CatholicsComeHome.org is a nonprofit organization who noticed that a lot of Church outreach efforts... are not really good. So they decided to do better.

Take a second and watch this clip. It's super.

NOTE: This is a different movie than the one I posted in July.

Well, maybe not rigged exactly. But predictable anyway.

From the WSJ's China Journal:

June 23, 2008, 6:26 am
The Science of the Medal Count

Economists got their turn in the Olympic spotlight on Monday, with the release of a report that suggests China could topple the U.S. on the medals table during this summer's Beijing Games.

PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates that Beijing will win 88 medals, followed by the U.S. with 87 and Russia with 79. However, the report's author, PWC's London-based Head of Macroeconomics John Hawksworth, is quick to point out that Beijing and U.S. are "basically neck and neck."

PWC has conducted the study since the 2000 Games in Sydney, and ITS China operation was not involved in coming up with the estimate. "It's just a break from our normal serious economic analysis," says Mr. Hawksworth.

Performing well is serious business for Chinese authorities, who have made topping the medals tally a tacit goal despite publicly downplaying exepectations. China came in third, with 63 medals, during the Athens Games.

The study isn't exactly a prediction of Games performance, says Mr. Hawksworth -- it's more of a benchmark to judge a country's performance. The economists didn't try to predict the performance of any individual athletes. Rather, they made a statistical model that took into account historical performance, political and economic factors, as well as a boost that athletes from the home team always seem to get.

Population and size of an economy are big factors in his model, but culture also plays a factor says Mr. Hawksworth. He points out, for example, that tiny Australia (41 medals in Athens) always performs far better in the Olympics than huge India (just 1 in Athens). "Everyone in India is mad about cricket, but not the Olympics," he says.

By his calcuations, some 90% of a country's performance in the Games medal tally is determined by these political and economic factors. "And 10% is down to individual genius, or those other factors that can't be explained through science," says Mr. Hawksworth.

"It would be a rather boring Olympics if it was totally predictable," he adds.

For example, benchmarks for the 2004 Olympics ran afoul of both individual feats and doping scandals. PWC benchmarked an Athens tally of 70 for the U.S., Russia 64, China 50, Germany 45, Australia 41 and Greece 29. The actual outcome was U.S. 103, Russia 92, China 63, Australia 49, Germany 48 and Greece 16 including six golds.

And before you ask, no. It has nothing to do with being Catholic.

It's August. Deal with it.

It's August. You get what you get from the newspaper, television and blogosphere. I'm sorry if the posting has been a little weak, but not REALLY sorry.

This post doesn't have anything to do with Catholicism. But it's of interest to me because it's about the feminization of men. I think this is a bit on the decline of late-- men have been trying to reclaim macho (If you don't believe me guys, look at this picture and think about how you totally wished you looked like that), but the damage has been done.

From The Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/aug/03/gender.healthandwellbeing

Depressed, repressed, objectified: are men the new women They're less fertile, more weight-obsessed and 'non-essential to parenting'. No wonder men are confused about modern masculinity. Elizabeth Day The Observer, Sunday August 3 2008

If recent research is anything to go by, 21st century man is in a desperate muddle.

In June, men discovered that their libidos are in freefall, prompting a 40 per cent increase in males seeking counselling for impotence problems. Their existential angst worsened in July, when British men discovered that they have the most unequal paternity rights in Europe. According to Nicola Brewer, chief executive of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, fathers in the UK are seen as 'not essential for parenting'. The same month saw the publication of a medical study that proved the quality of men's sperm declines to such an extent after they hit 45 that the chances of a partner's miscarriage are doubled.

It's not only their internal biology; men are also succumbing to the traditionally female preoccupation of looking good on the outside, too. Sales of male beauty products have leapt 30 per cent over the past decade. Almost 20 per cent more men are having plastic surgery than ever before while, last year, researchers from Harvard discovered that a quarter of anorexia and bulimia sufferers is male. During the fashion shows, male models had their own equivalent of the size-zero debate. 'Male models look chicken-chested, hollow-cheeked and undernourished' noted the New York Times.

