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Benedict XVI and Augustine of Hippo

This gives me shivers.

Years ago in the hallway of the Palazzo del Sant’Uffizio where I was working, just after the release of the CDF document on the Vocation of the Theologian, I ran into Cardinal Ratzinger.  I often had the chance to chat with him and ask him questions and he was very kind and helpful.

On this occasion, I said that I had read the document.  He asked what I thought of it. (!)   I said I wasn’t entirely satisfied.  He looked at me with a bit of surprised and asked me why.  I said, "You never really say who the theologican is."  He thought about this for a while and said, "Why don’t you tell us?"  (!!)  "You study at the Augustinianum [the Patristic Institute across the square from the Palazzo].  You are reading the Fathers.  Who would Augustine say the theologian is?" 

Bammo.  I had the topic of my first thesis from Joseph Ratzinger:


A couple years ago, Augustine’s bones were brought to Rome.  Inside the Vatican published my article on the event.

Here is the article with some added emphases:

“So,” [God says] “O man, did I make you for this, before you even existed, so that you would not believe me [about the resurrection of the body]?  That you could not return to be what you were before, who were able to be that which once you were not?” “But look, God”, man says, “at what I see in the tomb.  There’s ash, and dust, and these bones.  And that is going to receive again life, skin, muscles, flesh and rise again?  These ashes and bones I see in the tomb?”  “So you see ashes and bones in a tomb.  In your mother’s womb, there was nothing!  … Before you even were, there weren’t any ashes, there weren’t any bones there at all.  In spite of that, you were in fact made even though you were completely lacking in being before.  And do you now not believe that these bones… will receive the form they had, since you received what you did not have?  O believe!  For if you will have believed this, then your soul will be raised to new life!”  (St. Augustine, Sermon 127, 11, 15 – my trans.)

Rome had a visitor not seen for over 1600 years: St. Augustine of Hippo.  Augustine  (+ AD 430) had first been in Rome from AD 383-4 before going to the imperial court in Milan as the official rhetor, and finally in 387-8 when he was on his way back to North Africa.  The remains of the Bishop of Hippo were brought to Rome for the week of 7-15 November dubbed “Agostino Tra Noi… Augustine In Our Midst”, from the northern Italian city Pavia, just south of Milan.  They rested for a few days near the Pantheon and Piazza Navona in the basilica named for him and wherein is the tomb of his mother, St. Monnica  (+ AD 387 – and yes, that is the more accurate spelling).   This 13 November marked the 1650^th birthday of the great Bishop and Doctor of the Church, born to Monnica and her husband Patrick in Thagaste in modern day Algeria.   They gave their son a rare and audacious name, Augustinus - “Little Augustus”, in the 4^th century tantamount to “the little emperor”.  Biographer and scholar of Augustine, Serge Lancel, remarks, “Bearing this diminutive, a child would grow whose posthumous glory would one day eclipse that of the masters of the world.”  To mark the 1650^th anniversary of Augustine’s birth, son and mother were for a fleeting few days reunited.

Most visitors to the Eternal City find it puzzling and wondrous that Monnica’s remains would be in Rome and even more so that Augustine’s should be in northern Italy, or that we have them at all.  How did this come to pass?  Monnica died at age 56 of a malarial fever at Ostia, Rome’s port city, not far from where modern Rome’s port, DaVinci airport, is situated.  After Augustine’s baptism in 386 by Milan’s bishop St. Ambrose (+ AD 397), Monnica and Augustine together with his brother Navigius, Adeodatus the future bishop’s son by his concubine of many years whom Monnica had forced Augustine to put aside, and friends Nebridius, Alypius and the former Imperial secret service agent (agens in rebus) Evodius were all waiting at Ostia to return home to Africa by ship.  They were stuck there for some time because the port was blockaded during a period of civil strife.  As she lay dying near Rome, Monnica told Augustine (conf. 9): “Lay this body anywhere, let not the care for it trouble you at all. This only I ask, that you will remember me at the Lord’s altar, wherever you be.”  She was buried there in Ostia.  In the 6^th century she was moved to a little church named for St. Aurea, an early martyr of the city, and there she remained until 1430 when her remains were translated by Pope Martin V to the Roman Basilica of St. Augustine built in 1420 by the famous Guillaume Card. D’Estouteville of Rouen, then Camerlengo under Pope Sixtus IV.  As fate or God’s directing have would have it, in December 1945, some children were digging a hole in the courtyard of the little church of St. Aurea next to the ruins of ancient Ostia.  They wanted to put up a basketball hoop, probably having been taught the exciting new game – so different from soccer – by American GIs.  While digging they discovered the broken marble epitaph which had marked Monnica’s ancient grave.  Scholars were able to authenticate the inscription, the text of which had been preserved in a medieval manuscript.  The epitaph had been composed during Augustine’s lifetime by no less then a former Consul of AD 408 and resident at Ostia, Anicius Auchenius Bassus, perhaps Augustine’s host during their sojourn.  It is possible that Anicius Bassus placed the epitaph there after 410 which saw the ravages of Alaric the Visigoth and the sacking of Rome and its environs.  One can almost feel behind these traces of ancient evidence Augustine’s plea to his old friend sent by letter from the port of Hippo Regius over the waves to Ostia.  Hearing of the devastation to the area, far more shocking to the ancients than the events of 11 September were for us, did Augustine, now a renowned bishop, ask his old friend to tend the grave of the mother whom he had so loved and who in her time had wept for her son’s sins and rejoiced in his conversion?

