Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Top Ten Amateur Gardening Tips



1. When your friends say that you can let your herbs grow all summer and just keep clipping them for fresh herbs- it isn't true for Cilantro and Dill. They go to seed and lose most of their flavor. The flowers are pretty though. It is true for Basil and Chives. So far anyway.

2. When people try to tell you that you need a compost box or some other contraption- you really don't. Just dump all your vegetable scraps, hair clippings (these keep deer out of your garden too), dryer lint and egg shells in a pile. Throw weed and grass cuttings and leaves on it. Turn it with a shovel every once in a while and water it. You'll have great organic fertilizer. Never set your compost heap on fire. As the organics decompose they release methane gas. You will have an inferno on your hands.

3. When you finally find tomato cages and they are reasonably priced, realize that if you try to put them on your tomato plants now you will damage some of the stalks and some of the tomatoes will drop on the ground before they ripen. You will put them on anyway because you want to feel like a way cool gardener but there is a price to pay.

4. Plant lettuce adjacent to the butternut squash that will creep its way over and eventually take over. It's okay because you lettuce will have been harvested by then.

5.Never plant your pumpkin patch in a field where your children ride their 4 wheelers. The exhaust will keep them from growing. And seeing the plants, flowering and the exact same size as when you planted them 2 months ago will make you hate the 4 wheelers even more.

6. If you plant Peppermint it will thrive but it will continue to thrive until you actually become afraid of it.


7. Forsythia can be cut and stuck into the ground and it will grow impressively.

8. When you work in the garden with your children you create an unmistakeable bond.In the silence your souls meet.

9. Twilight is the buggiest time in the garden.

10. The minute the last vegetable is picked and the harvest is complete you'll feel an undeniable sense of loss. You will garden again next year but it will never be the garden of this past summer.

Monday, July 30, 2007

The Friendly Trad Parish

St. Josaphat's Church in Michigan.




Why is it that those words, "friendly Trad parish" make you cringe, or smile self consciously?

But I've found the answer. While working on a project I found this Church and the website for St. Josaphat's Church.

There is a link to find out how to get involved. Mass times are given as well as information on a parish latin class, subscribe to an email list for announcements, join the choir, become an usher, and check out the homeschooling group.

There are great links and Latin Mass resources.



This is a great example of what a Latin Mass Community should be, have, do and imitate. Go forth and do likewise.

Sunday, July 29, 2007

Not Your Ordinary Mommy Blog



Go and say hello to Simcha.


My favorite post is still, "There are Worse Things than being Hot".

Saturday, July 28, 2007

Mystical Wine



Tapestry from the Vatican Museum depicting the Christ Child making wine from grapes.

And to see more tapestries from the Vatican Museum go here.

Friday, July 27, 2007

What's Everyone Doing?



The Whirlwind: painting by Michael Lightsey.



Someone on our Catholic Restorationist's web ring asked what everyone is doing since no one seems to be posting much of anything. (I plead guilty as charged.) And while responding with the list I thought I would post it here just to change the look of the thing.

We had a copperhead in the kitchen 2 days ago and a bat in the house last week.

I just quit a part time evening job and am looking forward to being poorer, home and hopefully prolific.

Strep and conjunctivitis have ravaged the house.

Other medical woes include my 12 year old son with an eye swollen shut. He was stung by a wasp 2 days ago.

My oldest daughter is getting ready to go to the Philippines on a Medical Missionary trip. (she's 17). and my oldest son (13) is getting ready for Boot Camp with the Sea Cadets at Camp Edwards, MA.

My sisters just got back from a monthlong pilgrimage to Compostella, Spain and I'll be visiting with them today to hear about the trip.

And our 1870s Farmhouse is deteriorating faster than we can fix it up- LOL. Naturally the kids are working on the side of decay and destruction.

Our cottage tenant is getting married in less than a week and we will be installing a new kitchen floor, (to replace the nailed down linoleum circa 1940 that graces it now) for their "House of Dreams".

The garden is being overrun with weeds and organic pests. Sigh.

I'm sewing a little prairie dress with bloomers for my two year old and have just ordered a pattern for my 15 year old daughter's Confirmation- a 1950s Butterick semi formal. (Yes, we will be adding sleeves).

