The Roman day with sunlight began at 07:25 which will significantly dwindle after 17:21.
Our Ave Maria Bell: still in the 17:30 cycle, according to this calendar.
I think it should have changed today to 17:45. We will check this tomorrow.
Being up with the sun has some benefits. The walk to church and the still drowsy Piazza Farnese.
Here is an “Ivy Report”. You might remember them from past visits. This is the same spot as before. And it is really a “creeper” rather than an “ivy”. Or so I am told.
Breakfast. I’ve been eating more protein in the mornings, but you have to have a cornetto in Rome once in a while.
In the “You Had ONE Job!” Report. Internet installation took another step forward. I received a text to confirm that I wanted an technician appointment. CLICK. Someone is supposed to come on Thursday morning. Keep your fingers crossed and ask St. Isidore to smooth things down.
This is pretty crazy…
How can this be real? https://t.co/n5V4TZQo8q
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 27, 2025
In churchy news….
VP Vance is not impressed with the US Bishops regarding immigration. HERE
Neither is this guy in Austin, TX. HERE Blistering.
Catholic Charities Coaching Illegals on How to Evade Immigration Authorities?
HERE
In chessy news…
Black to mate in 2. How fast?
[NB: I’ll hold comments with solutions ’till the next day so there won’t be “spoilers” for others.]
From Chess.com (I’m an affiliate – HERE)
GMs Fabiano Caruana and Wei Yi kept alive their hopes of winning a second Tata Steel Chess Masters title with late wins with Black to move within a point of GMs Gukesh Dommaraju, Nodirbek Abdusattorov, and Praggnanandhaa Rameshbabu. Caruana pounced on a time-trouble mistake by GM Vincent Keymer, while Wei overcame GM Max Warmerdam only deep into the second session of play. The remaining games were drawn.From chess.com (I’m an affiliate)
Loading ...
You can read “Mars Project” online by accessing the splendid Internet Archive website at: https://archive.org/details/ProjectMars/mode/1up. See Chapter 24, Page 177 for the aforementioned reference to ‘Elon’.
If nothing else this post brought to mind Tom Lehrer’s hilarious song about Werner Von Braun… look it up if you have a sense of humor and you’ve never heard it before!
Enjoy your time in Rome. I envy you.
There are several possible explanations for the policies which the US bishops prefer. First, of course, is the one which J.D. Vance mentioned: the US bishops get money from it, and as has been said elsewhere, the phrase “follow the dollar” often explains why people do what they do. Second, the bishops are hoping to fill pews by importing Catholics to replace the Americans who have left the Church. Refilling a leaky bucket will not work, though. For as long as the Catholic bishops fail to correct the errors because of which they have lost so many Catholics since the Vatican II Council, they will eventually lose the current crop of immigrants, their children, or their grandchildren. Third, as Kyle Seraphin says in the indicated post, the thought of the US bishops has been infected by non-Christian modes of thinking: Marxism and liberation theology. I would add utopianism to the list of things which currently taints the thinking of the US bishops. By “utopianism,” which goes back to Desiderius Erasmus, I mean several things: taking no account of the negative consequences of an act, denying importance to place specifically in the form of national borders, and supposing that the government should operate by the same moral rules as a mere citizen. With regard to illegal immigration the US bishops seem never to consider its negative impacts on people who are already in this country and on the illegal immigrants themselves; they seem to think that crossing a border illegally is of no significance with regard to moral judgment, and consequently they make no distinction between a legal and illegal immigrant; they seem to think that in dealing with illegal immigrants the government is bound by the same rule of “turn the other cheek” by which a private person is bound. In terms of this last one I mean that the US bishops cannot envision any legitimate resistance from the government against illegal immigrants. In their opinion (so far as I can tell), the government, while seeing its immigration laws violated, should simply let the violators get away with it. This aspect of utopianism, i.e. applying “turn the other cheek” to the government, also explains the US bishops’ opposition to capital punishment. They gravely underestimate the extent to which holders of public authority have the right to make sure that their people’s interests are being respected. Luke 6.29, “ab eo, qui aufert tibi vestimentum, etiam tunicam noli prohibere,” is valid for individuals, but the rule for government is more like “tunicam prohibe et vestimentum ablatum recipera.”
One aspect of having a lawless border that doesn’t seem to be getting much attention from our bishops is how easy it makes human trafficking. Depending on which government statistics one consults, the number of minors trafficked across our borders in the past four years alone is estimated to be something between 350K-500K. No sane man wants to imagine the fate most of those children found on this side of the border. It is a scandal that our bishops seem ambivalent about the obvious need for increasing border security when for years our policy of hobbling ICE and border patrols has enabled trafficking of hundreds of thousands of children.
.
Where were those children mentioned in the recent mealy-mouthed statement from our USCCB? If you guessed ‘nowhere’, you’d be right.