random thoughts on a Sunday afternoon

St. Giles, pray for us

• The College of Cardinals has has 13 new members. God help us.
  
  
• I don't like doing housework on Sunday but my mother is spending the night with us tomorrow and I think I saw a mouse in the living room last night. If we were in South Carolina I'd ask one of my relative if their Feist dog could spend the day with me. They great little vermin hunters.  Instead I'm putting out traps and hope that if they don't get him the rodent will at least stay quiet and out of sight while Mama is here.  (Update: the mouse did not make an appearance while my mother was here!)
  
  
• C.L. at  Vincit Qui Se Vincit  has some very good thoughts after reading my thoughts on the call to unite the clans.
  
• Back in the 80s and early 90s corporate America sold us out by taking all the factories to China and other countries where they could pay a child a pittance an hour and work him all day. Working class Americans lost their jobs they were told that it was progress and to deal with it. There is a lot of talk today about the opioid "epidemic," as if it just happened but despair has been growing for at least three decades. The alcoholism, drug use and family destruction went through the roof in whole swaths of the country and it was either ignored, mocked or dismissed.  Kids were told that if you had a college degree in anything you'd never have to walk home in shock after finding out that the entire plant had closed. Well, a little bit legislation called  the Immigration Act of 1990 created the H1-B visa and made things....interesting for Americans with Bachelor's degrees. By the mid to late 90s people who thought they were bullet proof were stunned to find out that they weren't.
  
  The experts on TV, and in magazines and newspapers  told us that if you wanted to be safe you had to go beyond the Bachelors. A Master degree was the answer until it wasn't. For the past five years or so Americans have been told that STEM is the way to save themselves. Umm, no. STEM OPT gives foreign students a 24 month Visa extension if they pursue a science, technology, engineering or math program. If you think a STEM degree makes you safe you may be in for the same horrible surprise that one of my uncle's  faced when Bethlehem Steel closed or you may get to feel the same crushing fear some of my cousins faced when the textile mills closed in South Carolina. Nobody is safe.
  
  
  
  
  
  
•   I tell my relatives and best friends, ‘If you want your children to fight for their faith, send them to public school. If you want them to lose their faith, send them to Catholic school.’ ~Archbishop Fulton Sheen
  
  I'm sure the archbishop was talking about the Catholic-lite schools but there are still people in Rochester, NY who remember that one of the first things he did was to order the closure of a Catholic school. The families of the students fought back ferociously and the decision was dropped. The incident that ended the archbishop's time in Rochester was his decision to give St. Bridget's Church and school to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The reaction from the parishioners was intense and the idea was dropped and Archbishop Sheen put in for retirement.
  
  
  
• Eternal rest grant Oh Lord unto Thy servant.....

Fr. David Tanko was murdered in Nigeria. He is the 11th priest to be murdered in an African country this year. 

• I've read comments from Australians on multiple sites who are pretty much content with Cardinal Pell's conviction because all though he could not have done what he was convicted of but because of all the things he's been suspected of over the decades. Has Australian law always been like that or is this something new?