Is this your typical Catholic Parish?

By Michael Voris

What is the Church of Nice? It is a worship community that sort of looks Catholic and OFFICIALLY  is Catholic – but at the end of the day, authentic Catholicism has been sucked out of it in almost every possible way.
There are all kinds of signs you can look for to determine if your parish is a Church of Nice.
The priest will never preach on anything controversial related to your eternal life, like homosexuality, abortion, reception of Holy Communion as a divorced and remarried parishioner.
He will never utter a word about the immortal danger your soul is in if you are co-habiting and or having sex outside of marriage or using contraception INSIDE marriage.
Times for Confession will be sparse and practically none of the parishioners ever go –including you.
If you have been going to your Church of Nice parish for some years, you will occasionally have the thought come to your mind that it seems like less and less people attend.
You will also notice that there are nowhere near as many young adults or families as you remember from years ago. But the music director will bust out in a loud song rich with lyrics about the community, instead of God, and you will forget your thoughts about less people in the pews.
You will also hear a strange thing from time to time about something the RCIA instructor or Religious Ed director said in class and you will think to yourself for a moment – “hmmm .. that’s odd”, but then you will go on with your business and forget about it.
Then the occasional discussion will come up with friends and family who are former Catholics who bad mouth this or that about the Church – and while you might feel quietly uncomfortable about their outbursts, you won’t say anything because, frankly, you don’t have the knowledge to respond to them because it was never told to you.
And eventually, you will allow yourself to be lulled into a false set of comfort regarding their eternal lives by buying into the ridiculous diabolical canard that – it’s not REALLY important if they are Catholic or not – after all, they’re basically good people and God understands and we are all going to Heaven anyway so not that big a deal.

If you go to a parish replete with altar girls, protestant hymns, an army of so-called “Eucharistic ministers” (which they are NOT by the way), a joke-cracking priest, a con- gregation receiving Holy Communion in their hands, warped catechesis coming from the adult and/or kids religious ed department, no substantive preaching, a congregation with more older people than younger families and no one really in between, where people around you, including you dress in clothes more suited for going to the movies than wor- shipping God, if almost the entire congregation goes to Holy Communion, and a good number of them never return to their seats afterwards, if it is customary to applaud the band or singers – then you can be pretty certain, your parish is a Church of Nice.

If you have no idea why this list of issues are problematic, then you are almost guaran- teed to belong to the Church of Nice.
If you don’t know the answers to the following basic questions, you should be concerned: What are is meant by the Four Last Things and what are they?
What is wrong about using the term Eucharistic Ministers?
What is an indulgence and why is it important to know?
Can you explain why Protestantism is a heresy? (Did you even know it IS a heresy?) What are the various mysteries of the Holy Rosary?
What does the Church mean by the term “The Real Presence”?
What is the Mass?
Can you be a “good” Catholic and still disagree with the Magisterium? Do you even know what the word Magisterium means?
Is it EVER possible to refuse to believe an infallible teaching AND still be a good Catholic?
If you can’t answer ALL of these questions – at least on some fundamental level – then you need to be very concerned about your faith life. And this is just a beginning list – it could easily have hundreds of questions on it.
What the Church of Nice gang has been so fantastic at over the past 40 or 50 years .. and this means bishops and priests .. is substituting knowledge with feelings.
In this manner , they have introduced into the faith a humanist dimension that has no place in the Church.
The same madness that goes on in the culture about not being judgmental and always making sure no one is offended has become paramount in the Church as well, thanks to the Church of Nice crowd – hence the name, Church of NICE, where everyone is always  Nice.

