I'm Not an April Fooler ...

... but I know some folks who are.

Drop by Too Many Chefs and read all about their Newest Team Member and their Family Secret Pizza Recipe.

Roz gets a reminder of the date.

Just for Fun

A few of my favorite quotes that are not "churchy."

You and I are here to do good to others. What the others are here for, I don't know.

W.H. Auden

I know not how to abstain from reading.

Samuel Pepys
[obviously we are soul mates]

A dog teaches a boy fidelity, perseverance, and to turn around three times before lying down.

Robert Benchley

Nothing shows a man's character more than what he laughs at.

Goethe
[another soul mate]

Outside of a dog, man's best friend is a book. Inside a dog, it's too dark to read.

Groucho Marx

For Our Pope

Father in Heaven,

Thy will be done. Your faithful servant has served the faithful long and well. Thank you for the gift of him. If it be your will, let us keep him with us a while longer. Nevertheless Father, I'm certain that he is longing for home. Thy will be done to thy greater glory.

Amen

Steven Riddle at Flos Carmeli

Lord, hear our prayer. Amen.

Patience

Today's meditation in "In Conversation with God: Lent and Eastertide" is reflecting on the incident when the disciples had been fishing all night and caught nothing ... until Jesus told them to go back out after which their nets were so full that the boats were foundering. It seems perfectly timed to me.

Why did the Lord include so many fishermen among His Apostles? ... What were the good points that He saw in them? I think there was one thing which He specially appreciated in those who were to be his Apostles: an unshakeable patience ... They had worked all night and had caught nothing; long hours of waiting after which the grey light of dawn was to bring them their reward, but there was none ...

What a lot of waiting the Church of Christ has had to endure throughout the centuries ... partiently extending her invitations and leaving grace to do its work! ... What does it matter if she has worked very hard in one place or another and reaped very little for her Master? On the basis of his word, in spite of everything, she will launch her nets again until such time as his grace, the limits of which are in no way proportioned to human efforts, brings her again a new catch of fish. (R.A. Knox) We don't know how or when, but all apostolic effort bears fruit, even though it often happens that we do not see it. Our Lord asks from us Christians the same capacity for patient waiting as he found in the fishermen. He asks us to be constant in our personal apostolate with our friends and acquaintances, never to abandon them or to give up anybody as being impossible. ...

If we persevere and carry on in the firm conviction that the Lord wills it, signs of a Christian revolution will appear around you, everywhere. Some will follow the call, others will take their interior life seriously, and others -- the weakest -- will at least be forewarned. (St. Escriva, Furrow)

Keeping Our Papa in My Prayers

The Pope's condition

Fox News is reporting that an Italian news agency has said that the Pope’s condition has taken a turn for the worse. I don’t have any more information than that and am waiting for our Rome correspondent to notify us if there’s any real information. Until you can verify such things from two or more sources in Rome, I suggest you treat it as the rumor that it is.

That said, a few prayers for the Holy Father would not be out of order.

Update: CNN is reporting that he has received the last rites. Other sources say he’s had a urinary tract infection and is receiving antibiotics. Stay tuned.

Dom Bettinelli at BettNet

Thou Shalt Not Be Overcome

I know that many people are heartsick over Terri. Someone said that she saw George Felos on television trashing Fr. Frank Pavone who has a long history of fighting for life. We are not even allowed to lick our wounds and mourn our dead before the attack presses on.

GetReligion's story, "Sneer-quoting culture of life," tells about a new order of priests being founded by Pavone to fight against abortion and euthanasia ... and the sneering reactions of Planned Parenthood. This is the trend we can expect as this struggle between the cultures of life and death continue. Evil is not happy about this turn of events, that this very visible struggle has alerted us all to the dangers at hand ... and evil does not give up easily. It fights back.

We must not forget that this was a battle, not the war. If ever there was a time for "onward Christian soldiers" and "the Church militant" then this is that time. This quote has been running through my head all day. It applies to right here and right now.

He said not:
Thou shalt be troubled, thou shalt not be tempted, thou shalt not be distressed,
but He said:
thou shalt not be overcome.

Julian of Norwich

Keep the faith. Hold the line. Wipe your tears and straighten your shoulders and press on in the good fight. He has promised it and Our Father keeps His promises. We shall not be overcome.

Terri is Dead

Schiavo, 41, died quietly in a Pinellas Park hospice 13 days after her feeding tube was removed despite extraordinary intervention by Florida lawmakers, Congress and President Bush - efforts that were rebuffed at every turn by the courts.

