NORCIA 2014 Calendar (Hint: BEER!)

The wonderful Benedictine monks of the Monastero di San Benedetto at Norcia, Italy, gave me their new 2014 Calendar.  Order one HERE

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In the calendar are great shots of their monkish lives, involving the two great pillars of prayer and work.

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A detail of the entry for each day.  They include information about both the Ordinary and the Extraordinary Form.

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With Cardinal Burke.

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I was in Norcia recently, during the pilgrimage I led.  The monks showed us the new brewery and explained the process they use.

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This beer is WONDERFUL.  It is some of the best beer of its style that I have ever had.

To read more about their beer click HERE

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With some of the monks in their gift shop.

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If you go to Italy and have some time to spend in the countryside (which I warmly recommend), go to Norcia.  There is a spectacular small hotel where you can stay.

You can listen to the monks sing their Masses and their hours.  HERE.

Please consider sending them a donation?  These men are strengthening the Church’s spiritual spine.

Click HERE

There is a US and a UK route to send money, to make it easier for you.

 

Posted in Just Too Cool, Our Catholic Identity | Tagged ,
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What Wisconsin Democrats Are Really Like

Liberals think they hold the moral high ground.

Here’s their moral high ground: Death threats against the Wisconsin Governor, wife and children from Democrats.

Liberals would have us believe that only pro-lifers and tea-partyers engage in this kind of thuggery.

I want everyone to know what Wisconsin Democrats are really like.  This an act of civic duty.  This is a public service announcement.

They don’t get a pass on this.  This is too disgusting.  In their blind self-righteousness they threatened his children.

The Democrat Party in Wisconsin and big labor leadership need to denounce these tactics formally, openly, publicly.

From The Blaze:

READ THE CHILLING NOTE SENT TO GOV. SCOTT WALKER’S WIFE

It’s no secret that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is intensely disliked by organized labor and Democrats.

Chilling note sent to Scott Walkers wife

Indeed, the Republican governor’s opponents have made their feelings toward him very clear since he was first elected — especially during the state capital protests in 2011 and the defeated effort to have him recalled.

CLICK TO BUY

But if you thought the rhetoric aimed at Walker during the 2011 protests was bad, just wait until you hear his version of events included in his upcoming book, “Unintimidated: A Governor’s Story and a Nation’s Challenge” — particularly the chilling note that was sent to his wife.

State Patrol Capt. Dave Erwin, a former United States Marine, brought the governor a particularly eerie piece of hate mail during the protests that contained very specific information about his wife and children.

“[A]s I prepared to go out to the conference room for my daily press briefing, Dave came into my office and shut the door,” Walker recalls, according to a book excerpt published online.

“Sir, I don’t show you most of these, but I thought you ought to see this one,” the officer said.

The letter was addressed to Walker’s wife, Tonette. It read:

Has Wisconsin ever had a governor assassinated? Scotts heading that way. Or maybe one of your sons getting killed would hurt him more. I want him to feel the pain. I already follow them when they went to school in Wauwatosa, so it won’t be too hard to find them in Mad. Town. Big change from that house by [BLANK] Ave. to what you got now. Just let him know that it’s not right to [EXPLETIVE] over all those people. Or maybe I could find one of the Tarantinos [Tonette’s parents] back here.

Walker eventually told his wife about the threats — but only after some time had passed.

Erwin worked tirelessly to ensure Walker’s safety, the book notes. And it wasn’t just for him: Walker’s entire family was apparently being stalked.

“Governor, I’ve been at this awhile, and when the hairs stand up on the back of my neck, you have to be concerned,” the former Marine told Walker. “They know where you go to church; they’ve been to your church. They’re following your children and tracking your children. They know where your children go to school, what time they have class, what time they get out of class.”

“They know when they had football practice. They know where your wife works, they know that she was at the grocery store at this time, they know that she went to visit her father at his residence,” he said.

The size of Walker’s security detail was eventually increased and troopers had to be assigned to monitor his children at school.

During the protest, demonstrators left ghastly messages for the governor.

“The Wisconsin State Capitol had taken on an eerie quiet by late Friday. … The chalk outlines around fake dead bodies etched with Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s name remained in dismembered parts, not yet completely washed away by hoses,” Time magazine reported in 2011.

Protesters at one point even physically blocked Walker and his entourage from leaving a manufacturing company in La Crosse, Wis.

“As we prepared to leave, the state troopers saw that the protesters had physically blocked the entrance we had used to come onto the property. So they turned the squad car around and headed toward the other exit. We watched in disbelief as the throng of people rushed toward the second exit to block our path. As we tried to pull out, they surrounded the car and began beating on the windows and rocking the vehicle,” Walker writes in the book.

