Most bibliophiles would agree that Amazon.com has been one of the best advances of the last 20 years — It allows one to search for books, search within the content of books and flip through a sampling of scanned pages. It enables readers to critique and rate various works, sharing their sentiments with potential future buyers/readers. And it gives appropriate recommendations based on browsing and purchasing habits.

Enter now LibraryThing — the best thing since sliced… er… Amazon! Essentially, LibraryThing is a free interactive web tool that gives suggestions for books by finding out what books you own, which you liked and which you hated. It does so in three ways:

1. BookSuggester — As the name suggests, you enter the title of a book that you have read and enjoyed, and BookSuggester returns a large list of recommendations, categorized as follows: People with this book also have… (by analyzing over 10 million titles listed in LibraryThing’s user profiles); Books with similar subjects and classifications… (from Library of Congress subject headings); Books with similar tags… (from over 13 million user-specified tags); and Amazon also recommends… (from Amazon.com database).
2. UnSuggester — This tool gives book suggestions for books that you will enjoy based upon books that you disliked. In order to work, a book need be listed by at least 75 members.
3. LibrarySuggester — Ah!, this is where LibraryThing shines! By creating a free anonymous user account (no e-mail address required), you can catalog your current library. It’s user-friendly interface allows searching by title, author, ISBN#, etc. As you enter each item, it returns a list of matches with cover images to help you find the exact version on your shelf at home. Most importantly, you can specify your own tags that describe these books, which helps refine your suggestions later. After you have cataloged at least five books from your library, LibrarySuggester will look for other works of fiction/non-fiction owned by people with similar tastes. You can also search by tags.

Not to mention that the site uses typefaces reminiscent of Edward Gorey (of PBS’ “Mystery” fame), LibraryThing is sure to please book lovers everywhere!

In 2003, the American Episcopal church (a branch of the Anglican church) decided to “consecrate a non-celibate homosexual [man] as bishop of New Hampshire and to allow priests in several dioceses to bless same-sex unions formally,” sparking immediate global outrage. Debate raged furiously regarding women priests, homosexual priests and gay marriage. Multiple Anglican provinces (especially Nigeria and Rwanda) declared a state of “‘broken’ or ‘impaired’ communion” with the Anglican church. Recently, the remaining orthodox Anglican church submitted a proposal to reunite with Rome, under the undisputed authority of the magisterium of the Pope.

Read the full article in the Times.

Update: First Things reports that the Anglican/Episcopal church has reached an internal accord and will not undergo schism, with the liberal side being expelled from the Anglican communion and the orthodox side reuniting with the Roman Catholic Church, as was recently proposed. A new council has been created that will try to restore moral order to the church. Read the full article here.

Reprinted from CatholicCulture.org:

Lenten days bring two images immediately to mind, at least to my own idle mind. The first is of the bishops’ gathering that first established Lent in 325 during the great ecumenical council in the Turkish town of Isnik — then called Nicæa. Some of the bishops there had been mutilated in the persecutions of the emperors Maximin and Licinius. A dubious record says there were 318 bishops in all, but we do know that their fifth canon ordered a time of fasting and penance lasting 40 days that we now call Lent, presumably because Moses, Elijah, and Christ had fasted 40 days. There are bishops maimed like those Nicean bishops today in China, though our government and many corporations have not advertised them. When one of them, Ignatius Cardinal Kung, was released in 1985 after 30 years in prison, he was surprised to learn that the Church’s Friday meat abstinence had been changed. Evidently he did not think this an improvement. While his internment had been a perpetual Lent, he thought the mortifications of his brethren in the West had been sustaining him. In fact, it had been the other way around.

The bishops of Nicæa knew the consequences of mortification, the grief of it when inflicted, and the grace of it when voluntarily assumed. So they extended to 40 days what first had been a penitential period of three days before Easter. The season was catechetical as well as penitential, preparing catechumens for baptism and collaterally instructing all the faithful. Over the years, the nature of the Lenten fasts and penances varied, and not until the seventh century in the West was Ash Wednesday added so that Lent might last the full 40 days if Sundays were exempted. As early as the time of the Council of Nicæa, however, the Church in Jerusalem had kept Lent for eight five-day weeks. The word “Lent” comes from the Old English lencten, after the season of spring with its lengthening daylight. Christians, bringing to fulfillment an instinct of most religions, have known that some period of mortification as a “prayer of the senses” serves as a prelude to a spiritual rebirth.

