129 years ago today.
The final photo taken of Saint Térèse of Lisieux alive on earth.
NEW: Archbishop Cordileone on the Latin Mass --
“This is unstoppable. It’s what is drawing young people in & will continue to do so”
“I don’t think it’s realistic” to keep restrictions in place, he said in response to Cardinal Roche
Via @WorldOverLive
Church interiors were gutted
Buildings demolished
Parish life stopped overnight
So Jan Peters started Fluminalis in 1972... while the destruction of Dutch Catholicism was well underway
He called the stripping terrible
Yet sells the corpses (I don't blame him)
Today he runs the world’s largest reseller of church interiors
How telling…
…A tiny nation that once sent ~9,000 missionaries across the globe now leads the planet in warehousing the culture it discarded.
By Mark Lambert
This is genuinely encouraging news from the Diocese of Wheeling-Charleston. Bishop Evelio Menjívar has appointed Fr Timothy J. Grassi as Episcopal Delegate for Matters Concerning the Usus Antiquior explicitly “to foster greater unity among the Catholic faithful and provide for their various spiritual needs.”
Surely Traditiones Custodes is a dead letter?
Here is a bishop recognising that the spiritual needs of those who attend the Traditional Mass are real, that they belong within the life of the Church, and that pastoral care rather than suspicion is the proper response.
Surely this is the healthier Catholic instinct: not to manufacture division by suppressing what generations of Catholics regarded as sacred, but to seek unity by making room for legitimate differences within the Church’s own liturgical inheritance.
More of this, please.
“Courage is fear that has said its prayers.”
~ St. Thomas Aquinas
I’ve often heard men say, “I love looking at porn. Besides it doesn’t hurt anything. It’s only fantasy. What’s the problem?”
Now, you may not have a moral problem with porn, but many are starting to have a medical problem with it. The more we study the impact of porn on the male brain, the more men are starting to think twice about porn being a harmless pastime.
In 2002, the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy, published research showing that when men are shown pictures of centerfold models from Playboy and Penthouse, this significantly lowered their judgments about the attractiveness of “average” people.
In our hyper-sexualized media culture, is this something that really needs to be reinforced? Should we train our brains to rate women by the size, shape, and harmony of their body parts? Do we want our standard of beauty to be shaped by a fictional standard or by the woman we are actually in love with?
Related: 5 Ways Sex Gets Better After Giving Up Porn
The journal NeuroImage published a study in 2008 demonstrating that as men are sexually aroused by porn films, something called “mirror neurons” in the brain also fire.
What is a mirror neuron? Have you ever seen someone get hit in the face with a ball or some other blunt object, and then your own body recoils? This is because of mirror neurons: you instantly react as if you were the one hit.
When it comes to porn, the brain naturally imagines the viewer in the pornographic scene. When a man is turned on by porn his body is not merely responding to the naked woman. His brain is picturing himself as the main character, heightening the arousal. You see, porn isn’t merely arousing to men because the women in it are attractive, but because it makes the man feel sexy.
This trains men not to get their sense of personal validation from real life relationships but from pixels on a screen.
In 2014 scientists at Cambridge discovered that the brains of habitual porn users show great similarity to the brains of alcoholics. When a self-confessed porn addict is hooked up to an MRI machine and then is shown a pornographic image, a brain structure called the ventral striatum “lights up” in the same way it lights up for an alcoholic who sees a picture of an drink.
You might be thinking, “So what?” Well, researchers speculate that continued use of porn over time, especially starting at younger ages, makes it such that we actually lose willpower. The more we watch porn, the more difficult it is for men to say to no to watching porn because of the strong craving they feel.
This is not the kind of men most men want to be. We want to enjoy our passions, not be enslaved to them.
Related: Brain Chemicals and Porn Addiction
According to research by Dr. Dolf Zillmann and Dr. Jennings Bryant, the more porn one is exposed to, the more likely one is willing to trivialize rape. In their experiments, after watching just five hours of pornographic films stretched over a six-week period, subjects were willing to cut the sentencing of an accused rapist nearly in half, compared to those who had not watched pornography at all.
Those who watched more porn were also likely to believe that practices like sadomasochism were two to three times more common in general society than those who had not seen porn. Of course porn doesn’t make most consumers into sexually violent people, it does train men to embrace a culture of objectification, reinforcing a belief that women exist to give sexual pleasure to men. Again, is this the kind of men we want to become?
Let me make an appeal to men:
…then consuming porn will take you in the opposite direction.
