From the Georgia Bulletin this week, a story on a Methodist family that sent their kids to Catholic schools…and when the 8-year-old decided she wanted to receive first Communion along with her fellow second graders, Mom and Dad decided to join the Church:

The Halls traveled to China twice to adopt their daughters. Their second journey was the focus of a 2004 National Geographic program.

Their recent spiritual odyssey was also one the entire family took, and it was prompted by their older daughter, a second-grader at “St. Joe’s” School.

“I know most of the time it’s usually parents who make the spiritual decisions for the family,” said Denise. Not so for the Halls, as it was Marissa who wished to receive first Communion along with her second-grade classmates.

Denise and Rich, both raised Methodist, “did not want the family to be divided,” and so they began the Order of Christian Initiation for Adults.

Only one problem in the whole article…

In addition to the Easter Vigil, they had a profound moment on Holy Thursday when Father Paul Berny, pastor, washed Marissa’s feet.

Oh well. What can I say?  My wife and her brother are ridiculed by the rest of their family for being too “old fashioned” and “too Catholic” even though they’re the ones who raised them to be Catholic…and that’s directly responsible for the fact that I am Catholic.  Guess I should just overlook the profound misunderstanding that exists when the foot washing rite includes women.

Full article 

Several weeks ago I wrote on Allen Hunt. The Georgia Bulletin (Atlanta’s diocesan newspaper) finally saw fit to do the same thing:

The 44-year-old also finds himself on Sundays in the pews at Mary Our Queen Church, Norcross. He is one of the newest members of the Catholic Church in the Atlanta Archdiocese.

“I’m home and glad to be home. I have a deep, deep sense of interior peace,” said Hunt about joining the church. “It’s where God wants me to be. I have no doubt.”

Full article

So, now that a prominent former-Muslim has been baptized Catholic, the Vatican is having to do damage control and distance itself from what the convert says.

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — When Pope Benedict XVI welcomed into the Catholic Church a Muslim-born journalist often critical of Islam, it was not a sign that the pope accepts everything the journalist believes, said the Vatican spokesman.

The Italian journalist, Magdi Allam, “has the right to express his own ideas. They remain his personal opinions without in any way becoming the official expression of the positions of the pope or the Holy See,” said Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi.

Basically, the “Muslim world” is saying that the Pope shouldn’t have publically baptized this guy, because he is guilty of hate speech against Islam.

Nayed questioned the pope’s decision to baptize Allam March 22 during the globally televised Easter Vigil from St. Peter’s Basilica.

“It is sad that the intimate and personal act of a religious conversion is made into a triumphalist tool for scoring points,” Nayed said.

“It is sad that the particular person chosen for such a highly public gesture has a history of generating, and continues to generate, hateful discourse,” he added.

Naturally, one must remember that hate speech against Islam means disagreeing with Islam. The man has every right to make the comments he makes, because essentially there’s a price on his head. The Vatican’s being accused of not recognizing human dignity and freedom of choice somehow by publicly baptizing the man…fortunately, the Vatican spokesman got a dig in about that too:

Father Lombardi said the Catholic Church today does not deserve an accusation that it lacks respect for human dignity and freedom, but there are many situations in the world where such respect is lacking and which need attention.

“Maybe this is why the pope accepted the risk of this baptism: to affirm the freedom of religious choice which derives from the dignity of the human person,” he said.

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Standing for the processional hymn this morning, for the 6th year in a row, we sang “Jesus Christ is Risen Today.”  Once again, I thought to myself about the many years of singing “Christ the Lord is Risen Today” in the Baptist church, and how these lyrics still seemed weird to me, though I love the music (though the parish I attended this morning is utterly stuck in funeral dirge mode…we wouldn’t want an up-tempo, joyous (but reverent) hymn on the most important day on the calendar, now would we?  Seriously – the mass would have been 15 minutes shorter if the hymns had been sung at a comfortable tempo.  We’re talking painfully slow.  Sort of like this painfully long parenthetical.)

Anyway, as I was singing from the Gather hymnal, I figured this was one of the many hymns butchered by the Oregon Catholic Press for being “too Catholic” or “too gender specific.”  I’ve come to be greatly annoyed with some of the hymns in Gather, due to sometimes arbitrary butchering of hymns.  Many are “gender neutralized.”  Others just have weird changed in them.  “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” comes to mind – I am used to “were the whole realm of nature mine, that were a ransom far too small, love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life my all.”  Gather has us sing “were every realm of nature mine, my gift would still be far too small…”

And in my home parish, about half the folks know one set of words and sing them by habit…and the other half sings what’s printed on the page.  It can be messy.

So anyway, I figured this was just another situation where OCP decided to edit the hymns to make them more cosmopolitan.

Good news is, I was wrong.  Catholics have been singing “Jesus Christ is risen today” for 700 years in Latin, and for 300 years (300 years this year in fact) in English.  “Christ the Lord is Risen Today” has only been around since 1739, originating the John Wesley’s hymn book. Interestingly, at least one website I found lists the 3 original verses of “Jesus Christ is Risen Today” as the last 3 verses of “Christ the Lord is Risen Today.”

So, I learned something new today – that Gather can do some things right…and learned more about the authenticity of the Catholic heritage.

For those of you who’ve never seen “Christ The Lord Is Risen Today,” check out the link.  You can read over the words.  I like many of them myself.

Wonder if they had to insert apostrophes into the original Latin texts in order to fit syllables to the music?  After all, we have to sing “risen” as a single syllable in order for it to fit.  “ris’n.”  Wonder if every time a hymn writer does that, God kills an English teacher?

