One of the hardest non-optional commands of Christ to his followers is this one from Luke Chapter 6:
“But to you who hear I say, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.
Christ elaborates as to why we must do this
For if you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do the same. If you lend money to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit (is) that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, and get back the same amount. But rather, love your enemies and do good to them, and lend expecting nothing back; then your reward will be great and you will be children of the Most High, for he himself is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful, just as (also) your Father is merciful.
While I was at mass this Sunday the unjust and infamous heavily armed raid to arrest pro-life activist Mark Houck was on my mind as was the best way to respond while not forgetting that the men who did this evil deed are loved by God beyond their own understanding. As I was considering this my priest was giving a homily on how the opposite of love was indifference.
That’s where the idea of a Novena to St. Matthew for the FBI agents came from.
A Novena is a series of prayer over nine days, unusually in honor a Saint or the Blessed Mother or the Sacred Heart etc for an intention. I thought of what I tweeted concerning agents on this raid:
oh and I also expect to see a lot of agents who are on the fence about this stuff assigned to these kind of raids in the future.
It's the old "blood on their hands" business to keep them from playing along with any investigation.
Those in the agency who understand the use of the FBI as an administration’s private Gestapo against their political enemies but are afraid need to be encouraged and a novena is an excellent way of doing so.
I choose St. Matthew because as a tax collector for the Roman’s he was active in the oppression of his own people until Jesus called him and everything changed as illustrated in season one of the Chosen:
What better patron for the FBI agents in this situation?
There will be a different set of prayers each day for nine days so lets begin with Day 1
St. Matthew Novena - Day 1
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
Dear Lord, we thank You for giving us St. Matthew as an example of holiness. Help us to imitate the devotion to You he showed from the time he chose to leave his old life behind and follow You.
St. Matthew, you worked with the Roman authorities to collect taxes from the Jews. When Jesus called you to come follow Him, you immediately left behind everything in order to do so.
Please bring my petitions before Christ Whom you chose to follow!
You became one of Jesus’ closest friends and followers. You continued on the path of holy service to God throughout the rest of your life.
Pray for me, that I may always be ready and willing to follow Christ wherever He calls me. Pray that I may seek to serve God wholeheartedly each day of my life.
Please also pray for The FBI Agents involved in the Mark Houck arrest.
St. Matthew, pray for us!
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
Read more at: https://www.praymorenovenas.com/st-matthew-novena
I think a prayer warrior like Mr. Houck would appreciate and approve of this approach.
The latest media controversy in Illinois is the mailing of what the liberals call “pink slime” newspapers. The term was invented a decade ago by Ryan Zickgraf, a Washington Post reporter, to describe newspapers that aren’t “real,” such as the copy of North Cook News which was mailed to my home last week. On the other hand, as you can see in the photo, the North Cook News is printed on paper and it contains, get this concept, news. North Cook News, and similarly named publications (yes, I said it), is published by Local Government Information Services, which is run by Dan Proft, a conservative activist and former Illinois gubernatorial candidate, who is a co-host of a morning talk radio show on WIND-AM Chicago, part of the Salem News Network.
Proft is also the chair of the People Who Play By The Rules PAC, which has run a series of commercials, including “The Scream,” that have drawn much-needed attention to the SAFE-T Act. Among other things, the law eliminates cash bail in Illinois. Riding off of the emotion after the murder of George Floyd, the voluminous SAFE-T Act passed the Illinois state Senate at 5am on the last day of the lame duck session of the General Assembly early in 2021. It passed the state House that same day. Illinois’ Democratic governor, J.B. Pritzker, signed it into law a month later. Sensing trouble, Dem legislators, or whoever wrote the law, pushed the date that the SAFE-T Act takes effect until January 1, 2023, nearly two months after the 2022 general election.
As I noted in my Da Tech Guy post last week, in a discussion about the SAFE-T Act, Will County State’s Attorney, James Glasgow, a Democrat, told Fox Chicago’s Mike Flannery on his Flannery Fired Up show, “There are forcible felonies that are not detainable: burglary, robbery, arson, kidnapping, second degree murder, intimidation, aggravated battery, aggravated DUI, [and] drug offenses.” Not detainable means they’ll be set free until their trial date.
