My Thoughts

2003-11-16T09:42:00.000-06:00

More solar fireworks possible soon
JOSEPH B. VERRENGIA
Associated Press

DENVER - The sun is demanding everyone's attention, three weeks into perhaps the most dramatic and unexpected chain of eruptions ever observed venting from its seething, bubbling surface.

There have been as many as 11 salvos since Oct. 19. And the fireworks could reach a new crescendo by Thanksgiving, the nation's busiest holiday for air travel, just one of the things that can be disrupted.

"There's been nothing quite like this," said Bill Murtagh, a space weather forecaster for the National Oceanic and Space Administration in Boulder, Colo. "Another big blow is not what anyone needs."

NASA scientists compare it to a blizzard in July - in California.

It sounds incredible, but "something like that just happened on the sun," says David Hathaway, a solar physicist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama.

The biggest solar storm to affect Earth in the recent cycle was Oct. 28. It caused little damage, largely because it was forecast, and electric utilities and satellite companies took precautions.

Even so, it caused a blackout in Sweden, damaged two Japanese satellites and upset radio communications and navigation systems for jets and ships. Airlines in the northern latitudes flew lower to protect passengers from extra doses of radiation.

It is a startling reminder of who's really in charge of the solar system. Scientists worry that a new round of eruptions could do more of the same or worse.

Each solar burst hurls into space huge clouds of superheated, charged particle clouds that are 13 times the size of Earth. One explosion on Nov. 4 ranks as the most powerful solar flare to be recorded by orbiting instruments - although it was pointed away from Earth.

"This period will go into the history books as one of the most dramatic," said Paal Brekke, deputy project scientist for SOHO, a joint U.S.-European observatory between Earth and the sun.

What will the sun do next? Astronomers can only watch and wait.

2003-11-16T09:25:00.000-06:00

Dozens of people report fireball cross Colorado's sky

DENVER (AP) - Astronomers are receiving dozens of eyewitness accounts about a bright green fireball that streaked across Colorado's sky.

Astronomer Chris Peterson said the fireball moved across the sky at 7:41 p.m. Thursday, moving east to west.

Peterson, of the Cloudbait Observatory in Guffey, said he is compiling individual eyewitness reports on the fireball on his observatory's Web site, www.cloudbait.com. He had received nearly 70 reports by Friday afternoon.

''Up here in the mountains, a gentleman said he saw it from inside his house, through a window, with all the lights on inside,'' Peterson said.

The Denver Museum of Nature & Science also received calls about the fireball. Jack Murphy, curator of geology at the museum, said he received about 10 calls about it on Friday.

Murphy said the fireball was likely caused by a piece of space rock debris about the size of a basketball. It could have completely burned up in the atmosphere.

Another fireball moved across the sky last Thanksgiving, but was much brighter and illuminated entire mountain ranges, Murphy said. Witnesses reported that fireball lasted seven to eight seconds and was followed by a sonic boom.

The museum maintains 14 video cameras on top of Colorado schools, and scientists are going through the video footage to see if any of them captured Thursday night's fireball.

AP-WS-11-15-03 1035EST

2003-10-11T13:12:00.000-05:00

Date: 2003-10-10

"Belloc Would Not Have Been Surprised at Sept. 11"

Father James Schall on the Essayist's Thoughts on Europe and Islam

WASHINGTON, D.C., OCT. 10, 2003 (Zenit.org).- Fifty years after his death, Hilaire Belloc's views on the role of Christianity in Europe and the underlying mission of Islam still hold much relevance today.

Father James Schall, an expert on the Catholic essayist and historian, shared with ZENIT some of Belloc's thoughts that shed light on the European Union's refusal to acknowledge its Christian roots and the theological outlook of Islam.

Father Schall, author of numerous books, is a professor in the department of government at Georgetown University.

Q: Could you explain something of who Hilaire Belloc was, and the times in which he wrote?

Father Schall: Belloc died in 1953. He was an Englishman, in that his mother was English, but his father was French and his wife was an American. One of his sons was killed in World War I, and a second in World War II.

Belloc had attended Newman's Oratory school in Birmingham. He went to Oxford and was a Member of Parliament for a brief time. He was a man of all sorts -- a sailor, a poet, a historian, a controversialist, a philosopher, a born Catholic.

I think he was the finest essayist in the English language. Someone remarked that in reading his detailed historical and geographical writings, one would think that, to do so, he was born in every country in Europe since he knew them so well.

Q: Belloc once stated that Europe is the faith, and the faith is Europe. What did he mean, and what relevance does that statement have today?

Father Schall: This is one of the most refuted statements in all historiography. There are those who purport to think that Europe came from every background but Christianity. The zeal with which the Holy See is pursuing its insistence that the new European Constitution contain a reference to Christianity seems to suggest Belloc was on track, in spite of the denials.

The fact is that without Christianity, Europe is not Europe. In fact, with the rapid decline of its birthrates, with large-scale Muslim immigration and with a secularized Euro-elite, it is rapidly becoming something else.

What perhaps might have surprised Belloc, though I doubt it, is that many Europeans want to rid Europe of any reference to its Christian origins. What will take its place will be something less than Europe as Belloc knew it, something neither Christian nor human.

Q: How can Belloc's discussion of Islam in his books "The Great Heresies" and "The Crusades" shine new light on our current world affairs?"

Father Schall: The accepted doctrine today is that Islam itself is not a problem. As such, Islam is said to have no relation to world events that result in the need for defense in the West.

There are, however, something called "terrorists" who cause all the problems. Even though they have Muslim names and claim the legitimacy of what they do to be found in their religion, their origins are said to be elsewhere -- where, no one is quite sure. Western ideology forbids it to take Islam's notion of itself seriously.

Belloc understood that Islam has a defined theological outlook and goal: Everyone should be Muslim. Force was useful in this goal. Belloc expected, if it ever acquired power again, that Islam would take up right where it left off after its last great territorial conquests.

He would not have been in the least surprised at Sept. 11. Nor would he be astonished to find out that the Christians in the West are quite unprepared to understand the zeal for religion and conquest that Islam had and has in its faith. Not a few Muslim leaders of today both desire and see possible, on a worldwide scale, the return to aggressive and active proselytism.

Q: How can Belloc clarify what our social sciences may prevent us from understanding, particularly the spiritual forces for good or ill?

Father Schall: Belloc was quite clear that it was spiritual forces that ultimately moved the world. The social sciences never understand such sources and have to rely on a reductionist methodology that invariably excludes such forces as they cannot be measured by their methods.

Belloc was a historian who did not think that history had to happen the way it did. He knows how it did happen. He did not think the English Reformation needed to have happened or to have happened the way it did. History is not "determined."

Probably the great fruit of Belloc's sense of history is the fact that the events that appear on the record of history are filled with human choices and indeed human sins. The effect of this approach is to make us attentive to the spiritual forces that cause men to act or not to act the way they do.

Q: Belloc was famous for popularizing an economic vision known as distributism. Is the distributist solution of well-distributed property a cure to the economic problems of today?

