A Blog, rather a IREM
Name: Nicklaus Winker
I am a Roman Catholic Seminarian For the Archdiocese of St. Louis. I also have a BS in computer engineering so I sorta know how this internet thingy works.
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Actually St. Valentine still has his feast today!
He is actually still in the most current martyrology, the official list of saints. (Just because a Saint is not in the martyrology does not mean they can not be venerated either, St. Philomena was never in the martyrology and was a favorite of St.John Vianney.) A friend and I verified this last month when we briefly had our hands on a copy of the martyrology in a bookstore. I do not have a copy because it is $120 and only in Latin. This means that while he is not on the General calendar of the Ordinary Form, with the permission of the Holy See he could be venerated on the particular calendar of a specific place.
So what are general or particular calendars? In 1570 the new missal forced every place to use the list of feast days, more technically called the sanctatorial cycle, of the Church in Rome. So the main focus were saints with a relationship to the city of Rome. Now the calendar changed here and there over the next 400 years but the book, the Missal always included the saints of importance to the people of Rome. Local places would celebrate their own saints, but they also had to celebrate saints who were not venerated outside of Rome. So when the calendar was revised the concept of general, used by everybody, and particular used by one diocese or monestary, was a major emphasis. The number of feasts required for the whole Chruch was kept to a minimum, ideally only saints who are important to everybody. They also introduced the idea of an optional memorial, such that each pastor can decide if this saint is beneficial to his people. So young parishes might celebrate more young saints, those with greater Jesuit influence would celebrate Jesuit saints. Those saints who are important to a specific diocese are free to be added by the local Bishop with the approval of the Vatican. So in the US we celebrate the American saints, Thanksgiving, and a day of penance in reparation for Roe vs. Wade. These are feasts of the particular calendars of Dioceses in the US.
The idea was rather noble, to foster devotion to the saints by not burying the faithful under saints who are not likely to be their spiritual friends, and emphasizing those who should be given special devotion. This really did not work out too much in practice because at the same time so many people were trying to destroy piety.
St. Valentine is very much still a saint!
The document "Roman Calendar; Text and Commentary" which is the document and official commentary which promulgated the revised calendar for the ordinary form, explains why the feast of St. Valentine was removed from the general calendar:
Valentine: Although very ancient, the memorial of this saint is left to particular calendars since little is known concerning him except his name and the fact that he was buried on the Flaminian Way on February 14."
Valentine is not a saint many of us have a personal attachment to him other than to use his name as a noun.
There is also a second reason he is out, because Cyril and Methodius are very important saints, having evangelized a large area. They are not just spiritually important but historically and eccumenically important. Their feast was moved from 7/7 which was within the octave of Peter and Paul to 2/14 the day of Cyril's death. This restores the order of death dates as feast days and states to the East that we honor them not to make a political statement but to honor them as Holy men.
So St. Valentine is a saint, very much still a saint.
Pagan Deities love to eat fat kids, or something like that.
As Diogenes at Off the Record at Catholic World News reports scientists looking at the remains of the mummies of child sacrificial victims in Peru have found based on hair samples that the kids were fattened up for a whole year before being clubbed to death on a high mountain for the greater glory of some deity.
Sacrifice
I have an interest in the primitive theology of sacrifice, every religion before Islam was sacrificial, and Islam is only asacrificial out of a confused emulation of Christianity. (Of course Palestinian suicide bombers are quite similar to human sacrifice with the exception that the demand of the deity is passive and the action does not cause the deity to act. Allah's absolute power and capricious will makes him beyond the influence of sacrifice. The Chrisitian God is absolutely good, and then powerful in as much as the excercise of that power is consistent with the good. In Christianity God himself provides the one acceptable sacrifice, who is presented to the Father on behalf of all creation which is recapitulated, re-headed, in Him in the Liturgy, both the eternal Liturgy and in time in the Mass.) Those not influenced by Christian metaphysics in the Americas moved in two different directions with regard to sacrifice during the Christian era. The migrant peoples developed systems focused more on spiritual sacrifice, physical pain inflicted on the self, and ritual merriment. These are often seen as directed to a sort of pantheistic self annihilation or union with nature. (Personally I think the use of Eastern categories is totally foreign to the religions in the pre-Columbian era, but is a revisionist redaction of those who seek to reject Christian influence.) The urban civilizations developed complex mythologies of personal deities, and a complex fixed sacrificial system that focused on human sacrifice. Both groups drifted to human victims, because livestock was rare in the Americas. But also because ideally there is no better victim than a human. Sacrifice is a gift, and there is no better gift than the self, and no better replacement for the self than another human. Human sacrifice has always been something that seems to have captivated and horrified men.
Back to the fat kids
So why were they fattened? Well, they were likely treated well as either sacred to the gods, or possibly as the god's themselves. Or it was not uncommon in the ancient near East (ANE) to treat a sacrificial victim like a king so that the deity would take them in the place of the king. Still it was not uncommon to the early ANE or even to the Aztecs to understand the deities as eating the sacrificial victim. (Why else would one think that burning flesh in a sweet odor?)
