Announcing The Society Of St. Pius I

From their website:

Welcome to the fledgling website of the Society of St. Pius I (SSPI). Unlike other so-called “traditionalist” Roman Catholic groups, we adhere to the ORIGINAL Roman Catholic Mass of A.D. 40-200, and described by St. Justin Martyr and the Apostolic Constitutions, and used by Pope St. Pius I of happy memory.

Don’t be fooled by PHONY “Vulgate” neotraditionalists, who claim to protect tradition, and yet still defend the RADICAL and totally UNCATHOLIC reforms of the 4th century A.D.

So-called “trads” pretend to be against the modernism of the last hundred years, but where were they when the original Rite of Rome, the Greek rite USED BY ST. PETER AND THE APOSTLES was being totally gutted and revised by unknown scholars and translated into the vernacular language of Latin?

Y’gotta admire the (tongue in cheek) moxy here, but I sense a potential schism. Some members of the SSPI may well conclude that St. Peter and the apostles celebrated Mass in Aramaic, not Greek.

Till then . . .

CHECK IT OUT.

(CHT to the reader who e-mailed!)

Top 100 Movie Quotes?

Frankly_my_dearThe American Film Institute has released a list of what it considers the top 100 movie quotes of all time.

As you may guess from the image on the left, the #1 line was Gone With The Wind‘s "Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn."

To compile the list the AFI asked 1500 "leaders from the creative community, including film artists (directors,
screenwriters, actors, editors, cinematographers), critics and
historians." The "leaders" voted their favorites of a list of 400 nominated quotes.

The film with the most quotes was Casablanca, with 7 quotes, followed by The Wizard Of Oz, which had six.

I agree with most of the entries on the list (not necessarily the order they’re in, but their presence). Some, I don’t. For example, I don’t agree with Moonstruck‘s "Snap out of it!" It seems to me that for something to qualify as a movie quote, it needs to be something that people weren’t saying to each other All The Time before the movie came out. Folks have been saying "Snap out of it!" for far too long (and even in movies before Moonstruck).

GET THE LIST.

I definitely agree with Patrick over at Southern Appeal, though:

My reaction: What no quotes from The Princess Bride, the most quotable movie of all time?

No quotes from The Princess Bride????

<lisp>Inconceivable!!!!</lisp>

Southern Baptists Nix Disney Boycott

At their annual convention the nation’s Southern Baptists have voted to end their eight-year boycott of Disney.

"We believe for the boycott to be effective, it had to have a beginning and an ending," said Gene Mims, chairman of the Southern Baptist Convention committee that put the Disney resolution before some 12,000 members at the meeting.

"We felt like it was time to end it. We’re hopeful Disney will do what the resolution calls for," Mims added.

"We have cost them (Disney) hundreds of millions of dollars," said Wiley Gray, an SBC member from Florida, who spoke in favor of lifting the boycott because Disney had made corporate changes, including the March announcement that longtime Disney Chief Executive Michael Eisner would leave the company in October.

On the other hand:

A spokesman for The Human Rights Campaign, a Washington-based gay rights advocacy group, said Disney continues to be one of more than 8,200 companies that offer domestic partner benefits to gay employees.

GET THE STORY.

(CHT: Southern Appeal.)

Personally, I’m rather ambivalent about this announcement.

There is potentially wisdom, even if you don’t get all of what you want, to waiting until the enemy does something for which you can claim victory (like booting Michael Eisner over low corporate earnings) and then end the boycott. That way you show (a) that you are capable of costing them large amounts of money (as should become more obvious to them once people who were participating in the boycott start throwing business their way again), (b) that you are capable of being reasonable, and (c) that you are capable of hurting them again the same way in the future–thus strengthening your hand to go after more of what you want (like getting rid of "gay days" at Disneyland).

I don’t know if these were their motives. I’d like to see more of what the Baptist leadership had to say on the matter (rather than just what the AP reported).

I also don’t know how many folks will give up the boycott in the absence of unconditional surrender on the part of Disney. Boycotts can take on a life of their own, and the Southern Baptists could even take a P.R. hit if they are perceived as calling off the boycott in the absence of real progress.

Maybe the Donatists will even go into schism over it.

MP3 (Etc.) Tests!

Ho-okay, folks!

Gotcha some files of last Thursday’s Catholic Answers Live to test and see what works best for y’all.

The first three are .mp3 files, and the last is a Windows Media (.wma) file. NOTE: We’re definitely planning on doing .mp3 for the show; the .wma file is just thrown in here to see what folks think of it.

Please use the combox to let us know which format you prefer (taking file size, audio quality, and other factors into account). Please also let us know if you find any of them simply unacceptable (and why).

To make referring to them easier, I’ve labelled them all "Link 1," "Link 2," etc., so you don’t have to remember the technical specs on each one, though I’ve printed those here too.

Thanks for your feedback!

Miracle@Vatican.va

Jpiicomp

The Diocese of Rome is collecting accounts of miracles attributed to the intercession of the late Pope John Paul II:

"The Vatican is urging Roman Catholics to contribute to the late Pope’s beatification by sending e-mails about miracles performed after his death.

"The website for the Diocese of Rome will soon start publishing the readers’ messages under several categories.

"John Paul II, who died in April, encouraged the use of the internet."

GET THE STORY.

