A church building in need

A lady with whom I am acquainted at a Catholic web forum moved with her husband to Michigan awhile ago and dropped out of sight.  It has come to my attention that she is not doing too well.  Please say a prayer for Carleen.

I also learned that her husband has purchased an old Catholic church building.  He is quoted in this article, “I came by and saw the for sale sign in front of the church and inquired and realized I’d probably have to take a mortgage out on it so that’s what I did[.]”

There is a GoFundMe fundraiser for Mr. Price's efforts.  Check it out.  Pictures and a Youtube interview are posted along with updates.  Please say a prayer for Bill and Carleen and the restoration efforts and give something if you are a fan of old church buildings like me.

Vatican Bank

BBC

In January the Italian central bank suspended all bank card payments in the Vatican, citing its failure fully to implement anti-money laundering legislation.

The Holy See was required to meet European Union safeguards on finances by the start of 2013.

Pope Benedict has promised greater transparency in Vatican finances and the operations of its bank.

A group of experts from the Council of Europe said last year that the Vatican had made progress in reforming to meet EU standards but that a lot of work remained to be done.

I'm confused.  What is the obligation here for the Vatican?  Or is it the EU saying, "do this because I'm bigger than you"?   Click the link to read more about the Vatican Bank's newly appointed head.

Poor Timing

Magister has this article up today about Cardinal Bertone's efforts to secure control of two hospitals in Italy to build a Catholic medical hub. One of them is already controlled by the Italian bishops' conference and is basically a turf war over who gets to be on the board.

The other hospital, the San Raffaele, Magister describes as follows:

The San Raffaele is a massive, cutting-edge medical center, founded and headed in Milan by a priest, Luigi Maria Verzé, which does not, however, have anything in its statutes binding it to the Church, nor much that is Catholic in what it does.

Suffice it to say that artificial fertilization, which is condemned by the Church, is practiced there, and that in its highly modern laboratories experiments are conducted without any regard for the ethical criteria affirmed by the magisterium.

Not only that. In the connected Università Vita-Salute, dedicated to humanistic studies, philosophy, theology and scientific subjects are taught by professors who are in glaring contrast with the Catholic vision, from Emanuele Severino to Massimo Cacciari, from Roberta De Monticelli to Vito Mancuso, from Edoardo Boncinelli to Luca Cavalli-Sforza.

Fr. Verzé himself has repeatedly worried the Catholic hierarchy, with statements that could be taken as supporting euthanasia or the use of embryos.

Bertone's offer to take the San Raffaele, which is on the brink of bankruptcy thanks to its massive debt to the tune of a billion euros:

The IOR said that it was ready to provide 200 million euros immediately, while one billion over 3-5 years would be guaranteed by an international "charity" still shrouded in mystery (the financier George Soros has denied being part of the deal).

In exchange, Cardinal Bertone has demanded seats on the administrative board of the Mount Tabor Foundation, which governs the entire complex, of four of his proteges...

I am going to take a wild stab in the dark and guess that the "charity" to be named is the holding company of the Legion of Christ with its billions now under the control of a papal delegate.

The head priest Fr. Verzé is willing to accept the offer as long as he can expand the board and appoint two of his own men who will counter Bertone's people.

Magister says that it will all be decided in the next few days. He also notes that the character of the San Raffaele was only discussed for the first time a few days ago!

What he conceived of as an "epochal revolution" thus threatens, if not stopped in time, to turn into a costly and disastrous boomerang.

Because rebuilding from the ground up, on Catholic foundations, a complex like the San Raffaele, which has never been Catholihttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifc, is simply an impossible undertaking.

Now this story of Bertone's adventures in taking control of hospitals is interesting in itself to me. What makes it more interesting is that the secretary of state is willing to spend 200 million on a hospital and university in Italy right now.

Read here: "Hopeless, But Not Serious: Once Again", by David Goldman. He has a nice graph of population in a key demographic for several southern European countries including Italy.

The present crisis can and will be papered over, because there is no reason not to paper it over, and for the moment, there is plenty of fat to be cut from European government budgets. In ten or fifteen years, the budget knife will cut bone. Italy’s population is on the cusp of a tumble.

My conclusion: there is no reason to panic over the present kerfluffle, but there is no reason to own any exposure to southern Europe. Ever again.

Goldman's assessment rings true to me. Its lesson and the fact pointed out at the very end of Magister's article go well together: Bertone is on a fool's errand for more reasons than one.

