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Articles Posted by DogwoodSouth

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  • The Mystic, the Doubter, the Pope and the Dumb Ox: The Fascinating Origins of Corpus Christi

    06/07/2012 6:07:50 PM PDT · by DogwoodSouth · 5 replies
    Southern Fried Catholicism ^ | 6/7/2012 | Brad Noel
    Today, many throughout the Catholic Church celebrate a uniquely Catholic feast day: the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, better known by the Latin title "Corpus Christi." Though originally and traditionally celebrated on "the Thursday following Trinity Sunday," in parts of the Church where it is not kept as a Holy Day of Obligation (like here in the U.S.), the feast is transferred to the following Sunday. But in many parts of the world, Corpus Christi is celebrated today. In fact, in many European nations, today is a public holiday. Tonight, Pope Benedict will preside over the Corpus Christi...
  • The new Gloria... anyone else thought this?

    01/23/2012 8:32:11 AM PST · by DogwoodSouth · 12 replies
    Southern Fried Catholicism ^ | 1/23/2012 | Brad Noel
    Click the link. Now you're gonna think this every time....
  • The lost letters of the Vatican Dictionary

    01/20/2012 7:01:42 AM PST · by DogwoodSouth · 1 replies
    Southern Fried Catholicism ^ | 1/20/2012 | Fr. Joe Tonos
    The Vatican Insider has published an online Vatican dictionary. The site promises that you can understand your faith's terms from "A divinis" to "Zucchetto"! However, there are still a few letters not accounted for. J, K, Q, W, X, Y have no words as of this writing. No "juris"? And don't we have lots of "q" words? Not to fear, I've come up with some of the missing letters from the Diocese of Jackson and thereabouts. I even made child-friendly flashcards to go with them! The rhymes are a bit off but I'm not a poet, and I know it....
  • Happy Festum Asinorum!

    01/14/2012 8:04:29 AM PST · by DogwoodSouth · 21 replies
    Today on the medieval Church calendar was the Feast of the Ass...
  • A thought-provoking Catholic response to "Jesus>religion"

    01/13/2012 8:47:57 AM PST · by DogwoodSouth · 27 replies · 1+ views
    Southern Fried Catholicism ^ | 1/13/2012 | Bad Catholic
    If you've seen the video "Jesus>religion" (aka "Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus"), you probably nodded your head in agreement with some of the, thoughts... er, lyrics. It has a strong emotional appeal (not to mention great video editing). But is it all true? Bad Catholic has a thought-provoking response to the video that's burning up the ether around the net:
  • What the heck is a cardinal, anyway?

    01/12/2012 6:54:51 AM PST · by DogwoodSouth · 16 replies · 1+ views
    Southern Fried Catholicism ^ | 12/12/2012 | Brad Noel
    Apart from the newly-crowned national football champions (Go SEC!), there's been another tide of crimson on the horizon in the news: Earlier this week, Pope Benedict announced a consistory in which he will raise 22 prelates to the Sacred College of Cardinals. Among the newly named cardinals are two Americans: Timothy Dolan, the current archbishop of New York and Archbishop Edwin O’Brien, the former archbishop of Baltimore and the current Grand Master of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem. I was gonna post that news and leave it at that. But it occurred to me that for...
  • Happy Epiphany! ...sort of

    01/06/2012 3:02:40 PM PST · by DogwoodSouth · 1 replies
    Southern Fried Catholicism ^ | 1/6/2012 | Brad Noel
    Today is January 6. Which means that it has been twelve days since Christmas. Simple math, really. Why does that matter. Well, today is the “Twelfth Day of Christmas” (you know the song – partridge in a pear tree and all). But beyond an 18th century Christmas carol, there are important historical links between today (January 6) and Christmas. Epiphany and Christmas – what’s the connection? Let’s go back to square one. First of all, nobody (that we know of) thought to write down Jesus’ birthday. Believe it or not, things like exact birthdays just weren’t that important in the...
  • El Caganer: A Lovely Spanish Creche Tradition

