If you have written or are in the process of writing a children’s book you might be interested in Catholic Kid’s Press which is soliciting submission until July 15th, 2007.
This year when you vote in the Funniest Catholic Blog category of the Catholic Blog Awards do you know who you are voting for?
While the Ironic Catholic has a delightfully funny blog, just how much do we know about her? Why is her blog anonymous? What is she hiding? Would we find it Ironic that she is a Catholic if we knew her?
Happy Catholic is another great blog and Julie D. provides both smiles and great insights. But I have it on good authority that she once didn’t say grace before a meal.
Paul Nichols at the Catholic Cartoon Blog is one funny guy, but did you know he was born with original sin?
Gerald at The Cafeteria is Closed provides great coverage of the Church and has concluded with many a humorous line. But did you know that he named his blog after something Maureen Dowd wrote in a column? Can you truly trust someone who is such a devotee of Maureen Dowd that he would take his blog name from something she has written?
The Ox Files is a superb parody blog especially on liturgical matters, but opposition research has found that sometimes The Dumb Ox is distracted in prayer.
Kathy Shaidle at Relapsed Catholic has a wit sharper than a Ginzu knife and headlines that regularly invoke laughter, but did you realize that she regularly writes more about Islam than Christianity? Can you really trust a blog named Relapsed Catholic?
Fr. Erik Richtsteig at Orthometer is one funny priest, but shouldn’t he be praying, visiting the sick, or something instead of making us laugh so regularly?
The Shrine of the Holy Whapping is surely the funniest group blog, but did you know that their members only put in a buck or some loose change when the collection basket comes around?
If you vote for the Curt Jester I promise you a 20 percent increase in guffaws and a rubber chicken in every pot.
I’m the Curt Jester and I approve this message.
Recently Mitt Romney in his announcement for president said:
"I believe in God and I believe that every person in this great country, and every person on this grand planet, is a child of God,"
Well with Romney being a Mormon it seems to me it would have been much more accurate for him to say that he believes in Gods. For Mormon’s Jesus Christ joins a long line of gods who have preceded him in an infinite line of divine beings. That in fact faithful Mormon men can also become a god. So I think it is a little disingenuous to speak using normal monotheistic idea of God in a political speech when LDS theology holds to multiple gods, where God the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are all separate gods and that they are in addition to an unknown number of gods.
Though while I totally disagree with LDS theology, this does not mean that I wouldn’t vote for a Mormon. I am just not that thrilled with this particular Mormon in that I do not feel very solid on his conservatism and his new-found pro-life beliefs. Fiscally conservative he probably is, socially conservative is another story.
….Like it or not, full-service parishes will soon perish.
All 231 parishes in the Cleveland Diocese will soon change. The diocese will organize all parishes into groups that will share resources and priests.
I can see the bishop flipping through a thesaurus to find the right word to describe what he will do with the churches to combat the dwindling priesthood.
Hmm. Let’s see . . . Reorganize. Reconfigure. Reconstitute. Merge. Consolidate. Collaborate. Cluster.
That’s it.
Cluster sounds much better than Share A Priest, which is what clustering amounts to. It also sounds better than closing churches, which is bound to happen next.
We should’ve seen it coming. The trend has swept the nation as fewer men join the priesthood and more priests die and retire.
I still remember the letter from the bishop more than a decade ago addressing the shortage of priests. Our pastor read the letter and said we were to have meetings and talk about how to get along with fewer priests.
When he told us we were not allowed, however, to discuss the issue of married priests or women priests, you could feel a breeze as heads shook collectively in disgust.
We all knew there was a solution. Actually two of them:
Women priests.
Married priests.
End of shortage.
Unfortunately, every pope is deaf in one ear and can’t hear out of the other when it comes to ordaining women and married clergy.
Ryan Duns, SJ gives a fair critique of this article by Regina Brett of the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
What always gets me about articles like this where the answer to any priesthood shortage is always married priests and priestesses. They never ask the obvious questions and seem to see this problem without addressing the past. Just exactly how did the Catholic Church continue to grow and be around for 2,000 years without priestesses and married priests in the Latin Rite? They never notice that this is a modern problem. There were no stories about a vocations crunch forty years ago, but now there are more and more of them. They also never want to analyze just what it is in our culture that is suppressing people from responding to their vocations to the priesthood or the religious life. In fact I can’t recall one of these articles ever talking about the shrinking number of nuns and brothers in the religious life. If is always focused just on priests and for them the lack of access to the sacraments. The contemplative orders that are holding up the Church in prayer – and their declining numbers does not seem to be a problem for them. In fact prayer just never seems part of their vocations strategy. Praying to the Lord of the Harvest to send workers in the vineyard to them is an outdated strategy regardless of the fact that this was the vocations strategy in the Gospels.
