Posted on 04/20/2014 7:48:46 AM PDT by rwa265
FARMINGTON, Mo. It is a special Easter for Wilma Whitworth, who is undergoing a spiritual rebirth, just a week before her 78th birthday.
Whitworth is celebrating her first day as a full-fledged Catholic this holiday. And shes doing so in a largely Protestant town that is undergoing a kind of Catholic revival.
St. Joseph Catholic Church, or St. Joes as the locals call it, has had 24 children and adults, ages 7 and above, convert to the faith in the past year.
There is no one answer for the rise in Catholic conversion in this town of 17,000 an hour south of St. Louis. Some point to the friendly, welcoming environment at St. Joes.
Others at least partly credit the excitement around Pope Francis, or a new emphasis on evangelism that may be behind a broader uptick in adult and youth baptisms across the Archdiocese of St. Louis.
(Excerpt) Read more at stltoday.com ...
May you have a good and blessed Happy Easter!
Congrats and WELCOME HOME!
Amen. Thanks. And no worries. I didn’t mean you. I just meant, short of martyrdom, how much more in earnest would I need to be for some of the folks here to get it? Believe me, we’re on the same page here. Protestants are not just my brothers and sisters, they’re my friends, and I’m not about to consign them to Hell. Especially because most of them, over the time I’ve known them, have been better servants of God than I have.
This past Good Friday one of my parish deacons said in the Good Friday service homily that by Christ’s death on the cross, with the words, “it is finish”, it means that the debt has been PAID IN FULL that was our sin debt.
Christianity is BOTH a faith and a relationship, PERIOD.
NO, rather a true CATHOLIC revival, thanks be to God. Having Pope Francis as Pope has been truly a blessing for the Church.
You’re right. “it is finished” , done once and for all. Paid in full. And once it was finished Jesus said “father, into your hands I commend my spirit” and then, as the King James Bible says “he gave up the ghost”. Only once it was finished could he lay his burden down.
CC
21 Baptisms at my church at last night’s Easter Vigil. I wasn’t there, but was at the 8AM Mass and our priest was proud to mention it.
The same said that he based his homily on a discovery of a tax collector’s office that found in dig in Israel that had a document from the Biblical that had the words “it is finished” or paid in full, some time back.
3 canidates, finished up their sacraments of initation of confirmation and first eucharist.
And God bless you too, ma’am!
I adopted Richard Gwyn as my St. Richard. I hope it never comes to that, but if it does, I hope to face it well.
Exactly. These converts are being converted to NewReligion, the Vatican II religion.
Or, as we say,
Et cum spiritu tuo.
No, they came home to Rome, same Catholic Church that has been around for 2,000 years.
Rome is losing the Faith.
Yet non-Catholics come home to Rome all the same, so NO, Rome has NOT lost the FAITH.
Depends what one means by "Rome" - the Mystical Body of the Church or certain "human persons" at the helm.
Correct. And I said Rome is losing the Faith. It has not lost it completely. But we’re getting there. Thank God God will not allow it to lose it completely.
"...regard 'my' Faith, not the sins of Your Church..."
What prayer is that? You’ve only given a portion of it.
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