What Happened at Fatima



Leo Madigan



Adhering faithfully to the memoirs of Sister Lucia, the longest surviving seer, this book follows the events of Fatima: from the first "stirrings of the wings" in the appearances of the angels before the six apparitions of the Blessed Virgin herself, the deaths of Francisco and Jacinta Marto, the subsequent apparitions to Sister Lucia in Pontevedra and Tuy, the consecration of the world and Russia to the Immaculate Heart, the dissolution of Soviet Communism, to the beatifications of Francisco and Jacinta and the opening of the third part of the "secret" that Our Lady confided to the children in 1917.

The author, Leo Madigan, is a New Zealand writer who lives in Fatima.

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Taken from: http://www.lighthousecatholicmedia.org/store/title/what-happened-at-fatima

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Fatima: Living the message

Fatima: Living the message

In a time of lost innocence, the faith of three children inspired thousands and made the world believe in miracles. Mary's messages at Fatima have been promoted by Popes, approved by the Church, and validated by over 70,000 witnesses. Fr. Jason Brooks brings to light why Fatima is regarded by many as the most important spiritual event of the past 100 years. BONUS: Fr. Shanon Collins, retreat master and well known speaker on EWTN, explains the intended impact and opportunity of the messages of Fatima on the spiritual lives of believers today.



Click Here For Fatima Prayers

"Very enlightening. Hearing about Our Lady of Fatima both encourages and gives me renewed strength to continue with praying the Rosary with new meaning." - Breon, CA

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How is a diehard agnostic transformed into a fervent apostle of Christ? Fr. Donald Calloway, a former drug dealer, will have you on the edge of your seat as he candidly shares the amazing story of how he was unexpectedly led into the Catholic Faith and to the priesthood by God's grace and the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary. His conversion can be compared to that of St. Augustine. Formerly titled: Former Drug Dealer to Catholic Priesthood

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Made for More

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Seven Deadly Sins - Seven Lively Virtues

Seven Deadly Sins - Seven Lively Virtues

Join noted Professor of Theology and author, Fr. Robert Barron, in this revealing presentation as he sheds light on the Seven Deadly Sins - those great spiritual blocks that inhibit our relationship with God and others - and the antidote to them, the Seven Lively Virtues! Fr. Barron uses Dante's DIVINE COMEDY to expose these sinful patterns in our lives and show how they are effectively counteracted by the cultivation of virtue through the development of the gifts of the Holy Spirit. This fascinating journey shows the path that God has designed to lead us to health, happiness and holiness.

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Seven Reasons to be Catholic

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The Seven Levels of Intimacy

The Seven Levels of Intimacy

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The Lamb's Supper

The Lamb's Supper

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Which Came First - the Bible or the Church?



Matthew Arnold

Have you ever been asked where Catholic beliefs can be found in the bible? Here is a crash course in history proving that the bible is a Catholic book. Matthew Arnold offers convincing evidence showing that the Church has faithfully proclaimed and preserved the fullness of God's Word down through the centuries. This will provide all the facts you need.

 

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Taken from: http://www.lighthousecatholicmedia.org/store/title/which-came-first-the-bible-or-the-church

 

 

 

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Why Go To Mass: The Blood of the New Covenant



 

 

Reverend Alexander K. Sample

 

If you ever feel bored at Mass or think that you don?t get much out of it, this talk is for you. Most Reverend Alexander K. Sample, Bishop of Marquette, provides theological and practical reasons why we need to come to a deeper understanding of the nature of the Mass. By understanding the Mass as a sacrifice and a sacred banquet, we can tap into the transforming power offered whenever we worship.

 

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Taken from: http://www.lighthousecatholicmedia.org/store/title/why-go-to-mass-the-blood-of-the-new-covenant

 

 

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The Mass Explained

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OUTSTANDING!!! This timely presentation was filled with truth & presented in a way that was easy to identify with and understand. Anne - Youngstown, OH

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Why I am Catholic When I Could be Anything Else



 

 

Patrick Madrid

 

Patrick Madrid gives compelling biblical and historical reasons for why he embraces the faith as a lifelong Catholic. He shares valuable insights into the beauty of the Catholic Church and its claim to contain the fullness of the deposit of faith given by Christ.

 

....

