Fr. Finigan has a list of Things that are not going to happen in 2007. I for my part will work to ensure his prognostications are perfect.
Fr Tim Finegan links to a site that sells the Pope’s Cologne.
I thought the Pope’s Cologne was one of B16’s German cathedral cities, but it seems a California perfumier has resurrected a formula for a papal perfume. This adds a whole new dimension to ‘smells and bells’. I wonder if there is a special way to apply the stuff. Ring a little bell, dip your finger in the cologne, then make the sign of the cross on each wrist and behind your ears?
With the Italian heat and all those robes, I’m sure the body odor factor gets pretty high in the Vatican. If the cologne sells well maybe they will come out with a whole range of high class men’s toiletries. I can see fast paced TV ads featuring handsome seminarians splashing on the after shave. Will there be shower gel, underarm spray, shaving cream and a new range of razors patterned after the Swiss guards’ halberd?
Speaking of the odor of sanctity, I recently bought a new rosary supposedly made from rose petals. I think it has been soaked in rose oil and my study now smells heavily of cheap perfume.
I’m only a convert. Can someone tell me whether I am supposed to:
a.) like this, and thank the Lord that I now belong to a religion that is not ashamed of the physical aspects of worship.
b.) put up with it as a penance
c.) soak the thing in bleach to get rid of the smell
d.) not tell anyone, so they think when they enter my study it is permeated with the odor of sanctity and they are in the presence of a living saint.
Well I would invoke the Catholic both/and and pick a, b, and d.
Husbands never try this one at home. Never tell your wife they smell like the pope no matter how close her perfume is to the Pope’s Cologne.
What It Includes
Each Catholic-opoly game includes the following:
* Game Board
– New board folds in half for easier
shipping and compact storage at home
* 28 Property Deeds
– with historical facts about the world-wide locations and
scriptures
related to Biblical
locations on the back
* 15 Faith cards –
help you move around the board with
resulting rewards and penalties and scriptures to read as you go.
* 15 Community Service cards
– with financial rewards and penalties and scriptures to read.
* 1 Deck of Catholic-opoly money
* Bank money organizer tray
* 6 Player pieces: angel,
ark, chalice, donkey,dove, fish
* Churches and cathedrals
* Dice
*
Instructions
Why This Catholic Game Is Ideal for Fun and
Learning at Home and Church
–
Catholic-opoly is a Catholic game that brings families together in a
fun, interactive setting. Parents and children can enjoy wholesome,
engaging entertainment while learning about the history and growth
of the Catholic church. It is an ideal family activity or an
enjoyable Catholic game to play at other times. Create involvement together
using Catholic-opoly at other activities at church as well. There
are a variety of Catholic game activities and versions of this game that
will make it suitable for a wide variety of occasions.
No this isn’t one of my parodies, but an actual game available at catholic-opoly.com. My board game parody was called Episcopacy.
Considering the premise of the game Catholic-opoly� of building new Churches and Cathedrals to spread the faith, there are many diocese that would just plain suck at this game. A more real version of the game would have you instead of building new churches would have you consolidating them instead and Community Service cards would include sit-ins and protests of church closings.
Via Dawn Eden is Saint Kansas’ very funny Christmas carol parody.
With all the media hype among hopeful Democrats concerning the extreme pro-abortion Senator you do wonder about he parallels with Democrats almost throwing down palm leaves as he enters Washington. I can also see a Clinton machine – King Herod parallel also. The Clinton machine won’t be ordering a massacre of innocents two years and under (9 months in under is fine with them though), but I have a feeling they will be employing political strategies that will make King Herod seem like a political neophyte.
Chicago police describe their investigators as "three wise men" on the case who are hoping to find the pranksters who stole 32 baby Jesus figures and dumped them in someone’s front yard.
Rev. Marc Pasciak counted "32 plastic babies" and nothing else. No wise men, no Mary — just the Jesus babies vanishing from neighborhoods around Midway Airport.
"Talk about a Grinch," Pasciak said.
A woman wanting to remain anonymous brought the Jesus babies to Saint Symphorosa church after finding them in her yard.
"They were lying in her yard, arranged smallest to largest," said Pasciak. "It kind of scared her at first."
Probably the work of militant Catholic Adventists who don’t want the baby Jesus displayed until Christmas. Though why 32 and not 33 which would be much more symbolic
It is kind of funny to think about how they are going to get returned to their original owners. Will they have to go to the police station and pick theirs out from a lineup of Baby Jesus’s?
That’s the one officer – about 13 inches in swaddling clothes.
A reader sent me the following story.
Vatican City, 18 Dec. (AKI) – The Vatican could soon have a top football team, the Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, has said. "I am not ruling out that the Vatican could in the future have a soccer team of great value able to compete with (Italian top Serie A league teams) Roma, Inter, Genoa and Sampdoria," Bertone, the Vatican’s equivalent of a prime minister said on Sunday. The cardinal, a staunch supporter of fallen Serie A giants Juventus – which was relegated to Serie B this season following a match-fixing scandal – is a football expert who used to comment soccer matches for a local television when he was archbishop of the port city of Genoa from 2003 until his appointment as secretary of state this year.
Bertone had already hinted a few weeks ago at the Vatican’s football ambitions.
"If, for example, we were to recruit Brazilian players from our pontifical universities we could set up a great team," Bertone was quoted as saying by Rome daily La Repubblica. The cardinal added that the Vatican could also discover young talents in parish teams saying that "in the 1990 World Cup I noticed that 42 players from different national teams originally came from parish recreation centres."