Her death was confirmed to The Associated Press by Michael Schiavo's attorney, George Felos, and announced to reporters outside her hospice by a family adviser.

My Way News via Drudge Report

May God give support and comfort to all those who loved her and will miss her ... and may He have mercy on those who killed her.

A Lot of Hot Air

STEAM BOY
This was a wonderfully animated and otherwise dreadfully dull movie that is not worth the time I am taking type this mini-review. I do so only in the hope of saving others from a similar terrible fate. Therefore, I will pass on the two nuggets of wisdom that comprised the movie's entire message which took them two hours to communicate sufficiently to make sure that we'd really get it.

1. War is bad.
2. Science should not be used to make weapons because ... (see message 1).
   

Taking My Hat Off to "A Rational LIberal"

My dear friend, Toby, is a liberal with whom anyone in St. Blogs would enjoy crossing swords. She is open minded to others' reasoning, truly tolerant, and can hold her own intelligently but without heat in any verbal debate. One of the many things I admire about Toby so much is that she thinks for herself and never stops examining issues until she has considered every side of an argument. She also is the friend who spurred my thinking about federal involvement in Terri Schiavo's case.

Toby was so outraged over the federal government trying to step in that we "agreed to disagree" and stepped away from the discussion. However, that was not enough for Toby who hadn't heard of some of the information I had heard ... y'all would have laughed to hear us talking because we were both being so careful about qualifying our lack of documentation for much of what we had "heard." She's been out of town and I've had other things on my mind so I had forgotten all about our conversation. I was really surprised to find this comment from her this morning ... but I shouldn't have been. She's been busy thinking and investigating and isn't afraid to admit a change in position based on new information.

I have been surprised at the level of my ambivalence over this tragedy. I would call myself a "rational liberal" (stop laughing!) ...and am seriously conflicted over how much I want the government in my life. We always want it to be consistent with our selfish desires, don't we?

I freely admit that I formed an opinion before learning the details. Some of the "details" are fraught with hyperbole and difficult to believe. Motives are questionable, emotions are high. But the primary issue that has moved me from "let her go" to "examine more" is the absence of CURRENT testing.

We have a friend that has recovered from a devastating lack of oxygen to her brain ...she was diagnosed as having only "brain stem" activity, and would be unable to regain any kind of awareness. Today she is verbal, functional and taking vocational rehabilitation. She even remembers her friends and family from before the incident. She will never be "her old self", but she has become a welcomed and cherished member of her assisted living home. She is a loving, supporting and truly caring friend to her fellow residents.

It can happen ...everything should be done to give Terri a chance.

How's that for a 180, Julie!

I'm just sorry that y'all don't have a chance to get to know Toby. She's one in a million!

"The First Thing We Do, Let's Kill All the Lawyers"

Henry VI, Shakespeare

Remember that traffic ticket that Tom got? We paid it and then forgot it but about two days before the final due date he got three (three!) letters from lawyers all telling him that they could get it reduced to $75 whether he had done it or not. His comment? "Who are the real criminals here?" I think we all know the answer to that one.

BUT BLESS THE TAX ACCOUNTANTS
In the same set of mail we got our tax return from our accountant. We keep our business as separate as possible from our home finances but sometimes an intermingling is unavoidable and I rarely have any idea how we will come out tax-wise. Woohoo! Not only are we getting money back but it is about twice what I would have hoped for. There is nothing like that feeling of relief!

The Beatitudes: Happiness on a Higher Level

Those who heard Him preach the Beatitudes were invited to stretch themselves out on a cross, to find happiness on a higher level by death to a lower order, to despise all the world holds sacred, and to venerate as sacred all the world regards as an ideal. Heaven is happiness; but it is too much for man to have two heavens, an ersatz one below, and a real one above. Hence the four "woes" He immediately added to the Beatitudes.

But alas for you who are rich; you have had your time of happiness.
Alas for you who are well-fed now; you shall go hungry.
Alas for you who laugh now; you shall mourn and weep.
Alas for you when all speak well of you; just so did their fathers treat the false prophets.

