WobLog

March 7, the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas in the traditional calendar, will see the return of the Traditional Latin Mass to the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis. Solemn High Mass will be celebrated by priests of the Institute of Christ the King, Sovereign Priest from the St. Francis de Sales Oratory in St. Louis.

June 15 will see another landmark event when Archbishop Raymond Burke confers the first priestly ordinations of the Institute in the U.S. when he ordains two deacons of the Institute to the priesthood.

For more information on the Institute of Christ the King and their apostolates in the U.S., check out the Institute's website.

H/T St. Louis Catholic

Posted by Don Roberts at 6:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Each year when Lent comes again, I search myself to see what I should give up for Lent. One year it was "worrying." Another it was chocolate. And another it was speaking ill of others. I was explaining this concept to the children, the idea of giving up something, as a sacrifice, that gives us pleasure, or giving up a vice (that perhaps gives us some pleasure, too.)

Sarah seemed interested in the conversation and I asked her if she wanted to give up her Wednesday dessert as a Lenten sacrifice.

"I know!" she replied. "I can give up homeschooling!"

Posted by Lisa Roberts at 7:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today's San Francisco Chronicle has an article on the growing consumption of bottled water instead of (more stringently regulated) tap water:

San Franciscans and other Bay Area residents enjoy some of the nation's highest quality drinking water, with pristine Sierra snowmelt from the Hetch Hetchy reservoir as our primary source. Every year, our water is tested more than 100,000 times to ensure that it meets or exceeds every standard for safe drinking water. And yet we still buy bottled water. Why?

Maybe it's because we think bottled water is cleaner and somehow better, but that's not true. The federal standards for tap water are higher than those for bottled water.

The Environmental Law Foundation has sued eight bottlers for using words such as "pure" to market water that contains bacteria, arsenic and chlorine. Bottled water is no bargain either: It costs 240 to 10,000 times more than tap water. For the price of one bottle of Evian, a San Franciscan can receive 1,000 gallons of tap water. Forty percent of bottled water should be labeled bottled tap water because that is exactly what it is. But even that doesn't dampen the demand.

Most of the price of a bottle of water goes for its bottling, packaging, shipping, marketing, retailing and profit. Transporting bottled water by boat, truck and train involves burning massive quantities of fossil fuels. More than 5 trillion gallons of bottled water is shipped internationally each year. Here in San Francisco, we can buy water from Fiji (5,455 miles away) or Norway (5,194 miles away) and many other faraway places to satisfy our demand for the chic and exotic.

Just supplying Americans with plastic water bottles for one year consumes more than 47 million gallons of oil, enough to take 100,000 cars off the road and 1 billion pounds of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, according to the Container Recycling Institute. In contrast, San Francisco tap water is distributed through an existing zero-carbon infrastructure: plumbing and gravity. Our water generates clean energy on its way to our tap -- powering our streetcars, fire stations, the airport and schools.

More than 1 billion plastic water bottles end up in the California's trash each year, taking up valuable landfill space, leaking toxic additives, such as phthalates, into the groundwater and taking 1,000 years to biodegrade. That means bottled water may be harming our future water supply.

We've tried to switch away from using plastic around food after Lisa did some reading on the negative effects of the estrogen-like chemicals in many plastics. Once you start to pay attention, you begin notice the amazing amount of food-associated plastic we use (and toss).

What's to be done? The Chron has some suggestions:

So it is clear that bottled water directly adds to environmental degradation, global warming and a large amount of unnecessary waste and litter. All this for a product that is often inferior to San Francisco's tap water. Luckily, there are better, less expensive alternatives:

• In the office, use a water dispenser that taps into tap water. The only difference your company will notice is that you're saving a lot of money.
• At home and in your car, switch to a stainless steel water bottle and use it for the rest of your life knowing that you are drinking some of the nation's best water and making the planet a better place.

Hat-tip: Rush Limbaugh

Posted by Don Roberts at 8:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I have imagined writing this post for quite some time now, and I have found it daunting because Marie Bellet is my favorite singer. I want so much to capture the brilliance, love, sacrifice, oh, just everything that she encapsulates in her music. Mrs. Bellet is unabashedly Catholic, and yet any Christian would find almost all of her music accessible.

