A Deo et Rege

The Senate is meeting at 5:00pm today to consider passage of Terri’s Law. Please keep this issue in your prayers, especially at 5:00. Here is a good one:

Heavenly Father, your cosmic gaze focused on dust and you fashioned in your image and likeness every man and women: give us, we beg you, a keen eye to recognize that image so that respect for all human life becomes our way of life.Grant this through Christ our Lord. Amen. (Committee for Pro-Life Activities National Conference of  Catholic Bishops).

Source for Senate information: Blogsforterri
Source for prayer: Prayers for Life

Robbie Low, a (soon to be former?) vicar in the Church of England has written an excellent article about the inherent schismatic nature of Protestantism and its lack of any system of authority. This is what essentially led me to Catholicism too, so naturally I find Fr. Low’s argument’s persuasive. My favorite section:

The translation and interpretation of Holy Scripture is the task of the
Church brought into being by the same Holy Spirit who inspired the
written Word. The protesters who broke with Rome cannot have foreseen
the fissiparous nature of their enterprise. In rejecting the authority
of the Pope the Western reformers did not abolish autocracy but rather
set in train a process the logical end of which is that every man is a
pope in his own parish or in his own front room. The ‘idolatry’ of Rome
was replaced by the idolatry of self, social group and nation in swift
order. Reformation hopes gave way to puritanism. Parts of Europe
descended into the fierce joylessness of Calvinism, others to the
excitements of Anabaptism, revivalists, iconoclasts, Pentecostalists
etc, each seizing upon an aspect of the faith and overemphasizing it to
the distortion of the whole. The upshot is hundreds of ‘churches’, most
of them with their own bizarre subdivisions (low, strict and
particular, Southern, open etc, etc). In addition, there are thousands
upon thousands of one-man band conventicles brought about by the
falling out of Brother Smith with Pastor Jones. Pastor Smith, as he has
now appointed himself, has the ‘real’ truth and hopes shortly to be
needing to rent a bigger Scout Hut than the gravely misled Pastor
Jones, his former guru. While both (and millions like them) claim, sola scriptura,
the authority of the Word, they are in fact claiming merely a personal
authority to interpret God’s Word with no reference to the historic and
living community of faith. It is little better than theological piracy
and insupportable vanity. It is the rejection, all too often, of the
teaching of the Church in favour of the cult of private opinion. In an
age which has so comprehensively rejected traditional forms of
authority and embraced the highest good as individual gratification, it
is scarcely surprising that disintegration is gathering pace.

According to one source, Robbie Low and his family are converting to Catholicism. Can anybody confirm this?

Read all of Divided We Fall (courtesy of Pontifications)
Read the article at its original location
Hat tip to Charles.

Today is the solemnity of St. Joseph, foster father of Jesus and the most chaste earthly spouse and protector of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Although he is largely absent from Scripture and devotion to him is less widespread than to the Mother of God, he played an important role in the life of our Lord and the Blessed Virgin Mary. He is the patron of the Universal Church, the unborn, workers, the Croatian people, those having doubts, those fighting communism and social justice among many other things.

A Prayer to St. Joseph:

O blessed Joseph, faithful guardian of my Redeemer, Jesus Christ, protector
of thy chaste spouse, the virgin Mother of God, I choose thee this day to
be my special patron and advocate and I firmly resolve to honor thee all
the days of my life.

Therefore I humbly beseech thee to receive me as thy
client, to instruct me in every doubt, to comfort me in every affliction,
to obtain for me and for all the knowledge and love of the Heart of Jesus,
and finally to defend and protect me at the hour of my death.

Amen

Prayer from About.Com

Image from St. Charles Borromeo Church Image Gallery