Do you love Gay people?

This is a LOVE issue.



Here are some questions to think about from the video:

* Do you treat gay people with hatred?

* When someone doesn't believe with your Christian world view, do you become unloving?

* When you stand up for what you believe in, do you still love?

* Do you judge and condemn people outside the Church?

* Do you love people who believe differently to what you do?

* Do you love like Jesus?

The Catholic Church holds that, as a state beyond a person's choice, being homosexual is not wrong or sinful in itself.
But just as it is objectively wrong for unmarried heterosexuals to engage in sex, so too are homosexual acts considered to be wrong.

We should still love the sinner....Jesus is in everyone.

There is a world dying out there...
Would you rather be RIGHT or offer them LOVE?

History of casual sex

Females with history of casual sex report most depressive symptoms






According to a study featured in the Journal of Sex Research, various studies have shown that a majority of adolescents first engage in sexual intercourse before they graduate from high school.
Furthermore, other studies have shown that 70% of college students report having had sexual intercourse with individuals they did not consider to be their romantic partner.

Casual sex is a sexual relationship in which the partners do not define the relationship as romantic or as their partner being their boyfriend or girlfriend.

These “relationships” are mainly based on sexual desires or physical attraction alone and commonly involve drugs or alcohol.

In this particular study, the researchers aimed to identify the factors and circumstances associated with those engaged in casual sex and sought to examine the link between casual sex and depressive symptoms.

Researchers used a sample of 404 undergraduate students who were enrolled in an introductory psychology course at a large university in the southeastern United States.
Each student completed a Sexual Behaviors Questionnaire which was designed by the researchers to investigate sexual behaviors in romantic relationships and it was modified for this study to also include sexual behaviors with casual partners. Through these questionnaires, the researchers found that casual sex was a fairly common occurrence among the participants in the study.

76% of the sample reported having engaged in intercourse, oral sex, or anal sex, and more than half (53%) of those who were sexually experienced reported having engaged in sex with a partner with whom they were not involved in a romantic relationship.

The majority of males and females who engaged in sex with a casual partner reported knowing that the encounter was casual and had no expectations other than a physical affair.

The researchers also focused on the link between casual sex and psychological functioning.
They found that for females, as the number of sexual partners increased, symptoms of depression also increased.
Female partners who had the greatest number of partners had the highest symptoms of depressive pathology.
The researchers noted that the association of casual sex and depressive symptoms in females is worthy of further investigation.

Article found HERE.

Pornography

The Harmful Effects of Pornography:

1. Harm to the Soul

2. Harm to Personal Morality and Chastity

3. Harm to Public Morality

4. Harm to Marriage

5. Harm of Violence Toward Women

6. Harm of Degradation of Women

7. Harm to Children

8. Harm of stimulations resulting in Rape

9. Harm of Contracting AIDS and other Venereal Diseases in Peep Show Booths and spreading the same to the Public

10. Harm to Performers in the production of porno films and videos

11. Harm to Performers in Nude Dancing Establishments

12. Harm to innocent persons criminally assaulted and murdered by those stimulated by porn, including Serial Murderers

The available evidence from testimony, research, social science studies, and interviews with sexual offenders indicates that the production and consumption of pornography causes grave harm to society and individuals.

Click HERE for an explaination of each of these effects.











For those who desire to break their addiction to pornography, lust, and sins of the flesh, click HERE at the PornNoMore.com website and find help.

Homosexuality

A conversion story told by a woman who 'was' living a homosexual life.



It is important to know that the Church (and God himself), loves each and every person (even homosexuals), and how it is only when one participates in homosexual behaviour that it is wrong.

A great story of how...
God can make 'all' things new!

Question on Birth control

Question: Isn't using birth control better than having unwanted teen pregnancies and abortions?

Look at both these issues and judge for yourself if contraception is part of the solution or part of the problem.

Because of the widespread use of birth control, more people than ever have sex without intending to have children.
Sex out of wedlock has become far more common, and more sex means more babies.
Some argue that teaching people how to use contraceptives will alleviate the problem.
But research shows that “programs in safer sex education and condom distribution have not reduced the out-of-wedlock birth rates among sexually experienced teens. The fact is, increased condom use by teens is associated with increased out-of-wedlock birth rates.”

A few years ago in Colorado, one school began passing out condoms to the students. Within three years the birth rate rose 31 percent above the national average, and in one school year one hundred births were expected among the twelve hundred students. The administrators were described as “searching for explanations.”

When unwanted pregnancies occur, many turn to abortion as a solution.

In fact, studies show that about half of all unintended pregnancies end in abortion.
Some argue that increased use of contraception could have lowered these abortion rates.
However, the research institute of the nation’s largest abortion provider admits that most women who receive abortions had been using birth control during the month they became pregnant!

Such couples feel that the “fault” of the pregnancy can be blamed on the failed contraception, but by contracepting they have already set their wills against new life.

Since contraception treats pregnancy as if it were a disease, many people conclude that abortion must be the cure.

I once saw a condom advertisement that called pregnancy “the mother of all nightmares.”
With this mentality it is no surprise that the sex researcher Alfred Kinsey said, “At the risk of being repetitious, I would remind the group that we have found the highest frequency of induced abortion in the group which, in general, most frequently used contraceptives.”
Even a former medical director of Planned Parenthood admitted in 1973, “As people turn to contraception, there will be a rise, not a fall, in the abortion rate.”
Fifty million abortions later, no one can dispute his prediction.

Lastly, it should be noted that anyone who believes that contraception decreases abortions ignores the fact that hormonal birth control can cause abortions.
Click HERE for details on that.

