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A powerful vocations video here.

Make that "And" rather than "But": Now he tells me:

The Internet is riddled with false quotes attributed to More, or quotes from A Man for All Seasons claiming to be the real More's words. Even More's carefully chosen dying words are often misquoted by his advocates, the Honorable Robert Bork for instance. Judge Bork, with the great majority of educated mankind, misquoted Thomas More as having said at the scaffold, "I die the King's good servant but God's first." What he actually said is "I die the King's good servant and God's first." More's final words were ones not of conflict or tragedy, but of hopefulness and harmony between God and man, church and state, the individual and the collective.

While I do take some comfort in Judge Bork having made the same mistake, I simply cannot have a blog title based on a misquote. As such, BGF will now be known as AGF.

"Bible Belt Catholicism: changing face of Church is young, tech savvy and faithful": Here's a very interesting article on "the surge" of Catholicism in the deep South, and some of my favorite excerpts from the piece:

A recent report in the London Times showed that many states in the strongly Protestant Bible Belt are seeing a recent surge of Catholic growth, a trend which they say, is throwing a whole new face on southern stereotypes.

Times correspondent Dwight Longenecker reported that "A 'New Catholicism' is emerging that is likely to influence the whole US Church. These young Catholics tend to be faithful to the Church’s teachings while being educated and media-savvy."

. . . .

The Times report stated that the "New Catholicism is young and optimistic, but it is unlikely to tolerate the open dissent that went with the 1970s and the 'cultural Catholicism' of generations past."

"That form of Catholicism," it said, "is dying, and its death is symbolized by the northern US parishes with plummeting congregations, a shortage of priests and huge debts as they pay off child-abuse scandals. It seems that in the parishes where 'anything goes,' everybody went."

Indeed, Father Jay Scott Newman, who is pastor of St Mary’s parish in Greenville, South Carolina told the Times that, "Here you are not Catholic because your parents came from Italy or Slovakia. It’s because you believe what the Church teaches you is absolutely true."

(LvCITPS)

Godspy asks: "Will Catholics be fooled again?"

Nope. I am confident that my fellow Catholics will be quite pleased with the performance of soon-to-be-confirmed Justice Roberts.

May the peace of the Lord be with you, Lindsay.

Oh, and you might want to try praying the rosary as well, young lady.

(LvGB)

"Why We Quit Contracepting--Two couples tell their ‘conversion’ stories": A touching piece from the latest issue of NCR.

Excessive Catholicism: You gotta love the source of this blog's name. :)

Very clever.

Lots o' live blogging from the "World Youth Day" event, courtesy of Tim Drake.

Masthead image: It's taken from a painting called "The Vigil"; a beautiful piece of artwork if you ask me.

What do y'all think?