THE LAST PUBLISHED HOMILIES OF FATHER ROBERT J. ALTIER

March 2, 2006 Thursday after Ash Wednesday

Reading (Deuteronomy 30:15-20) Gospel (St. Luke 9:22-25)

In the first reading today, Moses tells the people of Israel that he places before them a blessing and a curse, life and death. And he makes very clear that the blessing and life is going to be dependent upon their obedience to the Will of God and to His commandments.

Now there are two places that we can look to find a blessing. You can turn to God with obedience to His command and He will bless you according to the way that God does, or you can turn to the devil and he will bless you according to the way that he does. The devil’s blessing, of course, is a curse. The devil is going to make all kinds of promises about what he will do for us if we are willing to do it his way. He will promise us fortune. He will promise us all kinds of fame. He will promise us whatever it is that we want, all of the good that the world might have to offer. Jesus, on the other hand, lays out exactly what the blessing that He is offering us is all about. He says, If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow Me, and then goes on to say, Whoever loses his life for My sake will save it.

That is what we have to be about, to be able to look at what the devil is offering – who says, “Save your life in this world!” – because Jesus says if you do that you are going to lose your life for eternity. We are not living for this world but for the next, and that is where we have to set our focus. We have to make sure that we are looking at Christ and seeking to deny ourselves. That does not come easily or naturally to any of us, which is where the problem comes in because the devil’s promises are enticing. They are much more according to what we like. They are much more according to our fallen nature. But they are not according to Christ. So we have to look at what Our Lord is offering.

Never did He tell us that if we follow Him we are going to have it easy in this life, but what He promised us was eternal life. If we are willing to take up our cross and follow Him, then we have life eternal, and that is all that matters. We have to remember that our souls are immortal; no matter what, they are going to live forever. And our bodies are going to rise from the dead and they too will live forever with our souls in one of two places according to our own choice of where we are going to spend eternity. When we see it from that perspective, this life is nothing but a drop in the bucket. It is nothing but a tick on the clock. It is just a flash and it is over. If in this life we have to suffer a bit, if in this life we have to be rejected, if in this life we have to take up our cross and follow Him, then praise Him because that is the road to eternal life. But if in this life we reject the cross, if in this life we choose not to follow Him, then we are on the road that leads us to eternal condemnation.

That is why it becomes so important as we begin this holy season to be able to ask the question, not of what we want to do in this life, but where we want to spend eternity, because the path that we choose here is going to lead to one of two places. And He makes it very clear: The path that leads to hell is wide and smooth and easy, and many there are who are on it; but the path that leads to life is rough and it is narrow, and few there are who are on it. We need to choose life. We have it clearly placed before us: the blessing and the curse, life and death. We have placed before us Satan and Jesus. To choose Satan is to choose death. To choose Christ is to choose life. But the path that leads to life is the way of the cross; it is the path that Jesus walked with the Cross on His shoulders to Calvary, and through Calvary to heaven. It will be no different for us. If we are not willing to deny ourselves, to take up our cross and follow Him, we cannot be His disciples. And He told us that where He is there will His disciples be. In this life, it is on the way of the cross, so that for the next life we will be with Him in eternity.

*This text was transcribed from the audio recording with minimal editing.

Friday March 3, 2006

Reading (Isaiah 58:1-9a) Gospel (St. Matthew 9:14-15)

Our Lord tells us in the Gospel reading today that when the bridegroom is taken away then the wedding guests will fast. Well, if this is the case, we can certainly say that Our Lord has been taken. Consequently, we are called, in this holy season especially, to fast and to pray. Now the Lord makes very clear through the prophet Isaiah what kind of fast He is looking for. He says, Is this the kind of fast I wish? That you cover yourselves with sackcloth and sit in the ashes? This, rather, is the kind of fast that I wish… He goes on to talk about all the points with regard to charity and justice, to make sure that we are setting free the oppressed, breaking every yoke, sharing our bread with the hungry, sheltering the oppressed and the homeless, clothing the naked, not turning your back on your own, and so on. These are the kinds of things that He is looking for.