Every week, it seems as if there are new surveys and studies tripping over themselves to paint the grimmest possible picture of modern masculinity. They tell us that men are more neurotic and less fulfilled than ever before; that they are objectified rather than revered; that they are expected to be more in touch with their emotions and yet are criticised for it. Men appear to be confused about what they are and unsure about who they are meant to be. So with more of them feeling disenfranchised, disillusioned and disempowered, is it feasible to think of men as the new oppressed minority? Might men, in fact, be the new women? And, if so, who is to blame for making them feel marginalised?

In the UK, men account for 75 per cent of all suicides. They are twice as likely to die from the 10 most common cancers that affect both sexes and, typically, develop heart disease 10 years earlier than women. Although there is a national screening programme in place for cervical and breast cancer, there is no equivalent for men, in spite of prostate cancer claiming 6.7 per cent more deaths for men than cervical cancer in women.

While women still earn on average 12 per cent less than men and are severely under-represented in top-level corporate roles, men in full-time employment work an average of 41.9 hours a week, compared to women's 37.6 hours. According to the American men's-rights author Warren Farrell, there might be a glass ceiling for women, but there is also what he calls 'a glass cellar' for men. 'What I mean by that is men are both at the top of the economy scale and at the bottom. Of the 25 professions ranked the lowest [in the US], 24 of them are 85-100 per cent male. That's things like roofer, welder, garbage collector, sewer maintenance - jobs with very little security, little pay and few people want them.'

Farrell says that women generally prefer a more flexible work-life balance and that implies 40-hour weeks 'at most'. Often, mothers are able to work fewer hours only because they are financially supported by their male partners. This, he claims, is the real definition of power. 'I define power as "control over one's life". A balanced life is far superior to the male definition of power: earning money someone else spends while he dies sooner.'

It would be easy to dismiss these arguments as anti-feminist but there are some commentators who think this could be a fundamental misreading of the movement's original goal: equality for both sexes, rather than the dominance of one at the cost of the other. Rosie Boycott, who co-founded the feminist magazine Spare Rib in 1971, points out that their first editorial insisted liberation should be for men as well as women. 'It is as much of a trap for a man aged 18-65 to feel solely financially responsible for 2.2 children and his wife, to be entitled to two weeks' holiday a year and to work nine to five, as it is for a woman to be responsible for all the childcare and housework,' she says. 'Men don't feel comfortable admitting that they're taking time off work to take their daughter to the dentist. We need a bigger critical mass of people to make that happen.'

But much of this remains a resolutely middle-class problem. At the lowest end of the economic scale, women are still attempting to shrug off the yoke of oppression and inequality.

Meanwhile for many men, their loss of status in the home and the workplace is twinned with a loss of confidence in themselves. Neil Oliver, the television historian who has just published Amazing Tales for Making Men out of Boys, says that there is a conspicuous dearth of positive male role models. 'I grew up hearing tales of Ernest Shackleton and watching films like Zulu,' he says. 'The world in which I was a little boy was one of clearly defined roles for men and women and we don't have that any more, so men are struggling to readjust. Manly men have been hunted to near extinction in Britain and the concept of manliness has been outmoded. Yet the urge to be a man is a primal thing and still exists in boys today.'

In the classroom, too, boys are at risk of losing out on male role models. According to government figures for 2006, the ratio of newly qualified female to male teachers under the age of 25 was approaching seven to one. The introduction of coursework and modular exams is believed to play to traditionally female strengths - girls tend to be more methodical while boys tend to follow high-risk strategies such as cramming the night before an exam.

Some critics argue that this creeping 'feminisation' has led to girls outperforming boys on almost every level: they use more words, speak more fluently in longer sentences and with fewer mistakes. By the age of 11, some 76 per cent of boys have attained government-set literacy standards, compared to 85 per cent of girls. At GCSE level, 66.8 per cent of girls achieved A-C grades in 2007, compared to 59.7 per cent of boys (in real terms, this means they trail behind their female counterparts by nine years).

