Friday, May 25, 2007
Saints, Saints, and More Saints: Oregon State University

Below is an email that I have received and wish to pass on to my readers.

I'm emailing a number of prominent Catholic bloggers, and have included your address in the BCC of this email, to inform you of a project that took place at Oregon State University. This university has a strong liberal presence. You might remember that The Insurgent student newspaper at the U of O (in Eugene, 40 minutes away) printed pornographic drawing of Jesus Christ about a year ago. This was lauded by some here at OSU. The university has a very strong gay presence (with pride week, featuring "lube olympics" and other vile events). Despite the secularism and liberalism, the Catholic students here are pretty cool.

Well, some friends of mine got the idea to "Saint bomb" campus. Using chalk, hundreds of Catholic Saint names were written all over campus last week. This was done during perhaps the busiest week of spring term. Many events took place this week on the Quad. The Genocide Awareness Project came to the quad, drawing a large number of people. The "Snow in the Quad" (put on by the Protestant apparel designer CIVIL) came to set up the next day. The Relay for Life event happened at night on the quad, which meant hundreds of students were walking by Saint names nonstop all night long. We also used chalk to advertise Mass times. Lots of exposure for the Church!

Here are two videos documenting this event:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yaAM5IpLqU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amsW6p13ofE

The Newman Center had a booth set up inside the Memorial Union building with a "Find your Saint" computer set up. Some non-Catholics came by to find their Saints. Other Catholics who haven't been to Church for a while saw their confirmation Saint name on the ground. Other Catholics got a lot of joy to see the names and to see Christ's presence in a tangible form on campus. And some others were annoyed at the audacity of these students.

We are trying to get more exposure to this project, so if you'd like to link to this video, please do! We'd like to see others get this idea, and maybe do it at their campus, to remind wayward Catholics of their roots and to show a strong presence of Faith! The response we've gotten from people around the community has been amazing, and the priests loved it!

One more thing to note... we got permission from the Memorial Union (the student union on campus) as well as the Church before doing this.
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Thursday, May 24, 2007
Religious Communities that Accept Online Prayer Requests

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Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Bishop Appointment: Prendergast

The Holy Father appointed Archbishop Terrence Thomas Prendergast S.J. of Halifax, Canada, as metropolitan archbishop of Ottawa (area 5,818, population 859,000, Catholics 410,635, priests 239, permanent deacons 67, religious 867), Canada. He succeeds Archbishop Marcel Andre J. Gervais, whose resignation from the pastoral care of the same archdiocese, the Holy Father accepted, upon having reached the age limit.

I do not know how Traditional Archbishop Prendergast is. Does anyone know anything about Archbishop Prendergast?

Photo Source: Archdiocese of Toronto
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Monday, May 21, 2007
Traditional Catholic Youth in France

The New Liturgical Movement offers this stunning photograph and several other ones of Traditional Catholic youth in France.
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Updates with Amnesty International

It appears that Amnesty International may have adopted an overall pro-abortion stance. For this and other updates see my main post: Amnesty International and Abortion.

Below is an email that I found on the blog Kyrie Eleison. It is certainly time for us to sever our membership with Amnesty International.

To: All those who signed the petition asking Amnesty International not to take a stand on decriminalizing abortion and pushing governments to allow access in certain circumstances.

From: Rachel MacNair, Vice-President, Consistent Life

The petition was hand-delivered to the hands of each member of the Board of Directors of the U. S. chapter of Amnesty International on March 23, 2007.

I am sorry to report that AI has indeed decided to take this step. You can get more information at http://www.consistent-life.org/ai.html and a good editorial on this at http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=719.

The decision was made despite polling of members in the UK that went against it, despite a vote of US members the results of which were never reported, and included explicit censorship of someone wishing to leaflet at the U.S. national conference. Those of us AI supporters who are heartsick about this no longer have a voice, inasmuch as it can be said we ever did.

