Random thoughts

*It's a heat advisory day today so I'm staying inside and enjoying the comforts of modern life. When Rocky comes home from work we may head to the Potomac river. In the meantime, thank you Mr. Carrier, Mr. Crapper, Mr. Farnsworth and good ole Mr. Edison, may you all rest in peace.


*After reading about St. Philip Neri I'm curious. How does an oratory work? Is it treated  like a parish or a monastery?

* If you've ever read the Pieta prayer book you've probably seen  excerpts from Mutter Vogel's Worldwide Love. Mother Vogel was a German woman who had many visits from Our Lord and Our Lady. Our Lord supposedly told her many things but the oft quoted words in the Pieta prayer book concerned criticism of priests. A number of people on various blogs have claimed that there's no evidence that Mutter Vogel existed.

I'm a librarian. Looking for stuff is my business so I went searching for Mother Vogel's book for myself. Google is great and I love it but it's not the end of online research by a long shot. After checking WorldCat, the Library of Congress, German Amazon, German books on mystics and a few German blogs I discovered that the Pieta editors spelled Mutter Vogel's name wrong. It's actually Vogl and the book doesn't seem to have been published in English. I then looked for Mutter Vogls weltweite Liebe  and learned that her name was Katharina and she was a Franciscan Third Order member. She did not publish the book herself but seems to have reported the details of her visions only to her superior(s). Someone named A. M. Weigl wrote the book so anyone searching for Vogel as the author wouldn't have found a thing. Katharina Vogl  died in 1956, and her cause for beatification has been opened.