Archive for the ‘catholic’ Category

There is a big hole where they are planning to build condo’s/apartments across the street from the old Romano’s Market (Now Lopez’s Market excellent Hamburg there btw they only do ground round) as the prepare to pour the foundation.

My first thought as I saw the hole was wondering if they would find anyone there. After all this was the Sicilian neighborhood of Fitchburg for many decades and the car dealership that was once there wasn’t there forever.

I often joke that you can tell you’re in a Sicilian Neighborhood because the shovels and lime are at the front of the hardware store. It’s one of the reasons why the urban riots you’ve been hearing about never quite manage to reach Italian/Sicilian neighborhoods

Unexpectedly of course


Of course Sicilians aren’t the only people who manage to keep their neighborhoods safe, to wit:

Toledo [a gang banger killed by police] was from Little Village, the main Mexican neighborhood in Chicago. During the George Floyd Memorial Riots last May, Latin Kings gang members took up armed patrol of Little Village and drove off carloads of potential black looters. So, in retrospect, it’s easy to see why black / Mexican solidarity turned out to be a chimera.

It’s almost as if the Democrats’ Coalition of the Fringes doesn’t quite jibe with the Democrats’ assumption of Black Supremacy.

It’s the certainty of punishment that prevents such crime and the certainty of no punishment that encourages them.


I have been saying since the Democrat crime ways began that if the various Sicilian Mafias offered to provide actual protection to a neighborhood from the Democrat crime waves hitting major cities they would have a major cash cow potential, The shop owners would find it worth the cost, the police would be happy to not have to deal with these problems when they know the local DA’s will not prosecute anyways and the various Insurance companies would be thrilled to not have to worry about giant large scale payouts.

More importantly for the mob is that people who are actually being protected are less likely to do anything to the people protecting them nor are likely to complain about other, shall we say less savory income streams said mobs are generating for themselves.

I’d not be surprised if this is already happening very quietly and unofficially, sort of like the deal between the mob and the feds during WW2 to keep enemy spies out.


Speaking of Sicilians apparently at least one of the Cuomo brothers is no fool:

You can be damn sure he kept more than emails as I suspect his brother the Governor has and they will have no compunction about using them to bring down people if and when they decide the time is right.

Anyone who is surprised by this knows nothing about Sicilians. As Tom Hagan said to a Senator once “All that’s left is our friendship.” When that friendship is gone look out.


Finally one of the hardest things about being both a devout Catholic and a Sicilian is the giant conflict that comes about when one is wronged.

The Sicilian wants vengeance and wants it badly while the devout Catholic sees vengeance for what it is and resists it.

Of course for some this conflict is easily solved:

I suspect the end quote of that clip is very popular in mob circles

It was great to be Catholic and go to confession, you could start over every week”

Of course such a person needs to be informed about the sin of presumption. But for those who don’t bother to know their faith ignorance is bliss, at least on earth.

Here is the indulgence Calendar for December.

And the blank calendar if you want to fill in all your own names

You know ever since I’ve started the indulgence calendar stuff (I don’t think I’d call it a ministry) things have happened to make it difficult. Last month the difficult reached the blog but that suggests it’s something worthwhile.

More important than JFK

Posted: November 23, 2021 by chrisharper in catholic, Church doctrine
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By Christopher Harper

Almost every American who was alive on November 22, 1963, knows where he and she was. That’s because JFK died that day.

But a far more influential man, Clive Staples Lewis, also died that day.

Better known as C.S. Lewis, or Jack to his friends and family, Lewis was one of the most important Christian apologists and fiction writers of the 20th century.

A recent motion picture, The Most Reluctant Convert, tells the story of Lewis’s evolution from atheist to great Christian writer. See https://www.cslewismovie.com/home/

The film doesn’t deal directly with his more famous works, The Chronicles of Narnia and The Screwtape Letters, but follows Lewis’s path from nonbeliever to true believer. 

The Most Reluctant Convert is based on a successful stage play written by Max McLean. This filmed version features McLean as an elderly C.S. Lewis who walks viewers through key dramatized moments in his younger years.

The film uses Lewis’s own words to describe his path. As a young man, he explored the occult, including Nordic mythology. Eventually, he recognized how empty and destructive those choices were. Part of that realization occurred, he said, when he came to the aid of a tormented fellow war veteran who screamed that he was being hounded by devils and dragged into hell.

Lewis began his academic career as an undergraduate student at Oxford University. After a brief but dramatic stint in World War I, where he was wounded, he was elected a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, where he worked from 1925 to 1954. He later joined the faculty at Cambridge University, where he taught until he died in 1963,

At Oxford, he returned to Christianity, having been influenced by arguments with his Oxford colleague and friend J. R. R. Tolkien, the author of Lord of the Rings. Lewis resisted conversion as he described in Surprised by Joy:

You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen [College, Oxford], night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929, I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. 

Let me leave you with two other important quotations from Lewis:

We meet no ordinary people in our lives.

In a much-cited passage from Mere Christianity, Lewis challenged the view that Jesus was a great moral teacher but not God. 

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic – on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg – or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon, or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

The Most Reluctant Convert is an engaging and important film. See it if it’s still in a theater near you!

Here is the 2nd of three posts from Fr. Leonard Mary’s visit to Fitchburg, Medford and Boston during his trip to Massachusetts Oct 26-30.

You can see the full playlist of videos here.

Rosary at St. Bernard’s

fyi those people on the side and in the back are getting confession

The Mass part 1

the Sermon from the mass part 2 of 5 from the mass part 1 of two of the sermon

Fr. Leonard celebrates Mass and completes his sermon 3 of 5 of the mass 2 of 2 of his sermon. I made it a point to keep the sermon separate for those who wished to watch it or listen to it independent of the Mass.

Fr. Leonard mass at St. Bernard part 4 of 5

fyi for those not familiar with daily Catholic mass It’s normally a bit shorter. This one is longer because with a visiting priest the sermon is naturally longer plus the number of people attending and receiving communion is much larger than for most daily masses which at St. Bernard’s usually runs about 20 min or 25 tops.

part 5 of 5

Following the mass was the healing service here is part 1

and here is the final part, as before the larger crowd meant for a longer service.

This week Fr. Leonard put up his video of his visit. It was an 8 minute video that had stuff from all his events including three in Medford that I could not attend.

My final post next weekend will include the events from his final day in Massachusetts including mass, the Cenacle for priest onboard ship in Boston Harbor and interviews with Fr. and his assistant Gus on the bus as we took them to the airport to go home.