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If you could only go to confession to Fr Ripperger or Fr James Martin, who would you choose:
58%Fr Ripp (I’m a man)
8%Fr Ripp (I’m a woman)
25%Fr JM (I’m a man)
8%Fr JM (I’m a woman)
318 votes • 1 daysIs this a good time to remind people that no one can actually explain what it means in practice if a couple lacks “just cause” to use NFP, and what they need to do instead to avoid sin?
The folks who insist that NFP is immoral also believe that God will send the spouse(s) to hell if they succumb to temptation in the shower after they’ve been living like cousins for 3 years.
Replying to @RejoiceCC
It's not a loophole because it's immoral.
Abstinence is moral for good reasons. Not wanting children is not a good reason.
Based
Replying to @LukeDashjr
Abstinence could be immoral if it were one-sided, but no married couple is required to have sex when neither of them want to.
So your argument would only work if, for instance, a woman tried to use NFP to avoid children against the wishes of her husband.
Craig Onin retweeted
Do you think birth control is a sin in marriage? I was reading Michael Knowles said if you avoid sex during a fertile window that’s sin. Do you agree? What about pills and other birth control?
We know what Catholics believe, looking for the Protestant answer. 🙏🏼
Twitter was being weird today and this posted twice. I deleted the other one, so make sure your vote is recorded below.
Cast your vote:
33%Fr Ripp (I’m a man)
50%Fr Ripp (I’m a woman)
17%Fr JM (I’m a man)
0%Fr JM (I’m a woman)
6 votes • Final results Craig Onin retweeted
I think the greatest challenge for a husband is to act virtuously even when he can't control his wife's response.
Across hundreds of coaching cases, I've noticed that the hardest thing for many men has been doing their duties when affection, respect or even basic cooperation appears uncertain.
Men who judge their own actions mainly by their wives' reactions desperately want their efforts to produce progress in their marriages. So when, for example, the same argument repeats, they start losing confidence that the marriage can EVER improve.
Physical intimacy often represents reassurance that his wife still desires him. Its disappearance can therefore threaten him on a deep level, making him even more insecure.
When his wife disagrees with his decisions, he imagines that he's failed to lead because, to him, leadership means securing her agreement.
He wants his sacrifices to contribute to a shared good, and he wants his wife to recognise them.
Her opinion carries enormous emotional weight for him. That's why her displeasure affects him far more deeply than criticism from his colleagues or friends does.
But because marriage exposes habits that a man can conceal elsewhere, his wife sees weaknesses that nobody else ever gets close enough to see. And many of her criticisms are perfectly justified.
Yet he can't make her appreciate his sacrifices. And he can't compel her to trust, forgive or cooperate with him.
So he feels responsible for protecting his family while recognising that he can't control the very person with whom he must build it.
And this is where his character is tested.
The effeminate man lacks the steadfastness to persevere in a necessary good without the consolation of immediate results. He becomes resentful, seeks constant reassurance or abandons his duties in discouragement.
The man of fortitude continues to act according to reason and charity. He corrects his faults, addresses wrongdoing and fulfils his responsibilities whether or not his wife gives him the response he desires.
He understands that his wife's response isn't the measure of his virtue.
And that's exactly how God uses marriage to help the man grow in masculinity.
God may permit DECADES of marital suffering through which a man learns lessons and grows in virtue in a way he could never have done in comfort.
And the man's great temptation is to make his obedience conditional upon God relieving his suffering.
Through pride, he imagines that he knows better than God does how long he should have to carry the cross that his duty lays upon him...
It is not possible to have a conversation with these people without them threatening you with hell.
Replying to @EternalLifePlan
You are a liar. And a public one at that. Doesn't bode well for your salvation.
I’ll no doubt get called a heretic for this, but the image of the Church I get from the gospels is that She’s a large boat designed to be a welcoming place of refuge for souls.
And yet so many Catholics seem to focus on how to kick as many people off the boat as we can.
I believe this is part of the reason we're seeing a growth in traditionalism and influx of "red pill" converts or reverts. I'm not a sociologist, but there's apparently an innate human desire for tribalism and exclusivity. People are wired to want to be part of an exclusive club, and are attracted to religions and organizations that are exclusive and restrictive. Marketing experts have explained how "watering down" or "loosening" the terms of membership in a religion often results in an exodus of members because people naturally gravitate to exclusivity over inclusivity.