Augustine died in 430, an ancient man by ancient standards, attaining the age of 76.   He had poor health and decades of constant crushing labor, both as a spiritual leader and civil authority.  In May 429 the Vandal armies, swollen to 80,000 by the tribes of the Alani and Goths, adherents of the Arian heresy, crossed the Straights of Gibraltar thus sealing North Africa’s fate.   By May of 430 Hippo was under siege by land, the port and escape by sea having been cut off by Vandal ships.   Some bishops of the area had fled, leaving their flocks, but Augustine remained.   In perhaps that last letter the old bishop was able to send before the fortifications of the Hippo were closed against the enemy he wrote (ep. 228, 2):

When the danger is the same for bishops, clerics and congregations, those who have need of others must not be abandoned by those whom they need.  Let everyone withdraw to fortified places, but those who are forced to stay must not be abandoned by those who owe them the aid of the Church.

Several months into the siege, with its attendant horrors, Augustine fell ill with a fever.  He convalesced in his room and requested that a few psalms be copied out in large letters for his elderly eyes and posted where he could see them from his bed.  He died on 28 August 430.  In his years, Augustine defended the Church’s faith and flock from the heresies of Manichaeism, Donatism, Pelagianism, Arianism, Gnosticism and the paganism which was still deeply rooted.  He coped with social ills and economic upheavals, schisms and clerical scandals that could be taken straight from the pages of the Boston Globe today.  Read him in a fresh and accurate translation, and you will find that Augustine’s words are still thrillingly current.  And there are a lot of them.  The proposed but still unofficial patron saint of the internet, St. Isidore of Seville (+ AD 636) quipped that anyone claiming to have read all of Augustine is a liar.  Of his works that have survived the centuries we have only a fraction of his output, but this fraction still amounts to over 5,000,000 words, according to scholar James J. O’ Donnell, now of Georgetown University.   Augustine was so rooted in Sacred Scripture that a great share of the Bible could be reconstructed from his works.  

Augustine’s city Hippo was burned by the Vandals, but his library, with his own manuscripts, survived, probably removed to Carthage ahead of time.  We can hear the very voice, mind and heart of the bishop preaching, for he had rapid writing stenographers present at all public appearances and liturgies.  They even at times recorded the noises of the crowds or the distractions in the street outside together with the bishop’s reactions.   He preached nearly every day for over thirty years, but we have only a few hundred of his sermons.  Nevertheless, the body of his work is still growing!  A few years ago, 30 hitherto unpublished letters were discovered in manuscript collections in Paris and Marseilles, and new sermons were uncovered in the city library of Mainz.  Augustine exerted decisive influence on the development of monasticism, forged theories of history and politics still in evidence today, provided an approach to education holding sway up to very recently, contributed to aesthetics the philosophy of beauty and the apt, bequeathed to the Church the formulation of her doctrine of grace, and perfected a literary genre of spiritual autobiography.  Augustine wrote on everything from music to diocesan finances, from living the happy life to the care of the dead.  A scan of the index of a handbook of the Church’s doctrine edited by Messers Heinrich Denzinger and Adolf Schönmetzer reveals that more than Pope felt the need to remind people not to confuse what Augustine said across the board for the Church’s dogmatic teaching.  It is not exaggerating to claim that the Church and therefore Western Civilization owes much of its present shape and content to St. Augustine of Hippo.

We don’t know preciously the chain of events, and how they survived the Vandals, but Augustine’s bones and library were removed from N. Africa to Sardina by St. Fulgentius (+533) perhaps around 508 to avoid further desecration by heretic Arian Vandals and then again to Pavia near Milan by the Lombard King Luitprand (+744) sometime between 710-30 to avoid the raids of pirates and sacking by Moors.   They were interred anew in Pavia’s Church San Pietro in Ciel d’Oro, the very same church where Augustine’s philosophical descendent, another member of the Anicius family, Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (+ AD 524 or 525) was buried.  With little mutual cordiality different groups of Augustinian canons held the church and jealously looked after the precious relics (and the revenues generated by pilgrims).  The actual location of the bones would eventually be forgotten, though everyone supposedly knew where they were until, of course, you asked to see them.  It was not uncommon to lose track of bodies: the secret of the location was intended to protect them from theft or other unholy acts and finally the secret itself would fade from remembrance.  But, according to the recent book by Harold Stone, St. Augustine’s Bones: A Microhistory (2002), on Tuesday morning of 1 October of 1695, some workman doing maintenance on an altar rediscovered a marble reliquary which was determined to hold the bones of the bishop, saint and Doctor of the Church.  He has lain under the main altar of the church since then.

Last year Augustine began to get out a little more.  He dramatically was reunited for a time in Milan with St. Ambrose who helped the young materialist philosopher get a grip on the concept of an immaterial God and soul, had helped to open his heart through the chants he composed for church, and after Augustine’s conversion had baptized him in 386 in the baptistery of the Church of St. Tecla adjacent to what is now the Cathedral of Milan.  You can visit the excavated baptistery of St. Tecla now and see the actual baptismal font.  This year, however, Augustine was reunited with his mother in Rome. 

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Each year Augustine’s presence and importance is brought into focus by literally hundreds of new monographs, scholarly articles and books.  Students at nearly every level of mature learning encounter him in some way, often in his works The City of God or his autobiographical prayer to God called Confessions.  There is virtually no field in the liberal arts or many of the sciences that does not owe something vital to the Augustinian tradition, extending through Boethius, John Eriugena, St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Bonaventure, Dante Alighieri, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz and a myriad of others.  His anti-materialist philosophical and theological writings even stand up to the challenges of modern physics, such as the Uncertainty Principle elucidated by Werner Heisenberg.

Augustine has particular relevance today.  As do many of the Father’s of the Church, they can teach us again to read Scripture, freed from the over emphasis on the often sterile and text killing historical-critical method which gripped the Church like a vice for so long, liberated from the “hermeneutic of suspicion” by which so many priests and scholars were taught to assume that what Scripture said was false unless provable with critical tools.  Most of the central doctrine and formulas describing what we believe as Catholics, indeed as Christians, were hammered out in the crucible of those turbulent centuries and no one made a greater contribution than Augustine.  Augustine could help enormously with a revival of doctrinally sound and useful preaching.  Always practical, the great and lofty orator shunned any style of discourse that went over the heads of his flock.  He thought that being understood, and helping people to love God and live properly through the living sermon of your own holiness was paramount.   Augustine wanted his clerics and the bishops he trained to be holy more than they were erudite.  As a matter of fact in the last book of De doctrina christiana… On Christian Doctrine (4, 24), which the old bishop completed near the end of his long career, he very practically said from his long experience that rather than risk being misunderstood it is better to use the barbaric sounding word for “bone” ossum rather than the Latinly correct os which with the North African accent of those days might have be mistaken for the word for “face”.  An appropriate example to illustrate merely one dimension of Augustine’s applicability.  And he could defend his choices, ironically, in breathtaking word plays, nearly impossible to put into English: “It is better that you should understand me with my barbarism, than that you should be flooded by my fluency” (en. ps. 36, 3, 6 – quam in nostra disertitudine vos deserti eritis).  Augustine can clarify for us how to be clear a time when moral and doctrinal clarity is so clearly needed.

I had the privilege to attend many of the major events scheduled during Augustine’s time among us in Rome, and this was easy since I live directly across the street from the Church of St. Augustine and I am writing my doctoral thesis, at the “Augustinianum”.   The sincere interest and piety of the people who came to see and venerate the relics of the saint were impressive.   In our age of skepticism and cynicism, many condescendingly sneer at such public displays of pious devotion as that which is given to the relics and images of saints.   What I observed in Rome reinforced what I witnessed during the 1990’s when the remains of the Little Flower, St. Thérèse de Lisieux had their world tour. 

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As the scholar of Augustinian monasticism Fr. George Lawless, OSA told me recently, invoking the bible image of old wine in new skins, it was once thought that a sermon without a citation from Augustine was like having wine cellar without wine.  The widely published Fr. Lawless, who teaches in Rome at the “Augustinianum”, one of the sites chosen for the exposition of the saints relics, also shared with me something he will have given in a conference by the time this goes to press, and it is entirely to him that I owe credit for this marvelous insight he recalled from the theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, namely, that post-Reformation doctrine had become so many bones without flesh, while pastoral practice and spirituality was now flesh without bones.  Fr. Lawless sees in Augustine’s gifts to us, these bones and flesh together.  This is a marvelous image to reflect on while the bones of Augustine were present with us all in Rome, near for the first time in 16 centuries to the mother who, by her cooperation with God, brought to light of the world this towering figure who took flesh and bone from her.  May we take spiritual and doctrinal flesh and bones from him in the years to come while we await the unification of the same in the coming of the Lord.

Today’s PODCAzT, on the eve of my trip to the USA for Msgr. Schuler’s funeral, features s. 3 of St. Leo the Great (+461), on the anniversary of his election to the See of Peter.  In light of what we hear from St. Leo, I also talk about Msgr. Schuler.

In a providential coincidence, as I recorded the last segment, the bells of the Church of St. Agnes at the P.za Navona began to peel.  I opened the window so you could hear the bells in the background.  This beautiful church, which I see out my window, is where you can venerate the skull of St. Agnes herself.  Sant’Agnese in agone is thought by some to stand at the place of St. Agnes’s martyrdom.  How appropriate that it should be the lead out for this PODCAzT, no?

 

 07-04-22 Leo s. 3; Msgr. Schuler [24:25m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I decided to fly to the USA for the funeral of Msgr. Richard Schuler, of St. Paul (MN -USA).

The cosmic laws governing phenomena like rain when you leave your umbrella at home or when you wash your car will also probably be activated as soon as I leave Rome.

Since I am leaving Rome on Monday 23 April and returning on Monday 30 April, I would not be in the least surprised were the expected M.P. to be issued anytime between Monday 23 April and Monday 30 April.

I hope I am wrong.  But I also hope I am right! 

Having the MP soon is far more important than my being at the press conference for its release. 

When I travel and stop at parish churches, or when I surf their sites, I scan their parish bulletins. 

Bulletins often include a "Pastor’s Page". 

I am delighted when these commmentaries are well-written, informative, and not condescending. 

I am rarely delighted.

Enter Fr. George Welzbacher, retired professor of ancient history and former pastor of St. Agnes in St. Paul.  He is one of the smartest priests I know.  Father has dignitas.

He produces a Pastor’s Page worthy of the name.  Often he quotes at length from news sources adding commentary.  (Hmmm… sounds rather like a blog, doesn’t it….)  He directs the reader exactly to the core of issues and unerringly servers up the money quotes.  His offerings are especially useful for figuring out who is who and what is what in puiblic debates on moral issues or during political campaigns.

What I appreciate most is that he thinks his parishoners are smart.

Here is this week’s Pastor’s Page from Fr. George Welzbacher of St. John’s in the East side of St. Paul, MN.   Some emphasis is in the original.  I add my emphasis in bold blue.