And someone recommended this website- Mormon formal dresses that are formal (though some could use a bit higher neckline) and so dreamy. It always annoys me when the Mormons or the Evangelicals or anyone else is out in front on this instead of us.

When does life slow down? And will I be sorry when it does?

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Good Fruit

Young photo of Pope Benedict XVI:



When I read this news:
that the Holy Father says the Latin Mass for his private Mass I thought of this quote from this week's reading:


Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit, and the evil tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can an evil tree bring forth good fruit. Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit, shall be cut down, and shall be cast into the fire. Wherefore by their fruits you shall know them. Matthew 6:17-20

Saturday, July 14, 2007

Eye See



This could be me except for the smile.

While we were eating dinner outside my husband was telling me that they must have de-regulated DEET (remember when you couldn't buy it because it was killing the planet). Well now you can buy 100% DEET.

So I celebrated by spraying it directly into my eye. Ah, I felt that. The instructions on the bottle said to flush the eye with water for 15-20 minutes. 15-20 minutes would wash your eye right out of your eye socket. I can still see so I expect to make a complete recovery.

L.A. Diocese Saves Face

... and a whole lotta dough.

LA Settles 500 Sex Abuse Cases for $600 million.


And it was still a bargain. Each victim will get between $1.2 and $1.3 million. With that kind of settlement you're talking a lot of damage to irrefutable victims.

Of course there will be some who are unhappy to hear this. People who think this is the fault of "money grubbing lawyers", ambulance chasers, people with an agenda to take down the Church.

Given the operational budgets that these diocese have these settlements are a mere drop in the bucket. And anyway they are justified.

Myriad Madonnae

From today's Boston Globe we have a story about attorney, Josh Michtom who has been photographing statues of Our Lady displayed in front of Somerville, Massachusetts homes for the past 3 years. According to Michtom, Somerville is home to the most statues of Our of all the surrounding communities; a fact he noticed while walking his infant son to sleep.



While it is common to see such devotional displays in Catholic countries, particularly Ireland it is not as common here. If you happen to see one you can be almost certain the homeowner has strong ethnic ties to a Catholic homeland.



I wondered at first why the Boston Globe would publish a story like this. They are a paper widely known for their hostility to anything Catholic because being Catholic means being anti-semitic in their anti-intellectual minds. But the end of the article makes it clear how this story made it past the editor's desk.

The reporter asks the Michtom if this "Madonna Mission" has affected his spirituality:

Q Has doing this project affected your spirituality? Are you going to put up a Mary in your yard in West Hartford?

A No, I'm not. I wasn't religious when I started, and I'm not religious now. In my more cantankerous moments, I have quarrels with organized religions. But I like seeing the ways that people practice religion. It tells you something about them. For a lot of people, religion is an important part of their lives. It's their beliefs, the rhythms of their weeks or months or years. So I like hearing church choirs. I like seeing people walking to temple on Saturday as a family. I feel like it gives me a passing insight into what those people are about.


So religion tells this guy something about the people who practice religion, presumably something positive but he is not religious. You wonder sometimes if people really hear what they are saying?

Thrown in for good measure in the collection of photos which can be seen here is a statue of a Buddha. I think the Boston Globe has covered all their bases on this one- Catholicism for the unreligious, families walking to Temple and Buddhism. I guess John Lennon would be proud, the Boston Globe comes as close to "Imagining there is no religion" as you possibly can. Each religion they mention is presented as a symbol of absolutely nothing.

Escaping from Peter Pan's Prison


From Mercatornet.com

Anne McDonald | Friday, 13 July 2007

"Doctors thought I had an IQ of 20. You know what? They were wrong." Anne McDonald

Three years ago, a six-year-old Seattle girl called Ashley, who had severe disabilities, was, at her parents' request, given a medical treatment called "growth attenuation" to prevent her growing. She had her uterus removed, had surgery on her breasts so they would not develop and was given hormone treatment. She is now known by the nickname her parents gave her -- Pillow Angel.

