No, this is not a photo of the HQ of the Fishwrap, a place so dense that no light can escape it. Nor is it a pic of the Jesuits’ Generalate in Rome. This isn’t an artistic rendering of the Democrat Party. This is the first ever snapshot of a black hole.
NASA used a gizmo called the Event Horizon Telescope (a collaborative venture) to capture the image.
The linked article is pretty interesting.
As you know, Beresheet is the Hebrew word for “In the beginning”.
It also is the name of Israel’s unmanned moon-landing mission!
The landing is scheduled for Thursday.
Here is an ultra-cool video about how they are doing it without a massive engine like the Saturn-V, etc.
I cannot even begin to imagine the math that went into this plan.
Beresheet Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/hashtag/Beresheet?src=hash
How to watch! HERE
From a reader…
QUAERITUR:
Our priest’s sermons are dull, dry, predictable, boring, , too
serious (they lack joy) don’t speak to the heart and are uninspiring. It’s like listening to a student teacher stand at the pulpit and give a 10 minute lecture on some topic except the priest has been ordained for 9 years. They’ not convicting, nor are they uplifting. They make me angry because I’m too spiritually dry to motivate myself in the spiritual life.Our previous priests have been very good at homeletics, and every once in awhile God throws me a bone and said priest needs to go somewhere for the weekend and we get a different priest to fill in on a Sunday, but that’s becoming a rarity. I’ve been praying for this priest every day since we found out we were getting him over three years ago but nothing has really improved. Things have actually gotten worse. His Superior has set in place a policy forbidding their priests from posting their sermons online so I can’t even just rely on the sermons of other priests from his fraternity.
I want him to be better at homeletics, and I wish his brother priests could/would help him, but that doesn’t seem like a reality. What do you recommend? I feel terrible about how I feel, but I’m so frustrated and fighting the urge to write his Superior to do something to help him/us.
GUEST PRIEST RESPONSE: Fr. T. Ferguson
It seems that the best way to ensure better preaching would be to harangue the homilist – after Mass, surrounded by a crowd of other troubled parishioners. Pitchforks and torches are optional, but encouraged especially during the Easter season. There must be a commitment to keeping it up throughout the week – rallies in front of the rectory, with egg-throwing and chants. Try…
“Ho Ho, Hey Hey / you should preach like Bossuet!”
or
“You’re too boring / we’re all snoring / flames of insight aren’t downpouring!”
or
“We’re not trying to be mean / why aren’t you like Fulton Sheen!”.
Bribery sometimes has effect – buy Father a new car, but only give him the keys if his preaching improves.
Angry letters to the bishop are also a good suggestion – the angrier and less grammatically precise, the better.
More seriously, in this day and age, if you’re not able to self-motivate in the spiritual life and you don’t find yourself spiritually fed by your parish priest, there are tons of resources out there to fill up the gap. You mention that this particular religious community forbids the posting of sermons online – an odd mandate, but hey, suum cuiusque – there are hundreds, if not thousands of other priests who are not members of that community who do so.
Spend the ten minutes that Father is preaching praying the rosary, and then go home and listen to a sermon online to motivate yourself spiritually, if you need to.
Not all priests are gifted homilists, it is, and always has been a simple fact, and that’s okay. Of the 12 Apostles, only two wrote Gospels, and an additional two wrote epistles – that doesn’t mean that the other 8 were bad Apostles. Similarly, a bad preacher does not necessarily make a bad pastor.
From a priest…
QUAERITUR:
I was at a church this week and this is the gluten-free stuff they’re passing out. Look at the ingredients. How can this be valid matter?
Just so that you can see it more clearly.
NO! This is invalid.
The pastor should be informed immediately. If nothing is done, the local bishop and then then the Congregation in Rome.
This is serious.
The hosts “consecrated” are NOT consecrated. Hence, sacrilege and idolatry are taking place.
Even if the hosts are low gluten, they must have originated from wheat. Other flours are INVALID.
UPDATE:
At the USCCB website there is a page with companies that make approved hosts and the company in question, Cavanaugh, is on the list… for LOW GLUTEN hosts, not Gluten Free, which are in the photo above.
Lest anyone think that that company is not clear about their product, this is from the company website:
They say explicitly: “The gluten free wafers are considered to be invalid material for the Catholic Mass.”
