Yum

Thanks to Inge on Plurk, I found this delicious Italian recipe blog (from the Puglia region of Italy, famous for its olive oil). Even if you can't read Italian, you can savor the pictures.

The conversions of st paul

Sr. Laura is creating a new image of St. Paul
for the Pauline Year. It is taking place in her "studio" (aka "cubicle") right across the hall from my "office."
Just today she asked the Paulist priest who celebrated Mass in our chapel if he could be a "hand model" for Paul. (How appropos!) Here you can see the "portrait" taking shape.

Sr. Julia's back!

I brought the video camera down to New Orleans when I visited my family, and Sr. Julia was gracious enough to expound on "summer reading": fiction! I apologize in advance for the audio problems in the first part of the video. You would not believe what I had to go through with this! For a while, I thought it was going to be a silent movie. Thankfully, St. Paul and Bl. James Alberione got at least some sound working...

So Where are "The Nuns"?

A comment that appeared not only in this blog's comment box, but also in Karen's (and I suspect quite a few others--someone must have spent the day doing blog marketing for Sony) announced an upcoming music sensation, already signed with Sony: The Priests. Real ones. And they sing. Their first album will be released in November.
As readers of this blog know, "The Nuns" have released almost two dozen albums. We're still waiting for that call from Sony/BMG: maybe they'd be interested in our upcoming project?

Introducing....

As soon as I get a picture, I'll do the formal introductions! Meanwhile, I just wanted to give you an update on our community, which is in summer flux as we take turns for retreat, updating and so on. Sr. Helen will be returning from her retreat tomorrow; I'll be leaving for mine in two weeks (actually, we have a recording project first and then retreat). Sr. Helena (movie philosopher blogger nun) is taking a course through our "Pauline Center for Media Studies" in Culver City, CA. I'm sure she's loving those Pacific Coast sunbeams.
Meanwhile in Chicago we are hosting a Korean sister who is working on her English skills at a language school two doors away. Sister Triphonia is a theology student at the Gregorian University in Rome (many classes, papers, texts and tests are in English). She is slated for higher studies in moral theology, probably at the "Alphonsianum." (Don't you love how those Roman Universities have such saintly names? In addition to the two just named, there are: the Angelicum (St. Thomas Aquinas), the Antonianum (St. Anthony), the Claretianum (St. Anthony Claret, with a specialization in Religious Life), the Anselmianum (St. Anselm--or was it Ambrose? I'm getting confused. This university specializes in Liturgy studies), the Seraphicum (St. Francis), the Teresianum (St. Teresa--specializing in spirituality!)... I know there are more; who wants to fill in the blanks?

iConfess

Somebody had to do it.
Cajun geek Travis Boudreaux has created an iPhone application for the distracted penitent. (It also functions as a very small web site.)
Great work, Travis! Now, what about the priest's edition?

Listen Up!

I'll be making my retreat day on Sunday, but you can still hear me chatting away with Sr. Tracey and my fellow New Orleanian (transplanted to Georgia these twenty years), Ken Lampert. An interview recorded at the Atlanta Eucharistic Congress will be broadcast Sunday night (8:30 pm) on "The Catholic Hour," WDUN AM 550 (wdun.com). Ken, who grew up in the same Metairie parish I did, just a few streets away, says that the first half of the program will be on Saint Columban, and then you can catch me and Sr. Tracey on the air.

Oviedo: Wish I had Known

Found a book in our center yesterday about the "Sudarium of Oviedo," a bloodstained linen cloth that has been venerated in an historically ascertainable way for at least 1400 years as the "cloth that covered the head" of Jesus after his death. Interestingly, although this cloth was locked in an wooden trunk in Spain and maintained in one place since 1041, the bloodstains match those found on the Shroud of Turin (which never passed through Spain). Sudarium and Shroud feature the same microscopic pollens. And blood type AB (common in the Middle East; rare in Europe). The sudarium was moved from Jerusalem to Alexandria when Muslim armies were conquering the Holy Land; two years later, they were at Egypt's door, and the relic, in its oaken trunk, was spirited off to Spain. As the Muslims advanced through Spain, the trunk was sent off to more and more remote places, finally being secured in Asturias (the one region of Spain that was never under Muslim rule). Finally it was moved in 1041 (or 1014? memory fails me) to what became the capital of Asturias, Oviedo, and a Cathedral was built up around the royal chapel where the trunk of relics was kept.
I visited that Cathedral in 2006. With Karen (see picture taken with her magic camera).
I didn't know what I was missing as we were hurriedly shown around the church (whose guardians wanted to lock up for siesta). We should have been in adoration, but it seems that the caretakers of the relic were only following historical precendent in not alerting us to its presence or significance. (This makes sense, given the need to protect it from destruction. Even in the 20th century, it wasn't safe; during the Spanish Civil War, the relic chapel was fire-bombed. The oaken trunk, though, was not destroyed.)
Turns out that medieval pilgrims to Compostela would make a detour through mountains (Asturias is Europe's prime mountain-climbing region) to visit the Cathedral of Oviedo. A couplet that was common at the time (and that appears in various forms in other languages than Spanish) said that one who went to Compostela and the tomb of St. James without visiting the Cathedral of Oviedo was focusing on the "servant" and not on the "Lord."

Catching Up

I was planning to spend the day catching up on the post-travel backlog in my office. Instead, we learned that the mom of a friend of the community had died, so the day was ordered around a visitation held quite far from downtown Chicago. I got a little bit done earlier in the afternoon, but there wasn't much left for blogging. Hopefully I'll be back in full swing by Monday. (I'm making my July retreat day on Sunday, but I don't blog on Sundays anyway. As for tomorrow...we'll see!)
If you are in the Chicago area, come and visit our center soon. We are having a clearance sale and there are some fantastic titles on the sale shelf. I think that priests and seminarians would be especially excited about the books in the areas of liturgy and Scripture study, as well as spirituality.

Back to Chi-town

Yesterday was a pretty full day with Mom, running around the city and ending up at my brother's house for "the world's healthiest pizza" with his two tiny girls. Then, back home, I couldn't print out my boarding pass for today's flight to Midway. That discovery led to the realization that Mom's impossibly slow computer was simply maxed out. So I spent my last waking hours last night with Mom, deleting duplicate and triplicate folders of family photos. And then doing a defrag. (Mom's not just losing a daughter here; she's losing in-home tech support!)
So, "angels on wings" for the flight to Midway. See you in Chicago!