AfterMass

🌹 Custom baby & children's rosary sale starts tomorrow 10/15, the biggest of the year! Shop Abundantly Yours: https://abundantlyyours.org/aftermass

Sydney Sweeney's nearly nude sports betting ad was called degrading to women. Weeks later, Shane Gillis was called a misogynist on SNL for criticizing what women wear to the gym. Our culture is arguing about modesty without realizing it.

Today we look at what the Church actually teaches about modesty: the Catechism's surprising words about advertising, St. Thomas Aquinas's four kinds of modesty, modesty of the tongue, custody of the eyes, and the fruits of a culture that threw modesty away.

📚 Books mentioned in this video:

• Introduction to the Devout Life: https://link.amazon/B02xBl5k0
• Training the Tongue and Growing Beyond Sins of Speech: https://link.amazon/B04KveGjT

Mary, Mother most pure, pray for us.

#Modesty #Catholic #SydneySweeney #ShaneGillis #AfterMass

🌹 Custom baby & children’s rosary sale starts 10/15, the biggest of the year! Shop Abundantly Yours: https://abundantlyyours.org/aftermass

The Pentagon plans to livestream the December firing-squad execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan, which would be the first public execution in America in 90 years. The U.S. bishops called it “a barbaric promotion of a culture of death,” and the archbishop for the military told Catholic soldiers to ask to be excused.

Online, many Catholics are pushing back, pointing out that Scripture, the Church Fathers, St. Thomas Aquinas, and even popes once accepted capital punishment. So is the Church contradicting herself? Today we go through what the Church actually taught, how doctrine develops, the honest debate over the word “inadmissible,” and why even the strongest defenders of the death penalty in Catholic history never defended making it a spectacle.

Please pray for the victims of the Fort Hood shooting and their families.

Our Lady of Good Counsel, pray for us.

#Catholic #DeathPenalty #ChurchTeaching #CultureOfLife #AfterMass

🌹 Shop the Abundantly Yours custom baby and children’s rosary sale, October 15 to 25. It’s their biggest sale of the year on kids’ rosaries, even bigger than Black Friday, and ordering early means your custom rosary arrives well before Christmas: abundantlyyours.org/aftermass

The Cornell 7 case is everywhere, and everyone from pop stars to politicians to Megyn Kelly has an opinion. I’m not here to argue the case. The investigation is ongoing and no one has been charged. I’m here to talk about what the reaction to it says about us, and what the Church actually teaches.

In this video:

• What the case is about and where it stands
• How commentators on the left and the right turned real people into political ammunition
• True crime and the Eighth Commandment: rash judgment, detraction, and calumny
• The sin of the bystander, and why we rarely confess what we let happen
• The problem underneath it all: what casual sex has done to a generation
• What we do as Catholics: the virtues to practice ourselves and teach our kids

If something like this has happened to you, it was not your fault, and you are not alone. National Sexual Assault Hotline: 1-800-656-4673, available 24/7.

#Catholic #Cornell7 #MegynKelly #TheologyOfTheBody #CatholicParenting #AfterMass

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In 1571, the Ottoman navy was about to take the Mediterranean, and the whole Church was asked to pray the Rosary. Today we tell the story of the Battle of Lepanto: the wind that shifted, the 12,000 Christian slaves set free, and the vision in Rome. Plus the other times Catholics turned to the Rosary against impossible odds.

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us.

#OurLadyOfTheRosary #Lepanto #Rosary #Catholic #AfterMass

🌹 Preorder the NEW St. Francis & St. Gemma rosaries from Abundantly Yours: https://abundantlyyours.org/aftermass

Every October, Catholics are told Halloween is a pagan festival in disguise. Today we look at the real history: how All Saints' Day spread from Rome, why early Irish Christians kept their feast of all saints in April, where the "Lord of the Dead" myth came from, how soul cakes became trick-or-treating, and how the Reformation and the twentieth century reshaped the night before All Saints.