Mother Teresa did not need to see the statistics.
She was well aware of the connection between contraception and abortion when she said in a speech in the presence of Bill and Hillary Clinton:

“The way to plan the family is Natural Family Planning, not contraception.
In destroying the power of giving life, through contraception, a husband or wife is doing something to self.
This turns the attention to self and so destroys the gift of love in him or her.
In loving, the husband and wife must turn the attention to each other.
Once that living love is destroyed by contraception, abortion follows very easily.”

This question was from Chastity.com.

The Pill Kills Babies

Go HERE for more information about how the PILL KILLS BABIES.

Why Catholics go to Confession

The Devil is afraid of you!

An American exorcist has said the film The Exorcist led people to believe wrongly that the devil could "come and zap them" when in fact the devil is afraid of the power of Jesus inside them.

Mgr John Esseff, retired exorcist of the Diocese of Scranton, Pennsylvania, told an audience of 400 students at Bowling Green State University, Ohio that the power of Jesus within them was "enormous".

He said: "The devil is afraid of you - if you would just awaken to who you are."

In describing one of his exorcisms, he said: "As she came in, she saw me and she shrieked - and the language and the growls - and then she slithered across the floor and was going up the wall. Well, there was obviously a force here, a presence. And I just simply silenced her in the name of Jesus."

Mgr Esseff said that each baptised person was united to Jesus by the power of the Holy Spirit. He read passages from the Gospels in which Jesus exorcised demons and then sent his disciples to do the same.

He said that Jesus ultimately defeated Satan through his death and Resurrection and then sent the power of the Holy Spirit to his Apostles at Pentecost.

"When God looks down, he sees Jesus in you," Mgr Esseff said. "You have that power as baptised, confirmed Christians. And so when he [Satan] sees you, he hates what you would discover about that power that is within you."

He suggested that each audience member had been tempted that day because temptation was the ordinary activity of the devil.

"Your soul is a battlefield because there is also someone who hates you," he said. "That one is the devil. The devil knows who you are and what you have. God passed him by. God did not choose to become one of the angels. God chose to be one like us."

But just as each person was tempted, Mgr Esseff said, another spirit also was at work.

"In your life today, this very day, has been the Holy Spirit," he said. "God is in you. God the Holy Spirit is operative in you. God the Holy Spirit wants to bring into your heart love. God wants to bring you peace."

Mgr Esseff also told students of the power of angels and encouraged them to renew their devotions to their guardian angels.

"His [the angel's] job is to protect you all through this world. And when you close your eyes, he wants to deliver you to God," Mgr Esseff said.

After the talk Megan Dowell-Howko, a first-year student, said she now had a better understanding of how she experienced temptation, and that she would remember she could say no to the devil.

She said: "I guess I'm taking away a renewed confidence that the devil only has as much power over me as I give to him," she said.

Before the event Mgr Esseff said he saw three indications of Satan's presence in the world: money, lies and war.

"I think one of the greatest things he has done is have people forget he exists. People deny he exists," he said.


Read the whole article HERE at the Catholic Herald.

What is the purpose of Prayer?

REASONS TO PRAY (from Prayer for Beginners by Peter Kreeft):




1. Praying keeps your soul alive: Prayer is real contact with God, and God is the life of the soul as the soul is the life of the body. If you do not pray, your soul will wither and die, just as, if you do not eat, your body will wither and die.

2. Because God commands it: Three reasons he commands us to pray correspond to our three deepest needs, the fundamental needs of the three powers of our soul: prayer gives truth to our mind, goodness to our will, and beauty to our heart. "The true, the good, and the beautiful" are the three things we need and love the most, because they are three attributes of God.

3. Prayer changes us: We pray, not to change God's mind, but to change our own; not to command God, but to let God command us. Prayer is our obedience to God even when it asks God for things, for God commanded us to ask.

4. We do not have an infinite amount of time: We are one day nearer Home today than we ever were before. I guarantee you that after you die, you will not say, "I spent too much time praying; I wish I had watched more TV instead." We must learn to pray because infinite and uncompromising Love will not leave us alone until we do. If we do not learn to practice his presence with our whole mind and will in this life, we will have to learn it in Purgatory, where it will be much more painful - or else we will never learn it, and that is Hell.

5. Learning to pray is dress rehearsal for eternal life: What you do when you rehearse a play is actually to practice it, to do it; and what we do when we pray is actually to practice what we will be doing in Heaven.

6. Prayer is delightful: Brother Lawrence says, in The Practice of the Presence of God, "There is not in the world a kind of life more sweet and delightful than that of a continual conversation with God. Those only can comprehend it who practice and experience it."

7. Prayer is the way to know God: One moment of prayer, of weak worship, confused contrition, tepid thanksgiving, or pitiful petition will bring us closer to God than all the books of theology in the world.

8. Prayer is the only way to spiritual progress: We must pray in order to grow, and we must grow because Infinite Love will not, cannot, settle for less than the greatest joy of which his beloved creature is capable.

9. Prayer is necessary because without it we cannot attain the meaning of life, the end and purpose of our existence: Becoming saints is the meaning of life. It is why we exist. It is why God created us. Prayer is our first step in becoming saints. The second step is charity, a life of love, the ecstasy of giving ourselves away over and over again forever, as each Persons of the Trinity do. But this is prayer, too, or an extension of prayer. This is practicing the presence of God in action.

From: Catholic Answers.

Why are many graces being lost at mass?

Fr. Bill Casey makes us think about these questions...

How well do you prepare before Mass?

Do you talk, joke or socialize before or during the Mass?

How do you act during Mass?

Do you forget about the 'Real Presence' during Mass?

Do you genuflect?

Do you make a thanksgiving after recieving Holy Communion when Mass is finished?