The CatholiCity Message
Volume XV, Number 3 – March 31, 2011
"Anything worth doing is worth doing badly."
G.K. Chesterton
Dear CatholiCity Citizen,
Your response to the release of our first new CD in three years, "The Eucharist Explained," has been spectacular. Thank you! You can order "In Bulk" (quantities of 100, a ridiculous 50 cents each, free shipping) here:
https://secure.catholicity.com/bulk-order.html
On a related topic, we opened a CatholiCity Message with the same Chesterton quote above this time two years ago, followed by a message about how evangelizing badly during Lent is a perfect way to live out his profound maxim. Reaction to our serious but hilarious plea to help us lose money and to take our overconfident shipping department workers down a peg or two was extraordinarily positive, so we formatted the whole thing into an article that you can read here:
http://www.catholicity.com/commentary/macfarlane/evangelizing.html
Hey, like you, we get emails with links to articles and we usually don't bother to read them either, but this one may just give you the extra little motivation (or the smile) you need during the dog days of Lent.
And now...we have lots of stuff, so much that you should not feel guilty about skipping over stuff and browsing the headlines until one or more grabs you.
A. WHY IS EASTER SO LATE THIS YEAR?
Easter falls on the second-latest possible date this year, April 24. The United States Navy happily provides the technical reasons why here, if you are curious:
http://aa.usno.navy.mil/faq/docs/easter.php
The last time Easter fell on the latest date, April 25, was in 1943, when my 76-year-old dad was ten. The next time that happens is 2038, so most of our grandpas will need to be centenarians to see it again. The earliest possible date for Easter is March 22, but it is not scheduled to occur again until 2285 (unless Our Lord returns beforehand).
B. HOW TO SAVE MONEY BUYING GASOLINE
Gas prices are skyrocketing, and there is only so much driving you can cut back on before you hit the minimum required to get to work and fulfill your family needs. Below is an edited summary of an email going around from a petroleum expert on how to save money when buying gas:
Purchase gas in the morning when the ground temperature is still cold and the gas is denser. Gasoline expands in volume significantly as it heats up.
Pump gas into your tank at the slowest setting because it reduces the effect of gas turning into vapor that is either returned into the pump or lost into the air.
To reduce gas evaporation inside your tank, fill up when your car is half full.
After the pump clicks off, you can usually jigger leftover ounces of gas into your tank by lifting the pump tube higher than the nozzle while twisting the nozzle upside down.
C. HOUSE-BUILDING and GOING TO HELL
If you have ever built a home, you know the dynamic. The contractor gives you an estimate then offers you choices to upgrade along the way. For a mere five or ten percent more, you can have a nicer countertop, bathroom fixture, floor covering, expanded driveway, bigger deck, or fancier windows. For another ten percent more, you can increase the quality once again. Incremental upgrades can add 30% or more to the original contract price of your home. In 1985, we met a very holy priest in northern California during our travels. If you are from the area, you probably have seen the two-story silvery statue of Our Lady on the parish grounds from the highway. He was an old man then, twenty-five years ago, with piercing gray eyes, and although we had never met before, he invited me into his office and began to explain how people end up in hell. He said the evil one first tempts us to commit small, seemingly insignificant sins, waits until they become habits and our conscience is deadened in regard to these, then tempts us with slightly more serious sins, until he has enventually us ensnared in serious mortal sins. "Then," the holy pastor told me, "at the end of your life, your conscience has been dead for a long time, and it easy to nudge you off the cliff into hell." In short, to follow the house-building analogy, the devil upgrades us in sin. (We do not imply that contractors are evil; virtually all are honest, hard-working folks in our experience who offer real value for their upgrades.) This Lent, if you are struggling with serious sin, it might be worth your while during prayer to take inventory of when and how the upgrades began, perhaps many years ago.
