Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Fasting this Friday

In response to the HHS Mandate and all the garbage it entails, the Bishops of the U.S. have asked all Catholics to fast on Friday, March 30th. The fast is to be what we are typically asked to carry out on Ash Wednesday, Good Friday, and January 22nd, the Anniversary of Roe v. Wade.

See here to read the statement by the Bishops

In searching for the link from the Bishops, I stumbled across another fast that was declared in history on March 30th - by President Abraham Lincoln!!! It is a MUST read. I put an excerpt below.

We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven. We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us!

It behooves us then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.

Now, therefore, in compliance with the request, and fully concurring in the views of the Senate, I do, by this my proclamation, designate and set apart Thursday, the 30th. day of April, 1863, as a day of national humiliation, fasting and prayer. And I do hereby request all the People to abstain, on that day, from their ordinary secular pursuits, and to unite, at their several places of public worship and their respective homes, in keeping the day holy to the Lord, and devoted to the humble discharge of the religious duties proper to that solemn occasion.

All this being done, in sincerity and truth, let us then rest humbly in the hope authorized by the Divine teachings, that the united cry of the Nation will be heard on high, and answered with blessings, no less than the pardon of our national sins, and the restoration of our now divided and suffering Country, to its former happy condition of unity and peace.

In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the City of Washington, this thirtieth day of March, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the Independence of the United States the eighty seventh.



WOW! WOW! WOW! That's all I can say! What if our President said something like this today!

Click here to read the address in its entirety

3 comments:

  1. Father, this is awesome! I've got to post this on FB. Thanks! Suzanne McConnell

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  2. Is the January 22nd request under the pain of sin, because I haven't done it before? Uh-oh.

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  3. don't hold your breath expecting any such proclamation from the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

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