 

Taken from: http://www.lighthousecatholicmedia.org/store/title/why-i-am-catholic-when-i-could-be-anything-else

 

 

 

Other Recommended Titles:

 

Seven Reasons to be Catholic

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Dr. Peter Kreeft is a world-renowned philosopher and best-selling author of over 35 books. Drawing from the treasured wisdom of such great spiritual thinkers as St. John of the Cross, Thomas Aquinas, C. S. Lewis, and Cardinal Newman, he helps us to understand why truth trumps everything! Listen as he clearly presents seven undisputable reasons why every person should indeed be Catholic.

This CD has re-started the spark I had lost! I am looking forward to listening to the other CDs I purchased! Bob - Fremont, OH

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I'm Not Being Fed

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A remarkable teaching… I will share this with many people… so full of answers! Lydia – Windham, NH

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Becoming The-Best-Version-of-Yourself

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Fantastic!! This is absolutely the one CD everyone should start with ... it is persuasive, informative, and highly valuable in educating Catholics and non-Catholics about Catholicism! I will order many and give them to family and friends. Susan - Land O Lakes, FL

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Humorous, insightful, moving, and motivating! A blockbuster in the making ? I want more of this!! Terry - Plainfield, IL

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Which Came First - the Bible or the Church?

Which Came First - the Bible or the Church?

Have you ever been asked where Catholic beliefs can be found in the bible? Here is a crash course in history proving that the bible is a Catholic book. Matthew Arnold offers convincing evidence showing that the Church has faithfully proclaimed and preserved the fullness of God's Word down through the centuries. This will provide all the facts you need.

I wish I had this CD 40 years ago! I think every Catholic family and school should have a copy! Patricia - Dunnellon, FL

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Previously titled "Building Better Families."

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The Healing Power of Confession

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This is an outstanding talk on Confession that cuts to the heart of this great Sacrament of Mercy. Father Joseph - Baltic, CT

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Praying the Rosary Like Never Before

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Awesome! Dr. Sri covers this subject in depth. I’ll need to listen to it two or three times to find all the golden nuggets hidden in this talk. Richard - Simi Valley, CA

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Pope calls for a ‘new dynamism’



 

 

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By Francis X Rocca in Vatican City

4 November, 2012
 

Winning converts to the Church, ministering better to practising Catholics and bringing lapsed members back into the fold are all parts of the multi-faceted effort known as the “new evangelisation”, Pope Benedict XVI told a group of bishops and other Church leaders on Sunday, 28 October. He was delivering his homily at a Mass marking the end of the world Synod of Bishops on the new evangelisation. The three-week gathering, which brought more than 260 bishops and religious superiors to the Vatican, along with dozens of official observers and experts, discussed how the Church can revive and spread the faith in increasingly secular societies. Pope Benedict underscored “three pastoral themes” that he said had emerged from the talks. “Ordinary pastoral ministry ... must be more animated by the fire of the Spirit, so as to inflame the hearts of the faithful,” he said, stressing the importance of the sacrament of confession, and the necessity of “appropriate catechesis” in preparation for the sacraments of baptism, confirmation and the Eucharist. The pope also called for a “new missionary dynamism” to “proclaim the message of salvation to those who do not yet know Jesus Christ”. “There are still many regions in Africa, Asia and Oceania whose inhabitants await with lively expectation, sometimes without being fully aware of it, the first proclamation of the Gospel,” he said. And as a result of migration driven by globalisation, he added, the “first proclamation is needed even in countries that were evangelised long ago”. The pope spoke also of the need to persuade lapsed Catholics, “especially in the most secular countries”, to “encounter Jesus Christ anew, rediscover the joy of faith and return to religious practice in the community of the faithful”. This effort, in particular, calls for “pastoral creativity” and use of a “new language attuned to the different world cultures”, he said. As an example of such innovation, the pope mentioned the Vatican’s “Courtyard of the Gentiles” project, which promotes dialogue between religious believers and agnostics. Referring to the day’s reading from the Gospel of St Mark, he invoked Bartimaeus – the blind man who miraculously received his sight back from Jesus and then joined him as one of the disciples – as a model for Christians in countries “where the light of faith has grown dim”. “New evangelisers are like that,” Pope Benedict said, “people who have had the experience of being healed by God, through Jesus Christ.” At the synod’s last working session, on 27 October, the pope thanked the participants for their work, including the final propositions that will eventually serve as the basis for a document of the pope’s own reflections on the new evangelisation. He said also he was making two administrative changes relevant to the new evangelisation. Responsibility for seminaries will shift from the Vatican Congregation for Catholic Education to the Congr­egation for the Clergy; and responsibility for catechesis will shift from the Congreg­ation for the Clergy to the Pontifical Council for Prom­oting New Evangelisation. The pope also congratulated the six bishops whom he will induct into the College of Cardinals on 24 November.