D. LAST CHANCE: DIVINE MERCY LAPEL PINS, MAGNETS, PRINTS
We still have a dozen or more custom-made Divine Mercy fridge magnets, lapel pins, and art-house prints left over from our Christmas appeal. You can scoop them up here, and if they are shown on the webpage when you click on this link, it means there are still a few left:
http://www.catholicity.com/support/donation.html
E. FROM GOD'S LIPS TO MY EARS
At the end of the sacrament of Confession today, my priest/Jesus prayed the following for your author: "May God the Father, His angels, and all the saints, especially your patron saint, guide you in holiness." There is a statue of my patron saint, Therese, the Little Flower, in the cathedral where I attend daily Mass, and I gave her a wink on the way back to my pew. She's my girl. Who is your patron saint? When was the last time you spoke with each other?
F. MIND-BLOWING BASEBALL
We have always felt that baseball is a mystical, if not Catholic game. How does one explain, for example, that virtually all of the top home run hitters -- Hank Aaron, Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, even Barry Bonds, saints and sinners like us -- were baptized Catholics? (Our best guess is that Our Lady loves the long ball.) With Opening Day today, we are reminded of an excellent article in First Things on the mystical and metaphysical appeal of this unique game:
http://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/07/a-perfect-game
G. FIFTEEN YEARS AND STILL LAZY AND UNRELIABLE
This year marks the fifteenth anniversary of the CatholiCity Message. We will not celebrate it because, well, that would be boring. If you are interested, we do have a few observations. First, why such steady popularity in the constantly-changing world of the Internet? Well, for one thing, we are sincere and respectful, even when we screw up, and it is hard to fake that year after year. Plus, there is something funny about our failed attempts at humor. Right? No. Sorry.
Also, we try to put ourselves in your shoes, and early on that led to our daring practice of letting weeks meander by before sending out the messages on our innovatively unreliable schedule. We get annoyed, just like you, when otherwise wonderful organizations constantly fill our in-box with stuff we do not necessarily want to read. We pride ourselves on only seldomly filling your inbox with stuff you do not necessarily want to read.
And praying with tens of thousands of people is definitely cool. Prayer changes the world. Mostly, we try to tell you stuff that you do not already know, or stuff you have not called to mind recently, and do so with a hopeful wink combined with a dogged faithfulness to the One True Holy and Apostolic Catholic Church that virtually every one of us has been blessed to be born in to, converted in to, or reverted back to.
H. QUOTES
"Redemption, in the fullest sense, can only come in the truth becoming recognizable. And it becomes recognizable when God becomes recognizable. He becomes recognizable in Jesus Christ. In Christ, God entered the world and set up the criterion of truth in the midst of history."
Pope Benedict, Jesus of Nazareth, Second Volume
"Baseball is a game where a curve is an optical illusion, a screwball can be a pitch or a person, stealing is legal and you can spit anywhere you like except in the umpire's eye or on the ball."
Jim Murray
"Little League baseball is a very good thing because it keeps the parents off the streets."
Yogi Berra
"Baseball is the only major sport that appears backward in a mirror."
George Carlin
"The word of Christ could make out of nothing that which was not; can it then not change the things which are into that which they were not? For to give new natures to things is quite as wonderful as to change their natures."
Saint Ambrose (4th Century)
"False humility is the most manipulative form of pride."
G.K. MacBrien
"A broken heart and God's will be done would be better than that God's will should be avoided."
Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson
I. REAL ADVICE FROM REAL CHILDREN
-Do not ever be too full for dessert.
-Do not pick on your brother when he is holding a baseball bat.
-Sleep in your clothes so you will be dressed in the morning.
-If Dad is mad and asks, Do I look stupid?, don't answer him.
J. TENS OF THOUSANDS PRAYING TOGETHER
Please join us in praying for, well, us, and all other worthy Catholic apostolates and organizations, and for you, all of us praying together, tens of thousands strong, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit...