The mayhem of Chicago and Cook County will spread statewide. And the Chicago area will suffer even more because of the SAFE-T Act.
People Who Play By The Rules PAC television ads and the Proft “pink slime” newspapers must be working. Pritzker and Illinois’ attorney general, Kwame Raoul, say they are open to amendments to the SAFE-T Act–but they don’t offer details. My guess is that the Democrats are panicking. I have no sympathy for them, they’ve had nearly two years to make major changes to the SAFE-T Act.
Meanwhile, Pritzker, a billionaire, is pushing back. He cancelled an appearance at a forum with his Republican opponent, Darren Bailey, sponsored by the Daily Herald newspaper. That paper is published by Paddock Publications, which printed Proft’s Local Government Information Services newspapers; LGIS used Paddock’s bulk-mailing permit to distribute them. That infuriated Pritzker. The governor’s campaign manager, among other things, called Proft’s papers, “fake and misleading and newspaper-style mailers.” Tellingly, the Pritzker camp doesn’t specifically attack the content of Proft’s papers. They are committing the ad hominem fallacy. Paddock, in a statement, announced that it cancelled future printings of LGIS papers. The forum is back on.
The headline of my North Cook News is “Former Chicago chief of detectives: Violent offenders given ‘get out of jail free card.'” That’s true.
Not only have Pritzker and the Democrats, who thanks to gerrymandering enjoy supermajorities in both chambers of the General Assembly, been negligent in fixing the SAFE-T Act debacle, so has the local media. With occasional exceptions, the newsrooms of Illinois’ major newspapers are woke echo chambers. They still claim to be the watchdogs for the public, but these so-called journalists are mostly interested in protecting and advancing leftist narratives. Contemporary reporters are a toxic combination of “the cool kids” in high school, with all of their arrogance, and the false ethical superiority of Iran’s morality police. Community newspapers usually only report on petty crime, but if you need to locate the nearest bake sale, well, you know where to find that information. These weekly papers are in fact weakly ones.
If the Illinois media performed their jobs honestly and capably, there’d be no need for “pink slime.”
Fact-checkers have been unkind to opposition arguments to the SAFE-T Act. The worst of these fact-checks comes from Jeff Cercone at PolitiFact. He deemed such opposition as “false.” Politi-Farce, that is Dan Bongino’s nickname for them, is partially funded by Facebook; the social media giant has used Cercone’s fact-check to blur out a video pointing out the flaws in the SAFE-T Act. Interestingly, Cercone’s Tweets are protected on Twitter. Is he afraid of his readers? I’m not. You can find me on Twitter. Come and get me, I’m not a coward!
Who did Cercone seek out as experts in his fact-check? Cops? No. Prosecutors? Nope. County sheriffs? Uh-uh. He called on Pritzker’s press secretary, Jordan Abudayyeh, and two criminology professors. Oh sure, he included links to articles with opposing opinions. As for Cercone’s experts, I don’t believe their defenses of the SAFE-T Act.
Instead, Cercone should have reached out to John Curran, a suburban Chicago Republican state senator who is a former Cook County assistant Cook County state’s attorney. That, my friends, is what I call an expert.
“You cannot take deterrence out of the system,’ Curran told John Kass last week in the former Chicago Tribune’s columnist’s Chicago Way podcast, “They’ve been doing that for years, the SAFE-T Act is the final straw. Crime is rampant because people don’t fear getting caught. They [the criminals] don’t stop, the police can’t pursue anymore because of insurance issues, coverage issues, and safety issues. They run and then when they do get caught–they know they are going to get processed, booked, and be back out that day. When there is no fear of accountability in the system, what is going to stop someone who sees something and says, ‘I want to take that?'”
Keep in mind, Curran is talking about the current status quo–before the SAFE-T Act kicks in. When that law goes live, Curran warns, what he described will “put that in place permanently.” Only worse, I’d like to add.
