'Earth hath no sorrow that Heaven cannot heal.'

St. Thomas More

This is a fascinating and uplifting quote, many thanks.  It leaves me wondering how we would have prayed for St Thomas during his 15 months in the Tower.  It makes me think that the Sainthood that resulted from his martyrdom, and the consequent miracles and his unknowable Divine inspiration, were certainly a great good, which offset at least some of the evil of Henry VIII.  I struggle with the question could Thomas' imprisonment and execution been God's Will?  The biography in Delaney cites two ironies:  St Thomas was a tutor of Henry for a time, and Thomas considered application as a Carthusian, but decided against.

Since the Russians invaded Ukraine, my prayer confidence and satisfaction have been enormously shaken.  Each of my prayer supplications for peace or mercy has seemed dreadfully hollow, with a question rising of what is God's Will, and whether His Will is ever attained.  How can it be that Christian countries can watch the destruction but do so relatively little compared to what we could do to stop it.  I am astonished that somehow I can't remember giving the first invasion under Obama much thought, nor his inaction nor Trump's, yet now I have deplored the limited action of Biden and Europe.  Is it conceivable that good can come somehow from this incredible evil?  Please pray for me and help me know just what to pray for.  As you can imagine, my distress is compounded by Israel-Palestine. 

Until covid, our parish had coffee and donuts after Mass, also fruit juice and crackers, but it has never been resumed.  Today we share a priest with another parish, and we are running a substantial deficit.  Please pray for us.

Many thanks for keeping this great thread active.  I offer a prayer I wrote.
Prayer of Hope
Heavenly Father, Divine Trinity,
We praise You and thank You
for Your Grace of Love and Hope and Faith.
As we grow in Understanding of Your gift of Love,
We grow more secure in Knowing Your Love for us
and feel Hope more fully in Your Grace and Mercy.
The more we know of Love and Hope,
the more we feel Faith,
which grows because of our Hope
in Your Divine and Eternal Love.
Help us grow in understanding and Hope,
that we might follow Your Will
with patience, joy, and fortitude
and share with our neighbors
Your Grace of Love and Hope and Faith.
We pray in the Name of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
Amen

The Hussite Wars occurred from 1419 to 1434.   
They were a series of civil wars fought between the Hussites and the combined Catholic forces of the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund, the Papacy, and European monarchs loyal to the Catholic Church, as well as various Hussite factions.

I admit again to concern about frequent criticism and exaggeration of Catholic involvement in war, as well as the frequent inherent implication that God would never call us to violence or war.  Could your source (or you) have duplicated this entry to make the list look longer?  And why include this at all when the post starts with wars of the 16th century?
Do you really believe the German peasants or these others were really fighting about liturgy or theology?  Have you read The Catholic Controversy that Shin recently commented on?  It covers St Francis de Sales conquest of 75 000 Calvinists, mostly with pamphlets.  I'm sorry to grumble, and I deeply appreciate your posts and effort, but I hope to persuade you this is misleading.

This is from St. Francis de Sales 'The Catholic Controversy', which is apologetic work against Protestantism, one of the popular heresies of which is somehow relying on the Bible alone without the Church.

I take it as along the lines of those who only read the surface meanings of the scriptures, rather than the true meaning and take the Holy Scriptures outside of their true context in the Faith. In other words, their understanding of the words is often superficial and flawed due to their lack of knowledge of the spirit or deeper meaning of of the passages as well as the source and context within Church history. This repeatedly occurring causes quite immense misunderstandings and heresies.

Who can properly understand the book of Apocalypse without referring to the teachings of the Church and the saints on the subject for one example?


The Church's authority and the unchanging rule of Faith handed down from the apostles is necessary to even begin to truly understand Holy Scripture.

Many thanks for your comment.  I had searched without success all 16 references to St Jerome in St Francis' Introduction to the Devout Life.  I also have The Catholic Controversy, but it has 31 references to St Jerome, some of which are multiple pages.  I'm sad to admit I can be impatient-would it be a bit better to say over-zealous?  I will keep searching, but if it's available the page number would be a great help.  And would you know if St Jerome was justifying the Vulgate or perhaps some other text altogether?

It happens quite often that a quote puzzles me, and I feel pressed to ask for some explanation of the context from which it was taken.  Almost always I resist making the request to avoid distraction or confusion, but in the case above of both Ss Francis de Sales and Jerome I would be very grateful for further comment.

Many thanks for your encouragement.  I hate to write this, but my old printer and Windows 11 don't seem to agree on scanning pictures, and I have never felt the need or desire to let the web into my cell phone, which still seems an enormous interruption (ever since the third day after I bought a car phone).  I'll keep trying. Sometimes my bride will help, but she's still unpacking from camp.