The second image that comes to mind when I think of Lent is that of the Church of St. George in Velabro along the Roman Forum. Unlike the Church in Jerusalem, whose own altars fasted on the weekdays of Lent by forgoing the liturgy, the Church in Rome celebrated Mass every day of Lent and with special ceremony. At the end of their workday, the faithful would gather around the bishop of Rome and his deacons in procession to a church appointed for the day. The Church of St. George was the station church for the first day after Ash Wednesday, and since St. George is the patron of soldiers, the traditional gospel reading for that Thursday was about the centurion who asked Christ to heal his servant. To that church in the course of his tumultuous pontificate during the eleventh century, Pope Urban II brought a portion of the skull of the great martyr George. Others of his relics are entombed outside what is now the entrance to the Ben Gurion Airport in Israel.

When I was living in Rome some years ago, it fell to my lot to preach each year at St. George on the Lenten station day, beginning when I was a deacon. By then, George’s official status on the Church calendar had been reduced in the neuralgic spirit of the late 1960s, though he continues to be the most honored saint — except for Mary — in many Christian nations. Last year, Pope John Paul II undid the revision of the feast, making St. George’s Day a solemnity in such nations as England and India. And of course, like the Nicaean bishops in their endurance, the survivors of Soviet Russia have restored St. George to their banners, and a new Church of St. George the Mega-Martyr shines in the sun across Red Square from the sullen tomb of Lenin the Martyrer. Ostpolitik is gone, and St. George remains.

Lenten Lightweights

All this is by way of saying that Lent is not for the fey. That is because Christianity is not for them either. Sentimentalists who are Catholics on their own jerry-built terms have no place for Lent. Cafeteria Catholicism, their fast-food version of the heavenly banquet, is neither feast nor fast. Its pastiche of Catholicism has become an anthropological vignette whose day is already past. The felt banners and ceramic butterflies that replaced crucifixes in the late 1960s and 1970s are fading away to the land of kitsch — detritus of the liturgical Martha Stewarts of their day. There is even a rumor that genuine observance of Lent is coming back. The anticipatory “gesima” Sundays that preceded Ash Wednesday before the Second Vatican Council, for all their psychological usefulness, unfortunately may have gone the way of all fleshlessness (pray to St. George Redivivus for their return), but at least the sense of Lent perdures.

I live in the middle of Manhattan, where Ash Wednesday is perhaps the most popular religious day of the year, albeit confused with Mardi Gras the day before and being quickly surpassed in popularity by Halloween. Thousands come to the Catholic churches for ashes, many without full knowledge of what the ritual really is but at least palpably aware that we are dust. Even the bulimic syntax of the English translation of the rite cannot rob our sense of mortality of a pathetic majesty. We are an Easter people, and as St. Augustine was wont to say, Alleluia is our song. But without confession of our many morbid betrayals of the living God, the song becomes a ditty, and instead of the scarred bishops calling the people to repentance as at Nicaea, the paschal landscape is festooned with harmless adults dressed as rabbits hiding eggs from bewildered children.

Thomas Merton recalled in The Seven Storey Mountain that before he became a Catholic, his Easter consisted of an abbreviated service of Morning Prayer followed by an egg hunt on a manicured lawn. Such Easters are like the festivals in the twilight of imperial Rome when, as Suetonius records, the great men spoke of the gods but secretly consulted the stars. Some have so lost confidence in the resurrection of Christ that they keep little of Lent at all. There are places where there are Ash Wednesday and Easter and in between an extended St. Patrick’s Day. Great Patrick would be the first to cry out against this from the heights of Croagh Patrick, his fasting place for all 40 days.

One could go to the other extreme and think of Easter as merely an interruption of a yearlong Lent. That is the piety of the rigorist for whom every silver lining has a cloud. Worse, there are certain Catholic types with the mottled spiritual complexion of the Jansenist nuns of Port Royal who were “pure as angels and proud as devils.” Patrick lit a Paschal fire, not a Lenten fire. All his fasts were for the feast ahead, and he knew that fasting is not only for the self, since in the Christian community one also fasts for the dead. A parable of the Lenten-Easter economy appears in the chronicles of Nennius the Briton and Tírechán the Gael. They wrote separately of how Patrick fasted another 40 days on Mount Aigli near the end of his life:

And the birds were a trouble to him, and he could not see the face of the heavens, the earth or the sea on account of them. God told all the saints of Erin, past, present and future, to come to the summit of that mountain which overlooks all others, and is higher than all the mountains of the West. On that mountain, God commanded the saints to bless the tribes of Erin, so that Patrick might see by anticipation the fruit of his labors, for all the choirs of the saints of Erin came to visit him, who was the father of them all.

