Home Education Book record and the Sacraments and a bit of history. (freebies)

LITERATURE and READING NOTEBOOKING PAGES that I made are up at That Resource Site. I have included some covers of books we are or have used to get y’all started. Just cut out the covers and stick them in the boxes or get your children to draw the book cover if that works better for you.

I have only a couple of lines for each book to help encourage the “Don’t make me write!” children in our families. It will hopefully encourage even young ones to keep a record of the books they love and hate.

You might also like my 19th Century timeline notebook. I’m presently working on a 14th century timeline which covers especially the events around the mother’s of Europe SS Bridget of Sweden and Catherine of Siena.

For those of us preparing children for the Sacraments there’s Kalei’s great little lapbooking and worksheet resource SEVEN SACRAMENTs LAPBOOK and this SIN AND FORGIVENESS worksheet and this little prep booklet for the Sacrament of Confession (scroll down the page a bit).

Finally a bit of history.

This Youtube video gives an excellent story view of the Cristeros in 1920s Mexico. It’s a part of history I know nothing about and the tellers of the history here admit it an astonishing story that has been forgotten. A new film is being made For The Greater Glory. This vid is great for teens (I personally wouldn’t show it to my younger ones as the violence is obvious and worse because it really happened).

Marriage and children: a side topic from contraception and abortion to polygamy/

This excellent article covers in a few short words why polygamy doesn’t bode well for women and children. While all of this looks like common sense and anyway history gives us a clear view of the problems that went with (and go with) polygamy, not just in child survival and care but population imbalance, I have another question.

How has contraception and the wholesale slaughter of unborn children affected the balance for men and women who are called to marriage? It has been mentioned fairly often that the shortage of priests and religious has something to do with the sheer number of children killed before birth.

We know that the mass killing from World War I left many women with dead husbands and fiance’s so that many women never married or had children.  Just from my gran’s family we can see the devastation. There were 8 girls and 1 boy. The boy was killed when he was 16 at the front on the last day of WWI (something my gran never got over). Of the girls only gran and one sister married. My auntie Gwen’s husband was killed or died early, so she had no children, and my auntie Eileen’s fiance was killed and I have no idea whether the other aunts ever had a boyfriend or fiance. My Gran had three sons, one of whom died at aged 6.  From just one family you can see that killing off a proportion of the population had a sad knock on effect.

What has the refusal to even have children done? Surely there are less potential marriageable people out there, and then the ones that make it to adulthood are often so seriously damaged by their parents “Me Myself and I” culture that they are hardly fit for friendship let along marriage and parenting.

So next – some solutions to consider.

Marriage and children; what went wrong and when (II)

There are parts of Scripture that are very difficult to understand and we should be grateful that Christ gave us the Church, His bride, to lead us to all truth, because otherwise we could go around interpreting Scripture pretty much as we like and as St. Peter warns, doing it to our own destruction.

From the very beginning the Church disallowed divorce and remarriage, contraception and abortion and treated children as blessings, not inconveniences or commodities.

No matter how people in the Church sinned, the teachings never changed. Even when pope’s were sinning against the 6th Commandment, they never changed the teachings of the Church.

But something gave way seriously in the 20th Century.  As the First World War ended a culture was growing in which adults were becoming more self serving and less willing to have and care for children.

In 1930 the Church of England’s Lambeth Council declared that married couples for very serious reasons could contracept. Some commenters have suggested this door was pushed open because many clergy were already contracepting in the face of Christian teaching. Christ was shoved aside for personal convenience.

Pope Pius XI responded immediately with Casti Connubii on the sanctity of marriage and reiterated the 2000 year prohibition of pushing God out of the bedroom with contraception.

You see the authority Christ gave to His Church in binding and losing was limited by His Will. She has no authority to go against God, which should be obvious, but we have lost the ability to reason.

So the C of E opened the door and all the consequences followed. By the time the 1960s arrived with “find yourself” and “how does it feel for you?” mantras even Christians were buying into the culture and divorce and remarriage, contraception kept God out of marriage.

The end result is as we see it today- and it’s an ugly mess. But we can’t point fingers at gay people wanting “marriage” or even couples playing “marriage” without actually making the Covenantal vows, when we Christians and that includes Catholics, have ditched Christ’s teaching for convenience sake.  The fact that many protestant churches have actually enabled divorce and remarriage, deliberately sterile marriages through contraception and even given a nod and a wink at adultery is shameful.

By the time Pope Paul VI published Humanae Vitae  in 1968, a lot of damage was already done to Christianity and the rejection of HV by so many Catholic priests and bishops sent us hurtling down the same road.

The prophecies of Humanae Vitae have all come true and the damage to women and especially to children can hardly be denied. Even secular research is admitting it.

THIS IS A GOOD OVERVIEW OF the teachings on marriage with some studies on how divorce is hurting families at the end.

So that’s how we fled down the slippery slope. How do we climb back up?

Marriage and children: what went wrong and when? (I)

I’m sure most of you are well aware that marriage took its first major hit in the Garden. The consequences of the sin of Adam and Eve are very much in how their marriage was now to be conducted and how fallen human nature would affect marriages from then on.

By the time Jesus is preaching on the subject and raising marriage to the status of Sacrament a lot of poisonous water has gone under the bridge. The last Old Testament prophet, St. John the Baptist is martyred for defending the sanctity of marriage. There is definitely a sign of things to come there, as the Bridegroom takes up His mantel.

Jesus was asked about the Rabbi Hillel’s view that a man should be able to divorce his wife for any reason. Essentially they were asking if “no fault” divorce was allowed by God.

