Catholic Light – Page 5 – (but not lite!)

Stop the spam, Fr. Pavone.

Yes. Fr. Frank Pavone is a spammer. And, believe me, as an internet user, that is a serious accusation.

It puts him among the banes of internet life, pumping out unwanted e-mail into mailboxes of people who never requested it. Pumping it into e-mail addresses that couldn’t have requested it, because they send no outgoing e-mail. His organization sends its messages out into people’s e-mail boxes, interfering with their work, taking up their time, and annoying them.

I will not donate one penny to your organization Priests for Life or to any organization you run as long as you keep doing this.

And don’t tell me that I can unsubscribe the affected e-mail address. The “unsubscribe” action on his web site has zero effect. I’ve used it for more than one e-mail address, and it never has an effect. When I called the PFL office, the staffer who spoke to me told me that the request had to go to some particular office that maintains the data, and it might take some weeks to take effect. How charmingly naive.

A message to whoever made up that story: YOU LIE.

Fr. Pavone, you have responsibility for what the organization does, and until you stop spamming, I have one word for you: Repent.

Guest post: Can we shake things up to help moms and kids?

[Hi, everyone! Rae Stabosz has been a friend for probably twenty years or so, and is one of my heroes in the cause of life, educating the public and offering practical help to women in need. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to help her share the word about this project. Join in! –Richard]

Dear Catholics, Big Damn Heroes, and Other White Hats of the Blogosphere,

How would you like to participate in a stunt that, if it comes off, will REALLY piss the heck out of the folks who profit from abortion, like Planned Parenthood and their kin?

My name is Rae Stabosz. Some of you know me. Most of you don’t. I would like to interrupt your kitten videos, your reddit snark and your all-purpose interwebs fun and bring you a bold display of naked desperation.

You don’t have to label yourself “pro-life”. Labels can sound like polemic. This is a non-political stunt for anybody who holds to this equal care principle: in an unwanted pregnancy, both the pregnant woman AND her unborn child deserve equal respect and care.

Here’s the stunt:

Between now and Sunday, November 30, we internet White Hats will pool our resources and fund a SINGLE mobile pregnancy center equipped with ultrasound!

It will be beautifully appointed and staffed by professionals; it will park outside of abortion clinics in Delaware and offer FREE ULTRASOUND, FREE PREGNANCY TESTING and FREE COUNSELING to women in crisis.

It will also park at fairs, church festivals, and other happy community events, educating the public to the marvels of ultrasound technology and what it shows of intrauterine development.

All we want to build the bus and put it on the road is $120,000 in capital expenses. We will get the operating expenses on our own! (there’s a reason for that).

You may have heard of Save the Storks, the national organization founded by Joe Baker in 2011. Save the Storks is taking the country by storm. Its mission is to equip pregnancy centers to more effectively connect with abortion-vulnerable women … by providing Stork Buses (mobile medical units) so that pregnancy centers can offer free sonograms and pregnancy tests wherever women need them.

Two months ago, an eclectic group representing two of the three counties of Delaware founded the Delaware Stork Bus, Inc. Our intention is to carry out the Save the Storks vision in Delaware. We have signed a contract with Joe and Co. We are ready to rumble. And we want your help.

We have put together a crowdsourcing campaign on GoFundMe with a goal of $120,000.

BUT BUT BUT BUT BUT BUT BUT BUT BUT… I can hear you say.

“Why should I help you? Aren’t there other groups in the country trying to get a Stork Bus off the ground?”

“I live in Kokomo, Indiana, home of the Kokomo Mantis. Why should I care about little Delaware?”

Fair enough. Here’s where the “stunt” part comes in. I DO live in Delaware, and I DO want to pull out all the stops to get this Stork Bus up and running. I freely admit that it is self-serving.

But if the stunt takes off we could fund more than just one little Delaware bus AND scare the pants off of Planned Parenthood!

“For the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light,” Jesus tells us in the gospel of Luke. And isn’t it the truth?

No Stork Bus project has used crowd funding to our knowledge, and we hope to establish a precedent. The secular world has been a lot quicker to harness the power of crowd sourcing than we have been. Witness the success of the ALS Bucket challenge. In two weeks’ time it made four million dollars for the ALS Association and its 38 chapters. It did this by harnessing the power of social media and the fun of seeing people (especially celebrities) have buckets of ice dumped on one another.