There are surely many factors in the suppression of the response to vocations. A society that focuses on pleasure and extreme selfishness is not exactly one that encourages a total giving of yourself to others and to the greater glory of the Church. Smaller families also contribute to the problem. Just how many of the great saints were the first or second born? Somehow we think we can both cut the number of children and at the same time provide the numbers of people in the priesthood in religious life as before. Isn’t it less likely that Catholic parents of a small family are going to encourage vocations in the first place? Most of us parents have all kinds of plans for the successful career of our children and the idea of losing access to them in a convent or to the busy life of a priest doesn’t fit most of our agendas. Few of us are like Louis Martin , father of St. Terese, who are willing to lose all their children to religious life. Relativism and modernism are certainly factors involved in this, yet their answers always seem to involve more relativism and modernism. Fighting viruses with dead viruses works in some cases, but is there a dead strain of relativism to fight relativism with? The vaccine to relativism is of course proclaiming and living the truth in the first place and this is a vaccine we can all produce.
While there are certainly factors that have lead to this decrease this does not mean we throw our hands in the air and just complain about these root causes. Our job is to pray for those who have vocations for the priesthood and religious life to respond with generosity and faithfulness. To encourage those we meet to discern whether they have these specific vocations. To fully live the Gospel and to not become a stumbling block to those who have been called.
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP is a great preacher on vocations and recently on this topic preached.
The witness of the lay faithful is needed now more than ever! If the faith is to center our vocation efforts, then we need daily witnesses, daily teachers, and the everyday faithful. That’s you, folks! Ask one young man this week to consider the priesthood. Just one. Tell him he is needed. With Christ on board, put your nets into deep water and pull for all you’re worth. And do not be afraid! They are waiting to hear your word of encouragement, your invitation. Trust me! They are waiting to be caught. Fish long and hard and fish faithfully. But whatever you do: FISH!
Melissa McEwan has now joined Amanda Marcotte in dropping from the Edwards campaign blog. Rightly they saw that they were only hurting the Edwards campaign, now if only John Edwards could see that his presence on his own ticket is also hurting his chances.
*As suggested by a reader
A reader sent me this story from Fr Greg Shaffer.
As you may or may not know, we started a basketball team of Washington priests and seminarians two years ago called “DC ‘Hood” (short for DC priesthood). We have played 11 games against 8 different parish teams of coaches, teachers, and teens. Thanks be to God, it has been growing and growing, averaging about 200 fans a game. The games have been great nights of fun for families while promoting vocations.
The Catholic Standard wrote an article about DC ‘Hood a few months ago. The sales manager of the Washington Wizards read the article and generously called the Archdiocese to see if DC ‘Hood ever wanted to play at the Verizon Center after a Wizards game. Umm, yeah! Thanks, Wizards!!
So DC ‘Hood will be playing at the Verizon Center (against CYO coaches after the Wizards 3:30 pm game versus the Chicago Bulls) on Sun., April 15. After our game, there will a game b/w CYO 11th and 12th grade co-ed all-stars; the winners of the two (16 minute) games will play in a “championship” game.
This event is intended to a) promote vocations, and b) raise funds for the CYO / OYM (Catholic Youth Organization/Office of Youth Ministry). We are helping CYO to sell tickets to the Wizards game; they receive a generous portion of the proceeds.
I personally will be purchasing a large amount of tickets the week of Feb. 11. Can you help me? The tickets are $ 25 (Upper Level B), $30 (Upper Level A), and $85 (Lower Level). Buying two $25 tickets, for example, would help greatly! Even if you’re not able or interested in going, can you make a donation to our cause? The more tickets we sell, the more we promote the priesthood and raise funds for our youth.
You can order tickets online at www.verizoncenter.com/cyo or, for donations only, mail a check to me directly at: Fr. Greg Shaffer, St. Andrew Apostle parish, 11600 Kemp Mill Rd., Silver Spring, MD 20902 (I will give your tickets to kids in the school or parish).
Voting has started as of Monday for the 2007 Catholic blog awards. Joshua Leblanc and crew have really done outstanding job this year and I think have made some great decisions. Each category now contains every blog nominated for that category and not just the top five nominations. I am aware of the large majority of blogs nominated, but there are also plenty I have to check out – which of course is one of the major purposes of the awards.
If my mother had not died four years ago I would be convinced that she was the one that nominated me in so many different categories. Now I truly appreciate every nomination. But those who voted for me as Best Apologetics, Best Written, Most Spiritual, Best Insider News, or Smartest Catholic blog category really need to start reading some other blogs – notably the ones voted alongside me. Though I am vain enough to think I deserved nominations in the other categories I am in.
You can vote for your favorite Catholic blogs here and I bet you will have a difficult time picking out just one from each category as I did.
From Brit Hume’s "grapevine " last night:
The minimum wage increase that took effect in Arizona last month has brought with it some unintended consequences — many teenagers are losing their jobs. The Arizona Republic reports some employers say payroll budgets have risen so much since the minimum wage went from $5.15 per hour to $6.75 — they have had to cut jobs and hours.
The owner of one Phoenix pizza restaurant says his payroll has shot up 13 percent and he’s had to lay off three teenagers and cut hours for others. Another shop owner said expenses rose by $2,000 a month.
A Federal Reserve study showed that for every ten percent increase in the minimum wage — there is a corresponding two to three percent decrease in employment.
[Via Veritas]
Well Democrats support a minimum wage and I guess zero is a minimum wage – just about as minimum as you can get.