Luke 6:24-26

Crucifixion cannot be far away when a Teacher says "woe" to the rich, the satiated, the gay and the popular. Truth is not in the Sermon on the Mount alone; it is in the One Who lived our the Sermon on the Mount on Golgotha. The four woes would have been ethical condemnations, if He had not died full of the opposite of the four woes: poor, abandoned, sorrowful, and despised. On the Mount of the Beatitudes, He bade men hurl themselves on the cross of self-denial; on the Mount of Calvary, He embraced that very cross. Though the shadow of the Cross would not fall across the place of the skull until three years later, it was already in His Heart the day He preached on "How to be Happy."

Life of Christ by Fulton Sheen

The Beatitudes: Lessons in Self-Crucifixion

The Beatitudes cannot be taken alone: they are not ideals; they are hard facts and realities inseparable from the Cross of Calvary. What He taught was self-crucifixion: to love those who hate us; to pluck out eyes and cut off arms in order to prevent sinning; to be clean on the inside when the passions clamor for satisfaction on the outside; to forgive those who would put us to death; to overcome evil with good; to bless those who curse us; to stop mouthing freedom until we have justice, truth and love of God in our hearts as the condition of freedom; to live in the world and still keep oneself unpolluted from it; to deny ourselves sometimes legitimate pleasures in order the better to crucify our egotism -- all this is to sentence the old man in us to death.

Life of Christ by Fulton Sheen

The Beatitudes: The Peacemakers and Those Reviled

Let Him come into a world which believes that one must resort to every manner of chicanery and duplicity in order to conquer the world, carrying doves of peace with stomachs full of bombs, say to them, "Blessed are the peacemakers," or "Blessed are they who eradicate sin that there may be peace"; and He will find Himself surrounded by men engaged in the silliest of all wars -- a war against the Son of God; making violence with steel and wood, pinions and gall and then setting a watch over His grave that He who lost the battle might not win the day.

Let Him come into a world that believes that our whole life should be geared to flattering and influencing people for the sake of utility and popularity, and say to them: "Blessed are you when men hate, persecute, and revile you"; and He will find Himself without a friend in the world, an outcast on a hill, with mobs shouting His death, and His flesh hanging from Him like purple rags.

Life of Christ by Fulton Sheen

The Beatitudes: The Holy, The Merciful, and The Pure

Let Him come into the world which denies Absolute Truth, which says that right and wrong are only questions of point of view, that we must be broadminded about virtue and vice, and let Him say to them, "Blessed are they who hunger and thirst after holiness," that is, after the Absolute, after the Truth which "I am"; and they will in their broadmindedness give the mob the choice of Him or Barabbas, they will crucify Him with thieves, and try to make the world believe that God is no different from a batch of robbers who are His bedfellows in death.

Let Him come into a world which says that "my neighbor is hell," that all which is opposite me is nothing, that the ego alone matters, that my will is supreme law, that what I decide is good, that I must forget others and think only of myself, and say to them, "Blessed are the merciful." He will find that He will receive no mercy; they will open five streams of blood out of His Body; they will pour vinegar and gall into His thirsting mouth; and, even after His death, be so merciless as to plunge a spear into His Sacred Heart.

Let Him come into a world which tries to interpret man in terms of sex; which regards purity as coldness, chastity as frustrated sex, self-containment as abnormality, and the union of husband and wife until death as boredom; which says that a marriage endures only so long as the glands endure, that one may unbind what God binds and unseal what God seals. Say to them, "Blessed are the pure"; and He will find Himself hanging naked on a Cross, made a spectacle to men and angels in a last wild crazy affirmation that purity is abnormal, that the virgins are neurotics, and that carnality is right.

Life of Christ by Fulton Sheen

The Beatitudes: The Poor in Spirit, The Patient, and They Who Mourn

The Sermon on the Mount is so much at variance with all that the world holds dear that the world will crucify anyone who tries to live up to its values. Because Christ preached them, He had to die. Calvary was the price He paid for the Sermon on the Mount. Only mediocrity survives. Those who call black black, and white white are sentenced for intolerance. Only the grays live.

The Lord Who says, "Blessed are the poor in spirit," comes into the world that believes in the primacy of the economic; let Him stand in the market place where some men live for collective profit, or where others say men live for individual profit, and see what happens. He will be so poor that during life He will have nowhere to lay His head; a day will come when He will die without anything of economic worth. In His last hour He will be so impoverished that they will strip Him of His garments and even give Him a stranger's grave for His burial, as He had a stranger's stable for His birth.

