Random thoughts on a Sunday evening

• Rocky's hip pain level has gone from two Tylenols and a good dinner to Tramadol and a cane so he's having surgery next month. St. Alphonsus Ligouri, patron of arthritis sufferers please pray for him.
• Bishop Morlino died of a heart attack last night. He seems to have run a decent diocese which is far more than many bishops in the US can say. May he rest in peace. Let's pray for his diocese because Cardinals Wuerl and Cupich will almost certainly have a say in who becomes his successor. 

• I was reading the Complicity Clergy site and paused to study the faces and body language in this photo. Even if I didn't know who this is I could see that something is clearly wrong. Men don't embrace each other around the waist. The  kid looks defeated and now as a 60 year old man he still appears to be haunted. Once again, I'm stunned that anybody who worked with Uncle Ted can say with a straight face that they had no idea what he was.
  
  
    

• Monsignor Nicola Bux is the theologian consultor of the Congregation for the Causes of the Saints in Rome but if you want to make him some stationery with his title on it I suggest you hurry because he probably won't be there much longer. Msgr. Bux is questioning the validity of Pope Benedict's abdication. He's not the only one but instead of just moaning about it in private he's made his query in public. 
  A number of public Catholics (Ann Barnhardt uses the term "thought leaders") have reacted poorly to Monsignor's  doubts.  Some of them say there's no point in talking about  Benedict anymore because the reality is that the St. Gallen mafia won and the Church lost. These people say that the only thing we can do is wait for Francis to die and try to keep our Faith. They may have point but they go too far when they  the hurl the epithets, "rad trad", "stupid", "schizophrenic", "weird" "unhelpful"  and "sedevacantist"  at people for not believing  or daring to doubt that  Benedict's abdication was valid. When I think of all the heretical garbage  I've heard seen freely spewed about in these last few years alone I don't see why this subject is taboo. Monsignor. Bux may be wrong but I've had enough of people telling us what we can't even discuss in public.
  
  
•  To the impure all purity in others must be destroyed.  They will not leave the innocent in peace. Sometimes they are violent. Usually they are sly and degrade the general culture. Earlier this year someone posted a video of her little granddaughter's dance recital. One little in the girl in the group abandoned the choreography and began gyrating and thrusting her chest and pelvis. The other three girls froze but the audience filled with parents and relatives cheered.  People in the comments section thought she was cute but one person said a six year old performing like a stripper wasn't cute at all. It was like a damn bursting. Some people wrote things like,  "it's harmless" and "lighten up," but they were overwhelmed by other people saying that they agreed that the dance number was distasteful and wondered where this child, not even a good three years out of diapers had learned to bump and grind like this? Where indeed?
  
   Several years ago a pervert  carrying items usually found on serial rapists walked into an Amish school in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, and  murdered multiple young girls before ending his own wicked life. On November 19th, an armed man in his 50s walked into the Catholic Supply Store in St. Louis. He forced himself on the all female staff and murdered a customer who refused his lust.  Who knows what story he's telling the police now but I think he chose the Catholic Supply store because it would be a soft target and he probably got a thrill out of defiling what he perceived to be good churchgoing women.