Visibility

St. John Neumann, Farragut, Tennessee:


Go check out the post at NLM for pictures of how it turned out. Two parishes where I live have recently constructed new buildings. They don't quite measure up...

Women in the Sanctuary

Over at TitusOneNine, the Reverend Canon Doctor Harmon has a post with an excerpt from the Detroit Free Press on churches getting creative in adding men to their congregations.

But today, the head of Greater Grace Temple [Charles Ellis III] in Detroit looks out over his flock on Sunday mornings and gazes at a scene where women outnumber men about 2-1. The demographic shift worries him and other Christians looking for ways to draw men back to church.
[...]

To bridge the gap, churches are developing nontraditional programs to reach out to men — from sponsoring hunting trips and car clubs to holding annual men’s conferences. Some have toughened their messages to emphasize power, using masculine imagery in their services.

Longtime readers of Father Z's blog know that Father frequently blogs about how over time a correlation can be drawn between things like Mass attendance and vocations for the priesthood and the entry of women into what were traditionally male roles.

For instance, this is a comment of mine at T19 where I summed up one of Father's points:

Despite all the ballyhoo attempting to prove some kind of causation between priestly celibacy and the decline in vocations, the number of vocations in the Catholic Church started falling off just when women were being introduced into the sanctuaries as readers and music leaders and communion ministers.

The most obvious and visible expression of this trend can be seen in the altar servers (/altar boys being now out of fashion/). As dioceses across the US one by one started allowing girls to join the ranks of servers, the boys who had always enthusiastically sought the job started coming out less and less. The raw material of the Catholic priesthood has been cut off at the source.

Most of the comments at T19 come from Protestants in churches that may or may not have a female clergy, so the comments on the post covering the Detroit story reflect that outlook. One in particular had this to say:

I strongly disagree with the idea that men follow men because they’re men. I think that men generally don’t choose to follow women pastors because women pastors tend to focus on a damp, huggy, indistinct, kumbaya unitarian Christ who accepts you as you are, so there’s nothing to do. Men would rather focus on the rules and how to “win,” thereby.

While the Catholic Church does not have a female clergy and I wouldn't be so bold as to offer such an all-encompassing generalization, the Church has been undergoing since Vatican II a fight between traditional elements of the faith and what the above describes as a "focus on a damp, huggy, indistinct, kumbaya unitarian Christ who accepts you as you are, so there’s nothing to do." At the same time as noted above, women have taken a greater role, not least of which is the catechizing of Catholic youth. When I was in CCD, I was taught mostly by women. Most of them were pious and devout, but in a few classes, the "touchy-feelly" was pronounced.

Coupled with Father Z's points, an explanation arises for the following given in another comment:

OK, I was able to track down the data and found a nerd’s dream site:

Denomination Percent of parishes with 56% or more female
ROMAN CATHOLIC 73.2%
BAPTIST 69.1%
METHODIST 80.1%
LUTHERAN 76.1%
PRESBYTERIAN OR REFORMED 77.8%
PENTECOSTAL 77.9%
OTHER MODERATE OR LIBERAL PROTESTANTS 86.1%
EPISCOPAL CHURCH 85.1%
OTHER CHRISTIAN, NOT OTHERWISE SPECIFIED 56.0%
OTHER CHRISTIAN, NOT OTHERWISE SPECIFIED 60.1%
NON-CHRISTIAN 57.6%

To have a lot of geeky fun, do the following steps:

# Go to the National Congregations home page.
# Clicked “explore the survey data”
# Under “Create Cross-tabulations of Two Variables”Wave 2: 2006-2007 data
# Clicked under the first Variable. “Denomination.” For the second variable choose “Percent of regular adult attendees are Female”

May mix it up. Caution: data junkies can spend a lot of time with this site.
# Clicked: “I want my tables to reflect the number of persons in congregations”
# Clicked: Create Frequency Table.

Bolding my own. Let's rearrange those from greatest to least:

OTHER MODERATE OR LIBERAL PROTESTANTS 86.1%
EPISCOPAL CHURCH 85.1%
METHODIST 80.1%
PENTECOSTAL 77.9%
PRESBYTERIAN OR REFORMED 77.8%
LUTHERAN 76.1%
ROMAN CATHOLIC 73.2%
BAPTIST 69.1%
OTHER CHRISTIAN, NOT OTHERWISE SPECIFIED 60.1%
NON-CHRISTIAN 57.6%
OTHER CHRISTIAN, NOT OTHERWISE SPECIFIED 56.0%

The Catholic Church isn't at the top of that list, but it can certainly do better that three-fourths.

