Blessed Are the Troublemakers 5
You know what really annoys me? This guy.
Yeah! That’s right! We’re Catholic!
Don’t take this with a grain of salt. If we take him at his word and follow his example, we have to be a holy nuisance and annoy the [you-know-what] out of people. Literally.
Yesterday, Pope Francis made it clear. He wants You to be a troublemaker too.
Read on… (From CNA/EWTN News:)
“If we annoy people, blessed be the Lord,” said Pope Francis during his morning Mass at the Vatican on May 16.
“We can ask the Holy Spirit to give us all this apostolic fervor and to give us the grace to be annoying when things are too quiet in the Church,” he said at the chapel of the Saint Martha residence, where he lives.
He celebrated the Mass alongside Cardinal Peter Turkson and Bishop Mario Toso, the president and the secretary of the Vatican Council for Justice and Peace.
Council staff and employees from Vatican Radio were among those attending the Eucharistic celebration.
The Pope preached on today’s first reading from Acts 22 and contrasted “backseat Christians” with those who have apostolic zeal.
“There are those who are well mannered, who do everything well, but are unable to bring people to the Church through proclamation and apostolic zeal,” he stated.
The pontiff said apostolic zeal “implies an element of madness,” which he labeled as “healthy” and “spiritual.”
He added that it “can only be understood in an atmosphere of love” and that it is not an “enthusiasm for power and possession.”
Pope Francis also dwelt on St. Paul’s actions in the reading from Acts.
“Paul, in preaching of the Lord, was a nuisance, but he had deep within him that most Christian of attitudes, apostolic zeal,” he stated.
“He was not a man of compromise, no!” he exclaimed. “The truth, forward! The proclamation of Jesus Christ, forward!”
The Pope noted that St. Paul’s fate was one “with many crosses, but he keeps going, he looks to the Lord and keeps going.”
“He is a man who, with his preaching, his work, his attitude irritates others, because testifying to Jesus Christ and the proclamation of Jesus Christ makes us uncomfortable.
“It threatens our comfort zones, even Christian comfort zones, right?” he asked the congregation. “It irritates us.”
Pope Francis underscored that the Lord “always wants us to move forward, forward, forward, not to take refuge in a quiet life or in cozy structures.”
Saint Paul’s apostolic zeal, he observed, comes from knowing Jesus Christ.
Paul did not find and encounter Jesus Christ with an intellectual or scientific knowledge, but with “that first knowledge of the heart and of a personal encounter.”
According to the Pope, St. Paul was a “fiery” individual who was always in trouble, “not in trouble for troubles’ sake, but for Jesus” because “proclaiming Jesus is the consequence.”
“The Church has so much need of this, not only in distant lands, in the young churches, among people who do not know Jesus Christ, but here in the cities, in our cities, they need this proclamation of Jesus Christ,” Pope Francis stressed.
“So let us ask the Holy Spirit for this grace of apostolic zeal, let’s be Christians with apostolic zeal, onwards, as the Lord says to Paul, take courage!” he exclaimed.
To sum it all up: Blessed are the Troublemakers; they will set the world on fire for the Kingdom of God!
I just wonder tonight: If you and I made the list.
I don’t know about you but I want to be known as a troublemaker.
I want to make trouble for the devil.
I want to make it hard for people to go to hell.
I want to make it hard for people to stay sick.
I want to make it hard for the discouraged and depressed to stay discouraged and depressed.
I want to make it hard for hypocrites to feel comfortable in the house of God.
I want to make it hard for Gods people to stay broke.
I want to make it hard for false prophets and hirelings to fatten their pockets by preying on the ignorance or the simplicity, and the generosity of Gods people.
I don’t want anyone walking away from here tonight wondering what I’m talking about.
I have a responsibility to make the message clear, to lift up the downcast, encourage the discouraged, and warn the wicked to flee from the wrath to come.
THE LAITYTUDE 
I do not know if the corrupt clergy realizes that slowly but surely, in a sometimes not so subtle manner, Pope Francis is closing in on them. Again and again he makes it clear that JESUS intended them to be shepherds and not wolves; and he definitely will see to it that they are brought to book; so we just have to be a bit more patient; after all, the rot of so many years cannot be cleared in a very short time or immediately, like a magician waving his wand. Bring down the stick he surely will; unless they, the mafia, see to it that he is bumped off.
Hi Fergy, you are correct and your fear is my fear too.I will not be shocked if the wolves and serpents within the administration attempt to bump him off..