First, fast to starve the devil, then feast with the saints.

Fasting, Not Dieting

For a long while, when there was a compact and coherent Christendom, Lent as the “truce of God” was a palpable social fact: Charity was flaunted, wars were suspended, and executions were postponed. This last was not because anyone thought capital punishment was intrinsically evil. It was because the law courts closed for Lent. To meet the Lenten deadline (yes, I said deadline), executions in the Papal States were speeded up to get them over with by Ash Wednesday. The salutary moral effects of the papal executions often brought about a celebratory spirit inconsistent with Lenten sobriety. With a flair alien to the morbidly edifying public posture of contemporary social engineers, the papal executioner sometimes wore a carnival costume. Blessed Pius IX’s octogenarian executioner killed 500 criminals during several papal reigns, including Pius’s, but Lent was time off for him.

Lent is an occasion of sin, for it is a time when the flesh is made weak. It is the only occasion of sin that one can seek out legitimately. St. John Chrysostom preached: “God does not impede temptations, first, so that you may be convinced of your strength; secondly, that you may be humble, not proud; thirdly, that the devil, who may doubt whether you have really abandoned him, will be certain of that fact; fourthly, so that you may become as strong as iron, understanding the value of the treasures which have been granted to you.”

Self-denial can strengthen the self as no glib kind of self-affirmation can. In California, I saw an advertisement for a preparatory school in which the top student in the senior class said that the school had taught her who she was, to feel good about herself, and to be satisfied with her choices. This Valley Girl vacuousness would have driven Socrates to drink a second nightcap. For those three smug confidences run afoul of the classical triad of erudition: Self-knowledge is delusional without perception of eternal beauty; self-contentment eradicates the civilized discontent born of a quest for eternal truth; and satisfaction with one’s choices is barbaric if one does not choose eternal good.

These transcendentals prefigure the temptations of Christ. During His 40 days in the wilderness, the prince of lies would have had Him turn stones to bread (nature defined materialistically in contradiction of natural aesthetics and supernatural faith); fly (happiness as vainglory in contradiction of natural wisdom and supernatural hope); and exercise power (morality as artifact of the will in contradiction of natural law and supernatural love). Diabolical deceit accepted instead of rejected now plays out its tragic drama in the wilderness of our schools and other social institutions.

Nonetheless, pilgrim voices still chant as guardian angels descant: “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil.” This cantus firmus of Lent means taking evil seriously enough not to fear it. To neglect evil is to take the self too seriously, which soon makes the self a fearful thing. This is a stubborn canker in spiritual discipline, and it is especially a problem with mortifications such as fasting, which can be self-defeating when done apart from a transcendent love. Fasting and abstinence should be nonchalant, done with panache, for the life of grace is nothing if it is not graceful. “When you fast, anoint your head and wash your face” (Matthew 6:17).

We have all had the experience of meeting or knowing people who make a fetish of fasting, even to the length of weighing themselves in the process. With a deluded spirituality, they claim to fast but only diet. The scales of justice are not in the bathroom. Fasting is meant to teach humility: If I cannot do without a few sandwiches, I should speak with reserve about being a soldier of Christ.

Was it not a special favor from God to watch the joint beatification of Pope Pius IX, Abbot Columba Marmion, O.S.B., third abbot of Maredsous Abbey in Belgium, and Pope John XXIII? It was a happy day for goodly fat people like all three and a day of abasement for aesthetical ascetics in “a sentimental passion of a vegetable fashion” who want only gaunt saints on their prayer cards. Enthusiasts who cut down on food principally to improve their tennis game would be less eager to fast if it added weight. In a perversely affluent culture where thinness is an outward sign of wealth, getting fat is not necessarily a way to humility, but it does guarantee humiliation. To paraphrase Chesterton on the angels, the key to heroic virtue may not be in being light but in taking one’s self lightly.

Much Communion, Little Confession

The sacramental economy of Lent acquaints earth with heaven without equating them. The 40 days are dialectical (earth separated from heaven) in their stress on dying to the old man and denying the passions, and analogical (earth in consort with heaven) by their focus on eternity. If you can get through the treacle in John Keble’s volume of poetry, The Christian Year, you can abide for a while in fine lines like this for Septuagesima Sunday:

The Moon above, the Church below,
Wondrous race they run,
But all their radiance, all their glow,
Each borrows of its Sun.