Do these statistics have any bearing on the everyday experiences of ordinary men? 'I don't know if I feel oppressed, but there's a sense in which women can talk about us with impunity,' says a 32-year-old male lawyer from London, who does not wish to give his name in case his female colleagues start pelting him with rotten tomatoes. 'I've been in the office on several occasions where sweeping generalisations have been made about the general crapness of men: "Oh, all men are useless, no wonder he couldn't get the job done in time" - that sort of thing. I don't take it all that seriously - at least, not yet - but I know that I wouldn't get away with saying the same things about women.'

For a long time, it wasn't particularly fashionable to stand up for men. Warren Farrell, the daddy of the so-called 'masculinist' movement, has been making his arguments since the late 1970s and frequently attracts outrage. His books -Why Men Earn More and his latest, Does Feminism Discriminate Against Men? - seek to redress what he sees as an endemic sociocultural bias against his gender.

In almost all respects, he believes that men are now the weaker sex: 'The problem with feminism is that it saw man as the enemy. When only one sex wins, both sexes lose.'

On a superficial level, Farrell's insistence that men are scrabbling around in the dark searching for their lost masculinity like a mislaid dumbbell seems ill-conceived and borderline offensive. However, over the last few months, several books have been written reiterating Farrell's belief that men are disgruntled with their lot and must fight back against a Western culture that worships womanhood while demeaning masculinity. Apparently, men are stymied by biology as well - human genetics experts estimate that man will be extinct within 125,000 years owing to their declining sperm count and the mutation of the Y chromosome.

So - although women hold only 17 per cent of parliamentary positions across the globe, despite there being only 10 female CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and ignoring the fact that it is still illegal for a woman to drive a car in Saudi Arabia - it seems that, sometimes, it is harder to be a man.

Just ask Guy Garcia, author of the forthcoming The Decline of Men, an upbeat look at how the American male is 'tuning out, giving up and flipping off his future'. There is, says Garcia, 'a social predisposition to treat men as unworthy parents, betrayers and incorrigible philanderers'. Or there's Michael Gilbert, whose 2007 study, The Disposable Male, does pretty much what it says on the tin. 'Motherhood is immutable,' Gilbert writes. 'Paternity is the social construct. Amazingly, we have been doing everything we can to deconstruct it.'

Nor is it just men who have taken up the cudgel. This year saw the publication of Save the Males: Why Men Matter, Why Women Should Care by Kathleen Parker, a pithy stateside newspaper columnist who prides herself on her Coulter-esque capacity to say the unsayable. 'I think men are confused because they are receiving conflicting and often confusing messages from women and culture,' she explains. 'We want them to be providers and protectors - except when we don't. We want them to count our contractions and share baby's midnight feedings, but then we want them out of the picture when we tire of them.'

Parker reserves much of her ire for 'the highly lucrative boy-bashing industry' that views sexual discrimination against men as a form of shared hilarity. So while you can buy T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan 'Boys Are Stupid - Throw Rocks At Them', to claim the same about women would be viewed as an incitement to violence. Discrimination against men increasingly seems socially acceptable. 'When Susan Pinker, the highly regarded psychologist and journalist published her recent book, The Sexual Paradox: Troubled Boys, Gifted Girls and the Real Difference Between the Sexes, she received an email from a colleague asking her to give a comment 'on the difference between men and women's brains - or rather, men's lack of brains!'

'It was a joke no one would make about women,' Pinker tells me. 'When you said you were writing a piece on men, I was just floored because my experience has been that no one cares a whit about men. I think there is a double standard. Because women have been discriminated against for so long there is a hyper-sensitivity about making jokes about them that doesn't exist for men. They are assumed to be fair game because they're on top. There's a notion that it's acceptable for women to treat men as dolts. It's a form of female bonding, as if it's known that men are a bit useless.'

Of course, lots of men are relatively happy with the status quo, but does this make it desirable or just?