Yet the ALS Association supports using human embryos for stem cell research, and so Catholics and others were not able to embrace this as readily as some.

$120,000 is just 4800 donors giving $25 each. What if the White Hat blogosphere gives more??

Here is the deal, and it’s a good one:

If we raise more than $120,000 between now and the end of November, we will give 100% of all additional monies collected to the national Save the Storks project!

That’s right! We are not greedy. This is our first fundraiser, and we are targeting our capital expenses only. We will trust in our fundraising acumen to raise the first three years’ operating expenses on our own. We came up with this stunt not just for Delaware Stork Bus, but for all of us. We want to show the abortion industry that we can get a fully-outfitted Stork Bus on the road in a little more than two months’ time. That will have them shaking in their stylish yet affordable boots!

But we don’t want this to be a Zero Sum Game. If YOU give to US, we don’t want you to worry that other Stork Buses will suffer.

Save the Storks gives grant money as part of its mission. So if our little stunt goes anywhere, and we collect any extra we make above our capital goal of $120,000, we will give the rest to Joe and his good people to give in grants as they see fit.

Most of you don’t know me from Eve, even though I’ve been an internet presence since before there was an Internet! (international PLATO system in the late 70s, anyone?) I have left a 20-plus year trail on the Internet. Look me up and see if I seem trustworthy.

Look our entire Board of Directors up! You’ll find some surprises!

Yes, you will find that we have paid our dues. We are trustworthy. Children of light: allons-y! No need to be less sensible than the children of the world!

Click here to help crowd fund the Delaware Stork Bus and maybe, just maybe, other stork buses throughout the country!

Rae Stabosz, with the Delaware Stork Bus Board of Directors:
Evelyn Baldwin
Susan Bullock
Nicole Collins
Jayne Mitchell-Werbrich
Ed Taubert
Tim Werbrich

PS: No trees were harmed in the sending of this message. However, a certain number of electrons were temporarily inconvenienced.

Looking a gift album in the mouth

LOL. The headline has it right. Seen on Slashdot:

Apple Outrages Users By Automatically Installing U2’s Album On Their Devices

Apple may have succeeded at breaking two records at once with the free release of U2’s latest album, titled Songs of Innocence, via iTunes. But now, it looks like it’s also on track to become one of the worst music publicity stunts of all time.

Users who have opted to download new purchases to their iPhones automatically have found the new U2 album sitting on their phones. But even if iTunes users hadn’t chosen automatic downloads, Songs of Innocence will still be displayed as an “iTunes in the Cloud” purchase. That means it will still be shown as part of your music library, even if you delete all the tracks. The only way to make the U2 album go away is to go to your Mac or PC and hide all of your “iTunes in the Cloud” purchases, or to use iTunes to manually hide each track from your purchased items list.

Other reactions include rapper, Tyler, The Creator, saying that having the new U2 album automatically downloaded on his iPhone was like waking up with a STD.

Yes, some of Apple’s customers are just seething with rage at having an unwanted free U2 album added to their libraries or automatically downloaded to their phones. They are offended. They are *outraged*. They are ridiculously overreacting. It’s laughable. Really, if you know one of these people, make popcorn.

One of my FB friends was so outraged at Apple that he declared the company was in “deep trouble” and he was going to call the Federal government over it. I teased him, saying: let us know how that phone call goes, and he banished me from his FB friends list. The poor bubby. His pretty phone has turned into a case of ‪#‎firstworldproblems‬.

What did the Cardinal really say?

Cardinal Woelki of Berlin (now transferred to Cologne) has been under fire for his favorable comments on respecting same-sex couples. Personally, I wish he’d be more careful about his comments, but they don’t seem to be as liberal as his critics suggest.

Here’s my casual translation of comments made in an August 2012 interview with the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper.

The reporter gets into sensitive territory by suggesting that the cardinal has his own “Woelki method”: keeping Catholic teaching untouched while giving practical signs that anything is possible.

Q. Under the “Woelki method”, we’re thinking of your statements at the Mannheim Catholic convention about recognition for homosexual couples. Aren’t you thereby taking a broad perspective on the teaching of the Catholic Church that lived homosexuality contradicts the Creator’s plan?

CARDINAL WOELKI: Wherever people are there for each other, that deserves recognition. With adult children who care for their parents, this is obvious. So when same-sex partners show a comparable degree of care, we can’t deny them respect for it. I recently heard of a young couple, in which one partner took care of the other in a serious illness and accompanied him to the point of death. That is humanly valuable and worth recognizing.