I am told that in the Eastern rites there is a custom of singing Alleluias quietly as Lent starts to remind the faithful of what the season of fast is all about: “Lord let me know my end and the number of my days.” The Western rite’s Laetare Sunday in the middle of Lent does something of the same, prompting the faithful to keep an “eschatological perspective” or, more felicitously, to “keep an eye on the prize.” Lent is a sublime paradox, weaving the pattern of suffering and joy that is the human condition, mortally tragic for the behaviorist and divinely comic for the graceful.

John Paul II is a case in point. Surely the pope’s physical infirmities are a mortification for a man of such spiritual authority. He is the only vicar of the one of whom it was said: He saved others, but Himself He cannot save. The sight of the pope so constrained by his illnesses makes him an icon of Lent, and as he gives his blessing urbi et orbi with trembling hands, he is an icon of Easter at the end of days many more than 40.

The saints have reiterated this: Unsought mortifications are more difficult than self-prescribed ones. Patience with long lines at the supermarket, rock music on public address systems, and the wrong people running things can be harder spiritual trials than fasts and vigils. If 40 days pass with our thinking we have kept a good Lent, we have kept a bad one. That would break the commandment against tempting God. To tempt God is to put His justice to the test by the ridiculous spiritual impertinence that authors of spiritual manuals delicately call “presumption.” It is what provoked the biblical imprecations against meretricious rituals and abominable sacrifices.

This is a point that may have eluded a Catholic archbishop in South Africa who, in an earnest effort to make worship more indigenous, recently proposed sacrificing cows for blood libations at Mass. I never expected to have to take up my pen against animal sacrifice, but new occasions teach new duties. The eucharistic sacrifice is different from all the other sacrifices of all the religions that have ever tried to appease heaven. First, it is all-sufficient, so we need not turn the sacristy into a butcher shop. Second, it is rational and therefore inseparable from moral truth. In Romans 12:1, St. Paul declares the Eucharist to be an offering of spirit and mind, and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger has identified intuitions of this in the ancient Dead Sea and Alexandrian Jewish communities. The moral dimension of the “reasonable sacrifice” (logike latreia) of which Lenten anticipation is a prophecy and an icon, is the reason we call this sort of presumption a bad thing, like praying to God without having first incarnated that prayer in acts of charity, or receiving much communion and confessing little. We may tempt God — that is the tawdriest privilege of a free will — but God is not mocked. Not for long. Presumption has its consequences. Look at the 360 degrees of desolation around us. Look at our parishes. Lent should mean more of both confession and communion, spiritual reading, examination of conscience, benevolent acts, and prayer issuing in resolution.

Much Ash but Many Miracles

Modern man has had a long Lent. You could say it lasted the entire 20th century. Postmodern spiritual fatigue perversely engenders a kind of compensatory hysteria: eclectic revivals of blood sacrifice in sub-Saharan lands and liturgical dancing around altars in suburban America. As a church, we have been mortified: By neglecting the intellectual case against Christ’s cultured despisers; by trusting in bureaucracies and utopian movements; by imputing divine inspiration to private conceits; by slothfulness in the face of infanticide; by complacency about hunger and injustice; by grossly exaggerating the value of entertainers and professional athletes while neglecting spiritual heroes; by confusing tradition and nostalgia; by degrading our artistic patrimony; by banality in the pulpits; by scandals and refusing to speak of them as unspeakable; by the consecration of mediocrity; by voting for degenerate Caesars when we had the political power to dethrone them; by contempt for history; by impatience with God’s unfathomable patience; by failing to give God thanks for the grace of living in a time of so many saints and miracles — in short, by softness in hard times.

In the same 20th century of so much ash, we have witnessed many miracles, which perhaps only a later generation will recognize as such. Lents come and go, and however we may keep them, there is always Easter at the end. The Lent-Easter cycle has nothing to do with the the change of season from winter to spring, for south of the equator everything is opposite. It has much to do with the rhythms of the body asleep and then awake, and much to do with the course of history with its ups and downs.

I recall a lady who died a few months ago who often rode a bicycle around Rome and unobtrusively attended Mass at our college chapel years ago. Only when I first visited her for dinner did I find out that her home was the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj with its 1,000 rooms, and that she was the Princess Orietta and part of the long Roman memory. A friend wrote after her death that when traveling with her recently on the Via Quattro Novembre, they went over a pothole, and she said, “That hole has been there since the war.” Civic intimacy of such charm is born of a profound acquaintance with and an even more profound love of the place where one lives.