If you attend a parish that subscribes to the Church of Nice agenda – watch out. Your soul is in jeopardy, serious jeopardy.
It is very likely that your religious instruction is deficient, you haven’t been to confession in God knows how long, and if you have children – they are bored out of their minds and more than likely will stop attending Mass after they leave home.
These are all symptoms of a dying faith – and it can all be placed at the doorstep of the Church of Nice.
The Church of Nice is failing in spectacular fashion! It’s beginning to resemble the Rus- sian Front from the German’s perspective in World War II. It won’t be much longer be- fore the whole edifice is flat our overrun.
As the Russian forces – the Red Army – was overrunning town after town and province after province – reclaiming all that had been taken by the Nazis in the previous two years, many of the German High Command and the civilian population back in Berlin carried on as though the eastern front was a sad fact, but not one they REALLY had to worry about.
In April 1945, the first Russian tanks crashed into the heart of Berlin. It took a while, but when it happened, it was decisive and final.
This is what is happening in the Church today – the portion of the Church, which is the majority part of it, that worships at the Altar of Nice. It is being overrun and the defeat is monumental.
2000 US parishes closed in the last 20 years, 1300 of them in the past 10 years and no end of closings in sight. And why has the Church of Nice risen to such heights of power and control.
Because fallen human nature is weak. Because most people don’t like confrontation and will only occasionally do the right thing and challenge evil and wrong. Because being vi- gilant – always vigilant - exacts a cost. And because sin is attractive. And because we are lazy and slothful.
If it were not for the Catholic Church, the whole world would end up in Hell because the Catholic Church is necessary for salvation. This is its charter – to be the instrument of salvation – not merely a sign of salvation, but the actual instrument through which God works His salvific action.
When much of that Church casts aside that charter and adopts an inauthentic attitude of being the Church of Nice, then the world will go out of balance – as it has – and the eternal lives of those Church of Nice members hangs in the balance.
If you attend a Church of Nice parish – get out of it and get to a parish where you will get AUTHENTIC Catholicism – the real McCoy. If you have friends or family who need to hear this, pass it along.

Catholics Don't Do Crystals

How to Use ‘Alternative Health Practices’ Without Endangering Your Soul

Yipe!

Are you familiar with Catholic Church communities who offer Reiki healing, yoga and other modern sprituality practices? It's easily convincing, when your church community offers classes and sessions using these New Age remedies. You may practice some of these spiritual healing arts. But this article touches on the precarious position of mixing Catholic Christian religious beliefs with these ancient (and new) healing arts, and cautions you to discern spirits.

BY JUDY ROBERTS
National Catholic Register

Growing up in a family that ran a health-food business, Charlene Williams learned to eat well and heal naturally.

Today the mother of four and grandmother of four raises some of her own vegetables and fruits, shops at farmers markets, and cooks from scratch. She also eats whole grains, avoids processed foods and relies on vitamin and mineral supplements, herbs, herbal teas, and home remedies like fresh-squeezed lemon and molasses in hot water for colds and sore throats.
In addition, she goes to a chiropractor and recently saw a naturopathic doctor and bioenergetics practitioner for help with stress and lack of energy.

But, as a Catholic, Williams is careful to avoid the New Age ideas and practices widely peddled in the subculture that has grown up around natural foods and alternative health care — whether it’s the crystals and books on transcendental meditation displayed in some health-food stores, Reiki treatments offered by certain massage therapists or yoga classes at the local gym.
Williams, whose grandparents started Dietrich’s Natural Foods in their home in Toledo, Ohio, in the 1930s, told the Register she doubts consumers interested in healthy living back then would have encountered the unorthodox spiritual offerings ubiquitous in the industry today.
“As the New Age became more common in our society, I started to see in various health-food stores more things like incense and crystals,” she says. “That kind of stuff was not around when I was a kid.”

Reading about the New Age from a Catholic perspective in books like Randy England’s The Unicorn in the Sanctuary (Tan, 1990) alerted Williams to New Age and Eastern religious practices within and outside the natural-healing movement, helping her discern what is and isn’t healthy for the eternal soul.

Many times, she says, “It sounds like it’s all good, [but] the problem is that the spiritual part isn’t in line with Catholicism.”

Truer words have seldom been spoken. For, although there is much to commend in many natural-healing approaches, any practice or belief that draws from a newfangled spiritual source should raise red flags for Catholics.

Eternity vs. OblivionThe U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Doctrine recently issued guidelines for evaluating Reiki, an alternative healing technique that attempts to correct imbalances in “life energy” through the placement of the practitioner’s hands on certain parts of the body. The bishops point out that the central elements of the worldview suggested by Reiki theory belong neither to the Christian faith nor to natural science.
Given this, they conclude, Catholics who trust in Reiki are entering the realm of superstition, which “corrupts one’s worship of God by turning one’s religious feeling and practice in a false direction.”

