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Archive for November, 2006
The Sanctity of Life
The Catholic Church is often beat-up for its ardent respect for life, conception till death. Now I hate to bring up what everyone else does with the War in Iraq, but let us look at what has happened there. Iraq is a mostly Muslim country. The Catholic Church has Priests, nuns, brothers, and parishes around the country side. We know for a fact that Priests are being “knocked off” and killed because of their Catholic beliefs. So with all this fresh in your brain let us move forward to Saddam’s trial and verdict of death. What would that Catholic Church do with it’s hemmoraging of life in Iraq, well of course, defend the sanctity of life. I have always wondered what I would do in the face of adversity and if ever faced with the death penalty. I imagined if it would be in my being to forgive someone rather than put them to death for the great attrocity against my family/friends/etc. When I heard a month ago about the Priests being killed in Iraq I was sad and upset. The military in me wanted to pickup a rifle and fix all of this. Yet, as it so often does, the Church showed me something my emotions masked behind the guise of truth. God’s love and law do not just apply to those in our parishes, no, it applies to all. I hope the Church can sway people to allow Saddam to live. Who knows what a loving forgiveness can perform on a man’s heart.
From the desk of Father Philip N. Powell
I have at times in my life thought about this seriously. While I don’t feel God’s grace calling me to the priesthood, still a good read to understand that calling:
Please give me five minutes to say something that must be said…
I will jump immediately to the punchline. To the men here tonight, if you know that God has called you to serve His church as a priest or even if you think he might have called you to serve, it is time to put aside your worries and your doubts and your fears and your hesitations and it is time to answer with a resounding YES!
There is no vocations crisis in this country. None. There is a crisis of courage. God has called all the men we need to serve His Church as priests. More than enough. There is never a lack of abundant blessings from our Father. There is, however, a lack of generous acceptance of His abundance. We, as a Church, can only benefit from those blessings that we accept, only those that we eagerly bring in and use and give thanks to God for! So my question is: if God is sending us all the vocations we need, why do we have such a shortage of priests?
The young men God is calling aren’t saying YES to the call. Why? The reasons are as old as the world: money, sex, prestige, or should I say the fear of not having any money sex, or prestige. Forgive me for saying this, but it needs to be said: there is a profound lack of courage among you who are called but will not say YES. What do you fear? If God has called you to the priesthood, what more do you need than His word setting you on the way? Yes, you will have to give up sex, money, and prestige. Why is this a problem for a Christian? Have you bought into the pagan ideal of the virile man? You can’t be a man if you don’t have a treasure box full of gold, an enviable career, and a little black book full of women?! No, I’m not saying that the vows of a Catholic priest are easy to live out. Far from it. It takes courage, resolve, and a lot of hard work with God’s grace to be a faithful ordained man of God. And the reward for this hard work isn’t always what we might want. But that’s what sacrifice is—giving to God the best we have and trusting that He will use it to the best possible end.
I was going to tell you what got me so riled up about this topic, but after several drafts I couldn’t find a way to tell you charitably. So rather than tell you what got me so angry, let me tell you what we need in the Church right now. We need young men—faithful, courageous, smart, eager to serve—young men who will give themselves to the tough work of leading the church through the first half of this century. Bishops all over the country are setting into place the self-fulfilling prophecy of priestless Sundays and activists are slowly preparing American Catholics for the disappearance of the priest. He is to become a relic, a rare thing seen only once or twice a year, and eventually, b/c of the terrible shortage that we all lament, of course, he is to become a luxury we can no longer afford.
We need young men who will step up and offer themselves as servant-leaders. We need young men who will battle the dissenting professors in the seminaries, who will step up and take charge in the parishes as men of God, who are not embarrassed by their vocation and who will proudly proclaim themselves religious, priests, and servants. We need young men who will patiently work with faithful lay men and women to prepare them for leadership roles proper to the lay charism. In other words, gentlemen, we need you to say YES to God’s call to you. We need young men with great big hearts to stand up, come forward, and do the job that Christ has left us to do: to teach, to preach, to celebrate his sacraments, and to show us the Way as faithful men of this century.
Tuesday night at Dinner and Discourse, Fr, Joe Koenig, the diocesan vocations director, will be here to speak. The university’s Serra Club will provide I Fratelli’s pizza for dinner and we will have dessert. Dinner starts at 5:30pm in Anselm 230. The talk begins at 6:00pm with a showing of the video, Fishers of Men. Come fill your bellies as all good Catholics should and come fill your hearts to serve.
Men, step up! There’s no time for fear.
ARRR!! I am a software pirate
And it is easier…I do my best to use opensource software at all times but there are times when I need, specifically, Windows XP. I just purchased a 24″ iMac and have had no problems with any software prohibiting me from actually using the computer. I figured that most of the people I know would be purchasing macs to also run Windows with bootcamp so I better learn it. No problem I thought, I have a pro purchased copy sitting in the closet collecting dust. I need SP2 to do an install so I download all the necessary updates and copy the cd to the drive. Let me actually list the steps for full effect:
1.) Copy contents of CD to drive
2.) Download XP SP2 - First verify you are “genuine”
3.) Microsoft tells me I am not…and the key is good…so I hack past with javascript
4.) Download and extract SP2
5.) Run update.exe with new directory of copied CD
6.) Download ISOBuster to extract Microsoft Corporation.img
7.) mkisofs -with - lots -of -options -to -make iso
8.) Verify it works, it doesn’t
9.) Wash, Rinse, Repeat
So lets play the “What If” game. What if I was a software pirate. Here are the steps
1.) Find torrent for XP SP2 ISO
2.) Found it in 10 seconds on search engine
3.) Realize that it not only has SP2 but all the updates and IE7/WM11 preloaded, cool!
4.) What 1 hour
5.) Burn ISO
Gee thanks for making a REAL customer feel like a worthless pile of crap. So tell me again why this is so difficult for companies to understand?! When you do crap like this it only makes your real customers pissed off.
