Pat's Top Ten Orthodox Catholic Pick-Up Lines

Okay, all you single Catholics who are searching for just the right thing to say to make a good first impression on that cute single Catholic you have your eyes on (chastely, of course), here's my classic top ten list of time-tested, sure-fire, often-imitated-but-never-improved-upon Orthodox Catholic Pick-Up Lines (please use them responsibly, and always give proper attribution!) . . .

Patrick Madrid's Orthodox Catholic Pick-Up Lines —

10. May I offer you a light for that votive candle?

9. Hi there. My buddy and I were wondering if you would settle a dispute we're having. Do you think the word should be pronounced HOMEschooling, or homeSCHOOLing?

8. Sorry, but I couldn't help but noticing how cute you look in that ankle-length, shapeless, plaid jumper.

7. What's a nice girl like you doing at a First Saturday Rosary Cenacle like this?

6. You don't like the culture of death either? Wow! We have so much in common!

5. Let's get out of here. I know a much cozier little Catholic bookstore downtown.

4. I bet I can guess your confirmation name.

3. You've got stunning scapular-brown eyes.

2. Did you feel what I felt when we reached into the holy water font at the same time?

1. Confess here often?

NOTE: This is an oldie but goodie from way back in my early days publishing Envoy Magazine. I do a top-ten list (with the help of excellent input from some other very funny Catholic guys) in each issue, but this particular top ten list seems to have been the most popular. You can check out some of the other "Pat's Top Ten" lists here. 

Care to Caption This?

I'll start things off:

“This is kind of how it feels when you study (i.e., drink deeply from) the works of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas.”

Fr. Roderick on the Newly Twittering U.S. Bishops

Father Roderick — a Twitter magnate in his own right — reports on how the U.S. Catholic Bishops Conference has hooked up with a new and rapidly growing online Catholic community at Twitter. Don't know what Twitter is? Don't worry, you soon will. Though if you've been reading this blog for the past couple of months that it's been in existence, you already know.

More and more individual Catholics and catholic organizations are discovering Twitter as a new medium to communicate with a world wide audience.

You can now even follow the U.S.  bishops via Twitter. USCCB Media Relations represent the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops to the media and the media to the bishops.

On twitter.com/usccbmedia, you can read important news updates straight from the bishops, like today’s nomination of Milwaukee Archbishop Timothy Dolan as the new archbishop of New York, the most prominent post in U.S. Church. (article)

Oh, and when you get started Twittering, if you haven't already, do look me up. My T-handle is patrickmadrid. 

Some Pics from Timothy & Nina's Wedding

The radiantly beautiful and happy couple, (my son) Timothy and Nina (née Pezzutti) Madrid, were joined in the sacrament of holy matrimony on February 14 at St. Patrick's Catholic Church, Columbus, Ohio.

Festivities ensued.

They spent a week in Italy — Rome and Naples — for their honeymoon.

This 1981 Movie Eerily Describes What's Happening Today

Hey, everyone! Here's a great way to start your week! (/sarcasm).

Seriously, though, take a look at this montage of scenes from the 1981 movie “Rollover,” which depicts a catastrophic global economic implosion. It could have been made today, in 2009, for its grim scenario is unsettlingly similar to some things we're seeing today.

Also, check out this interview on the economy and dangers we face, especially the last two minutes of the interview. Some very grim predictions here:

Sunday urged to be ‘day of fervent prayer’ for Pope Benedict

The Catholic News Service reports:

Saying Pope Benedict XVI has been “unjustly attacked,” the head of the international Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need has called for this Sunday, the Feast of the Chair of Peter, to be a day of fervent prayer for the Holy Father.

“Pope Benedict XVI has been unjustly attacked. There has been a resurgence of the unsavoury and aggressive attitudes that many thought belonged to the past,” Fr. Joaquín Alliende, International President of Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) said on Friday.

Referring to “serious errors” in “certain bodies within the Holy See,”Fr. Alliende’s statement claimed “these acknowledged mistakes have been seized upon to launch an astonishing avalanche of attacks.”

“The dignity of the papacy and the person of Benedict XVI himself have been crudely insulted. Many people have manipulated the facts, while others have frivolously abandoned the important fundamentals of our humanist tradition.

“This unworthy dealing with the truth does grave damage to the dialogue between civil society and the great religions. It is a sign of cultural degeneration.”

