On being a small but brighter light

4th Week of Lent (Th)
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
St. Dominic Church, NOLA

We are all children of the Enlightenment; that is, we were all raised on a daily diet of rational skepticism, the need for scientific proof, and a general suspicion of the supernatural. Add to this mix a uniquely American pragmatism and common good sense, and you have a model for the modern person who strives in live in the real world of things. However, like most children, we've taken bits and pieces of our upbringing and incorporated our own experiences into a worldview that seems coherent to us. Since we are believers, we have rejected the idea that there is no supernatural realm. We've accepted the existence of God; the reality of angels and their fallen kin; the destructive consequences of sin and the free availability of freedom from sin. Though few of us would claim to fully understand how the supernatural world works, most, if not all, of us would agree that there is something like a world beyond the physical world. How did we come to this conclusion? Evidence? Wishful thinking? Just a gamble? Maybe a little of each? If we follow Christ, we do so by choice. We made a decision to believe, a decision to trust the promises of God and to follow His Christ. Evidence plays a supporting role and reason helps us to understand, but ultimately, we choose. We choose to believe the witness of faithful generations.

Jesus confronts his accusers with a radical assertion: I am the Son of God. He shocks the Jews to their religious core by claiming to have the authority to pass judgment on sins, to forgive those sins, and heal the sinner. In effect, he is claiming to be God Himself. So why does he say, “If I testify on my own behalf, my testimony is not true”? First, let's understand what he is saying. He means, “When I testify for myself, you do not believe me.” He's not saying that his self-witness is false, only that his testimony is not heard as the truth by those who will not to believe. Augustine says it perfectly, “For He knew well that His Own witness of Himself was true; but for the sake of the weak, and hard of belief, and [those] without understanding, the Sun looked out for lamps. For their weakness of sight could not bear the dazzling brightness of the Sun.” The sun, our brightest star, looked for lamps. The Son of God looked for smaller lights to reflect his brightness so that those blinded by the brilliance of his witness could see him for who he really is. 

The Church—for 2,000 yrs—has been and continues to be a global collection of those smaller lights, each reflecting a sliver of Christ's light, each shining out a glimpse of his true glory. The accumulated light of 50 generations, 20 centuries, with each new generation adding to the brightness of our corporate witness, this gathered light tells the true but as yet imperfect story of our collective labors toward bearing a final witness to Christ's triumph over death. Evidence supports our claim that the Church is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic, even if individual lights in the Church fail at being one or all of the above. Reason—as a divine gift oriented toward the Gift-giver—supports our incomplete understanding of God's complete Self-revelation. But evidence and reason alone do not constitute faith. Reason and evidence do not suffice as truthful testimony. We choose to trust; we choose to love; we choose to hope. And when we choose to trust, love, and hope, our smaller light is added to the global witness, making the Church's testimony to the glory of God's mercy all the brighter. We can choose to brighten the light of our witness, or we can choose to darken it. Join the faithful generations in bearing witness to the saving power of Christ!

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Coffee Cup Browsing

His frustration with the bishops is understandable. . .but his rhetoric and understanding of canon law are deeply flawed.  

Boys castrated in Dutch Catholic psych wards in the '50's.  This sounds like the sort of thing that trendy scientific "thinkers" of the progressive-wing would do.  Orthodox Catholics know better.

Update:  Yup.  Turns out that those castrating shrinks in the Netherlands were just "following orders" from the All Benevolent State, specifically a mandate to castrate sex offenders.  

Occu-Idiots:  No Chores Strike on May 1st.  Looking at the recent pics of Occupy herding, I'd say not one of them as ever done a chore.  Much less held a real job.

Wow. . .yet another 9-0 Supreme Court Smackdown for B.O.  Maybe appointing all those political hacks to the ranks of the DOJ is turning out to be a really bad idea, uh?

Only the minds of a public service union could come up with something this twisted.

Decades of socialist dreaming and cradle to grave welfare have destroyed Italy's future.

Outrageous salaries for archdiocesan bureaucrats. 

