Portsmouth Roman Catholic

Advance notice!  Divine Mercy Day of Prayer, invoking the intercession of Our Lady of Walsingham in Westminster Cathedral - Saturday 28th September 2019, from 9.30am to 4.30pm with Holy Mass at 10.30am.  The day will be led by Bishop John Keenan of Diocese of Paisley and Fr. Dominic Allain, Pastoral Director of 'From Grief to Grace' among others. We will bring in prayer to the God of Mercy our anguish, burden of unspoken grief, horror & fury with regard to the sexual abuse crisis in the Church. We will pray for the wounded Body of Christ through prayer and reparation for the sins of sexual abuse in the Church. We will pray for the victims of such abuse and plead for God's Healing Mercy.  Bishop John Keenan will lead the central Communal Act of Reparation. Fr. Dominic Allain will give two powerful talks.  Fr. Dominic speaks as one who regularly leads Retreats to help heal those who have suffered such abuse.    " From Gr...

My last post was an explanation of John 21 and the power given by Jesus to forgive sin given to the Apostles.   I am sure however there were many who would have said "No, No, this was not what Jesus meant" and came out with their own interpretation based on the assumption that what they put forward  was revealed by the Holy Spirit to them.    After all the Bible was written by the authority of God and could be understood by all for that very reason.    Yet this unanimity among Christians just does not exist. When I quote from the Bible I need much further guidance.    The Books of the New Testament were written or inspired at the very beginning of the Church, when the apostles and their contemporaries were first teaching the Gospel of Christ.   In the Upper Room they had prayed for guidance  and discussed what Jesus had meant about 'eating his flesh and drinking his blood", "whose sins you shall forgive they are forgiven  whose si...

In the Gospel of John we find the following passage "Jesus said to them again "Peace be with you.  As the Father has sent me so I send you"   And when he had said the he breathed on them and said to them  "Receive the Holy Spirit.   If you forgive the sins on any they are forgiven, if you retain the sins of any they are retained"   John 20:21 Was Jesus just going over the top here.   "OK", the apostles should reply. "if you want me to forgive someone I will forgive, if you want me not to forgive someone I will not forgive.  But we know all this, except you told us always to forgive, so we are rather confused"   Now anyone reading this passage should be equally confused.  So what are we to make of it.   'And when he had said this He breathed on them and said to them, "Receive the Holy Spirit".   What a strange thing to do.   Well perhaps it was just his way or maybe I could be excused for daring to say that this was some...

Recently I was asked to pray for a group before the Blessed Sacrament.   At first I thought of all the useful things I would be doing in the group, and was tempted to say No.   However the temptation did not last long.    If I really believed that the Blessed Sacrament was the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus, where else should I be.  To argue would be to say that other things are more important than Jesus.  For me that was impossible.   So in humility I accepted. There are many courses and programmes in the Church which do a great deal of talking about Jesus.   This of course is as it should be.   But how do you transfer the knowledge in your mind into your heart, for the heart is the seat of our love.   Many struggle all their lives, and yet we have in the Catholic Church Jesus present to us in a very special way.   The old catechism asked the question "Where is Jesus Christ?".    OK, we have talked about Hi...

I am aged 81 and have been around then for some time.  I remember in Glasgow one summer in the 1940's there was a very warm summer and the tar on the pavements started to melt.   But it ended and next summer was a rainy one.  So because there is warm weather which is supposed to prove Climate Change I am not easily persuaded.    I remember a TV production about 6 maths ago where a ship was moored off one of the South Pacific low lying islands waiting it to be submerged by the sea as the Poles melted.   He had been there for 12 years.   This aroused my curiosity for I remembered that about 3 years ago the Antarctic Ice had expanded to level never recorded.  It was picked up when the Ice began to recede however to its former place and we were told the ice was melting at an alarming rate.   Everyone was of course telling me I was wrong, even the Pope.   So I always conceded that I could be and perhaps they just got one or two things wr...

I take no pride in posting this.   I do so as a warning that the media will soon be attacking the Church again and more viciously than ever.   I am thankful however that the Bishops of England and Wales, however much I disagreed with them in many things, did not allow the Church to be corrupted like this

Whereas the betrayal of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament was achieved by openly attacking the reverence towards him  by means of liturgical changes, while protesting these actions had authority the betrayal of the place of Mary was quite straight forward - devotion  to her were simply dismissed.     When the fathers of Vatican II gathers they were unprepared at the beginning for the attacks on devotion to Mary which the dissenters had prepared well in advance.   A schema on Mary was dismissed as something that would put the 'ecumenical movement' back ten years.   This came from the German bishops and if indeed the ecumenical movement was to be brought back ten  years  this could only mean the Our Lady had already been dismissed during that time by the German bishops.   So what need for an ecumenical council.    The bishops did fight back and eventually in the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church they inserted that Devotion to Mary shou...

It is not enough to know that Jesus loves me.   If I am made for his love then surely I must feel his love.   "Come to me all you who labour and are heavy burdened and I will give you rest"   Beautiful words but Jesus I am striving to know you and understand you.  I am trying to do what the saints did and live as the saints did, but somehow I fail and achieve nothing.   I read the Bible, I say my prayers,  I give to the poor but I do not feel loved.   Where can I find your love sweet Jesus? The above was once my prayer and then one day I found and felt Jesus loving me.    I had been a great defender of the Real Presence, I had shouted loudly at the betrayal of the Body of Christ, yes I was intellectually strong.   When I received the Body of Christ I had so many things to say to him, so many words I had stored in my heart.  Then one day I asked myself  "Is He listening?"   Then it struck me.  I had been talking to H...

The one thing that makes human beings different from the Animal World is that every human being has a need to be loved and feel loved.   God made us this way.  And when human beings feel unloved and unwanted they become up unstable and find substitutes in sex, drugs, self harming, and even suicide.   They begin to hate a world which apparently hates them. It was to help us understand this that God made us male and female.    It was for this love in one another lives that marriage was instituted, in which a child would not just grow up feeling loved but experiencing the love between the father and the mother which teaches them what family love is about.   The caldron are safe, secure, and happy. I was listening to a 'modern' psychologist on television.   The subject was two people who met ad married after knowing each other for just one week.   We could al disagree with this but the point she was making was that ti was too soon because they had...

A recent survey of United States Catholics found that 7 out of 10 of them did not believe in the Real Presence. I do not know what the figures are for the UK but I am sure there would be only a marginal difference.    Yet I am not surprised.   There was a vicious attack in America and the UK on the Real Presence by many bishops and priests after Vatican II, when Modernists had taken over many departments in the Vatican and were issuing instructions, not written of course they were far too clever for that, about what Vatican II had taught and certain changes the Council had brought about.   The attacks surrounded the love and adoration of the Blessed Sacrament and the first thing to go were the altar rails.   This was to stop people kneeling in adoration and receiving on the tongue.   As I say you will find nothing written about any of this for it was not discussed at the Council and indeed it was not even discussed with the laity - it was just done - in...