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A Woman who chooses to have a direct abortion denies earthly life to the child in her womb; yet what many forget, or do not realise, is that she denies Baptism for the child, and so deprives the infant of the Beatific vision in Heaven - although we can be certain that the tiny innocent soul is in God's merciful care.
It is a tragedy when people die suddenly, especially if they are unprepared or trapped in mortal sin. Each is catapulted into the presence of the Creator, and is carried towards Heaven, if in a state of grace, possessed by the Holy Spirit, or else falls into Hell. We should all give up our sins, and love God, and show love for Him and our neighbour.
We are wise if we listen to the Pope and His teaching. A priest who is unorthodox misleads those he should guide. It is as if he has set up and climbed a short ladder, so he can look upon the Church and the world, and decide on a personal opinion to share. The wise priest hands on what he has learned from Christ and His Church - through the Scriptures and the Sacred Tradition - because Christ has seen everything from a higher place: from Heaven, which He once left for our own sake, and where He now reigns.
We have witnessed desperate people calling out to their beloved friends and relations who are trapped underground after an earthquake. The Lord would like us to be as fervent in calling out to Him in prayer, interceding for the Holy Souls who are 'trapped underground' in Purgatory, being purified, and prepared for Heaven's glory
The Father in Heaven loves all His creatures, but He looks with delight and wonder upon the soul of a person newly-forgiven in the Sacrament of Penance; and like a mother full of wonder at her new-born baby's delightful fingers and toes, God looks with wonder upon the penitent's virtues and good resolutions.
What matters is not how many people die, but in what state-of-soul each person died. Has this one died - or that - in friendship with God, to inherit Heaven, or alienated from God, as one who had allowed Satan to lead him?
It is important to treat the dead with respect. Yet, no matter what type of death people die, no matter in what way they will be mourned, what counts, when they die, is whether they did so in friendship with God - which means they are on their way to God - or alienated from Him, forever to be without His love and beauty and peace. We all ought to prepare to leave this life.
It is not the duty of the priest, at a Requiem Mass, to announce that the deceased person is certainly in Heaven. His duty is to lead the Church in prayer, and to offer the Holy Sacrifice for the remission of the sins of the living and the departed. Only God knows who has been saved - though we should live in hope - and who has gone straight to Heaven: God and His Church, who canonises the Saints.
They do not see our sins; yet the saints in Heaven are in Communion with us. They see our joys, and comfort us by their prayers when we are in pain or dispirited. There is no death, for those who live in Christ: only 'life in Christ'
God invites us to love Him, to follow the hard road of obedience until we die, and share His love, with the Saints, eternally. People who refuse to love God and who deliberately take the broad road, refusing to repent of their sins, find that at death, by their own choice, they remain on the same path, on which there is no light from Heaven, nor any Heavenly peace, joy, beauty or companionship. To be without God is to exist in Hell.
The Sacred Host is Christ Himself, made Present in a sacramental form, under the appearance of bread. This Host can be seen as a lens, through which we can see Heaven, because, in this Blessed Sacrament is all the life of the Godhead! Christ is merciful in coming to us in this way; we are too weak, at present, to bear the sight of His Divinity.
We cannot save ourselves; but if we hold on to Christ and His Church, as if to a life-line from a pit, we can allow Him to draw us up to Heaven - so long as we are not so distracted, or tempted to clutch at sin, that we let go, and fall into the depths, through our own fault.
To receive Christ in Holy Communion, with His Divine life and light and love, is to receive Fire from Heaven: a transforming fire from the heart of the God-man. How foolish we are if we rush away straight afterwards. How foolish is the priest who does not pause in prayer and recollection, but rushes towards the end of the Mass.
When we pray for the Faithful Departed we not only help them to be drawn closer to the light of Heaven - by the grace of Christ - we also bring them the consolation of knowing that they are not forgotten: that their friends and relations on earth hold them in their hearts, and long for them to find joy, on entering Heaven's glory.
The path of love for Christ, and obedience, leads straight towards Heaven, for the faithful. Those Catholics who are disobedient or faithless take a dark, downward path. There can be an opportunity, before death, for repentance, at which the soul can be drawn up towards Heaven's light instead of falling down into Hell.
The gift of life comes from Heaven, as God gives an immortal soul to each person conceived on earth. But Satan is at work to destroy God's gifts. Disguised as a doctor, he kills in the womb, by the hands of doctors, millions of unborn babies whose mothers have tragically given permission for their own tiny infants to be destroyed.
God sends down His gifts from Heaven, including the gift of life, in newly-conceived babies, each of whom has an immortal soul. Yet Satan has engineered the whole abortion business, and many women who are dismayed to be pregnant ignore God's laws and seek a doctor who will kill and expel the child: a barbaric act.
Christ sends down new life from Heaven: the living souls of babies, which are sometimes then rejected by their own mothers, and killed in the womb by Doctors who agree with this practice. Satan boasts, as he points towards parliament, that many of it's members are as guilty as those who do abortions, since legislators voted for it to be made legal.
The Lord asks Catholics who doubt His Presence in the Blessed Sacrament: Ff Christ could become man, through the Virgin Mary, and allow Himself to die and be buried, and yet visit Abraham and the Prophets in the underworld, then ascend to Heaven to live there in glory, can He not come down to earth again, by the same power, as the Holy Spirit makes Him Present on the altar, as the bread and wine are changed into Christ's Body and Blood, and His friends prepare to receive Him?
Each human being receives life from God, Who plans that each can progress from infancy to adulthood, and - by God's grace - from spiritual infancy to maturity, and then to a life of bliss in Heaven. What a tragedy it is, when a tiny person is aborted, and denied life's development, or when an older person loses God through sin.
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