Serving the Parishes of
St. Martha and St. Mary
Plainville & Wrentham MA
St. Martha and St. Mary
Plainville & Wrentham MA
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Who Can You Believe?
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Who Can You Believe?
We live in an era of ‘fake news’ and posts on the internet from hackers with at least creative imaginations, if not downright evil intent. We need to be skeptical about the veracity of all that we read or hear. The surest way to test the validity of a post is to look to the authority and integrity of the source.
I was pleasantly surprised recently to see this ‘caveat’ on Facebook attributed to a source of unquestioned authority and integrity.
‘You cannot believe everything you read on the internet.’ ---Abraham Lincoln
Of course this ‘caveat’ is rendered somewhat questionable by the fact that Abraham Lincoln lived one hundred years before Al Gore invented the internet!
Putting that caution aside, President Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States, was eerily prescient in some of his reflections on the state of our great nation in ways that make his words sometimes even more meaningful today. As we fire up the grills for cook-outs and search out the perfect spots for viewing the fireworks on this 4th of July weekend in 2017, these words of Abraham Lincoln would seem quite current if we happened to stumble upon them while ‘surfing the net’ today. May we take them to heart as we celebrate our 241st Independence Day cognizant of the blessings we have received and the responsibilities we carry as American citizens.
Fr Bill
“We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth, and power as no other nation has ever grown.
But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these things were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own.
Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self -sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us.”
Abraham Lincoln