Humor

Catholic Church leaders say a phony priest has been making the rounds in Northern California, going into people’s homes, celebrating mass and possibly asking for money.

The Sacramento Diocese says Javier Posada is pretending to be someone he’s not—a Roman Catholic priest or bishop. He invites himself into homes of the faithful under false pretenses and celebrates mass. Source

This fake priest must not be very smart. Hitting up Catholics for money will likely give you a nice collection of dollar bills.

The Ironic Catholics as a series of It’s cold in the old Church tonight” jokes to which I add:

• Multiple people chipped fingernails reaching into the frozen Holy Water font.
• It is reported that in some parishes more people actually made it to the end of Mass as the church was warmer than braving the cold out in the parking lot.
• Inculturation lead to statues being dressed in snow parkas to fit in including mittens for the Infant Jesus Of Prague statue.
• Coffee and donuts were cancelled in the Parish Hall in favor of Hot Chocolate and donuts Flambé.
• The sound of twigs snapping turns out to be people’s fronzen joints at they make the Sign of the Cross and kneel.

How do you tell parody from reality. Some days it is really hard to tell such as the case of this actual product.

Whether you have trouble finding good, reliable organists (or other musicians), have no instrument or simply want good music available for outreach, the Hymnal Plus is the solution. As well as churches, the Hymnal Plus is widely used by Schools and Colleges, Chaplaincies in the Armed Forces, Prisons and Hospitals, Retirement Homes, Retreat Centres, Christian Holiday Centres, Cruise Liners, Crematoriums and private individuals – all of whom find the Hymnal Plus provides their complete worship music needs.

As well as providing a complete worship music solution, the Hymnal Plus can also be used to fill in when the regular musician(s) can’t make it. Use it for weddings, funerals and outreach. It’s ready to play any time, anywhere.

The HT–300 features an advanced, high quality sound generator, capable of reproducing up to 124 notes simultaneously. This processing power allows the HT–300 to create pipe organ sounds the right way, by layering individual pipe stops together – just like an expensive electronic church organ does. The end result is far more authentic than the usual simplistic approach found in other products and ordinary midi file players.

Hat tip Ironic Catholic

When they add a module for badly played folk music it will be a real hit in Catholic parishes. Getting the liturgical acoustic guitar sound down won’t take much effort. Plus considering it can hold 7400 hymns that is overkill for the small number of Haugen/Daas/Joncas hymns actually played each week at Mass.

Plus maybe they can get the robot musicians from the Vincent Price film The Abominable Dr. Phibes

I wonder about developing a Catholic hymnal jukebox app where people at Mass could select the hymns to be played? Or even better one that takes micro-transactions of 25¢ taken to prevent certain hymns from being played. Especially since I suspect that people would select the common fare because that is just what they are use to. We have such a rich tradition of sacred music and each week we get the Chinet equivalent.

Still I guess I prefer actual humans signing “Here I am Lord” for the millionth time than the HT–300 belting out an actual piece of sacred music written before 1970.

From Acts Of The Apostasy  If Traffic Reporters Covered Communion Lines

Funny stuff!

Sometimes I half-expect that somebody is going to trip over my feet when I kneel down for Communion.  Or maybe that is just buying into the propaganda that critics of kneeling for Communion spread.

What I am also nervous about is coming up quickly after receiving Communion and hitting the Ciborium on the way up. A problem Communion rails don’t have.

Now we could also have a traffic report at the end of Mass (or even before the end) as people stream out to get to their cars and out of there. Kind of a Eucharistic dine-and-dash.

Eye of the Tiber hilarious as usual:

Prototype clergydroid Fr. SRT4–11392 celebrating its first wedding ceremony.

Vatican––The Vatican has confirmed reports today that an agreement has been reached with the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) to begin development of what they are calling “Clergydroids.” The news comes as relief to many seminary directors around the world that have seen their numbers plummet in the past few decades. “With so little priests and so many Catholics, this is going to help assure that every parish not only has a pastor of their own, but also an associate pastor,” Father Tobi Riland told the press earlier this morning. “I  have had the pleasure of having a prototype absolve me of my sins. I’ll tell you one thing…he didn’t…excuse me, it didn’t forget the words of absolution!” One Vatican official, Monsignor Phillip Rudolph, who spearheaded the negotiations, told EOTT that “when you see those big, blue glowing eyes peering through the confessional grill at you, it feels as though they’re burning right through you. Seriously though…they freaking burn. Look at this burn mark on my throat. It’s a malfunction in the prototype that the IFR promise to resolve before their final launch next May.” Another issue with of the clergydroid prototype Fr. SRT4–11392 includes a recent frying of some of its mechanisms and kinematics after an altar boy attempted to pour water on the clergydroid’s titanium fingers. Witnesses say that Fr. SRT4–11392′s final words before catching fire were, “Lord, wash away my iniqui…iniqui…iniqui…iniqui. Oh, no…just when I was learning to love.”

Source

Stories involving robots that have obtained intelligence have been SF staples over the years. As pure conjecture what would happen if an artificial creature was actually sentient? Then such a creature could come to know God. This could cause problems though (besides Baptism and having to be soaked in rice afterwards to avoid system failure.). I can easily imagine a Robot Ordination Conference upset that the Catholic Church will not ordain them. The horror of inequality and making robots second class citizens in the Church. Robots citing St. Paul There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” while perhaps wearing pant suits. No doubt we would have all the sympathetic story from the media about robots desiring ordination and the injustice of it all. Especially after the Episcopalian Priestbots.

While we are conjecturing about such Priestbots, how about programming them with the three laws ala Asimov.

The first law would obviously have to be “Say the black, do the red.”

Hey maybe just one law would be enough.

In reality though I am extremely skeptical of an artificial intelligence leading to actual sentience. Instead of AI I much prefer SF writer Mike Flynn’s term Artificial Stupidity (AS) as much more accurate term regarding programming of machines.

WIth the LCWR conference recently over some random thoughts have occurred to me.

I would really like to see Dana Carvey do a take on their members.

Kind of a “Dissident Church Lady”

… and of course the punchline would be “Could it be Sartain!”

Besides he could easily use his old Church Lady outfit for a dissent nun portrayal.

Plus as the Church Lady he use to do the “superior dance” which could easily become the “Mother Superior dance.”