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Padre Pio was the first priest to bear the stigmata of Christ. For fifty years of his priesthood he had an intimate union with God through the Eucharist. His greatest act in life was not the miraculous cures, healings and conversions attributed to him, but rather his service at the altar offering the holy sacrifice of the Mass where he was one with Christ crucified.

Downloadable Palm OS compatible directory of over 6400 Eucharistic Adoration locations throughout the United States, complete with maps, addresses, phone numbers, and hours of adoration.

As Bishops of Rome, the Popes have succeeded St. Peter as visible heads of the Church on earth. From Peter on, over the centuries, the Bishops of Rome have been thus recognized by all believing Catholics. The Pope is therefore called the Vicar of Christ because he has received from the Divine Master delegated authority over all the People of God.

In a word, children are to be taught that their short stay here in time is only a preparation for the world that will never end. They are to be trained for heaven. That is why the subtitle of my article to you is: "Parents for Eternal Life".

Catholics are used to attacks on their school systems from professional critics like the editors of "The New Age" or "Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State".…Things are different when the services of a respected organization like the Fund for the Republic are used for the same purpose. Supported by the Ford Foundation, the Fund is officially a non-profit educational corporation, established to promote the principles of individual liberty expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. In practice, however, it has more than once been the unwitting tool for projecting a highly doctrinaire concept of libertarianism and state control that even persons with no sympathy for the Catholic Church have criticized.

Since the dawn of Christianity, the Passion of Christ has been the deepest inspiration of the followers of Christ. His sufferings and death have been the deepest motive that believing Christians have had to follow in His bloody footsteps. What He endured out of love for us is meant to inspire us out of love for Him. No matter how young the persons whom we instruct, they are not too young to have learned the deepest lesson of life, that life means endurance and only strong love can inspire people with the strength necessary to remain faithful to the teachings of Christ from childhood to old age, and into eternity.

Penance and reparation are the consequence of sin. Or again, penance and reparation are the price we have to pay for our own and other people's sin. Penance and reparation, finally, are what God requires from sinners as a condition for showing them His mercy.

During his first visit to the United States, Pope John Paul II pleaded with the bishops to do something about the drastic drop in confessions in many American dioceses. "In the face of a widespread phenomenon of our time, namely that many of our people who are among the great numbers who receive Communion make little use of confession, we must emphasize Christ's basic call to conversion. We must also stress that the personal encounter with the forgiving Jesus in the sacrament of Reconciliation is a divine means which keeps alive in our hearts and in our communities, a consciousness of sin in its perennial and tragic reality, and which actually brings forth, by the action of Jesus and the power of His Spirit, fruits of conversion in justice and holiness of life (Address to the Bishops of the Episcopal Conference of the United States, October 5, 1979)."

"For several years I have been counseling persons dedicated to Pentecostalism, mainly priests, religious, and seminarians. And on Palm Sunday of this year I preached at the First Solemn Mass of a priest who is deeply involved in the movement. My plan for today’s talk is to cover three areas of the subject, at uneven length, namely: 1) The Historical Background of the Pentecostal Movement, up to the present; 2) What are the principal elements of Pentecostalism, as viewed by Roman Catholics dedicated to the movement?; 3) An Evaluation in the form of a Critical Analysis of Pentecostalism as a Phenomenon which has developed an Ideology." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

"By every standard of comparison, the most popular prayer in existence is the Our Father. Not only Catholics and Protestants, but Mohammedans and Jews, admire the Lord's Prayer for its intrinsic beauty, and declare it to be the finest expression of Christian spirituality. An interesting sidelight on this popularity is furnished by the numerous polyglot collections of the Our Father which have been published at various times since the invention of printing. The most famous are those of John Chamberlayne in the early eighteenth century (in 150 different languages), and of Padre Hervaz (in 307 dialects and tongues), first published in 1787." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

"As we reflected on the power of the Eucharist to achieve miracles, we kept insisting that these miracles will be performed by Our Lord only if we believe." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

Fr. Hardon explains with the utmost clarity and ease how to achieve true peace. And in doing so, he also tells us how we can come to know what the will of God is for each one of us. How many people have searched for the answer to these questions?

When a person spends an hour before the Blessed Sacrament, that hour of precious time is absorbed into eternity. Time given to the Lord becomes eternity. When we give the Lord, truly present in the Blessed Sacrament, one hour of adoration, our hearts and souls are remade by him.