What we see, then, is that there are two different ways that we can deal with our fasting. For most of us, when we start to fast, if we are struggling with being hungry, we tend to get upset and angry. The Lord makes that very clear. He tells them, Your fasts end in quarreling and fighting, and striking with the wicked claw. That is not what He is looking for. When we do that, our fasting makes us turn into ourselves. But our fasting has to make us turn toward God, not toward ourselves. So the Lord is saying what He is looking for is that we get the focus off of ourselves.

The idea of fasting is self-denial, not self-indulgence. The fact that we are not indulging in food does not mean that we can indulge in all kinds of self-discovery internally, or all kinds of things with regard to the self. The Lord is looking for us to practice charity, charity toward Him and charity toward neighbor. If we are going to deny ourselves of something like food or some other point that we are fasting from, then that needs to be replaced with charity, not with another kind of selfishness. What good is self-denial if we replace it with self-indulgence? if we are practicing self pity? If we are giving into any form of selfishness, it completely defeats the purpose.

And so Our Lord is asking us to fast and to do penance. But that fasting and penance must help us get the focus off ourselves and put it where it belongs, in the places where He himself commands us: to love God and to love neighbor.

*This text was transcribed from the audio recording with minimal editing.

Dear Freepers in Christ,

I am posting a Homily here which does not appear on http://desertvoice.excerptsofinri.com .

It is the Homily for the Solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God -- 1-1-2006.

I am also posting two Links, one of the Links has all the Talks of Father Altier on the "Fundamentals of Catholicism" till Class 20.

The Other Link has all his Radio 1 minute talks on "Relevant Radio" which are in .wma format.

1) http://www.desertvoice.org/Talks/Catechism/

2) http://www.desertvoice.org/Radio/DYK/

Sunday January 1, 2006 Mary, Mother of God

Reading I (Numbers 6:22-27) Reading II (Galatians 4:4-7)

Gospel (St. Luke 2:16-21)

Homily from the Midnight Mass
(Homily from the Mass during the Day follows)

Today as we celebrate this great solemnity of the Divine Maternity of our Blessed Lady, we first of all have to understand this is a feast that tragically we do not share with many people who call themselves Christian. The vast majority of Protestant Christians do not believe that Mary is the Mother of God. They believe, in essence, in a heresy that is called Nestorianism. This is a heresy that was condemned back in the year 431. It was at the Council of Ephesus in 431 that Mary was infallibly proclaimed to be the Mother of God. And so we see that what has been continues to be. The heresies continue to be recycled and brought forth into our own day.

Yet if we look around at what is going on in our own time, we can all clearly see that things continue to get worse. It is pretty evident, if you follow anything in the news. The number of hurricanes and tropical storms set a record this year; the number of earthquakes set a record this year; the number of natural disasters is beyond what anybody can seem to comprehend. But these things are only reflecting what is going on in the spiritual order.

Remember back in 1917, Our Lady came to three little children in Fatima and she asked specifically that reparation would be made for crimes and blasphemies against her Immaculate Heart. Back in 1917, one might say, “What does that mean?” Today what we see is that the blasphemies against Our Lady are increasing and running rampant, even to the point where recently (and, I suspect, unsuspectingly) a Catholic (or so-called Catholic) publication was actually advertising some statues of Our Lady that were so completely blasphemous that I cannot even describe to you what it was they were trying to sell. Once this particular magazine caught on to what it was they were advertising, they pulled the advertisement. Unfortunately, the damage had already been done. Remember back a few years ago, there was some unfortunate soul who called himself an artist who took a picture of our Blessed Lady and flung elephant dung upon it and called it “artwork.” Someone took a crucifix and put it upside down in a bottle of urine and called it “art.” These are the kinds of blasphemies that the world has never heard of before that are going on in our own day, and they are getting worse.

We have lots of people who are denying articles of the Faith with great regularity. It is getting to the point now in our society where among those who wish to call themselves Catholic, we find ourselves to be fewer and fewer who really believe in much of what the Church actually teaches. It has become kind of a popular thing for people who want to call themselves Catholic to be interviewed by various news organizations in order to bash the Church, because the fact that they call themselves Catholic somehow gives them some sense of credibility when they want to try to undermine and deny what the Church teaches.

