Nonetheless, Dr. Chervin, in a vexatious paroxysm of impassioned impatience, rallied a cadre of hyper-punctilious punctualists to protest the prolonged procrastination of her blog processor and to petition for the immediate publication of Ronda's latest insights without the tedious adornments and adaptations only a silent minority of her followers are purported to appreciate. |
There is a translation now just published by the Von Hildebrand Project of his Aesthetics. Even if you are not a philosopher you will love his thoughts about beauty, especially how beauty lifts our souls out of tendencies to discouragement.
JIM Can you put up a link?
I was thrilled that Trump made it through in inauguration in spite of dire predictions that he wouldn’t. Many of the things he said I liked. But after he said that the Creator breathes life into each of, I wish he had added from conception to natural death.
Because he didn’t allude to abortion clearly, it seemed to me as if he thought that only poverty from bad economic policy that is the problem with our nation?????
I have been pondering a concept in Catholic spirituality: passive purification. This refers to the way God purifies us through the sufferings he permits or wills for us vs. how we try to purify ourselves through acts of will or penances.
This concept of passive purification seems to come in for me in this way. There are certain exercises in spirituality I want to do, such as the many that I suggest in books I have written like thanking God for every little thing. But that is not enough to bring me into a deeper union with Jesus such as all the saints experienced who actually longed to suffer more in life in union with Jesus! Between self-created spiritual paths, no matter how good in themselves, and positively asking for sufferings, is this passive purification. If we love Jesus, we have to accept sufferings that we cannot avoid. such as the suffering of not being able to rid our country of abortion, and this purifies our souls of too much attachment to distracting pleasures or comforts.
A propos abortion, in case you didn’t read of this here is a sensational abortion reversal story:
Abortionist Quits After St. Thomas Aquinas Visits Him in a Dream
“These children are the ones you killed with your abortions,” said St. Thomas, and Stojan awoke in shock and fear. He decided he would refuse to participate in any more abortions.
Angelo Stagnaro
Stojan Adasevic, a Serbian abortionist when Serbia was still a communist country, managed to kill 48,000 children in utero in his 26 years as a purveyor of death.
Sometimes up to 35 per day.
But that's all on the past, as Stojan is now one of Serbia's most important pro-life voices.
As explained in a recent interview with the Spanish daily newspaper, La Razon:
The medical textbooks of the Communist regime said abortion was simply the removal of a blob of tissue. Ultrasounds allowing the fetus to be seen did not arrive until the 1980s, but they did not change his opinion. Regardless of what he believed, or thought he believed, Stojan began to have nightmares.
In describing his conversion to La Razon, Adasevic "dreamed about a beautiful field full of children and young people who were playing and laughing, from four to 24 years of age, but who ran away from him in fear. A man dressed in a black and white habit stared at him in silence. The dream was repeated each night and he would wake up in a cold sweat.
One night Stojan asked the man in black and white in his frightening dream as to his identity.
"My name is Thomas Aquinas," he responded. Stojan, educated in communist schools that pushed atheism instead of real learning, didn't recognize the Dominican saint's name.
Stojan asked the nightly visitor, "Who are these children?"
"They are the ones you killed with your abortions," St. Thomas told him bluntly and without preamble.
Stojan awoke in shock and fear. He decided he would refuse to participate in any more abortions.
Unfortunately, that very day in which he made his decision, one of his cousins came to the hospital with his four months-pregnant girlfriend―they had hoped for an abortion. Apparently, it wasn’t her first which is not uncommon in countries of the Soviet bloc.
Stojan reluctantly agreed, but, instead of the usual Dilation and Curettage (D&C) Method in which the fetus is torn apart with the use of a hook shaped knife called a curette, he decided to chop it up and remove it as a single mass.
Horrifically and providentially, his little cousin's heart came out still beating.
It was then that Dr. Adasevic realized that he had indeed killed a human being.
Stojan immediately notified his hospital that he would no longer perform abortions.
No physician in communist Yugoslavia had ever before refused to perform an abortion. The hospital and government's reaction was swift and severe.
His salary was cut in half and his daughter was immediately fired from her job. In addition, Stojan's son wasn't allowed to matriculate into the state university.
After many years of surviving the many privations orchestrated by pro-abortion/pro-death fundamentalist atheist government, Stojan was about to buckle under the pressure and give into its demands.
Fortunately, Stojan had another dream about St. Thomas.
St. Thomas assured Stojan of his friendship and Stojan was in turn inspired.
The physician became involved in the pro-life movement in Yugoslavia. In fact, he was able to get the state-run Yugoslav television station to twice broadcast Bernard Nathanson's anti-abortion film The Silent Scream.
Since then, Stojan has told of his anti-abortion stance and his reversion to the Orthodox faith of his childhood to newspapers and television stations throughout Eastern Europe. In fact, he has a strong devotion to St. Thomas Aquinas and is rarely, if ever, without the saint's books―his constant reading material.
Stojan often reminds his listeners that in his Summa Theologiæ, St. Thomas wrote that human life begins forty days after fertilization. Perhaps, Stojan would opine, "the saint wanted to make amends for that error."
Today Stojan continues to fight for the lives and rights of the unborn.