₦airaland Forum

Governor Willie Obiano doles out 300m and 433m to the Anglican and Catholic Churches in ANAMBRA state.

This act of 'charity' I view with utmost suspicious. Hope he is trying to curry favour from the Church men. If that is the case, then he has failed.

Wake up my dear Governor.

I really welcome

[b]As a seminarian, I’m preparing for life as a celibate priest. People know this about Catholic priests, but many of them — both Catholic and non-Catholic — don’t really get it.

A lot of people just fundamentally misunderstand what celibacy is all about. In this category are those who think it’s about a hatred of, or lack of interest in, marriage and sex and family. You’ve those who suspect the worst, that celibacy exists as a cover for malicious sexual habits, homosexual and/or pedophilic, going on behind the scenes. Then you’ve got those who believe half-cocked historical myths about why celibacy exists: for example, that it was somehow about property rights and primogeniture, as if the parish priest personally owned the parish, and the Church had to invent an elaborate scheme to disinherit his kids. Behind all of this is sometimes anti-Catholic animus, but I suspect that more often it’s genuine confusion. We know that priests, monks, and nuns are celibate, but why?

This is probably why the conversation so often turns to the fact that clerical celibacy is a discipline, and that some Catholic priests aren’t required to be celibate. People want to know, “well, can the Church change this practice?” precisely because it looks like an arbitrary rule, as if the Church just randomly decided to flex her muscles by banning married men from becoming priests.

In answering this, we Catholics tend to do two things. First, we point out that celibacy is Biblical. St. Paul says that the man who marries does well, while the man who practices celibacy does better (1 Corinthians 7:38). Jesus Christ presents the same teaching in Matthew 19. After praising marriage, and emphasizing its indissolubility (Mt. 19:3-9), He immediately praises celibacy in yet higher terms, saying that “he who is able to receive this, let him receive it” (Mt. 19:10-12). All of this is true, but in isolation, not particularly helpful. Now, instead of looking like an arbitrary Church rule, it looks like an arbitrary Christian teaching.

So we need to give some logical reasons for the Biblical teaching. And that leads to the second part of the usual defense of celibacy: worldly arguments. Marriage creates a set of obligations that will naturally conflict with your ability to give yourself wholly to the priesthood or to monastic life… and a good marriage should create these sort of conflicts. In the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony, God intends for you to take on these new duties of caring for your spouse and children.

For monks and nuns, this is simple enough: monasteries and convents would pretty quickly lose their character once the monastic cell was replaced with family living quarters, and the silent cloister was filled with the sounds of children. These are places for people to go and give themselves entirely to the Lord, and it’s not hard to see how familial obligations would complicate that gift of self.

For diocesan priests, you’re also dealing with a religious calling that calls for you to give your whole life. “Office hours” don’t apply when you’re the priest responsible for making sure that the teen in a 4 a.m. car accident has access to the Sacraments before she dies, or meeting with engaged couples after they get off work, or responding to the various family crises that arise amongst your parishioners. It’s impractical to expect priests to split their time between their priesthood and their family, and can even be unfair to those who depend upon the priest (including, in this case, his wife and children).

Don’t get me wrong. These worldly arguments are true, and soundly Biblical. St. Paul takes a very similar approach in 1 Cor. 7:32-35:

The unmarried man is anxious about the affairs of the Lord, how to please the Lord; but the married man is anxious about worldly affairs, how to please his wife, and his interests are divided. And the unmarried woman or girl is anxious about the affairs of the Lord, how to be holy in body and spirit; but the married woman is anxious about worldly affairs, how to please her husband. I say this for your own benefit, not to lay any restraint upon you, but to promote good order and to secure your undivided devotion to the Lord.

Marriage, by its nature, precludes the sort of undivided devotion to the Lord that Paul encourages us towards, and so we can see why celibacy is an ideal for those who can handle it.

But if we focus just upon the worldly arguments, it makes celibacy sound like a purely practical arrangement, and that doesn’t do it justice. Underlying the call for celibacy is a radical argument, quite unlike the worldly arguments that we normally hear: that celibacy points to the Resurrection in a prophetic way.

The first clear hints of this come in Luke 20. The Sadducees, “those who say that there is no resurrection” (Lk. 20:27), pose a mocking question. A woman marries a man, he dies, and she marries one of his brothers, and then another, and then another. All told, she marries seven brothers, each of whom died. This leads to the provocative question “In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had her as wife” (Lk. 20:33).

Jesus begins His response with a sweeping statement about marriage and celibacy (Lk. 20:34-36):

The sons of this age marry and are given in marriage; but those who are accounted worthy to attain to that age and to the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage, for they cannot die any more, because they are equal to angels and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection.

In other words, it’s not just an issue of being a celibate “for the Kingdom” (Mt. 19:17). It’s also that the Kingdom is for celibates. Of course, Jesus isn’t saying that marriage is awful or less-than-holy or anything else. Instead, He’s saying that marriage is fleeting.

When you vow to stay married until “death do us part,” that sounds like a lifetime… which, of course, it is. But this life is just the briefest of preludes to eternity. There, all of the saved — whatever their vocations whilst on earth — will enjoy a celibate’s existence, giving themselves totally to God (in a way that we can’t even imagine) and being in full communion with the angels and all of the saints.

And it’s light of the fleeting nature of our earthly life that St. Paul encourages both celibacy and a detachment from worldly and material goods (1 Cor. 7:27-31):

Are you bound to a wife? Do not seek to be free. Are you free from a wife? Do not seek marriage. But if you marry, you do not sin, and if a girl marries she does not sin. Yet those who marry will have worldly troubles, and I would spare you that.

