Humor

Turkey: Protesters hold massive anti-pope rally

Well that is the last straw. First they have been holding protests against the visit of Pope Benedict, now they are holding rallies for anti-popes. I wonder which anti-pope they were rallying for. Perhaps Pope Michael the 1st who lives in Kansas.

I also just realized another reason why Jesus did not choose women to be ordained. Since sooner or later we would have ended up with an Auntie-Pope.

For a serious and in depth roundup of the Pope’s impending trip to Turkey see Christopher’s list of stories.

Here is a funny piece Abbott & Costello Learn Hebrew based on the classic Whose on first skit.

I once did a similar post along these lines Abbott and Costello go to Sunday School

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — The pastor at Anchorage First Free Methodist Church was mystified. Why was the activist group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals chastising him? No animals are harmed in the church’s holiday nativity display. In fact, animals aren’t used at all.

People, however, do dress the parts – Mary, Joseph, the wise men, etc. The volunteers stand shivering at a manger on the church lawn in a silent tribute to Christmas.

The Rev. Jason Armstrong was confused by an e-mail this week from PETA, which admonished him for subjecting animals "to cruel treatment and danger," by forcing them into roles in the church’s annual manger scene.

"We’ve never had live animals, so I just figured this was some spam thing," Armstrong said. "It’s rough enough on us people standing out there in the cold. So we’re definitely not using animals."

Jackie Vergerio, PETA’s captive animals in entertainment specialist, said her organization tracks churches nationwide that use real animals in "living nativity scenes."

Well that would be a rather strange bullet to have in your resume.

Seems the confusion started with the church’s choice of phrase. PETA flagged Free Methodist’s display as a "living nativity," and indeed, that’s how the church describes it on its Web site.

To PETA, that means animals.

Wow if this mistake doesn’t say everything about PETA nothing does. Exactly how dangerous is it for an animal to get a gig at a Nativity scene in the first place? Is their a high incidence of being crushed by a Creshe or accidents involving swaddling clothes? Where does the cruel part come in? Perhaps it is forcing animals to act and not getting paid to scale. Are they giving them their motivations first before thrusting them on stage. Are Cows and sheep always getting type-cast as cows and sheep?

Via Diogenes:

The home-page of America Magazine ("essential reading for thinking Catholics") has this notice up:

Note from Webmaster: Someone is using our domain name, americamagazine.org, as the return address for spam advertising HoodiaLife, a diet pill. This is NOT being sent by us. This deception is known as "spoofing" — the use of false "From:" addresses to make a message appear to be from a legitimate sender. We have complained to the FTC.

Yes. Now with regard to the spoofing that’s been going on for the past forty years, how do the rest of us get in contact with the FTC?

Spoofing – now that is an excellent term to describe organizations and media that describe themselves as Catholic while having various degrees of separation from authentic magisterial teaching. Just try to read the mission statements of most Catholic universities without having the word spoofing come to you now.

In computing there is a technique known as phishing that allows people to fraudulently acquire information by pretending they are something they are not. They do this via email or websites and on websites they make use of site redirection in a hidden frame to make you think you are on a legitimate site when you are not. Newer browsers have phishing filters to warn you when a site is not what it appears to be. It would be great to have a magisterial phishing detection toolbar built into your browser to warn you about rad trad and progressive sites. "Warning this site contains information contrary to the magisterium of the Catholic Church" Now with experience most people do develop a Catholic phishing filter on their own. For myself I know it normally does not take long to determine the Catholic spoofing factor of a website often by their links. But some sites are rather crafty concerning their links so it would be nice to have in a Catholic phishing filter a buzzword algorithm that gives you a buzzword index which can be used to determine the character of a site. High uses of words like prophetic, dialogue, male hierarchal, sexual identity could easily be indexed to give you a clue. Of course sites like Catholic Culture have been doing good site reviews for years with detailed information that could be easily used as a database to get started with in a Catholic phishing filter.

Guy Selvester at Shouts in the Piazza brilliantly captions this photo with.

Pssssst! Benedict, what did you get for number 36?

-Number 36? That answer was "Apostolic Succession".

Oh…I didn’t get that.

By The Universe: Scores of Catholics who pay thousands of pounds a year to watch cable television are frustrated at being denied access to the dedicated Catholic channel EWTN.

And it is looking increasingly unlikely that communications giant ntl:Telewest has any plans to resume negotiations aimed at broadcasting the network. This may mean many Catholics leaving cable for Sky, which shows the free-to-view channel, according to EWTN’s European manager Ian Murray.