We see these various things that are happening around us, and all we can say is that things are getting a lot worse; they are getting a lot closer. Over the years, I have likened the situation that we are going through to a woman in labor. If you liken it to that, as we all know, in labor the labor pains get closer together and they get more intense. They are certainly doing that. They are now at a point where there are major things happening less than every two weeks in the world. That is getting close. Now the birth of the baby does not come until there is no distinction between the labor pains, one on top of the next so that the labor is constant. We have not gotten quite to that point, but it is coming.

If we look at some of the bizarre things going on in the world that have happened over the last year, back around Easter time there is a convent of nuns over in England that, once again, put up something they call “art.” It was down in their crypt where they bury the nuns; and in the very place where they put the nuns for the wake, they put up an entire “art project” (or whatever you want to call it) that was devoted to what they called “Saint Judas of Iscariot.” They claimed that Judas did not really betray Jesus, that he did not kill himself, but rather he was killed by the other apostles, and so therefore he is really a saint–but the Church has “covered all that up over the years.” This is in a Roman Catholic convent of nuns.

Just in the last couple of weeks, we have seen all kinds of weird things going on: a man out in California who heads up some group that is determined to try to eliminate human beings from the face of the earth, telling us that the biggest problem on earth right now is humanity, that all of these various species of animals and plants that are going extinct or are endangered is all because of us, so plants and animals would succeed quite well if we would just get rid of human beings. I mentioned that on the radio and suggested that perhaps it would be best if he started with himself because his recommendation is that people start killing themselves in order to reduce the population of humanity so we can allow the plants and animals to grow. You see the idiocy of the things that are going on, but it keeps getting worse. Just a couple of days ago over in Israel, in a very, very beautiful place called Eilat (if you look at a map of Israel, at the very southern tip of Israel right at the Red Sea before you cross the border into Egypt, that is where Eilat is) a woman married a dolphin. I am not kidding. This is the kind of nonsense that we have going on in the world.

Now things are going to continue to get worse. I just heard recently (but have not been able to confirm) that this unfortunate character who runs around calling himself “Maitreya” has manifested himself just in the last couple of days out in California. Maitreya is a Buddhist word that means “Messiah.” He is calling himself “The Teacher,” “The Awaited One,” the Second Coming of Christ, the one whom the Jews are waiting for, the return of Mohammed, the return of Buddha, the return of Zoroaster, and every other goofy clown who has come along claiming himself to be anything of importance. This man is a figure of the Antichrist. He claims that when everything goes belly-up in the world, which is to come fairly soon, he will speak telepathically to the mind of every person on the face of the earth. And if you are watching TV, you will see his ugly mug on the TV because every network in the world, he claims, will be united at that moment and show his face on the TV set. Whether you are watching TV or not, you will hear him speak to you, so he claims. It is purely diabolical. And remember that just a few months ago a Jewish rabbi who is the head rabbi of the Kabbala, which is the occult group over in Israel (they are not true Jews; they are occultists), publicly announced–it was verified on the radio; in fact, he signed a form that was in the newspaper over in Israel–that the Messiah is now alive and is living in Israel. If the occult Jews think the Messiah is alive, my first thought is “This must be a figure of the Antichrist.” These are the not the ordinary Jews who are suggesting this; these are people who are into some very strange things. So we see that the time we are living in continues to get worse. We continue to progress forward.

