Here are Pope Benedict's prayer intentions for May:
General intention: That, following the example of the Virgin Mary, all Christians should allow themselves to be guided by the Word of God and always remain attentive to the signs of the Lord in his own life.
Missionary intention: That in mission territories there may be no lack of good and enlightened teachers in the major seminaries and in the institutes of consecrated life.
Many of our friends and family know that we're looking to by a house this spring.
This is a little bit late, but we're praying a novena to St. Joseph and we'd be delighted if any of you would like to join us in asking for his help.
We're praying the following novena prayer, but if you could just add us to your intentions, that would be more than enough!
Our Father
Hail Mary
Glory Be
St. Joseph, you are the faithful protector and intercessor of all who love and venerate you. I have a special confidence in you. You are powerful with God and will never abandon your faithful servants.
I humbly invoke you and commend myself, with all who are dear to me, to your intercession. By the love you have for Jesus and Mary, do not abandon me during life, and assist me at the hour of my death.
Glorious St. Joseph, spouse of the immaculate Virgin, Foster-father of Jesus Christ, obtain for me a pure, humble, and charitable mind, and perfect resignation to the Divine Will. Be my guide, my father, and my model through life that I may merit to die as you did in the arms of Jesus and Mary.
Loving St. Joseph, faithful follower of Jesus Christ, I raise my heart to you to implore your powerful intercession in obtaining from the Heart of Jesus all the graces necessary for my spiritual and temporal welfare, particularly the grace of a happy death, and the special grace I now implore: that we may find the right house for our family.
Guardian of the Word Incarnate, I am confident that your prayers in my behalf will be graciously heard before the throne of God.
And no, we will not be burying a statue of him upside down anywhere!
8 or 9 years ago, this news would have made very, very excited.
"It is as if pop chaos theory met Cold War paranoia and had a brief tryst in the supply closet at an establishment foreign policy think tank, resulting in the birth of modern interventionism."
Christianity Today has a convincing article arguing against putting post-abortion syndrome at the center of the abortion debate.
I think it's good to talk about PAS to the extent that we don't pretend that's the extent of or even the foundational pro-life concern. The problem with abortion is that it kills a human person, period, end of sentence. It can additionally lead to physical and psychological stress and illness, and pro-lifers should talk about that and definitely should reach out to those so affected, but if we omit the fact that the abortion is wrong as a matter of principle we present an incomplete and dishonest picture.
A great column from Roger Ebert. He's had multiple surgeries, first to remove and then unsuccessfully to replace part of his jaw that was affected by cancer of the salivary glands (which sounds excruciatingly painful). He is going to make his scheduled appearance at his annual "Overlooked Film Festival" here in Champaign, despite having a piece of his jaw missing and being unable to talk.
I have been very sick, am getting better and this is how it looks. I still have my brain and my typing fingers.
Cubbie hat-tip: Amy Welborn
Pope Benedict XVI took a weekend jaunt up to Pavia this weekend to venerate the remains of St. Augustine, Bishop, Doctor of the Church, and patron saint of beer brewers (well, among many other things). Much has been made (to the point of beating a dead horse) about his preference for Augustine over, say
The American Papist (who I just realized is Ed Peters' son) has pictures and links.
Zenit has an interview with Father Rovert Prevost, prior general of the Augustinians, who invited the pope to visit Augustine's tomb.
If you scroll to the bottom of this page you can find some unofficial translations of the Holy Father's addresses.
Interesting words from a pope famously precise about his use of language. I'm just sayin'.
Ed Emberley is the patron saint of parents who can't draw.
When your toddler wakes up and tells you, "I dreamed about God!"
Tom Wolfe on hedge fund managers. Frightening and hilarious.
If Imus Had Called Mother Teresa a "Ho" He’d Still Have a Job
He draws largely on Bill Donohue, who, despite making me crazy sometimes, has a job for a reason.
McSweeney's: Zen Parable or Just Someone Being Cruel?
