Such a beautiful birthday with a visit all the way from California of my daughter, Diana, her friend Paula, and my twin-sister, Carla. ​

www.wcatradio.com/rondaview
Readers of RondaView on this Blog might like to know I am starting Sunday, May 14 at 5 PM EST every week a radio show of the same name on WCATradio.  It will involve panels, led by me, with friends of mine who were in groups I led.  To find out more about these shows go to WCATradio. Then click on Programs and then on Sunday RondaView and click on the blueish link to see what the program will be like.
Tune in, or click on demand listening once we get started to the archive and just listen, or participate in the show by conference call as explained on the web for Sunday RondaView after you click on the blue link for show info.


​

SUCH AS THE FOLLOWING:

Do you think that Jesus is only present to you
when you think to pray to him during the day and night? It seems to me that Jesus was telling me that He is always present and wants me to avert to that presence often, either to let Him speak to me to advise or encourage me, or to just be in silence closer to Him. 
​The obstacle is that I think my own thoughts, deeds, and feelings
are more important than His presence.

I am grieving the divisions in the Church. The specific grief came when talking with a Catholic about the recent University of Berkeley riots.  This person insisted they were caused not by Berkeley students but by gangs of violent people who infiltrates protests.  I realize this person associates Berkeley with peace movements, but I associate Berkeley with  rebellion against sexual ethics leading to abortifacient contraception and abortion.  This is especially on my mind because I read an article about how new French laws now put in jail any pro-life person who even hands out a leaflet about alternatives to abortion to someone going into a abortuary. And I am thinking that this would have happened here if Hilary had won the election. ​

BERKLEY 1967

BERKLEY 2017

Praying about the dreadful conflict within the Church, Jesus seemed to tell me this:
“There is no peace without justice and no final peace, therefore, until the Last Judgment. You should work for justice on earth, as I command you to, but all the while loving forgiveness leads to greater peace in your personal life.  Can you accept that you and this other Catholic working for different types of justice in the Church and the world often do not know where each other is coming from?   And, therefore, forgive when you feel wrongly judged by each other?”

I had this thought.  Suppose the shadow side of German love of order (ordnung) was totalitarian control?  And suppose the shadow side of French intellectualism could be cynicism.  And the shadow side of American love of freedom, license?

First of all, let me christen the launching of the
​WHY I AM STILL A CATHOLIC booklet series.  

Click HERE or on the image above for access to the project's web page.

Now here beginneth the blog:
​
In a group of mine at Holy Apostles in Connecticut, based on my book Way of Love, Dave Bastoni was a member who actually owns real live horses which he keeps in a stable on his property.  He told us often about how “healing” horses are in ways different than pets. 

Here is one of his reflections:
Horses are prey animals and use all their senses to constantly monitor their environment.
In the wild, as soon as danger is detected, they run to safety. 
For example,
​wind can be a problem for horses because of what they hear and what they cannot hear.
What they hear is noise - the wind whistling, the rustle of leaves, etc - sounds that can make them anxious and aggressive. To them, any new sound is a threat until it can be checked out.
What they can't hear usually is the sound of an approaching predator.  When things are quiet, predators can be heard before they strike.

As I watch this play out with my horses on windy days, I cannot help but relate this to our lives.  Noise can prevent us from hearing the evil that surrounds us,
and can cause us to be anxious and aggressive.
Some of us know the value of quiet time in our day. We are simply happier and healthier people if we make room for it.  A sanctuary where we can leave the noise, whether it be a room,
​a chapel or even a barn.

My horses tell me the need for quiet in their lives.  Great barn lesson for us.

Generally, I am finding that in my new less busy retired life-style, it is especially good to pay attention to little nudges such as that from the Holy Spirit.  If in doubt, do it, I now think, of course only if it is something good in itself.

Many mentors have advised me to avoid using the words conservative and liberal except about politics. Transposing these into Church lingo has the risk of making it seem
as if these are just 2 possible positions. 
Rather, a person who believes every word of the catechism, social justice, and sexual morality,
​is not a conservative but a Catholic!
Calling such a one a conservative can be a subtle way to write one off!

A surprising alleged response of Mother Mary:
Ronda: I had an awful nightmare – usual about being lost and can’t find my way home type thing and no one would help.
Mary:  Now, give the anxiety behind the dream to us.  Be thankful that nightmares release anxiety and are not true because in real life even awful crosses  have great blessings attached.

Some thoughts about immigration:
Because I am strong on concepts but poor on facts, I have difficulty weighing in on current issues.  It seems as if the “facts” are sometimes totally different as cited by people on opposite sides of the fence. 
I am basically for amnesty for non-criminal non-documented people in the US.  But I hate the idea that they have been coming over so many decades because they know that US businesses will hire them for slave labor wages instead of having to pay US citizens.
​However, one couldn’t simply equate amnesty with entitlement.  What I have read is that there are so many undocumented good people that it would take 25 years to exile them under current long law processes, and that they are the very last priority for exiling anyone.   

Here is an analogy: Suppose someone comes into my home when I am not there.  When I come home he/she begs to stay and offers to do lots of work on my house in exchange for living in my house.  I agree.  But then someone in my family needs a place to stay in exchange for working on the house.  The one who came in unbidden, surely doesn’t have a right to insist that he/she can stay.
​Now this is where I get confused. Some people insist that the undocumented are taking a huge amount of jobs at lower wages such that citizens are unemployed.  Others, however, say that citizens refuse to do the kind of work that the un-documented readily do, happy for any wages!
For what it’s worth.

I have experienced a lot of anxiety since coming to live in Corpus Christi.  Our Lady seemed to tell me this about it:
We (the Holy Family) are allowing this anxiety to surface to such an extreme so that you will be convinced you need us every minute of the day, as I taught Venerable Maria Agreda (See The Mystical City of God).

A mentor to whom I relayed this “message” said that it sounded right, but that I had to be careful not to pray that way in a mechanical sort of way, like a machine, instead of in a deep personal prayer.

A beautiful thought:  those who pray for each other a lot become one in spirit. Is this not a foretaste of eternity, how before the Resurrected Body, we will be spiritually united without seeing each other!

My twin-sister, Carla De Sola, told me this amazing story.  An order priest was asked to help in a parish by saying Mass for a person who died.  He asked for information about the dead person to use in the homily.
​“We don’t know anything about him, Father.”
When he got to the Church there was a coffin but no family or friends. About 10 minutes into the Mass, one woman came in and sat at the back, but left just before the end of the funeral, before the priest could talk to her.
The next day he found in the local newspaper a full story about the man he had buried.  The woman turned out to be a reporter to devotes some of her time to interviewing elderly street people so as to honor their personhood but publishing their stories!

From a prayer of a dying philosopher, my friend, Michael Meaney, of Corpus Christi, Texas:
“Help us to witness that the more we supernaturally believe, hope and charitably share with others, the more our helpless old age will turn into a treasure for us all, helping everyone to enter the infinite, compassionate and eternal beatitude of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”

Two books by Dr. Michael Meaney

The first volume of  the new series of pamphlets I am editing titled WHY I AM STILL A CATHOLIC is now available.  

Most younger Catholics familiar with EWTN now think of Von Hildebrand as Alice Von Hildebrand.  She is wonderful, indeed, but it is her husband, Dietrich, who was the great 20th century Catholic philosopher with whom I had the joy to study during my graduate school years.
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.