Now the thing that we can do, of course, is to panic when we look at some of these things, but there is no need to panic. All you need to do is remember what Saint Therese of Lisieux pointed out with regard to the apostles. When Jesus was sleeping in the boat with the apostles and the water was coming over the sides and the apostles were panicking because of the storm, Jesus was sound asleep. They woke Him up, and Our Lord rebuked them and said, You of little faith. But Saint Therese simply commented on it and said, “Did they really think with Jesus in the boat that the boat was going to sink?” That should be self-evident to any of us. In this last year, we have witnessed the death of one of the greatest Popes who has ever lived and the election of a new Pope. Recall that this new Pope, before he was elected, went to the Coliseum in Rome on Good Friday (just a couple of weeks before his election to the papacy) and in one of the reflections of the Stations of the Cross he said that right now the Church is like a boat that is taking in water on all sides. It is sinking. But Jesus is in the boat, and as long as you are in the boat with Jesus, the boat will not sink. Jesus promised us that the jaws of hell will not prevail against the Church. That is a guarantee from the mouth of Almighty God. So as long as you are in the boat, you have absolutely nothing to fear.

Right now it will appear to many that Jesus is sound asleep. If you have been watching, it will seem that people’s prayers do not seem to have much effect. It is a constant complaint that we hear. You will notice there are all kinds of new and bizarre diseases that people are coming down with, things that doctors cannot seem to explain. The suffering that people are enduring is becoming more and more manifest by the day, and getting more extreme. These are great gifts from God. And while it may not seem that He is answering our prayers or listening, He is indeed. But perhaps He is sleeping in the bow of the boat. If He is asleep, why do we want to wake Him up? He is God; the boat will not sink. All we need to do is have faith and stay in the boat. Do not be stupid and try to jump out of the boat and see if you can swim through the waves and the wind and all the enemies that are out there. The waters are shark-infested and it is not going to be a pleasant swim. Stay in the boat and you have absolutely nothing to fear.

In the first reading that we heard, we heard about a blessing that God was going to give to His chosen people. In that blessing, it says: The Lord bless you and keep you! The Lord let His countenance shine upon you, and be gracious unto you! This is exactly what is happening. We need to understand that this is a great gift. It is such a gift to be alive today. People look back at things and say, “Oh, wouldn’t it have been nice to be alive in this time or in that time!” No, this is the best time in history to be a Catholic. There is no better time ever to be a Catholic. We are going to see things that, as Our Lord said, kings and prophets longed to see but did not see them. We are going to see in our day events that people have sought after for centuries and begged God to intervene, but He has chosen us to be alive at this time. You can be guaranteed that if He has chosen us to be alive at this time He will also provide every single grace we need to be able to be faithful, every single grace we need to be able to become saints. Never in the history of Christianity has there been a better time to be a saint, and God has chosen us to be able to do just that.

Now the question, of course, is: Are we willing to cooperate with Him? That is the problem. When you think about what was happening with the apostles out on the Sea of Galilee, their little tiny boat was pretty small compared to the sea. So too, the Church might appear to be small by comparison to all of the wind and the waves and attacks and enemies and everything else that surrounds us. It might seem to be a better thing to jump ship and join the enemy. Our Holy Father has told us that the remnant is going to be exceedingly small, much smaller, he said, than what most people would ever assume. And so, number one, what that means is do not trust yourself. It is easy to sit here today and say, “Oh, I won’t jump ship!” Do not count on it.

The only way we are not going to jump ship is if we keep our focus on Jesus. The only way–and I mean the only way–we are going to remain faithful is if we pray. If you do not know Jesus Christ present in the Blessed Sacrament, you will not make it. It is just that simple. If you are not spending time with Jesus in prayer, you are not going to make it. Jesus is right here in the bow of the ship, in the tabernacle, silent, passive, one could say “sleeping” in the Eucharist. But He is right there in the boat, and as long as we are with Jesus, we are going to be fine. But if we take our focus off of Him, we are in serious trouble. Ask Peter when he tried to walk across the water. As long as he was focused on Jesus, he was just fine. As soon as he took his focus off of Jesus and watched the wind and the waves, he began to sink. We will be no different. Stay in the boat and keep your focus on Jesus. Spend time in prayer every single day. I do not mean while you are stuffing your face and watching TV, cranking off a little prayer on your way out the door. Throw the stupid TV away, first of all, and pray. How much time every day do you spend in front of the TV? How much time every day do you spend in front of the tabernacle? Who is your God? That is what we really need to ask ourselves.