Q: How could this recognition be shown? For example, what possibility is there for openly living homosexual Catholics to be involved in parish councils?

CARDINAL: The Church’s Magisterium has repeatedly clearly and unmistakably established that homosexual acts “are intrinsically disordered”, contradict natural law, and therefore cannot be condoned by our conviction of the faith. Obviously I am not striking out a line of that.

Q: But then what does that mean?
(Woelki takes a long pause and reflects)

Q: Is the question crossing your mind now whether it would hurt things, if we insist so much on this point, or if you might lean even farther out the window if possible?

CARDINAL: For a fact, my words in Mannheim already immediately brought forth criticism. Not to overlook the “Internet Magisterium” with its usual polemical attacks, which, directed against a cardinal, come out even more embittered than they were before, if possible. But further polarization will not get us anywhere, for sure.

Q: Federal policy is close to doing what you called for in Mannheim – more recognition for same-sex couples through a better position in tax law.

CARDINAL: The secular state has the option to order such things for its citizens. This is clear: for us as the Catholic Church it is marriage of man and woman, open to children, the ideal of living together and also the model we support. Also in the Basic Law [the German Federal Constitution] marriage and family stand under special state protection as a natural basic unit of society (and also in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights).

Overall, it sounds like the bishop’s method is close to what the reporter thought: the bishop enunciates Catholic teaching clearly as applying to intra-Church matters; but he is unspecific about what society and the state should do. There is Catholic teaching against unjust discrimination toward homosexual persons, and perhaps the bishop is only calling for observance of that. But he gave no guidance about where the state should restrain itself in granting status to same-sex couples.

Sunset at La Salette

The La Salette Shrine in Enfield, New Hampshire is apparently going to be closing at some time in 2015, 87 years after they took over from the Shakers. So says an announcement from the Missionaries of La Salette, recently received at the Shrine and reported in the local press.

I can’t say this is a surprise. This isn’t the first La Salette apostolate in New England to close, and may not be the last. It may be hard to attract visitors to a site that is mainly an outdoor shrine, with only a rather minimal chapel.

There was once an attractive church open to visitors, complete with a Casavant Freres organ. The missionaries’ marykeanechapelfrontal 0907Riley_Rehearsal first major work on the site was across the street from the current Shrine. In 1927 they bought a property previously occupied by a settlement of the Shaker sect, and they built a stately chapel in 1930-31 along with a seminary high school and a junior college. The college was later relocated and the school closed in 1974: the student body had produced few vocations. The Mary Keane Chapel remains today, now deconsecrated, as part of the local museum that documents the history of the Shaker and LaSalette presence at the site. It is used as a site for weddings and concerts.

Activity at the Shrine in Enfield has been very low in recent years. An annual display of Christmas lights on the hillside attracts visitors; and the Sunday Mass serves locals and probably some tourists in the summer, but, going by this pamphlet of activities, Mass is only said at the Shrine chapel four times a week by the three priests on the staff. Normally, three priests would be saying Mass 21 times a week somewhere. Maybe they’re busy somewhere else.

The current Shrine chapel, as you can see, is rustic, but I have always thought it was just a euphemism for ‘miserable’ in this case, dark and poor. Perhaps it is so dark and poor in solidarity with the poor of the world, and for the sake of nearness to nature. The ministry activities the missionaries offer include a preached mission focused on reconciliation with creation, creation spirituality, water conservation, and other related topics.

The Shrine grounds also feature a “peace walk” area marked with a peace pole and portraits of “modern apostles”. The Japanese “interfaith” group that provided the pole says: “Thought forms create an energetic field strong enough to empower the course of planetary destiny.” Very inspiring, no doubt.

Anyway, the order, falling in numbers, has withdrawn from some parishes it formerly staffed. Closer to me, it sold its shrine and retreat house in Ipswich, Massachusetts in the 1980s, even though the church there once bore the title “National Shrine of Our Lady of La Salette”. The title was moved to their shrine in Attleboro, Mass. (between Boston and Providence), and that became the site of a substantial new church for pilgrims in 2002.

As for the shrine in Enfield, perhaps (God grant it!) some other religious community could take it on and make it a home. New Hampshire, a state with one of the most unchurched populations in the country, needs people inspired with the light of the faith.