So next time you notice yourself getting a little rotund, think about the hungry Incan gods.
Read this story:
Between Archbishop Burke and Giuliani
who is married?
who is seeking publicity?
who is called by some an American hero?
who is America's get tough on crime mayor?
who gets paid large sums of money for public speaking engagements?
who is seeking power?
who is protecting the pedophile priest?
Answer Key: Giuiani to all of the above!
If we can not demand that the man who cleaned up Times Square, who bravely handled September 11, 2001, to leave his friend out to dry just because his is, as far as our culture is concerned, the lowest form of life on Earth, a person who would not only use his authority to help others abuse children, but would himself abuse children, how come every body got mad when old celibate men, did the same thing, just because they wore funny hats? I know that any Bishop who truely enabled a pedophile needs to make public penance for the sin of scandal, and possibly resign. I also not think that Giuliani needs to let his friend starve to death for his crimes, but the media needs to show him a little of the same love they showed Cardinal Law.
Well wait there is one more question.
Who was the article really attacking?
(Archbishop Burke!)
http://blog.ipsissima-verba.org/archives/277
So we did this video for Alumni day, and posted it online and now over 1000 page views on youtube. That is a lot of people.
But in some parishes, those likely to have associates, in St. Louis there are over 1000 communicants on a Sunday (contingent, of course, on the time of the Ram's game). So it is rather easy for a priest to reach 1000 people every week.
The video took a lot of work, a lot of planning. We carefully phrased some things to best present the ideas. We debated if there was too many sci-fi elements, too much or too little smoking, to include a shoulder cape or not. There was a diverse audience, priests form classes dating to 1940 to 2007, formators, seminarians, and lay faculty. It was important to not offend anyone, some priests their wear a cassock in the parish, others despise it. We wanted them first to laugh but we also had a message. We, seminarians, while having a bi-monthly Mass according to the missal of John XXIII, can have fun, we are not robots, we love the same Church.
In the same way in which we antagonized over the video, we need to, in the future, God willing, carefully plan our homilies. The number of people we can touch is about the same as the, but the purpose is so much more important that laughter. While a homily is not a funny little video for alumni day, it needs to be just as clever. Not clever in the "boy, I am funny" way, but clever as in "gentle as doves and clever as serpents" (MT 10:16) Every parish has a diversity of people much broader than that for alumni day. In a large parish today there are the simple, the ardent readers of America, and subscribers of the Wanderer, the overly devotional, and those who proudly do not own a rosary, the sanitation engineer, and the stock broker, and the older pious looking couple who has a gay son and a daughter who has had multiple abortions who get upset when these topics are broached, and the tatooed young couple who want to teach NFP. To accomplish the work of pastoring this flock a shepherd has to be quite clever, and spend a lot of energy on preparing his homilies.
Oh why do my musing always mean more work after ordination! ;)
Dylan, I want you to note I directed the way to the video through your blog.
ChurchTEch had an interview with project leader of SSPX AB_Lefebvre
ChurchTEch: SSPX is a fork off of Roman Catholicism (RC), so what caused the fork?
AB_Lefebvre: We just were not comfortable with some of the interface changes being made. A lot of users were confused, and performance really suffered. But the big issue is licensing, the leaders of RC took a more permissive view of the licensing of Salvation technology.We agree that Truth technology is licensed permissively, but we really do not believe that it is right that other projects are using elements of Salvation. While we both claim the license never changed, we can not agree.
CT: There is a lot of bad blood between the projects.
AB_Lefebvre: Unfortunately so. After the developers convention VaticanCon2 the admins started accepting lot patches into the stable branch of RC directly without testing them, and we are talking about major refactoring here. Between versions 1.01963 and 1.01970 thousands of lines of code were rewritten. We saw compatibility issues even between minor version numbers. Stability was horrible, and the interface was changing every day, and these changes were happening in the stable branch with no testing. I got asked by several developers and users to lead a group dedicated to preserving the old interface, so we were given a branch and space on the FTP server.
In the meantime tensions were heating up about the licensing issues. As I said, many of us thought there are issues with the way other projects were implementing Salvation, and kept arguing on the list serve that their implementations were not going to work. This reignited a older flame war. There had been a group led by Fr.FeenySJ who trolled the lists and IRC saying Salvation should be closed source. After getting flamed so much by the people on the list serve, even though I have a GNU tattoo I’m inclined to agree with the Feenyites.
So I was generally hated, but I had some new developers who I wanted to give write privileges to the CVS server. I asked nicely as was the procedure, and I was told they would be added soon, but they never were. So I added them myself, and next thing I know the whole branch, my account, their accounts are all gone. So we took our code and opened a fork, SSPX, on SourceForge.
CT: So how are the goals of SSPX different from RC:
AB_Lefebvre: Well we have the older interface, but more importantly we stand for a stricter license on Salvation. For the most part we only issue maintaince releases. We are very careful with innovation. The code is complex, and it works now, adding things is going to break it. So I’d say were are dedicated to preserving the existing code base. Since VaticanCon2 RC has focused on cleaning up the codebase, simplifying the interface, and adding more network protocols, but we think this has resulted in a loss of functionality and stability. We have done a lot of documentation work, as well as some incremental work in the interface and the Education module. Occasionally we have to issue a compatibility patch to keep from falling to far from RC.