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Always pray for God's help and guidance before you open any PEA chapel. Then read The Real Presence Eucharistic Education and Adoration Association Perpetual Eucharistic Adoration Manual. This book is to be used as a guide to take you step by step through all the components that will help you to bring up and maintain a successful Perpetual Eucharistic Adoration chapel. Browse through and use the manual at your leisure either online or at home for free!

Here is a prepared program for those who want to establish a special spiritual event that gives recognition and blessings to their parish Perpetual Eucharistic Adoration Leadership Team.

"I think it is well worth, at least for a moment, as we get into this subject to reflect on the fact that besides the Original Sin, with which we are conceived and born, and the social sin, into which we are born, there is also our own personal sins that we have ourselves added to the sins of mankind." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

"No less than a good angel was sent from God to release Peter by angelic strategy from certain death; so another surprisingly good angel was the immediate miraculous cause of the death of Herod. The angels of God are engaged in two kinds of protection of human beings on earth. They are commissioned to deliver the servants of God from the harm which their enemies wished to cause them, but good angels are also used by the Lord to destroy those who are enemies of the servants of God." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

A body in the Methodist tradition with a strong emphasis on the Wesleyan principles of sanctification of believers and evangelistic missionary work. In 1897 Martin Wells Knapp, a Methodist minister in Cincinnati, Ohio, organized the International Apostolic Holiness Union to restore the primitive spirit of John *Wesley on "apostolic practices, methods, power and success." Twenty-five years later the International Holiness Church (derived from the Union) joined with the like-minded Pilgrim Church of California to become the Pilgrim Holiness Church.

Is it realistic to talk about Christian unity except in the broad, far-off sense of praying that someday the divided Christian world might come together again? After all, there have been divisions among Christians since the time of the Apostles; the great Eastern Schism which drew the Oriental churches away from Rome occurred 900 years ago and the Protestant Reformation took place in 1517. Humanly speaking, then, we should be pessimistic about the future and resign ourselves to disunity, that in spite of the will of Christ Who prayed "that they all may be one," Christianity will remain dismembered and there is no prospect of changing the unchangeable. But something revolutionary has happened.

Defections from the Catholic Church are as old and familiar as the Church itself, going back to the first century of the Christian era. In the United States the problem of leakage is recognized as an established fact and appropriate measures are being taken to control it. While the number of defections is not so great as the Protestant Press would have us believe, it is large enough to merit serious consideration.

Yes, it is from the Eucharist that all of us receive the grace and strength for daily living--to live real Christian lives, in the joy of knowing that God loves us, that Christ died for us, and that the Holy Spirit lives in us.

Pope John Paul II about Eucharistic Adoration: "I hope that this form of perpetual adoration, with permanent exposition of the Blessed Sacrament, will continue into the future."

"Biographers of Pius XII record that his devotion to the Blessed Virgin can be traced to the earliest days of his boyhood. He and his brother Francesco attended ginnasio classes in a private school on the Via de' Ginnasi, near the Jesuit Church of the Gesu in Rome. Next to the tomb of St. Ignatius, on the gospel side, is the chapel of Madonna della Strada, built around the picture of Our Lady to which St. Ignatius was specially devoted Before and after school hours, young Pacelli used to go into the Gesu to pour out his heart in prayer before the miraculous image. Sometimes he stayed so long that he was late in coming home. But his mother never worried about him. "I suppose he is with the Madonna della Strada again," she would say. Once she asked him what he was doing in the chapel all the time. "I pray and tell Mary everything," he answered simply." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

This must be the strangest title for a lecture, "The Popes and the Catholic Discovery of America." What makes it strange is that for many people, the last terms they would associate are "Popes" and "America." Not only that, but the last ideas they even want to conceive is the "papacy" having anything to do with "independent" nations like the United States of America. Yet the facts of history show that the Bishops of Rome had far more to do with the New World discovered by Columbus than most people realize. - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

We distinguish between natural poverty and supernatural poverty. The natural poverty which is binding by the natural law, requires that we respect other people’s property, whatever they own; that we not only do not steal with hands, we do not even steal with our hearts, otherwise known as greed or covetousness.

