The History of Catholicism on Long Island:

Glaciers cover the island.

Glaciers recede leaving behind tons of potato farms.

The entire population of Brooklyn moves to Long Island and procede to:

1. Pour concrete on everything
2. Talk about the old neighborhood and how much better it was in the old days, even though "we were poor"
3. create the Diocese of Rockville Centre

Then, on January 18th, 2003 a blog named Gen X Revert was created, ushering in the era known as "Pax Reverticana". All this is my way of advising:

My 4th Blogiversary will soon be here.

Entenmann's Bakery is downsizing at their Bay Shore plant. The cookies and crumb cakes will be made elsewhere. Entenmann's is a great Long Island business, their french-filled crumb cake is the greatest. You can't blame them for wanting to do business elsewhere, it is just simply too expensive here. The Entenmann family started out in Brooklyn and sold the business years ago.

Top Al Qaeda suspect killed in U.S. airstrike

I like what I see in Somalia, the Islamists are driven out the US can go in and kill Al Qaeda.

A choral group from Yale was attacked in San Francisco and not a single arrest has been made?

Mepham High School Football Rape -- 4 Years Later

Where are they now?

I am referring to the rapists from the Mepham High Football Team -

Ken Carney (the ringleader whose father died right after his son was exposed)

Phil Sofia

Tom Diasparra

Rich Guccione

These four monsters should be registered as sex offenders but don't have to because they were underage when they raped young boys as a football camp. This story focuses on the ringleader, Ken Carney, who was a typical white trash bully from Bellmore, but it also points out the problem with the attitudes of so many sports-minded people:

"Sometimes it’s hard to tell what bothers the people of Bellmore and Merrick more—allegations of sodomy or the abrupt end of football season. At a school-board meeting on October 1, packed with camera crews and angry parents, Superintendent Caramore tries to explain that hazing simply doesn’t happen at Mepham—that football was canceled not because of what the boys allegedly did but because their teammates never reported it. That hasn’t satisfied parents who complain about the lost scholarships, the deflated homecoming celebration, and the fund-raisers for other sports, all of which depend on football and are now ruined, they’re saying, because of a couple of messed-up kids."

Elizabeth Fox Genovese, RIP

Feminist, Writer, Scholar, Pro-Lifer, and Catholic convert

Link is via The Dawn Patrol

The East Meadow School District has refused to let a deaf student enter school with his service dog. It looks like the school district is breaking the law.

From Newsday:

"East Meadow School District officials appeared to dig in their heels after the state Division of Human Rights began an investigation into the district's refusal to allow John Cave, 14, to bring the dog, Simba, to W. Tresper Clarke High School. John, who has limited hearing with the aid of cochlear implants, was rebuffed yesterday for the fourth consecutive school day."

In other disability related news the big story is the "Ashley Treatment":

Parents halt growth of severely disabled girl (From The Seattle Times)

The parents have a website to give their side of the story, but it appears they have taken action to keep their girl small so they can more easily care for her.

"The girl's treatment has involved a hysterectomy, surgery to remove her breast buds and subsequent high doses of estrogen.

High-dose estrogen was used occasionally in the 1950s and '60s, mostly on teenage girls whose parents were concerned about the social stigma of being tall. The drugs could stop a 5-9 girl from becoming, say, 6 feet tall.

As that stigma has gone out of fashion, so has the treatment, medical ethicists say."

Sometimes Diogenes is so spot on that it is amazing! He is referring to Fr. Donald Cozzens but tell me this does not describe priests you have seen:

"We're all familiar with Cozzens's attitude, though perhaps most of us meet it in the celebrant at Mass. It's not as if they're obviously bored or perfunctory, but somehow they communicate the feeling that the real business takes place somewhere else. They seem bewildered, not by the meaning of Calvary exactly, but that the faithful would find it important. They don't understand genuflections or silences or prayers said kneeling. They're embarrassed by awe. Their breeziness at the altar as well as the velcro on their vestments shows that, for them, the whole golgotha/sacrifice/wine-into-blood thing is No Big Deal.


Their priesthood means something different to them than it does, say, to the faithful that show up at Mass during the week, whose eyes tend to focus on host and chalice. It's a priesthood in which the gift shop and the altar are simply two ways of reaching out to spiritual needs. It's a priesthood in which there's no damnation from which souls need to be rescued, a priesthood in which acceptance of self is more urgent than contrition. Small wonder if, for Cozzens's generation of priests, asceticism in general -- and celibacy in particular -- is hard to make sense of. "


Wow.

Oprah Winfrey has started a school for girls in South Africa which is awesome. More celebrities should use their wealth to make the world a better place as she does.

Speaking of Africa, a Long Islander originally from Rwanda has written a book on her experiences with the Rwanda Genocide.

Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust

Immaculee Ilibagiza is from Elmont and writes about surviving in a small bathroom of a pastor's house with seven other women. I will have to buy the book soon as my mother says it is an incredible story. Immaculee was featured on 60 Minutes also and it was amazing to see her speak about forgiving the man who killed her family members. Her Left To Tell Charitable Fund attempts to help the orphans of the Rwanda Genocide.

A new Church management consultant group promises a more faithful response to the problems of the Church

From the National Catholic Register

This article features Deal Hudson, former editor of Crisis Magazine, who has just founded the Church Resource Institute to assist Bishops in management. This Institute is meant to counter the National Leadership Roundtable started by Geoffrey Boisi, which some considered to be too liberal. I welcome lay people who are experts in business management, fund raising and finance offering assistance to the Bishops. I don't think Deal Hudson, who left Crisis after being exposed as a sleazebag should be seen as any more faithful to Catholic teaching than the Roundtable's group. I hope both groups can provide help as we all know the Bishops need it. Priests are overwhelmed today trying to run all aspects of parishes and they should not have to be. Rather than be another area of liberal vs. conservative, progressive vs orthodox, dissenters vs. faithful, these groups should both be able to prevent the Church from suffering from mis-management the way She has over the past 40 years.

