A Harvard Professor’s Conversion to Catholicism | Roy Schoeman | Jesus, My Savior

A Harvard Professor’s Conversion to Catholicism | Roy Schoeman | Jesus, My Savior


I saw that we live forever. I saw that every action has a moral content…   I, of course, knew that the meaning in my life was to worship and serve my Lord and God and Master, but I didn’t know who He was…

As I was walking, I prayed to know the name of my Lord and God and Master who is revealing Himself to me, so I would know what religion to follow. And I was praying as I walked along, let me know your name! I don’t mind if you are Buddha and I have to become Buddhist. I don’t mind if you are Krishna and I have to become Hindu. I don’t mind if you are Apollo and I have to become a Roman pagan as long as you’re not Christ and I have to become Christian!”

He then had an experience with Jesus’ Mother Mary and realized that his God was in fact Jesus. And Mary said, ‘My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior’ (Lk. 1:46-47).

For the rest of Roy’s amazing story please click on the following address: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWDevlijGUI&feature=share&fbclid=IwAR2ahFqEFXXjKZiIS4Uo-EPCyojzyP64XFfre53gHR_LDOXRMCnmcBYlQ08

Men of Christ Conference: Meet Roy Schoeman, a former professor at Harvard Business School, as he speaks about his acceptance of atheism when he went to university and how it dragged him into a pit of hopelessness. He shares how God personally intervened in his life in a miraculous way. Now working as a Catholic speaker and inspiring thousands of believers and nonbelievers with his story, he has found the true meaning of life and the overflowing ocean of God’s love. Roy will be at the 14th Annual Men of Christ Conference in Miller High Life Theatre, Milwaukee Wisconsin, on Saturday March 14th, 2020. Please come and join us. Jason Jones and John Edwards will also be there. For more information on this event please go to https://www.facebook.com/events/480165592540623/

Catholicmilwaukee.com: For copies of this article please go to https://www.catholicmilwaukee.net/wp-admin/post.php?post=33018&action=edit.

Does God multiply food today just as He did in Biblical times?

Does God multiply food today just as He did in Biblical times?

Does God multiply food today just as He did in Biblical times? 

Over the next days at the Bible study we talked a lot about what had happened at the dump. It didn’t make sense. We hadn’t brought enough food, but it had fed people for five hours, and there was some left. The food had simply multiplied.

Christmas With the Rag Pickers by Frank Alarcon
Not far from the central post office in downtown El Paso, Where I worked as a parcel-post driver, is a decrepit yellow-brick building with the name Our Lady’s Youth Center painted in blue letters over the door. The director is Richard Thomas, a Jesuit priest with a concern for the poor. I used to skip lunch to go to the Center because Father Rick held a Bible study then.

On a chilly day in November 1972, I came to the Center as usual. About 15 other men and women filed into an upstairs room, where Father Rick was waiting. He was in his mid-forties at the time, tall, already a bit gray, and so lean we’d joke that his trousers were held up by faith.

Father Rick really lived by his vow of poverty. I’d seen his room at the Center. It had a cot, a bureau, some books, no air-conditioning. I used to wonder why anybody would choose to live like that. That morning, Father Rick read a passage from the fourteenth chapter of Luke:


When you give a feast, invite the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you (Lk.14).
 

“I’ve never thrown a party like,” Father Rick said. “Have you?” Over the next few days we asked ourselves what would happen if we took the Bible passage literally. And if we had a feast, whom would we invite? “The poorest people I know,” said Father Rick, “live at the dump in Juarez.”

Father Rick had been spending time just across the Rio Grande in our sister city, Juarez, Mexico, visiting the rag pickers, the Dump People, they were called, men and women who made their living sifting through garbage at the city dump. The Dump People sold their gleanings to the man who had the recycling concession from the government. He paid whatever he chose, and it wasn’t much. A determined rag picker toiling, seven days a week from dawn till dark, might earn five dollars a week.

Well, Christmas was just a month away. What if we fixed a Christmas dinner for the rag-pickers of Juarez? We’d prepare the food in our homes and take it across the river on Christmas morning. We figured that if we brought 100 meals, 150 to be on the safe side, it would be enough. After all, not many people would be working then.

So on Christmas Day about a dozen of us gathered at the Center to drive to Juarez. I came in my pickup with its homemade camper shell perched on top. I brought 25 bologna sandwiches, my favorite meal. Others brought tamales and burritos, fruit, salads, bags of candy and cookies, and a ham. We piled into our vehicles, drove across the Stanton Street Bridge into Mexico, and mad our way through the empty streets toward the city dump.

It’s a good thing Father Rick knew the way. We drove through adobe barrios and then onto gravel roads and finally to a dusty track on the edge of town where many of the scattered dwellings were made of cardboard. Up ahead we could see the dump itself, low hills of garbage half a mile wide, half a mile deep. It was smoldering; the stench of burning and rotting garbage filled the air.