UPDATE:
This is from a reader… great story about the Internet Prayer (always linked on the top menu)!
I am a vice principal and theology teacher at a Catholic K-12 school in Texas. Last week I printed your post about St. Isidore and the very appropriate prayer you composed regarding one’s use of the internet. I always begin my 8th grade class with a story of the day’s saint. Unfortunately I had come across your post the day after St. Isidore’s feast, whom I had already discussed with the kids. I printed the post and read it in class. “Boys and Girls, allow me to read the prayer Fr. Z. composed. Almighty and Eternal God,” I said before I was immediately cut off by the sound of 18 teenage voices in unison… “Who created us in Thine image…” Turns out their computer teacher had already taught it to them! Imagine my surprise. “Did she tell you who wrote it?” I asked. “No,” they replied. You’ll be happy to know that now the students not only know the prayer but proper attribution has been assigned. Thanks again for your informative and entertaining posts.
Fun story!
It’s nice to get some good feedback like that once in a while.
At NLM, Peter Kwasniewski easily handles the facile notions of Msgr. M. Francis Mannion at the ultra-progressivist Pray Tell about Latin and vernacular in the Church’s sacred liturgy. In a nut shell, if people can’t understand the language (Latin) they will stop going to Mass, hence we have to have the vernacular. Also, even if young people today seem to be attracted to Latin, that’ll soon pass. I’m a little surprised that Mannion would go to the zoo like this. Perhaps he was writing for a particular audience.
Peter ably dismantles Mannion. I don’t have to do that here.
I would add, however, that reducing the language of our sacred rites the equivalent of a spoonful of pureed carrots and “Here comes the choochoo!” played a decisive role – not exclusive – in the constant drift of people out of our churches, men into anything but our seminaries, and respect for the Church in the public square down the drain.
As Peter touches, what is it that we are trying to “understand” in our rites? Mystery. Also, the content of our rites properly grasped (not twisted into the usual modern enclosed circular mutual affirmation hour it has become in so many places) is really hard.
What about Mass is easy?
If we can admit that, yes, this is really hard stuff (NB: my use of choochoo language for Pray Tell readers… and choochoo is better than airplane because of global warming) then perhaps we can take the next step and admit that the signs and gestures and language of Mass might help us encounter Mystery if it is hard. There is an apophatic dimension of our rites that is mostly neglected.
I often say here, “We are our rites.”
If our rites are facile, then what are we?
You know what would be really useful? A reprint of the 1959 Cantus Passionis. I think that was the last version published before the Flood struck.
It could be that the traditional movement is heading in the direction of the pre-1955 Holy Week… and other rites. It could very well be. In that case, there are still quite a few editions available, even in the three volumes, of the Cantus Passionis. But given that there wasn’t a very long period to settle in after 1955 before the massive and largely uneeded, unsought innovations were artificially imposed by the rogues of the Consilium, there aren’t many copies of the 1959 edition around.
Does anyone out there have one?
Can we work something out for a reprint or a high quality two-color PDF that we could print and bind?
And before some well-intentioned folks jump in with, “I have a 1953 version! Will that help?” Well…. no, given that I’m looking for a post 1955 edition, not a pre-1955 edition.
This is from SpaceWeather…. very cool.
I’ll bet this freaked out a lot of people… though there aren’t a lot of people up there.
___
ROCKETS DUMP CHEMICALS INTO NORTHERN LIGHTS: Last night (April 5th) in Norway, researchers at the Andøya Space Center launched two sounding rockets into a minor geomagnetic storm. The results were out of this world. Aurora tour guide Kim Hartviksen photographed glowing blobs of blue and purple caused by the rockets dumping chemical powders into the storm:
Photo credit: Kim Hartviksen of Aurora Addicts
“Residents for hundreds of miles were taken by surprise by these strange lights, which prompted calls to the police and ‘The aliens are coming!’ hysteria!” says Chris Nation who runs the Aurora Addicts guiding service.
When the night began, Nation, Hartviksen, and their clients were treated to a display of auroras, ignited by a stream of solar wind buffeting Earth’s magnetic field. “As the auroras started to ebb away, our friends at Andøya launched their rockets into the fading lights,” says Nation. “The show began anew as the rockets released their payload into the upper atmosphere.”