Sometimes a certain kind of blogpost can make me remember how low an opinion I have of humanity (in practice, as opposed to as created and willed by God, of course).
I'm not saying I have a low opinion of the blogger, I'm saying see the comment at around 11:51:48.
Some Chicago guy sneaked into a closed down Chicago church to take pictures. The result benefits us all. Why oh why!?
Link courtesy of Daniel Mistsui, who got it from the Society of St. Barbara.
The church's name, by the way, is St. Boniface.
Remember when you read and listen to and watch all of the "Oh the horrror!" editorials and news reports and other media coverage of the Partial Birth decision that all the fist-shaking and rhetoric about "activist" courts is basically saying that banning this is a bad thing.
I've written before that there are dangers in focusing on partial-birth abortion because it's just one procedure, and to say that an abortion procedure is bad is to an extent to imply that the idea of abortion itself isn't so bad if it's done the right way. (In fact you have to assume that since opposition to partial birth abortion is higher than opposition to abortion in general, there are certain people who do believe this. People can be incredibly unthoughtful.)
Without retracting what I wrote (since I stil believe that there was shameful cynicism on the part of some supporters of the PBABA), I have to say I'm pleased by the Supreme Court's decision. As minor of an effect as it will have, it is a real step towards sanity in our abortion law. I hold little hope that in my lifetime we'll see unborn children accorded full legal protection, but even to get to the point where our laws reflect the general beliefs of the people would be nice.
Supreme Court upholds Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act!
I'm genuinely happy, but I also think Mark Shea has a sharp take. This is a bare minimum.
I know there are many of you out there who hope one day to meet and marry Ms. Right. Should the time come when you wish to make a proposal for life-long sacramental companionship, use this post as a guide on how to go about it.
Oh, and while you're there, you may want to congratulate the groom-to-be. :)
Tolkien geeks, rejoice!
Today Pope Benedict XVI celebrates his eightieth birthday. Yesterday he celebrated Mass in St. Peter's to mark that occsaion as well as the second anniversary (April 19th) of his pontificate.
Gerald of the closed cafeteria was there and has photos. So was/does Fr. Z.
In commemoration, the mainstream press has spent the last three weeks telling us that the pope is MIA, backward, old, and an intolerant jerk.
And many more!
On this Friday*, I have two links for you on suffering:
* Yeah, yeah, I know it's Easter Friday and so not really penitential, but this is all really about coincidental timing anyway.
Sr. Ann Thole, who died March 31st while trying to rescue patients from a fire that engulfed the AIDS hospice where she worked.
A couple of years ago, a few bishops from the Phillipines started blogs. Well, they've gone a step further: this year, they started video blogging for Holy Week.
Get the story.
Watch the videos.
Here's a sample:
It's this year's Easter Vigil homily delivered by Manila Archbishop Gaudencio Cardinal Rosales.
The WaPo persuaded one of the best violinists in the world to play in a D.C. subway station. The write-up is a very enjoyable read.
Consumerism has infantilized us all and already has our children in its death grip. NOW GET BACK TO WORK!
When a new issue of Touchstone magazine comes out, they usually post two or three articles online for non-subscribers to read, which is a common and rational thing to do, since you generally want people to subscribe to your magazine instead of just giving away the contents for free.
BUT, if you check out their archives, you'll see that in addition to posting those couple of articles every month, they also post the entire issue of two years earlier. Knowing this, you can go here and see they they have the entire April 2005 issue available. Which means you can read this essay by Anthony Esolen on living the Sabbath as a way of life and not just by staying home on Sundays and this piece by Dawn Eden exposing the sickness of Planned Parenthood's TeenWire site.
If the stats are anything like last year's, we can expect that over 80,000 adults were Baptized into the Catholic Church on Saturday and over 70,000 already baptized adults came into the Church.
The Denver Catholic Register has a pretty amazing story of a man with AIDS who is joining the Church this year after being cared for by the Missionaries of Charity.
Happy Easter everybody!