What is going on in China?  Tanks in the street, a reported military coup in Shanghai, ousters of Party officials. 
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Jesus is not equal to God

4th Week of Lent (W)
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
St. Dominic Church, NOLA

Jesus heals a crippled man at the Pool of Bethesda, ordering him, “Rise, take up your mat, and walk.” The Jews who persecute the Lord accuse him of breaking the Sabbath Law. When Jesus hears these accusations, he answers them, “Amen, amen, I say to you, the Son cannot do anything on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing; for what he does, the Son will do also.” This is Jesus' answer to persecutors' question, but what is the question? What do the accusing Jews ask of Jesus? Implied in the accusation is the question: just who do you think you are. . .healing on the Sabbath, forgiving sins, and ordering others to break the Law?” Jesus answers, “My Father is at work until now, so I am at work.” This answer only adds to the fury of his accusers “because he not only broke the sabbath but he also called God his own father, making himself equal to God.” The sheer audacity of Jesus' claim to be the Son of God is breathtaking b/c no creature can ever be divine, no mere mortal can embody the glory of the Creator. Breaking the Sabbath Law is crime enough to warrant severe punishment, but to claim divine sonship is beyond the pale, beyond anything these religious folk have ever heard. It violates the First Commandment of the Ten. Of course, as Jesus makes abundantly clear, he is no creature; he is no mere mortal.

Had Jesus' persecutors fully understood what he is claiming about himself, they would've been really, really upset. According to John's Gospel, the accusers charge Jesus with the heresy of proclaiming himself “equal to God.” Jesus does no such thing. He never claims to be equal to God. He claims to be God Himself. Does this seem like a distinction w/o a difference to you? Well, let me ask you: two nickels equal a dime, right? But would you say that those two nickels are the same as one dime? How many of you would say, “I am equal to myself”? Americans claim that men and women are equal, but we do not claim that they are the same. Being equal to someone is not the same as being identical. We can be “equal under the law” while being very different in every other way. The claim that Jesus is making about his person, his mission, and his ultimate destination are all bound together in who he is as the Son of God made flesh. When he acts, speaks, and thinks, we witness the acts, speech, and thoughts of God. It took us a few centuries to wrestle this insight out of revelation, and it matters a great deal that we guard it well. 

Why does it matter how we think about the identity of Christ? We need to get this bit of theology right b/c we place so much of the weight of the faith on the person on Christ. We claim to follow Christ. To do and say all that he did and said. This means following him all the way to the Cross, into death, and on to the resurrection. Imagine how different our understanding of salvation would be if we had concluded (wrongly) some 1,800 yrs. ago that Jesus was just a man with a really deep insight into the divine. He died a criminal and so would we. He didn't rise from the tomb and neither will we. Our whole faith would be limited to being nice to one another, doing a few good works, and sharing a communal meal once a week. Is that worth dying for? Would you give your life to imitate an executed 1st century Jewish heretic? Instead we have this, “. . .whoever hears my word and believes in the one who sent me has eternal life and will not come to condemnation, but has passed from death to life.” That, brothers and sisters, is why any of this matters.

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It's not about your feelings. . .it's about the Truth!

The Soft Tyranny of Sentimentalism

Elizabeth Scalia

If 20th-century atheism rode in on the backs of totalitarian regimes, the 21st-century has delivered unto the world an anti-God, anti-Church movement that fits seamlessly into shallow, postmodern popular culture. Having no need for uprisings and the hardware of destruction, the new fog of faith has crept in on the little cat feet of Sentimentalism and it now sits on its haunches, surveying its splendidly wrought sanctimony.

Sentimentalism is the force of feel-goodism, the means by which we may cast off the conventions of faith and casually dismiss those institutions that refuse to submit to the trending times and morals. The Sentimentalist trusts his feelings over hallowed authority or the urgings of his reason, frequently answering hard religious questions with some noble-sounding phrase like "The God I believe in wouldn't . . . " (fill in the blank). What fits in that blank is typically some tenet of traditional faith that isn't currently fashionable, some moral demand that pop culture considers impossible—and hence, not worth even trying. Thus the Sentimentalist, while believing he follows the inviolate voice of his conscience, is really sniffing after trends, forming his heart according to the sensus fidelium of middlebrow magazines and public radio.

