Humor

God’s angry man, His crotchety scholar
Was Saint Jerome,
The great name-caller
Who cared not a dime
For the laws of Libel
And in his spare time
Translated the Bible.
Quick to disparage
All joys but learning
Jerome thought marriage
Better than burning;
But didn’t like woman’s
Painted cheeks;
Didn’t like Romans,
Didn’t like Greeks,
Hated Pagans
For their Pagan ways,
Yet doted on Cicero all of his days.

A born reformer, cross and gifted,
He scolded mankind
Sterner than Swift did;
Worked to save
The world from the heathen;
Fled to a cave
For peace to breathe in,
Promptly wherewith
For miles around
He filled the air with
Fury and sound.
In a mighty prose
For Almighty ends,
He thrust at his foes,
Quarreled with his friends,
And served his Master,
Though with complaint.
He wasn’t a plaster sort of a saint.

But he swelled men’s minds
With a Christian leaven.
It takes all kinds
To make a heaven.

From “Times Three” by Phyllis McGinley

You know you really do want to get into better shape, but really how can you stay motivated? Each Lent you promise to pray more and even if your goal is not “prayer warrior”, you would at least like to get to “prayer tenderfoot.” Yet each year your prayer life gets more flabby and you dispair of ever getting spiritually fit. The yo-yo spiritual life of temporary loss of prayer sloth only to gain it all back later.

You want to be a saint, if only you could stay motivated.

That’s why we created the Prayerbit family of products. By tracking your spiritual life we help you to stay motivated by being able to see your progress and to avoid back sliding.

This Prayerbit wireless tracker, shown in its recharger, helps you to keep track of your daily prayer life. Simply slip it on your clothing and you are all set to pump up your prayer life.

Each day the Prayerbit assigns a cumulative total of the day’s prayer activity using the standard ACTS model to help analyse possible imbalances.

A – Adoration.. (Worshipping God)
C – Contrition.. (Sorrow for sins)
T – Thanksgiving.. (Thanksgiving to God)
S – Supplication.. (Asking For Our Needs And The Needs Of Others)

• When praying the Rosary the Prayerbit captures the sound of you fingers slipping from bead to bead. You can also buy our wireless Prayerbit Rosary to make sure you capture every decade! The Prayerbit can also catch each instance of the Jesus prayer.
• The Prayerbit catches any ejaculatory prayers made throughout the day. The Prayerbit is smart enough to discern a short prayer of this type and profane uses of holy names. In fact the Prayerbit will also record such occurrences and subtract from your Prayerbit total.
• Connect the Prayerbit to your Kindle or other ebook device and it can discern the amount of or lack of spiritual reading.
• Using social networking your Prayerbit can automatically Tweet your daily prayer totals or update your status on Facebook. Logging your totals can help to keep you motivated and to encourage others to get spiritually fit also. As you advance in prayer no doubt you will want to enable “humility mode” to only post results when you start to slip.

The Prayerbit is also Holy Water proof, so don’t worry about using this sacramental liberally.

While the Prayerbit is amazing technology, it can not detect everything.

That is why we created the Prayerbit family of mobile apps.

• Location awareness allows the Prayerbit mobile app to know whether you are at Mass, adoration chapel, praying outside an abortion clinic, etc.
• Quickly enter information such as level of sacrificial giving, fasting, and acts of charity towards others.
• Log use of a novena or pray one of our built in novenas for automatic tracking.
• Users using app versions of the Liturgy of the Hours can opt for automatic tracking or enter in manually use of the four volume set or the Little Office of Our Lady.
• Bloggers can provide an RSS feed of their blog for monitoring. Warning: Your Prayerbit daily total could take a hit for rash judgments and other uncharitable acts.
• Spouse audit mode allows your spouse to score actually progress and allows a more objective measure of actually progress in the spiritual life. Those with spiritual directors can share their Prayerbit results and find where they need tweaking in getting spiritually fit.
• View statistics and reports regarding your progress.

While the Prayerbit can’t guarantee progress in the spiritual life, when used prudentially and in keeping with the sacramental life of the Church it can do wonders.

“There is only one tragedy in the end, not to have been a saint.” Leon Bloy

My attempt at a meme.

For betters ones see Catholic Memes

What if they ran a Conclave like a Science Fiction Convention? Really they are all dressed up with funny hats anyway. Instead of voting for a Hugo they vote for the pope. Plus the whole ballot burning and the stoves and chimney have a decidedly steampunk flavor. The papabile could set up tables to provide and autograph any books or pastoral letters they have written. Maybe the Cardinals could dress up as their favorite saints. A kind of Cardinal Occupy Sistine play (Cosplay).

Well maybe not.