"Certainly, the Gospels were meant to be lived not only in first century Palestine, but in twentieth century North America. The crucial question is how. The following are some directives. While referring directly to poverty, their underlying principles apply equally to the practice of Christian chastity and charity. Along with poverty, they form the triad of virtues that are mainly on trial in the affluent, sexual and self-preoccupied societies of our times." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

The practice of penance is simply living out the virtue. Where the virtue is the divinely endowed power, the practice is our exercising this power. Of course, we still need grace to practice penance, but nobody is going to do it for us. We must practice. God gave us the virtue, but then we have to use the penitential energy received. We must decide that we are sinners and act accordingly.

"…chastity has been called the difficult virtue and Christ's teaching on chastity the difficult commandment. But that is an understatement. When Christ told us that, ‘without me you can do nothing,’ He meant two things. He meant that without the possession of His grace in our souls no one can reach heaven. He also meant that without grace we cannot practice virtues which He told His followers are necessary to remain in His friendship." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

"In the present meditation we plan to again ask ourselves the three basic questions: what, why, and how. What are the principle forms of prayer? Why must we pray? And then, this being a retreat, how can we improve our practice of prayer? First then the main forms or kinds of prayer. The Church’s tradition distinguishes not just four but five principle forms of prayer. The adoration of submission, the prayer of adoration of love, the prayer of thanksgiving, the prayer of petition and the prayer of expiation." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

"Without prayer we will lose the divine life we possess, and more obviously, we shall not grow in the life we already have. In other words, no prayer, no salvation…we need to pray…because we have a fallen human nature…" - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

"When we speak of the Blessed Sacrament, we can mean the Real Presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist or the Holy Communion that we receive during the Eucharistic Liturgy. And the language of Catholicism does not separate the two, even while it distinguishes them. My present purpose is to look as closely as we can at one practice of Catholic piety that represents a real development of doctrine in the history of the Church, namely the practice of praying before the Blessed Sacrament, either exposed on the altar or reserved in the tabernacle." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

In the present conference I suggest that we ask two questions. What is prayer before the Blessed Sacrament? What are we talking about? And then, why is prayer before the Blessed Sacrament? What are we talking about? And then, why is prayer before the Blessed Sacrament so important in the spiritual life of the priest, the religious and the believing faithful Catholic?

"I know that numerous popular devotions held in church before the Blessed Sacrament have been swept away as by a tornado. I know that in the laudable effort to highlight the Eucharistic Liturgy and therefore emphasize the altar, the tabernacle has been almost put out of sight, hidden away, as though Christ's Eucharistic Presence continuing after Mass and between Masses were something to be apologized for. I know there are speakers and writers who say things about the Real Presence which obscure the fact that Jesus Christ is really, truly and substantially present in the Blessed Sacrament not only during Mass or at Communion time but all the time, as long as the sacred elements remain." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

No doubt many people, maybe most people, most of the time when they pray are asking God for a favor, whether something they want, or to be protected from something they don't want. But is that all there is to prayer, or more exactly, is this the highest form of prayer in which we can engage, the prayer in which we tell God, "Lord, come to my assistance; make haste to help me"? - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

The subject of our conference is really a statement of two mysteries of our faith: We were redeemed by the Precious Blood of Jesus Christ, and we are now living in the Age of Martyrs. Our purpose in this conference will be to briefly explain each of these two mysteries and show how they are related.…Certainly we need the strength that Jesus merited for us by shedding His blood on the cross. But, if we dare say it, Jesus needs us to supply, as St. Paul says, what is wanting in the sufferings of Christ. What are we being told? Did not Christ’s death redeem the world? Yes, His death redeemed the world, but conditionally. What is the condition? The condition is that we unite our sufferings with His, our crosses with His, our blood in body or spirit with His.

Our present conference is on the Precious Blood of Christ. As you know, we are reflecting on the principal attributes of Christ which Father Gerald identifies as the foundation stones for the imitation of Christ. He saw the most fundamental premise for the imitation of Christ. - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

Immediately we must distinguish between Catholic home education as such, and the education which Catholic parents are to give their children at home. While our focus here is on the first understanding of Catholic home education, we dare not ignore what is of the essence of our faith, namely, that parents must, the imperative is a revealed truth, must give their children a thorough Catholic education at home.

How is Christ the truth and the light of the believing soul? He is our truth and light because He has revealed to us, through the Church, those mysteries which until His time were hidden from the beginning of the world. What are we saying? We are saying that the truth and light of Christ is the truth and light that is Christ. His revelation of Himself to us is the knowledge we cannot do without if we are to see what life is all about, what suffering is all about, what death is all about and what life after death is all about.