“Just as we extricated ourselves from their grip, a truck pulled up and blocked our path, playing a game of chicken with the troopers. They turned the lights and sirens on and warned him to get out of way. Eventually he backed up, and we sped off.

“It was a lesson in how much our circumstance had changed in a matter of a few days. We were dealing with people who were so blinded by their anger that they were not in the least bit afraid to storm and shake a police car. We had never seen anything like it in Wisconsin before,” he adds.  [Get used to this, friends.  We will see a lot more of this from the dedicated left.]

And let’s not forget about the Wisconsin Democrats.

Democratic Sen. Lena Taylor at one point compared Walker to Adolph Hitler, saying, “The history of Hitler, in 1933, he abolished unions, and that’s what our governor’s doing today.”

Democrat Sen. Spencer Coggs called the Walker plan “legalized slavery.”

Ultimately, Walker said, the attacks and threats backfired on his opponents.

“Most people agreed with Tonette that targeting my family and disrupting the lives of our neighbors and their children was going too far,” he writes. “No matter what your political views, here in Wisconsin people simply don’t do things like that.

Still, he notes, it “was important to me that they saw that I never responded in kind to the often vicious attacks directed against me. I was firm and did not budge — but no matter how personal the invective became, I never made it personal.”

Walker’s new book is scheduled to be released on Nov. 19.

The Democrat Party in Wisconsin and big labor leadership need to denounce these tactics formally, openly, publicly.

Posted in Liberals, The Coming Storm, The Drill | Tagged ,
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DIVORCE OF THE CENTURY

This is tantamount to the imminent global threat of the loss of Twinkies we endured some months ago.

From The Blaze:

DIVORCE OF THE CENTURY? MCDONALD’S HAS CUT TIES WITH HEINZ KETCHUP

McDonalds has officially ended their longstanding relationship with Heinz ketchup.

In a statement released by the popular fast-food chain on Friday, the company blamed new management changes for cutting ties.

“We value the relationship we’ve maintained with Heinz for more than 40 years,” McDonalds said in a statement. “As a result of recent management changes at Heinz, we have decided to transition our business to other suppliers over time.”

“We have spoken to Heinz and plan to work together to ensure a smooth and orderly transition of the McDonald’s restaurant business, and are confident that there will be no impact to our business, our customers and our great tasting food at McDonald’s,” the company added.

As the Associated Press notes, a former Burger King CEO just took the reigns as head of Heinz in June.

Nonetheless, most Americans are unlikely to notice a change as McDonald’s only uses Heinz ketchup in Pittsburgh and Minneapolis locations.

Posted in Pò sì jiù | Tagged
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A plug for some British news and analysis sources

I had a note from a friend in London who is the media coordinator for Westminster Cathedral.  Of late he has set up some new social media opportunities for the great church.

Facebook
Twitter
Flicker 

Take a look at those. Pretty interesting.

It is a good idea for those of us in these USA to follow what is going on across the pond.  To that end I also recommend digital subscriptions to the UK’s best Catholic weekly The Catholic Herald.

They have dealt with anti-Catholicism there in a way we haven’t yet experienced.  They are farther along in the culture war than we are.  There are lessons to be learned  (including what to avoid and what not to neglect).

I will also give a plug to the blog of my friend Fr. Finigan HERE.  Shall we forget Fr. Blake?  No, we shall not.  HERE

Pay attention to the pro-life group SPUC, as well as the blog of the LMS Chairman (an Oxford prof who does not suffer liberal fools gladly.  His vivisections of the northern loon Basil Loftus, described by Damien Thompson as a “world-class bore”, are a hoot).

Finally, I am contemplating a trip to Ol’ Blighty perhaps in January.  I may try to get a couple gigs for talks while I am there.  I’m just sayin’

 

Posted in The Campus Telephone Pole | Tagged , ,
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Your Good News

Do you have some good news to share with the readers?

Posted in SESSIUNCULA |
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Card. Pell on the SSPX and Pope Francis

Vatican Insider has an interview with Card. Pell, who is one of the Gang of 8.

In this interview the cardinal comments on the recent meeting of the Council of Cardinals with Francis, the reform of the Roman Curia, and Lefebvrist leader Bishop Fellay’s attack on the Pope
GERARD O’CONNELL
ROME

The Australian cardinal George Pell, one of the eight cardinals that Pope Francis has chosen to advice  him, agreed to talk about his experience of their historic meeting (October 1-3) with the Holy Father on the understanding that “the only substantial information” available about that gathering is what Fr Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, gave to the media. “Anything that I might say will be peripheral to that”, he said; and “as one of the Pope’s councilors, I see that part of my task is to defend and explain the Holy Father, to support him in his role”.  [defend… explain… support]

On that basis, I interviewed him in Rome, October 17, five days after Bishop Bernard Fellay, Superior-General of the Society of Saint Pius X, speaking in Kansas City, had launched a harsh attack on Pope Francis. I began by asking him to comment on that attack.

Q.  Bishop Fellay has denounced Pope Francis as “a genuine modernist”, and charged that while the Church was “a disaster” before he was elected, he is making it “10,000 times worse”. What do you say to this?

A.  To put it politely, I think that’s absolute rubbish!   Francis said he’s a loyal son of the Church, and his record shows that.  He’s very, very concerned for the day-to-day life of the people, and for those who are suffering, those not well off and those in difficult situations.  He’s a completely faithful exponent of Christ’s teaching and the Church’s tradition. [I think we will eventually have ample evidence that Pope Francis will uphold the Church’s doctrine quite well.  And I remind the readers again that he speaks far more often of the Devil and of confession than previous Popes and that he excommunicated ex-Father Greg Reynolds for his promotion of women’s ordination and same-sex stuff.  Yah, I don’t like his liturgical approach and lack of proper decorum.  And liturgy is also theology.  Let’s keep our eyes on what he does.]

Q.  So people like Fellay have completely misread Pope Francis?

A.  Yes, it is a gigantic misreading!  In actual fact, the Lefebvrists – many of them – have misread the situation for decades.  [That’s a little vague.  They aren’t wrong about everything.] It was to Benedict’s great credit that he tried to reconcile with them, but they didn’t respond. Now the Church today accepts the Second Vatican Council. You don’t have to accept every jot and tittle of it, but it is part of Church’s life now, there’s no way around that.  [Get that?  “You don’t have to accept every jot and tittle” of Vatican II.  For example, the Council’s shift concerning religious liberty is hard to work with.  The topic is hard. Why not allow for varying views in a matter that is so difficult?]

Posted in Francis, Mail from priests, SSPX, Vatican II | Tagged , ,
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Weigel on “traditionalists”

I saw this at First Things:

Protesting Too Much

Matthew J. Franck
At National Review Online over the weekend, the familiar-to-First Things-readers George Weigel published a talk he gave recently in Green Bay, Wisconsin, in the course of which he argued: [For the NRO piece HERE]

The argument today isn’t about assimilation. The argument today is about who “gets” America: who understands the true character of America and the nature of freedom. And that puts Catholics—and those allies in the Evangelical Protestant, Mormon, and traditional Jewish worlds who, with serious Catholics, still hold to Murray’s four foundational truths of American democracy—in a challenging position. For the challenge now is to give America a new birth of freedom rightly understood as built upon those four truths; a new birth of freedom re-cemented to a foundation of transcendent moral truths about the human person, to the principle of government-by-consent, to a recognition of the priority of civil society over the state, and to an existential affirmation of the linkage between personal and civic virtue and liberty lived nobly.

This challenge will not be met by Catholic Lite. Indeed, one of the most powerful indicators that the Catholic Lite project is finished has been the uselessness of “progressive” Catholicism in the battle for religious freedom this past year and a half, a battle the stakes in which most Catholic “progressives” manifestly have not grasped.

The challenge also won’t be met by Catholic traditionalists retreating into auto-constructed catacombs. [?!?]

The challenge can be met only by a robustly evangelical Catholicism . . .  [Which just happens to be – and this might shock you – very like a title of one of Weigel’s books!]

I urge our readers to go read the rest of Weigel’s piece, which is as cogently argued as they will have come to expect.

Yesterday evening, however, at NRO’s Corner, Nicholas Frankovich directed all of his attention to the one line above concerning “Catholic traditionalists.” This he understood to be a remark contemning all those “who are attached to the traditional Latin Mass.” On he goes, then, for several hundred words elaborating his grievance, and celebrating these “traditional” Catholics (he objects to the “-ist” suffix).

[…]

Read the rest there.

From this comment and from his comments in his book (to which I referred above), I take it that Weigel doesn’t have much respect for those who prefer the older forms of sacred liturgical worship, along with all that goes with it, e.g., clear, faithful preaching and teaching about faith and morals.

UPDATE:

Someone I know sent me the following, which I include here for the sake of balance and fairness.  I have anonymized it.  My emphases:

Weigel has no brief against the Extraordinary Form and says so in his book “Evangelical Catholicism.” What he has often expressed, however, is his regret that the Traditionalist movement (particularly in its SSPX form) rejects Dignitatis Humanae and shows a predilection for the restoration of monarchy and religious establishment — neither of which he considers to be an intellectually serious position today. Please note in his Wisconsin remarks that his reference to Traditionalists being unable to mount a defense of religious liberty in US is connected to their rejection of Father Murray’s analysis of the Church’s position in the United States and to a general approach of separation from rather engagement with the broader culture.

[…], I am certain that this is what he meant. I thought this might be useful for you to consider in the future as you situate Weigel’s continuing effort to strengthen the Church in the US to accomplish her mission.

 

Posted in Hard-Identity Catholicism, Our Catholic Identity, SESSIUNCULA, The Drill | Tagged ,
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REGINA MAGAZINE and Fr. Keyes

When I was in Rome recently I ran into the editor of a newish online magazine called

REGINA

I was told that the magazine, available only in digital form, has a strongly traditional view and is especially geared to women.

Here is an example of an article, which features a priest friend, Fr. Keyes of St. Edward’s in Newark, CA.  HERE

He inherited a parish that had been “spiritized” by the “spirit of V2” crowd and has since made a lot of positive changes.

Friends, it is possible to shift things around with lots of helping hands and lots of grace and lots of elbow grease.

Now is not the time to set back and lament the times.  Now is the time to push forward!

Posted in "How To..." - Practical Notes, Liturgy Science Theatre 3000, Mail from priests, New Evangelization, Our Catholic Identity, The Campus Telephone Pole | Tagged
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REQUEST: Buy some Extraordinary Form learning materials for a “baby priest”

I was contacted by a priest:

Dear Fr. Z:  I am a baby priest (ordained 18 months ago) who would like to learn how to say the EF. I don’t have anybody to mentor me, so I need teach myself.  I noticed that the FSSP bookstore has a large kit with materials on how to say the EF along with an inexpensive altar missal. These materials are beyond my financial abilities at the moment. Do you know if there any societies or groups that help get these materials to priests for a discount or as a gift?

Please do not post my name or email should you publish this… Thanks for all you do!

I followed up with a couple questions about the materials he was considering.

This is a good project for this blog’s readership.

I will go ahead and get some things for this priest.  Perhaps some of you, in your goodness, will pitch in through donations?

Add as a comment on the donation: EF MATERIALS

Let’s change this priest’s life.

Through helping him learn the Extraordinary Form, we can also help the congregations for whom he says Mass for the rest of his priesthood.

Once a priest learns the older form of Mass, he ever after says also the Novus Ordo differently.

Learning the older form as a knock on effect that is long-lasting and far-reaching.

UPDATE:

OKAY!  You are fantastic.  I have received more than enough to cover the expenses of the materials and their shipping.

I am not saying “Don’t send more money!”, but the original project is now completed.

You people are the best!

Contributors (I hope I didn’t miss anyone):

JF, WH, MB, DMacD, AKP, JJ, AL, RG, CAM, ES, RA,JF,RF,MW,EC,VbyL [Veils by Lily’s ad is on the sidebar!], KB,CK, DS, NW, VK, CK, CS, WG, BA, BK, MB, DM, CF, BJ, TR,JA, MS,W-CH

UPDATE:

I also had a note from the nice folks who make the travel altar cards. See the ad on the side bar. She is going to send a set to the priest!

You are so good.

Posted in "How To..." - Practical Notes, Liturgy Science Theatre 3000, Mail from priests, SUMMORUM PONTIFICUM | Tagged
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Redefining ‘pedophilia’ as a ‘sexual orientation’

I have written more than once that a goal of homosexualists includes the elimination of the age of consent.  Goals like this are attained through creeping incrementalism.

I just read this, from the University of Southern California:

Pedophilia Now Classified As A Sexual Orientation

People can classify themselves as heterosexual, homosexual, asexual, metrosexual. There are endless sexual orientations under the sun, and now, pedophilia can be added to the list.
In the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM V), the American Psychological Association (APA) drew a very distinct line between pedophilia and pedophilic disorder. Pedophilia refers to a sexual orientation or profession of sexual preference devoid of consummation, whereas pedophilic disorder is defined as a compulsion and is used in reference to individuals who act on their sexuality.  [First step, change the language, change definitions.]

APA’s decision has given rise to numerous pedophilia-advocacy groups, the chief of them being B4U-ACT, a non-profit grassroots organization based in Maryland. Created in 2003 primarily as a means for “minor-attracted persons” to be open about their sexual preferences in a supportive atmosphere, B4U-ACT is now widening the scope of their organization.

According to spokesperson and registered sex offender Paul Christiano, the pedophilia-advocacy group is “working towards de-stigmatizing the mental health community.” Christiano explained that negative societal attitudes towards minor-attracted persons “trickle down to policy-making and the mental health community.”

[…]

Read the rest there.

This is dreadful.

Posted in Pò sì jiù, The Coming Storm, The Drill, The future and our choices, You must be joking! | Tagged , , ,
26 Comments