We encourage all US members of AI to telephone them at (212) 807-8400 and ask for the membership department. We have been told that they are keeping track of what this abortion policy decision does to their membership; they anticipate that losses may be offset by gains, so knowing of losses is important.

We also suggest the following organizations for those who wish to re-direct their human-rights donation budget:

Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International (TASSC)
4121 Harewood Road NE ~ Suite B
Washington, DC 20017
Phone: (202) 529-2991
www.tassc.org
info@tassc.org

National Religious Campaign Against Torture
c/o CCTPP
4500 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20016
Phone: (202) 885-8648
www.nrcat.org
campaign@nrcat.org

Human Rights First
333 Seventh Avenue, 13th Floor
New York, NY 10001-5108
Phone: (212) 845 5200
www.humanrightsfirst.org/
feedback@humanrightsfirst.org

Friends Committee on National Legislation (Issues of Torture and Civil Liberties)
245 Second St., NE
Washington DC 20002-5795

It would be good to include a note to let these groups know that they are getting funds re-directed from AI and why, to make it less likely that they will move in a pro-abortion direction in the future.

Student groups who no longer wish to affiliate with AI but would like to continue their good work might consider setting themselves up as independent organizations, and using informational research from AI along with other human rights groups in order to continue acting and educating on these important issues.
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Sunday, May 20, 2007
LibraryThing

I must thank DilexitPrior from Letters From a Young Catholic for directing me to LibraryThing. Using the ISBN, title, author, etc you can catalogue all of your books rather quickly! This is a great website! I am spending my free time this evening by cataloging all of mine.
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St. Paul of the Cross on Anger

"When you feel the assaults of passion and anger, then is the time to be silent as Jesus was silent in the midst of His ignominies and sufferings" (St. Paul of the Cross)

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Advice for Future Articles


 This post will be linked to from the article Suggestions/Comments, which is listed in the sidebar. I started this post in order to create a list of possible future articles on this blog. I don't have time to write some articles immediately due to time constraints, but I want to create a list of suggestions. Just leave your suggestions in the comment box, and I will add them to the list. When the article has been written, I will link to it from this post.
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Address of Cardinal Hoyos to CELAM