Father Schall: People such as Wendell Berry and Allan Carlson speak in terms of property, work and ownership in a way that Belloc did. Chesterton once remarked that the electric motor was a factor that fostered small enterprise. One suspects that the personal computer has developed this emphasis in a new even more graphic manner.

Perhaps Belloc's most famous book was "The Servile State." He was probably wrong in seeing the corporation, not the state, as the major problem that would reduce the people to a kind of happy servitude wherein they were taken care of in exchange for allowing the state to define all the conditions of their lives.

But he certainly understood that this "all-caring" atmosphere was the main character of the future. He thought, with Dostoyevsky, that men would give up their freedom in exchange for bread, or better in exchange for comfort.

Q: One of Belloc's concerns was to invigorate a Catholic culture that would help overcome the loss of traditions common in a modern industrial society. Are any of his recommendations in this area valid today?

Father Schall: Things of truth do not become valid or invalid because of the time in which they are enunciated. A thing true on Monday, as Chesterton said, does not become untrue on Tuesday.

Belloc's main concern about the Catholic culture was that it remain itself. This system of principle, insight and truth was what alone could invigorate a culture. The real problem is not the "adaptation" of Catholicism to modern culture, but the judgment of modern culture by a Catholicism that remains itself, that remains what was handed down to it to keep present in the world.

Q: Belloc has been criticized for his inclination toward an authoritarian style of politics and for his criticism of some groups of Jews. How can we adapt his writings to avoid some of these tendencies that were a product of the times in which he wrote?

Father Schall: If it is not possible to criticize "some groups of Jews" or any one else for controvertible opinions, it is not possible to have a free society. We can only "adapt his writings to avoid some of these tendencies that were a product of the times in which he wrote" if we assume that truth is pretty much relative to time.

The better approach is to face the issues as issues and try to understand the point Belloc was making. His book on the Jews was an attempt to point out that the Jews should be allowed to be Jews with their own homeland. What would have probably surprised him was the number of Jews who did not seem to want to return to the Jewish homeland. He assumed that the principle of "Europe is the faith" also applied, analogously, to a Jewish nation.

Q: What is Belloc's legacy?

Father Schall: Two of Belloc's most provocative statements are: that the greatest spiritual invention is the 20-minute Mass; and that as we get older, we worry about the human structure of the supernatural Church. In both cases, he was being both amusing and incisive.

That the main concern today is precisely the human side of the supernatural Church seems almost prophetic. If Belloc thought that Islam would rise again, it is probably only because he thought large numbers of Christians would be unfaithful to themselves and that Europeans would reject their heritage.

Nonetheless, the great legacy of Belloc is his essays. He wrote, and wrote well, on just about everything under the sun, everything on land or sea. He was jovial and solemn, funny and philosophical, ribald and pious -- a man of the world and a man of home. Our kind has produced few, if any, like him.

2003-10-11T11:47:00.000-05:00

Rabbi Says "Israel Abortionists kill more children than terrorists"
BROOKLYN, NY, October 9, 2003 (LifeSiteNews.com) - In a recent article, Rabbi Yehuda Levin of Jews for Morality relates quotes on an Israeli pro-life group poster saying, "STOP The Silent Holocaust - 2,000,000 children destroyed by abortion in Israel". Rabbi Levin says he was shocked by the enormity of the numbers and investigated the veracity of the claims. He presents the findings of his investigation and deems the statistics believable.

Rabbi Levin then comments: "Should we be surprised that the sword has been unleashed against our people in the Holy Land? Our continued silence on this issue makes us vulnerable, chas vesholom, to the punishments of hunger, plague, and the sword prophesized in the Zohar Hakodosh. Now that Rosh Hashana (the New Year) is here, it is time for us to do Teshuva (repent) on this horrible crime in G-D's Holy Land. If we truly want to end the sacrifice of Jewish blood of our brothers and sisters in the Holy Land of Israel, we must cry out to the heavens, loudly and clearly, against this shedding of innocent blood."

2003-10-10T23:15:00.000-05:00

Russian scientists say they may have found the remains of an animal that could be behind the yeti legend.

The furry limb, complete with furry padded paw, was found on a Siberian mountainside and is believed to be several thousand years old.

The climber who found it popped it in his bag and took it home for scientists to examine.

After examination the possibility that the limb could have belonged to a beast known as the Abominable Snowman has not been ruled out.

"I turned the limb over and examined the sole of the foot, and I thought it looked unusual," said climber Sergey Sememnov.

"So I decided to bring it back with me," he added.

The area, in the remote Altay region, is well-known for Yeti sightings.

Locals say the limb does belongs to the Yeti - pointing to the fact it has furry soles and probably walked on snow.

But other local scientists are not so sure.

The foot is about 24cms - the same length of an average human foot.

"It looks very human," said Yuriy Malofeyev, vice-president of the Russian association of veterinary anatomists.

"There are many similarities."

2003-09-24T09:56:00.000-05:00

Toronto Cardinal Warns "religion will soon need to be protected from the state."
Other speaker says "Christians who dare to speak out will be thrown to the judges and lawyers instead of the lions"
TORONTO, Sept. 23, 2003 (LifeSiteNews.com)- This time last year at the Toronto Red Mass and Red Mass Dinner for Catholic lawyers, judges and legislators, the featured guest speaker was pro-abortion former Prime Minister Joe Clarke. That choice scandalized many Catholics and caused Cardinal Aloysius Ambrozic to give a strong defence of the unborn in his homily. This year's dinner featured the Honourable Norm Cafik, P.C., former MP and Cabinet Minister under former Prime Minister John Diefenbaker.

After the mass reading on the beheading of John the Baptist, Cardinal Ambrozic, who lived under Communism in Slovenia, gave a homily emphasizing the necessity of Catholics in public life to be willing to suffer and even die for their faith. As a Catholic in public life, said the Cardinal, "you risk your neck for a (moral) absolute. There are things greater than ourselves for which we must be ready to die. If nothing is worth dying for, then I am not truly free."

In an obvious, though oblique reference to the recent passage of Svend Robinson's "sexual orientation" hate crimes bill in the House of Commons, the Cardinal went on to mention the erroneous interpretation of the concept of the separation of Church and state that is often used to silence the voice of faithful Canadian Christians. In this country, he said, the separation of Church and state will soon mean, not that the state needs to be protected from religion, but that "religion will soon need to be protected from the state." "Separation of Church and state," he said, "now means the separation of conscience from politics."

Later, dinner speaker Norm Cafik continued the Cardinal's theme comparing modern Christians in Canada with their spiritual ancestors in the Roman persecutions. Mr Cafik said that the time will shortly come when Christians who dare to speak out will be thrown to the judges and lawyers instead of the lions.

Mentioning the recent same-sex "marriage" and hate crimes legislation changes by name, he pointed out that John the Baptist lost his head over the definition of marriage and that St. Thomas More also lost his head over the definition of marriage. Cafik said that Catholic lawyers were now being compelled by law to accept what these saints would not accept.