The case of Ashley hit the media in January after publication of an article in a medical journal about her treatment. It reappeared in the news recently because of the admission by Children's Hospital and Regional Medical Center that the procedures its doctors had performed to stop Ashley from growing and reaching sexual maturity violated state law. In Canada (as in Australia), a child can be sterilised only with the consent of a court.

Only someone like me who has lain in a cot year after year hoping that someone would give her a chance can know the horror of being treated as if you were totally without conscious thought.

At the time of the initial publicity about growth attenuation, Ashley's parents wrote on their blog: "In our opinion only parents of special needs children are in a position to fully relate to this topic. Unless you are living the experience, you are speculating and you have no clue what it is like to be the bedridden child or their care givers."

I did live the experience. I lived it not as a parent or care giver but as a bed-ridden growth-attenuated child. My life story is the reverse of Ashley's.

Like Ashley, I, too, have a static encephalopathy. Mine was caused by brain damage at the time of my breech birth. Like Ashley, I can't walk, talk, feed or care for myself. My motor skills are those of a 3-month-old. When I was 3, a doctor assessed me as severely retarded (that is, as having an IQ of less than 35) and I was admitted to a state institution called St Nicholas Hospital in Melbourne, Australia. As the hospital didn't provide me with a wheelchair, I lay in bed or on the floor for most of the next 14 years. At the age of 12, I was relabelled as profoundly retarded (IQ less than 20) because I still hadn't learned to walk or talk.

Like Ashley, I have experienced growth attenuation. I may be the only person on Earth who can say, "Been there. Done that. Didn't like it. Preferred to grow."

Unlike Ashley, my growth was "attenuated" not by medical intervention but by medical neglect. My growth stopped because I was starved. St Nicholas offered little food and little time to eat it -- each staff member had 10 children with severe disabilities to feed in an hour. That was the roster set by the state and accepted by the medical profession. Consequently my growth stopped shortly after admission. When I turned 18, I weighed only 35 pounds. I hadn't developed breasts or menstruated. I was 42 inches tall.

My life changed when I was offered a means of communication. At the age of 16, I was taught to spell by pointing to letters on an alphabet board. Two years later, I used spelling to instruct the lawyers who fought the habeas corpus action that enabled me to leave the institution in which I'd lived for 14 years.

In the ultimate Catch-22, the hospital doctors told the Supreme Court that my small stature was evidence of my profound mental retardation. I've learned the hard way that not everything doctors say should be taken at face value.

After I left the institution, an X-ray showed that I had a bone age of about 6, a growth delay almost unheard of in an 18-year-old in the developed world.

I was not only tiny but lacked any secondary sexual characteristics (a significant difference from people with naturally small stature). I was a legal adult, but I couldn't see over a bar, much less convince anyone to serve me a drink. I didn't see small stature as desirable.

My new doctors said that presumably I had the growth potential of a 6-year-old, so my new care givers and I worked on increasing my size. My contribution was to eat everything I was offered. It worked. I started growing immediately, reaching a final height of 5 feet and weight of 120 pounds. That is, I grew 18 inches after the age of 18. Along the way I lost my milk teeth and reached puberty.

At the age of 19, I attended school for the first time, eventually graduating from university with majors in philosophy of science and fine arts. Annie's Coming Out, the book about my experiences that I wrote with my teacher, was made into a movie (Best Film, Australian Film Institute Awards, 1984, called Test of Love in the US).

Unlike Ashley, I'm now an ordinary height and weight -- but I don't get left out, nonetheless. Though I still can't walk, talk or feed myself, I'm an enthusiastic traveller. My size has never got in the way, though my hip flask of Bundy rum often causes alarm at airport security. I love New York for its galleries, its shops and its theatres; hearing Placido Domingo at the Met was one of the highlights of my life. Interestingly, Ashley is also reported as enjoying opera -- maybe it goes with the turf.

Many otherwise reasonable people think that growth attenuation was an appropriate treatment for Ashley. In an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times, for example, moral philosopher Peter Singer wrote: "there is the issue of treating Ashley with dignity... But why should dignity always go together with species membership, no matter what the characteristics of the individual may be? ... Lofty talk about human dignity should not stand in the way of children like her getting the treatment that is best both for them and their families."