Pastor’s Page
By Fr. George Welzbacher
  
Apri 22, 2007 
  
   In last week’s Pastor’s Page I alluded to Pope Benedict’s intent to restore to the liturgy of the Western Rite a more abundant use of Latin. Such restoration will include the singing (in Latin) of Gregorian Chant. In so doing, Pope Benedict is in no way subverting either the word or the spirit of Vatican II. Rather he is affirming what the Second Vatican Council taught. The Council’s document on the liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium, declares that, among all the options for the musical enhancement of the liturgy, Gregorian Chant enjoys pride of place, even as the pipe organ (as compared, let us say, to a guitar) is to be judged the instrument best suited to evoking the sense of grandeur that befits the worship of Almighty God. How the Council’s praise for Gregorian Chant as the preferential option for music at Mass should have come to be perceived as a mandate for abolition is a mystery. Equally mysterious is the misconstruing of the Council’s allowing the use of the vernacular in the Mass, without prejudice to the status of Latin as the official liturgical tongue, as in some way an interdiction of Latin. It would seem that in the minds of some the phrase "may be used" converts rather too easily to "must be used".
   There is much to be said for Pope Benedict’s campaign for the restoration of Gregorian Chant. The reverent singing of these ancient melodies in their original tongue can reinforce our sense of unity with successive generations of the Catholic past as well as with the faithful dispersed around the globe today. Reminding us that we belong to a community that transcends political borders and etlmic boundaries, these chants can strengthen our allegiance to an order that is holier and higher than the more recently emergent entities and values that compete for our allegiance today. Moreover a widespread familiarity with certain basic Chant settings for the Latin texts of the Common of the Mass will provide in this age of global travel a practical advantage, greatly facilitating at international gatherings such as Catholic World Youth Days a more active participation in the liturgy.
   In the aftermath of the French Revolution and the frenzy of demolition that accompanied it those who turned to the study of Gregorian Chant with the intent to restore its employment in the the liturgy were the monks of the Benedictine monastery of St. Peter at Solesmes (pronounced: Soh-lemm). (If you think of France as shaped like a tea-pot with its spout pointing to the west, Solesmes is located where the spout joins the pot).
   During the later decades of the nineteenth century enthusiasm for the restoration of Gregorian Chant spread from Solesmes to much of the rest of Europe. And with the call of Pope St. Pius X (1893-1914) for its use throughout the Latin rite its serious study took root in our seminaries here in America. But paradoxically – indeed, inexplicably – beginning quite suddenly in the mid – nineteen sixties and in open defiance of the explicit pronouncements of Vatican II the American Catholic Church, supposedly in the "spirit" of Vatican II, was seized with a frenzy of its own, in which every piece of music that suffered from the disadvantage of pre-dating the Beatles was consigned to the dumpheap. Catholic congregations were in consequence subjected to an era of hip-swinging, thwanking and whanking self-celebrating guitarists, belting out anthems such as "Here We Are, All together as We Sing Our Song, Joyous-lee-eey!" Trash such as this became coin of the realm, in irrefutable demonstration of Gresham’s Law.
   In time a reaction set in against these proletkult imbecilities, and American Catholic churches tentatively at first, and following as often as not in the footsteps of our "separated brethren" (who were blessed with better taste), began once again to draw from the whole immense range of the Catholic musical repertoire, from Chant and polyphony through the triumphs of the Baroque and the masterpieces of the School of Vienna to the exuberant lyricism of the Romantic Age and the astringent neo- mysticism of major compositions of our own time. The Church of St. Agnes in St. Paul, Minnesota, under the pastorate of Monsignor Richard Schuler, helped spectacularly to lead the way. Eventually it would come to pass that recordings of Gregorian Chant sung by the Spanish monks of the monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos would be flying off the shelves of CD stores all over the world.
   In view of all of this I thought you might be interested in reading about the monastery where the "resurrection" of Gregorian Chant began: the Benedictine monastery of St. Pierre de Solesmes.
   Let’s book passage with Reporter John Tagliabue of the New York Times for a visit to Solesmes via a story that appeared in the April 10th issue of The Times.

