Between finishing up end-of-the-month work, teaching Latin class, getting ready for the soup dinner, shoveling snow, and recovering from shoveling snow, I haven’t managed to post anything here for about a week. Today isn’t any better, so I’ll just post this announcement about the soup dinner at St. Rose on Sunday, from 11-2:30. We’re having 5 different kinds of soup, plus cream-turkey sandwiches, desserts, and drinks. Further details at that link.
We’ve also got a pretty excellent raffle going, with a grand prize of a $200 gift certificate from the Butcher Block, and several other prizes of gift cards from local businesses. Tickets will be available at the dinner for $1 each or 6 for $5.
Well, now the holidays are over and schedules are getting back somewhat to normal, it’s time to start having fundraising dinners at St. Rose again! The first one this year is this coming Sunday, the 24th, from 11-2:30. Come for the 11:00 High Mass and stay for lunch! We’ll be serving pulled-pork sandwiches (perhaps pulled by yours truly), green beans, corn, mashed potatoes, dessert, etc. More information at the link above.
Also, we’re having a couple raffles. One is a 50/50, and the other will give away a night’s stay for two at Stoney Creek Inn, plus some gift baskets. So I’m going to do what I did last year: I will buy a raffle ticket for the first ten people who leave a comment on this post. Just be sure to say which raffle you want me to enter for you.
Whaddya know. I’ve had his name for almost 40 years, and I didn’t even know Moses’s brother Aaron from the Old Testament was a saint. It turns out today is his feast day. I guess it’s a minor one, though; he doesn’t even rate a commemoration in my missal. (On the other hand, my middle name happens to belong to the guy who taught Jesus how to use a hammer, so it balances out.)
Many bloggers take it easy on Friday by offering lists of links, so who am I to argue? Here are some interesting Church-related things I’ve come across lately:
One thing Catholics and other pro-lifers hear a lot is that we’re all negative, no positive; that we only care about stopping abortion but don’t offer any solutions about what to do with the babies. Of course, that’s not true. The Church and other pro-life organizations run all sorts of pregnancy crisis centers, adoption agencies, and so on; but those things don’t get the press that the political stuff does. This video is a nice (non-political) reminder of the positive work that is always going on without fanfare—that always has gone on.
It’s funny how sometimes you find yourself encountering the same thought or conversation from different sources all at once. I’ve found myself talking to a few different people lately about Catholic education and how dismal our generation’s was, and then I ran across this podcast called “Catholic Traitors” by Michael Voris of St. Michael Media. (It was originally a video, but the podcast is free.) If you went to Catholic school or CCD/PSR/Catechism classes in the US in the past 40 years or so, you’ll probably find yourself nodding along with him in several places. It’s 45 minutes long, so for those who don’t have time to listen right now, here are a few money quotes and my comments.
By the time the 1970s dawned, religion classes had been replaced by Arts and Crafts.
We had some new people at the 8:00 Mass this Sunday, and I discovered afterward that we’re not doing a very good job of helping newbies get started and follow along. After you’ve been going a while, it’s easy to forget how confusing it was the first time, but it doesn’t have to be that way if people are helped a little. So for people who are thinking about joining us at St. Rose, here’s a step-by-step guide that I hope will prevent some confusion.
Like I mentioned a week or so ago, there was a lot going on at St. Rose in the last few days of Lent, leading up to Easter. I couldn’t make it to the Maundy Thursday Mass, unfortunately, but I was able to go to the Good Friday liturgy and Easter Vigil Saturday night. Both were long, but definitely worth the effort.
I found a place that I hoped would be obscure, over on one side, in the back, and went to it without genuflecting, and knelt down. As I knelt, the first thing I noticed was a young girl, very pretty too, perhaps fifteen or sixteen, kneeling straight up and praying quite seriously. I was very much impressed to see that someone who was young and beautiful could with such simplicity make prayer the real and serious and principal reason for going to church. She was clearly kneeling that way because she meant it, not in order to show off, and she was praying with an absorption which, though not the deep recollection of a saint, was serious enough to show that she was not thinking at all about the other people who were there.
What a revelation it was, to discover so many ordinary people in a place together, more conscious of God than of one another: not there to show off their hats or their clothes, but to pray, or at least to fulfill a religious obligation, not a human one.
photo from flickr.com
That’s Thomas Merton writing about the first time he went to Mass at about the age of 20. It reminded me quite a bit of my first Latin Mass. He wasn’t Catholic at that point, and I wasn’t a very good one, but I too remember sitting in the last pew and being impressed by the silence, the seriousness, and the reverence that people showed.
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