Ironically, I'm a friend of Peter's, and I've discussed ethics and disability with him previously. Despite this, he obviously didn't call me to mind when he wrote about Ashley.

This may be because Ashley is described as having static encephalopathy, a rather uncommon name for a rather common condition. Static encephalopathy just means "brain damage which isn't going to get worse." It's occasionally used as a euphemism for brain damage caused by maternal intoxication, but the most common form of the condition is cerebral palsy unrelated to maternal intoxication. Ashley and I both have cerebral palsy. Ashley's doctors may have used the term static encephalopathy to avoid the outcry that would have followed if people realised that it was being suggested that girls with cerebral palsy should have surgery to stunt their growth and prevent puberty.

When Singer wrote that, "Ashley is 9, but her mental age has never progressed beyond that of a 3-month-old. She cannot walk, talk, hold a toy or change her position in bed. Her parents are not sure she recognises them. She is expected to have a normal lifespan, but her mental condition will never improve," he has accepted the doctors' eyeball assessment of Ashley without asking the obvious questions.

What was their assessment based on? Has Ashley ever been offered a way of showing that she knows more than a 3-month-old baby? Only someone like me who has lain in a cot year after year hoping that someone would give her a chance can know the horror of being treated as if you were totally without conscious thought.

Given that Ashley's surgery is irreversible, I can only offer sympathy to her and her parents. For her sake, I hope she does not understand what has happened to her; but I'm afraid she probably does. As one who knows what it's like to be infantilised because I was the size of a 4-year-old at age 18, I don't recommend it.

My ongoing concern is the readiness with which Ashley's parents, doctors and most commentators assumed they could make an accurate estimation of the understanding of a child without speech who has severely restricted movement. Any assessment of intelligence that relies on speech and motor skills cannot conceivably be accurate because the child doesn't have any of the skills required to undertake testing. To equate intelligence with motor skills is as absurd as equating it with height.

The only possible way to find out how much a child who cannot talk actually understands is to develop an alternative means of communication for that child. An entire new discipline of non-speech communication has developed since I was born in 1961, and there are now literally hundreds of non-speech communication strategies available. Once communication is established, education and assessment can follow, in the usual way.

No child should be presumed to be profoundly retarded because she can't talk. All children who can't talk should be given access to communication therapy before any judgments are made about their intelligence.

Ashley's condemned to be a Peter Pan and never grow, but it's not too late for her to learn to communicate. It's profoundly unethical to leave her on that pillow without making every effort to give her a voice of her own.

Anne McDonald lives in Melbourne, Australia. She works on disability issues. She has a website with more information about her story.

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

A Dull Life


G.K. Chesterton wrote:

Unless we can bring men back to enjoying daily life which we moderns call a dull life, our whole civilisation will be in ruins in about 15 years.... Unless we can make daybreak and daily bread and the creative secrets of labor interesting in themselves, there will fall on all our civilisation a fatigue which is the one disease from which civilisations do not recover.


And it is as true today as when the masterful Chesterton wrote. I've made a list of daily things that I enjoy doing or admire in the example of others:

- reading poetry
- the silent diligence of working in the garden
- a sacrifice made for someone who will never say thank you or even know what you've done
- sitting down to dinner and having no reason at all to hurry
- admiring a friend's quilt and forgetting to feel any envy at all
- a little girl in a summer dress, barefoot
- clothes on the clothesline, some of them handmade
- patching a hole in the wall and having it turn out pretty well
- the smell of green apple dish detergent and clean, hot dishes
- giving away something that you need to someone who needs it more

Religious Indifferentist Interpretations of Vatican II Denounced by CDF

New Document Released from the Congregation for the Doctrine on the Faith


Dealing with the Question of whether or not the New Document Released from the Congregation for the Doctrine on the Faith">Catholic Church is One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic. Dispelling the heresies that all "churches" in particular protestant gatherings are equivalent to the Catholic Church.

(as read on Catholic World News).


These are a few of my favorite things:

First Question: Did the Second Vatican Council change the Catholic doctrine on the Church?

Response: The Second Vatican Council neither changed nor intended to change this doctrine, rather it developed, deepened and more fully explained it.