Why do I like her music so much? Marie has a pleasant voice, and I enjoy the variety of music styles she employs, but her lyrics tip the scales. Somehow, Marie, who is a mother to nine children, manages to catch so much of motherhood and living a Christian life in her stirring music. Both the joys and the trials are represented. Many of her songs are so poignant, they bring a tear to my eye. Often, they help me see the ways in which I am failing to follow Christ. This woman has a gift from God.

Just to whet your appetite, I'm going to do four reviews, one for each album she has released. The album I'll cover in this post is her first What I Wanted to Say. (Want to hear some clips from this album?) The first song, One Heroic Moment, focuses on Dads and the sacrifices they make for their families. "Sometimes it amazes him that a man can work so long. He didn't know till he had mouths to feed he could ever be that strong."

The fifth song, Here I Am echoes the Bible "Here I am, Lord" with lyrics like "Here I am, take all I have today. Take my hands. Take my mouth; make the words that I say. Take this cluttered heart, make it simple and sure to obey. Here I am. Take all I have today." Catholics will note that the subtitle of the song is "The Morning Offering," but one needn't be Catholic to appreciate this song.

Then there is my favorite, the last song on the album, Will You, Too, Go Away? In this brilliant, very Catholic, song, Marie sings as an older man who has left the Church. During his anger at the Church while at his daughter's wedding, he refuses to look at the Crucifix above the altar. "...The feet gnarled up in pain beneath the hammer's blow. He'd lift his eyes no further, he did not want to see. 'Why are you always suffering, suffering at me?' " The song finishes with his return to the Church. He looks up the rest of the Crucifix that he refused to see earlier. "And the crumpled eyelids closed clearing years of wasted doubts and he lifted up his heart to feel the wounds and hear the shouts. And the arms that spread to hold him, and the pain upon the face, said, 'So long I've waited for you. Please, this time won't you stay? This time won't you stay?"

Posted by Lisa Roberts at 10:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For the most part, there are two kinds of people in the world: cat people and dog people; and I am a dog person. Still, I think this video, found by my mother-in-law, is pretty impressive:

[This video] Features our cat ["our" refers to the people who made the video, not Lisa and me — Ed.], Nora, playing the piano. She's three-years-old, and started playing on her own at about age two. She plays even when no one else is in the room, but her favorite thing is to play duets with my wife's students.

Posted by Don Roberts at 9:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sometimes I tire of the endless fight against evil. I am even, upon occasion, tempted to despair. But, as Thomas Jefferson said, "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." It can seem at times that the Culture of Death will ensnare us all in its slavery, but even if this were true, we are still required to stand up for Truth, even when we get tired. Perhaps especially when we get tired. The enemy wants to wear us down.

On February 15th, Assemblywoman Patty Berg, Assemblyman Lloyd Levine, and Speaker of the Assembly Fabian Nunez introduced AB 374, misleadingly called "Compassionate Choices Act". AB 374 is just Physician-Assisted Suicide in sheep's clothing. Basically, once polling data indicated that people supported "choice" while cringing at the work "suicide," well, the word smiths knew what to do. (If you think this isn't important, bear in mind that the bill itself would require all state agencies to refer to assisted suicide as "aid-in-dying." A good part of this battle is a battle for language.)

Voters rejected a previous Physician-Assisted Suicide bill in 2006, and now it is time for us to jump into the fray again and make our voices heard. You can call it "compassionate choices" but it is still murder. Please don't get tired. Please stand vigorously for life. If you are a Californian, please call your State Assembly member and voice your objection to AB 374. People deserve better than being offered murder as "compassion."

If you want to sign up to receive updates on the status of this bill or if you just want to read more analysis of why this bill is bad law, check out the article at Catholics for the Common Good.

Posted by Lisa Roberts at 8:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When Don got home from work tonight he asked Alex if he enjoyed his day at the park.

"Not much," replied Alex. "I was annoying."
"You were annoyed?" Don prompted.
"No. I was annoying. I kept asking for a snack."

Ah, the honesty of the very young.

Posted by Lisa Roberts at 8:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Michael Crichton has an op-ed in the New York Times about the practice of companies patenting specific genes in your body:

YOU, or someone you love, may die because of a gene patent that should never have been granted in the first place. Sound far-fetched? Unfortunately, it’s only too real.