A Sentimentalist cannot reconcile religious convictions—whether rooted in scripture, tradition, or cultural practice—that do not correspond with his own considered feelings, which for him are both weighty and principled. Convinced that the people he loves cannot possibly be denied anything they want by a just God, or that the same just God would not permit deformities, illness, war, childhood abuse, or any of the human sufferings common to us all, he will not participate in a Church so fault-riddled and out-of-step with a generous and enlightened generation as . . . his own.

[. . .]

Sentimentalism nearly reigned supreme in the priestly formation programs of the 70's and 80's, thus producing a generation of pastors who casually dismiss Church teaching in favor of "following one's heart."  This Disneyesque approach to caring for God's children has inevitably bequeathed to us a generation or two of Catholics so sensitive, so imperiled by reason, authority, and tradition that the merest suggestion that Behavior X might be a sin or self-destructive is met with poo-poo's and derisive giggles.  

How often have you heard/read the phrases "out of step with the culture" or "throwback to pre-Vatican Two" or "turning back the clock on reform"?  All of these should be a loud, glaring warning that the speaker/writer is shoveling postmodern dung and calling it Something New.  The whole "Spirit of Vatican Two" project has been a long, disastrous experiment in global sentimentalism and, thankfully, the biological clock tracking this failed agenda is winding down. 

Unfortunately, it will take two generations to completely purge the ectoplasm of the "Spirit" and re-catechize Catholics in the truth of the faith.

Read the whole thing. . .it is WELL worth your time.
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NPR calls BXVI "a famous gay icon"

NPR game show host makes a series of offensive Pope BXVI jokes.  

Your tax dollars at work, folks!  Read the transcript and then contact NPR and let them know what you think. 

You might also consider contacting your Senators and Congressman to suggest that there are better ways to spend your taxes than paying some smug lefty to offend the Pope on public radio.

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Flaming clowning and a little dog too. . .

I'm a big fan of smelling good!  My cologne collection is very modest but stocked with reasonably high quality scents.  Below is a commercial for AXE Body Spray.  Never smelled the stuff. . .and don't plan to.  But the ad is pretty funny.

Got a laugh out of the flaming clown and the little dog.  :-)
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By the numbers: Fat Report and Page Views

Hmmmmm. . .looks like I gained four pounds.  This doesn't sound right.  I've gone down a notch on my habit belt.  Maybe the last weigh-in was a fluke.  Oh well.

Happier number:   1,003,833.   That's the number of page views for HancAquam since Feb. of 2006.  HA averages 557 page views a day. 

Thanks for reading!

Fr. Philip

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The original cell of social life

Solemnity of St. Joseph
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
St. Dominic Church, NOLA

If you ask a Catholic pastor how many members he has in his parish, he will say something like, “Oh, about 800 families.” Or 1,000 families, or 2,000 families. The number isn't as important here as the unit of measurement: families. Not individuals but families. Even if a household consists of one individual, it's counted as a family. This may seem odd until you read what the Catechism says about the family, “The family is the original cell of social life”(no. 2207). The most basic unit of our lives together as Christians is not the individual Christian but the Christian embedded in his/her family life. Given this, we can say that the parish then is a family of local families. The diocese is the family of all parochial families, and the Universal Church is the family of all the diocesan families. What is the Universal Church? The Church is the heir to God's promise made to “Abraham and his descendants that he would inherit the world, [not through the law] but through the righteousness that comes from faith.” When we believe on the name of Jesus, we are adopted into the family of God, becoming brothers and sisters to Christ, and co-heirs to the Kingdom. This means that Joseph, husband to Mary and adopted father of Jesus, is the our father in the Church. He is the Pillar of the Family, the Christian model for honoring God as our heavenly Father.