Nevertheless, of Rome it has been said that one knows it well after a year and not at all after a lifetime. This is even more true of the mysteries of salvation. Every lapse into sin should remind us of the first pothole in Eden. Lent is a small familiarity with the inexhaustible drama of redemption in which eternity transfigures mortality: “[W]hen I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Corinthians). It is a radical break from all other dispensations whose only response to mortality is to ignore it, to flee from it, or to bury it with horrible dirges. We live many Lents during our lives, and we should not make a big burden of them. We should come to know them well and even cherish them, hot cross buns and ashes and all. But when Lent is done, souls attain to the stature of heaven by having measured their own smallness, and they become strong enough to bask in the blaze of glory by sensing their own fragility and turning it into the transparency of grace.

Many times over the space of about nine years, I had the privilege of offering Holy Mass, preaching and working with Blessèd Teresa of Calcutta. Once while we were having a conversation, I noticed that she had placed an international award she had received on the floor as a doorstop. She graciously accepted the object made of some expensive-looking crystal, and would not hurt anyone’s feelings by getting rid of it, but she did make good use of what otherwise would have been useless to her.

The dynamic love that Mother Teresa shared confounded the sentimentalists who had a romantic notion of ’social work.’ She and her religious sisters patiently tried to form in true virtue volunteers who wanted to ‘feel good’ by acts of philanthropy. Mother did not romanticize destitution, nor did she condone vice when she cared for its victims. She meant it when she spoke of Christ in the “distressing” guise of the poor. One writer has said that when the needy are difficult and even offensive,

that’s the point at which the self-congratulatory do-gooders quit and go home and where the real charity kicks in. That’s the point at which it’s impossible to see the face of Jesus in the destitute (or sick, or deranged) except as a pure act of faith. And that’s the point at which it matters whether Jesus is divine or not, because belief in the repulsively disguised spark of divinity is the only reason to keep on giving love in exchange for contempt.

Parishioners who are living in London at the moment remark that in their neighborhood, their family of four is the smallest among their friends. This is certainly a change. Our parish’s “baby boom” is not unique, either. Larger families are increasingly seen among the so-called affluent sophisticates who, just a generation ago, disdained family life altogether.

Whether this bellwether of social responsibility is too late to stanch the decay of Western civilization remains to be seen. The United States is unusual among Western nations in maintaining population replacement levels. Without a more radical demographic increase Western Europe will have a Muslim majority within three generations at most. Soon the largest house of worship in Britain will be a mosque: The construction is about to begin and the money is guaranteed. It will be in central London.

While ideological dilettantes are thrashing themselves over the ambiguous conundrums of global warming, their civilization is teetering on the brink, and it could be replaced by the world’s fastest growing religion, which is used to hot weather. This was evident when shocked Belgian animal-rights activists were recently confronted by Muslims sacrificing thousands of sheep in the streets of Brussels in a religious ritual far different from our non-sanguineous Ash Wednesday. People in Western society who have been critical of Judaeo-Christian morality on issues of gender and sexuality must now confront a system which could disenfranchise or even behead them.

Pope Benedict XVI used his Angelus address on the Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas to reiterate his Regensburg appeal for the harmony of faith and reason. Telling how Aquinas developed the richness of Jewish and Arab thought, he said that “faith supports reason and perfection; and reason, illumined by faith, finds strength to raise itself to the knowledge of God.” This knowledge attains its fullness in the Logos, the Living Word, which is Jesus Christ, the Son of God made man.

It is only right that a religion that believes itself to be true, to use a word from rational discourse, should seek to convert others. But where reason does not figure in the theological system, conversion allows no conversation. While conscientious Muslims abjure terror, the “struggle for Allah,” known as Jihad, is enjoined on all believers if only by the subtle but also more effective method of population growth.

Since 1968, many mocked the Catholic Church’s warnings, in the encyclical Humanae Vitae, about the consequences of contraception and abortion. They now have to deal with the fact that in Germany right now the most popular name for newborn boys is not Carl or Hans or Dietrich, but Mohammed. With respect to the author of Humanae Vitae, it may not be too late for reasonable people in a self-indulgent society to admit that Pope Paul VI was, if they do not want to say infallible, accurate.

I suspect that most Christians already own a copy of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ.

If you don’t own a copy — Stop reading right now, and buy this DVD!

