Death of the Virgin

Sorrowful Mysteries in Latin

I believe in the communion of saints...

I have this print by Leonard Porter in my living room

Last week I said two novenas to St. Therese and St. Anthony. I ended the novenas on Sunday. On Tuesday I went to the mailbox and pulled out a rosary from the St. Therese society.  Today I found something that I've been looking for since Sunday. Have my prayers been answered? I don't know. But I am sure that both saints gave me a nod and a "I heard you, sweetie." That is a vast ocean of comfort.

Thank you, Therese, thank you Anthony of Padua.

A scapular he'll never lose

 I was reading What Lola Wants Really and she led me to Vir's of Lair of the Catholic Caveman's  newest tattoo. Amazing!

Seminarian emergency kit

I had a lot of fun making a seminarinan emergency kit for one of Rocky's friends who went to the seminary this Fall. It included a lint brush, a shoe shine kit, a pair of black laces, a black Sharpie pen to cover any stains or bleach marks on  his black pants or jacket, a sewing kit and fabric tape. I think I threw in a holy card too.

Pray for vocations!

Light of the World

Does Pat Robertson know the bible better than the average Catholic?

Catholics are told ad nauseum that Protestants know their bible better than we do. Well yes and no. I know Protestants who can quote the bible like a champ but their interpretation of what they've read can be whatever they or their sect or their particular preacher want it to be. Pat Robertson says that if your spouse has alzheimers you can divorce him or her and remarry provided that you make sure that the spouse is taken care of because alzheimers is a living death. Ole Pat, I assume has read the bible cover to cover and has come across Our Lord's words on marriage but this miserable, selfish "revelation" is what he  came up with.

A heroine and a saint

I do not fear....God is with me....it was for this that I was born.

Joan of Arc

Inflamatus by Rossini and Ride the Chariot

Rocky's great aunt died and these were played at  her funeral today.

What a shame

I heard somone call their  old priest "wonder schmuck" the other day. Schmuck is a Yiddish word for penis, it's a pejorative and is used to describe a stupid, contemptible person. What pray tell, has Fr. done? He dared to tell  the craft club ladies that they can't store their junk....er...precious collectible art work at the parish hall anymore and must take it with them when they leave the premises at night.  However, his really, really awful and objectionable crime is that he talks too long during the homily and Mass lasts an hour or more. People can watch a baseball game for hours. We have no problem with the length of a football game. We  read celebrity gossip sites for hours. We stand in line for over an hour to get into a nightclub and we do it cheerfully but let the Mass go on for an hour ...well storm the Bastile. We have to get to brunch  ya know!

What the heck is wrong with people?  St. Josemaria Escriva once reprimanded a person who complained to him that Mass was too long. The saint replied that the man found the Mass tedious becuase his love was too short.

Behold, thy mother

St. Veronica's veil

Bloggers and commenters --rules of engagement

There's a bunch of Catholic bloggers whining about comments lately. I find that annoying. If you don't like what people have to say either stop blogging or set your blog to no comments allowed or just delete the comment. End of problem. Now, on the other side, folks when you visit most blogs it's like visiting someones home. With this in mind, one  should always behave nicely when commenting at a mommy blog, a priest or consecrated person's blog or any personal blog.  There is one well known priest who blogs (NO IT IS NOT FR. Z. so DON'T EVEN GO THERE) whom I can't bear so I do not read his blog at all. That keeps me from offending our Lord and writing what I really think about some of his posts.

As for professional layperson bloggers who dare to present  themselves as Catholic experts who are qualified to teach and advise, yes, you betcha they are fair game.  Especially if they insinuate that anyone who isn't their sychophant is an idiot or a barbarian.  No layperson who makes their living off of the Church is too high and mighty to be questioned. If they can't take the heat they should leave the arena instead of being big ole crybabies.  If you do comment on something that seems wrong please be polite and I beg you -- don't write  in text-speak. Do not attack the pope. Attack the pope and I'm steering clear of you, period. Don't go for the jugular vein by calling the blogger or other commenters homosexuals (yeah, I've seen that) and damning people to hell because they don't agree with you is wrong and dangerous to your own soul.

I am not saying that we who comment on Catholic blogs have to talk like old spinster Aunt Pitty Pat espeacially when crap is being spoken about the Faith or in the name of Catholicism but you can tell someone that they are wrong without going mafioso on them.  Okay?

