… a St. Anthony 404 page.
Marc at the latest Catholic Vocations Podcast has an interview with Fr. Jonathan Meyer. Very interesting interview of how cradle Catholic Fr. Meyer found his vocation via Protestantism. Some will remember that Fr. Meyer was the priest in this vocations poster.
Moving from The Matrix to Battlestar Galactica. Husband and wife team Jeff and Zina have been producing the excellent Secrets of Battlestar Galactica podcast. They have produced four episodes so far and they are quite insightful and really dig into the series. Highly recommended for BSG fans.
WASHINGTON (Roto Reuters) — Democrat Barack Obama said Saturday he had quit his twenty year plus relationship with a Chicago church after months of controversy over racially laced pulpit rhetoric that still threatens to tarnish his White House hopes.
The Illinois senator said he and his wife Michelle were withdrawing from the 8,000-strong congregation of the Trinity United Church of Christ, following a new uproar over a priest’s mocking attack on his rival Hillary Clinton.
"This is not a decision I come to lightly, and frankly it is one I make with some sadness," said Obama, who was welcomed into Christianity by the church’s former pastor Jeremiah Wright two decades ago.
"I have no idea how it will impact my presidential campaign. I know it’s the right thing to do for the church and for our family," said the Democratic front-runner. "The recent episode with Father (Michael) Pfleger reinforced that view that we don’t want to have to answer for everything that is stated in a church," Obama told reporters in South Dakota.
The Senator then went on to tell reporters that he is currently in the hunt for a new church to attend. "I am currently leaning towards an Amish or any Anabapist congregation. I really like the idea of them not using electricity, especially in their churches. No cell phone cameras, no live streaming of church services and events, no greatest sermons DVDs, and no possibility of something showing up on YouTube seems to be a definite plus for me. Though I am open to other options. So if you are a pastor of a totally non-controversial church please contact my staff."
Fr. James Martin, S.J. is on a blog tour to promote the release of his book My Life With the Saints
June 2: Some Have Hats
June 3: A Nun’s Life
June 4: The Dawn Patrol
June 5: The Anchoress
June 6: Happy Catholic
He will be answering questions in the comboxes.
A total shutout of blogs written by men. I demand equality!!! Actually I really liked his book My Life With the Saints
His Catholic upbringing was rather sparse and surprisingly he discovered many saints for the first time while in seminary, even those these saints are not exactly obscure – but really quite well known. I would give one caveat about his book though. While it is mostly free of liberal Catholic bias (he identified himself a liberal Catholic on the NYT Pope blog), there are a couple of instances of it. Though I would still highly recommend his book. At one points he talks about being obedient by mentioning his superiors warned him about writing on topics that would be considered "controversial" (read dissent). In my mind it seems to me that obedience would be better met by not saying you are being obedient and then inferring you hold opinions contrary to Church teaching. The other annoying thing is that some times he would try to make conflicts saints had with the Church to be almost a blanket apology for dissent.
Regardless, check out all of these blogs for his blog tour. * A Nuns Life is more in the progressive camp.
A Shepherd’s Voice blog posts that Catholic Charities will host its annual Red House Fundraiser on June 3, 2008 with the following guests..
This year’s event is especially interesting because of its proximity to the recent California Supreme Court’s decision on same-sex "marriage." Honorary Committee Members for this year’s event (and their reactions to the court’s decision) include:
• Mayor Gavin Newsom: "What a day in San Francisco! What a day for equality! Who among us was prepared for this extraordinary moment and extraordinary time," said Newsom, who cut short a trip to Washington, D.C. to return home Wednesday night to await the court’s ruling. "I can’t tell you how proud I am to be a San Franciscan….It’s an affirmation of the gay and lesbian community and an extraordinary day for all of us as Americans," Newsom told the Bay Area Reporter in a Thursday phone call.-Bay Area Reporter; May 15, 2008
• Supervisor Bevan Dufty: "I think it is a win for justice and a win for California and a win for the future." -Bay Area Reporter; May 15, 2008.
