Papal audience today

Yep.

Came as a bit of a surprise to me too. I'm attending a conference for Catholic obstetricians and they said I could come along on their scheduled audience. I'll try to get a picture.

Meanwhile,

some fountains.

This one, looking tres tres papal, is just on the other side of the right-hand colonnade, under Papa's window. Snazzy huh? And the water is really good. Nothing like it in the hot weather.


This one is just on the inside of the Vatican city wall, at the start of the street of the offices of L'Osservatore Romano.

A bit of the Colonnade


And a Swiss Guard. You don't hardly ever see the blue uniforms in the media. I like it better than the orange one.

Making the best of it

Obama Win Causes Obsessive Supporters To Realize How Empty Their Lives Are

H/T to the inestimable Steve (You'll always be Evil to me, bro. Cheer up. The world actually ended in 1968. Too late to worry about it now).

More random pics

The Piazza in the rain. (It's been doing that quite a bit...big thunderstorms.)


A walled garden near the Vatican.


For some reason one very rainy day last week, I decided to climb up the Janiculum Hill.


It's really tall and there are a lot of steps.





Architecture. (These are apartments. Apartments I can't afford to live in.)


There are nuns everywhere. Good thing I no longer suffer more than periodic and brief bouts of nun-fever.

How does that go again?

I'm not quite getting it; could you tell it to me again?

It went something like, "Kill people to solve your problems"? or maybe, "It's OK to kill old people and sick people if they're in your way"? or "People who aren't able to look after themselves should be put out of our misery"? or "Let's pressure sick people into killing themselves to save the state some money"?

I'm sorry. I just can't quite grasp what you're saying...

Of your charity...

Henry Westen, the father of LifeSiteNews.com's general editor, John Henry Westen, died this week, after a long struggle with cancer. Henry Westen was one of those of the early generation of Catholics who refused to accept the "changes of Vatican II" and raised his family to be good and devout Catholics. All his children are still practising Catholics.

Prayers and Mass intentions gratefully accepted.

Life in the urbs

This is self and Sr. Mary Elizabeth Lariviere, from Connecticut, the English language editrix of L'Osservatore Romano, a fellow conspirator to Save the Humans.

New Home:
View from the terrace at the flat. (Ps: it's October 25th.) On November 1st, it was too warm to eat indoors, so we had lunch on the terrace.


Pointy trees on our street.


Tea the first morning. Somewhat befuddled.


The flat is mostly outdoors with a terrace on three sides. It's really meant to be occupied in the summer.


The Sea; the Sea

Roma:

At the Piazza del Popolo, looking a great deal like my maternal grandmother...scary.


Buying fruit at the Campo di Fiori.


Johnm Boyden trying helpfully to tell me that I'm doing it wrong.

The amusing thing is, that the Italians, having heard of this thing that other countries have called "winter" and having seen pictures of the people in those countries wearing warm woolly clothes during "winter", are all bundled up to the eyes in quilted coats and woolen jackets and scarves. No kidding. And it's 27 degrees. Me, I got my linen dresses out of the bottom of the suitcase and put them back into circulation.


Benedict's house. Always the lights are on up there. The guy works pretty hard I guess.


What I didn't get about the Swiss Guards is that they...well...guard things. Specifically the Vatican. Because its actually another country and you have to talk to the border guards before you go to another country. I notice that the Carrabinieri, who are Italian military police, don't go into the Piazza or the Colonnade because that's Vatican territory. I didn't realise that the whole place, other than the Piazza, is surrounded by a big wall, and that you can't just wander in. You have to have a reason, and when you want to go in, you have to tell them what you are going in for. They salute you too, which is weird.


The view out the window where I work. Under the Dome.


The other view out the window where I work. Rome is a strange place. It seems to be a lot of different places, and a lot of different times, all living together at once. Some of it astoundingly beautiful and magnificent (not always both of these at once) and some of it utterly repellent and awful. A strange and mystifying place.


You stand facing the basilica next to the fountain on the left side. You turn 90 degrees to the left (like America, yesterday), and are facing the big baroque decorative thing on the top of the colonnade. Then you count seven saints to the left and that's Philip.

Hi! I made it! So, what do you want me to do now?

OK Ok , I give

Here's some links:

Kathy has a good rant.

The only positive consequence of an Obama presidency -- and this is probably just wishful thinking on my part -- is we'll FINALLY stop hearing about slavery every five minutes.

It'll now be more like every ten minutes.

McCain bent over backwards to accomodate Mexicans and they voted for Obama, because his skin is brown. So did the usual guilty white liberals and secular Jews, who also voted for Obama based solely on his skin colour.