What little we know about Joseph comes from the gospel accounts of his betrothal to the virgin, Mary. Matthew tells us that he was “a righteous man,” a man consistent in his duties to God, following the Law, and keeping closely to the covenant. His personal integrity is demonstrated by the fact that he was unwilling to expose his wife to shame when she became pregnant before their period of betrothal had ended. Having decided to divorce her quietly, an angel came to him in a dream and told him that Mary's child was a gift from the Holy Spirit and that he (Joseph) should take them in and name the child, Emmanuel, “God is with us.” Matthew reports, “. . .[Joseph] did as the angel of the Lord had commanded him. . .” It is precisely Joseph's obedience to the Lord, his unwavering faith in the promises of God that forms the foundation of the Christian family, the original living cell of the Church. Had Joseph stubbornly followed the letter of the Law, Mary might have been a single mother raising a son without a father in the home.*

A recent study in England revealed that 2/3 of failed families there were fatherless. Most households below the poverty line in the U.S. are headed by single mothers and most of the young men serving prison terms in the U.S. were raised w/o a father in their lives. Now, there's nothing magical about having a man living with the family. Fathers can be abusive; a drain on the family finances rather than a help; and a bad example of fidelity to the vows of marriage. But a father who is faithful to God, faithful to his vows, and faithful to his children is a blessing beyond measure. The Catechism notes that “authority, stability, and a life of relationships within the family constitute the foundations for freedom, security, and fraternity within society” (no. 2207). If the original cell of social life, the family, is infected with selfishness, infidelity, uncontrolled addictions, and violence, then society at large is in danger of dying. The cure for these infections is to be found in the holy example of St. Joseph. A selfless life lived with sacrificial love in the service of one's family motivated by an unwavering faith in God. Joseph obeyed the Lord and his family flourishes still 2,000 years later!

* It has become expedient in recent years for Catholics of a particular political bent to claim that Mary was an "unwed mother."  This is patently false.  Mary was betrothed to Joseph.  If this were not so, how could he consider divorcing her?  Another politically expedient myth about Joseph and Mary is that the members of the Holy Family were "illegal immigrants."  This is also patently false.  If they were "illegals," why were they traveling to Jerusalem to participate in the Roman census? 

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Another B.O. blow to our religious liberty

From the NYT:

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration took another step on Friday to enforce a federal mandate for health insurance coverage of contraceptives, announcing how the new requirement would apply to the many Roman Catholic hospitals, universities and social service agencies that insure themselves [. . .]

Some otherwise solid Catholics are claiming that this mandate is not a violation of religious liberty.  I can't follow the logic of their twisted arguments.  If you pay for it, you're complicit. 

What I do know is that progressive social engineering by our Self Anointed Betters is indeed progressive, or rather it is incremental.  If the mandate stands, other mandates will follow until the only thing we're allowed to practice is our choir voices and maybe the occasional baptism. . .using FDA approved luke-warm, organic bottled water, of course.  

That's what B.O.'s whole freedom of worship rhetoric is about--the exclusion of religious voices from the public square. Keep your religion confined to the church. Our Constitution categorically restrains any governmental intrusion in our faith lives, guaranteeing our freedom of religion and not only our freedom to worship as we see fit.

STAND UP for our religious liberty on March 23rd!  And do not buy the lie that this battle is about women's health, contraception, or the right to privacy.  That's just faux political posturing to frighten women and shore up support among secularists.

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Return to Him all that is His. . .

