!catholics !christians happy Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe!

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First Reading

As the visions during the night continued, I saw

one like a Son of man coming,

    on the clouds of heaven;

when he reached the Ancient One

    and was presented before him,

the one like a Son of man received dominion, glory, and kingship;

    all peoples, nations, and languages serve him.

His dominion is an everlasting dominion

    that shall not be taken away,

    his kingship shall not be destroyed.

-Daniel 7:13-14

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Responsorial Psalm

R. (1a) The Lord is king; he is robed in majesty.

The LORD is king, in splendor robed;

robed is the LORD and girt about with strength.

R. The Lord is king; he is robed in majesty.

And he has made the world firm,

not to be moved.

Your throne stands firm from of old;

from everlasting you are, O LORD.

R. The Lord is king; he is robed in majesty.

Your decrees are worthy of trust indeed;

holiness befits your house,

O LORD, for length of days.

R. The Lord is king; he is robed in majesty.

-Psalms 93:1, 1-2, 5

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Second Reading

Jesus Christ is the faithful witness,

the firstborn of the dead and ruler of the kings of the earth.

To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood,

who has made us into a kingdom, priests for his God and Father,

to him be glory and power forever and ever. Amen.

Behold, he is coming amid the clouds,

and every eye will see him,

even those who pierced him.

All the peoples of the earth will lament him.

Yes. Amen.

"I am the Alpha and the Omega, " says the Lord God,

"the one who is and who was and who is to come, the almighty."

Revelations 1:5-8

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Alleluia

R. Alleluia, alleluia.

Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!

Blessed is the kingdom of our father David that is to come!

R. Alleluia, alleluia.

-Mark 11:9, 10

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Gospel

Pilate said to Jesus,

"Are you the King of the Jews?"

Jesus answered, "Do you say this on your own

or have others told you about me?"

Pilate answered, "I am not a Jew, am I?

Your own nation and the chief priests handed you over to me.

What have you done?"

Jesus answered, "My kingdom does not belong to this world.

If my kingdom did belong to this world,

my attendants would be fighting

to keep me from being handed over to the Jews.

But as it is, my kingdom is not here."

So Pilate said to him, "Then you are a king?"

Jesus answered, "You say I am a king.

For this I was born and for this I came into the world,

to testify to the truth.

Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice."

-John 18:33b-37

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1 week until Advent! Random thought, why is Saint Mark the Evangelist depicted as a winged lion? Maybe he really was a winged lion? That would explain why the Gospel took off, if a winged lion told me to read his book I would.

I'll open with my first impressions having given it a reading with my morning tea: It's great! This is by far the most doctrinally clear, Biblically and Traditionally grounded encyclical out of the Pope Francis episcopacy. Not coincidentally, it sticks within a defined theological scope rather than attempting to address hot button social issues (though honestly I wish American Catholics were more keen to submit and obey rather than openly resist). My favorite section is 86-89:

86. Many Jansenists found this difficult to comprehend, for they looked askance on all that was human, affective and corporeal, and so viewed this devotion as distancing us from pure worship of the Most High God. Pius XII described as "false mysticism"[79] the elitist attitude of those groups that saw God as so sublime, separate and distant that they regarded affective expressions of popular piety as dangerous and in need of ecclesiastical oversight.

87. It could be argued that today, in place of Jansenism, we find ourselves before a powerful wave of secularization that seeks to build a world free of God. In our societies, we are also seeing a proliferation of varied forms of religiosity that have nothing to do with a personal relationship with the God of love, but are new manifestations of a disembodied spirituality. I must warn that within the Church too, a baneful Jansenist dualism has re-emerged in new forms. This has gained renewed strength in recent decades, but it is a recrudescence of that Gnosticism which proved so great a spiritual threat in the early centuries of Christianity because it refused to acknowledge the reality of "the salvation of the flesh". For this reason, I turn my gaze to the heart of Christ and I invite all of us to renew our devotion to it. I hope this will also appeal to today's sensitivities and thus help us to confront the dualisms, old and new, to which this devotion offers an effective response.

88. I would add that the heart of Christ also frees us from another kind of dualism found in communities and pastors excessively caught up in external activities, structural reforms that have little to do with the Gospel, obsessive reorganization plans, worldly projects, secular ways of thinking and mandatory programmes. The result is often a Christianity stripped of the tender consolations of faith, the joy of serving others, the fervour of personal commitment to mission, the beauty of knowing Christ and the profound gratitude born of the friendship he offers and the ultimate meaning he gives to our lives. This too is the expression of an illusory and disembodied otherworldliness.

89. Once we succumb to these attitudes, so widespread in our day, we tend to lose all desire to be cured of them. This leads me to propose to the whole Church renewed reflection on the love of Christ represented in his Sacred Heart. For there we find the whole Gospel, a synthesis of the truths of our faith, all that we adore and seek in faith, all that responds to our deepest needs.

For our ESL Catholics like @szrotmistrz you can scroll up and find the translation in your local language, including Portuguese, Polish, Spanish etc. Please join me in reading this. For the less interested here is the Vatican News summary.

The text concludes with a prayer, and I ask all !Catholics and !prayerwarriors to join me:

"I ask our Lord Jesus Christ to grant that His Sacred Heart may continue to pour forth the streams of living water that can heal the hurt we have caused, strengthen our ability to love and serve others, and inspire us to journey together towards a just, solidary and fraternal world. Until that day when we will rejoice in celebrating together the banquet of the heavenly kingdom in the presence of the risen Lord, who harmonizes all our differences in the light that radiates perpetually from his open heart. May he be blessed forever" (220).

@JoyceScaryOates @Paragon @carpathianHORRORist you neighbors can't escape me by being outside the ping group. Please read this.

Since it's Black Friday, we should recognize some black Catholics that are on the way to sainthood.

Also, I saw sneedman post of black queens and I remember this article.

also the pope has strong opinions on aliens

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/05/pope-francis-says-he-would-definitely-baptize-aliens-if-they-wanted-it/362106/

https://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyle/vatican-scientist-says-belief-in-god-and-aliens-is-ok-idUSL1463646/