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Catholic Analysis has a post up on Fr. Solanus Casey of whom he compares to the Curé d’Ars for his lack of academic capabilities and he includes some of his quotes. His post reminded me of an article that included the following from Fr. Benedict Groeschel relating to Fr. Casey.

A Living Saint

Among those who recognized the simple holiness of the tall, bearded priest is Fr. Benedict Groeschel, C.F.R., director of the Office for Spiritual Development of the Archdiocese of New York. Fr. Groeschel was eighteen years old in 1950 and in formation at St. Felix Capuchin Novitiate in Huntington, Indiana, where Fr. Solanus lived at the time.

Fr. Groeschel recalled one warm evening that year when, unable to sleep, he slipped into the chapel to pray. "After a few minutes of kneeling in the dark, I realized that someone else was in there. A bit startled, I turned on the spotlight and there was Fr. Solanus, kneeling on the top step of the altar with his arms extended and his eyes riveted on the tabernacle. He was in his late seventies and yet he didn’t move a muscle. Although his eyes were open, he didn’t know I was there, and he didn’t seem to recognize that the light was on. He was a very humble man and he would have moved immediately if he knew that someone was watching him."

Fr. Groeschel could only conclude that the priest was in a kind of "ecstasy," a state of deep mystical prayer in which all his attention was absorbed in Christ. After a few minutes, feeling like an intruder, he turned the spotlight off and quietly left the chapel.

I believe I have heard Fr. Groeschel previously mention that Fr. Solanus would also play his violin in front of the Blessed Sacrament.

The latest book meme has been passed to my via
Dev Thakur at Against a dictatorship of relativism
.

Total number of books I’ve owned:
Not sure, but I expect that I would need to use an exponent to describe the number. Let us just say that God could have told Abraham that his descendents would be as numerous as amount of books that Jeff has owned.

Last book I bought:
Well the last haul contained Pope John Paul II’s Memory and Identity and Cardinal Ratzinger’s God and the World.

Last book I read:
Like some others I don’t confine myself to reading one book at a time, though I normally limit this to one book per room. Recently I finished reading Our Lady and the Church by Hugo Rahner, A Tour of the Summa by Msgr Glenn, Hail Holy Queen by Scott Hahn, St. Benedict and St. Therese by Dwight Longenecker, Worthy is the Lamb by Thomas J. Nash.

Five books that mean a lot to me:

Like most book lists this one will include the caveat of not including the Bible or the Catechism since they are assumed.

R.A. Salvatore series (including the Icewind Dale Trilogy) about the Drow Elf Drizzt Do’urden. I started reading this series before my conversion, but it sparked some questions for me. Drizzt grows up as part of what is an evil race and struggles against his birth right to reject evil and to do good by helping others. I found some of themes and especially the chapter introductions to be very Catholic in their understanding sometimes. I was drawn to characters such as Drizzt who displayed heroic virtue when at times it would have been easier for him to take an easy road and avoid problems his ethical understandings brought him. This made my ponder in my own life why I was attracted to characters such as these, though I wasn’t always doing the same in my own life.

Frank Sheed’s Theology and Sanity which is just an amazing book in its very lucid and easy to understand treatment of theology. A must read for all.

G.K Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man is the first book from him that I had read so it has a special place for me. He simply blew me away in that almost every paragraph made me pause and think. The view of history on a grand scale and his view of man made many things click for me. I was still on my way into the Church when I read this and after reading it I considered it almost criminal that before investigating the Catholic Church that I have never heard of him. Though it is understandable why a secular society would want to ignore his writings.

Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Series. My love of reading started with SF as a child really took when reading his books. The idea that human civilization could be guided by a group of elites who helped them especially appealed to me when I was still a raging liberal. Of course his propensities for puns didn’t turn me away either.

I declare a tie on this one between St. Teresa of Avila’s autobiography and St. Augustine’s Confessions St. Teresa’s common sense, her humor, and her striving for perfection have made a big impact on me. This book humanized saints for me more than any other. St. Augustine’s masterpiece spiritual biography also showed me that saints aren’t just some plastic thing on a dashboard. The following quote really spoke to me since I had spent most of my life as an atheist.

Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you. Created things kept me from you; yet if they had not been in you they would have not been at all. You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness. You breathed your fragrance on me; I drew in breath and now I pant for you. I have tasted you, now I hunger and thirst for more. You touched me, and I burned for your peace.

I will inflict or pass this one to Victor Lams, Zorak (Happy Birthday), Dave Armstrong, Tom at Disputations and Christopher Blosser.

From God and the World

Your motto as a bishop runs "co-worker of the truth". How did you come by this expression?

I am of course, as is only right, a keen reader of Holy Scripture, and I came upon this phrase, which somehow fascinated me right from the beginning, in the Third Letter of John. Its meaning is in the first instance rather limited. Whoever receives the messengers of the good news becomes thereafter a fellow worker of the truth. And by accepting the messengers he himself is already sharing in this work, in this world.

I must say that I felt very strongly within myself the crisis of the claim of truth during the decades of my teaching work as a professor. What I feared was that the way we use the idea of the truth of Christianity was sheer arrogance, yes, and even a lack of respect for others The question was how far may we still use it?

I have really thoroughly explored this question. In the end I could see that if we abandon the concept of truth, then we abandon our foundation. For it is characteristic of Christianity, from the beginning, that the Christian faith does not primarily transmit practices or observances, as is the case with many other religions, which consist above all in the observance of certain ritual rules.

Christianity makes its appearance with the claim to tell us something about God and the world and ourselves– something that is true and that enlightens us. On this basis I came to recognize that, in the crisis of an age in which we have have a great mass of communications about truth in natural science, but with respect to the questions essential for man we are sidelined into subjectivism, what we need above all is to seek anew for truth, with a new courage to recognize truth. In that way, this saying handed down from our origins, which I have chosen as my motto, defines something of the function of a priest and a theologian, to wit, that he should, in all humility, and knowing his own fallibility, seek to be a co-worker of the truth.

Jimmy Akin posts about the wonders of the iPod and its usefulness in playing back both music and audio books. As for myself I have not yet become an iPod people. I check around my bed before going to sleep to make sure no one had hidden an iPod anywhere about. Though I do fear being the last person without an iPod and having people pointing their finger at me and making that screeching noise. Well actually I do not have anything against the iPod which is a good player with the best navigation capabilities available. It is just that I need to be able to listen to asf files and I have already ripped 300 of my CDs to wma format. I record the Laura Ingraham, Hugh Hewitt, and Dennis Praeger show via an internet stream ripper that converts the internet broadcasts into asf files. Skipping over the commercials I can listen to a three hour show in considerably less than two hours while doing my work. I also download the Catholic Answers’ shows and convert them from their Real Audio format to mp3.

A commenter on Jimmy’s post mentioned an ftp site with a bunch of Catholic specific audio including many of EWTN’s shows in mp3 format. They also have Imitation of Christ in mp3 format.

Since I listen to a bunch of audio that has commercials in it I looked for and found a good software player that has a hotkey fast forward feature so that no matter what I am working on I can hit a simple key combination to advance through it. Jetaudio is really good for this and it will also play back mpeg video. I am really cheap so the majority of software I use is free. To show how cheap I am the stream rippers I have used have been in both Korean and Japanese and required some tinkering to get to work For the non geek For the less cheap non-geek there are programs available like Replay Radio. Like the SodakMonk I have been into digital audio for a fairly long time. Though I am glad I converted before the advent of Napster or I would of racked up even more sin in the way intellectual piracy. As it was I had to throw away about 500 cassette tapes that I had illegally recorded while at sea. Though I guess it was appropriate that I did mos of my pirating of music and software while at sea, Aarrr!

As part of my Rome Depot parody I did have a product that would be useful in this context.

iPope – Get connected and be not afraid.

Can anybody tell me the total number of seminarians for the Diocese of Los Angeles. I have had zero luck finding a current number via search engines and you would think it was a state secret on the diocesan web site. Other dioceses I looked at had the number of seminarians prominently displayed. I could only find the number for 1999 which was 63. Even a Tidings article which contained many statistics about priests and religious totally left out seminarians.

I have updated my Now with B16 post with more information and a new offer.

By the way Christopher’s Ratzinger Fan Club page is finally back up after the massive server hit he had and he has a new post up.

Here is an interesting post by an Episcopal priest on the Pope’s funeral.