2003-08-16T14:48:00.000-05:00

American zoo testing DNA from mystery apes

Scientists in the US hope DNA tests will reveal the origins of large, mysterious apes discovered in the heart of Africa.

Genetics research at Omaha's Henry Doorly Zoo on faecal samples collected from the rare apes should determine if are a new species, a new subspecies or a form of hybrid.

"It is a new, mystery ape and we are doing the DNA fingerprinting to find out more," said zoo director Dr Lee Simmons.

The apes, which stand five to six feet tall and have feet nearly 14 inches long, were first documented by primatologist Shelly Williams of Atlanta in a forest in the northern Democratic Republic of Congo.

They have bodies similar to those of gorillas, but generally the facial characteristics of a chimpanzee. Williams said the animals sleep on the ground at night like gorillas, but eat a fruit-rich diet like chimpanzees.

"I can't speculate yet as to what they are. Their behaviour is so unusual. It is a puzzle. I feel like Dr Dolittle in the land of Oz," said Williams, who has captured some video of the animals but no photographs.

Because of their size and elusiveness, the apes have no predators - not even poachers hunt them, Williams said. With no fear of lions, leopards or hyenas, the large animals hoot at the moon as it rises and sets, which is extremely unusual for apes, she said.

"The people are very afraid of them. They call them the 'lion killers' because they are huge creatures," Williams said.

"If this ends up being a new species of ape, that would be amazing. Even if it's a hybridisation, that would be fascinating," Louis said.

2003-05-30T19:04:00.000-05:00

Date: 2003-05-30

Controversy Swirls Around Mel Gibson's 'Passion'

Denver Archbishop Weighs In on Film About Christ

DENVER, Colorado, MAY 30, 2003 (Zenit.org).- Though Mel Gibson's latest film "The Passion" isn't scheduled to appear in theaters for another eight months, it is already arousing heated debate.

This week Archbishop Charles Chaput devoted his column in the Denver Catholic Register to defending Gibson's movie from those who charge that a cinematic portrayal of Christ's passion and death could stir up flames of anti-Semitism.

"I find it puzzling and disturbing that anyone would feel licensed to attack a film of sincere faith before it has even been released," Archbishop Chaput writes. "When the overtly provocative 'The Last Temptation of Christ' was released 15 years ago, movie critics piously lectured Catholics to be open-minded and tolerant. Surely that advice should apply equally for everyone."

The column follows on the heels of a string of recent attacks on Gibson's film, culminating in an 18-page report of an ad hoc committee of the U.S. bishops' Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs criticizing the script of the movie.

The ad hoc scholar's group that produced the report was assembled by Eugene Fisher of the bishops' conference and Rabbi Eugene Korn of the Anti-Defamation League, and comprised a mix of nine Jewish and Christian academics. One of the signers, Amy-Jill Levine of Vanderbilt University describes herself as "a Yankee Jewish feminist ... with a commitment to exposing and expunging anti-Jewish, sexist and heterosexist theologies."

The group's report, dated May 2, criticized everything from the size of the cross used for the crucifixion scene, to the languages spoken, to poor character development. The document's central complaint, however, is that "a graphic movie presentation of the crucifixion could reawaken the very anti-Semitic attitudes that we have devoted our careers to combating."

The report takes issue with director Gibson's decision to focus on Christ's passion rather than presenting a broader vision of "the ministry of Jesus, of his preaching and teaching about God's reign, his distinctive table companionship, his mediation of God's gracious mercy."

The report furthermore disapproves of the film's treatment of the Gospel accounts of Jesus' passion as historical facts. According to the signers, Gibson disregards exegetical theories that the Evangelists' accounts represent later efforts of the Christian community to "shift responsibility from Pilate onto Jewish figures," and accuses the script of utilizing the four distinct passion narratives "without regard for their apologetic and polemical features."

Yet Gibson has recently received support from the Jewish sector as well.

Writing in the New York Jewish weekly Forward, Orthodox Jewish author David Klinghoffer defended Gibson's efforts and chided his co-religionists for adhering to the historically dubious account of Jesus' death handed down by Jewish officialdom.

Such an account absolves the Jews from complicity in Jesus' death and places the blame on the shoulders of the Romans. "Our loyalty should be to Judaism and to truth," Klinghoffer writes, "not to an officially sanctioned, sanitized version of Judaism or the truth -- which may be neither Jewish nor true."

The ad hoc group report follows on a series of stories that appeared in different news media across North America, criticizing the movie along similar lines.

Boston Globe columnist James Carroll, for example, denounced Gibson's film for its literal reading of the Biblical accounts of Christ's passion. According to Carroll, "Even a faithful repetition of the Gospel stories of the death of Jesus can do damage exactly because those sacred texts themselves carry the virus of Jew hatred."

Such opinions are not shared by other scholars in the field. Jesuit Father William J. Fulco, National Endowment for the Humanities professor of ancient Mediterranean studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, not only read the script, but translated it into Aramaic and Latin.

In a recent Los Angeles Times article, Father Fulco points out that "the Jewish community portrayed in the film consists of people both sympathetic to Jesus and hostile to him, just as the Roman community is portrayed. Indeed, if anyone does not come off well in this film, it is the Roman community and governing establishment. ... I would be aghast at any suggestion that Mel is anti-Semitic."

This is not the first time the bishops' committee for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs has gone out on a limb in its interpretation of scriptural texts.

Last August, the committee published "Reflections on Covenant and Mission," which stated that Jews' witness to the Kingdom "must not be curtailed by seeking the conversion of the Jewish people to Christianity." The document immediately came under heavy fire from Catholics and Protestants alike, as betraying the message of the New Testament.

Cardinal William Keeler, the U.S. bishops' moderator for Catholic-Jewish relations, was quick to point out that the committee's findings did not represent a formal position of the bishops' conference.

Given that no one has yet viewed the film, Archbishop Chaput recommends prudence. "We'll get a chance to love or criticize 'The Passion' soon enough," he writes. "In the meantime, between a decent man and his critics, I'll choose the decent man every time -- until the evidence shows otherwise."

2003-05-30T18:53:00.000-05:00

Iraqi man ends 20 years in hiding

This tiny trapdoor was hardly ever used
After two decades in hiding, an Iraqi man has finally emerged back into the real world - squinting at the unaccustomed light.
Twenty-one years ago, Saddam Hussein placed an execution order on Jawad Amir for supporting an outspoken Shia cleric.

Mr Amir escaped - not into a far-off town or neighbouring country, but into a space sandwiched between two walls in his parents' home.

He said for the whole of his hiding he never left that small, dark space and had only a tiny peephole to view the outside world.

Few possessions

"When I felt the danger I escaped to my parents' house, then I prepared my hiding place to keep away from the people so no one could ever report me to the regime," he explained.

"In this place I prepared everything I needed to survive."

The narrow space contains few possessions - a radio, teeth he lost while in hiding and pictures of his younger self.

Jawad passed the time listening to the radio
He said he listened to the BBC's Arabic Service and read the Koran to pass the time. He drank river water from a small well.

Only his closest family members knew he was there. Even the neighbours in his tiny village of Jobah thought he had disappeared.

