"Daddy, where's my zebra?"

Happy Birthday to Aunt Kathy!

Where "Ratzinger" was a Swear Word

Those educated in Catholic institutions know of what I speak and not a few converts have been surprised to encounter someone in a parish who was less than enthusiastic about the faith...all of this contempt seemed to reach its zenith with the mention of one name "Ratzinger."

As I tell people I'm planning to write a book "Where Ratzinger Was a Swear Word" they share with me their own experiences, and I'd like to start sharing them here. I'd also invite readers to email me their own experiences with the caveat that in doing so they are giving me permission to use them in the book insuring of course their anonymity.

From a Campus Minister who is faithful, charismatic and was shocked the first time he attended a national conference of campus ministers and at Mass witnessed a priest shadowed by a woman who repeated everything he said as he said Mass. He wasn't terribly thrilled when Sister Minus Mary got up and invoked the four winds in imitation of the Native Americans she was sent as a missionary to and they evidently succeeded in converting her. But the relevant point to my story came when the campus ministers: clerical, religious and lay gathered for a small group session and brainstormed what they would do if they could be pope for one day.

My friend said that in his group there was a nun, two priests and himself. The nun spoke up first and she had only three words to say as to what she would do if she were the Supreme Pontiff and she said them loud enough for the adjacent groups to hear, "I'd fire Ratzinger." The two priests nodded approvingly. One of the priests spoke up next, "I'd make the church more gay-friendly, more inclusive." My friend wondered what he had gotten himself into.

Pope Still Learning How to be Pope

From All Headline News:

After being voted in last year by the Conclave of Cardinals, Pope Benedict the 16th says leading the world's 1.1 billion Catholics is not a small task and he has just started to "learn" his new job.

The German-born Pope was speaking while addressing journalists on Friday. He had just completed a private holiday in the northern Italian mountains. Reuters quotes him telling reporters, "During this period I have also been working, because holidays are good only if you do some work. Without doing anything, they are not holidays."

He is slated to travel to the papal summer retreat at Castel Gandolfo, south of Rome. The Pope will spend his time recollecting at the retreat that is scheduled to end by late September.

Spanish Bishops "The Church is sick"

And in need of a cure...fascinating document that was done in conjunction with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith when the Pope was still a cardinal and the head of it. It lays out what the problem is, its origin and the cure...

From Magister:

The sickness is “the secularization within the Church”: a widespread loss
of faith caused in part by “theological propositions that have in common a
deformed presentation of the mystery of Christ.”

The cure is precisely that of
restoring life to the profession of faith: “You are the Christ, the Son of the
living God” (Matthew 16:16), in the four areas where it is most seriously
undermined today:

• the interpretation of Scripture,
• Jesus Christ as the only savior of all men,
• the Church as the Body of Christ,
• moral life.

The instruction is organized under these four main headings. In each section, the
document first presents the features of correct Christological doctrine, and
then denounces the theologies that deform it. It denounces the theologies, not
the theologians. The instruction does not target particular authors, but limits
itself to denouncing erroneous tendencies. The names found in the notes that
accompany the text are simply those of theologians already marked out in the
past by doctrinal condemnations and disciplinary sanctions by the Vatican
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith or by the Spanish bishops’
conference.

And from the actual document:

2. They are not few who, in the shadow of a nonexistent Council, in terms of both letter and spirit, have sown agitation and disquiet in the hearts of many of the faithful.

13. From the denial of one aspect of the profession of faith, one passes to the total loss of the faith itself, in that by selecting some aspects and refuting others one does not respect the testimony of God, but rather human reasoning. When one alters the profession of faith, the entire Christian life is compromised by this.

19. In some instances the biblical texts are studied and interpreted as if these were nothing more than ancient texts. There is also the application of methods that systematically exclude the possibility of revelation, miracles, and intervention of God. Instead of integrating the contributions of history, philology, and other scholarly disciplines with the faith and the Church’s tradition, frequently the ecclesial interpretation itself is presented as the problem and considered as extraneous, if not opposed, to “scientific exegesis.”

25. The historical-critical method has been abused without a recognition of its limits, and this has gone so far as the assertion that the pre-existence of the divine person of Christ is a mere philosophical deformation of the biblical evidence. [...] The mission of Christ has been understood as a merely earthly event, if not political-revolutionary, thus denying his voluntary death on the cross for mankind.

Florida Housing Heading in Other Direction

After rising steeply, now its heading in the other direction...

Weeping Icon a Fake?

And other horrors at Orthodox monastery in Texas. The ring leader is a former Benedictine monk who left years ago, sold land in Texas and then formed an Orthodox monastery.

Read more about it here:

Besides naming the two boys tracked down by investigators, Elsbury said Greene confirmed suspicions that the picture of the Virgin Mary that was said to weep tears of rose oil was a fake.

"The whole thing is going to be exposed as a sham," the sheriff said. "They just put the tear drops on there themselves and then got all these people making donations trying to get some kind of miracle cure."

US Catechism for Adults

Available on July 31st. 638 pages!