Another moment that really impressed me was the Litany Of The Saints at the very end of the mass. In the litany a long list of saints was read out with the crowd responding in Latin “Pray For Us.” The tune was very beautiful and the cantor exquisite and the melodic response of thousands of voices, “Pray For Us” seemed to me to distill the longing of the human heart to the purest essence. Again the setting made something familiar come to life.

The cult of saints is one of the elements in Roman Catholic religion with which Protestants are most uncomfortable. The practice of seeking the intercession of the saints surely can lead to misunderstandings that border on the worst kind of magical religion and come very near to polytheism. This is not the official theology. I am catholic minded enough to accept the official theology which is that seeking the intercession of the saints is nothing more than asking friends to pray for us. It is just that these friends happen to be on the other side of death praising God in the church triumphant. I have enough Reformation antibodies in my theological blood stream to be allergic to the practice and such litanies are not part of my personal piety. They make me uncomfortable. Though when the priest that sponsored for ordination died I found myself without thinking asking him to intercede for me that I might be as faithful as he was. But what does this mean? Is there not a danger of losing track of Jesus Christ as the one and only mediator?

As this long list of saints was being read off in St. Peter’s square to the millions gathered there and the millions watching, each well known name followed by the deeply echoing petition, “Pray For Us,” the penny dropped for me that these people being mentioned whose prayers were being beseeched with great feeling were people whose names and histories were intimately known. Many of them had been martyred for the faith in Rome and were buried beneath the feet of the crowd. They were real people whose lives of holiness were well known who left friends and companions behind, who by their courage and witness had kept the faith alive in their time. Oh, Perpetua, Felicitas, Caspar, Vincentia and on and on. I wish I could call to mind all the names. But it was not a plea for magical people with magical powers to perform some wonder unrelated to our own relationship to Christ. It was a plea to friends known for their faithfulness, for their lives of holiness and costly sacrifice, friends not absent but nearby, underfoot in one sense, yet united to us in a living communion, to be in solidarity with us and beseech our only mediator and saviour to help us in our time to keep the faith as they have. It need not be a slip into magical religion but the legitimate cry of the human heart to friends in the faith whose faith strengthens us in a moment of weakness and need, to pray for us. How natural to say “John Paul II, pray for us.”

I especially enjoyed the part about "Reformation antibodies in my theological blood stream" of which I can partly relate to. Some devotional practices can still cause some of my old atheist antibodies to react and to release chemical shouts of "Beware superstition!". I can intellectually accept certain devotional practices, but old allergic reactions can step in from fully engaging in them without feeling a little uncomfortable. I can watch my wife touch the sandals of Jesus on the Pieta in our Church and can both want to follow her example and at the same time feel a little bit queasy about it. Having an intellectual belief in something is not the same thing as to be totally down with it. I have grown more comfortable with time asking the intercession of the saints, but it is still like first learning to ride a bicycle where you have to concentrate on what you are doing to keep moving along. Though I have found asking Pope John Paul II to pray for me very comfortable. I hope I am not presumptuous in being on a first name basis with him who I simply address as Karol. I have a feeling he doesn’t mind and besides "Pope John Paul II the Great" is a mouthful.

One of the consequences of the pope’s death might be on the career of Gene Greytak. Who is Gene Greytak you might ask, well he is the Catholic actor who has played Pope John Paul II so many times that he even has a set of vestments from the Pope’s tailor Gamarelli.

His movie appearances where he played the pope are.

Miss Cast Away (2004)
Just the Ticket (1999)
Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult (1994)
Sister Act (1992)
Hot Shots! (1991)
Repossessed (1990)

And on TV he played the pope in

"The Wayans Bros."
"Picket Fences"
"Murphy Brown"
"The Golden Girls"
"Just the Ten of Us"
"ALF"
"Night Court"

Gene Greytak

The sun is seen shining through a flag with a picture of the late Pope John Paul II in Krakow, Poland April 8, 2005. REUTERS/Tobias Schwarz

I was thinking of starting a Novena tomorrow in preparation of the conclave. There does not seem to be any universal memorials for a saint on the 18th of this month and wondered if you might have any appropriate suggestions for praying for our Cardinals as they move to elect our next pope.