I haven't done much Cubbie-blogging this spring, as I've been incredibly busy. You may have heard that the Cubs are on the auction block since the folks who are buying out the Tribune company have this silly idea that media folks should stick to media and not be running baseball teams.
Today, Chris DeLuca of the SunTimes notes that baseball guru and Cubs zealot Steve Stone, the anti-Dusty, is having his cell phone overheated from prospective buyers wanting to bend his ear. Stone also expresses interest in a high-level job with a future owner. "I would like to think that whoever gets the team, if he did his homework around the Chicago area, he would find that I would have something to lend to that group."
That might sound a little arrogant, but any serious Cubs fan would have to agree. The added bonus in all of this is that with Stone occupying a high ranking position, we'd have to say goodbye to Hendry.
Oh please, let it be so.
From Steve Sailer:
President Borat! That's better than anything Mark Steyn has come up with.
Champaign Police Increasing Patrols for Speeding
This is my doom. Of course, the car I drive now is slightly less of a hoopty cop-magnet than the one I got 4 tickets in 24 months in, so here's hoping!
David of CLS reports on two speakers the University of Illinois hosted last week: Fr. Charles Curran and Daniel Dennett. A gruesomer twosome I can scarcely imagine. Was Peter Singer all booked up? That would have been quite a trifecta!
Speaking of Dennett, Orthodox writer David B. Hart had some fun with Dennett's latest book in the January First Things.
A taste:
There are also the embarrassing moments of self-delusion, as when Dennett, the merry "Darwinian fundamentalist," claims that atheists-unlike persons of faith-welcome the ceaseless objective examination of their convictions, or that philosophers are as a rule open to all ideas (which accords with no sane person’s experience of either class of individuals). And then there is his silly tendency to feign mental decrepitude when it serves his purposes, as when he pretends that the concept of God possesses too many variations for him to keep track of, or as when he acts scandalized by the revelation that academic theology sometimes lapses into a technical jargon full of obscure Greek terms like apophatic and ontic. And there are the historical errors, such as his ludicrous assertion that the early Christians regarded apostasy as a capital offense.
The prose is rebarbative, moreover, and the book is unpleasantly shapeless: It labors to begin and then tediously meanders to an inconclusive conclusion. There is, as well, the utter tone-deafness evident in Dennett’s attempts to describe how persons of faith speak or think, or what they have been taught, or how they react to challenges to their convictions. He even invents an antagonist for himself whom he christens Professor Faith, a sort of ventriloquist’s doll that he compels to utter the sort of insipid bromides he imagines typical of the believer’s native idiom.
And that's before he gets to the Dennett's actual arguments.
Here are the Holy Father's prayer intentions for April:
General Prayer Intention: That, allowing himself to be enlightened and guided by the Holy Spirit, every Christian may answer enthusiastically and faithfully to the universal call to sanctity.
Mission Intention: That the number of priestly and religious vocations may grow in North America and the countries of the Pacific Ocean, in order to give an adequate answer to the pastoral and missionary needs of those populations.
Al Qaeda has provided the answer many times. Osama bin Laden, the one whose presence in Afghanistan presumably makes it the central front in the war on terror, has been explicit that “the most serious issue today for the whole world is this Third World War that is raging in Iraq.” Al Qaeda's No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, has declared that Iraq “is now the place for the greatest battle of Islam in this era.”
Alleged intellectual Krauthammer apparently thinks we can take Osama bin Laden's words at face value. Surely, the man with a multi-million dollar bounty on his head has no vested interest in keeping the full force of American military strength away from his cave! Or maybe, just maybe al Qaeda has learned our grand defense strategy: "fight them over there so we don't have to fight them here."
Larison puts it this way:
A thought: subprime mortages are the new stocks-on-margin. Good people were enticed by profiteers to throw money they did not have at a booming market only to find themselves with nothing when the market took a downturn I don't think we're headed for another depression, but the psychology of incurring unmanageable debt based on the assumption that the investment will increase in value is pretty much the same thing.
