Um no thanks.

In a spoof post, The Tablet cites this as what we should play, sing, listen to and generally actively participate in.

Oh whoops, they are for real.

Meantime lots of people can sing this and have been for lots of centuries.

I'll go with the option 2 please.

After all the western staff system was invented to notate it, so it must be quite important.

Plus document after document after document from the church keeps telling us it should have pride of place.

My nuanced reading of that is that it should have pride of place.

Happy Feast Day

Taking a peek

Weeks ago when it was half-term, I made the Christmas cake. Been doing it for twenty years, so no drama there. Decided to leave it in the oven, oven off, to dry out a little, before storing in a tin and um left it in the oven. Not for a long time, but from Thursday night when I made it til Sat evening when I returned from the IOW. Was distracted, or something. Anyway, moderately concerned that this might render the cake mouldy. Was chatting to a colleague who does all the Christmas catering for her family, now that her mother is too old and frail to cook and she was telling me how she has made four Christmas cakes for various branches of her family.

Decided to check on my cake.




Seems OK.

Rather similar to last year's ....




My Dad likes it, which is the main thing.

RIP

From ACN

Your prayers are urgently requested as breaking news comes in of the killing of 45 people from an ancient Christian town in Syria - including two teenagers and three of their grandmothers, who were thrown down a well.

The family were 18-year-old university student Ranim (pictured left), school pupil Fadi (right), aged 16, their mother, Njala, 45, and grandparents, Mariam El-Sheikh (pictured centre) aged 90, as well as Matanios, aged 85, and his wife, Habsah 75.

The atrocity, the worst against Christians since Syria's conflict began in March 2011, broke when rebels seized the town of Sadad and held 1,500 families hostage. A week later, Government forces retook Sadad.

Syria's Patriarch Gregorios III, who last month launched ACN UK's Persecuted and Forgotten? A Report on Christians oppressed for their Faith 2011-2013, told ACN: "How can somebody do such inhumane and bestial things?"

The Patriarch is determined to keep hope. He recently told ACN: "If we are now the Church of the Martyrs, we will be the Church of the Resurrection in the future. Christ is Risen - we will remain."

My hero

Ted Heath for Baroness Thatcher

Tony Blair for Gordon Brown

Barack Obama for FrZ

Peter Tatchell for ... Er

Ceremony of Innocence by Dorothy Cummings McLean

Publisher blurb says

Riots. Terrorist attacks. Neo-Nazi violence.

In modern-day Germany, journalist Catriona McClelland has seen it all while covering the contemporary European scene for a Catholic news organization. Keeping herself above the political fray in her professional life, she has also managed to keep herself from personal entanglements-still hurt from the wounds of a broken relationship. Things come to a head when her boyfriend Dennis, frustrated with a lack of commitment, leaves her for Suzy Davis, an idealistic young Canadian who is involved with a left-wing protest movement. But when Suzy is murdered... who is complicit and who is innocent?

Ripped from the headlines, Ceremony of Innocence is a very contemporary novel of Europe on the edge of social breakdown. Train stations are bombed and migrants targeted for violence as journalists and other tastemakers watch from their positions of privilege.

Dorothy Cummings McLean's realistic narrative does not describe the feats of heroes. Rather, it unnervingly lays bare the way religious faith and moral reasoning can be easily manipulated and compromised.

I'm enjoying it.

If you enjoyed, 'Poor Banished Children,' it has a similar level of destructiveness and turbulence.

Spot the schola director

Photo from Juventutem DC.

Happy Feast Day

Happy Feast Day