This is not a time for mediocrity. This is not a time for those who want to be able to hedge their bets. We need to make a choice. The prophet Elijah, when he went to Mount Carmel when the people had strayed from God, looked at the people and challenged them. He said, If Baal is God, follow him; if the Lord is God, follow Him. Which are you going to do? And the people refused to respond because they wanted to play both sides, just in case: “We’re not sure.” We are sure. The Lord is God. Period. Joshua, a thousand years before Elijah came along, looked at the people and said, Choose today whom you will serve, the gods your fathers served, or the Lord. He went on to say, As for me and my household, we will serve the Lord. Each one of us needs to make that same choice.

The time is near. The birth pangs are getting closer together. Any mother whose labor pains would be closer together understands exactly what that means. At that point, she is not goofing around trying to see if she can get a few last minute details accomplished, and she is certainly not wondering if there might be some way that she could skirt around having a baby at that time. What are we doing with our heads up in the clouds, wandering around aimlessly, wondering if we should serve the Lord or not, looking at the stupid bumper sticker that says: “How much can I get away with and still get to heaven”? Forget it. There is only one way, and He made it clear: I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. If we are not united with Him, we are going to fall off the boat. So it is very clear what we need to do. It does not take a genius to be able to look around and see what is happening in the world. Things are progressing very, very rapidly, and we have a radical choice that we need to make. We have all been warned, and none of us will be with excuse. We have to choose today whom we will serve. If you are going to say As for me and my household, we will serve the Lord then prove it. Words are cheap. Put it into practice. Jesus Christ is present in the Blessed Sacrament. Spend time with Him. Get to know Him. Get accustomed to the way that He deals with things, and then be at peace, because even if He does not seem to answer your prayers, even if He seems like He is sound asleep in the bow, it does not matter. He is God. As long as He is in the boat, it will not sink; and as long as we remain in the boat, we will be saved.

Homily from the Mass during the Day

Today we celebrate a feast which we as Catholics tend to take for granted: Mary, the Mother of God. It is something that we pray hundreds of times every week, because, of course, that is how the second half of the “Hail Mary” begins–Holy Mary, Mother of God. It is something that we just simply take for granted and perhaps do not even think about. And it is something we probably would assume that most other Christians take for granted. That, however, is not true. Those who are truly orthodox will believe in this teaching. However, there are some who call themselves orthodox Christians who do not believe in this, and most of the non-Catholics who call themselves Christian (that is, the Protestants) do not believe that Mary is the Mother of God either. So we need to ask ourselves: What exactly is this feast about and why is it so important?

Back in the year 431 at the Council of Ephesus, the Fathers of the Church were called together to deal with a particular heresy that was picking up a lot of steam at that time. That heresy was called Nestorianism. Now the Church had already condemned several other heresies regarding the person of Jesus. The Church had already condemned the idea that Jesus was just a human person like us. The Church also had condemned the idea that Jesus is merely God. He is the Second Person of the Trinity but He is also human, and so then the question was: How does that work? Nestorius suggested that perhaps Jesus was a divine person–which He is from all eternity the Second Person of the Trinity; therefore, because He is a divine person, He has to have a divine nature–but then Nestorius went wrong because he suggested that Jesus is also a human person with a human nature.

The problem is that we can only be one person; you cannot be two. That is the problem Nestorius had. He could not deal with the idea that God would actually become man in the womb of the Virgin. He could not accept that the person to whom Mary gave birth was God. So he suggested that Mary gave birth to a human person, just like all other moms do, but not to a divine person. Depending upon which form of Christianity one wants to embrace these days, some will accept what we would call “adoptionism,” which is another heresy condemned by the Church, that is, Jesus was such a wonderful guy that God adopted him as His own son and made him God. It does not work. In other words, Mary gave birth to somebody just like us, and then he became God at some point along the line. There are other heresies that suggest Jesus did not take a human body to Himself. Some heresies suggest that He only looked like a human body, but there really was not one. Obviously, that does not follow either. There are other heresies that suggest Jesus did not take a human soul to Himself. That also has been condemned. The truth of the matter as the Church teaches it is that Jesus Christ is a divine person who has both a divine and a human nature, one person with two natures. He is not both a divine person and a human person.