An automated webcam operated by Chad Blakely of Lights over Lapland in Abisko, Sweden, caught the first puffs of powder emerging from the rockets. “It looked like an invasion of UFOs,” says Blakley.
“Soon the glowing blobs evolved into more complicated structures–like two giant squid dancing in the northern sky with an impressive aurora display as its backdrop,” decribes Blakley. “Our webcam has been taking a picture every five minutes for nearly 10 years. These images are by far the most exciting I’ve ever seen it record.”
The name of the sounding rocket mission is AZURE–short for Auroral Zone Upwelling Rocket Experiment. Its goal is to measure winds and currents in the ionosphere, a electrically-charged layer of the Earth’s atmosphere where auroras appear. Specifically, the researchers are interested in discovering how auroral energy might percolate down toward Earth to influence the lower atmosphere.
The twin rockets deployed two chemical tracers: trimethyl aluminum (TMA) and abarium/strontium mixture. These mixtures create colorful clouds that allow researchers to visually track the flow of neutral and charged particles, respectively. According to NASA, which funded the mission, the chemicals pose no hazard to residents in the region. Aurora alerts: SMS text, email.
Update–a movie! “Here is my realtime video of the surprise rocket launch last night from NASA/ASC,” reports Ole Salomonsen of Tromsø, Norway. “I was shocked when I saw this in the night sky facing north, I was not aware of the launch.
Dear readers, this is an appeal.
Your use of my links to stuff on Amazon or your use of my search box on the right sidebar provides important income.
Every time you enter Amazon through my links or that search box, I get a small percentage of whatever you purchase.
I cannot see who buys what. I have no idea who you are.
Once you use my link or searchbox, you don’t have to keep going back to the link or searchbox for other things: Amazon remembers, during that session, how you got there.
There is a reader who alerts me to purchases made for his workplace. He’s in charge of that, and he uses my searchbox to enter Amazon. If you are in charge of making orders, perhaps you could do the same.
If you find something you want to get, highlighted the text of the item (Ctrl+C), and paste it into my searchbox (Ctrl+V).
The percentage which I get per item is small. Many people with small purchases makes a huge difference over the course of a month.
Take a couple more seconds to buy that gizmo. Come over to this blog and use my searchbox.
The searchbox is toward the top on the right.
Thanks for considering this. It is extremely helpful.
Fr. Jerabek, at his blog, has a good reminder about Lenten penance, and Fridays, and fasting and abstinence.
All Fridays of the year are days of penance. Fridays of Lent are more specific. All Catholics who have completed 14 years of age are to abstain from meat on Fridays of Lent.
Does this bind the Catholic on pain of sin?
The bishops – who were given authority to adjust the universal law for this regions – have so relaxed the obligations that there is barely anything there to move the Catholic to do penance.
The idea back in the 1960’s was that people should want to do penance. That would be better than doing penance out of obligation. They, with Paul VI, were optimistic. They weren’t, however, realistic about human nature. Once the laws were relaxed hardly anyone did penance after.
The same thing happen among the clergy.
In the older, traditional form of Mass, in the Missale Romanum, there were indications that certain defects in the celebration of Mass were mortal sins. Among a few priests (especially those tainted by a kind of Sulpician/Irish jansenism) this prompted scrupulosity. However, once the clarity was removed, priests started doing what they wanted.
Laws are helpful when the spirit and flesh are weak.
In any event, don’t be minimalist Catholics, just getting away with things within the strict bounds of law.
It seems to me we are living in a time when, as the Church is being slowly flayed and broken and diminished, even by her pastors, we need more prayer and more acts of penance and reparation, not fewer or the minimum.
Coat of Arms by D Burkart
A Daily Prayer for Priests
They find you a pro-life agent in your area who commits to giving a portion of the fee to a pro-life group!
PLEASE subscribe via PayPal if it is useful. Zelle and Wise are better, but PayPal is convenient.
A monthly subscription donation means I have steady income I can plan on. I put you my list of benefactors for whom I pray and for whom I often say Holy Mass.
In view of the rapidly changing challenges I now face, I would like to add more $10/month subscribers. Will you please help?
For a one time donation...
Help Monks in Wyoming (coffee – UPDATED LINK) and Norcia (beer) and the wonderful "Soap Sisters" of Summit, NJ!
Please follow me on Twitter!
Visits tracked by Statcounter
since Sat., 25 Nov. 2006:
