People seriously ask how Jesus became so influential when our world goes crazy for men like Fulton Sheen and Pope Leo XIV

People perennially underestimate the human capacity for exaggeration, self-deception, and idolatry.

 

Make not my Father's house an house of merchandise

 μὴ ποιεῖτε τὸν οἶκον τοῦ πατρός μου οἶκον ἐμπορίου

 ... Postulators are tasked with preparing a “positio” – a formal dossier summarising the case for sainthood, which can often span several thousand pages. These must be translated into Latin, printed, bound into special red volumes, and hand-delivered to the Vatican – meaning they can rack up exorbitant costs, often around €500,000 (£429,000).

Sheen’s positio ran to 15,000 pages, according to the Catholic University of America, where he taught. Two books published in 2016, Avarizia and Merchants, by two investigative journalists, claimed that leaked Vatican documents showed costs for Sheen’s sainthood cause had spiralled to €330,000 (£283,000) by 2013. ...

More.

Sainthood is big business. 

 

Holy moly, we truly do live in The Age of the Awesome and The Season of the Superlative

 

 The murky legacy of America’s first televangelist ‘saint’ 

... Just 62 saints were crowned in the 150 years before Sheen’s case was put forward, his own diocese stated in 2002.

But sweeping changes to saint-making rules have seen a flurry of halos handed out in recent decades. In 1983, Pope John Paul II reduced the mandatory waiting period before a sainthood bid could be opened from 50 years after a person’s death to just five. It allowed the Polish pope, who died in 2005, to beatify and canonise more people than all his predecessors combined.

Pope Francis, who died in 2025, went even further – authorising 912 saints during his 12 years as pope. He made 800 saints in one fell swoop in 2013 by canonising the “Martyrs of Otranto”, a town of 15th-century Italians who were massacred by Ottoman invaders.

Each of the past three popes has personally canonised more saints than all other popes combined. ...

Woke Episcopal bishop pleads with Trump on Tuesday to be merciful to transgenders after he on Monday proclaims liberty to the Jan 6th captives instead

 

                                                                      No! Not like that you namby-pamby!

 

Trump and Vance ambushed by bishop pleading for ‘mercy’ on trans children: President attacked in sermon at inauguration service for making trans people 'scared'

 "F--k it: Release 'em all": Why Trump embraced broad Jan. 6 pardons

Trump orders reflect his promises to roll back transgender protections and end DEI programs

 

The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me to bring good tidings to the afflicted; he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound; to proclaim the year of the LORD's favor, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn;

-- Isaiah 61:1f. 

I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. 

-- Romans 9:15

 

PEW says 55% of Americans pray daily, confirms Gallup's finding that 56% of Americans "feel religious"

Gallup's findings: Mapped: The world's most (and least) religious countries

With high levels of prayer, U.S. is an outlier among wealthy nations:

[T]he U.S. is unique in that it has both a high level of wealth ($56,000 per-capita gross domestic product in 2015) and a high level of daily prayer among its population

German Cardinal Walter Brandmüller: 80% of cases of sexual assault in the church involved male youths not children

Homosexuality is to blame for sexual abuse, not Catholic church, claims German cardinal:

Cardinal Brandmüller claimed that only a “vanishingly small number” of clergy had committed abuses. He said the real problem was homosexuality and claimed it is “statistically proven” that there is a link between homosexuality and abuse.

News reports about allegorical interpretation notwithstanding, the importance of Fortunatianus of Aquileia's commentary lies elsewhere

Fortunatianus' formerly lost commentary on the Gospels, discussed here by a translator in the project, will be important not primarily for its contributions to allegorical interpretation, but more for its witness to the so-called Western text of the Gospels.

The allegorical stuff is just all headline BS, designed to raise the profile for an audience no longer educated enough to appreciate the real significance.

The so-called "Vetus Latina" represents the Latin of the New Testament before Jerome got a hold of it, and Fortunatianus' commentary's "Old Latin" readings, as distinct from other text types which have been associated with Alexandria in Egypt and Antioch in Syria, should do much to improve our understanding of the Western text heretofore typically associated with the Greek and Latin Codex Bezae.

When sperm meets egg, a bright flash of light occurs, signifying a successful calcium/zinc reaction

From the story in the UK Telegraph here:

The bright flash occurs because when sperm enters an egg it leads to a surge of calcium which triggers the release of zinc from the egg. As the zinc shoots out, it binds to small molecules which emit a fluorescence which can be picked up by camera microscopes.

It's an old saying that "you began as a twinkle in your father's eye".

So began the universe.

And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. -- Genesis 1:3f.

