Meister Eckhart

 

Meister Eckhart, OP

German Dominican, c. 1260-c. 1328

This articles say it better than I can

Articles

• Wikipedia
• Catholic Encyclopedia

Act of Consecration to the Immaculate Heart of Mary - the actual text

Basilica of St. Peter
March 25, 2022

O Mary, Mother of God and our mother, in this time of trial we turn to you. As our mother, you love us and know us: No concern of our hearts is hidden from you. Mother of mercy, how often we have experienced your watchful care and your peaceful presence! You never cease to guide us to Jesus, the prince of peace.

Yet we have strayed from that path of peace. We have forgotten the lesson learned from the tragedies of the last century, the sacrifice of the millions who fell in two world wars. We have disregarded the commitments we made as a community of nations. We have betrayed peoples’ dreams of peace and the hopes of the young. We grew sick with greed, we thought only of our own nations and their interests, we grew indifferent and caught up in our selfish needs and concerns.

We chose to ignore God, to be satisfied with our illusions, to grow arrogant and aggressive, to suppress innocent lives and to stockpile weapons. We stopped being our neighbor’s keepers and stewards of our common home. We have ravaged the garden of the earth with war, and by our sins we have broken the heart of our heavenly Father, who desires us to be brothers and sisters. We grew indifferent to everyone and everything except ourselves. Now with shame we cry out: Forgive us, Lord!

Holy Mother, amid the misery of our sinfulness, amid our struggles and weaknesses, amid the mystery of iniquity that is evil and war, you remind us that God never abandons us, but continues to look upon us with love, ever ready to forgive us and raise us up to new life. He has given you to us and made your Immaculate Heart a refuge for the church and for all humanity. By God’s gracious will, you are ever with us; even in the most troubled moments of our history, you are there to guide us with tender love.

We now turn to you and knock at the door of your heart. We are your beloved children. In every age you make yourself known to us, calling us to conversion. At this dark hour, help us and grant us your comfort. Say to us once more: “Am I not here, I who am your Mother?” You are able to untie the knots of our hearts and of our times. In you we place our trust. We are confident that, especially in moments of trial, you will not be deaf to our supplication and will come to our aid.

That is what you did at Cana in Galilee, when you interceded with Jesus and he worked the first of his signs. To preserve the joy of the wedding feast, you said to him: “They have no wine” (Jn 2:3). Now, O Mother, repeat those words and that prayer, for in our own day we have run out of the wine of hope, joy has fled, fraternity has faded. We have forgotten our humanity and squandered the gift of peace. We opened our hearts to violence and destructiveness. How greatly we need your maternal help!

Therefore, O Mother, hear our prayer.

Star of the Sea, do not let us be shipwrecked in the tempest of war.

Ark of the New Covenant, inspire projects and paths of reconciliation.

Queen of Heaven, restore God’s peace to the world.

Eliminate hatred and the thirst for revenge, and teach us forgiveness.

Free us from war, protect our world from the menace of nuclear weapons.

Queen of the Rosary, make us realize our need to pray and to love.

Queen of the Human Family, show people the path of fraternity.

Queen of Peace, obtain peace for our world.

O Mother, may your sorrowful plea stir our hardened hearts. May the tears you shed for us make this valley parched by our hatred blossom anew. Amid the thunder of weapons, may your prayer turn our thoughts to peace. May your maternal touch soothe those who suffer and flee from the rain of bombs. May your motherly embrace comfort those forced to leave their homes and their native land. May your sorrowful heart move us to compassion and inspire us to open our doors and to care for our brothers and sisters who are injured and cast aside.

Holy Mother of God, as you stood beneath the cross, Jesus, seeing the disciple at your side, said: “Behold your son” (Jn 19:26). In this way, he entrusted each of us to you. To the disciple, and to each of us, he said: “Behold, your Mother” (Jn 19:27). Mother Mary, we now desire to welcome you into our lives and our history.

At this hour, a weary and distraught humanity stands with you beneath the cross, needing to entrust itself to you and, through you, to consecrate itself to Christ. The people of Ukraine and Russia, who venerate you with great love, now turn to you, even as your heart beats with compassion for them and for all those peoples decimated by war, hunger, injustice and poverty.

Therefore, Mother of God and our mother, to your Immaculate Heart we solemnly entrust and consecrate ourselves, the church and all humanity, especially Russia and Ukraine. Accept this act that we carry out with confidence and love. Grant that war may end and peace spread throughout the world. The “fiat” that arose from your heart opened the doors of history to the Prince of Peace. We trust that, through your heart, peace will dawn once more. To you we consecrate the future of the whole human family, the needs and expectations of every people, the anxieties and hopes of the world.

Through your intercession, may God’s mercy be poured out on the earth and the gentle rhythm of peace return to mark our days. Our Lady of the “fiat,” on whom the Holy Spirit descended, restore among us the harmony that comes from God. May you, our “living fountain of hope,” water the dryness of our hearts. In your womb Jesus took flesh; help us to foster the growth of communion. You once trod the streets of our world; lead us now on the paths of peace. Amen.

Spiritual Warfare 101

The body of Christ today is lacking in information on Spiritual Warfare, a battle which all of us in the Body of Christ cannot avoid. These lectures are offered as a small introduction for my brothers and sisters to start them on the path

Text Version

The Audio Version can be found on "The Reader's Podcast"

Clement of Alexandria wrote that singing our prayers drives out demons!

