The National Catholic Register has a interesting interview tith Rob Evans, the Donut Man. He and his wife and one daughter were received into the Catholic Church last Easter. The interview touches on his career as a Evangelical Christian performer, selling more than 6 million CDs and DVDs and the path that lead him into the Church.
Chicago police describe their investigators as "three wise men" on the case who are hoping to find the pranksters who stole 32 baby Jesus figures and dumped them in someone’s front yard.
Rev. Marc Pasciak counted "32 plastic babies" and nothing else. No wise men, no Mary — just the Jesus babies vanishing from neighborhoods around Midway Airport.
"Talk about a Grinch," Pasciak said.
A woman wanting to remain anonymous brought the Jesus babies to Saint Symphorosa church after finding them in her yard.
"They were lying in her yard, arranged smallest to largest," said Pasciak. "It kind of scared her at first."
Probably the work of militant Catholic Adventists who don’t want the baby Jesus displayed until Christmas. Though why 32 and not 33 which would be much more symbolic
It is kind of funny to think about how they are going to get returned to their original owners. Will they have to go to the police station and pick theirs out from a lineup of Baby Jesus’s?
That’s the one officer – about 13 inches in swaddling clothes.
Dec. 19, 2006 (CWNews.com) – Pope Benedict XVI (bio – news) will extend full communion to the new Coptic Catholic Patriarch Antonios Naguib today in a ceremony held at the Roman basilica of St. Paul-outside-the-Walls.
The Holy Father, who met with the newly elected Coptic Catholic patriarch on December 15, appointed Cardinal Ignace Moussa I Daoud, the prefect of the Congregation for the Eastern Churches, as his official representative at the ceremony confirming ecclesial communion.
Patriarch Antonios Naguib was elected by the Coptic synod in March of this year to succeed the retiring Patriarch Stephanos II Ghattas as Patriarch of Alexandria, Egypt, and leader of the Coptic Catholic Church. Following the usual practice of the Eastern churches in communion with the Holy See, he traveled to Rome this week to confirm that communion.
Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, retired auxiliary bishop of Detroit, announced at Sunday Mass Dec. 17 that he was being asked to leave St. Leo’s Parish in Detroit, where he has been stationed since 1983.
Gumbleton told NCR that he expects a new pastor to be appointed within a month. He also said he expects to continuing his weekly column, The Peace Pulpit, on the NCR website.
…Gumbleton also said he was anxious that his last days at St. Leo’s not be turned into “a media circus.”
“I would just as soon not have Sunday liturgy become something that is about me. I want to keep the parish going as a parish as we have for 20 some years,” he said.
“I don’t see any point in people coming to demonstrate or anything of the sort. It’s not like it’s my funeral Mass or something like that. I just want everything to continue to be as much for the parish as possible and not be flooded with outsiders.
“Christmas celebrations and Sunday liturgies should continue to be parish liturgies and not liturgies that are all about me. We have a very vibrant parish community and I want it to be that way.”
An excellent gesture on his part, though I doubt if it will make much difference to his fans. When you spend so much time working at breaking down authority you can’t much expect that your own authority will mean much when it does not suit others NCR for their part are doing what they can to make it a media circus since I received a email alert from them on this story. Something that I have not received from them before.
A reader sent me the following story.
Vatican City, 18 Dec. (AKI) – The Vatican could soon have a top football team, the Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, has said. "I am not ruling out that the Vatican could in the future have a soccer team of great value able to compete with (Italian top Serie A league teams) Roma, Inter, Genoa and Sampdoria," Bertone, the Vatican’s equivalent of a prime minister said on Sunday. The cardinal, a staunch supporter of fallen Serie A giants Juventus – which was relegated to Serie B this season following a match-fixing scandal – is a football expert who used to comment soccer matches for a local television when he was archbishop of the port city of Genoa from 2003 until his appointment as secretary of state this year.
Bertone had already hinted a few weeks ago at the Vatican’s football ambitions.
"If, for example, we were to recruit Brazilian players from our pontifical universities we could set up a great team," Bertone was quoted as saying by Rome daily La Repubblica. The cardinal added that the Vatican could also discover young talents in parish teams saying that "in the 1990 World Cup I noticed that 42 players from different national teams originally came from parish recreation centres."
Bertone is not the only soccer enthusiast at the Vatican.
Another cardinal, Fiorenzo Angelini, a supporter of Serie A team Roma, is a commentator of premier league matches for Vatican Radio and Sat2000, the TV network of the Italian Bishops’ Conference (CEI).
This is a serious story as evidenced by this exclusive photo of Pope Benedict XVI trying out as goalkeeper.
* I first saw the photo at Shrine of the Holy Whapping with their own hilarious caption.
My reader suggests a name that team contest for the Vatican Soccer team.
Pope John Paul II previously set up a sports department at the Vatican with ""the very intention of making the Holy See’s solicitude felt in the world of sports". I did a previous post on this topic and include part of it here with some additions.
Here is the previous Holy Father doing his part.
This appears to be a Vatican department to help to help re-inject fundamental values of fairness, ethics, transparency and legality into sports as its stated aim. Now I think real Vatican sport teams would be cool.
Like the Vatican Cardinals.
Where all passes are Hail Marys. Since there is a college of Cardinals certainly they can have college football.
Now the Vatican must have some real good athletes because newspaper headlines are always using adjectives like, bash, attack, smash, flay, irk, assail, denounce, hurt to describe their actions (and this small sample was taken from headlines just this week).
Other possible sport team names are:
- Tiber Tigers
- Spanish Inquisition (nobody would ever expect them)
- Fighting Papists
- Milwaukee Brewing Monks
- Papal Bulls
- The Mighty Magisterium
- The Church Militants
- Crusaders
- Flying Cupertinos
- Curia Commandoes
- The Dye is Casteries
- Holy Seehawks
- Peter’s Bite – After all the Barque of Peter is not worse than it’s bite
I am sure you can come up with some great names of your own.
Fr. Philip Powell has gotten around to recording his homiles live so we can expect is homily podcast to be much more timely. RSS Feed.
As always you can read the text of his homilies here.
The Virginia Pilot has a nice story of the woodworker creating a replica crucifix that is to be used as a gift.
A reader sent me a link to an interesting article on John Cardinal Henry Newman that appeard in the Telegraph. The author talks about the history of teh back cover torn from a school exercise that John Henry Newman maintained throughout his life.
This picture is via Father Stephanos, O.S.B.
This is obviously a collector set of Franciscan nuns since they have not yet been take out of their packaging decreasing their retail value. You can tell though that these are faithful nuns because progressive ones would obviously be wrappedn in tinfoil.