But after Saddam Hussein's statue fell in Baghdad, Mr Amir - now 49 - finally felt it safe to leave his hiding place.

His mother, Ramsya Haddi, was elated.

"I feel as if I had just given birth to him again," she said.

Mr Amir said he feels well and is optimistic about the future.

2003-02-26T14:18:00.000-06:00

Catholic healer doesn't mind skeptics

By J. Michael Parker
Express-News Religion Writer

Web Posted : 02/08/2003 12:00 AM

Seeing is believing, and some San Antonians say that is why they return to a Southeast Side Catholic church where they say a retired car salesman and lay parishioner brings healing with his prayers.
Women who had aggressive cancer, breast lumps or pain so great that they needed a wheelchair to get around say they have been healed thanks in part to the work of Domingo Setien, and attendance at his St. Margaret Mary Church service is up to 1,800 people a week.

What's more, Setien has the support of San Antonio's archbishop and a professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center. But that hasn't won over some skeptics because dramatic healings through prayer are difficult to verify.

Setien says that's OK, skepticism doesn't bother him.

"I don't blame them at all. Many people abuse spiritual gifts like healing, claiming they have them when they don't."

A mother-daughter story

Della Tarin and her daughter, Elvia Maxwell, said they were skeptical until they were healed after Setien prayed over them in 1985.

Maxwell said she had constant pain for two years and could not walk normally after her uterus was scarred during the removal of a contraceptive.

She said that despite medication, the intense pain in her pelvis was "like being in labor constantly — unbearable." To move the few feet from her bed to the bathroom, she had to inch forward, holding onto furniture.

"I was a week away from having a hysterectomy," she said.

She and her mother went to Setien's service at the urging of friends.

When Setien prayed over her, she said she felt a strange, warm sensation in the affected part of her body and the pain was gone. Maxwell rose from her wheelchair, walked about seven steps without help, then walked back.

Soon after her daughter's healing, Tarin attended Setien's prayer meeting after learning from a doctor that she had a small tumor on her left breast, she said.

"Mr. Setien said, 'There's a lady who's just learned she has a tumor on her breast. Raise your hand.'"

Setien said he told her, "You don't have it anymore. Don't worry about it."

When she returned to the doctor, she said, the lump was gone.

The ministry and the man

Setien, 73, has conducted his prayer meetings since 1973. He's never sought publicity, but TV coverage of his ministry in December swelled the weekly attendance from about 50 to as many as 1,800, often filling the church sanctuary twice in one evening.

Archbishop Patrick Flores said he has referred people to Setien for nearly 30 years.

"Many people tell me they've been healed after Setien prayed over them," Flores said. "He rightly says it's not him doing the healing, but God healing through him."

To maintain order, Joyce Swan, Setien's assistant, instructs the audience to remain seated and wait for Setien to come to them. No one will be left out, she says.

She admonishes them to follow doctors' advice and maintain a positive attitude toward medical treatment — but not to let their illness dominate them.

"Our message is that there's always hope; it's not to give up hope in medicine," Swan said.

The informally dressed Setien says someone in the audience has a specific kind of illness or disease, then says, "Don't worry about it; it's gone," or "Your life is going to change."

He estimates that a majority of the people he prays over are healed, but says it's impossible to say how many.

The quiet, easy-going Setien lives in a modest South Side home. He doesn't ask for money during the service, but that doesn't quiet the skeptics.

The skeptics

An oncologist who treated Swan said that although Swan had aggressive breast cancer, she did well with treatment — a fact Swan admits.

"That's what we hope for," said Dr. Helen Goldberg. "Her spiritual strength has helped her, but she got very good medical treatment and responded well with the treatment. It's not a miracle."

She's not alone in saying she is skeptical about miracles at St. Margaret Mary. Praying is one thing, but questionable tactics of faith-healers like Oral Roberts, Benny Hinn and Kathrynn Kuhlmann have made skeptics of Catholics and Protestants alike when it comes to healing. Some believe that spiritual healing ended with the era of Jesus' apostles.

"I believe God can heal people, but I believe he does it himself," said Northside Church of Christ minister David Allen. "I'm skeptical that God has gifted certain (modern) individuals to be channels for his power."

He cited a passage in Acts 8 in which Philip could work miracles only through power given him directly by the apostles.

The Catholic Church doesn't teach that, said Father George Montague, a St. Mary's University theology professor who offers healing Masses. But many Catholics either doubt spiritual healing is something to be sought or think the gift is given only to a few holy people.

God doesn't heal everyone, he said. God rebuffed the apostle Paul's prayer to remove a thorn from his flesh. But Montague said healing is sometimes given to encourage belief in the power and possibility of Jesus' Resurrection.

Theology aside, Setien says he understands Goldberg's skepticism.

"If someone had an incurable disease and then suddenly doesn't have it anymore, a doctor may not have an explanation, but he's not going to say it's a miracle. He'd look ridiculous," he said.

"The important thing is, (Swan has) been healed."

Sense of hope

Neither Tarin nor Maxwell could find a doctor to verify that they had a medically unexplainable healing, but that's not the point for them or other attendees. They believe their prayers have been answered, and they feel more at peace and closer to God.

Their attitude is very common, said Meredith McGuire, professor of sociology and anthropology at Trinity University. She said many people seek a wide range of healing sources simultaneously — including traditional medicine, prayer, psychics and curanderos (healers).

"If a patient gets a new sense of hope, that could have a physical effect," she said.

Dr. Donald Dudley, professor of obstetrics at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, said that in 20 years of obstetrical practice he has seen many dramatic recoveries that had no apparent medical explanation.

"I'm often struck by the incredible healing power of the human body," he said.

Emotional outlook can directly affect overall health, he said.

"If someone like (Setien) can help patients believe in themselves and give them confidence in their overall health, a reasonable number of people are going to benefit," he said.

Paul Parks, director of the Ecumenical Center for Religion and Health, said that for a long time, physicians speaking of healing in the context of faith often were considered scientifically suspect.

"But now, well-respected physicians are looking at data that point to the positive role of faith in the healing process. They know faith is beneficial, and now they're trying to understand how," he said.

Tarin said she still attends Setien's services because she knows how faith is beneficial.

"I'm grateful to God for my whole life," she said. "He gave me more than I deserve."

2003-02-18T22:49:00.000-06:00

Feb. 17 — As Presidents' Day of 2003 arrives, many in the United States are either pleased or upset that President Bush continues to lean heavily on religious symbolism in speaking about the anti-terror war and many other matters. But if George Washington or Abraham Lincoln were alive today — or Thomas Jefferson, for that matter — their spiritual beliefs would be far more controversial than Bush's, and not just because times change.
‘The Hand of Providence’

What did these great former presidents believe? Let's start with the first president.

When Washington ran for president, a few opponents tried to sully him as irreligious because he rarely attended services — though he was a vestryman in an Episcopal church in Alexandria, Va.

Supporters answered that the Alexandria church was a two-hour horse ride each way from the general's beloved Mount Vernon, and therefore Washington usually held private vespers at home.