"My purpose then in this conference is to do two things but treat them more or less together. To spell out in some detail the Church's teaching on the duty of priests to proclaim the message of salvation and then as we go along to identify what responsibility this places on priests if they are to live up to the Church's, which means Christ's, high expectations." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

In this conference, Fr. Hardon asks and answers what the Church's official doctrine is on the role of the priest and faithful in the sacrament of Penance, why there is a drop in confessions, and what the Church expects of her priests as administrators of this sacrament.

"Before dealing at length with the meaning of the priesthood in the Catholic Church, there is value in first looking at the priesthood in general, as revealed to us by God in the Sacred Scriptures, because today in so many circles there is such widespread confusion. People are being told that priests are really no different from the rest of the faithful. They are being told that at most priests are only ministers of the Gospel. Yet they have learned over the years that the priesthood is the sublimest dignity that God can confer on a human being." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

"Over the centuries volumes have been written about the dignity of the priesthood. Saints and scholars have published literally hundreds of volumes on the subject. But this much I can say. There is no human dignity more exalted. There is no heavenly vocation more sublime than to be called to share in the priesthood of Jesus Christ. What makes this state of life so exalted is its share, literally in the life and death of the Son of God." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

"The priesthood in the Catholic Church is identified with many things because over the centuries in the Church's history there have been priests engaged in a variety, a bewildering array of enterprises. The main reason he has been ordained is because of the Eucharist. So true is this that if we would specify the heart of the priesthood we would have to say it is the Eucharist: the Eucharist as Presence, and the Eucharist as Sacrifice." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

"Here, then, is the one important thing, or at least the principal thing that the man of today expects of the priest: to bring God into our lives and, in particular, to accomplish reconciliation between us and the all merciful God, to give us the Bread of Life and thus enable us to live in the Absolute." - John Cardinal Wright

By now, there must be as many definitions of the priesthood as there are dictionaries in print. But in the Catholic Church, the priest exists for one main purpose: to offer the Sacrifice of the Mass.So true is this that, without the priesthood, there would not only be no Sacrifice of the Mass. There would be no Catholic Church. This may sound strange, even exotic. But the fact of life is that God became man in order to sacrifice Himself on the Cross by dying for the salvation of the world. Having died once on Calvary, He continues offering Himself in every Mass so totally that He would be willing to die every time that Mass is offered.

"One of the most heartening features of the ecumenical movement among Christians separated from Rome is their re-examination of the status of the priesthood in the full concept of the Church, and their sincere desire to restore something of that priestly heritage which they lost at the time of the Reformation." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

"…The Mass, being in the vernaclular, now brings out more clearly than ever the intimate participation of the faithful in the Holy Sacrifice. …They [the faithful] participate in the priesthood. The question is how? It is worth going into this subject because it is part of divine revelation." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

"No words of mine, nothing I could say, if I spoke for fifty years, would be too clear, that we are living in the age of martyrs. Only one mistake we can make is to think this is exaggeration or some kind of pious fancy. I wish to concentrate, for the reasons we already have said, on the priesthood - it is a living martyrdom today - and on the fact that we have lost so many thousands of priests…What are some of the forces at work?" - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

Rather surprisingly perhaps, St. Ignatius makes a great deal of the appearances of Christ after the resurrection. He recounts no less than fourteen appearances.…Not coincidentally, the last gospel has a whole last chapter devoted to Christ’s appearing to Peter and conferring on him the primacy.

The purpose here is more theoretical, namely, to review just two aspects of the Incarnation - the hypostatic union and the Holy Eucharist - to see how this transcendent mystery can become more intelligible to students, who need to know a great deal about the doctrine if they are ever to become the supernatural men of character envisioned by Pius XI as the fruit of Catholic education.

"The future of the pro-life movement throughout the world depends on the Roman Catholic Church. To know this is to begin to understand the real issues underlying the wanton murder of over 50 million unborn children every year. To believe this is also to see some hope of stemming the tide that has made the 1900s the most homicidal century in human history." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

"It all seems to have happened so suddenly. As late as 1960, few would have dreamed that such complete reversal of policy on the age for first Confessions could take place in so short a time. What makes the situation still less intelligible is that nothing in the sixteen documents of the Second Vatican Council gave warning of what to expect. There are many theories to explain it. Yet theory alone would never explain the unprecedented decline in Confessions, of children and adults, that we have been witnessing since about 1965. Someone must have started a movement which others imitated, and rationalization followed." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

Whenever St. Paul is referred to without identifying him, he is simply called the Apostle. He was so completely identified with the mission of preaching Christ that his name and the apostolate are almost synonymous. No one in the Church’s history is more worthy of the title Apostle, because no one more than he zealously proclaimed Christ to the world. He is called Apostle of the Gentiles. It means Apostle of the world.