 

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Taken from: http://www.catholicweekly.com.au/article.php?classID=1&subclassID=3&articleID=11124&class=News&subclass=CW%20World

Collective Wisdom of Catholic Women



Colleen Carroll Campbell: A different brand of liberated woman

 

September 13, 2012 12:00 am • By Colleen Carroll Campbell

 

 

Enlarge Photo

Thanks to President Barack Obama's contraceptive mandate and Catholic concerns about its impact on religious liberty, Catholic women have emerged as this year's most coveted and scrutinized swing voters. At last week's Democratic National Convention, they heard copious testimonials about Obama's pro-woman credentials. Particularly pointed were the appeals from Caroline Kennedy, who invoked her Catholic faith while slamming abortion restrictions supported by the U.S. bishops, and activist nun Sr. Simone Campbell of NETWORK, who became famous this year for blasting the Vatican in the wake of a doctrinal assessment that faulted her organization for failing to faithfully represent Catholic teaching.

The convention's impact on Catholic women voters remains to be seen. But its constant repetition of righteously indignant references to "women's rights" and "choice" reinforced the dominant cultural narrative that a woman's freedom is defined primarily by what she rejects: unwanted children, outmoded ideas about the importance and meaning of marriage and retrograde religious doctrines that call her to subordinate her desires to the demands of others. Shared sacrifice is fine in the form of a more progressive tax code, it seems; but when applied to decisions such as whether to welcome a baby whose conception was unplanned, calls to self-sacrifice are an invitation to oppression.

To be fair, this negative view of freedom is not only the province of Democratic partisans or abortion-rights activists. It is the default view in America today, one that confronts Catholic women at every turn in their lives. When making decisions about love and sex, marriage and motherhood, careers and care for aging parents, the message we hear from our popular culture is the same one, in muted form, that we heard from the podium in Charlotte. Strong, joyful and liberated Catholic women do exist, we are told, but such women generally achieve freedom in spite of their church and its traditions, not because of them.

For many women in my generation, that message is so familiar that any examples to the contrary are perceived as shocking, scandalous — and more than a little intriguing. That was certainly my reaction during my college days when, bored with the campus party scene and dissatisfied by the stifling materialism of the secular feminist philosophers I was studying, I cracked open a biography of St. Teresa of Avila. The life story of this 16th-century Carmelite mystic, writer and reformer immediately grabbed my attention.

I was struck by the way Teresa combined steadfast fidelity to Catholic teachings with fearless determination to call her fellow Catholics to repentance, despite the personal and political costs. I appreciated that Teresa was no plaster-of-Paris saint: Despite a pious youth, her social-butterfly personality and weakness for status-seeking made her late-in-life conversion an improbable one. Ultimately, the mix of her natural gifts and the grace that led her to use them in service of a cause greater than self-made Teresa one of the greatest saints in church history. For me, Teresa was something more: a model of genuine freedom, the sort found not in isolation from and opposition to others but in connection, commitment and self-giving love.

Teresa was the first woman saint to capture my interest as an adult, but she would not be the last. Over the course of the next 15 years, as I wrestled with everything from my father's battle with Alzheimer's disease to my own trials in the realms of career, marriage and motherhood, I drew strength and inspiration from women saints whose lives and writings challenged me to rethink nearly everything I thought I knew about what it means to be a liberated woman. As I recount in my forthcoming book, "My Sisters the Saints: A Spiritual Memoir," I discovered that the very saints I once considered irrelevant to my modern struggles could be indispensable guides.