All you holy men and women, pray for us.

#Halloween #AllHallowsEve #Catholic #AfterMass

🌹 Preorder the NEW St. Francis & St. Gemma rosaries from Abundantly Yours: https://abundantlyyours.org/aftermass

On her feast day, we look at what Jesus told St. Faustina about the final moments of life: the hidden grace He offers at the very end, the promises attached to the Chaplet of Divine Mercy, and why you should never assume someone you love is lost. Plus, three simple things you can start tonight to pray for the dying.

St. Faustina, pray for us.

#StFaustina #DivineMercy #Catholic #AfterMass

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Taking September off from YouTube + the podcast 🤍

I’m giving myself the month of September to spend some real time working on AfterMass and a few other projects that have been sitting in my brain for a very long time.

One of the biggest things I’m working on is aftermass.org. My hope is to build it into a real Catholic hub for everything that happens after Mass ends. Resources to help you understand the faith, live the liturgical year, pray, learn, wrestle with the questions you’ve been afraid to ask and actually bring Catholicism into your everyday life.

I’ve also started the AfterMass Monthly, a free newsletter that comes out at the beginning of each month with the month’s important liturgical dates, a Gospel reflection, saint of the month, a Catholic question answered, an examination of conscience, what’s coming next and more. September’s issue is out now, so make sure you sign up above to get it. 🤍

And then there are a few other things happening behind the scenes...

I’m writing a lot. I’ve heard the “Ana, when are you going to write a book?” comments for a long time lol. That’s all I’m saying about that for now. 👀

I have ideas and projects that I keep saying I’ll get to “when I have time” and I finally realized I have to actually make the time.

So September is my month to build, write, create, pray about where all of this is going and get some things ready that I’ve wanted to do for a long time.

I’ll still be around on Instagram and there will be plenty happening over at AfterMass.

YouTube + the podcast will be back in October. 🤍

Tomorrow, August 22, the Church celebrates the Queenship of Mary, eight days after the Assumption. Most Catholics have said "Hail, Holy Queen" hundreds of times without knowing where that title actually comes from or what it means in practice.

The answer isn't in medieval royal courts. It's in the ancient Israelite office of the gebirah, the king's mother, the one figure with the standing to bring a request to the throne and be heard. This video traces that office from Solomon and Bathsheba in 1 Kings, through Pope Pius XII's 1954 encyclical establishing the feast, to what it actually means to ask for Mary's intercession today.

If you've ever wondered whether praying to Mary is a workaround instead of going straight to God, this explains why the answer is no, and gives you a clearer way to pray the Hail Holy Queen this week.

Padre Pio spent decades hearing confessions, and the sin he came back to most wasn't the one people expected. It was gossip, and more specifically what the Church calls detraction and calumny, revealing or fabricating things about someone who isn't in the room. This video breaks down the difference between rash judgment, detraction and calumny, why truth isn't a defense against it, and a simple test you can run before you speak about someone who isn't there. It also covers where the line is when you're talking about real harm someone did to you, since that's a different category entirely.

Examine your conscience this week for the conversations you'd never repeat if the person walked in and heard you.

A team of Italian cardiologists put people on heart monitors and had them pray the rosary in Latin. What they measured surprised even the researchers: praying it at a normal pace slowed people's breathing to almost exactly six breaths a minute, a rate where the heart and blood pressure systems fall into sync. Separately, neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Newberg used brain scans to study what happens during repetitive, verbal prayer like this and found something worth knowing if you've ever finished a rosary feeling like your mind never showed up.

This video walks through both studies and what they actually mean, without turning the rosary into a breathing exercise or claiming science can measure grace. It can't.. but it can tell you that a distracted, dry rosary is doing something real in your body whether you feel it or not.

Sources: Bernardi et al., BMJ (2001); Andrew Newberg's SPECT imaging research on contemplative prayer.