Dagnabbit
Replying to @CraigOnin
So you are saying you're not a practicing Catholic. Please remove from your bio
I’m skeptical that Fr Ripperger’s approach does much to evangelize non-Catholics or bring people in to the Church. His target audience is clearly those who are already Catholic and who are traditional or wanting to become more traditional. He’s clearly loved by those who already agree with him.
I think asking Father Ripperger to stop public speaking for an entire year is ridiculous, and being a faithful Catholic does not mean I have to pretend otherwise.
Archbishop James Golka of Denver asked Father Chad Ripperger to step away from public speaking and interviews for a year. The archdiocese says this will allow him to focus on his religious community and that Father readily agreed. I respect Father’s obedience. I question the judgment behind the request.
We cannot keep hearing about the urgency of evangelization while asking priests with an audience outside the pews to stop speaking. Who exactly are we hoping will reach those people?
Someone who will not set foot in a church may still listen to a priest on a podcast. That conversation can be the first time in years they have taken the Catholic faith seriously. Why would we want to close off that opportunity for an entire year?
If Father needs more time for his community, reduce his schedule. Explain why that would not be enough. Catholics are capable of understanding competing responsibilities, but we are also capable of recognizing when an explanation leaves serious questions unanswered.
Evangelization cannot be something we applaud in a papal address and then treat as expendable in practice. These are people’s souls we are talking about. Asking how this decision serves them is a fair question, and it deserves a serious answer.
I’m more concerned that the “demons” Fr Ripperger claims to converse with are figments of his imagination than that they are real and misleading him.
Big if true
BREAKING: Fr. Chad Ripperger silenced by his bishop for a year.
Denver Archbishop James Golka has ordered Fr. Ripperger to cease all public ministry — no talks, no preaching, no writing.
lifesitenews.com/news/breaki…
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The Archdiocese of Denver states Archbishop Golka asked Fr. Ripperger to consider a one-year fast from public speaking and interviews to focus on his society; Fr. Ripperger readily agreed.
lifesitenews.com/news/breaking-…
This is a very long post but I think there are some nuggets of wisdom here.
Did God make us men a bunch of sex hounds who want to jump on every pretty woman we see?
In a way...yes. Yes he did.
The male sex drive isn’t a tame lion. I’m not going to sanitize it. It’s not just about love and connection with someone special. It’s raw, hungry, and aggressive.
There’s a famous story where President Calvin Coolidge and his wife were visiting a chicken farm. Seeing a rooster mounting a hen right in front of her, the first lady asked the attendant, “how often does he mate?” She was told, “dozens of times a day.” She grinned, “tell that to the President!” Not to be outdone, the President asked, “is it the same hen every time?” to which the attendant replied, “Oh no, Mr. President, a different hen each time.” President Coolidge gave a mischievous smile and said, “tell that to the first lady.”
Researchers call this “the Coolidge effect”—the insatiable appetite of males for new females. If you drop a female rat in with a male, he’ll immediately mate with her several times in a row. But he’ll lose interest over time and mate less and less often. However, add a new female to the cage, and the male will immediately drop everything he’s doing and jump on her. If you keep adding new females, the male will mate himself into an unconscious stupor. His sexual desire is stronger than his little rat body.
You’re not a rat, but can you relate? Your primal drive is spontaneous. A pretty woman walks into the room, catches your eye, and your shaft gets hard and points toward the thing it wants to mate with. Your rational mind may not want to marry her or raise children with her, but your primal mind doesn’t care. He yells out loud and clear: “mating opportunity at twelve o’clock, let’s go get her!”
Your primal mind doesn’t seem very moral! But actually, he’s trying to obey God in his own simplistic way. In Genesis 1, God commanded every living thing to “be fruitful and multiply,” and to mankind added the command to “fill the earth and subdue it.” This is our “cultural mandate” from God, to build families, societies, civilizations. Our bodies (and those of the animals) don’t think about the command consciously—the instinct to follow it is just built into our essence. Your primal mind sees a chance for fruitfulness and jumps at it.