That Washington was a believer can be found in statements such as this, from a 1778 letter about the revolution: "The Hand of providence has been so conspicuous in all this, that he must be worse than an infidel that lacks faith."

Imagine the reaction if any contemporary president declared that anyone who lacks faith is "worse than an infidel," especially since as used by Washington, infidel meant Muslim.

Convinced "the Hand of providence" was guiding the establishment of the United States, Washington joined many of the founders in believing God was forming the new country partly so that people could realize a genuine, freely chosen worship of Jesus, impossible in the entrenched denominational wars of Europe.

To Washington, like many of the founders, civilization and Christianity were the same; it was just that in the Old World, the faith had become corrupted by politics. Without "our blessed religion," Washington said in his farewell address, "we can never hope to be a happy nation."

When Washington negotiated with Indians regarding bringing their children into school systems — one of his pet causes — he did so partly owing to his belief that Christianity was essential to full humanity.

"You do well to wish to learn our arts and our ways of life and above all, the religion of Jesus Christ," Washington once told a gathering of Delaware elders. "These will make you a greater and happier people."

Imagine an American president today who advised minority group members that they must embrace Christ to become "greater and happier."

Deism

Yet though Washington's assumption of America as a Christian nation would seem right-wing by today's standard, much of his theology would seem left-wing. Though historians dispute the details, Washington was probably a "deist" — a believer that nature, not revelation or church doctrine, was the proof of God.

Deism was the intellectual theology of Washington's day, best expressed in Thomas Paine's 1794 book, The Age of Reason, which argued that clerics were spewing mumbo-jumbo, and no one can be sure if the Bible is historically accurate, but we can be absolutely certain nature is so grand and intricate it must be the work of a Creator.

A favorite volume of many founders, The Age of Reason was seen by the Anglican, Catholic, Congregational and Episcopal hierarchies of the day as a direct attack, since the book asserted that the rational person could ignore organized religion and come to his or her own conclusions about God. It would be as if, today, an American president were to declare that priests, rabbis, and ministers were mainly bureaucrats, scripture was a muddle, and each individual should arrive at his or her own spiritual beliefs through private meditation.

This is more or less what George Washington thought, and a reason he preferred vespers in rustic Mount Vernon to that Alexandria pew.

Washington and the Freemasons

And what of Washington's membership in the Masons? Today, Freemasonry is a fraternal organization that mainly raises money for charity, but then it had a hushed, secretive connotation. The goofy, internal lingo of Masonic temples, such as "the Supreme Councils of the Scottish Rite" or the "Grand Encampment of Knights Templar," was whispered about as evidence of conspiracy.

Masonry, which originated in Anglican England, was during Washington's time often anti-Catholic (In the 19th century, Masonry sometimes was anti-Semitic, which would not stop the Nazis of the 1930s from denouncing many German Jews as secret servants of the Freemasons).

The Masons are not a religion — their only spiritual requirement is that members accept the existence of a supreme being — but at various points in history have been viewed as attempting to usurp or circumvent established faiths.

Even today, people don't know what to make of Washington's Masonic ties. The largest privately built monument in the nation's Capitol area — the George Washington Masonic National Memorial in Alexandria, a huge pseudo-Egyptian spire that dominates the skyline for airplanes approaching Reagan National Airport — is routinely absent from tourist agendas, as if it were something about the father of our country better left unmentioned.

It's fun to consider the delightful negative ads a modern political consultant might be able to generate off candidate Washington's Masonic ties. Secret society! Clandestine rites! What really goes on in that Supreme Council?

Minister Mocking

Now to Lincoln. When he first ran for Congress in 1840, Lincoln was derided by opponents for not belonging to a church. Indeed, Abe was not a member of any church, and was sufficiently skeptical of organized religion that on his drinking nights, he entertained friends by doing a stand-up parody routine about a pompous, hypercritical minister.

In 1858, Lincoln began using scripture language in public speaking — especially his popular "House Divided" speech, which extensively quoted Matthew. Northern abolitionists so embraced the "House Divided" speech that they began calling Lincoln the "new John the Baptist," playing on the fact that both shared an eccentric appearance and intense speaking style.

But being called the new John the Baptist did not seem to bring Lincoln to faith. Even after his election as president in 1860, he told friends he remained an agnostic, quoting scripture mainly because it was so powerful. His initial view of the Civil War was not religious, either. Though many northern churches from the outset called the war God's vengeance against slavery, Lincoln would tell Horace Greeley early on, "My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union," not abolish slavery.

All this changed in winter of 1862, when Lincoln's adored little son Willie died of typhoid fever in the White House, father weeping uncontrollably in the next room. Mary Lincoln was driven to mysticism by the loss; soon she would be consulting mediums, trying to communicate with Willie on the other side.

Lincoln turned to the Rev. Phineas Gurley of New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, located a few blocks from the White House. Gurley and the president began going on long walks.

During one of the walks, Lincoln converted to Christianity, accepting Jesus as his personal savior. Though he never formally joined any denomination, Lincoln started attending Gurley's church twice a week and studying scripture avidly.

Bible’s ‘Reason and … Faith’

When Joshua Speed, the Springfield store proprietor who was Lincoln's best friend during his carefree days, expressed surprise in 1864 to encounter Abe reading the Bible, Lincoln counseled him somberly, "Take all that you can of this book upon reason and the balance on faith, and you will live and die a happier man."

While this was happening, the course of the Civil War turned horrific. Lincoln was stunned by the bloodshed at Antietam in September 1862, where twice as many men died on a single day as had died in the entire War of 1812. Worse, Antietam was inconclusive, ensuring the carnage would go on.

Lincoln began to adopt the radical religious view that the conflict was not meant to end quickly because the Civil War was God's retribution against the United States for holding slaves. That is, God actually wanted huge numbers of Americans to die, paying for the nation's sins.

Imagine President Bush saying that he believed the divine wanted Americans to die in terrorism attacks as retribution for times when Americans deliberately killed the innocent, such as the bombing of Dresden. Yet Lincoln said as much: "In the present Civil War it is quite possible that God's purpose is something different from the purpose of either party. God wills the contest and wills that it shall not end yet."

In 1863, Lincoln declared a National Fast Day, saying, "We know that, by divine law, nations like individuals are subjected to punishments and chastisement in this world." The war, he went on, was "a punishment inflicted upon us for our presumptuous sins."

Lincoln's increasingly fatalistic view was summed in his second inaugural address, in words that now line the Lincoln Memorial in Washington: that God wills the Civil War to continue "until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid with another drawn with the sword."

As his views became more religious, increasingly Lincoln focused on the centrality of ending slavery, which today is seen as a civil rights issue but then was seen by most abolitionists first as a spiritual issue, because slave-holding was an abomination before God.

The mainly faith-affiliated abolition movement rallied to Lincoln intensively in the 1864 election, which many initially believed Lincoln would lose to Democratic candidate George McClellan, who opposed the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln's reelection was based on nearly unanimous religious support. As Lincoln biographer David Donald has written, "The support the President received [in 1864] from religious groups was overwhelming. There probably never was an election in all our history into which the religion element entered so largely, and nearly all on one side."