Gene patents are now used to halt research, prevent medical testing and keep vital information from you and your doctor. Gene patents slow the pace of medical advance on deadly diseases. And they raise costs exorbitantly: a test for breast cancer that could be done for $1,000 now costs $3,000.

Humans share mostly the same genes. The same genes are found in other animals as well. Our genetic makeup represents the common heritage of all life on earth. You can’t patent snow, eagles or gravity, and you shouldn’t be able to patent genes, either. Yet by now one-fifth of the genes in your body are privately owned.

The results have been disastrous. Ordinarily, we imagine patents promote innovation, but that’s because most patents are granted for human inventions. Genes aren’t human inventions, they are features of the natural world. As a result these patents can be used to block innovation, and hurt patient care.

Crichton ends his piece by noting that Congressmen Xavier Becerra (D, CA) and Dave Weldon (R, FL) have introduced legislation, the Genomic Research and Accessibility Act (H.R.977), to ban the practice of patenting genes found in nature.

Normally I'm a big supporter of the use of patents, but this sounds more like "abuse" than "use." Congressmen Becerra and Weldon are on the right track.

Posted by Don Roberts at 6:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Over at The New Liturgical Movement, Shawn Tribe proposes a project to make simple changes to the Sanctuary area in Catholic churches to more properly focus attention on the altar. His first example can be viewed here.

Posted by Don Roberts at 10:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

This will be a hard entry to write. I have been consumed lately with trying to "de-thing" so that we have more space in our much loved, though small, home. We have saved nearly everything from when our children were small in the hopes that we might have another child, and I have finally reached the point where my mind tells me we will not be so blessed. This leads to the next thought. Perhaps I should bless others with all the accoutrements of life with a baby. I have strollers and bouncy seats, and swings, clothes for boys and girls, diapers, and a host of other baby-related things. I have started to go through just a few small things, and I have been forced to stop. It feels like my heart is being ripped from my chest. My mother says she will buy us new clothes should we conceive again, and bless her, I know that she would, but somehow I can not bless others with my plenty. All I can feel as I try to divest is the pain of never having another child. And all this is in addition to believing that God knows what He is doing, and that perhaps He doesn't want us to conceive. It feels like giving up, even if it is not. And it feels like lack of generosity. Some days I tell God to use my suffering to help other souls, and I feel good about that, but most days it is hard to sit with the suffering. Particularly since I know we are so blessed with the children we already have. My mind and my emotions are at war.

Posted by Lisa Roberts at 10:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

The kids have been listening to a CD from storyteller Jim Weiss entitled "Heroes in Mythology: Theseus, Prometheus, Odin." In addition to their newfound interest in Theseus, they're also quite fond of The Wind in the Willows. They particularly like the stop-motion animated British TV adaptation.

Anyway, tonight at dinner, Alex and Sarah decided it was time to make up a story about Mr. Toad and his friends fighting the Minotaur. Lisa and I had to provide voices for Toad, Badger, Ratty, and Moley, while Sarah and Alex provided voices for the Minotaur (Sarah) and King Minos of Crete (Alex). Believe it or not, the story kind of worked!

Posted by Don Roberts at 9:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

First the open letter to Nancy Pelosi, and now this. Maybe there's something in the water that's suddenly giving American Catholics backbones:

ROME, February 2, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) — The Knights of Malta have officially notified LifeSiteNews that Terry McAuliffe will never be admitted to the Order of Malta on account of his pro-abortion stand and public repudiation of the Catholic Church's teachings on the sanctity of life.

On Monday, McAuliffe made a brazen boast on the Hugh Hewitt show that not only could he be "pro-choice" and "Catholic", but said he was also invited to join the famous Knights of Malta. The Knights initially disbelieved reports that pro-abortion McAuliffe was joining their Order, but after examining the facts re-informed LifeSiteNews that the Order has no choice but to reject McAuliffe as an unworthy candidate.

The Communications Office of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta headquartered in Rome wrote to LifeSiteNews that under no circumstances would Terry McAuliffe, an unabashed pro-abortion Catholic politician, ever find his way into the ranks of the august Knights of Malta, an organization dedicated for nearly 900 years to defending the Catholic Church and its teachings.

LifeSiteNews.com has also been informed by a U.S. member of the Knights of Malta that McAuliffe's application has been withdrawn.

