Fulton Sheen’s Beatification Cause To Start Again

Towards Beatification: Archbishop Fulton Sheen

The cause for the beatification of Fulton Sheen, a great man of God this blog has written about on several occasions (try here and here, or perhaps here), is now to be started again after a strange interruption due, in its essence, to a controversy about where his mortal spoils should rest (with New York having allegedly verbally promised to allow the tomb to be transferred to Peoria,then allegedly not delivering on the promise and so endangering the shrine project therein conceived, with the result that Peoria’s diocese stopped the procedure altogether).

It is a pleasure to read that a man who was almost forgotten when he died, and considered a part of an old church not worth wasting time about, is now not only safely marching toward beatification, but even the object of a tomb controversy like we have in Italy for our Divino Poeta, Dante Alighieri. This clearly shows not only that his message is now – after the dust of the Vatican II madness has clearly settled – properly read and listened to again (just make a google video search, or go on youtube, and stun; or visit Amazon for vast choice of re-printed books) but that it is clearly anticipated that his remains will become a mass attraction and source of great prestige; a prestige that evidently both Peoria and New York claim as their own.

Personally, I am unlikely to ever land in Peoria, whilst I will (God pleasing) probably have further occasions to visit St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan. Having said that, the idea of a national shrine attracting people from all the country – and, surely, from abroad – to kneel and say a prayer in front of the tomb of this great man is sweet even from the distance.

I allow myself to see in this a further sign of the times, and ask myself the rhetorical question whether, say, twenty-five years ago a shrine to his memory – and attendant tomb controversy – would have been very likely. How was that? Oh yeah….

The times they are a’ changing…

Mundabor

Pope Pius XII And The Allies: New Revelations From “Pave The Way”

Slandered, and victorious in the end: Pope Pius XII, "Pastor Angelicus"

I have already written about Pave The Way, a meritorious Jewish foundation making an excellent work of rehabilitating the unjustly slandered Pastor Angelicus among Jews and non-Jews alike.

Unfortunately, the massive material gathered by them now requires subscription. But Pave The Way – an organisation with extensive access to the Vatican archives – has now released an additional document, revealing that the Allies themselves had asked Pope Pius XII to stay silent about the german deportations of Jewish from Hungary, to avoid the Pope denouncing, whilst doing so, the massacres perpetrated by the Russians.

Notice that whilst the Germans were deporting, the Russians were raping and the Allies were politicking, the Vatican was saving 25,000 Jews from Budapest alone through their vast net of religious institutions and brave helpers.

This documents reveals a typical Pius XII: a shrewd diplomatician forced to move in extremely difficult times; doing all he can to help the oppressed whilst at the same time paying attention not to do anything which might be of damage to the oppressed themselves – one can easily imagine what would have happened in France, in Poland, perhaps in occupied Italy if he had openly and frontally attacked the Nazi regime on the holocaust – and to his Catholic fold alike.

What once more emerges, is a Pope admirably mixing courage, intelligence, prudence and diplomacy.

What a splendid Pope we had, and how fitting that this great man be, in the mad decades that followed his death, be slandered from the anti-Catholic and anti-Christian wolves.

We already know that the beatification prayer for his beatification mass has been already approved. This makes his beatification, to all practical purposes, only a matter of when. But I do think that another cry is here appropriate:

Santo subito!!

Mundabor

“Allahu Akbar”, Say The Episcopalians

This is not a joke; just, I am afraid, the last idea of some idiot Episcopalian who has completely forgotten what he should stand for.

Read here about this lates Episcopalian exploit. Cupio dissolvi at its best.

And if you happen to be one of those misled souls, do yourself a favour and convert to some Christian organisation (I would suggest the Only Church; the only one founded by Christ) before it’s too late.

Mundabor