Fr. Alliende warned that “old sectarian emotions” are being revived and that there has been an attempt to undermine “an irreprochable moral figure, one of the great beacons of hope for coming generations.”

Despite these “strident attacks,” Fr. Alliende said Pope Benedict’s personality “emerges untouched” as a figure who “incarnates rationality, lucid wisdom and courteous kindness.”

Fr. Alliende invited “all those who believe in a God of truth and love to join us in a day of special prayer.” (read article)

Dr. Alan Keyes Warns America

(courtesy of http://causa-nostrae-laetitiae.blogspot.com)

The Politics of Porn

By Robert R. Reilly

In many major American cities, the tawdry sections of town that once housed pornographic cinemas, bookstores, and strip joints have given way to shiny new office buildings and Starbucks coffee houses. Does this sign of urban renewal also signify moral renewal? Has America finally grown bored with a surfeit of pornography? Unfortunately not. Pornography has simply relocated from inner city slums to a far worse location — the home, which it now infiltrates via the latest technology.

U.S. News and World Report (Feb. 10, 1997) revealed just how deeply mired this country is in explicit depictions of sexual depravity; it is a sign of the times that the cover article on pornography was carried in the "Business and Technology" section. The story states that hardcore pornography is now an $8 billion industry.

A more recent Time magazine article (Sept. 7, 1998), "Porn Goes Mainstream," also in the "Business" section, estimates $10 billion in revenues. In either case, hardcore porn out-grosses all of Hollywood's domestic box office receipts and rakes in more cash than the rock and country music businesses combined. In 1996, 665 million hard core videos were rented -- over two for every man, woman, and child in America.

Explicit sex has become part of the bottom line for video stores, long-distance carriers like AT&T, cable companies like Time Warner and Tele-Communications, Inc., and hotel chains like Marriott, Hyatt, and Holiday Inn. In addition, there are an estimated 100,000 pornographic World Wide Web sites on the Internet, offering millions of hardcore pornographic images, some of them "interactive." Pornography is now mainstream. How did this happen? . . . (read article) courtesy of Spirit Daily.

Time Magazine's Crusade Against the Catholic Church

Time Magazine has hit a new low, even by its standards, with a recent article disingenuously claiming that the so-called “Freedom of Choice Act” (FOCA) is a “mythical” bill and, therefore, that the “Catholic crusade” against it is merely ignorant folly.

So watch this video and see what the Pro-Abortion Candidate himself said about his implacable commitment to “transform America” according to the death-dealing machinations of Planned Parenthood and extremist groups like it.

Does it sound to you like he was promising to sign a “mythical,” nonexistent fantasy of a bill? Time wants you to get that impression. The fact is, FOCA is deadly real and our new Líder Maximo has repeatedly promised that he is deadly serious about signing it into law.

Don't let the pro-abortion zealots at Time Magazine fool you and lull you into becoming passive and disinterested about this. Don't let them do it. This is real. And you need to spread the word far and wide so people won't buy into Time's dangerous foolishness.  

Freedom of Choice Act (Introduced in Senate)— Text of Senate bill S 2020 IS (2004)
Freedom of Choice Act (Introduced in House) — Text of House bill HR 3719 IH (2004)
Freedom of Choice Act (Introduced in Senate) — Text of Senate bill S 1173 IS (2007)
Freedom of Choice Act (Introduced in House) — Text of House bill HR 1964 IH (2007)

Gerald Celente Really Scares Me

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A Star Is Born

I sure hope these scientists know what they're doing. I have no doubt that some seriously smart people are working on this project aimed at generating a mini "star" within a laboratory in California. It's just that making something — inside a building — that burns at temperatures in excess of 100 million degrees seems kind of chancey to me.

I mean, what kind of material do you use to construct the room/chamber/device that will contain a 100-million degree object? And why can't we build our space shuttles out of that? I'm all in favor of finding new energy sources, and if this is a good and viable option, then let's get it going. But what if it gets out of hand? 

While it has seemed an impossible goal for nearly 100 years, scientists now believe that they are on brink of cracking one of the biggest problems in physics by harnessing the power of nuclear fusion, the reaction that burns at the heart of the sun.

In the spring, a team will begin attempts to ignite a tiny man-made star inside a laboratory and trigger a thermonuclear reaction.

Its goal is to generate temperatures of more than 100 million degrees Celsius and pressures billions of times higher than those found anywhere else on earth, from a speck of fuel little bigger than a pinhead. If successful, the experiment will mark the first step towards building a practical nuclear fusion power station and a source of almost limitless energy.