How cool is that? Modern technology at the service of a cause of canonization. Near as I can tell, here is the web site of the Diocese of Rome.  (Note: Link updated.) The post title is, of course, just my attempt to be clever. It is not the address to which you should send reports of miracles.

John Paul II, pray for us.

Our Friend, The Virus

Not just any virus, of course, a very special little virus that goes by the abbreviation AAV-2.

What’s so special about it?

"Our results suggest that adeno-associated virus type 2, which infects the majority of the population but has no known ill effects, kills multiple types of cancer cells yet has no effect on healthy cells," said Craig Meyers, a professor of microbiology and immunology at the Penn State College of Medicine in Pennsylvania.

"We believe that AAV-2 recognizes that the cancer cells are abnormal and destroys them. This suggests that AAV-2 has great potential to be developed as an anti-cancer agent," Meyers said in a statement.

It wipes out HPV or Human Pappiloma Virus cells, HPV being a leading cause of cervical cancer.

The same thing happened with cervical, breast, prostate and squamous cell tumor cells.

GET THE STORY.

Politics In Our Genes?

In the Gilbert & Sullivan operetta Iolanthe, a British Grenadier Guardsman named Sgt. Willis spends a lot of time on sentry duty thinking about the oddities of the universe. During the course of the opera he sings a song in which he shares some of his musings with us and remarks on how tickled he is by the fact

That Nature always does contrive
That every boy and every gal
                   
That’s born into the world alive
               
Is either a little Liberal
                   
Or else a little Conservative!

Politics is in our genes, Sgt. Willis suggests. It’s inborn.

But that’s just Gilbert being silly, right?

Maybe not.

A new study published in the American Political Science Review argues that, while party affiliation is more determined by the environment in which we are raised, our basic political instincts–conservative or liberal–are influenced by our genes.

The study relies on comparing the view of identical twins raised together to fraternal twins raised together. The results of such a study are suggestive, but not the gold standard of such research. The study was based on comparing twins raised together, but I’d like to see the study controlled by comparison to twins raised apart. If you’ve got two identical twins raised together, there may be additional forces at play that steer the twins toward sharing common opinions on thing besides just their genes. To remove these potential factors from the equation, one would want to look at the views of identical (and fraternal) twins not reared together.

Still, the evidence at hand is worth following up with further study.

The article concludes:

The researchers are not optimistic about the future of bipartisan cooperation or national unity. Because men and women tend to seek mates with a similar ideology, they say, the two gene pools are becoming, if anything, more concentrated, not less.

Okay, so we get culture wars . . . until the Roe effect runs its course and the anti-baby folks breed themselves into cultural obscurity.

GET THE STORY.

Geeking-Out Vs. Vegging-Out

The NYT has some interesting analysis of how movies have changed in the last number of years, using the Star Wars franchise as an example.

EXCERPTS:

[V]ery little of the new film [Episode III] makes sense, taken as a freestanding narrative. What’s interesting about this is how little it matters. Millions of people are happily spending their money to watch a movie they don’t understand. What gives?

Modern English has given us two terms we need to explain this phenomenon: "geeking out" and "vegging out." To geek out on something means to immerse yourself in its details to an extent that is distinctly abnormal – and to have a good time doing it. To veg out, by contrast, means to enter a passive state and allow sounds and images to wash over you without troubling yourself too much about what it all means.

The first "Star Wars" movie 28 years ago was distinguished by healthy interplay between veg and geek scenes. In the climactic sequence, where rebel fighters attacked the Death Star, we repeatedly cut away from the dogfights and strafing runs – the purest kind of vegging-out material – to hushed command bunkers where people stood around pondering computer displays, geeking out on the strategic progress of the battle.

All such content – as well as the long, beautiful, uncluttered shots of desert, sky, jungle and mountain that filled the early episodes – was banished in the first of the prequels ("Episode I: The Phantom Menace," 1999). In the 16 years that separated it from the initial trilogy, a new universe of ancillary media had come into existence. These had made it possible to take the geek material offline so that the movies could consist of pure, uncut veg-out content, steeped in day-care-center ambience. These newer films don’t even pretend to tell the whole story; they are akin to PowerPoint presentations that summarize the main bullet points from a much more comprehensive body of work developed by and for a geek subculture.

The author then suggests that America may be in danger because it’s national culture is becoming dominated by a veg-out attitude that wants to enjoy life rather than digging into the geek-oriented details needed to sustain the good life.

GET THE STORY.

(CHT to the reader who e-mailed!)

New B16 Book!

Why did Joseph Ratzinger come up with the name "Benedict" so quickly when he was asked what name he wanted to be called by following his election to the papacy? If reports are accurate, he said "Benedict" quite fast.

Of course, he’d had time to think about it as he saw which way the votes were trending over the four ballots of this conclave, and that gave him at least a little time to prepare mentally.

But was there anything rumbling in his mind in the background that set the stage for his choice?–something that he had already been thinking about when the conclave began?

It seems so.

B16 has a new book coming out:

Pope Benedict XVI rails against Europe in his first book published since becoming pope, chastising a culture that he says excludes God from life and allows innocent lives – the unborn – to be taken from God through legalized abortion.

“The Europe of Benedict: In the crisis of cultures” was written when the pope was still Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Vatican’s guardian of doctrine, and serves as a strong indication of issues that will be priorities in his pontificate.

GET THE STORY.

(CHT to the reader who e-mailed!)