No, Catholic Find is no dating site, and there's not an app for that to find your long lost rosary, but CatholicFind.com is a handy tool if you're searching for certain information.
Though the site appears to be under development still, as of now it has searches up and running for the Douay-Rheims Bible, the documents of Vatican II, the writings of Pope John Paul II and G.K. Chesterton, along with a few other searchable works.
A teaser says that the Early Church Fathers are soon to come. We've waited this long, but I'm still looking forward to that.
When my oldest son went to preschool, I would pick him up after school was out and would stay afterwards out back to chat with Dan Allen, one of the few other dads who wasn't working a job that time of day. We would adjourn to the schoolyard, with his kids and mine running ahead and climbing all over the playground equipment.
In those days, Dan and I spoke of many things. Dan is a deeply convicted and devout Protestant, and I the same thing, only Catholic. We discussed abortion, evil cultural influences on children, Islam, and morality. We spoke of sin, redemption, forgiveness, faith, heaven, and hell. We saw something unfold over time, a truism I first heard from Mark Crutcher at one of his seminars I'd attended 15 years before - namely, that because religious conservatives seek, affirm and embrace that which is true, they find more in common with each other beyond sectarian lines than they do with liberals bearing their own denominational label, who reduce and deny that which is true.
All the while our children played near us, sometimes cutting in competing for our attention. His two beautiful little girls had a way of hugging each other "sorry" when they'd accidentally hurt one another, and would hug my kids when they accidentally hurt them.
Those people are very far away from me now. After having given the matter much prayer and thought, the Allen family - Dad, Mom, and girls - sold their home, packed everything up and went off to Mozambique to do missionary work for their church. I've added their new blog to my blogroll.
Personally, I wouldn't do that with my kids. Mozambique is poverty stricken, AIDS ridden, and not as safe as America. By Dan's first blog entry alone, it looks like the country suffers from poor infrastructure, scarcity, and overpricing as well. Personalizing the situation by imagining my own family in it clarifies in my mind why the Catholic Church defines unmarried vocations for missionary priests, brothers, and nuns. But this family feels led there by the Spirit to do God's work, to bring the Gospel and loving hands to the people of Mozambique.
And so they have. And so they do. I pray for their success and eventual safe return.
The resolution of a few short conferences with Matt Cassens is that St. Blogustine is officially our team blog. Over there, I'll post issues related pieces that are national in scope, and here I'll keep everything else, the lighter and more personal stuff. St. B has a larger, established readership that's come to expect a National Review Online lite, and thus much of what I find amusing to post wouldn't have a happy home life there. The Serious Blog will stick around for the less serious stuff.
On St. Blogustine, we discuss how the USCCB is playing post-election catch-up ball. The bishops are defunding ACORN, now that they've done so much damage over these many years, funded in part by Catholic money.
The conference failed to unify against Obama before the election, and consequently now risk shutting down the nation's Catholic hospitals because of Obama's support for FOCA. There's a little you can do yet to fight FOCA.
Friday was the parent-teacher conference at the school and, per laws of physics, the chain of parents ahead of me extended over their alloted face time with the teacher; thus, arriving at the appointed time entailed a wait out in the hall. In anticipation of parental wait times, the teacher hung up essays written by the entire first grade class out in the hall, entitled If I Were President.
With one exception, every child's essay's points were confined to the following:
I would stop the war in Iraq.
I would bring all the soldiers home.
I would give the poor people money.
I would give the poor people food.
I would move into the White House.
Two of the boys added "I would play" as the final point.
My son reports that the entire first grade class except himself voted for Obama in the mock election. Were they under the misimpression that we don't give money and food to the poor people now, and that Obama's the only candidate who would do it? Who guided them to think that the only policies worthy of the President are of pacifism and redistributive socialism?
As I said, there was one single exception to the above manifesto; I'm proud to report that my son singly strayed from the lockstep with this opening sentence of his essay:
Al Franken to Catholics: Vote For Me, You Big Fat Idiots
In a tight race for Minnesota's contested seat in the US Senate beginning to slightly shift in favor of Republican incumbent Norm Coleman, it doesn't help Democratic candidate-comedian Al Franken to have his anti-Catholic bigotry erupt back in his face at this time. The Catholic League's press release details some choice morsels of Franken's hate speech, including mocking the Eucharist and the crucifixion of Jesus. To the devout and sensitive, that brand of "comedy" is less amusing than sitting on the Kaiser's spiked helmet by mistake. In a race where every single vote's going to count, Catholics should give Franken the spike in remembrance.
To see the Christian case against voting for Obama, go here. Click the full page spandex thingie in the upper right of the page viewer. It fits on a single printable page, and holds links to supporting evidence on each point made for those who are interested.
The guide comes from CatholicVote.com, but no Christian can afford to draw divisive sectarian lines at a time like this. Heck, I'd say run with it if it were from JehovahsWitnessesVote.com. (Now that, ah say, that's a joke, son!)
Vote The Common Good: the Other "Catholics for Obama"
Out of nowhere last week, I got a visit from a comment poster self-identified as "SisterSharon" from VoteTheCommonGood.com. The comment looked just like this posting on the Blogspot blog she created, and it was peppered on three Obama and abortion related posts here as well as on a few other spots around the Net. SisterSharon's been back to visit this comment thread a couple times.
