English Pop Star Receives Sacrilegious Communion in Colombia

The English pop star, Paul David Hewson, more popularly known as Bono, received sacrilegious Communion in the Hand, despite not being a professed Catholic.

He was at a concert in Colombia and attended Mass at a boy's school there.

http://m.eltiempo.com/cultura/gente/bono-cantante-de-u2-comulgo-en-el-gimnasio-moderno-de-bogota-139010

AMDG

Pixar to Release Cartoon for Centenary Fatima

Edit: a regular reader sent us this.   Is the message of the Gospel really so hard to communicate that we have to resort to these kinds of degrading, pedestrian portrayals of the divine?  The production values and spiritual sentiments of the man producing this are completely ill matched to the beauty and majesty of the message of Fatima.  They do not send the message, they degrade and demean it by such trivializing portrayals.  We shudder to think what the rest of the film looks like.


 

J.K. Rowling: Hogwarts Magic School Has Aberrosexual Students

The Hogwarts school of magic has homosexual students. This was confirmed by the author Joanne K. Rowland at the request of fans of the novel series, Harry Potter.

Edinburgh (kath.net/LSN/jg) The Hogwarts school of magic in Joanne K. Rowling's novel series "Harry Potter" has homosexual students. This was confirmed by the author on Twitter. A Harry Potter fan asked the writer, whether one may assume that the Hogwarts School is a "safe space for LGBT students."

"Of course," said Rowling, adding to her answer the following sentence: "If Harry Potter has taught us anything, it is that no one should live in hiding." This is the second occasion on which the bestselling author had announced that homosexuality in her children's books will be treated as something normal.

Back in 2007, she had revealed that Albus Dumbledore, the headmaster of the school of magic, was a homosexual. This and the positive presentation of occult and initiation of magical practices led many Christians to reject it. Link to Kath.net... AMDG

First Communion "Star Wars" Mass with Light Saber Blessing

Hohenbrunn (Catholic news). There is a tremendous departure presently in southern Germany, which had its source in association with four parishes (St. Stephen in Putzbrunn, Ortisei in Sunnyvale, St. Magdalena in Ottobrun and St. Stephen in Hohenbrunn), from the tradition of the Roman Catholic Church. It wasn't Darth Vader who gave the blessing to the first communion children. This was personally undertaken by Pastor Christoph Nobs with a bright green laser sword at the celebration of a Star Wars First Communion Mass. The idea for the stars-War Communion came from Nicolas Gkotses community director. Star Wars had been a theme for the children in their religious instruction and so he tried to communicate the gospel in this way in a timely manner. - "May the force be with you!"

 Source: Lightsaber blessing hi-münchen.de

Jesuit Periodical Celebrates 25 Years Since Warhol's Death

München/Munich (kath.net/KAP) Andy Warhol was "despite his deep, albeit ever hidden persistent piety" too peculiar, while his work was stamped by his "rootedness in the Byzantine-Catholic Church". That's how the German Jesuit periodical "Stimmen der Zeit" took note of the 25th anniversary of the death of the famous Pop-Art-Artist. Warhol's portraits of famous stars take on the Iconography of the Eastern Church, its style of repetition recalls Orthodox Liturgy, it says in an article "Modern Icons" by art historian Ruth Langenberg.

Andy Warhol was born on August 6, 1928 in the Ruthenian quarter of Pittsburgh (USA) as Andrew Warhola, who was raised in a strict immigrant family. The Warholas came from the north east of modern Slovakia, recalls Langebach. The participation in  religious life had been understandably important in Andy Warhol's youth in the community of St. John Chrysostom -- which belongs to the Latin Church and is at the same time bound to the Byzantine-Slavic Rite. This influence was not broken by his move to New York and he lived in a home "full of religious objects."

The Pop Art, to which Warhol was inclined and to which he was one of the most famous participants, is considered to be "profane art in any case", says Langenberg. In the early 1960s a few young artists in Great Britain and the USA made the banal everyday, the consumerist world, the formal language of consumerism and comics the elements and formal objects of their art.

If Andy Warhol, for example, originated the face of Marilyn Monroe, by way of a series shortly after her death -- represented in diverse repetitions, he made said "Stimmen der Zeit" on the one conscious of the side of mass media "abrasiveness" through repetition, and on the other side also the quasi "reverential" object. "The principle of repetition, which is the characteristic of Warhol's Pop Art, is in many respects natural for Icon painting", explained Langenberg in his article. "An Icon repeats always a basic image with the least possible variation."

