. One is a heavenly blessing. One is a wish for good will, probably to men who have none. “…and all the faithful here assembled…” is another one of those blessings that excludes the unfaithful and those individuals lacking good will.
PF
No explanation necessary.
I didn’t think for a moment you doubted.
I’ve shared the story throughout the years and mostly with Protestant Co-workers.
The book always catches them.
Planting seeds….Not weeds. 🙂
THE CONSTITUTION for the United States, the supreme Law of the Land is one of our Founding Principles, the other being The UNANIMOUS DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. Both THE CONSTITUTION and THE UNANIMOUS DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE acknowledge divine Providence and God as our “Creator”. Both Founding Principles are integral cornerstones of freedom, indispensable and inviolable.
Atheism denies both the sovereign person endowed by “their Creator” and the Constitution’s First Amendment freedom acknowledging the citizen’s innate human right to relate to God in a private and personal relationship with his “Creator” in thought, word, deed and peaceable assembly. (When we speak of peaceable assembly we speak of a person’s civil right to defend himself against addiction to sodomy. The angels sing of Peace on earth to men of good will. The absence of good will for the common good is a sure sign of tyranny and abuse of power) The violation of the sovereign person’s civil right to engage in a personal relationship with God is a violation of the Law of the Land and of our Founding Principles. A violation of our Founding Principles violates the sovereign personhood of the human being and his sovereignty to institute sovereign government.
Our Founding Principles acknowledge God and the sovereign Persons of God by invoking the protection of divine providence and guarding the innate sovereignty of the citizen endowed by their “Creator”. This is the secular function of all government.
Atheism eradicates all First Amendment freedom for the citizen. The atheist as a death bed convert must be tolerated because of his unrealized sovereign personhood.
Why does Roe v. Wade enshrine the lowly human being elected to public office as public servant by his peers to rule as lord and master of life? The public servant has no authentic authority over life and death except as informed by The Founding Principles. How does Roe v. Wade, the abortion decision of January 22, 1973, violate against our Founding Principles? The newly begotten human being is legally and morally innocent. Perfect innocence is the standard of Justice for our government. Since the sovereignty of the newly begotten human person institutes the state from the very first moment of his existence, the newly begotten person has a claim on the government to guard and protect his life.
When the innocent human being is threatened with death and annihilation by Roe v. Wade and abortion, the person becomes a ward of the court to have his innate human right to life guarded for him until he may guard himself.
How does Roe v. Wade redefine our government? Roe v. Wade redefines our government by indiscriminately relegating authority to destroy human life in the womb to a civilian by abolishing the guardianship of the government to protect the sovereign person and that sovereign person’s civil rights.
Roe v. Wade is a decision handed down to every citizen legalizing the termination of human life in the womb. The abortion decision abolished the authentic authority of the government in the Supreme Court to guard and protect the human being as a ward of the court. Roe v. Wade never ascertained nor demanded that the burden of proof that the newly conceived human being in the womb was not a sovereign person. The decision to allow the slaughter of innocent unborn people in the womb is a miscarriage of Justice that cries to heaven for vengeance. It is a violation that abrogates our Founding Principles and damns the nation to a demographic winter, to a people not replacing themselves.
All human life begins as a single cell animated by a created rational, immortal, human soul. All human life, the human being of one cell, begins life with free will, intellect and sovereign personhood. The newly begotten sovereign person freely wills to survive from the very first moment of his existence. Death or a spontaneous abortion occurs when the soul can no longer abide in the human body. The intentional destruction of a single human person is homicide. The eradication of generations of our constitutional Posterity, all future generations, is genocide. Genocide perpetrated by another person is treason.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness….That to secure these rights Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” The UNANIMOUS DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE ratified by every state, specifically states that all men are created equal and endowed with certain unalienable human rights by their Creator. Roe v. Wade states that the sovereign person is not created equal. The abortion decision states that the human being is born equal and is endowed with unalienable human rights by the government. Roe v. Wade refuses to accept our Founding Principles, refuses to defend the unborn sovereign person as a ward of the Court, refuses to admit to the innate human right to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, and further denies “their Creator” in a gasp of atheism being spewed upon the citizens.
The Supreme Court’s denial of “their Creator” in Roe v. Wade is a violation of our Founding Principles. The Court’s denial of “their Creator” in Roe v. Wade is seized upon by government agencies, most of which are comprised of unelected officials, who use Roe v. Wade to further their political careers and abuse the taxpayers. Unelected officials and the Supreme Court through the abortion decision of 1973 have fostered genocide against our Constitutional Posterity. There cannot be peace on earth unless men have good will.
Thank you…The Freelance Philosopher
“The decision to allow the slaughter of innocent unborn people in the womb is a miscarriage of Justice that cries to heaven for vengeance.”
Mary De Voe.
You are spot on, agian.
All of it.
A Nation chosen by God. A Blessed Nation.
A Nation that was…Was the light on the hill.
Ashes and sackcloth might not be enough.
Thank you, Philip. I got my hair shirt on now.
Mortifications Mary.
Hair shirt on Tuesday and Thursday, bed of glass on Saturday and self flagellation on Monday Wednesday and Friday.
Sunday? Well..
After Mass, you must watch an hour of CNN.
That might be too much punishment…The CNN part.
On a serious note, the following piece is from a imprisoned priest that I’ve been following for a number of years. Fr. Gordon. Today’s publication, in my opinion, is note worthy and I hope you don’t mind if I share the link.
http://thesestonewalls.com/gordon-macrae/as-a-new-year-dawns-who-is-left-on-the-side-of-right/
Thank you.
Philip: Thank you for the link. Walls do not a prison make. Prayers for Father Gordon Macrae
Thanks Mary.
He has a devotion to Mary through St. Maximilian Kolbe. Please use this information when praying on his behalf.
Peace sister.
🙂