For flight risks, apologists for the SAFE-T Act claim, accused criminals can be detained. “The problem with that,” Curran pointed out to Kass, “is to show that someone is a willful flight risk the prosecutor has to prove that they are planning or attempting to intentionally to evade prosecution by concealing oneself. That is never going to happen,” adding, “You literally have to catch them with the plane ticket in their pocket going to the airport.”
As I mentioned earlier the SAFE-T Act, which is 764 pages long, passed on the last day of the 101st General Assembly. Curran said he was given one hour to read it.
Social media regularly blocks or suppresses stories that the “enlightened ones” deem false. Most notably is the New York Post’s initial report on the information found on the Hunter Biden laptop, which has since been found to be as genuine as today’s sunrise. On a personal note, I’ve been repeatedly warned by Facebook that my blog entries that I’ve posted on Facebook will be pushed lower into the general FB feed, meaning of course that fewer people will see my posts, because my writings have been labeled “false and misleading.” I am fairly certain I am “shadowbanned” by Twitter. I used to oppose setting up alternative social media platforms for conservatives–it’s best that the libs see the truth, was my reasoning.
Only they don’t see it.
Twitter and Facebook used to suspend accounts of users who claimed that COVID-19 was manufactured in a Chinese laboratory. That story, still not debunked, may end up being authenticated. There are numerous similar tales
What to do?
Well, as a resort, to get an alternative message out, conservatives can mail out “pink slime” newspapers. As a last resort there is always the Howard Beale approach. You can open the window and scream, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna to take it anymore!”
Proft is undaunted. In a statement he fired back at the billionaire, “Governor Pritzker believes his money guarantees him control of government and entitles him to make all media subservient to his government. He lords over Illinois through executive orders. He sees the Fourth Estate as no different than his equestrian estate in Wellington, FL. If he doesn’t like a television ad, it must be taken off the air. If he doesn’t like a newspaper, it must not be printed or circulated.”
In that same statement, Proft vowed that his papers “will continue to be printed and distributed even if we have to return to the Gutenberg press and must enlist fair-minded people across Illinois who want the truth, not Pritzker’s ‘truth,’ to hand deliver them door-to-door.”
John Ruberry regularly blogs from suburban Cook County at Marathon Pundit.
And a Catholic dad with seven children warranted the full wrath of Joe Biden’s DOJ, with a SWAT raid on the family home at 7:05 a.m.
According to Ryan-Marie’s account, there were 25-30 agents in 15 cars. They surrounded the house with rifles in firing position, and “started pounding on the door and yelling for us to open it.”
Mark replied, “Please, I’m going to open the door, but, please, my children are in the home. I have seven babies in the house.”
“But they just kept pounding and screaming,” the mother said. “They had big, huge rifles pointed at Mark and pointed at me and kind of pointed throughout the house,” and ordered the children upstairs. “The kids were all just screaming. It was all just very scary and traumatic.”
This should terrify every American. Mark Houck isn’t a drug lord or a mass murderer. He was involved in a minor scuffle at an abortion clinic, and now he’s facing a possible sentence of 11 years in prison, three years of supervised release, and fines of up to $350,000 if convicted.
…but there is a commandment against false witness.
I have several thoughts that I’ve already tweeted out but there are worth repeating here:
This is just the sort of thing a completely legitimately elected administration does with what has become its secret police
That this is all about intimidation is proven by the overwhelming armed force 25 armed men to arrest a guy who spends his time praying? If they were just interested in enforcing the law two guys with a warrant could have shown up and he would have come quietly
You will never see this version of the FBI take this kind of action against ANTIFA or any of those burning down US cities, those folks tend to shoot back, much after to go up against people whose primary weapon is prayer.
That the @FBI has stooped this low is a disgrace, but that won’t be the opinion of the MSM till the #gop is in charge & starts returning the favor
I expect to see a lot of agents who are on the fence about this stuff assigned to these kind of raids in the future in order to put “blood on their hands” so to speak to make them less willing to speak out if there is ever an investigation about this stuff.
I expect to see a lot more of this particularly before the election in the hopes that one of these people will decide to resist or that it provokes a violent reaction that can justify even more repressive actions.
