July 2007 Archives

There's a fairly new site on the web called Agnus Daily offering it up -- I mean, offering up spoofy news "stories" about Church events. Sort of a Catholic counterpart to Scott Ott's satirical site Scrappleface. I particularly like the one about the apologist for agnosticism.

How could you not laugh along with a site that offers this as a headline:

Archdiocese of Los Angeles Voted "Best Performing Arts Venue"

By the way, there's an analogous site that pokes fun that the oddities of life in the Eastern Orthodox Churches, The Onion Dome, and for Evangelical culture, Lark News. It's good that we're catching up with the separated brethren here!

A couple of years ago, BBC Radio 4's history series "In Our Time" presented a very worthwhile discussion on an important period of Church history: the founding of the great mendicant orders, the Franciscans and the Dominicans. You can read about the program and replay it (41 minutes) at Radio 4's website.

Considering how shallow some BBC treatment of religion is, the show's producers deserve credit for presenting something so informative, non-polemical, and respectful of the audience.

I'm starting to assemble the pictures from my 2007 "Summer Tour".

Starting out of sequence, here are the ones I took in Shenandoah National Park in Virginia along the Skyline Drive. These were made on Monday, 6/25, the day after the CMAA colloquium ended in Washington.

No bloggers were harmed in the process of taking this photo:

Despite being an indoor-geek kind of guy, I'm a fan of botanical gardens, so when I visited Hershey, PA on Monday, 6/18, it was an opportunity to see theirs, including the garden's butterfly house. Besides, it was too hot to buy chocolate.

More photos are on-line at the links above.

In case you haven't already picked it up from Kathy Shaidle, a number of Canadian bloggers are worried over the following, which appears in today's Washington Times on-line:

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Activist's remarks about Islam and sex probed

By Pete Vere
July 24, 2007

SAULT STE. MARIE, Ontario — Organizers of a conservative online forum in Canada say their free-speech rights are under attack after they received a letter saying a complaint has been filed with the Canadian Human Rights Commission.

The complaint, filed by a private citizen and accepted for further investigation by the commission, protested a critical posting on the forum's Web site regarding Islam and homosexuality.

The remarks were posted on FreeDominion.ca, a sister site to the conservative U.S. forum FreeRepublic, by FreeDominion member Bill Whatcott, a former homosexual prostitute turned outspoken Christian activist.

“I can't figure out why the homosexuals I ran into are on the side of the Muslims,” Mr. Whatcott wrote on the Web site. “After all, Muslims who practice Sharia law tend to advocate beheading homosexuals.”

[continue reading]

A beautiful word of encouragement for choral singers:

LORENZAGO DI CADORE, Italy, JULY 22, 2007 (Zenit.org).- Benedict XVI says that choral singing is an authentic education in life and peace, and an exercise in the "hearing of the heart."

The Pope said this Friday following a concert in his honor performed by Alpine choirs at the Castle of Mirabello, near where he is vacationing until July 27.

"Training in singing, in singing in choir, is not only an exercise of the external hearing and voice; it is also an education of interior hearing, the hearing of the heart, an exercise and a education in life and peace," the Holy Father said in his improvised remarks.

"Singing together in choir and with other choirs together, demands attention to the other, attention to the composer, attention to the conductor, attention to this totality that we call music and culture. And," he added, "in this way singing in choir is a training in life, a training in peace, a walking together."

Seven different choirs from Cadore participated in the concert, offered by Bishop Giuseppe Andrich of Belluno-Feltre.

Before the beginning of the concert, Bishop Andrich spoke of the dramatic stage of the First World War in which the Dolomites were also a theatre.

The Pope too spoke of those dramatic moments "when this mountain was a barrier, a terrible and bloody theatre of war."

"Let us thank the Lord because there is peace now in our Europe and let us do everything to make peace grow in us and in the world," he urged. "I am certain that precisely this beautiful music is a commitment to peace and a help to live in peace."

I'm not referring to G-d, but to gadolinium, the rare-earth element whose chemical symbol is Gd. Never did learn enough about those rare-earths in school. Somehow, I'd forgotten that Gd even exists, but was reminded of it today.

Apparently I'm going to get a shot of some Gd compound on Monday when I have a little MRI done on my head (...insert joke here...), as a followup to a hearing test I took this week. No biggie.

The CMAA web site is offering a PDF of a 1961 Liber Usualis for download, but to avoid burdening their servers, you can download it (115 MB) from this caching site. Bravo to whoever made the PDF available!

Fellow investigators,

I have engaged in a daring experiment, eating a food which is reported to be luscious but has an off-putting, almost disgusting name, which is: clotted cream. I presume any of you who have lived in England may have met this stuff, hm?

What got me interested was hearing a couple of ex-pat Brits raving about how wonderful it was the other day, during a morning radio show from DC. (It was a podcast, of course, as I am not up at such a time of day.)

According to them, the most typical use of clotted cream -- I looked it up on Wikipedia to get some idea of what it is -- is apparently on scones with strawberry jam, a dish called Cream Tea, so I set out today to get the ingredients.

A leading Internet seller of the stuff is located in Westford, MA, so I went to their shop and picked up a jar, and some jam. Nice enough. The same shop offers scone mix, but as I'm a lazy person (cf. Perl programmer), I passed it up in the hope of finding some already made.

A Panera Bread shop did have some scones, but not plain ones, just frosted ones with various fruits. It didn't seem appealing to add jam and a shmear on top of that.

Anyway, to the actual test:
The cream jar's label claimed that it was the ideal topping for berries, so I had some on raspberries, and was a bit disappointed. The stuff has a consistency like whipped butter, and putting something that heavy on raspberries wasn't a good match. It just wasn't easy to apply product A to fruit B. Besides, the non-sweet flavor of the cream was not that interesting a companion for sweet raspberries just passing their peak.

On the other hand, I had some on a Panera plain bagel, with jam, and found it just delightful there. Context is everything.

Continuing the quest for knowledge (of food), I am, yours fraternally,

If you've been wondering how to let bishops know that there is interest in the old form of Mass, I recommend you take a look at Jacob Michael's Summorum Pontificum contact database. So far there are about 1000 people who've manifested their desire to attend and support Masses celebrated according to the extraordinary form of the Roman Rite, but I think the word about this project is just starting to get out.

Cool!

Wikipedia's article on Magisterium has a neatly organized table listing the possible ways authoritative teaching is expressed in the Catholic Church, and showing what type of assent is required in each case. Infallible teaching is to be believed with an act of the virtue of faith; authoritative non-infallible teaching is to be accepted with "religious assent".

Keep this summary handy for when people ask you whether a particular document's teaching is infallible.

Somebody up there doesn't like me. That is, somebody with influence in the Archdiocese of Boston. Otherwise, why would my comments get deleted from the Cardinal's blog twice?

As in the old Lifebuoy commercials, it's time to ask: Do I... offend?

It's not obvious what's rubbing His Eminence or His Eminence's Blogmaster the wrong way: I expressed a polite and reasoned disagreement, and I didn't gush with compliments, but then several similar comments with the same qualities do remain on the thread.

Anyway, it's nice to know my views are being read by somebody, if not respected.