When Lincoln was assassinated on Good Friday, many ministers preached sermons comparing him to Jesus, and many newspaper editorials said the same. Surely, he was the only American president ever spoken of in such terms.

Bible Cutting and Pasting

And since the topic is Presidents' Day, why not throw in Jefferson? He also was a deist, his famous declaration, "We hold these truths to be self-evident," meaning that the principles of freedom could be proclaimed from nature, not from either human or divine law. And though Jefferson revered Jesus, saying Christ's teachings were "the sublimest system of morality that has ever been taught," he rejected the miracle accounts of the gospels.

Jefferson wrote a short book, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, that anticipated modern revisionism by presenting Christ as a beautiful mortal sage about whom supernatural talk was invented mythology. The normally daring Virginian declined to publish this work during his lifetime, showing it to friends but leaving instructions that the volume not be printed until after his death.

Suffice it to say, an American president today might not venture to write a book rejecting the divinity of Jesus.

In fact, Jefferson did most of his work on The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth (which remains in press under the title The Jefferson Bible) while sitting in the old White House. Late into the night, he sat pouring over the gospels with a razor and glue pot, physically splicing out miracle references and pasting together a non-supernatural account of Christ.

If, today, a president sat up late at night cutting passages out of the Bible, the right would go ballistic, claiming sacrilege, while the left would be disgusted that a president would take religion so seriously as to be tormented by a thirst to find a version of faith he could believe.

Compared with Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln, Bush's religious beliefs seem quite conventional.

2003-02-18T22:38:00.000-06:00

NEW YORK (Reuters) - When last we saw Maria von Trapp and her adopted family of angel-voiced children, they were fleeing across the Alps from Austria, pursued by Nazis to the strains of "Edelweiss."

"So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Good-bye" perhaps, but not quite the end of the story.

Because now, some 40 years after the musical and the movie "The Sound of Music," the hills are alive once again with a new generation of von Trapps making sugar-sweet music.

They are the great-grandchildren of Capt. Georg von Trapp, the retired naval officer played in the movie by Christopher Plummer who falls for the impetuous ex-nun Maria, one of Julie Andrews' most beloved roles.

Surely even the most lonely goatherd in the world has seen "The Sound of Music" and the von Trapp children -- Liesl, Louisa, Marta, Friedrich, Brigitta, Gretl and Kurt -- who grow to love the free-spirited Fraulein Maria after first torturing her when she becomes their governess.

Now meet the new Von Trapp Children singing group -- Melanie, Sofia, Amanda and Justin -- born and raised not in the Austrian Alps, but in equally rugged Montana.

They have just released a CD featuring a couple of songs from the musical -- "Edelweiss" and "Lonely Goatherd" -- along with such classics as "Danny Boy" and "Amazing Grace." Close your eyes and it's like hearing the darlings from the movie all over again.

There has been such a positive response from their appearances with New Age pianist George Winston, folk royalty Peter, Paul and Mary and at New York's "Ground Zero" site, that they are working on Volume 2 and an album of Christmas music.

"HOW DO YOU SOLVE A PROBLEM LIKE MARIA?"

After the von Trapps came to America before the war, the original kids sang together for 27 years, touring the United States. But despite the musical heritage of their grandfather Werner (Kurt in the movie), the new kids' own parents are not in the least musical.

Father Stefan operates a stone masonry business and mom Annie is busy organizing the lives of the four children she schools at home.

"The kids have always been singing. They used to sing along with Barney (the dinosaur) on TV and that may have had a lot to do with it," Annie von Trapp told Reuters in a recent interview.

Although they sang in churches, they didn't really take it too seriously until last year when their grandfather was unable to visit them in Montana.

"Opa (grandfather Werner) had a stroke and couldn't come to visit so I said to the kids 'Why not put some songs on a CD and send them to him?'," Annie said.

They recorded some favorites at the University of Montana and it turned into a major project.

"Annie and I are not musically inclined," said Stefan during a recent family trip to New York where they appeared on "Good Morning America." "But I have had a rebirth since."

Stefan recalled listening to his father and his aunts and uncles singing during those long New England winters at the Trapp Family Lodge in Stowe, Vermont, which reminded Maria and the baron so much of their homeland .

Of the original seven children, three are still alive -- Werner, along with older sisters Agathe (Liesl in the film), who is 90 this year, and Maria (Gretl). The original Maria von Trapp, who will live forever as Julie Andrews swirling around on an Alpine pasture above Salzburg, died in 1987 at age 82.

"Dad listened to that CD while recuperating. I blame him for all this," said Stefan.

"BROWN PAPER PACKAGES TIED UP WITH STRING"

Their parents would be quite happy if the kids wanted to go on to careers in music. "But the neat thing is that they are really getting an understanding of their heritage," said Annie.

Not quite "Sixteen going on Seventeen," Sofia is the oldest, at 14. "I have seen 'The Sound of Music' so many times and I don't know anyone who doesn't like it. I never met (great-grandmother) Maria, but I heard she was always laughing," she said.

Sofia has been studying German, and Great-Aunt Agatha taught the kids to sing 'Silent Night' in German for the planned Christmas album. But Sofia is not sure if she wants to pursue a singing career. "I'm really interested in genetics," she said.

For Melanie, 12, the movie is clearly one of her favorite things. "It's really neat to think it's about my family."

On one of the planned albums, she and Sofia sing a duet of "Cockles and Mussels." Melanie also plays guitar, and although she would like to be a singer, she is more interested in being a writer or a poet when she grows up.

Next comes Amanda, who is 11, and is quite adamant she wants to be a police officer. She and little brother Justin will sing "God Bless America" on the next CD.

Last but not least, 8-year-old Justin likes singing enough now but has his eyes set on being a pilot or a sailor. And his favorite song from the movie is not "My Favorite Things," but "Do-Re-Mi."

2003-02-11T22:20:00.000-06:00

Scientists develop darkest substance on earth
British scientists have invented the darkest material on Earth. The super-black coating was developed by researchers at the National Physical Laboratory in London. It could revolutionise optical instruments because it reflects 10 to 20 times less light than the black paint currently used to reduce unwanted reflections. The key to the nickel and phosphorous coating's blackness is that its surface is pitted with microscopic craters. "Super-black" is especially effective at absorbing light which hits it at an angle. With the light source at right angles, the coating reflects less than 0.35%. Black paint reflects about 2.5% - seven times more. One of the early applications might be on star-trackers, navigational aids which help spacecraft stay on course by fixing on pinpricks of light in the heavens. The material could also be used in works of art. NPL says several artists have shown an interest. Nigel Fox, who heads the optics group at NPL, said: "When you look at the black, it is an incredibly beautiful surface. It's like black velvet."