How many hundreds of times have we heard, "...but Vatican II changed all that"? Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.


Fifth Question: Why do the texts of the Council and those of the Magisterium since the Council not use the title of "Church" with regard to those Christian Communities born out of the Reformation of the sixteenth century?

Response: According to Catholic doctrine, these Communities do not enjoy apostolic succession in the sacrament of Orders, and are, therefore, deprived of a constitutive element of the Church. These ecclesial Communities which, specifically because of the absence of the sacramental priesthood, have not preserved the genuine and integral substance of the Eucharistic Mystery19 cannot, according to Catholic doctrine, be called "Churches" in the proper sense20.

Appeal from Good Counsel Homes


A note from Chris Bell:

OK, this is what is keeping me up. I owe nearly $400,000 in bills this year to date and don't know how I'm going to get through the next two weeks. This happened last year and certainly it was the grace of God that helped and by the end of the year (actually the beginning of this year) Good Counsel www.goodcounselhomes.org was able to pay its bills.

Why do I owe so much? Running five homes, with a lot of volunteers and many, many tons of donated food items, mostly canned goods and spaghetti, rice and cereals, pampers, baby wipes, too but kids still need fresh milk, meats, vegetables and yes, I even brought them ice cream because they are really, really good kids. Also I need staff, paid staff, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Staff I can count on to be there for each and every mom who needs help.

No one is paid a lot at Good Counsel www.goodcounselhomes.org

But, if you saw a pregnant girl on the street in Manhattan tonight, wouldn't you want to help her find a safe home and help her go to a pre-natal appointment? Of course you would and that's partly how Good Counsel began. I saw a young mother in Times Square. I see them and know they are their today.

I also know they are in the N.Y. City shelter system and need a way out.

I need your help, today, to keep our doors open and put food on the table.

Here's what happened last year as I wrote a desperate appeal.

From the Dominican Republic a Father brought his daughter to Florida as a young teenager for reasons she really didn’t understand. At home and in her neighborhood all she heard wsa Spanish.

Now consider this: You’re now 18 and thinking of boys all the time. A nice boy takes you out. He buys you things, he treats you special. He says come to New York where he can work. Your father is too busy to care. You go, you become pregnant. The boy leaves you in an apartment with no forwarding address.

That’s when Marta, who just turned 19 while she was 7 months pregnant had someone tell her about Good Counsel. She lost the apartment, of course, and wound up in the horrid labyrinth run by New York City for emergency shelter.

Could you imagine that this young woman was sweet and full of life! Always wanting to please someone. You know the kind, when you look thirsty, she’ll pull out a soda and tell you to drink it.

She gave birth June 21st last year to a real cute little boy with curly dark hair and olive skin, Angel. His brown eyes were penetrating from his earliest gazes.

Marta wasn’t going to sit around. She started working at a car wash. Up at 6 a.m., preparing baby bottles. By 6:30 a.m. she was out the door when our young, overnight staff, Cortney, would get up to take Angel until Claudia, the House Manager, or someone else from the day-shift came in.

To get to her car wash in Brooklyn, she had to take a bus from our house in the Rosebank section of Staten Island to the Staten Island Ferry, hop a train to Brooklyn . Hey, she was making about minimum wage, $5.50 per hour with her residency card, plus tips. That did make a big difference overall.

Of course, that wasn’t enough for her though. She started going to a trade school and learned to do hair on weekends. Also, she picked up English very well, between living in our home and a few English as a Second Language courses we had her take.

Well, with all that, she was actually able to save more than a thousand dollars. Then she got her own apartment. All smiles, we helped her set up, donated furniture, kitchen ware and linens.

“She keeps in touch. We’re her family,” Claudia said.

“She lives in Flatbush, Brooklyn ,” Claudia added. “When Angel had his first birthday, we were invited to her house. It was wonderful.”

“I keep asking her if she is going to school and I stress the fact that it is very important for her to finish.” Claudia cares a lot about her and you can tell the feelings are mutual. “She told me that when she is finished with her program she will let us know so we can go to her graduation. I let her know that I would be there with bells on.”

