The Collected Thoughts of the Zappe Family

"Ultimately, the Catholic who is very angry is a Catholic who is full of fear. He sees what is going on around him and he fears that God cannot overcome it. He fears that perhaps it is possible that our sins really will rule the day and that the gates of hell will in fact overcome the Church. Yet the more one surveys history, the more one sees that no matter how terrible man can be (and terrible indeed he can be), God is still at work in the world and He cannot be overcome. The Church endures, saints still live in the world, and the Gospel is still preached to the ends of the earth.

…from The Daily Peep

Interestingly, idiot derives from the Latin idiōta (Greek idiōtēs) meaning a private person, layman, or one not holding public office; from the Greek idios meaning own or private. This makes Bierce’s cynical analysis of the ultimate power vested in the idiot ironic, for one could argue to proponents of ‘social contract theory’ and the democratisation of nations are literally placing the rule of the state in the hands of idiots.

When I was a child, my old parish priest taught me that there are eight sacraments: the eighth is ignorance. And the eighth saves more than all the others together.
- Fr Amorth

From The Reform of the Rite of Exorcism

Gen. Kevin Chilton, the head of STRATCOM, just declared that the Law of Armed Conflict will apply to cyberwar, and that the US won't rule out conventional (read: kinetic) responses to cyber-attacks.

"Lord, you return gladly and lovingly to lift up the one who offends you, but I do not turn to raise and honor the one who annoys me." ~ St. John of the Cross

Here

This is a great little video that shows a Anglican Vicar living as a hermit by the Monastery of Saint Anthony. It's a full hour, but it's well worth the time — something I rarely say about video.

One of my good friends recently said that "One of my biggest pet peeves is that Catholic adults have the knowledge of a child about their faith." To some extent I really wish that was true. A child's knowledge leads them to love Christ for what He did for them, and to trust in the teaching of His Church. What happens is that adult ideas that pose for knowledge come in and drown out the simple knowledge that should enlighten our every action: "Salvator mundi, salva nos, qui per crucem et resurrectionem tuam liberasti nos."

Easter is here and we celebrate the rising of Christ to new life, His conquering death forever. All of our hope lies in this one event that arrived 2000 years ago! So let us rejoice for this more than anything!

One of the great and beautiful moments of the Easter Vigil is the singing of the Gloria and the ringing of the bells. Here is a beautiful video of that moment: