AND IF FROM AMERICAN CATASTROPHIST FILMOGRAPHY WE TRY TO REFLECT ON THE TRUE APOCALYPSE OF THE SACRED SCRIPTURES?
“The true martyr is the one who has become the instrument of God, who has lost his will in the will of God, and that he no longer desires anything for himself, not even the glory of being a martyr".
Author: Gabriele Giordano M. Scardocci, o.p.
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Dear readers of The Island of Patmos,
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this XXXIII Sunday of Ordinary Time places us before a theme that concerns apocalyptic signs and times. In the current lexicon the term Apocalypse frightens us because it evokes something terrible, it sounds like a word that says we will all die at the end of the world. But if we avoid a little’ the filmic American girls who have played a lot on this term, especially in the period of the end of the first millennium (1997–2000) – to which various films such as contributed Deep Impact, Armageddonetc… – we can finally really understand what this word means, without minimizing its importance, but without even being afraid of scenarios that prophesy great disasters and great tragedies.
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Apocalypse is a Greek word (revelation) composta da from (apo) I cover it (calupto) which we could translate as "revealed". So, the Apocalypse is the definitive revelation. The translation itself should reassure us, as it does not mean anything that evokes death, pain and destruction. From this we understand one important thing: Jesus in today's song came to offer a ultimate revelationand decisive for all those who will be his witnesses. Jesus therefore describes the path that every disciple and apostle is called to take until completion. Until we land in Paradise. To this end, it draws inspiration from an everyday circumstance:
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“While some spoke of the temple and the beautiful stones and votive offerings that adorned it, he said: “There will come days when, of all that you admire, there will not be stone upon stone that will not be destroyed".
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The announcement of the end of the Temple and beautiful stones is really fortissimo for the listener. In fact, Jesus has before him the splendid Temple begun by King Herod ten years ago, which employed a hundred thousand workmen and a thousand priests who were specially trained as masons. The Temple factory was started in 20 a.C. and continued for a very long time due to the numerous decorations. It will be finished with white stones of white limestone only in the 64 after Christ, and was destroyed in 70 by the emperor Titus Vespasian during the first Jewish war and was only functional for six years. So Jesus, at this time, he is describing a Temple filled with votive gifts to God. That "stone upon stone will not remain" has a value that goes beyond the destruction of the monumental work that stands before the interlocutors.
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This destruction heralds a great event: the first Temple to be destroyed will be the body of Christ, in the days of his passion. That apocalyptic event will truly reveal God's love for his neighbor. The stones of the Temple, which were also a place of encounter with God, they will be reduced with respect to the post-Easter meeting place, which will be Christ himself. To this destruction of the Temple, each of us who are disciples and followers of Jesus is called to this offering of self in our daily crosses. This is what the Apocalypse of his witnesses is, that is, the most important revelation that Jesus offers us today:
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“You will be hated by all because of my name. But not a hair of your head perish. By your perseverance you will save your souls".
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Jesus foretells us that his following will bring us antipathy and hatred. But at the same time it reassures us that we need not fear anything. Indeed, our testimony as true believers generates confusion and opposition from all those who do not recognize the truth. It shakes their conscience together with those who do not want to leave their comfort zone to the point of doing everything to silence us. We will therefore be those who are the apocalyptics, the revealers of a greater truth. The Lord asks us to persevere despite the difficulties and contrasts of the world, because this testimony of truth up to white martyrdom, it will save ourselves first. Here, then, is the central nucleus of today's teaching, avoiding catastrophic rereadings.
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About white martyrdom and testimony of following Christ, scrive Thomas Sterne Elliott:
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“The true martyr is the one who has become the instrument of God, who has lost his will in the will of God, and that he no longer desires anything for himself, not even the glory of being a martyr".
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We ask the Lord to become authentic witnesses of his love, become instruments of the Trinity, to testify to the whole world that the end is the true beginning of every man, but that that end must be reached after a life of love and dedication to God and neighbor.
Amen.
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Santa Maria Novella in Florence, 12 November 2022
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Staff Blog
Father Gabriele
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Visit the pages of our book shop WHO and support our editions by purchasing and distributing our books.