Father Rick had been right: Most Dump People had taken Christmas off. Only a few dozen men and women scrabbled over the hills with homemade rakes, raising clouds of dust. A little boy, maybe five, was sitting on the ground near-by, gnawing on a cantaloupe rind. One of God’s children, eating garbage! My eyes stung, and not just from the smoke.

At the edge of the dump we improvised a table, resting plywood on steel drums. We covered it with sheets and spread out the food. We’d easily have enough for the few people at the dump that day.

Around 11:00 an old man, then a woman with a child, drifted over, their faces streaked with sweat and dirt. We invited them to join us. Father Rick said a blessing and timidly our guests stepped up to the table and helped themselves. One of our group started to strum a guitar and a line began to form. People took their turns politely and ancient looking man, a pregnant woman who seemed still a child herself, youngsters with stick-thin arms and legs.

I climbed onto the roof of my camper to see if we could expect any more guests and gulped. The low hills of trash had hidden a great swarm of laboring men, women and children. People were spread out everywhere, camouflaged by the trash and, to my, alarm; they were stopping their work and coming toward us. Soon there must have been 300 people lined up to receive our meager offering. Father Rick threw up his hands and laughed.


“We can’t feed you all,” he said in Spanish. But you’re welcome to what we have.”

Even more rag pickers showed up. “There’ll never be enough,” I called to a friend. It was 1:00 P.M. now. We’d originally estimated the party would last an hour or so, but it looked as if there was still plenty of food so we kept handing it out, including thick slices of ham being carved on the tailgate of my truck by a teenage boy from the Center.

A joyous contagion was spreading. People from the shacks surrounding the dump joined us, laughing, clapping in time to the guitar music, waving burritos in the air in a kind of celebration dance. At three o’clock the crowd was larger than ever. At four o’clock we started to gather our things, urging people to help themselves to the remaining food.

There was a lot left. “Please, take it home! Yes, the ham too!” The ham just seemed inexhaustible. People filled bags with food to take to their shacks. Even that didn’t finish things. We stowed what was left in our vehicles to take to two orphanages on the way home.

That night I tried to put together what my eyes had seen with what my mind knew as impossible. All those people, eating and eating, the table still piled with food!!!!! Then other scenes crowded out the joyous ones. I remembered the little boy gnawing on garbage. And the old man struggling beneath an enormous load of flattened cardboard boxes. And the pile of garbage that began to move as a man crawled out from it. I knew all of us from the Center wished we could do something more lasting than just bringing do-gooder food from our comfortable homes. I begged God to show me a way to go back to the dump, to help on a full-time basis.

But I was just a postman. I had little. No one at the Center had much, and the need was so great. What could we possibly do to ease the burdens the size of those we’d seen?


Over the next days at the Bible study we talked a lot about what had happened at the dump. It didn’t make sense. We hadn’t brought enough food, but it had fed people for five hours, and there was some left. The food had simply multiplied.

We’d taken God at His word and He’d performed a, yes. We finally had to use the word, miracle. God had shown us that His promises work. When we’d given without restraint, in a joyous mood and without hope of repayment, he’d multiplied our small offering.

Here are a few of the thing that have happened in the 22 years since that Christmas Day. I am at the dump. Permanently, I left my job with the postal service and moved to within a hundred yards of the place where we first saw the Lord multiply our offering. My home is a room with a leaky roof, a bed, a table and enough light to read my Bible by. And it’s more than enough!

Today we have a small medical clinic built on the sit of the Christmas party; the doctor comes four times a week. Next to the clinic is a dental office, where a dentist volunteers her services three days a week. There’s a pharmacy too. If some one can’t pay even the few pesos we charge, they are still treated. We give the medicine away.

Now there’s a day-care center, where parents can drop off their little ones while they, when we first came to the dump the children, were so deep-down dirty that we had to Bathe them in stages: The first day the tub water was black, the second day gray, the third just cloudy, till at last it ran clear.

The dump people now have their own business co-op. The monopoly on recycled trash has been broken; rag pickers can now sell to whomever they choose, and the best prices are paid by their own co-op. Today the rag pickers can buy groceries at The Lord’s Store, where food is made available by the Center, and sold at or below cost.

When a powerful Juarez lawyer and tax collector, Sergio Conde Varela, heard that we were running a store at the dump, he hoped to trip us up on tax charges and even to arrest me and other “guilty” parties. But when Sergio came to the dump and saw what was going on, he quit his job, gave all his money away, and started managing the store himself. Today, in addition to overseeing the Lord’s Store, Sergio defends without charge the poor of Juarez. We even have a fire engine an old water truck with a hose attached! We have many more tasks ahead.