On this Fifth Sunday of Lent

An important message from Father Z:

You are all going to die.

I am going to die. You are going to die.

There is no way around it.

When we die, and we will, we will be judged.

Heaven and Hell are the only alternatives.

Both of them are never going to end.

Heaven or Hell are not like going on a really good or really bad cruise.

So, get ready.

You could die before you click away from this page.

Or it could be in a few more years.

But it is going to happen.

You might have some warning and lead time.

You might not.

One day that funeral procession that blocks traffic and keeps you sitting an [sic] waiting at the light is going to be about you.

Get ready.

You will have to account for what you have done with your life.

Father Coyle

by Sharon Davies

Remembering the 1921 slaying of Father James E. Coyle
[From Columbia, the magazine of the Knights of Columbus.]

Father James E. Coyle, an extraordinary priest and Knight of Columbus in the early 20th century, courageously stood up against widely-held anti-Catholic views at the risk, and then cost, of his life.

The Irish-born priest was scarcely in his 20s when, after his ordination in Rome, he was dispatched to Alabama to begin his priesthood. The Catholic population in Alabama had exploded with a promise of jobs, especially in and around Birmingham’s network of coal mines, steel mills and iron foundries. Father Coyle arrived in the city shortly before a wave of anti-Catholicism flooded the country, and the revived Ku Klux Klan (KKK) rebranded itself as a “patriotic” fraternity, targeting blacks, Catholics, Jews and foreigners.

[Read it all.]

More Ave Maria News

AveWatch: Safranek Wins Settlement from Ave Maria and Monaghan

Detroit attorney Deborah Gordon announced today that former Ave Maria School of Law professor Stephen Safranek accepted a settlement offer in his October 2007 wrongful termination suit against Tom Monaghan, the Ave Maria Foundation, the Law School, and Bernard Dobranski (the recently-resigned AMSL Dean and President). The Law School’s Board of Governors will rescind its earlier revocation of Professor Safranek’s tenure; further, the Board will rescind the preceding suspension and all censures imposed by then-Dean Dobranski.

Lots of links and reaction. Check it out.

Ouch

Peruse this article in American Thinker: The Catholic Bishops and ACORN by Mark Wauck. He goes into detail, quoting many previous articles, in describing the Catholic Campaign for Human Development's history and relations with the world of ACORN (before CCHD severed ties with it amid news of massive embezzlement at ACORN) and community organizing at large. (Guess which organization funded a few of our present president's jobs?)

Summing up:

The article [a CNS article quoted by Wauck] goes on to relate a CCHD spokesman's claims that CCHD subjects its grantees to a great deal of scrutiny, and that they had no suspicion of irregularities in voter registration drives. You can take those claims for what they're worth, but the fact remains that CCHD -- which is to say, the Catholic Church in America -- has for decades been funneling millions of dollars into an organization founded by radical leftists.

That's bad news. Bad for the bishops, bad for the Church, bad for America.

In an addendum written after the new revelation on CCHD's funding of pro-abortion and prostitution groups, Wauck refers to the widely-quoted words of Father Neuhaus of First Things regarding where the Catholic laity's money is going: down the rabbit hole:

He called the organization "misbegotten in concept and corrupt in practice," and went so far as to urge that it be terminated. "What most Catholics don't know, and what would likely astonish them," wrote Fr. Neuhaus, "is that CHD very explicitly does not fund Catholic institutions and apostolates that work with the poor." Neuhaus suggested that the bishops would do better to spend their money on more Catholic-related projects, such as "Catholic inner-city schools."

Bolding mine.

Pretending and Reality

Father Z has pointed out an article at the website of the Cincinnati Enquirer regarding the actions of the local ordinary in dismissing a female religious for advocating on behalf of women's (pretend) ordination. They're also doing a poll.

Check it out.

Last checked: 6:10 PM CDT

WHAT DO YOU THINK?
Should the Church allow women to be ordained as priests?
Yes (1560) 55.85%
No (1157) 41.42%
I'm undecided (76) 2.72%
Total Votes: 2793

FUMARE has a post on monetary policy and the Pope's failure to address it in his encyclical. The post references a critique by Thomas E. Woods, Jr. in Taki's Magazine.