A New Catholic Church in Town! (Lindenhurst)

"The Ukrainian Catholic Church, which is in full communion with the Latin-rite Catholic Church, is one of several Eastern churches that maintain their own form of worship, tradition, and hierarchy while remaining under the pope’s authority."


The Church moved from West Islip as it had outgrown the building there. I hope I can get to a Mass at this Church some day.

A local parish bulletin has a weekly page dedicated to "Adult Faith Formation". There has been a cry for adult faith formation from both sides of the ideological spectrum in the Church for years. This page reprinted the old false tale of the "Twelve Days of Christmas" song being a secret way to teach the faith to Catholics in England during the persecution. This is sad on so many levels. How many more people are now going to believe this? It would only take a little knowledge of history and a little common sense to realize that this is a myth. To have this published in a parish bulletin, under the context of teaching adults, is a sign of just how bad things are. Anyway, to set the record straight:

Snopes Urban Legend Page on the 12 Days of Christmas

Tommorrow there will be a Mass for the Celebration of the Feast of Mary Mother of God and the Anniversary of the Independence of Haiti. It will be offered at St. Boniface Church in Elmont in the French and Haitian Creole languages. Haiti is a very Catholic country and many Haitians are on Long Island. Haiti was the first country founded via a slave revolt.

In today's Newsday:


Two of the Franciscan Brothers who run St. Anthony's High School in Huntington died within a day of each other.

Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine. Et lux perpetua luceat eis.

Also a story on St. John Antiochian Orthodox Church in Levittown that is home to Christian Palestinians. The story focuses on how the congregation tries to keep their culture alive here and how so many have fled the middle east since the founding of Israel. There is not much about their religious traditions specifically, but still an interesting read.

And finally, Suffolk County has always had terrible public tranportation, and the situation for disabled people is particularly bad. A lawsuit filed on behalf of disabled riders was settled and it looks like there will be some improvement.

Voice of the Faithful has a Long Island chapter in case anyone cares. I occasionally check out their website to see if there is anything of interest. The minutes of their November 15th regional meeting (held at a Universalist Unitarian place) had an interesting sentence that caught my eye. The guest speaker was a writer named Thomas Cahill who wrote "Mysteries of the Middle Ages The Rise of Feminism, Science, and Art from the Cults of Catholic Europe". The minutes list some good things he says about the Middle Ages and I am glad to read that yet another author is attempting to correct the record of this age as the "dark ages". I don't know if the minutes accurately reflect what he said but the VOTF minute taker records:

"With regard to the structure of our Church, he reminded us that Jesus did not ordain anyone. It is safe to assume that neither did He envision the pyramidal organization as we have today. " [emphasis mine]

Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein executed

This is good.

Islamists kicked out of Mogadishu

This is even better.

About 4,000 people, mostly militants, have died in 2006, the bloodiest period in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban regime in late 2001.

This is the best news so far.

Let's hope the New Year will see American troops leave Iraq, where they are not needed, and moved to Afghanistan and Pakistan where they are very much needed. I hope 2007 will be the year when we finally see real progress in the war on terror. Remember to follow all the news by reading Jihad Watch and Dhimmi Watch. And consider buying the new book from Robert Spencer:

The Truth About Muhammad: Founder of the World's Most Intolerant Religion

Unruly Passenger Slaps Federal Air Marshal

"A US Airways passenger faced charges of interfering with a flight crew Thursday after he apparently unknowingly slapped an undercover federal air marshal, said an official familiar with the case.
The man, who'd been drinking liquor, threw a mid-air temper tantrum Wednesday night after attendants refused to serve him any more alcohol during his flight from Washington's Reagan National Airport to Fort Myers, Florida, the official said. "

People this pathetic should be banned from flying any airlines, put in jail for a year, and fined very heavily. After 9/11, there should be mandatory prison terms for unruly flight behavior.

Since this blog sometimes focuses on Long Island stuff having nothing to do with Catholicism, I suppose posting about the Rosie O'Donnell VS. Donald Trump battle is in order. After all, Rosie is from Commack and Donald hails from Lattington. Their hometowns are approx. 30 miles apart physically but economically, the two towns are light years apart. The battling between them is doing nothing to enhance Long Islanders' reputation, although I am not sure people think of Trump as a Long Islander. I don't care for either one of them so let's hope the battle ends soon, as it is annoying.

I went to Mass last night at St. Martin of Tours in Amityville. I have been attending the 8 PM Christmas Eve Mass there for a few years. It is a well kept secret of the Diocese of Rockville Centre as it happens to have some of the best music on Long Island. At 7 PM a choir came out and sang some Christmas carols. Then at 7:30 the choir is joined by an orchestra and plays another 30 minutes of songs. At 8 PM, the Mass begins and the choir and orchestra play the music throughout the Mass. It is all done very well, although at times the music is a bit drawn out, a bit too dramatic. I wish I knew music because I would love to post what settings were used. The Gloria and Agnus Dei were both in latin. The orchestra sounded great, and the Church is always beautiful, even more so at Chistmas time. The closing hymn was the Alleluia Chorus!! I would encourage Long Islanders to go at least once to this Mass.

Merry Christmas!!