CAPG's Blog 

 “There is good reason for Christ’s weeping over Jerusalem and all our cities today. Christ sees not only the externals, He sees all His human creatures, all mankind, their sins and their souls. All mankind is His creation and all in the city of man is not beautiful or good".(...)

"Let us look up to the mystical city of man which faces Christ today and over which we weep. (...) Man behaves self-centered, independent of God, a self-seeker going to the limit. A confused man not knowing his purpose, gives up to satisfaction and so his passions prevail. He becomes not only a danger to himself but to those who live with him,” Bishop Waters declared, emphasizing that lust, anger, hatred and injustice are symptomatic of our times."

"Christ is weeping today because He has provided the means to change all this for every man, woman, and child,(...) But man must cooperate. Man must help save man. It should be His city, He labored for it, He died for it. Christ is speaking to us through His gospel, also weeping for us and our lack of love. He is living, we are living. He is the living head of our living body. We can convert the world through Him, for Him and by Him if we love Him enough." (...) “Love Him in deed and in truth. Christ has the power, through you, to change great sinners into saints through love. This is the strength of the love of God through you. The city of God is with us, the city of God is built up by consolation and help given one another. Think of the joy of all the converts discovering this living body of Christ for the first time. Think of the power of this living body in the Mass."

"We are His Church, His family, His people and we are His body. In this ordered body there is no real competition only cooperation with the emphasis on the common good and the common cause which is Christ for one and all."

Source: The Voice, July 24, 1964

Bishop's Letter March 13, 1956

My dear Brethren:

On Thursday of this week there will arrive in Asheville six professed nuns and one postulant of the cloistered Carmelite Nuns of Strict Observance, to make the first foundation of cloistered contemplatives in the Diocese of Raleigh. These good nuns will arrive from the Carmelite Monastery of St. Therese, Little Flower of Jesus, and St. Magdalene de Pazzi of Allentown, Pennsylvania. Through the efforts of Fr. Fred Stanton of New York and Mother Elizabeth of the Trinity of Allentown, a cloistered convent site has been found and purchased on the outskirts of Asheville.
It is fitting that our first contemplative group of sisters should come from a Monastery under the title of St. Therese, Little Flower of Jesus, who is the Patroness of the Missions, and that the sisters should be of the Little Flower's own religious order.
It is also fitting that the first Mother Prioress of the new community should be called "Mother M. Bernadette of Our Lady of Lourdes," one of the special titles of Our Blessed Mother, so near to the heart of Father Price, our pioneer missionary, and also the Little Bernadette to whom he was especially devoted.
It is also fitting that the new monastery be dedicated to "Saint Joseph and the Child Jesus," since the Church is still in its infancy here in the missions, and Saint Joseph is the Patron of the Universal Church, and no doubt Our Blessed Mother, the Patroness of the Diocese of Raleigh, under so many titles, has been instrumental in honoring her Divine Son and her Holy Spouse by the beginning of this good work for God and souls in our midst.
The Rule of the Carmelite cloistered nuns is the Holy Rule of Saint Albert, as given to Saint Brocard, O. Carm., on Mount Carmel in Palestine. It is a penitential life, devoted to Prayer, Mortification, and Self-Denial. The choir religious are bound to the recitation or chanting of the Divine Office, of which Matins and Lauds are said at midnight. These sisters will also enjoy the privilege of Perpetual Adoration when they are sufficiently numerous for that devotion. Day and night one or two sisters will kneel, hour by hour, in Prayer and Adoration before Our Lord in the Most Blessed Sacrament.
When not engaged in mental or vocal prayer, the nuns will engage in manual labor, such as making or mending vestments, making altar breads, maintaining mission correspondence, publishing books on the order, pamphlets on prayer, etc. Some nuns do artistic painting on reliquaries and vestments, and the nuns usually tend their own garden of shrubs, fruit trees, and vegetables, etc.
(...)
We are privileged beyond measure in being given a foundation of Carmel in the Missions of North Carolina. Our obligation will be to help these good nuns by our interest, our alms, our prayers, and our support, for they are ours and have been given to us in the Diocese of Raleigh by our Holy Father who is their Major Superior.
I am sure that our good priests and people will welcome these Carmelites with open arms and that this Carmel of "St. Joseph and the Child Jesus" will blossom forth in our mission territory and obtain good contemplative vocations in numbers. By their good prayers and sacrifices the Church in the Diocese will produce fruit a hundredfold.
May I commend, especially, these nuns to our good people in and around Asheville. You are privileged above the rest of the Diocese in getting this first foundation of contemplatives. Though they will pray and sacrifice for all of us, they are closer to you. Please assist them in every way possible in name of Christ and the Church.
Thanking God through His holy Mother for this special sign of His Benevolence to us of the Diocese of Raleigh, and praying His Divine Blessing on the beginning of this good work, I remain sincerely yours in Christ, Bishop Vincent Waters Bishop of Raleigh.

Source: North Carolina Catholic

"There is only one objective norm for truth, justice, liberty, law-namely, God's eternal Order. (...) Atheistic secularism like atheistic communism, believes in no rights. All legal procedure is a mockery of justice where civil law is cut off from the source of morality: God. When men throw away this external objective, unbiased norm of justice, justice becomes what is expedient for the State and we have a substitute for God in the deification of the State we have arrived back at pagan times of the Roman Empire.

Under such a form of modern negation where truth, where justice, where nature, where liberty, where God, is denied we find no God-given rights of man, no unchangeable code of morality, no freedom under God or man, no will directed toward universal goodness, but instead we find law a caprice, might is right, evil is called good and good, evil, and so the will to evil is employed absolutely by atheistic governments
Now is the time to call a halt to this destruction of man and the world and to set about to rebuild man, society, and the world. Instead of negation, affirmation is necessary.

Men should make a definite and vigorous affirmation of the existence of God and an equally strong affirmation of the existence of God's order visible in the universe and in man. There should also be the affirmation "that man's will, directed to universal goodness or happiness, also participates in God's order. (...)

Then and then only we shall have peace. peace which is the work of justice. Divine justice. Peace which St. Augustine defined as the tranquility of order. Not the order of man, or of nations, or of mere human society, but peace, the tranquility of God's order in the universe."

Source NCWC News Service. Washington, Jan 14, 1952 page 7