Here’s another one the media will enjoy reporting.

A former priest began a seven-year jail term Wednesday for murdering a young nun during an exorcism ritual when she was bound, chained to a cross and denied food and water for days.

Irina Cornici, 23, died from dehydration, exhaustion and suffocation during an ordeal that stunned Romania and prompted the Orthodox Church to promise reforms and psychological tests to screen potential clergy.

more… 

Hmm…it’s looking like the anointed one, Rudy Giuliani, may be toast.  And I for one say, good job to the Republicans who weren’t interested in voting only for the person they thought could beat Hillary.  Giuliani isn’t nearly conservative enough to be a Republican.

Now…who am I going to vote for next week?  Romney, Huckabee, or Paul?  Ouch.

Just wanted to let you folks know that my daughter Cecilia arrived in our arms early Saturday morning, 1/26/08.  Praise be to God for a good, drug free birth, and good initial bonding between mother and baby.  We are home from the hospital this afternoon, Sunday, 1/27.  Pray for our family as it adjusts to a new member!

Through an acquaintance, I learned today that Allen Hunt, an Atlanta area Methodist minister has recently been received into the Catholic Church.  Hunt has been serving as pastor at an Atlanta Methodist church, and has also been steadily growing his Allen Hunt Show radio ministry, which currently is syndicated on 13 stations with eyes on growing to 75 stations by the end of the year.  The show airs on mainstream stations, out of a desire to be, well, mainstream and therefore reach a larger audience.

I emailed Hunt to find out if what I had heard was indeed true, and he responded in the affirmative.  So, to Allen Hunt, we say, “Welcome Home!”  I asked him for a summary of his reasons for coming into the Church, and he gave me permission to publish the following:

this transition reflects my personal journey over the past 15 years. When on vacation, I have usually worshipped at Catholic churches because I felt most at home there. Since stepping aside from my role at Mount Pisgah, I have had the freedom to consider why I felt most at home in the Catholic Church.

To make a long story short, I do believe in the real presence of Christ in communion. That doctrine is very important to me as is the notion that Christ birthed one Church. I have struggled with both of these issues internally for a number of years. The fact that there are 30,000 branches of Christianity in America alone grieves my heart. I believe that continuing division and debate over essentials provides a poor witness to the lost about our Christian unity in the one Lord. My ministry in radio has only served to reinforce that conviction. Finally, I have always struggled with the idea I call “doctrine by democracy.” I simply have not been able to get my arms around the concept that we vote on certain things to decide what is true.

A concise, well-written explanation to be sure.  You can find out more about Allen Hunt at http://allenhuntshow.com.

In the small alcove on the right side of our church, where the prayer candles are, we have some of the precious little statuary in the whole place.  We have one of Our Lady of Guadalupe hanging on the wall above the candles, and to the left of the candles we have a freestanding statue of Joseph holding the child Jesus.  Jesus is holding a small cross.

Following Mass this past Sunday, I went to speak to one of the acolytes for a few minutes.  My wife and daughter lit a candle, as has become our custom, because my daughter wants to pray for her soon-to-be-born baby sister.  After lighting the candle and kneeling for prayer, my daughter and my wife were talking a bit about the statuary, and rather out of the blue, my daughter said, “The statue of Joseph and Jesus is a nice statue.  May I kiss the cross?”

Good Friday comes early?  She’s never seen anyone kiss the cross before, at all.  She’s never been to Good Friday services, and even if she had, she wouldn’t remember.  Where, then, does something like this come from?  I’m not complaining, don’t get me wrong.

It’s been a while since I posted on breastfeeding, but Radical Catholic Mom has a great post over at Vox Nova.  An excerpt:

In America, we still struggle with a woman openly nursing in public.  A few weeks ago, I was in public with my friend–a new mom–and every time she nursed she placed a blanket over her child’s head.  I asked her why she was covering herself and she said “It makes people so uncomfortable to see a baby connected to a female breast.”  She couldn’t have said it better.  In American culture, boobs are purely for sex so we really have a difficult time when we see an innocent child connected to that boob.  Some women I know so hate nursing their hungry baby in public, THEY DON’T DO IT!  They bring formula to Church with them.  How many Catholic women at Mass have I seen pop a bottle in their babies mouth when they are hungry?  Far more than seeing a nursing mom at Mass.

Gerald at Closed Cafeteria exhibited some of his ignorance (borne in part of the fact that he does not have any kids yet) with his comments, and of course the comments on the post are a mixed bag comprising those who say “breastfeeding is great and should be done unashamedly” to those who say “breastfeeding is okay as long as I don’t know it’s happening in my general vicinity.”

A leading Vatican official on Friday condemned a US company’s announcement that it had created cloned human embryos from adult skin cells. The medical breakthrough could ultimately lead to the development of cures for Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s, and other untreatable ailments.

Gotta love that paragraph.  Totally unfounded, unproven claim.

“This study demonstrates, for the first time, that SCNT can be utilized to generate cloned human blastocysts using differentiated adult donor nuclei remodeled and reprogrammed by human oocytes,” the researchers wrote in the study, which appear Thursday in the online edition of the journal “Stem Cells.”

And, also,

A scientist has achieved a world first… by cloning himself.

In a breakthrough certain to provoke an ethical furore, Samuel Wood created embryo copies of himself by placing his skin cells in a woman’s egg.

The embryos were the first to be made from cells taken from adult humans.

Although they survived for only five days and were smaller than a pinhead, they are seen as a milestone in the quest for treatments for diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

The brave new world continues…

More

And More 

What sense does this even make?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaoYD7iZG9w 

Y’know how only a third of Catholics believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist?

Well, apparently this factoid is based on faulty survey techniques…and Jimmy Akin explains it, along with a new survey revealing that some 81% of Catholics believe in the Real Presence!

So, we have a daughter due to arrive within the next couple of weeks, and we dutifully went to the parish baptism class this morning after Mass. Shortly, we found out that since we’d been once we didn’t need to go again (our nearly-three-year-old was baptised at one month of age.)  We were discussing how it’s going to be difficult because the baby is due to arrive on January 25, and yet Lent starts just a few days after; our parish only baptises the last Sunday of each month during Mass, and as a rule doesn’t do private baptism.  In addition, no baptisms during penitential seasons.  That means more than likely, it’ll be the Easter Vigil or the last Sunday in March before she can be baptised.

So the couple who teaches the baptism class says, “well, the Church is trying to get people away from the mentality that if you don’t get your baby baptised right away, terrible things will happen.”

Sad…