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HTTPS://i0.wp.com/isoladipatmos.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/padre-Gabriele-piccola.png?fit=150,150&ssl=1150150Father GabrieleHTTPS://isoladipatmos.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/logo724c.pngFather Gabriele2022-11-12 22:37:062022-11-13 15:06:05And if from the American catastrophic filmography we tried to reflect on the true Apocalypse of the Holy Scriptures?
ABORTION IS LIKE PAYING A MURDER TO KILL AN INNOCENT. ABORTION WILL ALWAYS REMAIN THE BANKRUPTCY OF MODERN MAN. THE 194 IT IS A LAW WHICH WANTS TO RECONCILIATE Irreconcilable Opposites
Someone has proudly stated that the 194 it is an imperfect Law, but worthy of a civilized country. As a Catholic and as a priest I say instead that the 194 it is in fact a chimera law, an absurd hypothesis that some Christian Democrat politicians have attempted to justify by resorting to the worst clerical double standard which reconciles irreconcilable opposites, namely legal infanticide with the culture of life made up of weak social-health and welfare policies.
if abortion is a "sacrosanct right" and a "great social conquest", then people have the courage and consistency to face the “sacred” the “santo” the A “great social conquest”, without invoking censorship by calling certain images harsh and raw. Because this is abortion, hard and raw: the killing of a human being.
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With the establishment of the new government centre-right traction, the "very civilized" issue on the right to abortion was revived with vigor and emphasis. Used as a detonator to ignite the revolt against the conservatives, the sentinels of rights, they are now warning Italy of the fascist and ecclesiastical danger (read between the lines Meloni, La Russa and Fontana) against a law, the 194/1978, which according to them would run the risk of disappearing as has already happened for Hungary and Poland, countries where voluntary termination of pregnancy is strongly discouraged.
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But how are things really?? We are truly facing a democratic danger? Or perhaps more prosaically we are retracing the footsteps of a bankruptcy ideology that already smelled of old more than forty years ago? Let's go in order, I would first like to contribute to the topic with some considerations on the matter, both as a Catholic and as a priest who has spent years of his life serving in a large hospital complex, and thus express some advice ― unsolicited ― to the address of the new government which has the great opportunity to accompany citizens today in reflecting on reality.
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Never like in this historical moment there is a need for awareness of reality and a sense of reality to understand that any policy can only manage simple things, even if vast and delicate like the administration of a nation. When politics claims to interfere with human nature, with its dignity and sacredness, up to the claim of ontological overcoming - that is, that Dionysian over-man, free from the chains of ethical and normative values ― disasters are experienced punctually.
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The improvement of human beings it is not established by politics but by the acceptance of high and demanding goals. The experience of the sacred, of the truth, of the beautiful and the good are essential and inalienable principles for stay human, values also known by our Greek and Latin fathers and which Christianity has gathered by attributing them to the God of revelation as the Supreme Being from whom all good springs. Among the high and demanding goals that life offers us we can certainly include the custody of human life. Life is not one res to shape as desired, a sample of helpless primitive matter emptied of any superior and spiritual reflection. Human life is sacred, always, from its rise to its natural decline. As we approach the reification of life, we must be aware that we are approaching a highly dangerous process that leads to that transhumanism that has made abortion its most violent fruit, proudly claimed, I dare say evil, as a "law of civilization" and as a "great social achievement".
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First, let's start with some evidence:it is convenient for everyone today not to consider the Law 194 in its true essence, in quell’humus cultural and political in which it was written and thought rather badly by the legislator. Let's overlook the fact that this law was signed by six politicians belonging to the Christian Democrats: a president of the republic, a president of the Council of Ministers and four ministers. They refused to listen to the voice of conscience to arrive at a more just and protective law, preferring a ployclerical that only old Christian Democrat foxes could have devised. As proponents of Christian values, but much more as statesmen, they should have exercised a healthy principle of secularism (not to be confused with secularism) which would have allowed them to consider the defense of life fully understood as a priority, safeguarding the foundations of a modern and democratic civilization. And here we recall incidentally the story of the King of Belgium Baldwin Ithan in 1990 he refused, for matters of conscience, to put his signature on the law that made abortion legal, to the point of abdicating the throne for two days [see WHO, WHO]. But on the other hand, this ruler, he was not a Christian Democrat pile-upper but an authentic Christian.