Really what I would like to see is a ClaveCon where the faithful can get together and wait for white smoke. Again you could have the fun aspects of a Science Fiction convention in dressing up and instead of Klingon’s and Anime characters there is certainly a treasury of Catholic history to pull from. Maybe even dress as your favorite Cardinal that you want to be pope. People trying to break into the Cardinal’s pro-conclave meeting shouldn’t have all the fun. Some large screen displaying the chimney of the Sistine Chapel along with perhaps EWTN’s coverage would be nice. Or maybe a screen with a stream of MSM coverage to laugh at waiting for a “crows ear” moment. Of course praying for the Cardinal-electors and the new pope would be an integral part of ClaveCon.

It would be fun to be surrounded by a group of faithful Catholics when it became time to shout “Habemus Papum!”. What fun when the proto-deacon of the College of Cardinals first says the first name of the new pope and you try to guess the last name based on it. Maybe a pope name pool with minor prizes with the entry fee being of course paid using PayPal (punningly appropriate).

Fun idea, but logistically not possible. We don’t exactly get much ramp up time or ability to plan ahead regarding papal elections and getting a convention center. Still the perfect religious order to arrange this would be Conventual Franciscan Friars.

Come and listen to a story about a man renamed Peter
A poor fisherman, barely kept his family fed,
Then one day Andrew brought Simon to see him,
And Jesus invites them to be fishers of men

Messiah he is, Son of God, Second person of the Trinity

Well the first thing you know ole Peter’s got a chair,
Kinfolk said “Peter move away from there”
Said “Rome is the place you ought to be”
So they loaded up the ship and moved to Babylon.

Seven Hills, that is. Swimmin pools, Caesar.

Well now its time to say goodbye to B Sixteen
And invoke the conclave for Cardinals kindly droppin in.
The Sistine Chapel will be the locality
To see which man will head the Holy See

Pababile that is. burn the ballots, white smoke

Y’all pray now, y’hear?

* Cardinal pictured are just some at the top of the New Advent Buzz Meter.

Fr. Roderick has surpassed himself here!

Finally the media is getting to meatier stories regarding Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI.

Benedict XVI, no-longer-pope, is resuming pleasures once crowded out of his stressful life: Reading, strolling in the gardens and playing the piano, according to the Vatican.

So, can the pontiff emeritus finally have a cat again? Maybe.

No pets were allowed in the papal residence in Vatican City. But there are kitties all over the enormous garden at the papal retreat, Castel Gandolfo. That’s where Benedict is now ensconced for a few weeks until he can move to a residence being readied for him within Vatican City.

In the archives at Catholic University, there’s a 1958 comic book calledThe Cat from Castelgandolfo in which a fictitious kitty hung out with Pope Pius XI. And undated Web images show some plump felines languishing on the garden walls.

The pope’s brother, Rev. Georg Ratzinger, in his 2011 book, My Brother, the Pope, describes Joseph-who-became-Benedict as someone “very tenderhearted; he loves animals and flowers.” Back in 1968, when Rev. Joseph Ratzinger was a theology professor in the Bavarian town of Tubingen, a neighbor’s cat visited him daily.

“It even accompanied him to his lectures and to Mass. It was a black cat, a very intelligent pussycat,” the older brother writes.

In 2005, Georg Ratzinger’s housekeeper in Germany told MSNBC that the pope’s personal cat, Chico, was under the care of the person who tends the pope’s private residence there and another neighborhood cat visited Chico often.

So, if Georg wants to bring Chico along for a visit, there are two hotels in Castel Gandolfo that advertise they are “pet friendly.”

Once Benedict returns to live at the Mater Ecclesiae (Mother of the Church) refurbished apartment inside the Vatican City State, there are countless cats already afoot that could cozy up to a known soft touch. (source)

Really we need a Kitty Conclave to help him to ge an appropriate cat.

Could Contessina, a cat that roams the gardens at Vatican City, be pontiff emeritus Benedict XVI’s first post-papacy cat? He couldn’t have one when he lived in the papal residence. / Filippo Monteforte, AFP/Getty Images

The pope being a cat person is not put of by their standoffish ways and the fact cats are friendly only when they want something. Really every pope should be a cat person since it will prepare them in working with the Curia. The cat above is really not really wearing liturgically appropriate fut. The emeritus pope needs a cat wearing appropriate fur. Perhaps all white with brown paws.

VATICAN CITY — Pope Benedict has decided what he will wear once he is no longer pope: a simple white cassock and brown shoes given to him in León, Mexico.

“The city of Leon is known for beautiful shoes and very comfortable shoes. And when the Pope was asked what he wanted to wear, he said, ‘I want the shoes from León in Mexico,’” Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi told journalists Feb. 26.

“It will no longer be the red shoes that you have seen him wear. He has chosen to keep brown shoes that were given to him on his recent trip,” he said.

As for his apparel, the pope emeritus will wear a simple white cassock without the mozzetta (the short cape that covers his shoulders). (source)

I especially like that Benedict will be wearing brown shoes. In the Navy officers and chiefs involved in aviation were allowed to wear brown shoes. So my being a Chief with the Aviation Electionic Technician rating I got to wear brown shoes instead of black. So finally I have exactly one thing in common with him (besides being male and Catholic).