The answer was a very clear “No.” Jesus explained that Moses only allowed divorce because the Israelites were so hard-hearted. I have heard more than one Biblical scholar comment that Moses allowed divorce to prevent the even worse sin of wife murder. Israel became so sunk into the blood thirsty and nasty pagan culture that killing your wife to get a better one would have been a genuine problem had it not been for the “get out clause” Moses allowed.

But Jesus raises the bar again for His Church reminding us of this:

Have you not read that at the beginning the Creator made them male and female? For this reason a man will leave his father and his mother and be united with his wife and the two will become one flesh. So they are no longer two but one. Therefore, what God has put together, let no man put asunder.

(Matt. 19:4-6)

So a man and a woman who are free to marry (I’ll come back to that) go before God and take their vows and so God puts them together and therefore they cannot be separated. That means that even if they divorce they are still married and not free to remarry. In fact Jesus Himself clarifies that point when He said

Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery.

(Luke 16:18)

The “get out” clause that has been overused and misinterpreted has been the “except for unchastity” that Jesus speaks of in Matthew 5:32. I’ll come back to that.

As the Church grew it was well understood and written in the Didache c.80 AD that marriage was a Sacrament and that no Christian couple could divorce and remarry or use contraception (St. Paul called it pharmakai) or abortion.

But things are very different now. What went wrong?

On Marriage and children

I’ve been wondering about writing on this topic for some time, but always felt I couldn’t really do it clearly. Emily Stimpson puts into words the very same problems I’ve been mulling over since the bishops of England and Wales sent that letter around to be read at Mass. You see, I just can’t think of one single time when I’ve heard anyone preach about the sanctity of marriage and the place of children in the family. Priests are not only ignoring the onslaught that marriage has suffered, and not supporting those of us trying to stay in valid, sacramental marriages, many of them have been actively engaged in undermining it.

The Catholic Church in Her teaching has never wavered on marriage; it’s indissolubility, the place of children and the grave matter of contraception and abortion. And as far as I know She is the only Church who has never budged an inch on the truth and has stuck with Jesus throughout- but many priests are not shepherds but hirelings and that shows.

It’s obvious that when society – especially Christians- ditch Christ’s teaching on marriage and decide to make the adults choose whatever they like to do about it, that the place of children will be seriously effected. Bizarrely, however, there’s a great propaganda war going on to try and convince us that what we see in our kids friend’s and our neighbours and those who go to our churches, simply isn’t happening and that divorce, remarriage, mum’s boyfriends. dad’s girlfriends, and the “I did it my way” adults have not damaged the children at all.

Thanks to contraception children are no longer a gift or a blessing, they are a product of adult choice.  Adult’s choose when and whether to have a child and will therefore choose whether to adhere to any vows taken for the benefit of that product. And this is how so-called Christians have behaved since 1930.  As a Christian “culture” we have turned Christ’s words of “Suffer the little children…” around to means “Let the little children suffer so long as I can do whatever I want with whomever I choose.”

Christian communities have sunk so low that they are no longer merely allowing abortion to happen, some of them are voting in favour of killing off unborn children.

When we are asked why we are standing up against the ontologically impossible “gay marriage” those who ask are looking at the rotten fruit of our own trees.

We need to get back to what Christ commands on marriage…

(more on this later)

Friday Freebies

Free Audio Books

Lit2GO has a good set of audio books with the words available as pdfs.

For more audio books you might like a recent find of mine,  Cover to Cover where Ron Hansen’s book Atticus is presently being read. Can’t tell you anything about this book as I’ve never read it – and haven’t listened to it yet either. I note that Cover to Cover has a Library section which is being updated.

This Librivox reading of The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald is really good. I hope Mr. Minter might get around to reading The Princess and th Curdie as well.

We are still listening to Stranger Moon from Readings from Under the Grapevine

Patrick Madrid does a complete set of talks following his useful little book Pope fiction debunking the silly black legends and other crud that has been spread about the papacy over the years.

Free lesson help

We are using the Classical Academic Press Latin and Greek. They have Head Adventure Land as a free resource to back the lessons up, but I reckon you could use some of the resources whether or not you use the books.

FREE from ME

My latest Freebie is up on Kalei’s  Thatrescourcesite Blog which is a notebook timeline of the 19th Century. I am hoping to make other century notebooks as time goes on.

ME/CFS and FM – the Ampligen question.

I am STILL reading my way through Osler’s Web and it’s still very good and worth the effort of me reading it. I am in awe of Hillary Johnson for the sheer care, time and work that she put into this ten year overview of the crisis in care and treatment for people with ME misnamed Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

One of the threads throughout the book is the story of the Amligen trials. It’s a story that is still going on today. Patient’s from the severe end of CFS were chosen to do the trial and all patients have to stop taking any other medication they were on for the duration of the trial. Half were given Amligen via IV and half received saline.  Remember these patients were so ill they either used a wheelchair, were more or less housebound or were unable to get out of bed most days.

As the trial went on those on saline became much sicker and 4 patients, unable to cope any longer committed suicide. I cannot begin to describe what it’s like to be that ill – and for them to be trying to survive with no meds, is unbelievably difficult.

Meanwhile those on Ampligen were improving all the time and the side effects had proved marginal in all but one case, and even she requested to continue the trial because she was getting better.

It was going so well that the drug company and researchers thought they could end it early and go to the FDA with what they had, as it was already showing better results than drugs that had so quickly been approved for HIV and AIDS patients.  So the drug was stopped.

And those who had been so much better, out and about, cognitively functioning and no longer needing their wheelchairs, relapsed within three months.

The drug was not approved.

The fight goes on as more and more people lose everything to this illness and more and more people die of it.  The myths are still circulated, but thankfully are answered by those who have spent the time finding out the truth about this.

More recently Rituximab is also going through trials and showing some promise. Let’s hope and pray that even if those of us ill now will never see treatment let along a cure, at least the next generation can hope for a better deal.