random thoughts on a Sunday afternoon

Saints Dominic and Francis, pray for us

• If your beloved wants to major in theology expects you to live in genteel poverty like the March family from Little Women* until he can get a professorship at Ave Maria, Christendom or Steubenville and a book contract, run away.
  
  
  
• The Bishop's Lenten appeal in DC is not doing as well as in previous years. Rocky looked at the collecion basket during Mass and noted that there was only one Appeal envelope in it. People aren't saying so out loud but the whole parade of McCarrick, Wuerl, Bransfield, and Rossi has had it's effect.
  
  
• How can Matthew Matt talk about uniting the clans when he's still treating Louie Verrechio as persona non grata?

• I'm listening to a woman give an interview on a Catholic podcast. She says a priest made advances up to laying hands on her. She reported it to the bishop who after an investigation decided in favor of the priest. She then went on about how hurt she was. I had only one thought: People, stop going to your bishop.  If Fr. X lays hand on you with carnal intent you need to call the police. Period. Don't trust anybody who tells you to keep this quiet and handle it in house. That's one of the reasons the pedophilia scandal festered for decades. If the plumber, the accountant or the man next door attempts to visit his sexual urges on to your unwilling person; do you call their bosses afterwards? No, you call the cops. Stop going to the bishop. Call the cops and then and only then do you make an appointment at the chancery. 

* I loved Little Women and one day when I was 12 I started thinking critically about the back story and suddenly I just couldn't read it anymore. Mr. March was a terrible father who let his wife and girls live in patched clothes and be so poor that Jo had to sell her hair in order to get the money for Marmee to travel to see him in the battlefield hospital and they had to rely on the charity of the rich aunt, and the kindly rich neighbor.  Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women because she needed to support the family, her father, the Rev. Alcott and the real Mr. March failed. She didn't love the book for itself but she was delighted to be able to give her mother a secure old age.