Which is what used to be called "racist", until the word came to mean its exact opposite, just like every other word that's been put through the leftwing lexicon laundry.

America has chosen as its leader an unaccomplished, spoiled, cowardly, shallow narcissist who wouldn't last five minutes under torture, let alone five years, and who associates with radical freaks and weirdos. He supports partial birth abortion, and wants to make you pay for it, too.

And Carriere is quite on form in the last few days:

Remember when W won his second term and a lot of liberal Americans threatened to move to Canada? Any who did: Please go home now.

Which got me thinking, to fully enjoy the New Gringo Dystopia, what if all the Cannucki Libs go along too and sensible Americans flee to Canada?

'Course, commies being commies, they'll soon be running out down there of half-caf lo-fat soy lattes and toilet paper, and then Whoopie Golberg will try to defect, probably with Matt Damon in her carry-on.

So I'm thinking, a shiny new 'lectric fence all along the 49th with Sarah Palin as Head Northern Sniper.

Canada: Suddenly the Conservative Option. This could be okay.

I have nothing to add about the US vote, really,

except...



and...

I win my bet.

Sorry

Things are probably not going to speed up here for a while. I don't have internet at home and the time I spend in the office is going to be focused very heavily on work, of which I suddenly have a great deal more. It is also a great deal more interesting and involved than ever before, so good for me but bad for the 'blog; sorry.

But I will be putting up pictures fairly regularly, and they should be dillies. Although I've been struck with some kind of dreaded lurgey (and have been so run down that I'm wondering if I should not go see a doctor), I'm having a wonderfully interesting time and my liturgical life has really picked up. The solemn high Mass at Sanctissima Trinita dei Pellegrini for All Souls last night was wonderful, though I was half in a coma for it. JP Sonnen was there taking a video so I expect there will be some nice pics at Orbis Catholicus or NLM. I can't bring myself to take pictures at Mass, so you'll just have to go over there to look. The vestments were worth the plane fare all by themselves.

There's lots on the plate. On Saturday, a friend and I will be visiting the Capitoline museums and having a nice easy wander around and the camera will come too.

So, stay tuned, but keep 'blog expectations low for the moment.

PS: I must be fitting in. I've been given girl-work to do by the parish. When I start work on restoring a cloth-of-silver faldstool cover, I'll put some pics up of it and the vestments that are stashed away in the sacristy. Buried treasure.

"Better than nothing"

I wonder who, (apart from the Devil, that is) is writing the script for these "pro-life" people? Because it really does sound all pretty much the same from country to country.

From the Chair of the Parliamentary All Party "Pro-life" Group, UK:

"Thank you for your concern. You have, however, missed the point. Voting against the whole of the bill would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There are many clauses in the bill which are very necessary and welcome. As co-chair of the all party pro-life group, I am clear on my responsibilities and will continue to vote against those parts of the bill which I find morally objectionable."

From New Zealand.

...and still my all-time favourite stab in the back:

"While Catholic politicians must always seek to protect human life and dignity to the fullest extent possible, there can be legitimate difference on how to achieve this objective. It is , therefore not our intention to tell Catholic Senators how to vote because it is their responsibility to discern the best way to protect human life and dignity after reflecting on all of the resources available to them. This discernment certainly includes Church teaching, but also the Senators' own personal reflections on the political and social realities they face," said Bishop Prendergast reading from a prepared text.

Well, oddly enough, as it turns out, there is a script writer after all.

Dr. Irving told LifeSite that it is no surprise that various countries have been following a predictable pattern in approving embryonic stem cell research despite countervailing scientific evidence. The reason is that the international community is reading from the same erroneous page when it comes to decisions around research on human embryos - an erroneous definition of the human embryo as fostered by the false science of bioethics...

Bioethics was established as a quasi-ethical framework by order of the US Congress to address research on human subjects. In 1974 Congress passed the National Research Act which mandated that a National Commission be set up which in 1978 issued the Belmont Report. The report identified three ethical principles to be used by government to evaluate research on human subjects: respect for persons, justice, and beneficence, but perverted the definitions of these terms to suit their own ends.

Rather than the traditional Hippocratic understanding of beneficence as doing "good" for the individual patient, the report used a utilitarian definition: doing "good" for society, or, "the greatest good for the greatest number". While "justice" in its classic Aristotelian definition refers to treating people fairly as individuals, the report saw justice as allocating the benefits and burdens of research fairly across the social spectrum. And finally, "respect for persons" became respect only for 'persons' defined as fully conscious, rational adults capable of acting autonomously. The redefined principles, according to Dr. Irving, "bear no relation to the patient-centered Hippocratic ethics that for nearly 2500 years required physicians to treat every human being in their care as worthy of respect no matter now sick or small, weak or disabled."