Let Him come into the world which proclaims the gospel of the strong, which advocates hating our enemies, which condemns Christian virtues as the "soft" virtues, and say to that world, "Blessed are the patient," and He will one day feel the scourges of the strong barbarians laid across His back; He will be struck on the cheek by a mocking fist during one of His trials; He will see men take a sickle and cut the grass from a hill on Calvary, and then use a hammer to pinion Him to a Cross to test the patience of One Who endures the worst that evil has to offer, that having exhausted itself it might eventually turn to Love.

Let Him come into our world which ridicules the idea of sin as morbidity, considers reparation for past guilt as a guilt complex and preach to that world, "Blessed are they who mourn" for their sins, and He will be blindfolded and mocked as a fool. They will take His Body and scourge it, until His bones can be numbered; they will crown His head with thorns, until He begins to weep not salt tears but crimson beads of blood, as they laugh at the weakness of Him Who will not come down from the Cross.

Life of Christ by Fulton Sheen

The Cure for Cynicism

PAPER CLIPS
Chances are that you haven't heard of this documentary . I'll write more about it later but Rose has really been wanting to see it so I took her this afternoon. Bottom line: see it. And if you have kids who understand what the Holocaust is, have them see it also. It is rated G and, although there are moments that bring tears on there is nothing graphic about the Holocaust itself. As a person in the movie said, when you get older you start to think that there is nothing good in the world. This is the cure for that cynicism.

The Beatitudes: The Key

The key to the Sermon on the Mount is the way He used two expressions: one was, "You have heard"; the other was the short, emphatic word, "But." When He said, "You have heard," He reached back to what human ears had heard for centuries and still hear from ethical reformers -- all those rules and codes and precepts which are half measures between instinct and reason, between local customs and the highest ideals. When He said, "You have heard," He included the Mosaic Law, Buddha with his eightfold way, Confucius with his rules for being a gentleman, Aristotle with his natural happiness, the broadness of the Hindus, and all the humanitarian groups of our day, who would translate some of the old codes into their own language and call them a new way of life. Of all these compromises, He said, "You have heard."

Life of Christ by Fulton Sheen

The Beatitudes: Taking On the World

The fascinating thing about this passage and the ones I will post over the next few days is that Sheen wrote this in 1958. 1958! I think of that as being an innocent, happy time where these problems had nothing like the emphasis they have in our modern lives. However, we can easily see from what Sheen says that was not case. His words could have been written today.

In the Beatitudes, Our Divine Lord takes those eight flimsy catch-words of the world -- "Security," "Revenge," "Laughter," "Popularity," "Getting Even," "Sex," "Armed Might," and "Comfort" -- and turns them upside down. To those who say, "You cannot be happy unless you are rich," He says, "Blessed are the poor in spirit." To those who say, "Don't let him get away with it," He says, "Blessed are the patient." To those who say, "Laugh and the world laughs with you," He says, "Blessed are those who mourn." To those who say: "If nature gave you sex instincts you ought to give them free expression, otherwise you will become frustrated," He says, "Blessed are the clean of heart." To those who say, "Seek to be popular and well known," He says, "Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and speak all manner of evil against you falsely because of Me." To those who say, "In time of peace prepare for war," He says, "Blessed are the peacemakers."

The cheap clichés around which movies are written and novels composed, He scorns. He proposes to burn what they worship; to conquer errant sex instincts instead of allowing them to make slaves of man; to tame economic conquests instead of making happiness consist in an abundance of things external to the soul. All false beatitudes which make happiness depend on self-expression, license, having a good time, or "Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow you die," He scorns because they bring mental disorders, unhappiness, false hopes, fears, and anxieties.

Life of Christ by Fulton Sheen

My Bellwether for the Culture of Death

bell·weth·er
Pronunciation: 'bel-'we-[th]&r, -"we-
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, leading sheep of a flock, leader, from belle bell + wether; from the practice of belling the leader of a flock
: one that takes the lead or initiative : LEADER; also : an indicator of trends

Merriam-Webster Dictionary

I was talking to my mother on the phone last night and realized just how far I'd come in not thinking like the rest of our society. I can't remember why this came up but she suddenly was laughing and saying, "Why won't the pope just quit? That stubborn old guy ... what is his problem?" I was shocked into silence.

I stammered, "But we love our Papa," thinking to myself, "can I sound any lamer or more sentimental or more Catholic?" Because I knew that wasn't going to get me anywhere with my mom. "He can't even talk." was her reply. I pulled myself together and pointed out that he was showing our society a wonderful example of how old age or sickness didn't mean you had to be shoved into a corner ... and then dropped the big bomb, "like Terri Schiavo down in Florida. Her husband's trying to kill her and no one's stopping him."