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It is our European story, the one to be clear that begins with San Benedetto da Norcia and his monks, which tells us how an authentic modern democratic civilization is characterized by the care of its members - from conception to death - above all protecting the life of the weak, of the poor, of the helpless and the infirm, without falling into that ideological schizophrenia which comes to recognize all rights as equal, only to rant that some rights are more equal than others.
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For supporters of the law 194, of yesterday as of today, the main defensive argument consists in repeating it like a mantra ratiofoundation with which the law was carried out, that is, to prevent the practice of clandestine abortion to the poorest classes who could not afford a trip to London or Lugano to get rid of the unborn child in complete confidentiality and cleanliness. Read that, in the intention of the most savvy, he certainly did not want to grant women wild abortion but only to deal with a medical and social emergency which at that time was practiced in unhealthy basements and improvised clinics, with the well-founded risk and danger to the health of the women who underwent such operations. However, it must be reiterated that this reasoning is false because it constitutes only a partial truth, a good Trojan horse that allows you to achieve the real goal which is to normalize abortion, then the killing of the fetus, as a process of a therapeutic compromise.
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We remind the younger onesone of the most popular methods of abortion in the late seventies, the so-called Karman method, sponsored by CISA activists (Sterilization and Abortion Information Center) founded by Emma Bonino and partners. Method that has become iconic because it is documented by a photo that portrays Emma Bonino in the act of performing an abortion with the Karman method. This photo was then used for propaganda purposes both by the Radical Party and by +Europe to advance the "ideas of civilization" of a great Italian today [cf.. WHO]. Alongside the intention of the pure to create a legal provision that would limit the damages of the practice of clandestine abortion, it is necessary to consider much more seriously the line of thought which underlies this law and which represents the true ideological cradle in which 194 found a political justification, social and later referendum.
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Ten years before the law came out, exactly in 1968, everyone had witnessed that great deception for youth which concerned freedom and sexual self-determination now considered an emergency of modernity. Indeed, when the sixty-eight thinking he spread his mistakes in high schools and universities, he also proudly and convincedly advocated the right to use his own corporality in modality multitasking. However, there was not in those young people the acceptance of as many duties as, in the face of sexual self-determination, they should have arisen. In other words, the right to make love with anyone and anywhere was defended to the bitter end, without acknowledging themselves responsible for that conception that would have resulted from that physical act. The woman was guided by a positive freedom that did not accept limitations and controls, to the point of denying the freedom to the unborn child to come into the world and severely limiting the involvement of the biological father who ended up being a spectator, a mere cooperator in copulation. So we continued to carry out a policy made up of rights - sexual and otherwise - to the sound of slogans and surreal words which was the cause of numerous unwanted pregnancies, but above all of a hypocritical mentality that suddenly imposed itself on the minds of the new generations: “I can do what I want, the body is mine and no one else's, the uterus is mine and I command".
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With the arrival of so many unwanted pregnancies, the concrete problem arose of having to respond in some way to the fruit of numerous conceptions. This happened in two ways: or by sending children to orphanages ― closed in Italy with the Law of 28 March 2001 ― or with recourse to abortion. And certainly not all of these aborted pregnancies, circa 6 million and more abortions since 1978 to date, they were malformed fetuses or miscarriages. Unfortunately, today again, the pure preachers of rights too frequently forget to preach also the duties that are unfailingly unloaded on the shoulders of others, first of all the Catholic Church which for a long time has taken charge of the protection of unwanted little children, this is where, for example, the surnames of Proietti come from, Esposito, Diotallevi, I hope, Find yourself, Uncertain, Innocent etc...
