Today, the longest Saturday in recent history (my recent history), happy hour is convened in honor of Jesse Donald Knotts (1924 - 2006).
No exposition of the Eucharist is permitted from before evening Mass on Holy Thursday until after the Easter Vigil on Holy Saturday. This applies even to parishes and religious communities authorized for perpetual adoration. The Blessed Sacrament is taken to an altar of repose after the Mass of the Lord's Supper where it is reposed only in a closed tabernacle or pyx, but not a monstrance. Adoration may be held, but only until the stroke of midnight on Holy Thursday. I wonder how that will fly in the LC centers...
Parish priest have the faculty to confirm at the Paschal Vigil unless the candidate is a baptized, uncatechized Catholic. In that case, specific permission must be requested from the Archbishop.
It may seem strange, but that exception actually says a lot about how the Catholic Church perceives itself. On Holy Saturday, without consulting the bishop, I could confirm an unbaptized adult (after baptizing him, of course), someone baptized in a non-Catholic church, a baptized Catholic who - by no fault of his own - was brought up in a non-Catholic community and therefore, never confirmed and an apostate who has returned to full communion with the Church.
It is only in the case of the negligent, lax or indifferent Catholics (or Catholics brought up by negligent, lax or indifferent parents) that the bishop's specific permission must be sought.
Get it?
OK. Now let's go play golf!
Haitian vodun, Caribbean santeria and Brazilian macumba all allow for the sacrifice of small animals in their rituals. There are certainly Haitians, Caribbean hispanos and Brazilians on this side of the city, but the Exorcist can not recall pissing any of them off.
Last night, as the wind howled through the church steeple, I watched The Birds. Alfred Hichcock's dramatization of Daphne Du Maurier's story casts our commonplace feathered friends in their most sinister light: winged terrorists with an anti-human agenda.
On February 15, I opened the curtains in my bedroom and saw, by the door of the rectory two large roosters. One white, one red, both headless. They were laid out on either side of the steps with a border of pennies carefully arranged around them in the snow. No blood. No other message.
Many testimonies have surfaced, by Christians and Muslims alike, recognizing the stature and healing presence of Fr. Santoro. This is the type of man on whom the salvation of humanity ultimately depends.
He is buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in Malden. By 1929 over one million pilgrims and miracle seekers had visited his grave. To this day there is an endless stream of visitors who leave letters of thanks, petitions, photos and other symbols of their personal world on the site of the good Father's resting place. He was young, joyful, caring and holy and people still flock to him.
See Voces Inocentes, staring the beautiful Chilean actress Leonor Varela and a cast of children actors that draw even the most detatched viewer into the story.
Hardline hindus have gone on a bloody rampage to protest the celebration of Valentine's Day in India as "shameless and totally contrary to Indian culture".
1. I had stopped on the side of the street to answer my cell phone when a little kid with a backpack and a box of juice opened the door of the van and got in. We stared at each other for what seemed like decades until he uttered words of profound truth: "You're not my mom." "Nor are you my son", I observed.
Damn mini-vans all look alike.
He quickly exited and I decided to move on before the local authorities asked me what I was doing outside the school to begin with.
2. I got home Tuesday at 4pm. As soon as I opened the door and shut off the alarm, I knew something was terribly wrong. My four brain damaged parakeets were absolutely silent. I climbed the stairs to the second floor hallway and saw them huddled together in the cage, under their wooden house, trembling with fear.
The reason? Three bats were flapping about, helter-skelter, throughout the upper floor of the rectory. This is February, people. The dead of winter in New England. Aren't bats marsupials or herbivores or crustaceans or whatever? You know, the type of critter that HIBERNATES in the winter?
It's got to be global warming. Even the bats are confused.
3. Old lady #1: I was sitting where I always like to sit at the cinema, the last row of floor seats before the stairs, watching the trailers. An old man, himself none too steady on his own feet, was steering a wheelchair with a rather large woman in my direction. He stopped by the aisle seat and, with difficulty, maneuvered the chair according to his wife's instructions. She then tried to unload herself from the wheelchair to the theatre seat with her husband's help.
In fact, she plopped unceremoniously to the floor.
She glared up at her hapless mate and accused him publicly: "See that? You done it again! Look at me here on my butt in front of everybody. Ain't that a fine sight?"
It was, indeed, a fine sight.
So fine, that I got up and offered a hand at the same time her chastised husband was trying to lift her considerable butt off the carpet. She said to me, "Thank you, young man. I'm sorry to be of bother." And she pushed her husband away nearly shouting, "Don't you grab me, you ol' fool! You want to end up on the floor with me?" He did not. I could tell.
4. On Thursday evening I went to unlock the rectory door because folks were showing up for the parish council meeting. There, outside the door on the frozen lawn were two grayish-red foxes. They startled, stared and then scampered down the embankment toward the railroad tracks. There appears to be an urban fox population now in our vecinity. Who knew?
5. Old lady #2 and #3: The woman I went to visit at the nursing home yesterday was quite ill and quite old. I sat at her bedside for a few minutes after giving her the annointing of the sick. The door opened, a head leaned in and said, "Padre, Catalina's mother is here and wants to see you." And I thought Catalina looked old...
Catalina's mother told me that she had thirteen children and Catalina was the third she watched die. She also said that children should bury their parents, not the other way around. But I guess that's just one of the risks of living to be 98 years old. You may outlive your children.
And that's the Exorcist's post for today.
Have you seen the blasphemous cartoons of the Danish infidels?
As a kid he always had a very contagious laugh. His whole body would tense up and his arms and legs would jerk around as he cracked up, totally out of control. We would come up with all kinds of really dumb stuff just to get Jamie to "spaz out". I like to think that he enjoyed it as much as we did...