Similarly, Father Mitch Pacwa, Eternal Word Television Network host and author of Catholics and the New Age: How Good People Are Being Drawn into Jungian Psychology, the Enneagram, and the Age of Aquarius (Servant, 1992), cautions that yoga, regarded by some as merely a form of exercise or relaxation, is in fact a religious practice with a spiritual goal: making the personality cease to exist. “That is incompatible with Christian goals,” Father Pacwa says. “As a Catholic,” he adds, “my goal is not simply to have this state of mind. My goal is union with Christ.”

During the 1970s, Father Pacwa says, he tried practicing something called “Christian yoga” that involved meditating on the words of Christ while assuming various yoga positions. But, he recalls, “The problem still remained. I was trying to attain a certain state of consciousness rather than personal union with Christ. I was not really connecting with Christ.”

Father Pacwa says to be wary of practitioners who claim to be able to balance or align chakras, energy centers along the spinal column according to kundalini yoga. Through meditation, kundalini yoga tries to awaken “the sleeping kundalini serpent” at the base of the spine to increase enlightenment.

Practitioners who say they work with chakras, Father Pacwa explains, may be mixing and matching different Asian philosophies. Besides failing to respect the integrity of and differences between each philosophy, he says, they could be wading into dangerous territory. “If you start opening up the chakras and don’t know what you are doing,” he says, “you are opening up yourself to grave danger, madness and even death. That’s according to practitioners of kundalini yoga. It’s not my interpretation.”

On the other hand, Father Pacwa says, he considers reflexology, which involves applying pressure to the feet and hands, a harmless (if questionably effective) nonmedical therapy.
His concern about alternative healing practices and methods in general is that their medical claims are often unsubstantiated — and they are sometimes used as a shill to draw people into New Age spirituality.

For example, he says, when a method does not work, a practitioner may propose a spiritual solution like past-life regression or the application of crystals to channel the universe’s energy.
“This nonsense,” he says, “will take your soul to the other side. It’s entering enemy territory.”


God’s Good Earth
Rebecca Otto of Leipsic, Ohio, a registered nurse and mother of six whose family’s health regimen includes chiropractic care, vitamin supplements and visits to a naturopathic doctor, says she is very much aware of the need to avoid anything that could become a portal into areas of spiritual warfare.

“There are good and bad spirits, and we don’t want to put ourselves in those areas,” she says, adding that she would refrain from involvement in yoga, Reiki, acupuncture and crystals, for example. “All I’ve had to hear is a few knowledgeable people on this,” she says. “There are a few areas I don’t feel it’s worth risking my soul to venture into.”


Although Otto acknowledges that there are times modern medicine is needed, her experience has shown that some alternative forms of healing work.

One of her sons, for instance, suffered from allergies to the point that he needed breathing treatments every spring and fall. The naturopathic doctor who evaluated him recommended several lifestyle changes and gave the boy a mixture of drops to take along with natural herbs. Her son improved so much, Otto says, that he only needs an occasional breathing treatment.
“God created nature, and he has given us ways to help other than [traditional] medicine,” she says.

Maryann Marshall of Lawrenceville, Ga., an herbalist who teaches online classes and has organized a Catholic herbalists group on the Internet, says she has discovered that much of natural healing was actually advanced by monks during the Middle Ages.
“The monasteries kept medicine alive through the Middle Ages,” she says. “They kept civilization alive, including medicine — and medicine was herbology. The monks had amazing herb gardens and vegetable gardens, too.”

Marshall received much of her knowledge about herbs from her Polish immigrant grandfather and, over the last 30 years, has added to what he taught her through her own research. In the process, she has often run into New Age material, something she finds both “distracting and distressing.”

As a result, she has learned not to proceed without some kind of spiritual grounding. She always prays to the Holy Spirit before doing any reading or studying and also consults a priest who is her spiritual director.

There’s lots to benefit from in natural foods and remedies, she says, but “you need a very, very, very firm foundation in the Catholic faith.”