"First, by way of long introduction. I don’t believe anyone has any question about the need for retrieving, recalling, reconverting millions of lapsed Catholics throughout the world and at least hundreds of thousands, I would submit, even millions, in our own country. In one large diocese after another, parishes are closing. Catholics schools are down to a fraction of what they had been even twenty years ago. The millions of young people, once-believing Catholics, who no longer either attend Mass or receive the sacraments." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

Who, then, are the “men of good will” to whom the angels on Christmas morning promised peace? They are those whose wills are good because they are ready and willing to do whatever the Creator expects of them.

At least one Catholic professor in a large non-sectarian university on the West Coast makes it a point to discourage Catholic students from entering the institution where he teaches. Or if they have already entered, he urges them to withdraw as soon as possible. On one occasion he confided to a friend of the writer: "If a Catholic can keep his faith after spending one year in this university, I consider it a miracle. Naturally speaking it can’t be done."

By engaging in dialogue with Catholics, Protestants would awaken to the obsolescence of their imagery and be forced to examine (and confess) the essential discontinuity of their historical background. They might discover, with Paul Tillich, that the strength of Protestantism lies not in its history but in the freedom to pass judgment on "every man and every moment, every document and every impulse, to reveal the partiality of every apprehension of divine reality"; and therefore to condemn any human agency or institution which pretends to speak as the vicegerent of God.

After the Protestant Reformation those who broke with the Church still retained many terms from their Catholic tradition. However, their theology and forms of church government gave the terms a different meaning for them. In addition, developments within their churches gave rise to new terms. Thus the Protestant vocabulary includes a blending of words familiar to the Catholic tradition, but used in unfamiliar ways and of terms exclusive to Protestantism.

Contrary to the negative implication of the word itself, Protestantism is a positive affirmation of religious belief based on the principles of the Reformation. As a system of teaching, worship, and practice, it is frequently described as any form of Christianity, which is not Catholic.

In its nature and in its development, Protestantism in the United States differs widely from its counterpart in other countries. The growth of a great many separate and independent churches has produced a distinctively American variety of denominations. This, in turn, has stimulated mergers and federations that have become a pattern for the world movement toward union among the various churches.

The multiplicity of separate and independent Protestant churches in the United States is something unique in the modern world, which Protestants themselves are the first to deplore….On the one hand, the problems facing ecumenism are magnified many times in America - so deep have been the ravages of religious liberalism outside the Catholic Church. On the other hand, in spite of these obstacles, if any measure of success is achieved in the United States, then the world ecumenical movement may take heart and not despair that unity is impossible.

In the present study we shall examine this "unhappy division" through Protestant eyes, allowing their own church leaders to make the evaluation. In this way we can better appreciate the gigantic problem which faces the ecumenical movement, not only in the United States, but wherever Christianity has broken away from the unity of Roman Catholicism.

A brief description of the ecumenical movement in the United States would be to call it the effort to join a divided Protestantism into some semblance of religious unity. Protestant sectarianism has been given many epithets by the critics from its own ranks, but none more critical than the expressive term - sin. Without the suspicion of love for Roman Catholicism, the multiplication of churches instead of allegiance to one Church is judged to be a crime against Christ Himself.

"The spiritual riches of the Psalms are proved from experience, which now spans some three thousand years of religious history. The Psalms were the principal prayers of the Chosen People by which they expressed their faith and hope, their joys and their sorrows to Yahweh, and through which they mainly prayed as a believing community." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

My plan for this conference is first to briefly explain how secular psychology paved the way for introducing sex indoctrination into elementary education in the United States. Then, in sequence I will point out some of the principal departures from historic Christian principles which have penetrated sex education even in nominally Catholic institutions.

The new Code of Canon Law could not be more clear. It declares that, "The public witness to be rendered by religious to Christ and the Church entails a separation from the world proper to the character and purpose of each institute" (Canon 607, §3). There are seven basic elements in this canon and each deserves careful explanation. On the faithful living out of these elements depends the future well-being and even survival of religious life in countries like the United States.

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