I am not alone. A revival of interest in female saints has begun percolating among Catholic women today. Weary of establishment feminism's emphasis on me-first autonomy and our popular culture's reduction of women to sex objects and shopaholics, many are discovering another, more radical model of women's liberation. In the women who populate the canon of saints — one that will expand again next month, when Pope Benedict XVI canonizes four new female saints, two of whom are Americans — faith and freedom are united, not opposed. Fulfillment comes from embracing one's feminine distinctiveness and equal dignity, not denying either. And fidelity to church teaching coexists with clear-eyed realism about the personal failings of individual church members and leaders, and recognition of our universal need for grace.

Liberated Catholic women were not born yesterday. And they are not found only at the podiums of political conventions or the helm of modern feminist organizations. They can be found in every corner and every era of the Catholic Church, and their centuries of collected wisdom deserve to be rediscovered by a new generation.

Colleen Carroll Campbell is a St. Louis-based author, former presidential speechwriter and television and radio host of "Faith & Culture" on EWTN.

Her website is www.colleen-campbell.com.

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Taken from: http://www.stltoday.com/news/opinion/columns/colleen-carroll-campbell-a-different-brand-of-liberated-woman/article_b36dd32b-fbe8-58a9-be27-976b607280c4.html

Pope Marks 50th Anniversary of Vatican II



By NICOLE WINFIELD Associated Press

VATICAN CITY October 11, 2012 (AP)

 

Pope Benedict XVI on Thursday marked the 50th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council — the church meetings he attended as a young priest that brought the Catholic Church into the modern world but whose true meaning is still hotly debated.
Benedict celebrated Mass in St. Peter's Square, attended by patriarchs, cardinals, bishops and a dozen elderly churchmen who participated in the council, and later will greet the faithful re-enacting the great procession into St. Peter's that launched the council in 1962.
In his homily, Benedict urged the faithful to return to the "letter" and "authentic spirit" of the council found in the Vatican II documents themselves, rather than rely on the distorted spirit promoted by those who saw in Vatican II a radical reform away from the church's tradition.
"The council did not formulate anything new in matters of faith, nor did it wish to replace what was ancient," Benedict said from the steps of St. Peter's. "Rather, it concerned itself with seeing that the same faith might continue to be lived in the present day, that it might remain a living faith in a world of change."
The anniversary comes as the church is fighting what it sees as a wave of secularism erasing the Christian heritage of the West and competition for souls from rival evangelical churches in Latin America and Africa. Clerical sex abuse scandals, debates over celibacy for priests, open dissent among some priests in Europe and a recent Vatican crackdown on liberal nuns in the United States have also contributed to erode the church's place in the world.

 

AP

Pope Benedict XVI blesses the faithful during the weekly general audience in St. Peter's sqaure at the Vatican, Wednesday, Oct. 10, 2012. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

The pope has spent much of his pontificate seeking to correct what he considers the misinterpretation of Vatican II, insisting that it wasn't a revolutionary break from the past, as liberal Catholics paint it, but rather a renewal and reawakening of the best traditions of the ancient church.
In that vein, he decided to mark the 50th anniversary of the council with the launch of a "Year of Faith," precisely to remind Christians of what the council truly taught and seek to "re-evangelize" those Catholics who have fallen away from their faith in the decades since.
He lamented Thursday that a "spiritual desertification" had advanced where people think they can live without God.
"In the council's time it was already possible from a few tragic pages of history to know what a life or a world without God looked like, but now we see it every day around us," he said, referring to the totalitarian, atheistic regimes of the 20th century. "But it is in starting from the experience of this desert, from this void, that we can again discover the joy of believing, its vital importance for us, men and women."
Benedict was the Rev. Joseph Ratzinger, a young priest and theological consultant to German Cardinal Joseph Frings when Vatican II began, and he has recently reminisced about what the council sought to accomplish, where it succeeded and where it erred.
"It was a splendid day on 11 October, 1962," Benedict wrote in a forward to a commemorative book about the anniversary published this week by the Vatican newspaper. "It was a moment of extraordinary expectation. Great things were about to happen."
Indeed, by its conclusion in 1965, the council had approved documents allowing for the celebration of Mass in the vernacular rather than Latin, and revolutionizing the church's relations with Jews, Muslims and people of other faiths.
Yet as great as that document on relations with other faiths was, Benedict wrote, a "weakness" has emerged in the ensuing years in that "it speaks of religion solely in a positive way and it disregards the sick and distorted forms of religion" that have become all too apparent.

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Taken from: http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/pope-marks-50th-anniversary-vatican-ii-17449698