There is still a novelty factor attached to the notion of a full-time father and a mother who goes out to work: in many ways, the man who wishes to be a stay-at-home dad can be likened to the woman who wanted to be a surgeon in the 1950s. They both face a similar barrage of sexist assumptions.

'There is a culture of motherhood, a sanctity about it, that is quite strong in the UK,' argues Duncan Fisher, chief executive of the Fatherhood Institute. 'There's a gratuitous exclusion of men and the impression is given that you're left looking over the mother's shoulder. Midwifery services are described as "one-to-one care". After the birth, each mother is given a free magazine called "Mum Plus One". If a woman goes to a job office, she is asked "Are you a mother? Let's see what kind of job you want to do," whereas no one would ask a man if he was a father.

'The guy is just not factored in. That's OK if you're a well-resourced middle-class man who can assert himself. But that's why so many teenage fathers drift away: there's no expectation that they should be included.'

Yet research shows that children with supportive fathers have lower instances of substance abuse, higher self-esteem and higher educational achievement.

Nor is this cheerful presumption of man's uselessness limited to fatherhood. The Advertising Standards Bureau reports a steady increase each year in the number of complaints about the way men are portrayed on television as 'buffoons' or 'idiots'. A 2007 advertisement for MFI kitchens depicted a woman slapping her husband in a dispute about leaving the toilet seat up. 'If a man belittles a woman, it could become a lawsuit,' says Farrell. 'If women belittle men, it's a Hallmark card.'

Tad Safran, a Los Angeles-based scriptwriter and journalist, discovered this to his cost last year when he wrote a scathing piece in a national newspaper about British women's 'unkempt' appearance. 'The hate mail I got was insane,' he says now. 'I was called "Sexist of the Year". Maybe I deserved it, but certainly that wouldn't have happened to the same extent if it had been written about men.' As if to prove his point, a few months later, another British broadsheet published a feature entitled 'Are Men Boring?' Both articles were based on ludicrous generalisations but no one labelled the female journalist sexist.

Does any of this really matter when men occupy an almost unquestioned position of primacy in nearly all walks of life? Are they getting their boxer shorts in a twist about trivialities? And is it patronising to assume that the nagging disaffection felt by primarily middle-class men in the Western hemisphere is shared by men the world over?

Maybe. But, according to experts like Susan Pinker, there is a necessary truth here too: that perhaps our harmless chatter among female friends occasionally carries a deeper significance than we might like to think; that for all the sperm banks and Rampant Rabbit vibrators on offer, men still have a role to play that can complement women rather than limiting them. We might, she argues, end up demeaning our own gender: 'It does us a disservice to gloss over the fact that our husbands, sons, brothers or fathers are all unique individuals. I've never believed in this Mars/Venus division: we're all just people.'

This is interesting to me. In the 60's, women learned to roar. Since then, men have learned to wimper.

CatholicsComeHome.org is a nonprofit organization who noticed that a lot of Church outreach efforts... are not really good. So they decided to do better.

Take a second and watch this clip. It's super.

Hat tip: Get To Mass.

Danielle Bean, writing in Faith and Family Magazine:

"You know the problem with being an author?" Ambrose mused from the backseat of the car yesterday afternoon.

I absolutely do, I wanted to tell him. I know many of the problems with being an author. The pay, the hours, the never having the right idea when you need it but then having exactly the right idea immediately after you hit "send" or in the middle of the night or while you are driving down the highway at 70 miles per hour with nary a pen in sight.

But I thought a 9 year old might have a different perspective, and so I answered only, "What?"

I'm not exactly an author, but I can appreciate the talk. Go read the whole thing.

One of my new favorite blogs on the internets, "'Et tu?' The Diary of a Former Athiest" writes about depression and self-identity.