• Rebecca Rolfe, Executive Director, San Francisco LGBT Center: "This is the best day of my professional life." -San Francisco Bay Times; May 22, 2008.
Another Honorary Committee Member is, once again, transvestite entertainer "Donna Sachet," who is a Board Member of the Equality California Institute. "Equality California" was one of those represented in the case before the Supreme Court.
Also posted is the contrast of the statements of the Honorary Committee members with the position of the Catholic Church, as enunciated by Archbishop George Niederauer (here), Bishop Allen Vigneron (here), and the Vatican (here).
I fixed a problem with my blog that appeared only in Internet Explorer 6. Some people are forced to use this browser in libraries or at work. If you are not being forced to use Internet Explorer 6 at least upgrade to IE 7, better yet to Firefox.
Luckily I was able to use VMWare Fusion on my Mac and load a fresh copy of Windows XP that had Internet Explorer 6 in it to track down the problem. It turned out that some images in the sidebar were a couple pixels larger than the width of the sidebar causing Internet Explorer 6’s rendering engine to misplace the second column.
St. Scholastica to the rescue.
I see this headline “Cardinal Mahony bars Australian bishop with doctrinal …” only to find that the Catholic News Agency site is down.
This obviously refers to Bishop Geoffrey Robinson who was an auxiliary bishop of the Sydney for twenty years. The Australian Catholic Bishop’s conference recently issued a public warning about the doctrinal difficulties in his book. I only hope that this is a trend for Cardinal Mahony to ban dissident speakers. The Cardinal wrote after the Pope’s visit.
I return to Los Angeles a different disciple of Jesus than when I left a week ago. Thank you, Lord, for sending us not only the Vicar of Christ and the Successor of Peter, but also a brother and friend who knows Jesus personally and gave us six extraordinary days of grace and hope!
May my pessimism be drowned in Christian charity.
Update: Unfortunately Bishop Robinson did speak in Washington D.C. last night to Voice of the the “Faithful” an event advertised in a parish bulletin. It would be nice to have a statement by Archbishop Wuerl about this.
The Catholic Beer Reviews writes on the Politics of Beer. He covers some controversies in recent years where beer companies were involved in supporting some evil. For example the Miller Brewing Company and their homosexual advocacy, Samuel Adams with their "Sex for Sam" debacle several years ago, and Sierra Nevada Brewing Company for their support of abortion.
He then "raises the much larger question of a Catholic consumer’s responsibility in the face of corporate behavior that runs directly counter to Catholic moral teaching."
To me this would seem to be in the category of remote material cooperation and so it would not be directly sinful to drink their products responsibly. That is unless you specifically like their support of some evil and then it would be formal material cooperation.
Now my taste buds think that drinking Miller beer would be sinful, so I couldn’t boycott them anyway. Samuel Adam appears not to have made the same mistakes they did previously and so I don’t think their is any real need for a boycott against them. Sierra Nevada is another story and I will be boycotting them. They support as Jeff Culbreath previous wrote one of "Chico’s most notorious abortion providers" and the letter they replied to him with doesn’t change matters. This is too bad since I really like Sierra Nevada’s brews and ironically started buying their beer after Greg Willits of Rosary Army mentioned them.
I will be though looking for Summit Brewing Company’s beers since it is run by a pro-life Catholic convert and Catholic Beer Review recommends them as top notch.
I do hope I never find a reason to have to boycott Guinness.
Rome, May. 28, 2008 (CWNews.com) – The Holy See’s permanent observer to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Msgr. Renato Volante, has denounced the use of agricultural products for fuel.
Speaking on Vatican Radio, Msgr. Volante said: "It is not ethically just to use food for purposes other than human consumption, when there are people who suffer from hunger.”
The Vatican representative’s statement comes just ahead of an FAO conference on the Food Crisis, to be held in Rome next week.
Hey doesn’t he know that in US politics that politicians must appease corn producing states. Billions of dollars in ethanol subsidies are needed for early primary states and ones that can go either way in an election. People starving is just an unintended consequence. Kind of like banning DDT and letting millions die of malaria.