Sub Tuum Praesidium and Litany of Humility

 

Sub Tuum Praesidium

The Litany of Humility

The 2020 Election - Recommended Reading to Understand Our History

 

Pioneer Priests and Makeshift Altars: A History of Catholicism in the Thirteen Colonies

In this comprehensive history, Fr. Charles Connor details the life of Catholics in the American Colonies. It's a tale that begins with the flight of English Catholics to religious freedom in Maryland in 1634, and continues through the post-Revolutionary period, by which time the constitutions of all but four of the first 13 states contained harsh anti-Catholic provisions. 

Catholic readers will be proud to learn from that despite almost two centuries of ever-more-intense religious persecutions and even harsher legal prohibitions, American Catholics in the colonies simply refused to abandon the Catholic Faith.

This is an indispensable reading for souls interested in the deep roots of Catholicism in America, and in the holy courage of scores of Catholics who kept remorseless forces from driving Catholicism out of America. Among other things, you'll learn:

The tale of The Ark and The Dove that carried the first settlers to Maryland

The surprisingly harsh anti-Catholic sentiments of most of the Founding Fathers

The Quaker/Catholic alliance that promoted both religions

The role of persecuted Catholics in the Revolutionary War

Why, in that War, many Catholics favored the anti-Catholic British

The French Jesuits who evangelized New York and its frontier areas, and the saints who were martyred there

The years in which, throughout the colonies, Catholics became an endangered species

---

Faith and Fury: The Rise of Catholicism During the Civil War

In the bloody Civil War that split our nation, American bishops worked for the success of the Union . . . and of the Confederacy! As Catholics slaughtered Catholics, pious priests on both sides prayed God to give success in battle. . . to their own side. Men in blue and men in gray flinched at the Consecration as cannonballs (fired by Catholic opponents) rained down on them during battlefield Masses.

Many are the moving and often surprising stories in these pages of brave Catholics on both sides of the conflict stories told by Fr. Charles Connor, one of our country s foremost experts on Catholic American history.

Through searing anecdotes and learned analysis, Fr. Connor here shows how the tumult, tragedy, and bravery of the War forged a new American identity, even as it created a new American Catholic identity, as Catholics often new immigrants found themselves on both sides of the conflict.

Fr. Connor s account shows that in the nineteenth century and on both sides of the conflict, the Church in America was a combination of visionary leadership and moral blindness much as is the Church in America today. From consideration of the strengths and weaknesses of both sides, Catholics today will discover ways to bridge the gulf that today divides so many in our Church and in our nation.

---

Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States has sold more than 2.5 million copies. It is pushed by Hollywood celebrities, defended by university professors who know better, and assigned in high school and college classrooms to teach students that American history is nothing more than a litany of oppression, slavery, and exploitation. 

Zinn’s history is popular, but it is also massively wrong.

Scholar Mary Grabar exposes just how wrong in her stunning new book Debunking Howard Zinn, which demolishes Zinn’s Marxist talking points that now dominate American education. 

In Debunking Howard Zinn, you’ll learn, contra Zinn: 

• How Columbus was not a genocidal maniac, and was, in fact, a defender of Indians
• Why the American Indians were not feminist-communist sexual revolutionaries ahead of their time
• How the United States was founded to protect liberty, not white males’ ill-gotten wealth
• Why Americans of the “Greatest Generation” were not the equivalent of Nazi war criminals 
• How the Viet Cong were not well-meaning community leaders advocating for local self-rule
• Why the Black Panthers were not civil rights leaders

Grabar also reveals Zinn’s bag of dishonest rhetorical tricks: his slavish reliance on partisan history, explicit rejection of historical balance, and selective quotation of sources to make them say the exact opposite of what their authors intended. If you care about America’s past—and our future—you need this book.

The 2020 Election

The 2020 Presidential Election will determine the course of the future.

As Christians, we MUST wage war in the spiritual realm. We propose that the following sequence of prayers be our daily rule until the election, if not afterwards.

Sunday - A Dominican Litany to the Mother of God
Monday - Litany for America
Tuesday - The Litany of Loreto/The Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary
Wednesday - The Litany of the Sacred Heart
Thursday - The Litany of St. Dominic
Friday - The Litany of the Saints
Saturday - The Litany of Dominican Saints and Blesseds

At the conclusion, each day, we pray Consecration of Our Nation to the Mother of God  and Efficacious Novena to the Sacred Heart, with the intention, "that every evil spirit leading the US to perdition be bound and that the US once again become a Christian nation"

One may wish to periodically pray The Lorica of St. Patrick, for protection, and The Litany of Humility.


Additionally, we pray The Divine Praises(below) sporadically during the day

Blessed be God.
Blessed be His Holy Name.
Blessed be Jesus Christ, true God and true Man.
Blessed be the Name of Jesus.
Blessed be His Most Sacred Heart.
Blessed be His Most Precious Blood.
Blessed be Jesus in the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar.
Blessed be the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete.
Blessed be the great Mother of God, Mary most Holy.
Blessed be her Holy and Immaculate Conception.
Blessed be her Glorious Assumption.
Blessed be the Name of Mary, Virgin and Mother.
Blessed be St. Joseph, her most chaste spouse.
Blessed be God in His Angels and in His Saints forever.

Pray for America

I think most of us would agree that the United States is in desperate need of prayer.

Please consider the prayers on our Recommended Devotions page, in particular The Litany for America.

God bless you for your faithfulness.