For quite a few years in my late teens and early 20's, I struggled with depression. It was clear to me that there was some kind of chemical imbalance going on in my brain, and it permeated every aspect of my life and thoughts. I would sometimes lament the fact that I just wasn't "myself" anymore...yet I was never comfortable with that idea. In my worldview, the human person was nothing more than a collection of molecules; selfhood was nothing more than a unique set of chemical reactions firing in the brain. In that case, how could the current set of chemical reactions be less "me" than the chemical reactions that were going on a few years before?

Go read the whole thing. The author, Jennifer F. converted from certain athiest to believing Christian through an intellectual process first, then by emotional connection. I think most people, me included, do it the other way around. She's a good writer and it's worth a couple minutes to read.

First Fridays in Kansas City are a pretty big event.

Did you read that first sentence?

It means totally different things to different people.

Until a handful of months ago, I heard "First Fridays" and instantly thought of the street parties and art galleries in Kansas City's Crossroads District. In fact, if you put "First Friday" in the Google, you'll see it's a regular party on the first Friday of each month in a variety of cities for a number of different events from a block party in Las Vegas to a mixer for African American Professionals in San Francisco.

So when I first heard "First Friday" in a Catholic sense, I was understandably confused.

It has to do with a Catholic sense of the calendar, each day is set aside for a type of commemoration. It's commonly known that each day of the calendar is set aside as a saint's feast day, but certain months are set aside to recognize different commemorations--as are certain days of the week. Think of it like this: every Sunday is a "miniature Easter", Catholics go to Mass to celebrate the risen Jesus in the Mass. Likewise, Fridays are "miniature Good Fridays" dedicated to Christ's Passion and his Sacred Heart. Months work the same way; in the secular world, March is National Frozen Food Month, but in a the Church's realm, March is also dedicated to St. Joseph, Jesus' Earthly father.

You can pick which one is more important, or incorporate both commemorations into your St. Joseph's Table. Frozen cookie dough, anyone?

First Fridays are a little different though. As the devotion to Jesus's Sacred Heart, they are a call for Catholics to go to Mass on that day in devotion.

I remember a story told to me by a priest about going to Catholic School in the '50's. Back then, he said that there was a three-hour fast before going to Mass, which basically meant that you didn't have any breakfast before you went to church. There's a variety of reasons for this act that Canon Lawyer Ed Peters discusses on his blog and elsewhere, but the short answer is that when you receive Communion, you should be hungry for the Lord. Today, the Church only requires a one-hour fast before receiving communion (not one-hour before Mass, which practically means don't eat during church) and some old-timers talk about when it was a 12-hour fast (anyone know when it changed to the 3-hour fast?), which meant you had to have watch the time of dinner on Saturday night. So you first meal in the morning is when you would break the fast, or... eat breakfast. But I digress.

This priest was talking about how all the Catholic school children would go to Mass before school on the first Friday of each month (as was the custom), and of course, wouldn't have eaten anything before they left for school that morning. So after Mass, the parish and school would have milk and doughnuts in the church basement. He remembered really looking forward to each first Friday because it meant that he could get sugared-up before going to class. The priest would join them too, all the nuns and teachers were easy-going on those days, they really had fun as they kicked off each month at church and school.

It's a cute story about how people become attached to their church and how when people put God first in their lives, life is sweet. For a moment, this priest telling me the story was smiling, leaning back in his chair with his hands folded on top of his belly, lost in a little corner of time.

This was a practice that was totally lost on me. In Catholic school, we went to Mass once a week. But we would have easily fulfilled the 1-hour fast by the time lined up at the front of class in our single-file lines to march over to church; milk and doughnuts after Mass were pretty irrelevant at that point. And we didn't discuss the Sacred Heart of Jesus at all, much less taking the first Friday of each month in commemoration. I don't know why, except the charitable presumption that religion teachers all had other topics to talk about and there's only so much time in a school day.