Please send what you can today, go to www.goodcounselhomes.org because we have 100 mothers and babies in our four homes, we’ve got to feed them, try to keep everyone cool and more importantly pointed in the best direction we can find.

It’s up to you, today, to allow this to happen. Right now. I really am behind in our bills and with the summer vacations, people haven’t answered their mail or email like they usually do.

Please help. If you sent something in already this year, please consider another gift now. If you were planning to send something later this year, please consider sending it now. I can’t stress how hard, how difficult it is to pay bills right now today. www.goodcounselhomes.org

I won’t repeat our need again. I pray you understand. Thanks for all you do. Thanks for your prayers.

Know I’m praying for you and so is Fr. Benedict Groeschel, he and I began Good Counsel 23 years ago. We pray for you because you do put bread on our table.

Thank you for helping. Thank you for caring.

Peace,
Christopher Bell +

Good Counsel homes
www.goodcounselhomes.org
24/7 Helpline: 1.800.723.8331

P. 201-795-0637
Fax. 201-795-0809

P.O. Box 6068
Hoboken, NJ
07030

Good Counsel's Lumina program
Lumina - Hope and Healing After Abortion
offers hope and healing after an abortion
www.postabortionhelp.org
1.877.LUMINA1 (1.877.586.4621)


Every mother and child deserves love and support
from the moment of conception.

Monday, July 09, 2007

Happy Days

I'd been wanting to put this up since I saw it from the :


AWESOME Hermeneutics of Continutity Blog
run by the
AWESOME Fr. Tim Finigan


and I just remembered how to. All that euphoria has surely gone to my head!

Enjoy. Go back and play it on your lunch break. Best yet, it has apparently "annoyed" some people. How very, very unfortunate.


Sunday, July 08, 2007

Motu Proprio: the Pope's outreach to the Mentally Ill

"...a lot of crazy people are now going to come out of the woodwork, people who are discontent with the way the church has gone for the last 40 years...."

Rev. John F. Baldovin , a professor of historical and liturgical theology at the Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge.


The Boston Globe
in their usual, "we have no idea what we're talking about but people read us anyway" brand of journalism on the Motu Propio. We are reassured that nothing will change and that if any crazed Traditionalists are nervy enough to ask for the Latin Mass the diocese is ready. Ready to say no. Unless you're a schismatic sedevacantist in which case they may think about it.

Check out this statement- I've highlighted the important words:

"Clearly, the pope is attempting to respond pastorally to a small group of disaffected former Catholics who were very disturbed by the Vatican II liturgical reforms, but potentially this runs the risk of being misinterpreted as calling into question the Second Vatican Council," said the Rev. Keith J. Pecklers , a professor of liturgy at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome.

And finally:


Some scholars fear that advocates of the Latin Mass also want the Vatican to roll back its efforts at interfaith and ecumenical relations, lay participation, and other changes since the Second Vatican Council. And the Anti-Defamation League has objected to wider use of the old rite because it includes on Good Friday a prayer for the conversion of the Jews.


Desiring to worship according to the Latin Mass is a transparent way of proving that you are anti-Semitic just like saying, "Merry Christmas" and praying for someone's conversion- just another hate crime.

We haven't been able to fool anyone. The Globe has seen right through us- crazy, disturbed, disaffected, anti-Semites. The only thing left to look forward to now is an editorial by James Carroll.

Saturday, July 07, 2007

Round Up

It's here: The Motu Proprio

Press Release from the Superior of St. Pius X


[Let's be honest this is what it's all about]

The Bishop of Vermont His Excellency Bishop Salvatore Matano


Bishop Matano will celebrate the Mass according to the 1962 Missal on the Feast of the Assumption, August 15th at St. Joseph's Church in Burlington, Vermont. This was our parish we were first married and we often went to Mass there. Our oldest daughter was baptized there as well. I plan to travel to Burlington to attend the Mass.



Cardinal Sean O'Malley
and his comments before the Motu Proprio were released:

In my comments at the meeting I told my brother bishops that in the United States the number of people who participate in the Latin Mass even with permission is very low. Additionally, according to the research that I did, there are only 18 priories of the Society of St. Pius X in the entire country. Therefore this document will not result in a great deal of change for the Catholics in the U.S. Indeed, interest in the Latin Mass is particularly low here in New England.