To the lost

Contrary to what our elites may tell  you 9/11 is not Be Nice to Muslims Day nor is it Go to a School and Paint Yet Another Ugly Mural Day. Remember the dead. Have mercy on those who were lost, especially those who were not in a state of grace and did not have time to recollect themselves. Please pray for them. Anything else is a betrayal.

Don't foreget him. Don't forget them.

This will all end in tears

• That poor boy who married Kim Kardashian.
  
  
  
• The people who thought Obama was going to be the messiah.
  
  
  
• England
  
  
• France
  
  
• People who think they'll be saved if they pander to Islam
  
  
  
• Fans who think the Redskins are going to the Playoffs this year
  
  
  
• People who actually think there will be peace in the Middle East before the Second Coming
  
  
• The Arab Spring
  
  
• Insisting that you and your wife must wait until everything is perfect before she can get pregnant ten or fifteen years from now
  
  
• This, unless marriage (not necasarily to the natural father since the odds are that he's no prize to begin with) and/or adoption are also talked about. Single motherhood is no picnic. Financially, emotionally or physically it's a struggle every day.
  
  My mother was a widow and although she was as strong as an Amazon it was hard. She was simply heroic. Most young girls aren't ready to be heroic and they blow it horribly. Gangs and prisons are full of the sons of single mothers. Of course Mama didn't mean for things to go that way but she was busy and tired and she had no-one watching her back.  Let's not kid ourselves. Go talk to a cop, or an ermergency room nurse or visit the mourge and you'll  find a lot stories about kids who ran into the boogie man. He's not in the woods and he's not hiding in the alley, he's mommy's boyfriend and he was invited in.

Saints Nunilo and Aloida

You were both just girls but you loved Jesus more than your own lives. Cowardice and comprimise found no place in your tender hearts.
Pray for us.

Christ Consoling the Wanderers

The French artist, James Tissot stopped by a church to make sketches when he had a completely unexpected vision. Later he tried to paint what he saw. This is one of the paintings he did. After this vision, Tissot changed his life. He went to the Holy Land and dedicated himself to painting scenes from the life of Our Lord and from the Old Testament.

Thank you, Pope Benedict!

Recently the Holy Father made some strong comments about the generations of cradle Catholics who didn't evangelize.. Except for Fr. Z., the response in most Catholic blogs both liberal and conservative was silence. On Fr. Z's blog there were quite a few huffy "He doesn't mean me," comments. It's easy to jeer other people's ugliness but it hurts like hell when you realize that you aren't so cute yourself. And this issue isn't esoteric. It's not a matter of two guys arguing over how much lace on an alb is too much, it isn't a matter of mocking  the show off cantor for her horrible music. The pope's comments stung because it's many of us, the pewsitters that are in the wrong.

I know of one old couple who have two children.  One had his kids baptized and hasn't set foot in a church since. His parents are afraid to say anything to him. The other child got married in the Church, attends Mass but is against many Church teachings.  The parents again, are too afraid to say anything. Many decent parents tried to raise their children in the Faith in the 70s and 80s but they were back-stabbed by the prevailing culture, the weakness of the religious education in their own parishes, the liberalism and feminism of their nuns, and the wishy washiness of their priests. I feel sorry for those people.

I have no pity however, for the people that the Pope was really talking about. We've had a problem with people who wanted their parishes to be  private ethnic or social class clubs. Years ago Rocky and I visited Our Lady of Hope in Potomac Falls and while the pastor was pleasant, and the church is beautiful, the parishioners were not either one of these traits. We encountered surprising rudeness and won't go back.  I know of a church in Baltimore that has security guards. This is partially because the neighborhood is so bad it's like something out of a gangsta rap video and partially because the parishioners refused to have anything to do with the black people who moved into the neighborhood in the late 60s.  They do make an effort to welcome everyone now and it's a joy to visit  but the damage was done. Just think, if Catholics at that parish had not ignored the changing populations that neighborhood might not be the pest hole it is now.
And the Church has had a problem with another large group of  people: the sophisticates who downplayed their Catholicism to fit in with the crowd. "Well yeah, I'm Catholic," they say with a blush of shame, "But it's not a big deal." They kept their Faith so down low that it became like a forgotten prisoner in a dungeon. One famous person who fit into this group was JFK but we've all seen folks like this: The Catholic woman who's obsessed with the homosexual subculture and is the token straight female at all her friend's gatherings. She's also the one who's forever asking where all the marriageable men are. If you tell her that straight men don't go where she and her friends go she'll have none of it.  We've all seen and heard the Catholic casual fornicator who brags to one and all  about his weekend adventures every Monday morning, there's the rosary as a necklace wearing chick who won't eat meat but thinks abortion is okay. We've all seen these people and so have the atheist, the unchurched, and the Protestants who nod and think 'hypocrite,' as they turn and walk away, maybe forever.  So many of us are unaware that all eyes really are on us and what we do and don't do reflects on the Faith. 