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The law 194 Promethean attempted to curb the unseemly and dangerous practice of clandestine abortion without ever really succeeding, to consider well that in Italy there are still among the 10.000 e i 13.000 cases of clandestine abortions per year. Worst of the worst, this Law has not been able to create a culture of care for women with which to value life as a discriminated reality and defend that vocation to life that flourishes precisely in the natural role of parenting. This would have allowed women to develop their own social responsibility starting from their truest identity, united with that duty of maternity which is expressed above all by bringing a pregnancy to term, regardless of whether or not you want to recognize the unborn child or entrust it to other families who can look after it with love. These are the interventions to be able to exercise a truly responsible motherhood, as well as the Catholic Church continues to propose through the magisterium of the Holy Pontiff John Paul II.
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Someone proudly stated that the 194 it is an imperfect Law, but worthy of a civilized country. As a Catholic and as a priest I say instead that the 194 it is in fact a chimera law, an absurd hypothesis that some Christian Democrat politicians have attempted to justify by resorting to the worst clerical double standard which reconciles irreconcilable opposites, namely legal infanticide with the culture of life made up of weak social-health and welfare policies. It is not a law of civilization because there is no modern civilization that can justify infanticide as an inviolable right of man or woman [cf.. art. 2 Italian Constitution e Universal Declaration of Human Rights]. In this regard it is good to dwell on the paragraphs 4 e 5 of the law 194 which represent the weak link between two clearly irreconcilable positions: the paragraph 4 sees the continuation of the pregnancy as
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a danger to his physical or mental health [woman], related to or related to your health, or its economic conditions, either social or family, or the circumstances under which conception occurred, or predictions of anomalies or malformations of the conceptus";
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and the paragraph 5 looking for solutions for
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"help [the woman] to remove the causes that would lead to the termination of the pregnancy, and enable her to assert her rights as a worker and as a mother, to promote any appropriate intervention aimed at supporting it, offering her all the necessary help both during pregnancy and after the birth».
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This last paragraphit is utterly insignificant and badly applied to the state of the matter. Until today the 194 it is considered by all to be the law of abortion and for abortion. That law that allows you to give death to an innocent when the mother does not have sufficient income, when it was abandoned, when someone has proved against the continuation of the pregnancy, when due to age one is too young to become a mother, when the time or the way to bring a child into the world is not deemed suitable, when the unborn child is not aesthetically perfect. Feminist ideology has often contributed to mortifying any demonstration of protection for the pregnant woman and the unborn child, almost as if it were more urgent to choose to have an abortion instead of getting help during the preand the postpregnancy.
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With the establishment of the new government, the legal schizophrenia on the paragraphs 4 e 5 of the law 194 it seems to have been taken up by Forza Italia senator Maurizio Gasparri. With a bill he thought of enhancing the aspect of the protection of pregnant women but above all of the unborn child. Through a decidedly pro-life manoeuvre, the aim is to protect the legal capacity of the conceived from the mother's womb and to raise awareness in the country towards a culture of life by establishing a day dedicated to nascent life. I find these bills very sensible because it is necessary to reaffirm that there is only one right to defend which is the right to life. From understanding this, then a whole series of other interventions arise to favor a dignified life: economic policies, work increase, enhancement of education and culture, health policies focused on the good of the patient. If these proposals were to be accepted, they would represent only a small part of those timid attempts to focus on Italy, increasingly affected by the demographic winter, towards an awareness of human protection, a path of integral humanization and accompaniment of widely understood weakness.
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The best advice I can give the new government is to invest immediately in family policies, social and health pro-life with generosity and determination, involving as many people as possible. Beyond what one might think, the protection of life is not just a matter of obscurantist Catholics. There are many people who, while not recognizing themselves within a faith, feel the need to fight in defense of human life, highlighting that cultural short circuit of mainstreamwhich claims to protect all forms of life on the planet, from climate to animals to plants, refusing however to protect man from his first moments of biological life in the mother's womb.
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In all of this talk there is no shortage of columnists e enlightened punditswho shouted at the fascist scandal over Senator Gasparri's bills, proposing the usual propaganda on the self-determination of women who, as carriers of the uterus, they cannot and must never be contradicted, not just on the days of their menstrual cycle, but above all when the right to choose about one's body and one's health presents itself. No matter, then, if this right denies a newborn to come to light and if the healthy therapeutic principle coincides in practice with the death in the womb of the conceived.