In the picture "Gold Marilyn Monroe" of 1962 even the profane significance of the coincided with the sacred in the "Icon". The portrait of the film star stood like an Orthodox holy painting in an iconostasis in the midst of a golden plaque: "Marilyn appeared almost as Maria."

More and More Religious Themes
From the 1970s Warhol set apart with diverse variations with the death's head as the traditional "memento mori" - motif of Christian painting, says Langenberg. His last five years of life were occupied explicitly with Christian themes -- above all the cross, but also with "Icons of art history" like Raffaels Sixtine Madonna or Leonardo da Vincis Last Supper.

The large sized work "The Last Supper (Christ 112 Times)" of 1986 gives a view of the Leonardo Fresco with the accentuated head of Christ 28-times in four rows. Langenberg evaluated Warhol's work consequently as a "desacralization" of the famous painting, yet at the same time it consisted in the extreme oblique format and the coloration "as a thoroughly valuable, near to sacral radiation, which wasn't preoccupied with the Pop-attitude of other works." And the principle of repetition an explicit summoning of Jesus, to review the last supper, a "sacral connotation".

Andy Warhol died on the 22nd February 1987 following a gall bladder operation and was buried in the city of his birth, Pittsburgh at the Byzantine-Catholic cemetery. At his funeral Mass, Priest John Richardson warned then against taking the artist's apparent superficiality too literally: The knowledge of his secret piety altered the perception of the artist, "who led the world by the nose, till it understood that its only obsessions were gold, fame and glamour (...) the unobtrusive observer was fundamentally a chronicling angel."

Link to original..kath.net...

Hell's Procession: Spain

Editor:  As a child, I fell into a deep sleep after eating sweets, rich sweet creme cheese dainties, frosted with glistening quartz sugar, gingerbread men as large as small dogs, and slender cones filled with ice scream as tall as Cathedral spires while I listened all the while to tales that hadn't been sanitized by our authorities about dark castles, impenetrable enchanted forests and the dark things that moved the human heart to do terrible things from our gramophone in the smi-darkness of my childhood home.  Falling asleep, I was transported near a place not too far from my home on the edge of a river, where red Indians hunted their game in the summer and the sleepy oaks had seen the coming and going of hundreds of years.  As I walked along the road, I saw low fire ahead of me in the garden yard of a very small cottage, the kind in which an old widow might be spending her years to see a single dark figure sitting there, its wavering giant shadow cast rhythmically against the worn front of the tired old house which was more of a picturesque shed.  Its disrepair was clear even in the faint firelight, the only light which shone in the darkness of the neighborhood, the eves of the tall, elegant homes surrounding, visible against the faint stars of a moonless sky in the sepulchral silence.

Everything was silent, except for the gentle simmering of the fire over which stood another brazier, filled with red coals and the silent figure standing watch over it.  It was completely enrobed in black and I could see no face against the faint light of the coals and it made no movement or sign of recognition as I said, "hello".  Out of the darkness, I could hear the footsteps and hushed whispering of a very large throng of people moving up the street beyond, a joyless procession of lone voices occasionally called out from it, some I even recognized, a hopeless throng with occasional cries of despair, marching to or from the pit as it seemed.   I could even hear the voices of friends against the dark slump of hundreds of shapes lurching slowly forward, a weird procession of Hell it seemed. . Then I awoke and went to school, but never forgot the dream, even writing down in case my memory would change it in some way.

It comes to my mind after having read this passage on Arturo Vasquez's folk Catholicism blog, about a decadent who died in an accident in the street where he was struck by a garbage truck in the morning light as he stumbled from a brothel, an unconfessed, and lifelong débauché,, he has become for the increasingly irreligious majority of Spain a kind of anti-Saint, and his procession competes with the official one, according to Vasques. It is, a procession from and to Hell and it struck a chord which reminded me of the procession of my childhood dream so long ago.

Probably one of the more unique stories in the Spanish speaking world during holy week, this is a procession done on the night of Holy Thursday in commemoration of the tragic death of one of Leon’s most infamous clients of the bars and whorehouses there, Genaro Blanco Blanco, later known as San Genarín. At dawn on Holy Thursday, 1929, while completely drunk, Genaro was hit by the first garbage truck of the day while relieving himself on a wall. A few of his friends (later known as the “Evangelists) deeply appreciative of having known this bon vivant and figure on the bohemian scene of Leon, decided to have their own procession the next Holy Thursday, 1930, in which they went to all of the bars and whorehouses that Genaro once frequented. The legend then grew to include miracles attributed to “San Genarín”, such as a person being cured of a kidney ailment and a miraculous goal for the home team in an important game. The numbers in the annual procession grew until 1957, when it was banned by the fascist authorities, some say because it had more participants than the religious one.

