Feast of St. Giles (Patron of cripples, breastfeeding)

Every now and again there are saints whose lives are just that interesting...

From Catholic Culture:

St. Giles

According to tradition, St. Giles was born at Athens, Greece, and was of noble
extraction. After his parents died, he fled from his fatherland to avoid
followers and fame. He went to France, and in a cave in a forest near the mouth
of the Rhone he was able to lead the life of a hermit. Legend has a hind came
everyday to his cell and furnished him with milk. One day the King's hunters
chased the hind and discovered St. Giles and his secret hermitage. The hunters
shot at the hind, but missed and hit Giles' leg with an arrow, which kept him
crippled the rest of his life. He then consented to King Theodoric's request of
building a monastery (known later as "Saint Gilles du Gard") and he became its
first Abbot. He died some eight years later towards 712.

In
Normandy, France, women having difficulty becoming pregnant would sleep
with a picture or statues of the saint.

In England,
churches named for St. Giles were built so that cripples could reach them
easily, and he was also considered the chief patron of the poor. That in his
name charity was granted the most miserable is shown from the custom that on
their passage to Tyburn for execution, convicts were allowed to stop at St.
Giles' Hospital where they were presented with a bowl of ale called St. Giles'
Bowl, "thereof to drink at their pleasure, as their last refreshing in this
life."

St. Giles is included in the list of the fourteen "Auxiliary
Saints" or "Holy Helpers". These are a group of saints invoked because they have
been efficacious in assisting in trials and sufferings. Each saint has a
separate feast or memorial day, and the group was collectively venerated on
August 8, until the 1969 reform of the Roman calendar, when the feast was
dropped.

Patron: Beggars; breastfeeding; hermits;
horses; physically disabled; woods; blacksmiths; against lameness; against
leprosy; against sterility; against infertility.

Symbols: Hand pierced with arrows; hind pierced with
arrows; gold doe, pierced by a silver arrow; Benedictine with crosier, arrow
piercing hand, protecting hind.

How You Can Help the Victims

Check out Helping victims and survivors

Katrina Refugees will go to Astrodome

From one dome to another...frommlive.com: NewsFlash - Katrina refugees will go to Astrodome:

At least 25,000 of Hurricane Katrina's refugees, a majority of them at the New
Orleans Superdome, will travel in a bus convoy to Houston starting Wednesday and
will be sheltered at the 40-year-old Astrodome, which hasn't been used for
professional sporting events in years.

The Federal Emergency Management
Agency will provide 475 buses for the transfer, and the Astrodome's schedule has
been cleared through December for housing evacuees, said Kathy Walt, a
spokeswoman for Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

1,000 Die in Iraq Stamped Fueled by Terror Rumor

From Top News Article Reuters.com:

Up to 1,000 Iraqi Shi'ites might have died in a stampede on a Tigris River
bridge in Baghdad on Wednesday, panicked by rumors a suicide bomber was about to
blow himself up, government officials told Reuters.

Most victims were women and children who 'died by drowning or being
trampled' after panic swept a throng of thousands as they headed to a religious
ceremony, an Interior Ministry official said.

'An hour ago the death toll was 695 killed, but we expect it to hit
1,000,' said Dr Jaseb Latif Ali, a general manager at Iraq's Health
Ministry.

Fuel Here $3.29 a Gallon

For the cheap stuff.



Last night the local (Northern Indiana) fuel people were claiming they were nearly out--I can guarantee you that our fuel comes from the Great Lakes not the Gulf. How these people aren't all prosecuted for price gouging and lying is beyond me.

Pope Prays for Victims of Katrina

From The Seattle Post-Intelligence:

Pope Benedict XVI said Wednesday he was praying for victims of Hurricane Katrina
and urged rescue workers to persevere in bringing comfort to survivors.

CATASTROPHIC!

From CATASTROPHIC

In Lakeview, the scene was surreal. A woman yelled to reporters from a rooftop,
asking them to call her father and tell him she was OK, although fleeing to the
roof of a two-story home hardly seemed to qualify.

About 5 p.m., almost
as if on cue, the battery power of all the house alarms in the neighborhood
seemed to reach a critical level, and they all went off, making it sound as if
the area was under an air-raid warning. Two men surviving on generator power in
the Lake Terrace neighborhood near the Lake Pontchartrain levee still had a dry
house, but they were watching the rising water in the yard nervously. They were
planning to head out to retrieve a vast stash of beer, champagne and hard liquor
they found washed onto the levee. As night fell, the sirens of house alarms
finally fell silent, and the air filled with a different, deafening and
unfamiliar sound: the extraordinary din of thousands of croaking frogs.