I'm not so interested on the monetary policy bits as I am the general response of Woods to Caritas in Veritate:

I actually didn’t want to write anything about the Pope’s encyclical. In 2007, I wrote a book, Sacred Then and Sacred Now: The Return of the Old Latin Mass, in defense of the Pope’s restoration of the traditional Latin liturgy, an area in which Benedict XVI is quite knowledgeable and has much of value to say. I like this Pope. He is smart and serious, not frivolous or vain. He is in many ways a substantial improvement over his predecessor. (I cite as evidence the very fact that the media believes the opposite.) And having been viciously denounced and ridiculed by some pretty despicable people, he certainly has all the right enemies.

I have reluctantly yielded to the urging of quite a few correspondents and typed up a few thoughts. So here goes: Caritas in Veritate strikes me as at best a relatively unremarkable restatement of some familiar themes from previous social encyclicals. At worst, it is bewilderingly naïve, and its policy recommendations, while attracting no one to the Church, are certain to repel.

The response to the encyclical throughout the right-of-center Catholic world was drearily predictable: with few exceptions, it was a performance worthy of the Soviet Politburo, with unrestrained huzzahs everywhere.

It is one thing to receive a statement from the Pope with the respect that is due to the man and his office. It is quite another to treat his every missive as ipso facto brilliant, as if the Catholic faith depended on it. If his supporters are trying to live down to the Left’s portrayal of Catholicism as a billion-person cult, they could hardly do a better job.

Woods then launches into an explanation of the concepts of his book and how economics should be viewed only as what it really is, an objective study of economic processes and the theories that attempt to describe those processes. Then Woods goes on:

Nothing in the Deposit of Faith even comes close to deciding this and countless other important economic questions one way or the other. Not even the most uncomprehending or exaggerated rendering of papal infallibility would have the Pope adjudicating such disputes as these. Yet misunderstandings or ignorance regarding such seemingly abstruse points are so often at the heart of the policy recommendations that bishops’ conferences propose and papal encyclicals can seem to imply.

It is obviously not “dissent” merely to observe that the cause-and-effect relationships that constitute the theoretical edifice of economics are not a matter of faith and morals. They simply do not fall within the range of subjects on which a Catholic prelate is endowed with special insight or authority. Catholic laity cannot head up petition drives against them. They are facts of life. Facts cannot be protested, defied, or lectured to; they can only be learned and acted upon. There is no use in shaking our fists at the fact that price controls lead to shortages. All we can do is understand the phenomenon, and be sure to bear it and other economic truths in mind if we want to make statements about the economy that are rational and useful.

Woods closes out the section of his critique by basically saying what we already know in the real world (and the Holy Father does in his Catholic world when dealing with Catholic things): just saying it should be this way won't make it so, especially when economics is a trade-off. One can't ask for higher wages for all bread winners and expect employers to be able to pay to hire as many bread winners as before.

Anyway, go read through the rest. It's pretty interesting.

Unidentified Body

I follow a few cases at websleuths.com including the following:



We have a few readers out that way. Leave a comment if you know anything.

A Great Quote

To be Roman Catholic, on the other hand, is to join a motley crew. We come from all classes. We are sometimes desperate in our prayers and excessive in our devotions.

And further on:

Yes, let us continue to bring a greater dignity and reverence to Roman Catholic liturgy, and yes, in this let us learn something from Anglo-Catholics if we can. But let us never lose sight of who we do it for. Someone once said to Newman, dismissively, ‘Who are the laity, anyway?’ To which Newman quietly replied: ‘The Church would look pretty foolish without them.’

Walter Cronkite Dead At 92

The former CBS News anchor is dead at age 92. Walter Cronkite is a bit before my time, though of course I've known of him for as long as I can remember. Kind of like waiting to have the telephone installed, gas pumps with analog dials and a world without cable, Uncle Walt represented a different era.

Rest in peace.