3rd Week of Lent (S)
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
St. Dominic Church, NOLA

Hosea prophesies to those who turn from God, "Come, let us return to the LORD, it is he who has rent, but he will heal us; he has struck us, but he will bind our wounds. He will revive us . . . he will raise us up, to live in his presence. . .let us strive to know the Lord. . .” Let us strive to know the Lord! To know the Lord, to hear His Word and live according to His law, is the one sacrifice He will not refuse. To turn our heart and mind to His purpose and surrender our strength to His end is way back to His presence. But what turns us from the Lord in the first place? Hosea accuses God's people of practicing a piety “like a morning cloud, like the dew that early passes away.” Soft, thin, easily evaporated—a piety that collapses under the slightest pressure, that hides itself when threatened. Such a dainty love for God cannot stand along side the demands of righteousness. And it didn't. “For this reason I struck them through the prophets, I slew them by the words of my mouth. . .” If our Lord does want burnt offerings, if He rejects pietistic ritual and empty prayer, what does He want from us? “. . .it is love that I desire, not sacrifice, and knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.” To be truly righteous, we must love God and come to know Him in that love.

Jesus preaches a parable: a Pharisee and a tax collector approach the temple to pray. The Pharisee is convinced of his own righteousness, while the tax collector is convicted in his sin. The Pharisee cries out, “O God, I thank you that I am not like the rest of humanity—greedy, dishonest, adulterous. . .I fast twice a week, and I pay tithes on my whole income.” The tax collector “would not even raise his eyes to heaven but beat his breast and prayed, 'O God, be merciful to me a sinner.'” The Pharisee believes that fasting twice a week and paying a tithe on his whole income makes him righteous, makes him unlike the rest of us. He believes that his own actions—in following the Law—are the source of his holiness. His prayer is a lie. The tax collector approaches the temple, freely confessing his sin, and throws himself headlong into God's mercy, placing himself squarely and fully into God's hands. He knows that any righteousness he might enjoy is solely the work of the Lord. His prayer is true. Which of these two offers an acceptable sacrifice? Jesus says, “I tell you, the [tax collector] went home justified, not the [Pharisee]. . .” 

To be truly righteous, truly justified, we must love God and come to know Him in that love. And when we love God and come to know Him in that love, we are made righteous by Him whom we love. Hosea tells God's people that they have been humbled by the Lord b/c of their flimsy piety. Rather than humbling themselves like the tax collector, they choose instead to exalt themselves like the Pharisee; so now, they are urged to return to the Lord to be healed, to have their self-inflicted wounds bound by the very one they disobeyed. Hosea prophesies to God's fallen-away, “Let us strive to know the Lord!” And in knowing Him, love Him. He wants our contrite hearts, hearts well and truly turned to Him; He wants our strength, our courage turned to His purpose; He wants all of us, each of us; but He also wants all, everything from each of us. Not our pious gestures, nor our memorized and mumbled prayers. He wants from us all that He gives us: love, mercy, patience, and humility. Everything we have to give was first given. Before it all became ours, it was His. Return to Him all that is His; sacrifice your contrite heart. Know Him and love Him.

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Coffee Cup Browsing

No comment necessary:  local Planned Parenthood CEO arrested for indecent exposure.  

NAACP asks the UN to investigate state voter ID laws. . .in the US!  Given the UN's history as an overpriced but worthless collection of radical blowhards, I'm not worried.

The priest who fell for the Lesbian Buddhist set up finally speaks out. 

Canonist Ed Peters says that the Good Father does not understand the relevant canons.  I agree.

Fantastic vid from a Catholic woman challenging the B.O./MSM meme about the Church's "war on women." 

The woman who wants the Church to pay for her birth control pills vacations in Spain and Italy with her rich boyfriend. Apparently, $9/mo. for condoms will cramp her partying budget.

"You're more awesome than a monkey wearing a tuxedo made out of bacon. . ."  LOL!

Odd.  NYT won't publish "It's Time to Leave Islam" ad b/c it might endanger the troops. . .yet, they regularly argue that publishing leaked military info must be published despite any threat to the troops.
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Stand Up!

The Nationwide Rally for Religious Freedom is being held Friday, March 23 at noon, local time, outside federal buildings, Congressional offices and historic sites across the country. The theme for the Rally is “Stand Up for Religious Freedom—Stop the HHS Mandate!”

Will there be a rally near you?  Check it out.  If not, organize one!

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Can an acorn produce anything but an oak?