Posted by Don Roberts at 8:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Punxsutawney Phil predicts an early spring:

Feb. 2 (Bloomberg) — The groundhog called Phil emerged from his burrow this morning in central Pennsylvania and didn't see his shadow, which according to a German legend signals there will be an early spring.

Weathermen, or at least the ones who believe that the only weather worth talking about occurs on the East Coast, disagree:

Government meteorologists disagreed with Phil. The El Nino weather pattern credited with helping to bring an unusually mild start to this winter is dissipating, clearing the way for colder weather during the remainder of the heating season, they said.

Except of course, in California, where El Nino can cause floods and landslides. An end to El Nino promises us an early, albeit dry, Spring.

By the way, today is the day to check out the annual re-posting of Jonah Goldberg's ode to the movie Groundhog Day.

Posted by Don Roberts at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This poor fellow's experience teaches us: 1) Don't get behind on your laundry and 2) Hold your temper.

Husband's underpant tantrum destroys home

An angry husband who threw old clothes into the garden and set fire to them because he couldn't find any clean underpants accidentally burnt his home down.

Ivo Jerbic, 55, from Prikraj, near Zagreb, told police he had lost his temper after failing to find any clean underpants in a closet full of old clothes.

He had thrown them all in the garden and set fire to them.

He told police: "My wife never throws anything out, I just lost my temper."

But the fire spread to the house which burned to the ground.

Posted by Don Roberts at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Congrats! You're the Hero of Time! You have a strong sense of justice and go out of your way to right a wrong. You are very patient and treat everyone with respect...no matter how much they annoy you. It's obvious you can hold your own in a fight, but because of your quiet nature, people tend to underestimate you.

Take the Which OoT Character are You? Quiz!

Woo-hoo! I didn't have any idea how this quiz would turn out, but I ended up as Link! What? You don't know who Link is? Gosh, I don't even know where to start.

Some years ago... 1990?... my dad and I used to play Zelda games on the old Super Nintendo machine. What better way to blow off steam between college exams that by freeing the world from bad guys! Truth, honor, justice -- all in a day's work for Link! Flash forward to 2006 and the release of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Wow! Did you check out those links and see the difference in the graphics between then and now?

Anyway, as a continuation of the legacy, Alex has become a Link fan. (I'll have to find a picture of him dressed up as Link.) So now we have three generations playing Twilight Princess. Kinda makes the eyes mist up, doesn't it?

Posted by Lisa Roberts at 1:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Fr. John Malloy, pastor of the Church of Sts. Peter and Paul, wrote an Open Letter to Nancy Pelosi (the Speaker of the House, not our "Mother Sponge") published in the parish bulletin:

Nancy, you are fooling yourself and I fear fooling many good Catholics. You are simply not in sync with the Catholic Church. Until you change your non-Catholic positions, you should stop calling yourself Catholic. Your record shows that you support embryonic stem cell research, Planned Parenthood, contraception, family planning funding, allowing minors to have an abortion without parental consent, and are against making it a crime to harm a fetus, etc. etc.

Do we not elect politicians to make laws that help people honor their responsibilities, such as protecting life itself? Can politicians not tell someone else not to kill? [...] Nancy, we (together with your pro-life family) would all like it if you were not so vocally pro-choice, i.e. pro-death. Until your choice is in line with Catholic doctrine, please, Nancy, do not receive the Eucharist when you attend Mass.

Way to go, Fr. Maloy!

Posted by Don Roberts at 9:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

1 February 2003: four years ago today, the shuttle Columbia disintegrated during reentry, killing all seven on board:

The crew of STS-107. Front row, from left to right: Rick D. Husband, Kalpana Chawla, and William C. McCool. Back row, from left to right: David M. Brown, Laurel B. Clark, Michael P. Anderson, and Ilan Ramon.

Coming a little over two years after the 9/11 attacks, my first assumption was that the explosion might have been the work of terrorist sabotage. However, evidence from NASA cameras during the launch quickly indicated that foam falling from the external tank was the culprit. The big disadvantage of the Shuttle's design is that the orbiter sits beside the external tank and solid rocket boosters, instead of on top of the rocket stack, as in the Apollo/Saturn V design. It's very unlikely that any manned spacecraft fielded by NASA in the foreseeable future will use a side-by-side design. In fact, the design for the new Crew Exploration Vehicle (aka "Orion") looks very much like the Apollo/Saturn V design.

Posted by Don Roberts at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)