After a twenty year hiatus, the processions began again, and continue to this day. They are complete with torches, statues of the people involved in the historical events, couplets celebrating the life of the “saint”, and offerings at the site of death. It is perhaps the only example that I know of where militant secularists have their own procession to rival the Catholic ones of Holy Week.

Link to Reditus...

How to Avoid Witchcraft or X-rated Films for Your Kids

[California Catholic Daily] The following was prepared by the California Catholic Conference [of bishops] education committee (July 2010) and posted on the bishops’ site this summer.

Most of California's Catholic families with school-age children choose to enroll them in the state's public schools-rather than in Catholic or other private schools. However, many families are unfamiliar with the laws that govern what their child will be allowed to do-or asked to do-and unaware of certain ideas and information their child will be taught while at school.

WHAT THE CHURCH TEACHES: As Catholics, we strongly believe that parents are the first and foremost educators of their children. The Catholic Catechism states that families are the "privileged community" where children are meant to grow in wisdom, stature, and grace (# 2206-2209). The Church counsels us to work with public authorities to ensure and protect the rights of parents.

Read further...

Love-Parade in Duisberg Ends in Tears

Editor: So far, there hasn't been a lot of coverage of this event in the USA and little mention was made of the explicit and decadent nature of the event, except on some conservative German Catholic news blogs, but there are others who see it correctly, as Kathnet reports:

[Kath.net] "Welcome to the sexiest party in the world!" wrote "Bild" still on 23 July, the day before the Love-Parade in Duisburg. Instead of sexiness, journalists are coming to describe it in terms of biblical decine after the mass panic with 19 dead and hundreds of injured. "Hell at the Love-Parade", wrote the Wochenzeitung Die Zeit.

And Evan Herman, christian publicist and television moderator, felt herself reminded of "Sodom and Gomorrha." The Old Testament history (Genisis 19:28) went that God destroyed both cities because of the sinful deeds of their inhabitants; only Lot and his daughter were saved in the minute.

ABC reduces what is a moral issue into a mere question of public safety and proper crowd control. Nothing is mentioned of the deplorable intent of the event as being the "Sexiest Party in the World".

[ABC]German state authorities on Wednesday accused the organizer of last weekend's Love Parade techno festival of major security breaches which may have led to the crush that killed 21 people and injured more than 500.

The organizer's security officials failed to properly control the entrance area where the victims were crushed, according to North Rhine-Westphalia's Interior Minister Ralf Jaeger and the state's chief police controller Dieter Wehe.

"Security did not fulfill its duty," Wehe said while presenting the key findings of a preliminary police investigation at a news conference.

Read further...

Correction: One of the injured has since died, so the death-toll is now 20.

Why is Vatican paper reviewing Avatar, the Simpsons?

Why is Vatican paper reviewing Avatar, the Simpsons?



Osservatore Romano's review was a little strident and petulant, but we expect that from OR, but it was right on for a change. Avatar really is a pantheistic, goofy Gnostic film that cobbles together anarchic influences from film and literature with an eye to ecology and social "justice" like the Mission, Emerald Forest, Apocalypse Now, Star Wars and a few other films we can't think of right now.

The unfortunate thing about this from our point of view is that the one dimension that could have made this film a far deeper one were almost entirely left out. In CS Lewis'science fiction series, That Hideous Strength, creatures rather like those of the planet Pandora are threatened by diabolical forces from Earth who hope to subjugate their world for the sake of scientific imperialism.

The worst thing about this film, in our opinion, will be the large number of people who will swallow it whole and internalize its erroneous lessons sight unseen; that is to say, unconsciously. Dealing with people like that, ruled by emotions and failing to appreciate the delicate power relationships between peoples and elites will no-doubt provide more fodder for further class warfare and the homogenalization of human excellence.

Thank you, Hollyweird.

Of course, most of the reviewers of the review want to talk about how the Vatican wants to spiff up its periodicals image and make it more relevant. We think it's wise of them to be conversant in the popular culture, but why join your enemies and oppressors? Attack them in print we say!