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I like to statethat whoever is the spokesperson for these "very civilized" untouchable rights is a child of that same intelligentsiaviolent and manipulative who is creating turmoil within the university these days Wisdomof Rome to deny the right to speak and debate to those who think differently. And after more than forty years of the law 194 you feel the need to think otherwise, take note that before the right conscientious objection there is an objection of thought which is the one that allows you to see reality for what it is, calling things by their proper names. And if we hear ourselves told that the therapeutic and voluntary interruption of pregnancy is civilization, we can make our decisive objection of thought and say, using the words of the Supreme Pontiff Francis, that abortion is the practice of those who want to hire a hit man to put an end to the life of an innocent [cf.. WHO].
Laconi, 9 November 2022
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HTTPS://i0.wp.com/isoladipatmos.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Padre-Ivano-piccola.jpg?fit=150,150&ssl=1150150Father IvanoHTTPS://isoladipatmos.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/logo724c.pngFather Ivano2022-11-09 12:37:522022-11-09 15:01:39Abortion is like paying a hitman to kill an innocent. Abortion will always remain the failure of modern man. The 194 it is a law that seeks to reconcile irreconcilable opposites
IF A WOMAN MARRIES SEVEN MEN REMAINING WIDOW OF ALL, ON THE DAY OF THE RESURRECTION, WHICH OF THEM WILL BE HER HUSBAND?
“Those who are judged worthy of the future life and resurrection from the dead, they take neither a wife nor a husband: in fact they can no longer die, because they are equal to the angels and, for they are children of the resurrection, they are children of God".
"So the woman, at the resurrection, whose wife will she be?? For all seven had her to wife"
this Sunday prompts us to reflect on the theme of the resurrection of the flesh, therefore of our daily relationship with God. A relationship of love and vital momentum towards us, like that of a tender and affectionate Father who never frees himself from his children, which, however, at the same time empowers individual freedom.
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In Holy Gospel of today Jesus must first of all answer the question of the Sadducees who use the law of the Levirate to try to trap him and make him contradict. The present Levirate Law — in Genesis and Exodus — required the widow of a Levite to marry her brother and bear children, who would then be recognized as offspring of the first husband. So, the Sadducees exacerbate this Law which created precise constraints on the members of the priestly caste, because they believed neither in the resurrection of the flesh nor in the immortality of the soul. Here then is the question-trap:
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"So the woman, at the resurrection, whose wife will she be?? For all seven had her to wife".
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Jesus knows well that that question is asked to question his words and his work. It serves the Sadducees to discredit him in front of the crowds that had begun to follow him, but to answer and overcome the fallacious objection it offers an articulated answer. The central point of the answer lies in these words:
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“Those who are judged worthy of the future life and resurrection from the dead, they take neither a wife nor a husband: in fact they can no longer die, because they are equal to the angels and, for they are children of the resurrection, they are children of God".
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The children of God are children of the resurrection and they never get married. This is in summary the Lord's answer which explains how marriage - a reality definitively consecrated by Jesus when he blessed the wedding at Cana and transformed the water into wine - is a dual path and a couple's journey, but first and foremost a path to personal and spousal holiness. Therefore a path that accompanies the couple until the resurrection.
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This is the deep meaning: there is life after death. From the beginning of our existence we have always been accompanied by the Lord. We were born and we will never die again. Therefore God, ever since we were tiny embryos in our mother's womb, he has always showered us with love. With Baptism we then entered the perspective of Children of God: that is, adopted by God as children to be nourished and sustained at all times. Between us and God there is a radical and dependent relationship. Without Him we can do nothing.
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Understand well that there is a horizonthat goes beyond matter and horizontality. There is a dimension of eternity to which we are all called. Then it's up to us, to our freedom and our free will to respond responsibly and freely before the vocation to eternity that awaits us. Let's rediscover it in such a way as not to end up in conjectures of pure ephemerality, typical of the Sadducees.