This is also why I think the left with the full help of the will be fixing elections for years to come. Because those who have crossed so many lines won’t be anxious to be out of power and risk being held responsible by people who actually believe in the rule of law.
I’ve met with and marched with and participated in many prayer vigils in front of abortion clinics. That could have been me, one of my sons or any of a hundred people I know.
I’ve often said nobody does good better than a good catholic and nobody does evil better than a bad one. Joe Biden & co are doing theirs best to prove me right.
I know I’ve said this before but it’s worth repeating, when the left eventually loses power I expect the official line from a lot of FBI agents questioned by this will be: “I was only following orders”
Finally let me point out that Christ himself has predicted this kind of thing here:
“I have told you this so that you may not fall away. They will expel you from the synagogues; in fact, the hour is coming when everyone who kills you will think he is offering worship to God. They will do this because they have not known either the Father or me.
If the world hates you, realize that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, the world would love its own; but because you do not belong to the world, and I have chosen you out of the world, the world hates you. Remember the word I spoke to you, ‘No slave is greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you. If they kept my word, they will also keep yours. And they will do all these things to you on account of my name, because they do not know the one who sent me. If I had not come and spoken to them, they would have no sin; but as it is they have no excuse for their sin. Whoever hates me also hates my Father.
What hasn’t been discussed is safety equipment. I’ve worked in plenty of industrial environments, from shipyards to metal shops, and have had my share of flying metal objects that cracked safety helmets, broke safety glasses, and in general tried to kill me in a variety of unique and interesting ways. If Tik-Tok is any indication of the trajectory of our society (and one shudders at THAT thought), we should be teaching teenagers how to properly use safety equipment.
And yet, this Canadian teacher is not doing any of that.
Let’s start with the skirt. Unless you are a secretary, nobody in a shop wears a skirt. Even most secretaries in shops wear a long maxi skirt, especially if they have to walk out of the office for any reason. If you’ve ever had a burning piece of metal touch your skin, or brushed up against something sharp, you’ll only do that once or twice before you become best friends with your jeans. Let’s be honest, you can wear some pretty sexy jeans if you want, all while still protecting your legs from being impaled by the splinters flying out from a nearby cutting saw.
The other reason skirts aren’t a good choice is because rotating machinery tends to grab loose items, and having your skirt violently ripped off your body by lathe is just not appealing. Jewelry, especially necklaces and earrings, are also at risk of being forcibly ripped from your body. Hair is the same way. This Canadian teacher should have her hair (wig?) up in a bun, or at least in a ponytail secured with a hat, and most certainly not in her face. Not only is it at risk of being ripped out of her head, but it impedes her ability to see what she is working on.
Speaking of seeing things, I see no gloves or safety glasses.
Seriously, WTF?
Gloves and glasses are an absolute necessity when running a saw. I can’t tell you the number of times my miter saw has kicked up a chunk of wood that smacked me in the hand or the face. It sucks when it happens, but at least I can STILL SEE OUT OF EACH EYEBALL in the end. If you open any user manual, the first section will tell you to wear gloves and eye protection. Heck, the company that provides insurance for the school should be calling and complaining that this teacher is placing them at significant risk for an insurance claim.
All this makes me view this as a dumb, attention-grabbing prank. If this teacher cared about her students and also happened to be transgender, she would be dressing appropriately for class, teaching her students how to properly run saws and other equipment. As a teacher, she should dress appropriately anyway, and if she had large breasts like that (and some women do), she should at least wear a bra.
Which brings up my final point, and that is if the transgender community wants to be taken seriously, they are going to have to divorce themselves from these attention-grabbing idiots. It’s not dissimilar from the Westboro Baptist Church, a very small community that doesn’t represent anything close to mainstream Christian theology. Plenty of transgender individuals want us to believe that they are normal members of society, and truth be told, plenty of them are. But just like the Westboro Baptist Church, people should call out bad behavior when they see it, and most transgender people should join them in saying “This behavior isn’t normal.” Just because a teacher is transgender doesn’t mean we should allow that person to run roughshod over basic safety protocol and dress codes. Until we see more pushback on these people, its going to be harder for most people to normalize transgender individuals in society.
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