2003-02-11T22:18:00.000-06:00

Hungry 'Hitchcock' Ravens Kill 19 Sheep
Mon Feb 10,10:37 AM ET Add Oddly Enough - Reuters to My Yahoo!
BERLIN (Reuters) - A flock of hungry ravens killed 19 sheep grazing on snow-covered fields in southern Germany, raising the uneasy feeling that the killer birds of Alfred Hitchcock's famous thriller "The Birds" have come alive.
"There's a lot of snow in the area. The birds are hungry so they attack my sheep," shepherd Juergen Fritz said.
"I have seen the Hitchcock film. But I'm experiencing it 'live'," he said, referring to the 1963 classic, in which aggressive birds tyrannize a village in the United States.
Fritz said he was not able to protect his 500 sheep against attacks all the time. But even when he was with his flock, he was powerless when the ravens attacked.
"The worst thing is that I can't do anything about it. You're not allowed to shoot the ravens because they are protected animals," the 43-year old said.
Dietmar Ernst, a police spokesman in Loerrach, southwestern Germany, said he thought about 50 to 60 ravens living near a rubbish site had carried out the attacks on Fritz's sheep.
"It's a full-blown attack on the sheep. They use their beaks, their feet. They pick out the animals' eyes," he said. He said such attacks were common when a large number of birds gathered in one area where they could not easily find food.
"As soon as one starts the attack, the others all follow," he said. "But they're especially aggressive this year," he said.
Fritz said he had experienced attacks by ravens before in his 30 years as a traveling shepherd, but never had he lost so many animals in the course of a fortnight.
"I'm going to leave this area," he said, adding he had already lost about $2,000 due to the killings.

2003-01-22T19:20:00.000-06:00

(AP) Paleontologists have discovered the remains of what they believe is a four-winged creature that glided from ancient trees above its dinosaur cousins long before two wings took over to power flight.

The small animal called "Microraptor gui" - in honor of Chinese paleontologist Gu Zhiwei - was about 2½ feet long and had feathers covering its legs that were similar to the feathers in its wings. The fossils were dated to 128 million years ago.

Other researchers hailed the discovery, but said the fossils don't necessarily mean all winged creatures share Microraptor gui as a common ancestor.

"It's a phenomenal find," said Luis Chiappe, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Chiappe did not participate in the dig, but he has visited the fossil site in the Chinese province of Liaoning, northeast of Beijing. Liaoning has yielded several important specimens in recent years.

"We don't have anything that resembles this in the whole dinosaur and bird spectrum," Chiappe said.

Scientists say the fossils revive a debate between two theories of how dinosaurs might have evolved into birds. One theory holds that some of these apparent bird ancestors learned to flap their wings to power flight while they were gliding.

The other theory suggests they learned to fly by increasing their running speed with their wings and taking off from the ground.

Details of the fossils appear in the current issue of the journal Nature.

Paleontologist Xing Xu of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences described six fossils with leg feathers arranged in a pattern similar to wing feathers in modern birds.

"They are long and some have asymmetrical veins like flight feathers," Xu said.

The feathered legs amount to rear wings, Xu said. He speculated they could have been an intermediate stage before the arrival of the birdlike Archaeopteryx, whose flight was powered by two real wings.

Or, the feathered legs could have been an evolutionary dead-end, researchers said.

The legs probably didn't flap like wings. They were oriented like the legs of typical dinosaurs and modern birds, meaning they fit vertically into hip sockets. It would have been extremely difficult to rotate the legs 90 degrees to gain lift for the creature and may have been aerodynamically unstable unless it was just used for gliding, Chiappe said.

"And if that were case it would be a total oddity - the weirdest creature in the world of dinosaurs and birds," Chiappe said.

Other scientists said the fossils add diversity to the story of flight, even if they don't immediately provide answers.

Ken Dial, head of a biological flight laboratory at the University of Montana, said there is room for both gliding and flapping dinosaurs in evolutionary history.

"Gliding represents a splendid example of convergent evolution," Dial said. "We should not be surprised to unearth gliding dinosaurs as we have numerous living-day examples of gliders in nearly all the vertebrate groups - reptiles, mammals, birds and even parachuting amphibians."

Last week, Dial reported in the journal Science the way young birds such as turkeys and quail use their wings suggests their ancestors eventually learned to fly by running and flapping.

Paul Sereno, a University of Chicago paleontologist, said the best way to determine whether Microraptor gui was an intermediate stage in bird evolution or a dead end is to find other dinosaur fossils with feathered legs.

Sereno called the Xu study a "landmark paper" but added: "Whether this represents an intermediate form that all birds passed through is a question that's going to be hotly debated."

By William McCall

2003-01-15T23:20:00.000-06:00

Date: 2003-01-14

Turkey Investigating Capuchin for Baptizing a Muslim

Case Worries a Fellow Religious

ANKARA, Turkey, JAN. 14, 2003 (ZENIT.org-Avvenire).- Turkish authorities are investigating a Capuchin friar for baptizing a 26-year-old Muslim who asked for the sacrament but later turned on the priest.

Italian Father Roberto Ferrari, 70, whose passport has been seized, has been a missionary in Turkey for the past 45 years. The Capuchins have several houses and missions in the country.

Another Capuchin, Father Mario Cappucci, who is familiar with Turkey, said that "Father Roberto baptized a 26-year-old youth in the mission of Iskenderun, on the border with Syria, who had asked insistently that the sacrament be administered to him, after appropriate preparation."

"However, the youth then denounced the missionary to the Turkish authorities, who removed his passport and put him under investigation," said Father Cappucci, 67.

Father Cappucci is the chaplain at Santa Maria Nuova hospital in Reggio, Italy, and a native of Quara, a town of the region, where Father Ferrari was born.

Father Cappucci was surprised at the news. "I have been in that country some 30 to 40 times, both to lead pilgrimages as well as to visit our houses," he said. "I have good relations with the guides and with different authorities. I never expected an incident like this."

"The situation in Turkey is certainly complex," he added. "However, this serious event is worrying."

In fact, although the constitutional law guarantees religious freedom, there are strong social pressures against conversion from Islam -- the main religion in Turkey -- to Christianity. In some regions, local authorities back the persecution of Christian communities, especially the Chaldeans.

"Why does Turkey call itself a secular state and put a friar under investigation who baptized a converted Muslim?" Father Cappucci asked. "Why can't religious wear their habit?"

"A lay state is not concerned with these matters," he added. "And this is happening in countries that would like to form part of Europe, where human rights are the foundation of the secular state."

He further stressed: "Father Roberto did not baptized an unconscious child, but an adult who consented to it."

2003-01-13T00:28:00.000-06:00

Blood-Sucking Politicans?

BLANTYRE, Malawi — An angry mob attacked a senior ruling party official who local residents believed was harboring vampires.

Chiwaya, a senior official with the United Democratic Front party, was hospitalized Thursday after being badly beaten by the mob.

Hundreds of people from a township south of Blantyre stoned the house of Eric Chiwaya Wednesday night. They began stoning him inside his vehicle when he tried to escape by car.

Police had to fire shots to disperse the crowd. Three people were arrested for inciting violence in the incident, police said.

Horrifying stories of vampires attacking villagers in the dead of night and sucking their blood began circulating last month in Malawi.