God bless Pope Benedict. 

Priorities

I see that Cardinal Wuerl is donating 25K to the repair work fund at the Episcopalian National Cathedral which was damaged in the earthquake.  I haven’t seen any reports on how much was given to St. Peter’s on the Hill, Holy Name or  St. Gabriel, all of  which are actual DC Catholic churches that were also damaged in the earthquake. I understand that historic St. Paticks in Baltimore was so damaged that it’s closed indefinitely. They might need some money too.

It's a thin line between brilliant and crazy

I just read an email from an educated traditionalist Catholic person that promoted a conspiracy theory so ridiculous that I won’t even describe it. It's easy to put everyone who holds a conspiracy theory in the same crazy basket as this person but every now and then someone comes along who turns out to have been brilliantly aware, and absolutely correct.

The author, Stephen King once wrote an essay in which he posited the idea that Americans are prone to conspiracy theories because of Watergate. No. It's deeper than that. If you look at the individual family histories of Americans you'll find that a lot of us owe our existence to an ancestor who thought something weird was going  on and decided to risk ridicule by having  conversations that went something like these:

France
Helene: Maurice, I want to go to America. That man Hitler scares me.
Maurice: What? He’s a big deal in Germany but we live in Paris, my little cabbage.
Helene: Have you read his book? It’s sold out at the bookstore up the street.
Maurice: It’s just crazy talk. Besides I'm not Jewish anymore. I converted ten years ago. I’ve never even been to a synagogue in my whole life.
Helene: Maurice, I’m serious. We need to leave here.

One year later. France has surrendered to Germany. Maurice and Helene are in New Orleans running a snooty restaurant.
Maurice: Thank God I listened to you.
Helene: Mmm Hmm.

Ireland

Mam: Son, I bought you a ticket to Boston in America.
Ned: What? I couldn’t leave you and Dah.
Mam: Sweet boy, the way the English are running things this blight is going to lead to a famine. I want to you be in America with your Uncle Declan.
Ned: But
Mam: No buts, boy!

Thirty Years Later
The famine did happen. Ned became a big man in Boston. His son graduated from Harvard at the top of his class and married a daughter of the Brahmins.

Ned: Thank God I listened to Mammy.
Spirit of Mam : Mmm Hmm.


Armenia
Brosh: I’m sick of living like this and I heard that the Turks wiped out a whole village last week.
Elizi: It’s just a rumor. If we stay calm and don’t cause any trouble…
Brosh: Elizi, it’s just a matter of time before they come to our village. I’m selling the goats and getting tickets for the whole family to go to America.

Four months later. The Armenian genocide begins in earnest. Eliz, Brosh and their children are in Coney Island running a sandwich cart that will one day be a diner.

Eliz: I’m not one hundred percent in love with this tenement but thank God I listened to you.
Brosh : Mmm Hmm!


Oklahoma
Bernice: Tony, I think we should leave Tulsa.
Tony: What?
Bernice: I overheard some people talking. The Klan is going to ride Saturday night.
Tony: We have a house, a business!
Bernice: Tony, I’m going to be on the train Friday morning . You can come with me or not.

Two days later. The KKK burns down most of the  neighborhood known as Black Wall Street. Bernice and Tony start their lives over in Muskogee.

Tony: My brother’s place was burned to the ground and the neighbors on either side of our old house are missing. Thank God I listened to you.
Bernice: Mmm Hmm.


So here's to the ancestors, the ones who smelled something funny in the wind and decided it was time to put on the traveling shoes. They straddled that line between brilliant and crazy and just maybe, saved the world.