Her tone grew cold. "She's been in a coma for twelve years."
"She isn't in a coma, Mom."
"Well, she's in a vegetative state."
"No, she's not. I've seen videos of her responding to her mother and people around her."
"Well," my mother said dismissively, "I don't agree with you."
"But it's a video. You don't agree or disagree with it. It shows you what it shows you."

And then, because we love each other and didn't want to go past the point of no return, we changed the subject.

So, you probably can understand why, when my mother brought up how curious she was to see Million Dollar Baby, I just told her about how all the movie critics liked it too. There wasn't any point in bringing up the whole euthanasia issue ... we were already running on pure luck in that conversation.

My mother is a wonderful person, kind and good to anyone she meets, and would never knowingly harm anyone. She also is an atheist and, consequently, much of the time has no reason to question what modern culture holds to be "good." She truly believes that we are simply very intelligent animals and when we die ... poof ... we disappear. That's it.

I can't be upset with what she thinks. A few years ago I would have agreed with my mother on every point except the atheism. She gets her news from television and The New York Times. She is only saying what a lot of people think, a bellwether in essence for which way the wind is blowing on current issues. However, it makes two things perfectly clear to me.

The first is that we truly are those bits of yeast Jesus spoke of, the light that can change the world. If my mother doesn't hear a different viewpoint from me, where will she hear it? She may not agree but at least someone has mentioned a few facts from the opposite point of view. Without Christians who hold the line against the culture of death, there is no one to say anything or stop anyone.

The second realization was connected to Million Dollar Baby. I have watched with great interest as Barbara Nicolosi at Church of the Masses and Jeffrey Overstreet at Looking Closer Journal have traded viewpoints about this movie. Nicolosi maintains that the overwhelmingly negative presentation of Christians and support for euthanasia make the movie dangerous; that it validates euthanasia as an option of love. Overstreet holds that the movie presents both sides in an issue that we must examine and that to suppress the other point of view is dangerous censorship.

I haven't seen the movie so couldn't really come down on one side or the other until that conversation with my mother. I realized that even if Million Dollar Baby was very fair presenting euthanasia pros and cons, Barbara Nicolosi was right. My mother has no reason to think that there is such a thing as a soul or believe in the sanctity of life itself as a gift from God. She would take that movie as affirmation of her viewpoint. She doesn't care about the cons of the argument because she thinks they are based on stupidity, not compassion or love. It would take a truly passionate and intelligent presentation of the opposite side to make her begin to rethink it. She has not had any reason to go through the process that I have of reexamining all my beliefs against what the Catholic Church teaches; an examination was often painful and forced me to abandon long-held "truths" for a much brighter light that called "black black and white white" as Fulton Sheen says in Life of Christ.

What this says about society as a whole, if my mother is truly the bellwether I believe her to be, is a very scary proposition. If a 70 year old grandmother holds these views and thinks them perfectly reasonable we are much closer to the sort of situation that exists in Holland today than I realized. I do not know what the answer is and, truth be told, there is undoubtedly not merely one answer at all. Again, we are back to Jesus' analogy of the yeast. Each of us holds a bit of the key, even if it is only a daughter forcing herself to talk about the tough stuff with her mother on the phone and both of them tolerating, in love, hearing what the other side thinks. It's a start anyway.

Once people stop believing in God, the problem is not that they will believe in nothing; rather, the problem is that they will believe anything.

C.S. Lewis

Why Twelve Apostles?

The number twelve is symbolic. The Book of the Apocalypse speaks of the twelve foundations of the Church. There were twelve patriarchs in the Old Testament, and also twelve tribes in Israel; there were twelve spies who explored the promised land; there were twelve stones on the breast of the High Priest; when Judas failed, a twelfth Apostle had to be named. The Apostles are most often referred to in the Gospels as "the twelve," that title being attributed to them thirty-two times. In choosing these twelve, it was evident that Our Lord was preparing them for a work after His Ascension; that the Kingdom He came to found was not only invisible but visible; not only Divine but human. But they had so much to learn before they could be the twelve gates of the Kingdom of God. Their first lesson would be the Beatitudes.

Life of Christ by Fulton Sheen

I will be following up this with several excerpts about the Beatitudes also as Sheen presents them in a way that I really never had thought of and y'all may like it also.