Mr Murray has called on Catholic viewers to make one final attempt to change ntl:Telewest’s mind.

“As many people as possible should bombard the company with requests for it to show EWTN,” he said.

Andy Tollock, head of St Claire Media, which broadcasts the American-based channel, said: “We receive frequent requests from cable viewers for EWTN to be broadcast on ntl:Telewest but nothing so far has happened from them.

“I have ntl:Telewest myself and it has a large number of channels, including the pay-for-view God Channel, so one presumes the problem is not a restricted number of channel bands available.”

Pay-for-view God Channel? Shouldn’t that be Pray-for-view? Some of course do try to channel God or say make me a channel of your peace, but the God Channel just seems more like a parody idea than an actual name. This channel though is actually not pay-per-view, they charge a 5 pound premium per month for access. Checking up on this channel I found that they started off with a really dumb idea for Billboard advertisements with "God the Father, God the Son and god the tv channel." Again more like parody then an actual Christian cable television ad campaign.

Now they have a new ad campaign for their future availability in the U.S. with "GOD is coming to AMERICA." Apparently God is now writing press releases for them in this long rambling piece.

“And I shall light a TORCH, a TORCH, a literal TORCH of the fire of My saints of America – a torch that shall set ablaze the world, for it is time to look OUT America, beyond your cities, beyond your towns. Look out, Look OUT, America, for the nations have need of you. Rise up from the bondage of complacency, for the East cries out to you and the North travails and the South calls to you in the spirit. And so My fire shall fall and from the East Coast to the West and from the West across the seas it shall go, and from the North it shall rise, north, north even to Russia, it shall burn, and to the South – the South, a flame of fire shall rise."

It seems by the quality of this writing that God is either suffering writers block since the completion of the New Testament or somebody else wrote it. Though I have heard that he hired a Holy Ghost writer for the Bible in the first place.

The Pope holds on for dear life as his driver decides to test out the capabilities of the Papal Jeep.

Though I guess the Pope’s Fiat goes well with Mary’s Fiat.

THE POPE, who is this week meeting the Archbishop of Canterbury, is drawing up plans to welcome disaffected Anglicans into the Roman Catholic Church.

Pope Benedict XVI is keen to reach out to conservative Anglicans who have been antagonised by their church’s stance on women priests and homosexuality. Senior Vatican figures are understood to have drawn up a dossier on the most effective means of attracting disenchanted Anglicans.

The recruitment drive is a potential embarrassment for Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who is travelling to Italy for his meeting with the Pope.

It is understood that Fr Joseph Augustine di Noia, undersecretary of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, the most powerful of the Vatican’s departments, has led a team analysing the current schism in the Anglican world.

…In America, some of the 2.5m Anglicans have already left the church and become Catholics. In some cases, entire parishes have “defected”, but they have been allowed to continue with some of their Anglican traditions and prayers.

John Myers, the Archbishop of Newark, New Jersey, who has been involved in supporting former Anglicans who have converted to Catholicism, has been helping di Noia with his recruitment dossier. He travelled to Rome last month to suggest ways of appealing to Anglicans.

The Pope’s enthusiasm for bringing traditional Anglicans into the fold was expressed powerfully three years ago when as Cardinal Ratzinger he sent greetings to a group of conservative churchmen meeting in Texas in protest at the election of Robinson.

The way the article is framed this seems rather dubious. As if they was planning some specific recruitment drive aimed at conservative Anglicans. For one thing what can the Vatican do compared to what the Anglican communion isn’t already doing to repel conservative Anglicans?

There could be some things in the works though. The website for The Pastoral Provision, the process to bring in Anglican priests into the priesthood, has recently been spruced up. There could also be an effort to make Anglican Use parishes more available – though this is just conjecture. Any effort to heal the schism is very unlikely since the split has been widening at a pace to make the Grand Canyon seem like a crack in the sidewalk by comparison. Any efforts at this will primarily be done at the individual and the rare case a whole parish level. Diogneses has a good post on this subject.

Now if there was an actual campaign to attract disaffected Catholics – what would it look like? A campaign could be the reverse of this one in a Simpson’s episode.

Though "Welcome pissed-off Anglicans" just doesn’t have the desired ring to it.

Maybe something more like this.

Some are under the impression that the Papal States have been eliminated. Well here is a collection of Papal States to show they are wrong.

Reflective

Thirsty

Punkish

Appreciative

Amused

Suspicious

Exasperated

Pleading

Cool

Somber

Prayerful

Joyful

Chillin’

Ha!