"Dear Jesus, we pray for all Catholic organizations, their leaders and workers, especially for CatholiCity; that they be the first human cause in millions if not billions going to heaven; and for the spiritual and temporal needs of all our readers, listeners, benefactors, workers, suppliers, visitors, and friends, great and small, past-present-and-future, especially for those who have asked us to pray for them today. Dear Lord, continue to send us generous benefactors, and Your angels and grace from heaven, to guide, guard, govern, and protect our decisions, families, locations, workers, and projects. Echoing the motto of Pope John Paul II, we pray: we are all yours Mary and all that we have is yours. Amen."
K. SAINT MAXIMILIAN KOLBE, INNOVATOR
If you look on your calendars, you notice that April Fools Day has been moved to Monday, April 4. Only kidding. (Ho ho. Really, somebody should have edited that out.) Actually, April 4 is the Feast of Saint Isadore, who many consider the patron saint of the Internet, and for good reason. Our vote goes to Saint Maximilian Kolbe, who used the most modern technology available in a backwater of Poland in the 1920s to build the largest Catholic media apostolate in human history.
Kolbe gave most of his stuff away free-of-charge. At one point, there were over eight hundred Franciscan priests and brothers in Neipokalanov (City of the Immaculata) churning out millions of newspapers, pamphlets, and books on the world's best printing presses in the world's largest monastery, before or since. We have been told that modern offset presses still incorporate mechanical innovations developed by Kolbe's friars. Not content with evangelizing Poland only, Maximilian personally set up beachheads in India and Japan, as well. Exceedingly holy, for these achievements alone he might have been canonized.
"Kolbe was not only ahead of his time, but he is still ahead of our time," Joseph Wood once wrote. Saint Maximilian Kolbe, best known for volunteering to die in place of a married man at a Nazi concentration camp, was even an innovator in death because Pope John Paul II felt it necessary to designate a new category for his martyrdom, declaring him a Martyr for Charity. Camp witnesses say that the happiest days of his life were those spent at Aushwitz, where, although starving himself, he gave away his food to other internees and encouraged countless others, all while enduring regular beatings by guards because he was a Catholic priest. Locked in a dungeon to starve to death with others, camp officials decided to murder him and his comrades with injections of carbolic acid, in part to stop Kolbe from leading his fellows in hymns and prayer.
Few people know this, but when he was a little boy, then Raymond Kolbe (Maximilian was his religious name) had a visitation from the Blessed Mother during which she offered him a choice between a red crown of martyrdom or a white crown of chastity. Raymond chose both, according to his mom (who related the event after his death). Interestingly, every local area of Poland has its own flag, and investigators after World War II discovered, based on camp records, that the place where Kolbe's cremated remains were most likely dumped after his body was incinerated was on a plot of land whose flag depicted a red and a white crown.
Theologians will ponder Kolbe's mystical writings on Immaculate Mary and the Holy Trinity for decades to come. Oddly, or providentially, considering that his body was reduced to ash, there still exist first class relics of Saint Maximilian. We know this because the Mary Foundation wrote to the good friars at Neipokalanow and described how we were inspired by our beloved Uncle Max to give away free stuff by the millions using the latest technology. Their reply envelope included a treasure of three certified beard hairs, saved by a Franciscan barber in Rome who gave Maximilian a haircut when he was a young seminarian, and who, after meeting the young man, had an intuition he had just trimmed the beard of a saint.
From early on, Saint Maximilian was animated by one overarching goal--that every person in the world consecrate themselves completely to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, or the Immaculata, as he fondly addressed her. In 1917, as a seminarian, he founded the Militia Immaculata (MI) to achieve this goal. Today there are millions of members in virtually every country on the planet. Many of our readers have already consecrated themselves to the Immaculate Heart of Mary through the Sacred Heart of Jesus, but if you have not, we believe that the patron saint of innovation, Raymond Maximilian Maria Kolbe, still wants you to join our ranks. Expect dramatic changes in your life:
Thank you for reading to the end, even if you skipped stuff. Until next time, we remain...
With Immaculate Mary,
Your Friends at CatholiCity
