Misc (Mainly Marital...)

Seraphic announces an engagement (hers, to him) and tells the story.

One of my favourite podcasts is Jawbone Radio. It's like eavesdropping on the evening conversation of Len and Nora who celebrated 15 years of marriage recently. (6 kids!) Anyway, their latest podcast includes Nora's tips on how to ruin a marriage - a typically ironic way of marking the big occasion.

Finally, Rocco reports on a recent lecture by James Cardinal Stafford at CUA. Stafford's an interesting guy... I've heard him speak a number of times in Rome and found one homily of his in recent times very interesting. He was very critical of certain aspects of the American national outlook, government and society when contrasted with the demands of our faith. It wasn't an ill-informed or lefty critique of America, but I suspected that some (please note that I said some!) of the guys at the NAC might have heard it as such because it wasn't 'The Holy Gospel according to the Republican Party.' It was interesting, therefore, to read his criticisms of the incoming administration:

James Francis Cardinal Stafford criticized President-elect Barack Obama as “aggressive, disruptive and apocalyptic,“ and said he campaigned on an “extremist anti-life platform,” Thursday night in Keane Auditorium during his lecture “Pope Paul VI and Pope John Paul II: Being True in Body and Soul.“
“Because man is a sacred element of secular life,” Stafford remarked, “man should not be held to a supreme power of state, and a person’s life cannot ultimately be controlled by government.”
"For the next few years, Gethsemane will not be marginal. We will know that garden,” Stafford said, comparing America’s future with Obama as president to Jesus’ agony in the garden. “On November 4, 2008, America suffered a cultural earthquake.”
Cardinal Stafford said Catholics must deal with the “hot, angry tears of betrayal” by beginning a new sentiment where one is “with Jesus, sick because of love.”
(snip)
“If 1968 was the year of America’s ‘suicide attempt,’ 2008 is the year of America’s exhaustion,” said Stafford, an American Cardinal and Major Penitentiary of the Apostolic Penitentiary for the Tribunal of the Holy See. “In the intervening 40 years since Humanae Vitae, the United States has been thrown upon ruins.”
This destruction and America’s decline is largely in part due to the Supreme Court’s decisions in the life-issue cases of 1973, specifically Roe v. Wade. Stafford asserted these cases undermined respect for human life in the United States.
“Its scrupulous meanness has had catastrophic effects upon the unity and integrity of the American republic,” said Stafford.