    12/23/2011 10:52:35 AM PST · by DogwoodSouth · 4 replies
    Southern Fried Catholicism ^ | 12/23/2011 | Brad Noel
    You gotta love off-the-wall holiday traditions. The Swedes have their day-long Donald Duck TV show marathon on Christmas Eve (no, seriously) and the Germans and Austrians have the Krampus. But one of the most unique just has to be el caganer of the traditional Spanish nativity scene. "Merry Christmas! Sh*tter was full!" What is the caganer you might ask? Well, quite literally, it is a person... ummm... (how can I put this delicately? - Oh good, my nine-year-old son looking over my shoulder as I type this helped me out: "Just put it's a guy taking a poo."). Fine then....
  • Our Lady of Guadalupe - A Mother for us all

    12/12/2011 9:36:01 AM PST · by DogwoodSouth · 15 replies
    Southern Fried Catholicism ^ | 12/12/2011 | Brad Noel
    On November 8, 1519 - only two years after the start of the Protestant Reformation in Western Europe - a Spanish conquistador named Hernando Cortes, led his army into the sprawling city of Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec empire in modern-day Mexico. This was the symbolic start of the conquest of the Meso-America by the Spanish. The Spanish conquistadors were seeking fame and fortune. They were accompanied, however, by Catholic missionaries who were seeking to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the indigeonous peoples of Meso-America. For more than a decade, the labor of the Catholic missionaries among...
  • All Souls' Day: Praying for the dead is a Christian duty

    11/02/2011 9:26:44 AM PDT · by DogwoodSouth · 184 replies
    Southern Fried Catholicism ^ | 11/2/2011 | Brad Noel
    Well, I'm not a theological expert, so I can't explain exactly how praying for anyone (dead or not) works. I just know that we are commanded to pray for one another. Scripture commands us to "pray without ceasing" (1 Thessalonians 5:17) and specifically demands that we intercede "for one another" (James 5:16) and that we pray "for all" (1 Timothy 2:1). There are no qualifiers in these instructions; nothing that would act as though death has separated the Body of Christ or made prayers ineffective. In addition to this, we know that praying for the souls of the dead was...
  • All Saints or All Souls? Differences should be black and white

    11/01/2011 8:47:19 AM PDT · by DogwoodSouth · 47 replies
    Southern Fried Catholicism ^ | 11/1/2011 | Brad Noel
    ...[T]oday's feast of All Saints is wholly different from tomorrow's feast: that of All Souls. Today, we celebrate the men and women who have entered heaven; tomorrow, we will remember the souls of our friends and family members who are being purified to do the same. Today, we pray to the saints in heaven with full confidence that they will intercede for us; tomorrow, we pray for the souls in purgatory with full hope that others will do the same for us after we are gone. There's a big difference between the emphases (and purpose) of the two days. Honestly,...
  • Be Not Afraid: The Surprisingly Holy Origins of Halloween

    10/31/2011 8:46:41 AM PDT · by DogwoodSouth · 28 replies
    Southern Fried Catholicism ^ | 10-31-2011 | Brad Noel
    In case you didn’t realize it, today is Halloween. For those of you who have been taught to find nothing redeemable in this night of masks, merriment and candy-begging: calm down! Here in the Deep South, Evangelicalism has a strong sway. Because of this, there are mixed emotions about Halloween – even among some Catholics. Yes, it’s a night set apart for children to dress up in costumes and innocently go door-to-door asking for candy – no harm in that, right? But then there are the persistent (and often convincing) tales, often perpetuated by well-meaning Christians, which link any celebration...
  • Funny Catholic vid for your Tuesday

    10/25/2011 8:27:15 AM PDT · by DogwoodSouth · 1+ views
    Southern Fried Catholicism ^ | October 25, 2011 | CCM
    Just a vanity post of a funny video. "He be rollin..."
  • Catholicism in the South growing

    07/22/2011 6:47:04 AM PDT · by DogwoodSouth · 290 replies
    Southern Fried Catholicism ^ | 7-22-2011 | Brad Noel
    "It is good to be here in the sunny south..." So said Francis Xavier Seelos, the now-beatified Redemptorist priest when he was arrived in New Orleans in 1866. Indeed, it seems that many modern-day Catholics would agree. Recent statistics released by the Emerging Models of Pastoral Leadership project show that while the number of Catholic priests and parishes has continually dropped in the U.S. over the past decade, the number of American Catholics has risen. This means that the average size of American Catholic parishes is growing, along with the number of weekend Masses offered at these parishes. The 1964...
  • Who are Maronite Catholics?

