Finally getting RAIN!

Well, today the kids are out of school and they are greeted with a rainy weekend! The good news is taht we are in the middle of a drought but, rain is still rain. They kids are cooped up inside.

J

For your Palm - Catholic updates

Avantgo has some really incredible tools for the faith now. I currently am using three fantastic Catholic resources:

1. Catholic News Agency - which includes News, Daily Mass readings, and the Saint of the Day0
2. Mobile Gabriel - which includes daily Mass readings, and a daily reading from the Catechism
3. Universalis - which gives me the Daily Office.

Between the three, I have some incredible resources at my disposal. These are very easy and Avantgo is free (I like that price!)

http://www.mobilegabriel.com is the mobile Gabriel site, http://www.universalis.com will get you the daily office and search for Catholic News at Avantgo to get that. Again, Avantgo is free but you can get more space and channels with a paid subscription.

I hope that these programs are useful. I will be adding them to my links page soon.

God Bless

Papal preacher lambasts Dan Brown

Well, Easter Sunday has come and gone and now is the time for Easter Season in the Church. Easter season will go through Pentecost, when the Paraclete comes. For the Apostles in the upper room, these 40 days were probably the longest of their lives. More food for thought follows:


Gospel of Judas also dismissed as money-making venture

(ANSA) - Vatican City, April 14 - The pope's personal preacher railed on Friday against Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code and the recently published Gospel of Judas, saying they amounted to a fresh betrayal of Christ .

In a Good Friday homily in St Peter's Basilica, Capuchin father Raniero Cantalamessa told Benedict XVI and several top Vatican officials that the media was exploiting the Christian tradition to make millions of dollars .

"No one can stop this wave of speculation, which is in fact going to get stronger with the imminent release of a certain film," he said, in a clear allusion to the movie of the Da Vinci Code, which is due out next month .

Cantalamessa said there was a growing trend in the media to weave fanciful stories which played shamelessly with Christian beliefs and ancient legends. As well as making money for the publishers, these stories misled millions of people, he continued .

The Da Vinci Code portrays the Catholic Church as a corrupt organisation determined to hide certain explosive truths and contains the notion that Jesus Christ married and had descendants .

The Capuchin then directed his attention at the so-called Gospel of Judas which was published earlier this week amid intense media attention. The document, which dates back to the second or third century, offers a positive view of Judas, the betrayer of Christ .

The content of the document was branded heretical by the early fathers of the Christian Church and Pope Benedict himself strongly reaffirmed the traditional view of Judas on Thursday .

"There's a lot of talk about Judas's betrayal and nobody realises that it's happening all over again," said Father Cantalamessa. "Christ is still being sold, not to religious authorities for 30 pieces of silver, but to publishers and bookshops for billions". The preacher said the underlying problem was that the media was more interested in novelty than in truth .

He also said that such questions didn't deserve to be talked about on one of the most important days in the Christian calendar. "But we can't allow the silence of believers to pass for embarrassment and the good faith of millions of people to be manipulated by the media" .


© Copyright ANSA. All rights reserved 2006-04-14 20:23

Good Friday

Is 52:13—53:12

See, my servant shall prosper,
he shall be raised high and greatly exalted.
Even as many were amazed at him—
so marred was his look beyond human semblance
and his appearance beyond that of the sons of man—
so shall he startle many nations,
because of him kings shall stand speechless;
for those who have not been told shall see,
those who have not heard shall ponder it.

Who would believe what we have heard?
To whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed?
He grew up like a sapling before him,
like a shoot from the parched earth;
there was in him no stately bearing to make us look at him,
nor appearance that would attract us to him.
He was spurned and avoided by people,
a man of suffering, accustomed to infirmity,
one of those from whom people hide their faces,
spurned, and we held him in no esteem.

Yet it was our infirmities that he bore,
our sufferings that he endured,
while we thought of him as stricken,
as one smitten by God and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our offenses,
crushed for our sins;
upon him was the chastisement that makes us whole,
by his stripes we were healed.
We had all gone astray like sheep,
each following his own way;
but the LORD laid upon him
the guilt of us all.

