The Catholic Message Board

I often get a first glance at the morning's news from Microsoft Bing. This morning it featured a photo of Porto Flavia in Sardinia, the Mediterranean Sea's second biggest island (Sicily is its biggest) to show how its limestone cliffs were transformed into a dock for loading ores from mines in the a...

A Dictionary of Popes from Oxford University Press. I have this in digital format for the Kindle Reader apps on my iPhone, iPad, and Macbook Pro.

Doom wrote: ↑Fri May 09, 2025 2:27 pm

anawim wrote: ↑Thu May 08, 2025 4:25 pm As an undergraduate, he majored in math....

So he knows both sin and cos

I don't think I'm going off on a tangent with this, and Major League Baseball seems to be enjoying the unexpected publicity: The new pope was at the 2005 World Series.

Obi-Wan Kenobi wrote: ↑Sun Apr 27, 2025 5:51 pm He's also not a cardinal, and while it's not impossible for a non-cardinal to be elected, it would be most unexpected.

And he's also not an archbishop. Not sure how much that affects things. Does getting a cardinal's hat usually follow or accompany getting an archbishopric?

Chastity: Reconciliation of the Senses Well, I read it a few months ago, but it crossed my mind in the last several days that the author, Erik Varden, might be papabile (Pope Francis was laid to rest yesterday, so we are in an interregnum) were he not so young (born 13 May 1974), though he is alrea...

Oh, just a bit more from Chesterton's biography of St. Thomas Aquinas: Yes; in spite of the contrasts that are as conspicuous and even comic as the comparison between the fat man and the thin man, the tall man and the short; in spite of the contrast between the vagabond and the student, between the ...

The following is from Chapter I of G. K. Chesterton's St. Thomas Aquinas . Chesterton had first published in 1923 his biography of St. Francis of Assisi and in this first chapter in the biography of Aquinas first published in 1933 compares the two famous friars. I ON TWO FRIARS Let me at once antici...

Here is about half of the Prologue to Act IV of Shakespeare's Henry V . The English and French are about to engage in the battle of Agincourt. PROLOGUE Enter Chorus Chorus Now entertain conjecture of a time When creeping murmur and the poring dark Fills the wide vessel of the universe. From camp to ...

Archangel is from John Updike's Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories , a collection of his early short stories. I never read any of his novels which reputedly deal often with suburban adultery and divorce. But some of the passage below could pass for parts of the Apocalypse . Archangel by John Updike ...

Greetings. Nearly all of the books I've bought in the last several years have been in digital format. The excellent eyesight of my youth has declined, and now I usually need eyeglasses to read. I have a Kindle app on my phone, tablet, and laptop and can summon my entire digital library from any of t...

Obi-Wan Kenobi wrote: ↑Wed Apr 02, 2025 2:59 pm The Yankees are evil, but this is not evidence of it.

This evil you write of does not exist.

Putin & Trump are cut from the same cloth - nasty and evil bullies. Trump and his supporters can f*ck off. <sarc>Oh. I guess, then, that, instead of Trump, I should have voted for Harris who supports unlimited direct abortion and whose party supports the infanticide of babies surviving botched ...

Not irreverent.

I'm a Bronx native but was raised in the NYC suburbs. I lived in California for just over eight years. Somehow I never made it north of Sacramento, but I did visit plenty of the state south of Sacramento. Let's see, visited SF for a weekend with my parents, visited Yosemite, Kings Canyon, and Death ...

I only discovered this, The Visual Commentary on Scripture (VCS), in the last day or so, thanks to an article, Seeing Sacred Scripture, in First Things, but on first blush it looks great. And here is a link to the VCS channel's home on YouTube.

Actually, it is the priest who should fold his hands in prayer during the Our Father. It was sometime in the 1950's that the Pope allowed for the congregation to join the priest in saying the Our Father. Prior to that it was only said by the priest. The priest folds his hands in prayer when the con...

Joe Heschmeyer's Shameless Popery Podcast on YouTube published the video linked below just yesterday (2 January 2025) about the recent news of an archeological dig from 2017-2018 that discovered an early Christian's remains in a cemetery near the ancient Roman city, Nida (northeast of today's Frankf...

Priests from the Legion of Christ sometimes served at St. Mary's Church in Greenwich, CT, where I often attended Mass when I lived in Greenwich. The LC priests had a great formation, some of which was in Rome and some of which might have been in Ireland. I recall one of them telling me that the accu...

The long-proposed bridge from Calabria on the peninsula to Messina on Sicily may any day now get started. Or at least some funds are to be released. Or something. The Sicilians I discussed this with were somewhat skeptical about the benefits. I think it could be very beneficial to nearly everyone. I...