Sistani Redux

Read this: August 2007

Then read this (from Pajamas Media, quote below from Threatswatch):

This is a huge development. One of the biggest questions I and others have had since the Iranian protests/revolt/revolution began was whether Mousavi would be any different in tangible effect (Hizballah & Hamas support, etc.) than Ahmadinejad and whether Rafsanjani was seeking to sack ‘Supreme’ Leader Khamenei simply to acquire the powerful position for himself. That question perhaps may have been answered today. My ears first perked up when word made it through the grapevines over the weekend that Rafsanjani had been meeting with other Ayatollahs and clerics in Qom, and had among them a representative of Iraq’s Ayatollah Ali Sistani. Why? Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani in 2007 made two very critical statements: that “I am a servant of all Iraqis, there is no difference between a Sunni, a Shiite or a Kurd or a Christian,” and that Islam can exist within a democracy without theological conflict. You will never hear such words slip past the lips of Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei. Ever. Sistani’s presence at the Rafsanjani talks in Qom, Iran, through a representative brings therefore added significance. And the al-Arabiya report above seems to suggest that Rafsanjani is not seeking Sistani’s support for superficial reasons. In November 2007 at National Review Online, I wrote about this aspect of Ayatollah Ali Sistani, including a reference to another analysis I had written earlier in the spring.
[...]

Sistani’s appeal does not end at the Iraqi border, as Iranians increasingly observe his leadership with interest and fondness. Some are “intrigued by the more freewheeling experiment in Shi’ite empowerment taking place across the border in Iraq,” which is fundamentally different in approach than the Iranian theocratic brand of dictated observance and obedience. The Boston Globe’s Anne Barnard reports that within Tehran’s own central bazaar, “an increasing number of merchants are sending their religious donations, a 20 percent tithe expected from all who can spare it, to Iraq’s most senior Shi’ite cleric.”

If that didn’t quite sink in, go read that paragraph again. many Iranian merchants have been sending their 20% tithes to Sistani, not Khamenei. Since at least 2007. I spoke to the significance of Rafsanjani seeking Sistani’s support earlier on ‘The Steve Schippert Show’ on RFC Radio just before the al-Arabiya story broke. His name is an attention-getter for those aware of players and forces in both Iran and Iraq. And for good reason. Perhaps in Iran, just as in Iraq today, true democracy can exist “without theological conflict” with the Shi’a faith. And perhaps the most unlikely cast of available men in Iran are set to bring that to be. Perhaps only something close, or closer. But whatever the change, and the extent of the change - and it appears the intent is significant change and not simply a game of Shuffling Ayatollahs - it will be positive for Iranians, for the region, for Americans and for the entire world. I think it is nearly inevitable at his point, and time is not on the regime’s side.

This is huge if Sistani is truly playing a part in whatever is going on in clerical circles in Qom. Sistani is the most senior cleric in Shi'ite Islam and any move by the Iranian clerics toward him and the tradition he represents would be as the quote says truly beneficial for Iran and the Middle East.

Theological Underpinnings

According to reports, things in Iran are mostly quiet. The threat of using the Revolutionary Guard to put down further revolt has been made, but plans are allegedly being made for a general strike.

Reza Aslan at The Daily Beast has a new post up on the origins and theological underpinnings of the religious portions of the Iranian government.

Called Valayat-e Faqih, or “Guardianship of the Jurist,” this unique religio-political system was the brainchild of the founder of the Islamic republic, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who died in 1988. In theory, the faqih—what the West calls the supreme leader—was supposed to be the most learned religious authority in the country. He was originally supposed to be a sort of pope-like figure that would ensure the Islamic nature of what would otherwise be a democratic state. He would have moral and spiritual authority, and he would certainly wield enormous political influence, but he would by no means maintain direct political control over the state.

However, in the years following the revolution of 1979, through a series of constitutional amendments pushed through parliament, the position of faqih [supreme leader] was gradually transformed from a symbolic moral authority into the supreme authority of the state.

Aslan then goes on to explain how this new system when originally conceived ran counter to a thousand years of Shi'ite clerical non-meddling in politics as all government was illegitimate until the coming of the Madhi, the messiah figure of the Islamic end times. Khomeini though adopted for himself the trappings (if not the actual title) of the Madhi for himself as supreme leader; his thought was that as agents of the messiah, the clerics must work to build his kingdom of earth before his coming.

But by far the most overt connection Khomeini established between himself and the messiah was his doctrine of the Valayat-e Faqih. In Khomeini’s view, the faqih would have more than just supreme authority, he would have infallible and divine authority—authority that, in fact, would be equal to the authority of the Prophet Muhammad.
[...]