I mean, brethren, the appointed time has grown very short; from now on, let those who have wives live as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no goods, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the form of this world is passing away.

Celibacy, then, is supposed to remind us of that this world passes away. The priest wears the color associated with death, and lives like a son of the Resurrection. Hopefully, whether or not he’s taken a vow of poverty, he lives out a detachment from the goods of this world, including the good of sacramental marriage.

This is an important piece in the Catholic puzzle, so to speak. We already know (from Ephesians 5:21-30) that the marriage of a man to his wife is an image of Christ’s love for the Church. This shows the other side of the coin: that celibacy also reveals the divine plan, and particularly the life of the world to come. In the words of Andrew Preslar, “Marriage underscores the “already” of the Kingdom of God, while celibacy points towards the “not yet.” ”[/b]

When your undertakers are the same people whom you refused to employ; and they struggle to bury you and march on your bloating carcass.

Make Oluwa help us ooooooo.


Audu Abubakar, laa nke oma.

May the soul of Fr Emmanuel Idika and the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen

Holy and precious nuggets to live by.

Oh Lord! May you make me malleable and docile to your wish, Amen.

At the best affordable price, we can afford a steady supply of table eggs to you.

In need of that, PM me.

I stay in Anambra state, precisely Isuofia in Aguata LGA.

10 Ways to Get Over Yourself and Become Humble


“It’s not all about you!” Except, it sort of is. You are there every minute of your day. Everywhere you go, there you are. Who stars in all your dreams? You again.

Yet, detaching from self is mandatory for holiness. It is our life-long task, to get over ourselves by following Jesus whose life, death, and resurrection were all about us. Here are ten ways to help with that task.

1) Look at a crucifix and meditate on Christ’s Passion. During a Lenten retreat several years ago, Msgr. Chad Gion of Spirit of Life church spoke on “Holy Forgetfulness” and recommended looking to the cross. He presented pride as not just thinking we are better than others, but the problem of a preoccupation with self. “Humility only comes in self-forgetting, when I am not at the center,” he explained. “Christ lowered himself for us because love requires self-emptying. His death is the model of humility because he did not do it for himself. Christ did not die in our place to show us how great he was but he did it to show us how great his love was for us and through it, he did show us his greatness.”

2) Give up aspirations to star on a reality show or anything of the like. Being famous is not a career goal. Three recent studies revealed that kids now list being famous as what they want to do when they grow up-- Making it big rather than doing something big. Be countercultural; seek service over fame.


3) Step out in confidence, not pride. God gave us all the gifts we need to accomplish our mission on earth. We are complete! Believe it, celebrate it, and don’t take credit for it.

4) Don’t put yourself down. Whether boasting or bemoaning one’s own characteristics, both put the focus on self. In One-Minute Aquinas: The Doctor’s Quick Answers to Fundamental Questions Kevin Vost, Psy.D. warned people to snap out of the habit of putting themselves down. “Yet even wise pagan philosophers have observed: ‘It is the practice of boasters to make overmuch of themselves, and to make very little of themselves.’”

He pointed out that St. Augustine avoided clothing that was either too costly or too shabby because both serve to seek glory. Vost wrote that St. Thomas Aquinas addressed this issue on the topic of irony, explaining that the word irony comes from the Greek word, which means to speak falsely about one’s good points.

“We must be wary then, of a false humility,” Vost quoted St. Thomas as saying. “We need not seek out ways to broadcast our talents to others but neither should we deny that we have them or seek to hide them under bushel baskets.”

5) Go to Adoration Come before him, empty your mind, fill your heart, and infuse your soul with God’s grace. From there, a desire grows to want what he wants.

6) Read the Lives of the Saints. Interesting, heroic, inspirational and more edifying than Facebook. They are examples of God-empowerment over self-empowerment.

7) Embrace Failure. I didn't say to seek it. That would be stupid. Just embrace what happens, trusting that God can use all things for good for those who love him (Romans 8:28). St. Faustina illuminates such a lesson on failure. On February 22, 1931, Our Lord Jesus Christ began appearing to St. Faustina, a simple nun in Poland, bringing a message of mercy for all mankind. During one of the visions, St. Faustina brought up a priest who was being obedient to God’s wishes, but his attempts were not accomplishing his goal. “Why are you letting him fail?” she asked.

Jesus explained that failure in man’s eyes is not always failure in God’s eyes. In her Diary: Divine Mercy in My Soul, St. Faustina reported Jesus explained: “Write that by day and by night My gaze is fixed upon him, and I permit these adversities in order to increase his merit. I do not reward for good results but for the patience and hardship undergone for My sake.” (86).

Say the Humility Prayer

9) Do Good Deeds in Secret. Secretly performing good deeds such as donating anonymously, picking up someone else’s litter, praying for someone who seems not to like you, etc. avoids vain glory. “And your Father who sees in secret will reward you" (Matt 6:4).

10) Don’t compare yourself with others. Comparing, whether those achieving more or less success is a pitfall. One leads to jealousy and envy and the other to pride. Life is about doing your best for God and for others, not about doing better than others.

In the end, that alone leads to a happier, holier life. We can never be our best while looking over our shoulder at everyone else. God did not plan for us to be anyone other than who we are, so it brings peace as well as humility to simply seek to live out God’s plan for us.

But that's true. Ndi Igbo, Chi anyi mere anyi eze.

aAK1:
We are clearing out our old stock of incubatorsl
Capacity : 48 chicken and turkey egg
Features : automatic Turner ,temp control and humidity display
Power requirement:160 wat
Price40000 only.
We usually sell this machines at 60/65

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