Blogposts

The Church Under Attack. In the Distance Safety: the Eucharist and the Blessed Virgin - The Apparition at Tre Fontane

08-31-2025Weekly ReflectionFr. Leonard F. Villa

On November 1st, 1950, Venerable Pius XII proclaimed the Fourth Marian Dogma “We pronounce, declare, and define it to be a divinely revealed dogma: that the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory.”

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A Miraculous Medal To Beat Hell: Mary's Word

08-24-2025Weekly ReflectionFr. Leonard F. Villa

Our Lady has always intervened to support her children throughout the centuries with various manifestations. We remember, for example, the interventions of Lepanto (1571) and Vienna (1683), where she saved European Christianity from Islamic military aggression. For several centuries, this infernal aggression has become more subtle and, we might say, increasingly "ideological." At the end of the Napoleonic adventure, having entered into "modernity", the anti-Christian revolution, while accentuating its violent fight against the Church, developed a whole current of thought that would justify the persecution of Christians and the construction of a society hostile to God and human nature.

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A Saintly Exorcist: Father Candido Amantini C.P.

08-17-2025Weekly ReflectionFr. Leonard F. Villa

Guest article by Elmar Lübbers-Paal kath.net (edited) https://kath.net/news/88005

In the Catholic Church, only an exorcist may perform a "major exorcism" if he receives the order from the diocesan bishop and has previously examined whether the person concerned is suffering from a mental illness. If this ecclesiastical service is performed, it is performed in secret, as it is often met with incomprehension.

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The Meaning of “Memory “in the Mass

08-10-2025Weekly ReflectionFr. Leonard F. Villa

The Mishnah or Mishna is the first written collection of the Jewish oral traditions that are known as the Oral Torah. Having been collected in the 3rd century A.D. it is the first work of rabbinic literature, written primarily in Hebrew but also partly in Aramaic. The oldest surviving physical fragments of it are from the 6th to 7th centuries. It is viewed as authoritative and binding revelation by most Orthodox Jews and some non-Orthodox Jews.

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Continued Martyrdom of, and Attacks on Christians

08-03-2025Weekly ReflectionFr. Leonard F. Villa

The bomb that fell the previous day on the Catholic Church of the Holy Family in Gaza (see photo), which knocked down part of the roof and killed three and wounded ten of the 550 worshipers who daily took refuge there, is only the latest sign of a growing wave of rejection of the Christian presence in the Holy Land by a significant segment of Judaism, with its fanatical parties and ministers, its settlers rampaging in the occupied territories, its soldiers intolerant of orders. It is that messianic extremism which Benjamin Netanyahu’s government supports in its acts and which makes any political solution to the war unrealistic, that of two states, Israeli and Palestinian, and that of a single state with two peoples with equal rights.

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Science? Yes. Green Ideology? It’s Not Part of the Catholic Faith

07-27-2025Weekly ReflectionFr. Leonard F. Villa

Is Pope Leo XIV a supporter of this ideology? The harmony to which the Pope and Saint Augustine refer is antithetical to that of the green ideology. Right reason and divine Revelation teach us that man, created in the image of God, stands at the top of the hierarchical scale of creation. Nature is a means given by God to man to achieve his supernatural end. Man must respect nature and its laws, which are not only physical and chemical, but also religious and moral.

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Our Lady of Good Counsel of Genazzano

07-20-2025Weekly ReflectionNelson Ribeiro Fragelli

At the borders of Europe, people awaken: Albanians return to the Church! (Edited)

It should be remembered that Albanians are direct descendants of the Illyrians, an Indo-European people evangelized in the early centuries. In his Letter to the Romans, the Apostle Paul writes: "From Jerusalem to Illyricum I have fully proclaimed the gospel of Christ" (Rom. 15:19). This is one of the first testimonies of the Christian presence on the European continent.

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Saint Junipero Serra and Those Who Attack him

07-13-2025Weekly ReflectionFr. Leonard F. Villa

The feast of St. Junipero Serra was on July 1st. This saint has been attacked by anti-Catholics with a false narrative. Bill Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights reported about one such attack: NEW YORK TIMES SMEAR OF ST. SERRA STANDS On September 30, (2020) the New York Times ran a front-page story that smeared St. Junipero Serra. Repeated attempts to have the paper correct the record have failed.

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Beleaguered Christians Have No One to Defend Them…. And Their Enemies Know it

07-06-2025Weekly ReflectionFr. Leonard F. Villa

A prayer chamber destroyed at St Mary Tahira in Qaraqosh, Iraq, where Islamic State militants took over it and used the courtyard as a firing range.

Today, persecution of Christians is as brutal and vicious as that experienced by Christians in the early church. “If one member suffers, all suffer together” 1 Corinthians 12:26 St. Paul tells us. On May 24, 2025, Fulani militants attacked the villages of Tse-Ubiam and Tyolaha in Benue State, killing ten people.

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Young Americans (and beyond) are flocking to the Catholic Church

06-29-2025Weekly ReflectionFr. Leonard F. Villa

Earlier this year, The Pillar reported a surge in the number of prospective Catholics looking to join the Church at Easter. The Diocese of Lansing, Michigan, reported a 30 percent increase over the previous year to 633 converts, the highest number in a decade. Father Ryan Kaup of the Catholic Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln baptized 20 students himself— “the most ever”—and performed initiation rites for 50 others from different Christian denominations and now, of course, we have an American pope, Leo XIV, who church leaders hope will further boost the country’s Catholic boom.

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True Shepherds

06-22-2025Weekly ReflectionFr. Leonard F. Villa

Government Interrogator (to the Cardinal under arrest): You see, you represent a religion ...... which provides an organization outside the state. In your pulpit you are more dangerous than a politician. ... you're a national monument. You are outside the party, and that monument must be ... The Cardinal: Destroyed? Interrogator: Defaced. Dialog from the movie The Prisoner 1955

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The Sacred Heart - Prefer Nothing to the Love of Christ

06-15-2025Weekly ReflectionFr. Leonard F. Villa

The Heart in Scripture: In Hebrew thought the heart means the entire interior life of the person. It is the center of the person’s identity and the center of understanding and free will. Tradition: The Fathers and theologians from St. Augustine and St. Cyril of Alexandria down to St. Peter Canisius speak of the fountain of living waters of divine love as taking their source in the side of Christ. By this the Fathers meant that the Holy Spirit was poured forth on mankind because he who possessed the Holy Spirit in all his fullness had sacrificed his own Heart. As a direct result the Church and all that it effects, her sacraments and the life of grace flow out from the Heart of Christ as the work of the Holy Spirit.

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Church-Amnesia on Communism, Its Roots, and Cure

06-08-2025Weekly ReflectionFr. Leonard F. Villa

This just so happens is not a cash-and-carry business, you’re not dealing with the A&P now. These are cannibals, Mr. Leatherby, headhunting bloodthirsty cannibals who are out to eat us up.
Lt Colonel Van Dyke schools naïve American Mr. Leatherby on the nature of the Soviets in the movie Night People 1954. To update you can paste in for Soviets “the communist government of China.”

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Why is IVF morally wrong?

06-01-2025Weekly ReflectionFr. Leonard F. Villa

The current administration in Washington is unfortunately promoting and is in favor of IVF, in vitro fertilization, popularly called test tube fertilization. The rationale for this procedure is to help infertile couples have a child. People ask what can be wrong with that?

NOTE: The Church has clearly and unequivocally judged to be immoral in vitro fertilization or IVF. Unfortunately, most Catholics are not aware of the Church's teaching, do not know that IVF is immoral, and some have used it in attempting to have children.

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