Khamenei was chosen to succeed Khomeini because he was considered a safe bet, someone who would not rock the boat, someone who could be easily controlled by more powerful, more charismatic figures who chaired the various clerical subcommittees, like his fellow revolutionary Hashemi Rafsanjani (now an ayatollah himself), who was instrumental in Khamenei’s selection to the post of supreme leader.

This leads us to the present situation. Khomenei's power was slowly diffused among the committees of the clerics, but Aslan points out that this crisis is his attempt to reassert absolute control.

Except:

Simply put, Khamenei’s reckless and rambling Friday sermon has changed the tenor of Iran’s uprising, making it as much about his own leadership and the nature of clerical rule, as it is about Ahmadinejad’s presidency. He has, in other words, helped create a revolution.

Thanks to Hot Air. I also suggest reading this primer on the geopolitical situation for Shi'ites across the Middle East and into South Asia as detailed by Spengler.

Ave Maria

Greetings to you all. To my priestly readers (probably few in number...), happy Year of the Priest to you.

There seems to be much going on of late, but little of it interests me enough to mount an effort at posting. There are plenty of sources out there with more in-depth coverage.

But I have found one thing that has developed further that always interests: Ave Maria and Tom Monaghan.

Check out this headline from AveWatch: Monaghan Legal Claim: Ave Maria School of Law is a “Religious Institution” with “Ministerial” Professors.

In a stunning legal maneuver that could trigger unintended negative consequences involving a host of sources (Catholic legal academics, the American Bar Association, Ave Maria students/employees/alumni/recruits, official Church authorities) — Tom Monaghan’s lawyers argued in court on Wednesday that Ave Maria School of Law is a “religious institution” claiming “ministerial exception” such that any inquires into their “underlying motivation for a contested employment situation” should be barred from government courts. They also argued that AMSL’s law professors are “ministerial employees”, claiming that the “legal doctrine of ‘ecclesiastical abstention‘ is pertinent to the court’s lack of subject matter jurisdiction of AMSL’s employment decision and the allegations concerning AMSL’s governance”.

Nice, huh. AveWatch has all kinds of analysis in that post, go check it out if you're so inclined. The crew at Fumare took a look at the development from a civil standpoint and Doctor Ed Peters from a canon law standpoint.

Mr. Monaghan's latest legal maneuver comes on the heels of a Michigan Supreme Court ruling that upholds a lower court's order for Monaghan to turn over his notes regarding Ave Maria School of Law, formerly of Ann Arbor, MI and soon to be of Naples, FL, for the lawsuit of former three professors.

The saga of Monaghan and the various incarnations of Ave Maria (the college, the university, the law school, the town, etc.) is covered with great attention by AveWatch and Fumare, but despite Monaghan's tendrils throughout the more traditional wing of American Catholicism, his allegedly less-than-ethical affairs don't receive much attention from more mainstream Catholic blogs. Hopefully this latest clain will draw some attention given just how ludicrous it is.

Tu esse Pietro.

Or something. I don't remember the exact Italian quoted by Oskar Werner in his conversation with Anthony Quinn.

In case you all haven't guessed yet and don't have TCM, The Shoes of the Fisherman was on this afternoon. I was flipping back and forth between that and Family Feud. The movie has great production values. It's an MGM film made during that time when MGM still made films that looked truly epic in scope. The only part that really looked fake was the final balcony scene where the balcony was superimposed over the real thing at St. Peter's. Just not quite convincing. But aside from all that, I found the film to be slightly annoying with the annoyance growing as the movie went on.

If you haven't seen it and don't know the resolution of the plot, I won't spoil it, but I will say that it is pretty unbelievable in the first viewing and its hokey-ness only increases in subsequent viewings. Seeing it tonight and knowing it was coming, it just worked against the entire thing. The movie is a positive portrayal (to me) of the Church and I want to like the movie for that reason and because it looks so cool, but the plot just totally turns me off.

The actora were all great. About the only problem I had with the actors was the performance of Oskar Werner as the heterodox priest in his interview with the commission from the Holy Office. His views were actually not that hard to understand and his final answer to their question was actually pretty interesting, but he answered everything in such a convoluted way, he basically gave the commission no choice but to condemn his works. Father Telemond comes off as not very articulate.

The O Antiphons

Father Z's examination of them, always an interesting read each year.

We'll be back for a year-end look soon. Merry Christmas!

New Blog

Monstrous Regiment of Women
-Twentysomething mother of two.
-Via Father Finigan.

The first post is still on the main page, so it is quite new. Go have a look.