The way the Church was able to make this eminently clear was to declare that Mary is the Mother of God. In other words, if the person to whom Mary gave birth is God then she is the Mother of God. Now she is not the Mother of God in the way of suggesting that somehow God began to exist in her womb. God exists from all eternity; He did not begin in Our Lady’s womb. All of us, of course, begin at the moment of conception; that was not the case for Jesus. His human nature began in the womb of His mother; His divine nature, however, is eternal. That, again, is something that becomes a point of confusion for some because when we think about the beginning of a human being, we naturally think that it is somebody who did not exist and then began to exist. Of course, every mother gives birth to a child who did not exist before the child was conceived within her, but that is different with Jesus. The person whom Our Lady conceived in her womb is eternal; He is God; He is the Second Person of the Most Blessed Trinity from all eternity; and He took our human nature to Himself in the womb of the Blessed Mother. Therefore, the person to whom Mary gave birth is truly God.

But because He had a human nature just like ours, He is also man. But, again, we need to be careful of the distinction. He is not a human person. He is a human being, but He is not a human person. If He were a human person and a divine person, He would be a perfect schizophrenic. Jesus was not. He is one person with two natures. Having two natures means that He has two minds and two wills. You must understand that your brain is not your mind. Your brain is merely the physical organ that allows what happens in your mind to be able to be expressed physically. Your mind and your will are faculties of your soul. Jesus had a human soul; therefore, He had a human mind and He had a human will. Jesus also, of course, is God, and God is a person (three persons to be exact); therefore, being a person, that means God also has a mind and a will. So Jesus has a divine mind and a divine will. He has a human mind and a human will. They did not interfere with one another. There was no problem within Himself as to the operation. He could operate on two different levels, on both a human level and a divine level, but with the unity of only one person. That is the point we need to understand.

The question about Our Lady’s Divine Maternity was not so much an understanding of Our Lady as it was of Our Lord, because the question back in the early centuries was “Who is Jesus Christ?” and the easiest way and the most clear way that the Fathers of the Church could make absolutely certain in an infallible statement was to say that Mary is the Mother of God. Now the people of Ephesus understood exactly what that meant. Even though the Fathers of the Church were looking at the question of “Who is Jesus,” the popular devotion of the people who loved Our Lady was so much–remember, Our Lady lived in Ephesus with Saint John, so the people of Ephesus had a profound love for our Blessed Lady–that after this declaration was made by the Fathers of the Council of Ephesus, the people of the Church in Ephesus took to the streets and they paraded, chanting Theotokos, Theotokos, which means “the God-bearer,” “the Mother of God.” It was that particular point that the people understood, the greatest privilege that Our Lady had. In fact, it was precisely so she could be the Mother of God that every other privilege was given to her. That is why she was conceived without Original Sin. That is why the extraordinary graces were given to her so that she never sinned once in her entire life. It was for this reason that God gave to her the profound holiness from the first moment of her conception, and such a profound love that all of the saints and all of the angels combined do not love God as much as our Blessed Lady does.

So when we think about this feast and we think about the fact that we so take it for granted, we need to put it into its proper context and realize that there was a day when it was not taken for granted. If you poll most people who today would call themselves Christian, you will also find that this truth is not taken for granted. It is something that is one of the most beautiful things humanity can ever imagine, that God would become man in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and that one of us, a human person, would give birth to God so that we could be saved. That is what Our Lady has done. We recognize, then, that without her fiat (that is, when she said to the angel, Let it be done to me according to thy word), without her approval, and without her acceptance of God’s invitation, there would be no salvation because there would be no Savior, there would be no Church, there would be no sacraments. We would not have Our Lord if it were not for His mother. And so we are completely indebted to Our Lady, not only now but for all eternity we will be in her debt, and we will be so grateful forever that Our Lady was willing to say “yes” to something that on the natural level sounds so ludicrous and so completely impossible that we cannot even begin to conceive the idea, that God would become man in the womb of a human woman. Yet that is precisely what happened, and that is what we celebrate today as we honor our Blessed Lady with her greatest privilege of all: to be the worthy Mother of God.