CT: Has there been progress towards a reconciliation.
AB_Lefebvre: We are paying close attention to what is going on upstream, we like some of the more recent patches and are seeing increased stability. We also submit any thing we can upstream, but most of it does not get into the codebase. I met with their leader Papa_Nostro16 on IRC a few months ago, and there was no flaming which is a start. I think they see we have some really talented developers and important users, and are interested in talking. I respect Papa_Nostro16, and we have made progress in the interface area, but the licensing issues are still very much there.
CT: AB_Lefebvre thank you for your time.
Here is conclusive evidence of other Nick Winkers:
One in CT who can run faster than I can see line 71
And Another down south who seems to be musically inclined
And Another in the UK who is a Liberal!
Luckily none appear to be Nicklaus Winker all Nicholas Winker's so I am apprently, as far as Google knows unique.
So this is purely for irony:
I'm at a conference at the seminary on media, and the speaker just mentioned blogs so I decide to post since I lack impulse control:
http://www.kennedybrownrigg.com -> Our speakers website
(Ok this is my second post, but I figure since the purpose of a IREM(see first post), I mean Blog is to preserve for eternity in cyberspace all the stupid thoughts no one cares about, I need to get busy, since I have a lot of stupid musings)
I wonder what google thinks of me?
Looking at the profile of a fellow seminarian, I saw some adds, two for tridentine missals ( I wonder what Google thinks of me, after all it reads my email and remembers my seraches) and one that linked to this page:
http://everystudent.com/forum/difference.html
SO...
"Is there a difference between being Catholic and being a Christian?"
The site this link goes to is a protestant evangelical evangelization site, which answers politely that it depends on the person and their well personal relationship with Jesus Christ.
Although I'm glad to know I'm not a pagan, I'll now do some investigating, sophistry, to show that Christians are merely a subset of Catholics.
1. Ask the second most omnipotent being on the net (wikipedia) what is a Christian?
"A Christian is a follower of Jesus of Nazareth, referred to as Christ."
2. Jesus of Nazareth, henceforth know as Christ is not a Christian
All Christians are a follower Christ
Christ is not a follower of Christ (because to follow without a leader, to follow oneself is a semantic contradiction)
No Christs are Christian QED
3. Christ is Catholic
"Christ is the head of the body, the Church" Col 1:18
so the head must be a member of the body, so Christ is a member of the Church.
The Church must refer to the Catholic Church.
Since Christ is not Christian it can not refer to the Christian Church since it is the Church of all Christians.
Jesus is not Russian, Greek, or Byzantine, so that leaves out the orthodox churches, seems they are not universal, catholic, enought to include Jesus.
So Christ is Catholic
4. Some Catholics are not Christians
Christ is Catholic
Christ is not Christian
Some Catholics are not Christians (This is what the article admitts)
5.All Christians are Catholic
All Christians would claim to belong to the same Chruch Christ does,
Christ belongs to the Catholic Church
Thus All Christians should claim to belong to the Catholic Church
6. Thus Christians are a subset of Catholics
Albeit a large subset, but a lot of them protest too much.
So this is my Blog.
I do not like blogs, at least the name, blog, sounds to trendy, too froofy. I also do not like the word podcast, sounds like some sort of process involved in fishing with aliens.
IMHO (click for definition) Names of computer technologies should obscure what is actually going on, but should convey a clever masculine intrigue. An example is BASH, which when expanded from its acronym is Bourne Again SHell, which still does not let the neophyte know what it is, (which insures job security), but it sounds like something manly, something Chuck Norris might use. Other favoriate computer names are: ash, vim, awk, apt, zip, rss, cvs, DOS, GIF, C++, PL1, (three letters ensures optimal confusion) ssh, ping, daemon, ASCII, EBDIC, http, ajax, telnet, apache, dd, kill, man, and because I'm a sucker for recursive acronyms GNU and lame.
Lets look at the history of personal expression on the net.
First there were .plan (dot plan) files.
Predating the world wide web a .plan file was a file which was requested by the finger command (note the cool name). They were plain text, and used to tell your current plans, and thoughts. But they did not keep past information or allow comments Next comes
Geocities, tripod, lycos, etc. personal websites.
In a sea of contrasting colors, blinking text, and animated gifs, people could finally express themselves and their cat in a way the whole world could see. If you could find the guest book link you could leave your comments.
Now we have blogs, podcasts, myspace, and all the other WEB 2.0 phenomenon.
So what should we call blogs so they do not sound so lame?
.plan2.0 ,Geocities TNG, quadpod?
My suggestion is:
IREMvHP :Interactive Random Exhobitionist Musings via the Hypertext Protocal
or IREM for short pronounced either (irem) or I-rem if you need to be trendy.
So this is the first post in my IREM