Jesus multiplies the loaves and fishes: Looking up, Jesus saw the crowds approaching and said to Philip, ‘Where can we buy some bread for these people to eat?’ He said this only to put Philip to the test; he himself knew exactly what he was going to do. Philip answered, ‘Two hundred denarii would not buy enough to give them a little piece each.’ One of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, said, ‘Here is a small boy with five barley loaves and two fish; but what is that among so many?’ Jesus said to them, ‘Make the people sit down.’ There was plenty of grass there, and as many as five thousand men sat down. Then Jesus took the loaves, gave thanks, and distributed them to those who were sitting there; he then did the same with the fish, distributing as much as they wanted. When they had eaten enough he said to the disciples, ‘Pick up the pieces left over, so that nothing is wasted.’ So they picked them up and filled twelve large baskets with scraps left over from the meal of five barley loaves. Seeing the sign that he had done, the people said, ‘This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world’ (Jn 5:5-14).

The Mysterious Image of Our Lady of the Fjords, Oldest Photo of an Apparition

The Mysterious Image of Our Lady of the Fjords, Oldest Photo of an Apparition

The Mysterious Image of Our Lady of the Fjords, Oldest Photo of an Apparition: 

Tuesday, December 17, 2019
Thank you CATHOLICSAY.COM for this post I shared via Leonard Alt. Thank you too, Leonard.
“O Blessed Mary, Mother of our LORD JESUS – true GOD and true MAN – I believe in your apparitions to prove your holy intercessions for us who seek GOD’s mercy and help.” Amen.
– Roberto Kee, San Diego, California.

On June 24th, 1905, Thomas B. Hayward was enjoying the sights of the Narrows of St. John’s in Newfoundland, Canada when he pointed his camera at an unusual iceberg and snapped a photo. After getting the photo developed, it was clear there was something very unique about it: it appeared to contain the figure of the Blessed Virgin Mary!
It’s not clear if the figure was a giant statue, an apparition, or just a lucky ice formation. But he wasn’t the only person who spotted the mysterious figure: crowds along the shore saw it, and Archbishop Michael Francis Howley even caught a glimpse of it from the steps of his cathedral in St. John’s.

The figure appeared on a particularly meaningful day: June 24th is the Feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, the saint for whom St. John’s is named and to whose patronage the archdiocese is dedicated. It was also the anniversary of English explorer John Cabot “discovering” North America by landing near St. John’s.

The Archbishop took all of this as a miraculous sign from heaven and did everything he could to promote it. He approved the sale of postcards and other memorabilia with the image and he wrote an article for Boston’s diocesan newspaper naming the figure “the Crystal Lady.”

He even wrote a sonnet about the figure! Our Lady of the Fjords, by Archbishop Michael Francis Howley Hail Crystal Virgin, from the frozen fjords
Where far-off Greenland’s gelid glaciers gleen
O’er Oceans bosom soaring, cool, serene
Not famed Carrara’s purest vein affords
Such sparkling brilliance, as mid countless hordes
Of spotless glistning bergs thou reignest Queen
In all the glory of thy opal sheen
A Shimmering Shrine; Our bright Atlantic Lourdes.
We hail thee, dual patront, with acclaim,
Thou standest guardian o er our Island home.
To-day, four cycles since, our rock-bound strand.
First Cabot saw: and gave the Baptist’s name:
To-day we clothe with Pallium from Rome.
The first Archbishop of our Newfoundland!

Since it was taken in 1905, the photo may be the oldest photograph of a supernatural Christian apparition.

 

 

Are the time of miracles over?

Are the time of miracles over?

Are the time of miracles over? Some say yes; others no, BUT WHAT DID JESUS SAY?

NILO SAYS: Yes, you did not say that her incorrupt body is going to heaven. But the BIBLE never had any such miracles, promised any such miracles, and on the contrary, the INCORRUPTIBLE body is promised ONLY during the resurrection.

LENNY SAYS: Nilo, at the time of our resurrection we are given an incorruptible body as you say. Your premise that w…e can accept only miracles that are existent in the Bible is not Biblical. This is coming from your man-made tradition. You have violated your own belief in the Bible Alone “Sola Scriptura,” (one of the pillars of Protestantism), by believing something not in the Bible.

Furthermore your thesis is in violation of the Bible because Jesus did not limit us only to the works He worked. “I tell you most solemnly;whoever believes in me will perform the same works as I do myself, he will perform even greater works because I am going to the Father” (Jn 14:12). Also note that Jesus has gone to the Father and His works are still happening.

Nilo, I can believe you who limit the works of God or I can believe Jesus who says; we “WILL PERFORM EVEN GREATER WORKS” (Jn 14:12)!

Jesus even used miracles to show that He is the one. “And he answered them, “Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, the poor have good news preached to them.” Those who oppose miracles are at odds with Jesus and their bible.