Random thoughts and rattled nerves

• In the last few weeks I've come to admire pro-life workers even more than I ever did before. They risk enduring violent attacks, arrest, rough treatment while in jail, and verbal abuse every day they go out to protest or pray. But the worst thing, I've come to see must be the stabs in the back they get from their fellow Catholics.  I'm beginning to believe that a good chunk of the people in the chanceries and the pews would like to forget about abortion altogether. Oh they'll donate to the local Unwed Mother's Home and they'll show up for the Life Mass----maybe, but they are embarrassed by anything else.
  
  
  
• I read a couple of blog post decrying celebrity priests and I thought do you mean like Father Baker, Fr. Flanagan, Fr. Bessette, Fr. Casey, Archbishop Sheen or Father Peyton?  Not every priest is meant for parish life. God has different jobs for all of us. I don't have a dog in the Father Pavonne fight  and never paid much attention to him at all but I'm shocked at how many bloggers have turned against him. Did they hate him all along or are they just instinctively reacting like a wolf pack that has come across a wounded beast?
  
  
  
• The Pentagon says that military chaplains may perform same sex marriages. Of course nobody believes this is the end game. The next shoe to drop will be that chaplains will be ordered to do such weddings. In six months to a year some poor Catholic chaplain is going to be in trouble because he'll refuse to say a Nuptial Mass or give the Nuptial blessing without Mass to a homosexual copule. I hope I'm wrong. Betcha I'm not.
  
  
  
• One of my relatives is very ill and after my mother and I were  finally  able to visit-- barge in actually-- and see for ourselves what's really going on we discovered that this relative is in appalling living conditions. I've contacted  authorities and social workers and I'm working on a rescue plan but it makes me sick to think that my relative actually came to this state. I'll write more about it later but I haven't slept well since. I guess I must be suffering from a form of delayed shock but the urge to sit and wail or vomit is very strong. Christ in Heaven, oh sweet merciful Christ! I just can't believe what I saw this week. The only comfort I've been able to find is in the rosary and in this painting by James Tissot. I know that Jesus is right there with my relative in the middle of the awfulness.