+
JMJ
In a column, "Pacquiao's new religion and the national anguish over Marquez's victory," of today's Philippine Daily Inquirer, Mr. Ted Laguatan writes "[Pacquiao] will also understand that God expresses his love for us not only in giving us successes, joys and pleasures – BUT ALSO in giving us failures, pains and suffering – in order to make us humble and bring us closer to Him." Meanwhile, Francis Lucas, executive secretary of CBCP's Episcopal Commission on Social Communications and Mass Media, told Yahoo News Southeast Asia that "Our God is not a vengeful God but a God of love."
God rather shows us His tender mercy MORE SO in sending us failures, defeats, pains, sufferings, and humiliations for the Catholic Religion is the religion authored by the Crucified (cf., Heb. 12.2). However, a devastating overturn is also a demonstration of how the God of exacting justice (the other "part of the equation", so to speak, of who-the-true-God-is repudiated by the Neo-Catholicism of Vatican II, cf., "The Ultimate Delusion of Vatican II 'Catholicism'") chastises apostasy.
The Sign of the Cross and the Holy Rosary have always been powerful sacramental means of Catholic victory BUT for the vindication and glory of God and His Religion. God must have ordained that at such 'grand' moment and with such a grand icon - representing also a nation that has long since officially dumped the Catholic Religion to embrace the Masonic Secularism (cf., "The Philippines: Another Lost Catholic Nation") and yet still prides itself as 'Catholic', though nominally and actually 'Liberal Catholic' - upon whom the eyes of the apostate world are fixed, it is an evil and a bitter thing for thee, to have left the Lord thy God... For you have forgotten God, Who brought you up, and you have grieved [the Church, the New Jerusalem] that nursed you (Jer. 2.19; Bar. 4.8 - DRV).
Given the circumstances, it was not just about the Filipino Champ's own grand defeat. All that forsake Thee shall be confounded... (Jer. 17.13).
True Christian Virtue and the Truth
ReplyDeleteA "Bible-only" fundamentalist asserted that "When Manny was allegedly a womanizer and a
gambler, when he had family problems, when he had a scandal with an actress, his religion then was never blamed. Now Manny is a
faithful husband and a doting father, gambler no more, his present religion was not appreciated. But when he was KO'd, his religion became
the forefront in blames.."
On the contrary, "All that is not of Faith is sin" (Rom. 14.23). St. Augustine of Hippo, the greatest 'born-again' Catholic, explains: "Where there is no knowledge of the eternal and unchanging Truth* [that the Church built by the Eternal Word on Cephas (the rock plain and simple in the original Aramaic spoken by the Lord and Savior) more than two thousand years ago is "the pillar and ground of the truth" (1 Tim. 3.15)], virtue even in the midst of the best moral life is false" (in St. Thomas Aquinas, "Catechetical Instructions"). What more when the baptized apostatizes by repudiating and vomiting out that Faith which has Christ Himself for its "author and finisher" (Heb. 12.2)?
* The "Bible-only" fundamentalists assert, in justification for the existence of their "sects of perdition" (2 Pet. 2.1), that the Church built by the Eternal Word-made flesh succumbed to doctrinal errors and therefore descended into idolatry (cf., my post "'Catholic idolatry'"). They therefore BELIE the Word of God who declared that "the gates of hell shall not prevail against it" (Mt. 16.18) and that "the Spirit of truth" shall "abide in [it] for ever" (Jn. 14.16-17: 16.13). The Truth can never be the basis of their division.