                           *          *          *          *         *
At the Local Abbey, Singing Unto the Lord an Old Song
                                              By John Tagliabue
                                              Solesmes, France
One of the tasks of Roger Sever as mayor of this quaint village in western France is to console misguided tourists who want to hear the monks in its  11th-century monastery singing in Gregorian chant. "People come and ask, ‘Can you visit the concerts?’"
   Tourists are restricted to the back of the church, he said, shaking his white hair in mock exasperation, "I tell them: ‘You can visit at the chanting of the [Divine]Offices. You can admire the sculptures in the church.’ But the monks say, ‘We’re not here to receive tourists; we’re contemplatives.’"
    The monks, 55 of them, inhabit the monastery that hovers over the village like some great granite mother hen over her chicks. But in recent times the monks have gained a measure of fame for their dedication to Gregorian chant, the simple vocal music whose cadences, in Latin, for centuries adorned the Roman Catholic liturgy.
    Now, a constant stream of visitors comes to Solesmes to sit in the monastery church and listen while the monks sing the psalms and prayers, seven times a day, of the sacred liturgy.
   "They want their calm," Mr. Server, 65, a retired schoolteacher, said of the monks. "And after all, the monastery was there before us."
   The monks’ dedication to Gregorian chant dates to the 19th century, when the monastery was refounded as the Benedictine abbey of St. Pierre de Solesmes after being closed after the French Revolution.
   When it came to life again, in 1833, the monks resolved to restore Gregorian chant to its proper place in the Church, after centuries of neglect. With time the papacy came to recognize Solesmes’s role as the guardian and propagator of the chanting.
   "Monasteries have always been places where you conserved a patrimony in the church," said Dom Yves-Marie Lelievre, who left a career as a professional violinist to become a monk and the monastery’s choir-master.
   That mission was hurt in the 1960’s by [the misrepresentation and botched implementation of] the Second Vatican Council, which opened up the liturgy to contemporary musical fors and a greater use of instruments.  "The council was an opening, an evolution," said Dom Lelievre, 42, taking time between Holy Week services to receive a visitor, "But after [though not at the command of] the Council, parishes dropped Gregorian chant," he said, and deserted the Latin texts of the liturgy for the vernacular.
   But with the church’s sanction, the monks of Solesmes, the oldest now 95, the youngest 22, remained faithful to their mission, spending their days researching ancient Gregorian manuscripts, publishing updated texts and retaining Latin as the language of their chanting.
   They were encouraged recently when Pope Benedict XVI, in a papal pronouncement known as an apostolic exhortation, decreed that….at international gatherings….the liturgies should be celebrated in Latin, except for the readings and the homily. Moreover, he said, "If possible, selections of Gregorian chant should be sung."...
    Some saw the remarks as a slap in the face to contemporary church music, with its sometimes lively public participation. "Exit the guitars and the xylophones," wrote Henri Tincq, LeMonde’s Vatican correspondent, adding "Condemned are all ‘abuses’ in the adaptation of liturgies to local cultures."
   Dom Lelievre, a compact, friendly man who entered Solesmes 14 years ago, was naturally pleased with the pope’s endorsement of Gregorian chant. Yet he said that Gregorian chant did not need the pope’s support for revival.
   "Beginning 10 or 15 years ago in France, chant has regained interest in the musical milieu," he said, "as have baroque music and medieval song." The monks of a Benedictine monastery in Spain, Santo Domingo de Silos, recorded several internationally popular CD’s of Gregorian chant in the 1990’s.
   Despite their cloistered life and flight from the world, the monks of Solesmes have accepted invitations to lecture and provide demonstrations at conservatories in Paris and other places.
   More recently other church choirs in France have begun to adopt Gregorian chant. In nearby Le Mans, the cathedral choir has begun using Gregorian chants, as has a church choir in Nantes.
   The mayor here is pleased that the growing interest is translating into a somewhat heavier flow of tourists. The monks, for their part, take in visitors in several monastery guest-houses, some for religious retreats, and are generally content with the flow of tourists, who recently have shown signs of better preparation for their visit.
   "Tourism has always existed," said Dom Lelievre. "Maybe it’s more specific today. Before it was just visit.  No there isless of that.  Now there is more interest in discovering this way of life.
   Most townspeople say relations between the village and the monks are good. Didier Guilot, a chauffeur who occasionally drives for the monks, recalls the kind of open house-for men only, of course-that the monks organize every year at Christmas for people they do business with. "Electricians, plumbers, drivers, everyone who works for them is invited," he said. "They are very agreeable."
   He paused, then added, "They are men of another age." 

There is a blog award thingie taking place right now.  Religion blogs are a category.  It is called the Blogger’s Choice Awards.

WDTPRS has been nominated.

I am reading in the blogosphere some interest that blogs with a Catholic focus make a good showing. 

May I ask you to take a look and find a blog you would be willing to vote for?

I think you have to register.

I am not sure what all this means, frankly.  (I am still waiting for my Bugatti.)