This might be well known, but since I found it an oddity considering his influence I will make this quick.
Thomas died in 1471, but when his remains were exhumed they found splinters under his finger nails and the coffin scratched up. In other-words, Thomas was most likely buried alive. The church seeing this as a situation where Thomas may have despaired decided to not proceed with his canonization cause citing this incident twice when the cause is again and again brought up.
Pray for his soul.
+JMJ+
OTL: Gandhi carried with him two books, a new testament and the Imitation of Christ wherever he went. Pray for him, he was not ignorant of the faith according to Fr. Hardon
Also interesting to note how the order that he helped establish for sisters, The Daughters of Charity seem to no longer take their visible sign as important anymore. Now their head covering was odd, I grant you, but it was distinguishable and people knew their mission:
Pray for this order through the intercession of St. Vincent De Paul and support if possible!
I needed to bring this up before I forgot about it
Catholic Apologist Dave Armstrong made a number of statements a while back about a Vortex that can be seen below.
One of his major points is that we cant really trace the things that are going on today to Protestantism, that is that modernism and the contraceptive ideology that flows through modern protestant ciricles, cant be said to come from the protestant heresy specifically.
Just today as I was rereading the Encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis written by Saint Pope Pius X in 1907, in which the Pope, the reigning Pontiff himself makes this statement as can be seen below:
Modernism and All the
Heresies39. It may be, Venerable
Brethren, that some may think We have dwelt too long on this exposition of the
doctrines of the Modernists. But it was necessary, both in order to refute
their customary charge that We do not understand their ideas, and to show that
their system does not consist in scattered and unconnected theories but in a
perfectly organised body, all the parts of which are solidly joined so that it
is not possible to admit one without admitting all. For this reason, too, We
have had to give this exposition a somewhat didactic form and not to shrink
from employing certain uncouth terms in use among the Modernists. And now, can
anybody who takes a survey of the whole system be surprised that We should
define it as the synthesis of all heresies? Were one to attempt the task of
collecting together all the errors that have been broached against the faith
and to concentrate the sap and substance of them all into one, he could not
better succeed than the Modernists have done. Nay, they have done more than
this, for, as we have already intimated, their system means the destruction not
of the Catholic religion alone but of all religion. With good reason do the
rationalists applaud them, for the most sincere and the frankest among the
rationalists warmly welcome the modernists as their most valuable allies.For let us return for a moment,
Venerable Brethren, to that most disastrous doctrine ofagnosticism. By it every avenue
that leads the intellect to God is barred, but the Modernists would seek to
open others available for sentiment and action. Vain efforts! For, after all,
what is sentiment but the reaction of the soul on the action of the
intelligence or the senses. Take away the intelligence, and man, already
inclined to follow the senses, becomes their slave. Vain, too, from another
point of view, for all these fantasias on the religious sentiment will never be
able to destroy common sense, and common sense tells us that emotion and
everything that leads the heart captive proves a hindrance instead of a help to
the discovery of truth. We speak, of course, of truth in itself - as for that
other purelysubjectivetruth,
the fruit of sentiment and action, if it serves its purpose for the jugglery of
words, it is of no use to the man who wants to know above all things whether
outside himself there is a God into whose hands he is one day to fall. True,
the Modernists do call inexperienceto eke out their system, but what does
thisexperienceadd to sentiment? Absolutely nothing
beyond a certain intensity and a proportionate deepening of the conviction of
the reality of the object. But these two will never make sentiment into
anything but sentiment, nor deprive it of its characteristic which is to cause
deception when the intelligence is not there to guide it; on the contrary, they
but confirm and aggravate this characteristic, for the more intense sentiment
is the more it is sentimental. In matters of religious sentiment and religious
experience, you know, Venerable Brethren, how necessary is prudence and how necessary,
too, the science which directs prudence. You know it from your own dealings
with sounds, and especially with souls in whom sentiment predominates; you know
it also from your reading of ascetical books - books for which the Modernists
have but little esteem, but which testify to a science and a solidity very
different from theirs, and to a refinement and subtlety of observation of which
the Modernists give no evidence. Is it not really folly, or at least sovereign
imprudence, to trust oneself without control to Modernist experiences? Let us
for a moment put the question: if experiences have so much value in their eyes,
why do they not attach equal weight to the experience that thousands upon
thousands of Catholics have that the Modernists are on the wrong road? It is,
perchance, that all experiences except those felt by the Modernists are false
and deceptive? The vast majority of mankind holds and always will hold firmly
that sentiment and experience alone, when not enlightened and guided by reason,
do not lead to the knowledge of God. What remains, then, but the annihilation
of all religion, - atheism? Certainly it is not the doctrine ofsymbolism- will save us from this. For if all
the intellectual elements, as they call them, of religion are pure symbols,
will not the very name of God or of divine personality be also a symbol, and if
this be admitted will not the personality of God become a matter of doubt and
the way opened to Pantheism? And to Pantheism that other doctrine of thedivine immanenceleads directly. For does it, We ask,
leave God distinct from man or not? If yes, in what does it differ from
Catholic doctrine, and why reject external revelation? If no, we are at once in
Pantheism. Now the doctrine of immanence in the Modernist acceptation holds and
professes that every phenomenon of conscience proceeds from man as man. The
rigorous conclusion from this is the identity of man with God, which means
Pantheism. The same conclusion follows from the distinction Modernists make
between science and faith. The object of science they say is the reality of the
knowable; the object of faith, on the contrary, is the reality of the
unknowable. Now what makes the unknowable unknowable is its disproportion with
the intelligible - a disproportion which nothing whatever, even in the doctrine
of the Modernist, can suppress. Hence the unknowable remains and will eternally
remain unknowable to the believer as well as to the man of science. Therefore
if any religion at all is possible it can only be the religion of an unknowable
reality. And why this religion might not be that universal soul of the
universe, of which a rationalist speaks, is something We do see. Certainly this
suffices to show superabundantly by how many roads Modernism leads to the
annihilation of all religion. The first step in this direction was taken by Protestantism;the second is made by Modernism; the next
will plunge headlong into atheism.
Now one might object that the encyclical wasn't specifically written about contraception, to which we agree. Yet it hits on the very principles that were used 25 years later at the Lambeth conference in making contraception an ok practice for the Anglicans. Need more proof of that read CASTI CONNUBII.
So the take away is simple, Protestantism is indeed identified by perhaps the greatest reigning Pontiff of the last 500 years as the root cause of modernism and the contraceptive mentality that follows. Waiting for a sorry to Mr. Voris...this could take a while seeing as Voris is now locked in a fight with Fr. Longinecker. Imagine that, a consecrated lay celebate, against a dispensed Catholic priest on the matter of Professional Catholisism... its actually fun to watch. Oh and thanks for linking the last post Dave, I apprieciate it and thank you for the kind words.
Oh and Dave the point of the vortex wasnt about money as he stated in his follow up. Nor does it have to do with him having applied for CA as a host in the past. All of those things are irrelevant to what he identified as the purpose of the vortex post. And finally if you are so interested in what he makes for a talk why not just ask him?