As most Catholics should know, the Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, recently visited Brazil and offered Holy Mass for the start of the 5th general Conference of Latin American and Caribbean bishops (CELAM). At the CELAM on May 16, 2007, Cardinal Castrillón Hoyos, President of the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei gave the following address. Dear and Venerable Brothers, I allow myself to present a brief information on the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei and on the state of the pastoral reality which the Holy Father has placed under its competence. This Commission was created by the Servant of God John Paul II in 1988, when a notable group of priests, religious, and faithful, who had made manifest their discontent with the Conciliar liturgical reform and who had congregated themselves under the leadership of French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, separated themselves from him because they were not in agreement with the schismatic action of the ordination of Bishops without the appropriate pontifical mandate. They preferred, therefore, to stay in full union with the Church. The Holy Father, by way of the Motu Proprio Ecclesia Dei Adflicta, entrusted the pastoral care of these Traditionalist faithful to this Commission. Nowadays, the activity of the Commission is not limited to the service of those faithful who, at that time, wished to remain in full communion with the Church, nor to the efforts made to put an end to the painful schismatic situation and to attain the return of these brothers of the Saint Pius X fraternity to full communion. By the will of the Holy Father, this Dicastery extends its service, moreover, to satisfy the just aspirations of those who, due to a particular sensibility, and not having kept links to the above-mentioned groups, wish to keep alive the ancient Latin Liturgy in the celebration of the Eucharist and of the other Sacraments. Undoubtedly, the most important effort, which concerns the entire Church, is the search for an end to the schismatic action and to rebuild the full communion, without ambiguities. The Holy Father, who was for some years a member of this Commission, wishes it to become an organ of the Holy See with the proper and distinct end of preserving and maintaining the worth of the Traditional Latin Liturgy. Yet it must be said with all clarity that it is not a turning back, a return to the time before the 1970 reform. It is, instead, a generous offer of the Vicar of Christ who, as an expression of his pastoral will, wishes to put at the disposal of the whole Church all the treasures of the Latin Liturgy which for centuries has nourished the spiritual life of so many generations of Catholic faithful.The Holy Father wishes to preserve the immense spiritual, cultural, and aesthetic treasures linked to the Ancient Liturgy. The retrieval of this wealth is linked to the no less precious one of the current Liturgy of the Church. For these reasons, the Holy Father has the intention of extending to the entire Latin Church the possibility of celebrating Holy Mass and the Sacraments according to the liturgical books promulgated by John XXIII in 1962. There is today a new and renewed interest for this liturgy, which has never been abolished and which, as we have said, is considered a treasure, and also for this reason [the interest] the Holy Father believes that the time has come to ease, as the first Cardinalatial Commission of 1986 had wished to do, the access to this liturgy, making it an extraordinary form of the one Roman Rite. There are good experiences of communities of religious or apostolic life recently erected by the Holy See which celebrate this liturgy in peace and serenity. Groups of faithful who attend these celebrations with joy and gratitude assemble around them. The most recent establishments are the Institute of Saint Philip Neri, in Berlin, which functions as an Oratory, and which is also present, and well received, in the Diocese of Trier; the Institute of the Good Shepherd, of Bordeaux, which gathers together priests, seminarians, and faithful, some of them from the Fraternity of Saint Pius X. The proceedings for the recognition of a contemplative community, the Oasis of Jesus Priest, of Barcelona, are well advanced. In Latin America, as is well known, we must thank the Lord for the return of a whole diocese, that of Campos, Lefebvrian in the past, which now, after five years, presents good fruits. It was a peaceful return and the faithful who have enrolled themselves in the Apostolic Administration are glad to be able to live in peace in their parochial communities; furthermore, in effect, some Brazilian dioceses have made contacts with the Campos Apostolic Administration, which has placed priests at their disposal for the pastoral care of the Traditionalist faithful in their local churches. The Holy Father's project has been partly proved in Campos, where the peaceful cohabitation of the forms of the only Roman Rite in the Church is a beautiful reality. We have the hope that this model will yield good fruits, also in other places of the Church where Catholic faithful with diverse liturgical sensibilities live together. And we hope, furthermore, that this way of living together will also attract those Traditionalists which still remain far away. The current members of the Commission are Cardinals Julián Herranz, Jean-Pierre Ricard, William Joseph Levada, Antonio Cañizares, and Franc Rodé. Its consultants are the Undersecretaries of some Dicasteries. Several communities spread throughout the world have been up to now under Ecclesia Dei. 300 priests, 79 religious men, 300 religious women, 200 seminarians, and several hundreds of thousands of faithful. The interest of the young curiously increases in France, the United States, Brazil, Italy, Scandinavia, Australia, and China. At the moment of its return, 50 priests, around 50 seminarians, 100 religious women, and 25,000 faithful came from Campos. Today, the group of the Lefebvrians includes 4 Bishops who were ordained by Mons. Lefebvre, 500 priests, and 600,000 faithful. Several contemplative monasteries, and some male and female religious groups have joined the group, which has parishes (they call them priories), seminaries, and associations. They are present in 26 countries. Let us ask the Lord that this project of the Holy Father may soon be accomplished for the unity of the Church. Translation from the blog of Rorate Caeli.
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Saturday, May 19, 2007
Blogging Break

I will not be posting much this week. I have finally reached a new point in my life. Next week I will graduate from my current school, and I am honored to be the Valedictorian. Therefore, I will be giving the Valedictory Address and I am spending time writing it. Tuesday through Thursday I am also on a spiritual retreat and will not have access to the Internet. I am excited as the date for starting seminary is slowly advancing.

Consequently, I will not be able to blog very frequently during this week. I'm sure that you, my readers, understand. Thanks.
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