This video is the centerpiece of the presentation on their web site, and as of now it's got 2,500 views. Compare that to 1.2 million views of RosaryFilms Catholic Vote 2008 I embedded here. The soundtrack is John Lennon's Imagine. The chanters managed to musically moan and sigh through the inconvenient lyrics that go "imagine there's no heaven, no religion too."
"Uhh-hhh! Uhhh-hhhh! Imagine all the people..."
What is The Common Good, and how do we vote for it, you ask? Why, the Common Good is liberal things, of course! Their whole platform is here, and the broadstrokes are to give amnesty to the illegals, get more people in unions, cut and run in Iraq, and end capital punishment. They're also against racism, classism, and sexism. Trade agreements "have to serve the common good," which by definition means we need to sign treaties to trade liberal things.
Fair enough. While I wouldn't agree with these people that there's a religious imperative to vote for liberal things, there's nothing there to stop you from voting for them either. The Church is pro-choice in that regard, with one glaring exception. The Big A, dripping, in brilliant crimson. These guys are totally "Catholic" on abortion, right?
Um, not completely. Their platform statement on abortion, start to finish, reads:
Promote policies that prevent and reduce abortions by supporting women and families. Ensure robust alternatives to abortion, including adoption.
Hasn't it occurred to these people to abolish abortions? You know, "abolish", as in "Abolish capital punishment," which I seem to recall reading just recently. Just under the abortion statement in their very platform, actually.
It wasn't phrased as such either because their hearts really aren't in the Right to Life cause with gusto (being liberals and all), or because such a statement would be incompatible with electing their favorite candidate ever, Obama, and they're not gonna let a little thing like the Freedom of Choice Act stand in the way of electing Obama (being liberals and all) because of all the other Common Good he'll usher in with the tide.
On the tangential issue of health insurance, SisterSharon sent me an article here ("as a point of reference", she says). It's from the National Catholic Reporter (also known as the National Reporter to us orthodoxish Catholics), whose premise is that Obama's health insurance policy is in line with the teaching of the American Bishops. Actually, it compares Obama's and McCain's proposals. Guess which one is described with the words "common good" in the article?
I don't see this as a black/white issue between these two candidates; it's not as if McCain's policy is to "let 'em die and rot," and that we don't have Medicaid already. But let's just say Obama's health insurance is what the bishops want, and McCain's health insurance policy is unacceptable to them.
That still doesn't outweigh the fact that Obama is for keeping abortion legal at every stage and against every restriction on it. 1.1 million dead babies each year, and keeping 'em comin'. Who says the Big A outweighs the other Common Good issues at election time?
The Pope does, that's who! When keeping or ending abortion is at stake, everything else takes the back seat, which is what I've been saying all along.
This movie is moving in more ways than one. While it places abortion at the forefront of the list of issues to vote for, it also contains a segment showing peace demonstrators, which could serve as a loophole for those Catholics who are throwing their support on the wrong side of this election. ("See! Look, Marge, it's OK to support Obama. He's the guy for peace!")
That little peace sign can stuff a sock into the mouth of the conscience of a Catholic voter inclined to cast a ballot for Obama, the candidate who's hellbent on deregulation and permanentizing abortion. Religious Left voters will see what they want to see (as are we all so inclined), but the producers of this film didn't have to go and place that visual sticking out so conveniently for them to grasp onto like that.
As today's polling numbers bear out, the election's nothing like in the bag for McCain. Catholic voters weigh in at 20% of the national total, a key determing factor in who wins US presidential elections. With so many US Catholics wandering astray from the flock, they're not voting overwhelmingly prolife, and it's going to take more than this little viral video to get them to vote the right way.
Join the prayer effort here (or roll your own). Only God Himself can move hardened hearts.
Your support for the most pro-abortion presidential candidate in US history leaves me very skeptical that your front group consists of believing, practicing Catholics at all.
I'd go on, but I have to write a similar complaint to Marxists for McCain while the night is still young.
The time has come to pull the wraps off our plan to homeschool. Every homeschooling family has its own reasons for doing so, including imparting their values they hold precious, which is where we fit in to all this.
Truth be known, we'd send them to a Catholic school could we afford it, but we can't. Now that convents are empty, lay people fill the need for teachers at a living wage, driving tuitions up into the stratosphere. Tuition has roughly tripled its inflation-indexed cost since I was a student in Catholic schools.
Our first plan was to send our children to public school for the 3 R's, then supplement them with religious instruction here at home and at Sunday school. For starters we registered our oldest, our kindergartener in the district, and shortly received two indicators that the plan wasn't working out. First, he candidly stated that what he likes about lunch at school is that he doesn't pray before eating. The second and greater sign was when he uttered forbidden words. "Oh my God," he slipped, before he caught himself and corrected, "I mean, oh my gosh!"
This slip indicated that his mindset maintained a dual set of standards, one for school and one for home. At school, he matched his peers', and for all I know, even the teachers' casual use of OMGs. This was a substantial environmental difference between his public school education and my Catholic one. In my day, the teachers would correct you for breaking the Second Commandment, but at public school, the only values they're empowered to impart are to eat healthy, study, and visit your library.
After having applied a good deal of research, we decided to enroll in Seton Home Study School. They're solid on Catholic orthodoxy, provide curriculum and materials, maintain actual grades and enrollment records for your child on site, include human telephone support in real time, and appear to have the best Internet based support in place for communications and work submission. Since I'm uncomfortable with wandering the child-directed wilderness of unschooling, I like Seton's structured day to day lesson plan booklet and big box o' books included in the price. Next, on to class.