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Scriveva Soren Kierkegaard: "Nothing finished, not even the whole world, can satisfy the human soul that feels the need for the eternal».
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We ask the Lord to rediscover our thirst for eternity, to ground our every daily act of kindness and love in the Love of Jesus, the one who decided to love us to the end.
Amen
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Santa Maria Novella in Florence, 5 November 2022
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Staff Blog
Father Gabriele
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Visit the pages of our book shop WHO and support our editions by purchasing and distributing our books.
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News from the Dominican Province Roman: visit the official website of the Dominicans, WHO
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Dear Readers, this magazine requires management costs that we have always faced only with your free offers. Those who wish to support our apostolic work can send us their contribution through the convenient and safe way PayPal by clicking below:
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HTTPS://i0.wp.com/isoladipatmos.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/padre-Gabriele-piccola.png?fit=150,150&ssl=1150150Father GabrieleHTTPS://isoladipatmos.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/logo724c.pngFather Gabriele2022-11-05 20:07:422022-11-06 14:56:48If a woman marries seven men and remains widowed of all, on the day of the resurrection, which of them will be her husband?
HOW TO TALK ABOUT CHRISTIAN DEATH IN A SOCIETY THAT REJECTS THE SAME IDEA OF DEATH?
Contemporary cultureseems not to ask the question of death, or try to exorcise it and make it fall into oblivion, do not ask questions and give no answers, while Divine Revelation assures us that God created man for a purpose of happiness that goes beyond earthly life.
William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1859. Day of the Dead. Museum of Fine Arts, Lyon
The Fathers of the last Council of the Church wrote that «In the face of death the enigma of the human condition reaches its climax» [cf.. The joy and hope, 18]. The Solemnity of All Saints and the Commemoration of the Faithful Departed are offered to us every year as an occasion to «contemplate the city of heaven, holy Jerusalem which is our mother" and to remind every baptized person that towards this common homeland "we pilgrims on earth hasten our journey in hope, rejoicing in the glorious lot of the elected members of the Church whom the Lord has given us as friends and role models" [cf.. Preface of November 1st].
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Usually many people, even the inexperienced ones, there is no shortage in these days of remembering their deceased loved ones, participating in the Eucharist in the parishes and visiting the cemeteries. With heartbreaking affection we remember those who loved us, grateful for what we have received, eager perhaps to forgive and to be forgiven. There are many children who are no longer young, if anything with adult children or even grandparents, who before the graves of their parents reflect on many moments of their lives, saying to themselves, now with tenderness now with bitterness, sometimes even with deep feelings of guilt, that if it were possible to go back they would have had other attitudes and behaviors towards them.
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Death can only lead us to question ourselvesbecause - as I often say in funeral celebrations - nothing is more certain than that as we received this life, one day we will have to make it. Wisely an old English apologue expresses how a baby gives the first cry, already starting to age, so the age that passes - were even a few minutes, or a month or a year - it makes you inexorably old. This is why a child born from a minute is one minut old (a minute older).
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When man finds the strength to stopand think about yourself, he feels like death does not belong to him. We feel, in our deepest innermost, that we are made for life. But not simply for eternal life on this earth, where he should be eternally subject to the contradictions and limitations of this world, or in a sort of modern highlander, painfully forced to part with loved ones and situations. We carry within our hearts a seed of eternity that arises every time we are faced with the mystery of death and what derives from it: disease, suffering, fear that everything will end forever. The dead, good to remember: it is an “invention” and consequence of human action. God created us immortal, non-mortals subject as such to physical decay, aging and pain, all elements that enter the scene of the world and human experience through original sin [cf.. Gen 3, 1-19], because of which a corrupted nature was given to all mankind to come. All fruit of the freedom and free will that God gave to man at the very moment of his creation [cf.. cf.. Gen 1, 26; Dt 7, 6].
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Contemporary culture seems not to ask the question of death, or try to exorcise it and make it fall into oblivion, do not ask questions and give no answers, while Divine Revelation assures us that God created man for a purpose of happiness that goes beyond earthly life. God has called and calls man to cling to him with his whole nature in perpetual communion with his divine life. Jesus, Word incarnate, with his incarnation, passion, death and resurrection fully embraced our human nature; by dying he conquered death and by rising he gave man life again.