At a time when fossil fuel supplies are dwindling and fears about global warming are forcing governments to seek clean energy sources, fusion could provide the answer. Hydrogen, the fuel needed for fusion reactions, is among the most abundant in the universe. Building work on the £1.2 billion nuclear fusion experiment is due to be completed in spring.

Scientists at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in Livermore, nestled among the wine-producing vineyards of central California, will use a laser that concentrates 1,000 times the electric generating power of the United States into a billionth of a second.

The result should be an explosion in the 32ft-wide reaction chamber which will produce at least 10 times the amount of energy used to create it. "We are creating the conditions that exist inside the sun," said Ed Moses, director of the facility. "It is like tapping into the real solar energy as fusion is the source of all energy in the world. It is really exciting physics, but beyond that there are huge social, economic and global problems that it can help to solve."

Inside a structure covering an area the size of three football pitches, a single infrared laser will be sent through almost a mile of lenses, mirrors and amplifiers to create a beam more than 10 billion times more powerful than a household light bulb.

Housed within a hanger-sized room that has to be pumped clear of dust to prevent impurities getting into the beam, the laser will then be split into 192 separate beams, converted into ultraviolet light and focused into a capsule at the centre of an aluminium and concrete-coated target chamber.

When the laser beams hit the inside of the capsule, they should generate high-energy X-rays that, within a few billionths of a second, compress the fuel pellet inside until its outer shell blows off.

This explosion of the fuel pellet shell produces an equal and opposite reaction that compresses the fuel itself together until nuclear fusion begins, releasing vast amounts of energy.

Scientists have been attempting to harness nuclear fusion since Albert Einstein’s equation E=mc², which he derived in 1905, raised the possibility that fusing atoms together could release tremendous amounts of energy.

Under Einstein’s theory, the amount of energy locked up in one gram of matter is enough to power 28,500 100-watt lightbulbs for a year.

Until now, such fusion has only been possible inside nuclear weapons and highly unstable plasmas created in incredibly strong magnetic fields. The work at Livermore could change all this.

The sense of excitement at the facility is clear. In the city itself, people on the street are speaking about the experiment and what it could bring them. Until now Livermore has had only the dubious honour of being home of the US government’s nuclear weapons research laboratories which are on the same site as the NIF.

Inside the facility, the scientists are impatient. After 11 years of development work, they want the last of the lenses and mirrors for the laser to be put in place and the tedious task of adjusting and aiming the laser to be over, a process they fear could take up to a year before they can successfully achieve fusion.

Jeff Wisoff, a former astronaut who is deputy principal associate director of science at the NIF, said: "Everyone is keen to get started, but we have to get the targeting right, otherwise it won’t work. "We will be firing laser pulses that last just a few billionths of a second but we will be creating conditions that are found in the interior of stars or exploding nuclear weapons. (read article)

"You Never Think It's Going to Happen to You"

I cannot imagine how devastating it would be for any family to lose a loved one in a plane crash, the way the Eckert Family lost Beverly in last night's crash of Continental Express's flight 3407 in Buffalo. Even less, though, can I imagine how traumatizing it must be for them given that on 9/11 Beverly's husband, Sean, perished on the 105th floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center when it collapsed after the second hijacked plane struck. 

According to one news report, Beverly was “traveling to Buffalo for a weekend celebration of what would have been her husband's 58th birthday. She also had planned to take part in presentation of a scholarship award at Canisius High School that she established in honor of her late husband.”

One woman, a family member of another passenger on Flight 3407, said: "You never think this is going to happen to you . . . It always happens to somebody else, and you see it on TV."

So true. Which is why this is a good time for us all to ponder the words of James 4:13-15:

"Come now, you who say, 'Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and get gain'; whereas you do not know about tomorrow. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, 'If the Lord wills, we shall live and we shall do this or that.'"

The families and friends of those killed in last night's crash are reeling with grief right now. Let's pray today for the repose of the souls of those who died and that the grace of the Lord's consolation would strengthen and comfort those who are grieving.

From Fr. Z: Rabbi Warns that the Left-Wing Is Destroying the Church

Read and share this very interesting commentary from an unexpected source regarding a major struggle the Catholic Church is locked in right now.

Against All Odds

Here's a truly heartwarming video about a young man with autism who accomplished something quite astonishing.