If you do own a copy, you’re probably wondering what’s new in this re-release.

Mel Gibson’s 2004 blockbuster is at the same time part documentary and part (very personal) artistic meditation of the Passion — the suffering and death of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is perhaps one of the most moving films ever made and one of the most important films for evangelism in today’s secularist Culture of Death.

Three years after its release (which, like the Gospels themselves, was a source of heated debate and division), it has been re-released as a “Definitive Edition,” with a number of special features:

The movie is still in Aramaic and Latin, with subtitles. The purpose of this is to avoid “bringing Jesus into today’s world” and rather force the viewer back in time, as if you were a witness to the actual events. Disc 1 has both the theatrical and re-cut version of the film, complete with accompanying commentaries by filmmakers, cinematographers, producers, musical directors and theologians. A particularly wonderful feature is an enhanced viewing mode featuring Biblical footnotes while the movie is playing. Disc 2 features one reasonably in-depth behind-the-scenes/making-of documentary. The other features on this disc include mini featurettes on religious art, ancient languages, a short showcase of the actual places in Jerusalem where the Stations of the Cross occurred, production art, a couple of deleted scenes, and a few other things like actors’ bios and (disappointingly short) lives of the saints.

Personally, I found the discussion regarding ancient languages most interesting. Fr.Fulco, who served as historical and ancient language consultant during the scripting, shooting and post-production of the film, is erudite and well spoken. The section on religious art was quite engaging, but a bit disappointing in its superficiality (perhaps because I have a particular interest in art history and love the details). It would have been nice, for example, if the names of artists and some details of the pieces accompanied the art documentary and the art gallery. However, in exchange, the DVD gives a great mini documentary on crucifixion as a mode of punishment and execution.

As far as the behind-the-scenes features, most touching were Jim Caviezel’s humble and soft-spoken interview, during which he (and others) describes the physical, mental and spiritual anguish he endured during the making of this movie — which include, but are not limited to, eight-hour makeup sessions, itching, migraine headaches, freezing weather (while in a loin cloth), being whipped for real, having the several-hundred-pound cross fall on him and crush his skull, and being struck by lightning.

Over these past three years, I have often wondered (with great frustration) why they didn’t include extras on the DVD release of “The Passion of the Christ.” Perhaps the reason was that they did not want people to view this as a regular movie, concentrating on how it was made, etc. Rather, they wanted people to take the movie as it was and concentrate on the message and the emotional/spiritual impact that it had on them, as viewers. Whether Catholic/Christian, Jewish, agnostic or atheist, it is sure to have profound impact on the very fiber of every human being.

This re-release comes at a good time — just when the movie is starting to fade from people’s minds. The strong impact that it had three years ago is starting to taper out, and people are settling back into their fast-paced modern lives, which too often results in a distilling of religious convictions and a laxity of spiritual fervor.

Well, Lent is around the corner, and this movie makes a wonderful accompaniment to spiritual preparation during this time.

For those who have never seen the movie, now is the time.

For those who have seen it, but don’t particularly care to see it again — The extras may give you a new appreciation for the film and spark a sudden desire to watch it over again. This may move you to meditate on its scenes, pray and feel closer to God.

And that is a very good thing.

See also:

• Neither Gibson nor The Passion is anti-Semitic, but anti-Catholicism abounds!.
• Via Crucis (Way of the Cross) with scenes from The Passion of the Christ.
• Click here to purchase The Passion of the Christ.

CNN reports: A new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns the world that “warming of the climate system is unequivocal,” that it is expected to worsen and “continue for centuries” and that it is “likely man-made.”

No kidding! You don’t say!

Well, now that we have that out of the way, perhaps people (e.g., G.W.) can stop denying the self-evident and concentrate on what to do about it.

Greenhouse gases are blamed for fewer cold days, hotter nights and changing weather patterns such as floods and droughts. Temperature is predicted to rise up to 6.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. Furthermore, sea level is projected to rise up to 58-78 centimeters (23-30 inches) during this time.

All Catholics have the social responsibility of taking care of the good Earth that God has given us. Check out ClimateCrisis.net for more information about global warming. StopGlobalWarming.org and FightGlobalWarming.com are informative sites that include tips of what you can — and should — do. Another site, Earth911.org, gives tons of resources for recycling and pollution prevention. Oh, and whether you’re Republican or Democrat or non-partisan, if you haven’t seen the engaging and eye-opening documentary An Inconvenient Truth, now would be a good time.