Milano non va bene - In Milan all is not well

These are not the kind of posts I enjoy writing. But it would hurt me even more to pretend nothing happened.

Last night, 11:40 pm, Milano Centrale Station. While waiting for the M2 metro, a deranged North African guy steps right in front of me and aggressively demands money. I tell him I don’t have any, and out of nowhere he kicks me in the knee.

On the scale of violence it’s a small thing, but it reopened an ugly scar. A little over a year ago I was attacked from behind by two North Africans inside an M5 metro carriage and thrown to the ground: they ripped off the baptism chain I had worn my whole life.

Now in the evenings in Milan I walk around with personal defense tools. That is not normal.  

Just as it is not normal that yesterday, on the platform of the main station metro, there was no one there to keep watch.

Someone might say: “you have money, take a taxi”. No, I’m not having it. Not at all.  

For me, the civilization of a city is measured above all by the quality of its public services. And I always take buses and metro wherever I live. It cannot be considered a crime to do so.

I myself have been an immigrant. I’ve traveled the world, worked on 3 continents, but never have I felt so unsafe, in terms of personal physical security, as I do in Milan.  

A gem in Italy as a city from a work/career point of view. But having to constantly look around, never being able to lower your guard, and jumping every time someone suddenly appears outside your field of vision… really, it’s not a nice feeling at all.

- Vincenzo Di Nicola @vincenzo on Twitter/X

Detachment

"If ever you have a fit of sadness or trouble, remember that it is because you are still attached to life, or health, or some comfort, or person, or thing that you ought to forget and despise that you may desire Jesus Christ only."

-  St. Claude de la Colombiere

No one can oblige us to separate ourselves from the true Church

 “We declare that no one can oblige us to separate ourselves from the true Church, from that Church instituted by Christ Himself and which is destined to last until the consummation of the world just as He instituted it.”  

- Archbishop Thuc

“Religion alone can avail to destroy evil at its root”

“Since religion alone… can avail to destroy the evil at its root, all men should rest persuaded that the main thing needful is to re-establish Christian morals, apart from which all the plans and devices of the wisest will prove of little avail” 

- Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum

Olympic Athlete Britta Curl-Salemme draws strength from her Catholic faith

The Deposit of Faith and the Priesthood

Rejection of the heresy of Modernism means rejection of its approach to the Deposit of Faith and Morals.

THE DEPOSIT OF FAITH AND THE PRIESTHOOD

By Eugene Kevane

The priesthood in this period since Vatican II, in the English-speaking world at least, is torn by a deep division. It is an incipient schism and more than a schism for it arises from a fundamental heresy with regard to the Deposit of Faith and Morals. This underlying cause of the present suffering of the Church needs to be uncovered and analyzed. Only by identifying and removing this cause can we priests of today help to heal it.

St. Paul uses the Greek word "paratheke," "deposit," meaning something precious entrusted to a depositary for safekeeping. He means by it not an inert object like gold or diamonds or a sum placed in the trust department of a bank, but a living body of doctrine. "O Timothy, guard the 'paratheke,' the deposit" (1 Tim. 6:20). This urgent appeal of the Apostle to his Successor is not only thematic for the "Acts of the Apostles" and their Epistles but also for the Gospels. The reason is the fact that this deposit is the doctrine and the teaching program which Jesus entrusted to his Apostles when he taught them, and mandated them to take it out to all nations (see Matt. 28:16-20). He entrusted it therefore also to their Successors, including the men of Holy Orders as a whole until his Second Coming at the end of the world. This concept of a priceless divine deposit entrusted to the teaching Church belongs to the New Testament as one of its principal themes.

The origin of the deposit, then, is Jesus the Divine Teacher. It originated in his teaching of his Apostles, when he prepared them to carry his program forth to all nations. What is the value of the deposit? Unique and priceless. Jesus himself states it: "My teaching is not mine, but his who sent me" (John 7:16). It is the Word of God, not diffused throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, but gathered into a brief teachable synthesis and summary by Jesus himself. It was a stroke of genius, humanly speaking, that Jesus made his revelation of the Three Divine Persons the pattern of this teachable summary of divine revelation. Jesus was preparing teachers in the age-old oral methods of mankind; printing, printed catechisms and printed textbooks were still fifteen centuries in the future.

More: https://x.com/father_rmv/status/2015104169258959093?s=46&t=IydJ-X8H6c0NM044nYKQ0w

Today: Saint Felix, feast day of cats