Welcome registrant:
FrGabriel
Please remember me when shopping online and use my affiliate links. US HERE – WHY? This helps to pay for health insurance, utilities, groceries, and now also my late mother’s place. At no extra cost, you provide help for which I am grateful.
“The Catholics pick the very best chaplains – young, virile, active and patriotic. The troops look up to them. I’ve only met one or two Protestant chaplains worth their ration cards.”
– USMC Lt. General Chesty PullerIn the Pacific Theatre of WW2, a Protestant chaplain… pic.twitter.com/qx8dCTLEkH
— ????????? ? (@OrdinariateUSA) July 10, 2026
And… an analogy for how smoothly the Church has been running post Vatican II…
“I only took 3 days to build SAAS with 0 coding knowledge using AI. Developers are obsolete.”
Their build: pic.twitter.com/j3aBxCqyI2— Deep (@DeepStarts) July 9, 2026
And…
He was so funny in this! The whole thing was very Funny. pic.twitter.com/RkScOp9lEU
— Johnny Midnight ?? (@its_The_Dr) July 10, 2026
And…. QUAERITUR… have you read it?
Cause for novelist Sigrid Undset’s canonization expected to open in fall https://t.co/6YJpLZtNQB pic.twitter.com/SJIHYtpDA9
— The Catholic Spirit (@CatholicSpirit) July 10, 2026
White to move and mate in 4.
NB: I’ll excommunicate comments with solutions ’till the next day so there won’t be “spoilers” for others.
Fifty years ago on 10 July 1976, Viktor Korchoi defected from the USSR while he was in Amsterdam. HERE
Efficiency level 1 billion!
well, i don’t know about Miss Undset’s personal sanctity, but i do know that her Kristin Lavransdottir is an amazing novel. Perhaps the meteoric fame of the charming young Erling Braut Haaland will draw more attention to other things Norsk.
The X post about Chesty Puller reminded me about something my mother’s second husband told me. My mother had met Buddy and had only one date with him about two years before she met my father. 6 years after my father died, Buddy’s wife died. About a year later they married. Buddy was a troubled man from what I eventually realized was a troubled family. He had left VMI (Virginia Military Academy) to join the airborne Rangers probably in 1944. He had been scheduled to be in the upcoming invasion of Japan and so he spent at least a year as part of the USA occupation forces in Japan. During this time he came to have great pity on the surviving Japanese who were poor and hungry and very great admiration for the Jesuits who were ministering to them. He told me at some point he began talking to one of the priests about becoming Catholic. Interestingly enough and understandable, at least to me, the priest told Buddy that he (Buddy) was away from home and in a stressful situation. So the priest suggested that he wait until he returned to the United States and pursue becoming a Catholic at that time. Buddy remained a rather poor member of the (southern branch of the) Church of Christ.
So what was the difference between Buddy’s case and that of the soldiers who converted while in combat? Buddy was not in imminent danger of death and so, I believe, the Jesuit he spoke with in Japan was worried (in Buddy’s case probably rightly) Buddy would not have kept his Catholic vocation if he had converted, whereas with marines involved in island hopping there was a very high probability that they would not make it home.
I pray for Buddy and his first wife (whom I only met once), along with my mother and father every time I assist at Mass. After all, the essence of Catholicism is uncertainty, as Chesterton put it.
The reading of Kristin Lavransdatter is a landmark in my life.