*This text was transcribed from the audio recording with minimal editing.

Dear Freepers,

Please Ping this List whenever you can to all who are "Fans of Father Altier's Homilies".

P.S.- To Freeper nanetteclaret-- I humbly did as you asked me to as you said quite rightly when I had posted the last 2 Homilies on Catholic Caucus 3-23-2006 that these Homilies might get buried in this Thread as there are usually a lot of readings on a daily basis.

Therefore,I decided to take your advice literally and posted a new thread.

Dear SOJC:

This is perfect and exactly what I had in mind! Now anyone who searches for Fr. Altier's sermons will be able to find them, since the title of your thread has his name in it. If you are able to gain access to any more which have not been published, please post them (with the date given) to their own separate threads, as well. We here at FR will make them available to all, even if other websites go down or are otherwise unavailable. (Another reason to thank our dear Lord for Jim Robinson and FreeRepublic!)

You have done a wonderful service in transcribing and posting these.

God Bless You!

nc

**Now anyone who searches for Fr. Altier's sermons will be able to find them, **

If you go back through the Daily Mass Readings before Ash Wednesday you will see his homilies posted for over one year! They really aren't hidden; everyone knew they were posted there!

Yes, Salvation, those of us here on FR knew they were there. But what about others who aren't even familiar with FR? I Googled "Father Altier" and looked through twenty pages of entries - 200 of over 30,000. There were only about 3 or 4 from FR (in those 20 pages), the first of which (on the third page) was this one which you posted as a separate thread for SoldierofJesusChrist:

http://209.157.64.201/focus/f-religion/1589059/posts

Maybe those threads were there on Google somewhere, but not many people will scroll through 30,000 entries to find them. My idea was that even if other websites are shut down, there will be a permanent record of his sermons here, and they would be able to be found (easily) by the date given. His sermons here on FR are easy to find if you search by title or by keyword, but you have to get to FR first. I'm thinking of the wider audience.

It's great to have more copies wherever they are.

Dear nanetteclaret,

Thank you for your note that you posted some time back.

Frankly Speaking, You should not be worrying about a Site like http://desertvoice.excerptsofinri.com going down.

I am positive that it will never go down. It is run by a Group of excellent Catholic Apologists whom I believe cannot be easily bullied like the Folks at a "Voice in the Desert" were bullied by Archbishop Harry "Bully" Flynn and in some way were pressurized to remove even the online archive of Homilies of Father Altier dating back to 2001.

In any case, this is what I plan to do. As, Tomorrow is the Feast of the Anunciation the 25th of March 2006 I will be posting on a separate thread all the Homilies that Father Altier has preached from 2001 on the Anunciation.

Later, on I have more plans for eg. I plan to post all of Father Altier's Homilies for Palm Sunday from 2001-2005 on a separate thread, so also those for Easter Sunday from 2001-2005 on a separate thread, Divine mercy sunday Homilies on a separate thread, Corpus Christi Homilies on a separate thread, and any excellent Homilies that he has preached on the "Real Presence", Our Lady, and the Saints as well as on the Spiritual Life all on Separate Threads over the next 2-3 Months.

But, first I am going to post a thread in the next 10 minutes on all the Homilies that Father Altier has preached for the Feast of the Anunciation.

The next Thread will be all his Homilies for Palm Sunday from 2001 - 2005 and I will post that in 10-14 days from now.

However, I must end by saying that it is physically impossible for anyone to post all his Homilies on FR just so that they are saved for the future.

Again, I must reiterate that http://desertvoice.excerptsofinri.com is not likely to go down any time soon.

Check out their main site too http://excerptsofinri.com It is awesome and colossal.

Dear SOJC:

I just read your Annunciation thread and it is awesome! Thank you so much for doing this. Even if the other sites don't go down, you are really blessing us by posting his sermons for particular feast days.

I will look forward to them and thank you so much!

nc