These are wonderful prayers, and the intent to specifically pray daily for Spiritual Communion seems to be a wonderful inspiration.  I offer the following from the book My Daily Bread, p245.
Lord, let Your Holy Grace fall on this sinful heart of mine, so that I may love most what is most lovable, know best what is most important, and desire first what is most valuable.  Let me fear and hate whatever draws me away from You.  I do not want to judge things as they appear, but as they really help me to please You more.  Teach me to pray.  Help me to love Your Company and to seek it as often as possible.  Make me aware of Your Presence throughout the day.  Amen

I think I've tried this before.  Should I be able to copy and paste from elsewhere on my laptop to Works here?  See Clouds III thread in Everything Else forum.

I am struggling at this moment to transfer here a cloud photo I deeply love, showing also My bride and I at our camp lake.  My stepdaughter took the picture and made a notepad for me wiith the picture on the cover.  I pray I can get it to show up here.  I photoed the notebook cover, but even my bride couldn't figure out how to send it here from my cell phone.  She sent it to my laptop as an email (I don't get emails on the cell phone and don't want to) but we also can't figure out how to copy it from the laptop.  I'll keep working on copying.  Can anyone please advise?  AI Copilot wants to rewrite some of this.  I'll try to put that down below.

Copilot wants me to copy and paste this text to another screen.  May that's a hint to try first with the cloud picture.

It seems too much Eschator here, and this last post is too old, but I haven't found my post on St Alphonsus, which said the first two chapters to chapters praising his youth and his mother's devotion were wonderful, but then the next several describing enormous tribulation, indecision, and opposition have been very difficult to read.  I pray again to find the post, for encouragement and fortitude to keep reading, and for more prayers by others.   

I think I've mentioned previously I have three editions of the NAB study Bible from my time on the RCIA team, and also the NAB Concordance Dictionary which I think is usually very helpful.  Later I bought the Scott Hahn New Testament Study edition, but have not found it frequently helpful.  I'm wondering if it would be useful to copy some sections here.  Are there any particular issues you would like to see a comparison with your edition?

Many thanks for reference to the caccioppoli website(s).  The Duckduck display was confusing about whether there were connections between the family, the fabric business, and St Pio, but the Segment about Encounters with Pio in confession captured me again even though we had heard many stories in Italy about his confessions.  I too have a big picture of him in my study, and he frequently seems to urge me to confession.  Another Section of the web is Encounters with Jesus' Passion, and I plan to go back to it frequently.
I find myself called to review my earliest readings about Spiritual Life:
Introduction to the Devout Life by St Francis DeSales
Rule of St Benedict
Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola
Enchiridion by St Augustine, aka Faith, Hope, and Love
as well as my first RCIA text and several others I've acquired.
If you would have interest in discussing any of your books, or Shin's here at Works, or mine, I would be delighted to join in.

Interesting but difficult issues I think.  It seems St Luke quoted Jesus (16:17) It is easier for Heaven and earth to pass away than a letter of Law to become invalid.  But we know Jesus prophesied a new Heaven and earth, and also said all things are possible for God. And Jesus questioned some laws himself.  I'd like to find comments by highly regarded exegetes rather than try to imagine my own suggested explanation.

How can time pass so quickly.  I brought four books to camp at Shin's suggestion and sadly have done little justice to any of them so far.  The incredible complications and controversies of the life of St Anthony Claret seem almost on a par with those of St Alphonsus Liguori, whose life has been very difficult for me to try to read and summarize.  Delaney's Life of St Anthony says he wrote more than 140 books and pamphlets, but unfortunately doesn't refer to any specifically.  His life of extensive travel and preaching (25 000 sermons recorded), foundation of Missionary Society, Bishop, survival of assassination attempt, counsellor to Queen and so much more seems calling me to own the book regardless of how hard it may be to
read.
I'm almost convinced I have St Faustina's Diary, looked all over for it on my last short trip home and then bogged down in one of Fr George Kosicki's books, Special Urgency of Mercy.  I hope you will comment further on both Saints.
Your comment on St Pio seems an incredible coincidence.  During our pilgrimage to Italy, my wife and I were able to visit San Giovanni Rotundo in Italy and the magnificent, incredible, impossible medical campus and Cathedral of St Pio, and visit his cell and monastery.  The Holy fragrance will be with us forever, as well as our imagination of all the soldiers and others who came to him for confession.  Your relationship with him sounds wonderful, is there a guide or website you follow?