Bertone is not the only soccer enthusiast at the Vatican.
Another cardinal, Fiorenzo Angelini, a supporter of Serie A team Roma, is a commentator of premier league matches for Vatican Radio and Sat2000, the TV network of the Italian Bishops’ Conference (CEI).
This is a serious story as evidenced by this exclusive photo of Pope Benedict XVI trying out as goalkeeper.
* I first saw the photo at Shrine of the Holy Whapping with their own hilarious caption.
My reader suggests a name that team contest for the Vatican Soccer team.
Pope John Paul II previously set up a sports department at the Vatican with ""the very intention of making the Holy See’s solicitude felt in the world of sports". I did a previous post on this topic and include part of it here with some additions.
Here is the previous Holy Father doing his part.
This appears to be a Vatican department to help to help re-inject fundamental values of fairness, ethics, transparency and legality into sports as its stated aim. Now I think real Vatican sport teams would be cool.
Like the Vatican Cardinals.
Where all passes are Hail Marys. Since there is a college of Cardinals certainly they can have college football.
Now the Vatican must have some real good athletes because newspaper headlines are always using adjectives like, bash, attack, smash, flay, irk, assail, denounce, hurt to describe their actions (and this small sample was taken from headlines just this week).
Other possible sport team names are:
- Tiber Tigers
- Spanish Inquisition (nobody would ever expect them)
- Fighting Papists
- Milwaukee Brewing Monks
- Papal Bulls
- The Mighty Magisterium
- The Church Militants
- Crusaders
- Flying Cupertinos
- Curia Commandoes
- The Dye is Casteries
- Holy Seehawks
- Peter’s Bite – After all the Barque of Peter is not worse than it’s bite
I am sure you can come up with some great names of your own.
This picture is via Father Stephanos, O.S.B.
This is obviously a collector set of Franciscan nuns since they have not yet been take out of their packaging decreasing their retail value. You can tell though that these are faithful nuns because progressive ones would obviously be wrappedn in tinfoil.
Catholic League president Bill Donohue released these remarks today on the latest round of anti-Christmas incidents:
“Like most Jews, Olympic skater Sasha Cohen is not offended by Christmas carols. But that didn’t stop a government employee from trying to protect her. While Cohen was skating at a rink in Riverside, California, a high-school choir started singing ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman,’ immediately sending Michelle Baldwin into orbit. She summoned a cop and got him to institute a gag rule: he ordered the choir to stop singing. Baldwin maintained that because Cohen was Jewish, she would be upset by the carol. But she never bothered to ask the skater if she objected. As it turns out, Cohen couldn’t have cared less. As usual, those who say we must be careful not to offend non-Christians at Christmastime are the ones who object to Christmas—not those whom they falsely claim to represent.
“Like Baldwin, Sandra Byrne, principal of an elementary school in Delray Beach, Florida, has a need to show how inclusive she is. That’s why she has no Christmas tree, nativity scene or menorah in her office. Instead, her spot is adorned with teddy bears wearing sweaters. Moreover, only ‘winter parties’ and ‘winter celebrations’ are tolerated. ‘We’re very careful about this,’ she says. No doubt she is.
“Here’s another example of anti-Christmas fever. In a Detroit suburban school district, they’ve instituted a quota system on religious songs that can be sung at school concerts. That’s right, only 30 percent of the songs at Howell Public Schools can be religious. It’s not certain whether the choir director will be fined or imprisoned if a multicultural monitor finds that 31 percent of the songs are religious. We recommend incarceration.
“After Pope John Paul II visited Cuba in 1998, Castro made a good-faith gesture by allowing Cubans to celebrate Christmas again. Maybe we should hire Fidel to talk to these madmen.”
If only they had hired the singers from my last years parody and none of this would have happened.
PORTLAND, OR (Roto Reuters) A new children’s choir groups is getting lots of attention and bookings during the winter season. The Silent Night Seasonal Semi-Singers sidestep the problems inherent in a multi-cultural society and what has been called the "Christmas wars." Secularists are upset with the lyrics of explicitly Christian carols and Christians become upset when these carols are left out. To solve this problem Ms. Giesel of the the Glencoe school elementary choir decided instead of hymns to do hums. Students are gagged while performing to ensure no actual Christian carols are ever sung. The instrumental portions of traditional Christmas carols are slightly altered to ensure no one in the audience might attempt to sing along. Silent Night is sung just as intended – totally silent. To ensure fairness winter holiday songs are also hummed.
Parents at first were hesitant to endorse the idea until they found out how enthusiastic their kids were. Now even students with no musical talent can join the choir and hum along. The provided humnal makes it very easy for kids to learn songs since they do not have to memorize any lyrics. When the audience is invited to join in and hum along nobody ever feels bad or put down since they don’t know the words or only know the first refrain.
The idea is catching on in neighborhoods where kids bundle up and go around the neighborhood from door to door humming or what some have called humoling. People are thrilled to find hummers at their door humming along to slightly familiar tunes invoking the winter season. So if you see a group of humolers approaching your door this season then open your door to the joys of holiday humoling.
Pope Benedict XVI and Greece’s Orthodox Church Archbishop Christodoulos
race to complete their entry in the first annual East/West Icon and Calligraphy contest.
A tense moment occurred later during the first East/West Dance. The Holy Father asked Archbishop Christodoulos to follow his lead. The Archbishop declined though he said he would consider him first among equals.