“Jesus Christ is Risen Today”

“Christ the Lord is Risen Today”

(important to note that at least in the USA we use the “Easter Hymn” melody for both versions.)

Here’s a good piece of news this Easter Vigil.  What do you bet there’s a price on this guy’s head now?

Italy’s most prominent Muslim, an iconoclastic writer who condemned Islamic extremism and defended Israel, converted to Catholicism Saturday in a baptism by the pope at a Vatican Easter service.

As a choir sang, Pope Benedict XVI poured holy water over Allam’s head and said a brief prayer in Latin.

“We no longer stand alongside or in opposition to one another,” Benedict said in a homily reflecting on the meaning of baptism. “Thus faith is a force for peace and reconciliation in the world: distances between people are overcome, in the Lord we have become close.”

Vatican Television zoomed in on Allam, who sat in the front row of the basilica along with six other candidates for baptism. He later received his first Communion.

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Here we go.  DFCS should just line up and arrest each parent that agrees to let their baby participate in this.

Baby Borrowers is a unique social experiment that takes five teenage couples on a rollercoaster ride of adult responsibility, allowing them to experience parenting firsthand. Desperate to have their own life and family, our lovebirds are thrown in at the deep end. They�re given real houses and real responsibilities � the most important

of which is to look after children from a range of age groups. They�ll begin with an infant, followed by a toddler, pre-teen, young teenager, and lastly a senior citizen. In the end, will these couples be able to cope with the pressure of parenthood or will they break?

 This ranks right up there with that show they tried to do a couple of years ago with the drug-addicted hallucinogenic Episcopal priest who had a lesbian daughter and the nutty father or whatever…what was that called…”the gospel of ___” ….can’t seem to recall.  Anyway, hopefully, this garbage will suffer the same fate.  As an attached parent, I can’t imagine what kind of self-absorbed, irresponsible, abusive parent would allow their baby to be “used” in this way.  They aren’t fit to be parents and they should have their babies taken and given to a loving couple who won’t sell them and in so doing sell their own souls.

To my surprise, my letter to the editor of the Georgia Bulletin regarding the recent study that reveals Catholic young people aren’t really interested in being Catholic was published in the most recent issue. An excerpt from my letter:

In response to the article in the Feb. 21 edition of The Georgia Bulletin, “Young Catholics Embrace Jesus’ Message, Not Practices,” I would ask the faithful of Georgia to call upon Archbishop Gregory to make a statement. Throughout the article, the impression is given that church teachings are negotiable. Statements such as, “Increasingly, people want a dialogue with bishops and other church leaders on moral issues” gives the false impression that church teachings are up for discussion—that the laity could meet with the clergy and have a discussion and get her teachings changed or at least softened a bit.

Not sure if it’s insidious or just some sort of journalistic standard, but throughout the letter, I capitalized the word “Church” as well as the pronouns “She” and “Her” in reference to the Church, and the editor went through and un-capitalized them.

The whole editorial is here

The media has been beside itself with glee reporting that the Vatican has come up with a list of an additional 7 deadly sins.  Of course, in reality, the list is simply mentioning problematic behaviors that have surfaced in recent history.  The one presenting the greatest difficulty is “accumulating excess wealth.”  People I normally love to listen to have immediately jumped to the (somewhat logical) conclusion that the Vatican sees all personal wealth as bad, and that it advocates using the police power of government to confiscate it.

A Father Ray Beck was on Glenn Beck’s TV show on CNN last night (no relation by the way) and he clarified that taken in proper context, the sin of “accumulating excess wealth” in fact is when there is no charity involved.  He explained that the Vatican understands that charity by force is not charity at all, but that the hording of money without using it to improve your fellow man’s situation is where the problem lies.  Personally, I can’t find the text anywhere, so I can’t read it in context.  But it’s interesting nonetheless, and I hope Fr. Beck’s explanation is indeed what the Vatican means.

I’m on my guard about this, because on a fairly regular basis one of the prayers of the faithful at Mass at my church is “that governments will work for a fair distribution of wealth, we pray to the Lord,” and that scares the fire out of me.

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Well I figured that being in discernment would mean that I’m off limits to girls. What a nice idea. Unfortunately some of the girls that I go to school with that don’t really understand the Catholic Church (Ignorant prots). They are convinced that the last girl I dated turned me “Priest” as if it were like she had turned me gay. So now they are trying to redeem themselves as the female race by finding me a new girlfriend. I keep telling them I am off limits; don’t waste their time. It’s not fair to me and its not fair to any girl that would think I am interested in her. When I told them that they were tempting me, they said, “so you do think that she is pretty?” Well lets look at the facts: I am a guy, I’m 19, I like girls. Of course she is pretty, you’re tempting me! They just don’t understand that I’m pretty much taken. No I’m not taken by a girl, but at least as of now, my life belongs to Christ and His Church. So to all of the people that want to find me a girlfriend, you’re about six months late.

Here’s the word from our local Church here, the Atlanta Archdiocese.  Archbishop Gregory has decided that since St. Patrick’s Day falls on Monday of Holy Week, that the diocese will officially celebrate the holiday on the preceding Friday…and as a result, he’s also promulgated a dispensation for all Atlanta’s faithful, from the obligation to abstain from eating meat on that Friday.

How does this even make sense?  Monday of Holy Week is not part of the Triduum or anything, it’s not even a day when there are typically special services scheduled at parishes?  Why move the celebration to Friday?  Is it just so we could have a dispensation from abstaining from meat?

Seems bizarre to me.