3rd Week of Lent (W)
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
St. Dominic Church, NOLA

You've probably never thought of Moses as a salesman. But think about it. He sales thousands of Hebrew slaves on the idea of following him out of slavery. He sales them on a plan to follow him through the desert. . .for forty years! He sales them the truth of a number of improbable revelations from God. Perhaps his best sales pitch comes when he delivers the Lord's Ten Commandments. Note this sentence in particular: “Observe [these commandments] carefully, for thus will you give evidence of your wisdom and intelligence to the nations who will hear of all these statutes and say, 'This great nation is truly a wise and intelligent people.'” That's brilliant! Moses knows that the commandments aren't going to be all that popular; they're going to be downright tough to swallow. That these commandments come from God should be enough for the fleeing Jews, but Moses knows his people. So, a little sugar is added to make any bitterness sweeter. Moses isn't fudging the truth. Following God's law is a sign of a wise and intelligent people. But a simple moral code like the Commandments needs to be practiced over time before it can develop into a proper ethical worldview. When Jesus announces that he has come to fulfill the law, he means that his arrival marks the full maturing of the Commandments' potential. At the deepest root of every oak tree is an acorn.

One of the many delusions of failed revolutions in the modern period is the idea that the traditions of a people must be destroyed before the revolution can succeed. The enlightened revolutionaries of 18th century France murdered priests and nuns. Destroyed churches. And set up a temple to reason. Bolivar, Castro, and Chavez all attacked the Church and their cultural heritages. It's no accident that both Stalin and Mao destroyed the religious and cultural heritages of their respective nations in the pursuit of secular, totalitarian utopias. They saw the past as the enemy of the future and (quite literally) bulldozed churches, temples, museums, and burned whole libraries of books. Their socialist utopias had to be built on a foundation of absolute dependence on the state and the party. Faith, tradition, family, individuality, and equality under the law were all named “enemies of the people” and destroyed. For these two murderous dictators, the past was an inconvenient truth, an obstacle to be eliminated. They came to destroy history not to fulfill it. And without a proper foundation, their revolutions collapsed.

The revolution that Christ brings is the fulfillment of his religious heritage, the full actualization of his tradition's potential. Moses handed down a moral code, a code of behavior designed to regulate how God's people behave toward Him and one another. Behind this code of behavior is an ethical imperative, a universal mandate that gives life to those words chiseled on cold stone, a living, breathing spirit that grows in us with time and practice. At the root of the Christian revolution is the Mosaic Law. Jesus says, “. . .until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or the smallest part of a letter will pass from the law. . .” How can it? Our Lord's commandment to love God and one another rests on the historical foundation of his Father's commandments given to Moses. And Moses' law rests on the spiritual foundation of the Father's love. We cannot love and ignore the law nor can we follow the law without love. Can we grow an oak tree w/o an acorn? Can an acorn produce anything but an oak?

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Monday Fat Report (Dispensed)

I didn't weigh myself on Monday. . .after confessions and Mass, I collapsed into a glorious nap after getting only about one hour's sleep this night before.  

I'll catch up this coming Monday.
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Folks often ask me if God is going to punish America for allowing abortion.  I say, "No.  He's going to allow the natural consequences of this sin to punish us."  Ergo.

B.O.'s The Catholic Church Hates Women Because It Refuses to Subsidize Mortal Sin meme backfires.  Lies never win. . .in the end.

You must have valid I.D. to drive; open a bank account; buy beer, tobacco, Sudafed; but, not to vote.  Well past time for the SupCrt to gut Section Five of the Voting Rights Act. 

Speaking of. . .undercover vid of voter fraud in VT.

Heh.  Pew Poll:  self-described political liberals are the most intolerant of dissenting views.  Told ya.

Some advice from Fr. Z. to orthodox seminarians trying to navigate the death throes of Baby Boomer modernist-progressive "formation teams."  Remember, guys:  tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock.

No, Fr Marcel was not suspended for refusing communion to that lesbian Buddhist activist in MD.  He is on administrative leave. . .a very, very different sort of thing altogether.

We're not going to jail. . .yet.  

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