I was 28 years old in my lifelong Catholicity before I'd ever heard of a church first Friday or given any thought to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

Strictly speaking, a First Friday commitment is part of a novena to the Sacred Heart. A novena is a set of nine of something. Commonly, a novena would be going to Mass or saying a rosary for nine consecutive days or once a week for nine consecutive weeks or--as in first Friday--once a month for nine consecutive months. The idea comes from the Bible; after Jesus ascended to heaven, he instructed his disciples to devote themselves to constant prayer. The apostles, Mary and some other followers locked themselves in the upper room and prayed together for nine days ending in Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit descended upon them and compelled them to being their Christian ministry to the world. Yet despite its part in a nine-month set, I'd venture a guess that most people that participate in First Friday Mass do it every month, not just 9 out of 12 in a year. I don't specifically keep the First Friday novena myself--but maybe I'll start this month.

June is the month that the Church dedicates to the Sacred Heart of Jesus--so I guess I probably have started last month. Truth be told--I probably actually did go to Mass on the first Friday of June, but I didn't do it as a Sacred Heart devotional, I just went because I go to Mass fairly often. I think I'll start it here on Friday. It sounds like a nice way to start a nice 3-day weekend.

You know, it would be hard for me to grasp this connection to the Sacred Heart. I guess it's because I don't really understand what people are going for; but since I've never tried, there's no surprise I don't understand the connection. I'm looking for the end result before I've made the first step.

Yet intellectually, what does it mean to have a devotion to the Sacred Heart? From FishEaters:

The heart has always been seen as the "center" or essence a person ("the heart of the matter," "you are my heart," "take it to heart," etc.) and the wellspring of our emotional lives and love ("you break my heart," "my heart sings," etc.) Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus is devotion to Jesus Christ Himself, but in the particular ways of meditating on his interior life and on His threefold love -- His divine love, His burning love that fed His human will, and His sensible love that affects His interior life.

Later:

Devotion to the Sacred Heart has two elements: consecration and reparation:

We consecrate ourselves to the Sacred Heart by acknowledging Him as Creator and Redeemer and as having full rights over us as King of Kings, by repenting, and by resolving to serve Him.

We make reparations for the indifference and ingratitude with which He is treated and for leaving Him abandoned by humanity.

In art, the Sacred Heart is often depicted as a heart, burning with Love and tortured by thorns. Sometimes you'll see it just as a heart by itself, sometimes you'll see it in a statue or image of Jesus with his heart on his chest.

A woman once told me told me a story: at one point of her life, her marriage was falling apart, her kids were turning away from her, she was nearly bankrupt and sick, she found a small picture of Jesus and put it on her desk. In those moments where she was too weak from crying to pray, she was able to turn to Jesus and sob, knowing that with His love, she could make it another day. She was able to go to the Sacred Heart just as her own heart was breaking.

Sometimes we devote ourselves to God. Sometimes he devotes Himself to us.

Hey, I like art galleries and wine too. And in that respect, I like First Fridays. But if you're ever around some Catholic nerd (like me) and he mentions that he's going to First Friday, he might not mean that he's going down to cruise the art galleries and drink wine on a warm summer night (of course, he might mean that exact thing). Or maybe he's got something else on his mind?

I'm sure it's not exactly what they're teaching in medical school these days, but I'm going to start thinking of the Heart when I think of doughnuts.

That's my kind of Catholicism!

The Catholic Thing

The Beam in Our Brother's Eye
By Robert Royal
Monday, 16 June 2008

Excerpt:

Benedict XVI has deplored the widespread misrepresentation of Jesus as Someone Who "demands nothing, never scolds, Who accepts everyone and everything, Who no longer does anything but affirm us." It was not always thus. Why? Well, to begin with, if you read the Gospels, Jesus says He is meek and humble of heart, but He has a sharp tongue: He calls some fellow Jews a "brood of vipers"; in Luke, after teaching the Lord's Prayer, He remarks almost casually to His own disciples, "If you then, who are wicked. . ."; and He warns often about the possibility of eternal damnation. This excludes people, is judgmental, may not exactly build self-esteem. Benedict has noted tartly that Christian community "must not be conceived as if the avoidance of conflict were the highest pastoral value."

Hat Tip: The Curt Jester