I spent the past week in Blind River, a community of about 3000 in a peaceful part of Northern Ontario. It was great! No internet, no television, choppy cell phone service and some of the most beautiful tracts of nature to fall within a friendly community.
Every Thursday evening in Blind River the local Legion Ladies Auxiliary holds its charity Bingo. Given that all my co-workers are ladies who enjoy playing Bingo, they invited me to join them. I purchased the smallest Bingo card package at the door and my supervisor passed me a bingo dabber.
“Make sure you turn the cap upside down,” she said. “It brings bad luck to the table if turns right side up.”
I glanced around me. Sure enough, everyone’s cap was upside down. I had only been to a Bingo once before in my life — about fifteen years ago — but I found this superstition ridiculous. Thus I grabbed my bingo dabber cap, turned it right side up, and slammed it down on the table.
Everyone around me gasped. “You’ll bring bad luck to the table,” they protested.
“I’m Catholic. My God trumps the god of Bingo.”
The ladies just kinda stared at me for a moment, then went back to helping me get set up and play.
Throughout the evening, everyone at my table won a small Bingo pot except me. So our table was pretty lucky and my coworkers began to doubt this Bingo superstition.
Then came one of the last games of the evening with one of the largest pots. My supervisor said: “I have a feeling Pete is going to win this. If that happens, I will put all my caps right side up from now on.”
I sorta laughed it off. I hadn’t invoked God’s name in the gamble, but against this silly Bingo superstition. Well God showed everyone that He wasn’t bound by which way a dabber cap stood. I won the Bingo pot.
Author: Pete Vere
Jimmy Carter and Killer Rabbits
Twenty-seven years ago today, Jimmy Carter was attacked by a killer rabbit. An omen of what was to come?
Prayer Request
Please keep Sonya’s grandmother in prayer. She is not expected to last through the night.
Bruskewitz to NRB: “If I’m attacked, they are going to get a mouthful of porcupine quills. “
Bishop Bruskewitz continues to roll against the National Review Board. The Wanderer just published an interview with the Bishop of Lincoln in which His Excellency pulls no punches. Here’s some of the more pithy quotes:
Q. Why do you object to pro-abortion Catholics serving on the lay board? Aren’t a lot of prominent Catholics supporters of partial-birth abortion? Don’t they deserve representation too?
A. It’s a standing disgrace that some of these people who call themselves Catholic don’t understand the heinous evil that they support. That we should give them a position of prominence in the Church is an outrage.
Bishop Bruskewitz vs. the Review Board, prt 2
(Part One Here)
I found the Wanderer interview with Paul Likoudis where Bishop Bruskewitz offers the ten reasons why he refused to participate in the John Jay study:
“1) This study is not directed to developing programs for the protection of young people. . . . The study seems to be to satisfy curiosity.
“2) Serious sins against the Eighth Commandment are likely to be part of the result of the study: detraction, calumny, slander, contumely, etc.
“3) The study asks to include information even for inconclusive allegations and anonymous allegations.
“4) Many of the accused in the files of many dioceses are dead and will not be able to defend themselves.
“5) No equivalent study has ever been made in the United States so that there is no comparison to any other sector of people in the United States, such as Protestant ministers, public school teachers, doctors, youth ministers, artists, newspaper reporters, etc.
“6) The United States federal government Office of Health and Human Services refused to grant a certificate of confidentiality for the study as requested by the National Review Board.
“7) The reporting of the study does not promise to place into context the overwhelming number of priests who do not and did not ever commit any sexual abuse of minors.
“8) The study is skewed and inaccurate from the start because any self-reporting can include both inflation and deflation of information.
“9) About one-third of all the Catholic clergy in the United States are not included in the study, since religious orders and other communities (for instance, Jesuits, Dominicans, Benedictines, Franciscans, etc.) are not included.
“10) The administration of the USCCB [United States Conference of Catholic Bishops] which signed the contract with the John Jay College of Criminal Justice has given the ownership of all the information into the possession of the college.”