If you let him go at it aimlessly, you’ll be that fire that burns the entire landscape. The result throughout history? Sexual assault. Single mothers. Fatherless children. Jealousy. Adultery. Broken homes. Ruined marriages. Murderous rivalry with other men. Without wisdom, your primal mind’s innate desire to obey the cultural mandate will end up destroying families, societies, and even civilizations.
The Cost of Being Careful
Since male sexual power can be so destructive, it makes sense that people try to tie it down. You can’t grab every pretty woman you see. Without a moral outlet for his desire, every Christian man can feel faced with a constant battle. It may seem that the price of virtue is eternal vigilance.
I once heard a sermon by a megachurch pastor who talked about lust. At any point he could stumble into sexual scandal, which would jeopardize his entire ministry. His solution? Stay away from anything that could tempt him. His phone was so locked down that he couldn’t even do a search for a hot air balloon ride. His wife and his staff had all the passwords. He admitted that it might seem extreme, but would you welcome a tiger into your home and just hope it doesn’t attack your family? He asked the congregation, “what do I lose by being careful?”
The pastor saw his own virility as a stalking predator, with his soul as the prey. A chance circumstance landing him alone in a room with a woman would be an emergency. A new ipad out of the box might as well be a pit viper. To protect himself from the capacity to do harm, he became someone else’s responsibility to manage. Another child to his wife, and a burden to his staff.
Christ said that the gates of Hell would not prevail against his church. That implies that we are on the offense against the forces of darkness. We’re coming to batter down the gates and set slaves free. But in this man’s framework, he’s the one under siege, frantically running from defense to defense, and hoping the devil doesn’t get through.
This is no way to live. One little chink in the defenses and the whole thing comes crumbling down. There’s no keeping the tiger away when the tiger is you. But even if he succeeded, what then? What sort of frame does a man have who truly believes he can’t trust himself? What power does a man have for life and ministry, when he is terrified by his own primal drive?
What did he lose by being careful? His manhood.
If you live like this, you’ll be the guy frantically chasing new outbreaks of an underground fire. Your energy will be spent reacting to crises, rather than chasing your goals. You’ll always be vulnerable to unexpected slips. And if you do finally quench your fire, the landscape you preserve will be cold and cheerless.
The journey of Christian discipleship isn’t about becoming a nice boy, but a good man. By “good” I don’t just mean morally the opposite of evil. I mean “good” like in “Good Friday.” Faithful, dependable, reliable—“all the knots held good.” And that means being trustworthy with power. A man doesn’t delegate the management of his own passions to his staff, his wife, or his mother. The buck stops with him.
The Primal Hunt
You’ve seen two approaches to your sex drive that don’t work. Now I’ll show you the one that does. You don’t have to learn some sophisticated technique to do it either—it’s as natural as breathing.
We can understand our instincts better if we see them in their original context. Masculinity and femininity weren’t created first and foremost for life in the modern world. So let’s imagine a young man growing up in a tribe of several hundred people living off the land—like the camp of the Biblical patriarch Isaac.
Our young hero is fourteen years old and puberty has arrived. He’s growing taller, his voice is cracking, and he gets erections. He’s sexually attracted to the young ladies in the camp, but none of them notice him. And so his virility feels like a frustrating irritation. He’s moody and antsy. How can he let out his sexual fire with no woman in his life?
Then one day the burly Esau walks by, and invites him to join the men on the hunt. The young man is intimidated. He doesn’t want to look bad in front of the men. But all of that pent-up virility propels him forward. In the moment that matters, he overcomes his fears, and takes down his first kill.
Walking back into the camp, the successful hunter has his head held high with the kill slung over his shoulders. Esau punches his arm and says, “not bad for your first hunt.” He’s not feeling sexual frustration at all. He’s on top of the world. And it’s at this point that one of the pretty young ladies attending Rebecca asks a friend, “Who is that young man? I’ve never noticed him before.”
Sexual Transmutation
Our hero just experienced “sexual transmutation.” That’s an esoteric word, but it just means responding to sexual arousal by using your virility for a non-sexual purpose. He started off sexually frustrated and channeled that energy into hunting. What was the result? His success satiated his drive while raising his status in the tribe.