Though he was harshly treated, he submitted
and opened not his mouth;
like a lamb led to the slaughter
or a sheep before the shearers,
he was silent and opened not his mouth.

Oppressed and condemned, he was taken away,
and who would have thought any more of his destiny?
When he was cut off from the land of the living,
and smitten for the sin of his people,
a grave was assigned him among the wicked
and a burial place with evildoers,
though he had done no wrong
nor spoken any falsehood.
But the LORD was pleased
to crush him in infirmity.

If he gives his life as an offering for sin,
he shall see his descendants in a long life,
and the will of the LORD shall be accomplished through him.

Because of his affliction
he shall see the light in fullness of days;
through his suffering, my servant shall justify many,
and their guilt he shall bear.
Therefore I will give him his portion among the great,
and he shall divide the spoils with the mighty,
because he surrendered himself to death
and was counted among the wicked;
and he shall take away the sins of many,
and win pardon for their offenses.

Jesus Decoded - DaVinci Code Response

Jesus Decoded

By Msgr. Francis J. Maniscalco

Causing people to see something they never saw before in a five-hundred-year-old work of art which is among the most famous and reproduced of all time is an accomplishment of genius, if that “something” is a valid new insight. If it is not, then this kind of achievement usually goes by other names.

The Da Vinci Code novel contains a claim that in Leonardo’s mural The Last Supper, which portrays Jesus and his twelve apostles at the meal he took with them on the night before he died, one of the twelve is not the apostle John but actually a woman who is Mary Magdalene.

Forget the Gospel narratives through which Leonardo, like every other Christian, would have known about the Last Supper and which contain no mention of Mary Magdalene; forget the fact that this mural seems to have caused no sensation among the monks whose refectory it decorated and who would have been as likely to recognize a female form then as we are today; forget the many paintings of the Last Supper which show a handsome youth often leaning on Christ’s shoulder or on his chest following the tradition that identified John with the unnamed “beloved disciple” of the fourth Gospel. If such a claim is put between the covers of a book, apparently it merits respectful consideration no matter how absurd.

What this novel does to Leonardo’s Last Supper, it does to Christianity as such. It asks people to consider equivalent to the mainstream Christian tradition quite a few odd claims. Some are merely distortions of hypotheses advanced by serious scholars who do serious research. Others, however, are inaccurate or false.

One false claim is that the Emperor Constantine, for political reasons of his own, decided to make a god out of Jesus Christ who was solely a Jewish rabbi for whom neither he nor his first followers ever asserted a divine origin. This claim cannot be sustained on the basis of the existing evidence which demonstrates that Constantine did no such thing.

It also highlights the schizophrenia in the The Da Vinci Code about Jesus Christ. Only if Jesus is divine would we have any interest in the possibility that his descendant might walk the earth today. If he is not, such a descendant ceases to be a mythic figure and becomes only a kind of celebrity child, so many of whom have turned out to be disappointments to their parents.

Reporters have asked whether even a bestselling novel can seriously damage a Church of one billion believers. No, in the long run, it cannot. But that is not the point. The pastoral concern of the Church is for each and every person. If only one person were to come away with a distorted impression of Jesus Christ or His Church, our concern is for that person as if he or she were the whole world.

Due to the concern about many current media portrayals of Jesus Christ and the origins of Christianity, this Web site was developed by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ (USCCB) Department of Communications, under the direction of the USCCB Committee on Communications, chaired by the Most Reverend Gerald F. Kicanas, in consultation with the USCCB Secretariat for Doctrine.

Monsignor Francis J. Maniscalco is a priest of the Diocese of Rockville Centre, New York who has served the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops since 1993, and since 1995 as Director of Communications

Speech Meet - Meets Star

Love that pun! Well, the speech meet at Evangelistic Temple School yesterday brought many parents to see how their darlings did at the ACSI Event. One of the attendees was the parent of a neighboring school, Garth Brooks. A great gentleman and a pleasure to meet, Mr. Brooks was there for this 9 year old daughter. She did very well, by the way!

Another tid bit, my ACSI Teacher Certification came in so I am an official, certified, teacher!

J