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The resurrection of Jesusit is the central nucleus of the Christian faith. Whoever lives and dies in Jesus participates in his death in order to participate in his resurrection, as we recite in the III Eucharistic Prayer when we do Memory of deceased: "He (n.d.r Cristo) will transfigure our mortal body into the image of His glorious body". The Incarnate Word in the priestly prayer addressed to the Father before undergoing the passion asks that «all those you have given me are also with me where I am, so that they may contemplate my glory" [GV 17,24]. This is why the Apostle Paul says: “Certain is this word: if we die with Christ, we will also live with him" [2TM 2, 11]. It is in this that the novelty and essence of Christian death consists: with Baptism, the Christian is "sacramentally" dead with Christ, and is already entered into a new life. Therefore, physical death, consummates our dying with Christ and definitively completes our incorporation into Him. The Christian, despite knowing that death is also a painful passage ("pangs") he faces the inexorable shortening of his days in hope, knowing that Jesus has conquered death, that He is that light of the world also symbolized by the Paschal candle placed in front of the coffin during the funeral, the firstborn of the resurrected, the Head of the Body which is the Church [cf.. With the 1, 18] through which the certainty of eternal life reaches all members.
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The Christian view of death it is expressed in an unsurpassable way in the gestures and words of the funeral rite e, in general, in the forms of the Holy Mass of the dead. Omitting for obvious reasons the texts, we want to emphasize the liturgical rites, in which the Church expresses its faith, well summarized by the words of the first preface of the dead: «To your faithful, o Lord, life is not taken away, but transformed; and while the home of this earthly exile is being destroyed, an eternal habitation is prepared in heaven".
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On the day of the funeral the Church,after having entrusted his children to God, sprinkles the bodies with blessed water. Water is the primary and fundamental element for life to exist. It reminds us that we are made for life. It reminds us of Baptism in which we were inextricably united to Christ's death and resurrection and inscribed our name in the book of life. After sprinkling with water, the body of the deceased is incensed. Incense is used in the liturgy to honor God and what He means. In addition to the Eucharist, the altar is also incensed, l'Evangelario, the celebrant, the assembly, the sacred images... The body of the deceased is thus honored because it is recognized as a "temple of the Holy Spirit" and an instrument of communion with God and brothers.
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The body of the faithful departedit is finally entrusted to the earth as a seed of immortality, buried in it as he awaits the never ending spring at the end of time. In this regard, I find these words of Cardinal Giuseppe Betori appropriate, Archbishop of Florence, with which I conclude:
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“Even today, cemeteries are a place to exercise faith by praying for our loved ones. They used to stand at the churches so that there, where Jesus died and rose again, the deceased were also remembered and their memory referred to Jesus, Lord of the living and the dead. Even today the Church recommends burial as the closest form to our faith. It also allows for other choices, such as cremation, provided it is not made explicitly to deny belief in the final resurrection. In all cases, he asks that the ashes be kept in cemeteries, not in one's own homes and never disperse them in nature, denying a precise place to remember together and where the Christian community can ensure constant prayer. May these holidays give us that light and warmth that we deeply need and ease the step for those who in faith walk towards the place of bliss and peace, where God will be all in all".
Florence, 2 November 2022
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1He is a presbyter of the archdiocese of Florence and a specialist in the sacred liturgy and history of the liturgy
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PRAISE OF DEATH
Popular liturgical hymn
Church of Santa Maria della Misericordia, Lastra a Signa (Florence)
Octave of the Dead, November 2013
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Of our brothers, afflicted and weeping, Lord of the people: pardon, compassion.
Submerged in fire of a horrible prison they cry out to you: pardon, compassion.
If at our works regards severe, then I no longer hope: pardon, compassion.
But I look kind if you turn to the cross, repeats each voice: pardon, compassion.
To our brothers therefore give rest, the loving priest: pardon, compassion.
Until from that fire they will be resurrected, Lord of your dead: pardon, compassion.
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