That’s why I started the book with the word “virility”—because your sexual drive and your status drive are fundamentally the same power. Notice that the cultural mandate includes both procreation and conquest, “be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it.” Think of the hunt as a kind of sexual conquest. The young man exerted his strength and fertilized reality with his will. This brought forth fruit (food for the tribe) and raised his status. Sexual energy built up his frame.
It goes the other way too. This non-sexual pursuit was the young man’s clearest path to sexual abundance. If he had gone after the young ladies of the tribe as a nobody, they wouldn’t have been interested. But now that stalemate has been outflanked. There are new opportunities for courtship. The ladies love a conquering hero.
It’s a totally natural thing for any guy to do. Here’s an example from married life. I remember feeling sexually frustrated one evening after an argument with my wife. I stormed out to the garage, and it was a disaster. I snapped. In a fury, I started organizing the area around my workbench. It felt like a battle. How dare these intruding objects be out of place in my garage—I’ll show them! By the time I was finished, I wasn’t frustrated or horny anymore. I was pleased with a job well done. My wife noticed the shift in me, we made up, and we made love.
In that example, my sexual frustration was channeled into conquest energy. It wasn’t just that I distracted myself from being horny. Rather, going to war with the forces of chaos in the garage is what I did with those horny feelings. Virility was exerted and Primal was satisfied.
Here’s another example. Last summer, I was with my kids at a waterpark. While climbing a slide, I looked up and found a woman’s bikini-clad rear right in my face. Before I understood how virility works, I would have tied myself in knots trying not to stare. Instead, I relaxed, took a deep breath, and realized I already had all I needed. I thanked Primal for his powerful drive, and shifted the energy into jumping that much higher into the water with my boys. After that, there was no internal pull to ogle, nor any resentment towards the woman for “tempting” me.
Fuel for Mission
Some guys have trouble imagining how to channel sexual energy into anything besides sexual release—orgasm through masturbation or sex. The solution is simple: you need to be OK with the feeling of sexual arousal. In a way, both indulgence and repression are forms of resistance—they’re both trying to get rid of the arousal.
But is being horny really such a bad feeling?
You get an erection. Your heart beats faster. Your body feels charged, like it’s humming with energy. There’s a tingling heat under your skin, a kind of restless aliveness. What if you just let yourself feel that? Sexual transmutation isn’t about reducing desire—it’s about moving forward with it. Being OK with that sensation and doing something purposeful while it’s still running hot in your system.
Once you get the hang of directing your virility, you’ll experience sexual arousal as a gift and not a nuisance. It’s your “fuel for mission.”
For me with my wife, that mission may be sexual, but most of the time it’s not. Maybe you’re looking forward to married life as this oasis of sex on demand. You may be shocked to discover that, in a given week, I spend more waking hours not having sex than having sex! My sexual desire far exceeds sexual opportunities, even in a passionate marriage. But that’s OK, because there are other conquests in my life that require virility.
There’s a spiritual component to the “Coolidge effect.” If you dig a little, you’ll find high desires hidden in the base ones. Behind the desire to couple with every beautiful woman sits the desire to read every great book, to explore every wilderness, to understand every mystery of science and nature, to embark on every worthy adventure, and to express the infinite fullness of God himself. The cultural mandate, as its sights aim higher, merges with the great commandment, “love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.”
That means a virile man who is clear in his frame before God makes love to life. Train yourself to welcome a tinge of sexual energy when you feel it. And then look for ways to bring a virile charge to whatever you are doing. Type like you’re laying bricks—building a cathedral one keystroke at a time. Turn the doorknob like you're entering a space that was waiting for your presence. Walk down the street with a swagger as a member of God’s vanguard on the earth, with each footstep marking your territory. Feel an electric energy as you fertilize that exam with the lead of your pencil. Plant the seed of excellence in the work that you do.
Bear fruit with your intentions. Multiply your efforts. Fill your sphere of influence. Subdue your goals.
From THE WAY OF MEN WITH MAIDS 👇
