Ultra-religious Protestants predominate among those suffering manic episodes known as Jerusalem Syndrome Type III

Snake-handling faith healers, Stone Creek, VA August 1944

From the story here:

These are just a few examples of what has come to be known as the Jerusalem Syndrome: a well-documented phenomenon where foreign visitors suffer psychotic delusions that they are figures from the Bible or harbingers of the End of Days.

Israel’s health ministry records around 50 cases a year where a tourist’s delusions are so strong that police or mental health professionals are forced to intervene. Many more incidents go undocumented on the streets of Jerusalem’s Old City. ...

The most contentious point of debate among scholars of Jerusalem Syndrome is what one group of doctors has called Type III cases: people with no history of mental illness who become overwhelmed by the city’s religiosity and temporarily lose their minds. ...

They record 42 cases of people who arrived in Jerusalem as regular tourists, suffered severe psychotic episodes while there, and then recovered completely after leaving the city. Of the 42 individuals, 40 were from what doctors described as “ultra-religious” Protestant families.

For the successful equation of religion with politics in our time, credit Islam not Christianity

From Charles Moore here:

'Ayatollah Khomeini ... said “Islam is politics”. He meant that Islam tells you how to rule, and therefore any unIslamic way of ruling is illegitimate. ... Khomeini was a Shia, but a similar way of weaponising the faith was also developed in Sunni Islam. It stands behind organisations like the Muslim Brotherhood . . .. It rests not only on an interpretation of the words of God allegedly spoken through the mouth of his Prophet, but on a tale of grievance. In this tale, bad people – colonial powers, Christians, Jews, America, “hypocrite” Muslim monarchs – destroyed the right rule of true Islam (the caliphate) and humiliated the faithful. This world-view is known as “Islamism”. Islam itself is related to Islamism as patriotism is related to nationalism, the former being based on love of something, the latter on hatred of something else. Islamism validates resentment. Its emotional appeal is like that of communism and fascism, but stronger, because it promises heaven to those who commit its violent acts on earth.'

Uh oh, the world's ending again . . . TOMORROW!

And I thought I was going to a piano lesson as usual.

Glad I found out, and just in the nick of time, too.

Story here, about eBible Fellowship's Chris McCann.

Without The Bible, Vices Become Our Virtues, Tyrants Our Liberators

Cristina Odone, here:

The extraordinary, subversive book, with its lessons on charity, compassion and respect for others inspired generations to rebel against tyrannies of all kinds – dictators, addictions, vices. Men and women dedicated their lives to its teachings – and were ready to die for it. But today it seems that a host of martyrs lost their lives in vain: the Bible is just another book that sold more than the Hunger Games trilogy at some point.

Little Lord Lesus

It was embarrassing enough when Pope Benedict resigned before the assembled cardinals in Latin and no one understood him. Was "Francis" in the crowd?

Now a papal medal with a favorite line of the new pope misspells "Jesus" in Latin, as reported here:

"They went on sale on Tuesday but it was not long before it was noticed that the word Jesus, stamped around the edge of each medallion, had been spelt wrongly, with an L in place of the J."

Even more embarrassing is that this gotcha gets it wrong also, not realizing there is no "J" in Latin. The Vulgate spells it with an "I", so for example Jesus becomes "Iesus" as in "et lacrimatus est Iesus" (John 11:35). So did I.

Until I saw in the comments section that philology and textual criticism aren't quite dead yet out there after all, as one Seth Murray explains how the error must have occurred:

The Latin capital "I" was taken for an "l" in the lower case as in "lover", and re-capitalized "L" unthinkingly at the mint.

Francis' papal motto, incidentally, comes from the venerable Bede:

The motto of Pope Francis is taken from a passage from the venerable Bede, Homily 21 (CCL 122, 149-151), on the Feast of Matthew, which reads: Vidit ergo Jesus publicanum, et quia miserando atque eligendo vidit, ait illi, ‘Sequere me’. [Jesus therefore sees the tax collector, and since he sees by having mercy and by choosing, he says to him, ‘follow me’.]

Not even the Mayans believe it's the end of the world.

Mayans themselves reject any notion that the world will end. Pedro Celestino Yac Noj, a Mayan sage, burned seeds and fruits to mark the end of the old calender at a ceremony in Cuba. He said: "The 21st is for giving thanks and gratitude and the 22nd welcomes the new cycle, a new dawn."

More here.

"I Don't Believe In The End Of The World . . ."

Speaking in a live interview to five television channels on Friday, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev seized on a chance reference to the Mayan prediction to express his scepticism. "I don't believe in the end of the world," he said, before adding mysteriously: "At least, not this year."

More, here.

1,048 Facebook 'Friends' Ignored Suicide's Message

As reported here by the UK Telegraph:

Mental health charities said the case was a sad reflection on today’s society where friends made online are not necessarily friends in real life.

Gee, do ya think?!

With friends like these . . ..