In our archdiocese, the permission to celebrate the Latin Mass has been in place for several years, and I granted permission when I was in Fall River for a Mass down on the Cape. The archdiocesan Mass is now at Immaculate Mary of Lourdes Parish in Newton. It is well attended, and if the need arises for an extension of that we would, of course, address it.

This issue of the Latin Mass is not urgent for our country, however I think they wanted us to be part of the conversation so that we would be able to understand what the situation is in countries where the numbers are very significant. For example, in Brazil there is an entire diocese of 30,000 people that has already been reconciled to the Church.


That's okay Cardinal, we knew we couldn't count on you anyway.

The real story on the "wide and generous" application of Ecclesia Dei by then Bishop O'Malley:

Well, what the Cardinal Says about the TLM on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, ("the Cape") is quite an obfuscation.

After 2 years of petitioning the Catholics of Cape Cod got their representative a personal meeting with the Cardinal, when he was the Bishop of this Diocese (Fall River): that was on April 2, 1999. After a desultory meeting, the rep. obtained the signatures of over 100 catholics in the Diocese (of whom I and my entire family made 5). After another 2 years of waiting, the Bishop established the indult on Cape Cod.

Though at least 1 diocesan priest begged to say it, the Bishop decided that it was best for the diocese of a priest of New York City did (NYC is 4 hours away)! He was a retired priest, and at the very first Mass he forced everyone to receive in the hand standing!

Other travesties followed, complaints were made to the Bishop, nothing was done! Most traditionalists do not even talk of the indult on Cape Cod now, they drive from Cape Cod 1 hour to go to
Providence or Boston!


I wonder if Cardinal Sean understands that it is directly because of Cardinals and Bishops like HIM that this document was necessary?

The Bishop of Rhode on the Motu Proprio- I could not find a statement. Not even on the Diocesan webpage. But there is a button to translate the webpage in Spanish.

Bishop McCormack of New Hampshire, who should be in jail for his role in the sex abuse scandal while he was an auxiliary bishop in Boston on the Motu Proprio.

[One gets the impression that the Bishop is thankful the implementation date is faraway September 14, 2007 and hopes that perhaps everyone will forget all about it.]

The Latin Mass is not officially authorized anywhere in New Hampshire.

The Bishop of Portland, Maine. Silent.

And the Bishop of the Archdiocese of Connecticut. Likewise silent.


Too busy celebrating I suppose or else hoping that they will wake up and it will all be a bad dream. If that is the case now they know what it has been like for us for the past 30 years.

Thursday, July 05, 2007

Rorate Caeli Making the Complicated Simple

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet according to Shakespeare but the Liturgy according to the New Rite... well I'll let you decide.

Don't miss the comments. There are some decidedly unhappy apologists for the Novus Ordo. But if ths does't convince them I really don't know what will.

To the charge of triumphalism I plead guilty.

Wednesday, July 04, 2007

And Speaking of Traditional Homemaking...

...did you know that vintage aprons are ALL THE RAGE?



All these images are of vintage aprons available on Ebay.
Wouldn't this be darling as a mother/daughter apron set?




And the very best aprons have rick rack. Next to polka dots, nothing says femininity like rick rack.



This final apron is made of checked green and white gingham with hand sewn embrodiery in an Ohio Star pattern.




Hours of work and skill went into this apron. All to have spaghetti sauce splashed all over it. Ahh, the life of the homemaker. All the glamor it affords it sometimes in the apron you wear.

Homemaking and Heresies :a new name for my blog?

I'm feeling a little frivolous lately after an evening of making jam. I've been making strawberry, raspberry, blueberry. I think it's my favorite because the blueberries stay whole and look so beautiful. The aroma had the boys coming into the kitchen hopefully. I made toast and spread the jam and everyone was happy.

And on another homemaking front:

I'm painting my kitchen and have chosen "praire grass"- a beautiful gold for the molding and wainscoting. I want to place a vintage framed poster (preferably French) on the wall above the breakfast nook. I've been looking at these and have nearly chosen the first.



This is very dear but too cutsy I think. Though if I had triplets it would be a must have.