    03/16/2011 7:41:14 AM PDT · by DogwoodSouth · 11 replies
    Southern-fried Catholicism ^ | 03/16/2011 | Brad Noel
    Bishop Beshara Rai was elected as the 77th patriarch of the Maronite Catholic Church today. He takes over after the retirement of 91-year-old Nasrallah Sfeir, who had served as the Maronite patriarch for 25 years. A patriarch is the highest-ranking bishop in a particular Church. Maronites were once the most important political bloc in Lebanon but since the 1960s, high emigration rates have reduced the community's size in the country. They still make up more than 20% of the Lebanese population and, according to an agreement enshrined in the country's constitution, the president of Lebanon must always be a Maronite....
  • Why ashes?

    03/09/2011 7:44:42 AM PST · by DogwoodSouth · 15 replies
    Southern-fried Catholicism ^ | 3/9/2011 | Brad Noel
    Today, on this first day of Lent, we humble ourselves as we seek to have ashes placed on our heads to begin this season of penance. They are a symbol of sorrow and contrition, of penance and mortality. But where did we derive such a curious custom? What are the roots behind this strange symbolic act? To answer these questions, we have to go back to the days before Christ. We don't exactly know why, but we know that wearing ashes was a symbol of repentance for the ancient Jews, our forefathers in faith. The Prophet Jeremiah, for example, calls...
  • Did you forget Valentine's Day? We've got your out!

    02/14/2011 9:54:37 AM PST · by DogwoodSouth · 11 replies
    Southern-Fried Catholicism ^ | 2-14-2011 | Brad Noel
    Poor St. Valentine. He never asked for it. He never asked that his name come to be associated with cheap candy and heart-shaped mylar balloons. I'm pretty sure he would have never guessed - not in a million years - that he would become synonymous with romantic crushes, red foil heart decorations and free hug coupons. What a horrid fate. All we know about him is that he was buried along the Via Flaminia (an ancient Roman road which led from the city to the Adriatic Sea) on February 14th. We're not even positive about the year, but it was...
  • Comparing the New Missal to Pre-Vatican II Hand Missals

    10/01/2010 11:09:06 AM PDT · by DogwoodSouth · 9 replies
    One comment/question that was raised during the class last Sunday piqued my curiosity. One parishioner remembered, as a little girl, attending the older form of the Mass (now known as the Extraordinary Form but often called the Tridentine Mass) and how the prayers were all said in Latin. Like most Catholics then, she used a hand missal which contained two columns of text for all of the parts of the Mass: one column in Latin and, in the other column, a translation in English. This parishioner asked if the new translations we'll soon begin using were similar to the ones...
  • A priest dissects "Wall St.: Money Never Sleeps" (w/humor and truth!)

    09/29/2010 6:57:19 AM PDT · by DogwoodSouth · 2 replies
    Not caring for our progeny, our future, the next generation is one of the greatest sins we can commit. However, in the church, it can be argued that the loss of vocations to the priesthood, the decline of people joining or attending churches, the lack of concern for following church teachings and the closing of many, many churches is because we are led by a generation that has little concern for the future. In the same way, a generation led this generation to debt and social breakdown, also got the best of what was left.
  • Say Goodbye to "No Offence Catholicism"

    09/28/2010 8:06:30 AM PDT · by DogwoodSouth · 5 replies
    This was a philosophy that I like to call "no offence Catholicism". It often invited Catholics to embrace a very watered-down version of the Faith, one which was sure to take it's place, in the young developing mind, as little more than a glorified social works club. Mystery, transcendence and the majesty of the divine were downplayed in the Mass (often totally suppressed), handled as little more embarrassing curiosities of the past. It's almost as if people were taught to cringe when asked their religious affiliation and answer "I'm Catholic... no offence!" Is it any wonder, then, that many of...