Malawi's government has been campaigning to quell the vampire rumors, saying opposition elements were using the rumors to discredit the ruling party.

Rumors had spread through the township that Chiwaya was harboring vampires and had approached community leaders asking them to let them into the area.

Frightened villagers have beaten to death a man suspected of being a vampire, attacked and nearly lynched three visiting priests and destroyed an aid group's encampment they feared was the vampires' headquarters.

President Bakili Muluzi called the rumors unfounded and malicious, and accused unnamed opposition groups of trying to undermine him by saying his government gave aid agencies human blood in exchange for food aid.

2003-01-11T11:31:00.000-06:00

Date: 2003-01-08

Pope Thanks "Little Missionaries" for Spreading Gospel

World Day of Missionary Childhood Celebrated on Epiphany

VATICAN CITY, JAN. 8, 2003 (Zenit.org).- John Paul II recalled the 160th anniversary of the Pontifical Missionary Society of Holy Childhood, a group that relies on youngsters for support to spread the Gospel.

The society proposes to children prayer and the offering of "gestures of concrete solidarity, even at the cost of personal sacrifice, for the good of their contemporaries who still do not know Jesus and live in difficult situations," the Pope said, following the recitation of the midday Angelus in St. Peter's Square on Monday.

"I thank all these 'little missionaries' for their contribution to the spread of the Gospel and I hope that they will know how to witness to it every day with their life," he added.

The purpose of the World Day of Missionary Childhood, observed on Jan. 6, feast of the Epiphany, is to awaken in children a missionary consciousness, as well as material and spiritual communion with other children throughout the world, especially those of the poorest regions.

"Children must save children" was the invitation with which Bishop Charles de Forbin Janson of Nancy began the Missionary Society of Holy Childhood in Paris on May 9, 1843. The group is known today as the Pontifical Missionary Society of Holy Childhood, part of the Vatican Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples.

Last year the group distributed more than $13 million in aid for 2,667 projects worldwide: 1,181 in Africa, 1,247 in Asia, 188 in the Americas, 30 in Oceania, and 21 in Europe.

By contrast, the children of the missionary society funded 300 projects in 1983.

2003-01-09T08:48:00.000-06:00

Water way to run a network
By Rene Millman [02-01-2003]
Artist makes waves with H20/IP

Streaming media has taken on a literal meaning, after an artist worked out a way of sending images between computers using water.
Jonah Brucker-Cohen explained that the core technology behind the idea is a new internet protocol he has developed called H2O/IP.

"H20/IP functions in a similar way as TCP/IP but focuses on the inherent viscous properties of water that are not present in traditional packet networks," he said.

"These properties include fluidity, heat index, tri-state properties, density difference depending on state, and surface tension."

Brucker-Cohen set up two computers, one above the other. A webcam attached to the higher PC takes a picture, which is translated into a 16 by 16 pixel greyscale image.

The computer then analyses the colour of each pixel and 'prints' out pulses to the electronically controlled water valve depending on the colour of that pixel.

The water drops into a funnel connected to a second computer which, through an infrared switch and a micro-controller, decodes the water and uses a video projector to display the reconstructed image.

2003-01-01T09:17:00.000-06:00

Raelians, Catholics and the Clone Age
2002-12-29 3:45 PM PST

By Deacon Keith Fournier
(c) Third Millennium, LLC

________________________________________________

"When men cease to believe in God," said G. K. Chesterton, "they do not believe in nothing; they believe in anything!"

_________________________________________________

On the day after Christmas, the world watched in shock as “Brigitte” an alleged “Bishop” of the “Raelian” movement, announced that “Clonaid”, a for profit outreach of the same movement, had “successfully” cloned a baby girl whom they had named “Eve”.

I was reminded of a phrase used by an editorialist I read years ago when he warned of a new “Clone Age.”

Amidst the cries of “hoax” and the justified international uproar against the “ethics’ of this macabre claim (and even more importantly, the disastrous path of “cloning” human beings at all) there is a bigger struggle unfolding. It is a struggle for the heart, mind and soul of the human race at the threshold of the Third Millennium. At risk is nothing less than the future of civilization

In years past I probably would have thought that this (up until recently) obscure, esoteric sect was only one of many examples of the timeless truth of the maxim of the great Catholic writer, G.K. Chesterton, "When men cease to believe in God, they do not believe in nothing; they believe in anything!"

However, these last few days have opened my eyes. I have read much about these people, their philosophy, their claims, their plans and their founder. The ideas behind their actions may reveal the next great struggle in the continuing battle for the future and the soul of human civilization, especially if we do not act quickly to stop this insane movement toward a new “Clone Age”.

This “Bishop” ( a woman dressed in skin tight black clothing) is a follower of Claude Vorhilon (a.k.a.“Rael”). This new Pied Piper of the U.F.O. jet set claims to have been given both a revelation and a new name by a visiting space alien named “Yahweh Elohim” (two of the names given to God in the Hebrew Scriptures) on a volcano in 1973. In that encounter he also claims to have been given a mission to prepare this manufactured race for the return of their masters in 2035.

In this “new” teaching, the manufacturers of the human race were not “gods” at all but simply a master race of aliens. The technology they used is now being revealed and by harnessing it we can become like them. We can create our own future and “make” new humans.

The preparation that “Rael” preaches, that must precede their return, is to encourage his followers to live a life of complete and total self centeredness and self worship and bring others to do the same. “Liberation” in this new “way” is simply licentiousness dressed up in a science fiction soup of bizarre esoteric pseudo-spiritual mumbo jumbo. They claim that they can “free” the inhabitants of this planet from their restrictive morals and world view by bringing them into this new “way”.

The group has an open hatred for Catholics in particular. They regularly disturb Catholic schools in Canada by handing out condoms to children in order that they may begin to adopt the way of his new Raelian definition of freedom. I think their hatred of Catholic Christianity is actually quite understandable. If, as I do, one believes that Catholic faith is the fullness of Christianity and that what the Catholic Church teaches about human sexuality, dignity and destiny are true, it is the opposite of what they teach. No wonder it is therefore their great enemy!

The seed of the profane dogma proclaimed by the words and deeds of the Raelians is set forth in its seed form in Rael’s book entitled “Extra Terrestrials Took me To Their Planet.” It extols a form of sexual “liberation” including teaching children to engage in sexual activity as early as possible “purely for pleasure without any commitment to the sexual partner.”

Additionally, the “liberation” message includes directions to women to “have sex with one or more individuals of either sex as long as the individuals agree, since contraception has freed women from fear of pregnancy…” Thus the group promotes regular orgies and has completely separated sexual activity from marriage, love, reproduction or any connection whatsoever and simply made it one more “thing” that one does to gratify self.

In the final act of desecration, this bizarre new way of “living” promises a form of eternal “life”. This is to be gained by adherents following the instruction that all “Raelians” are to “arrange on their death, (that) one square centimeter of the bone from their forehead, 33 millimeters above the middle axis between their pupils , is sent to the (Raelian) embassy for re-creation purposes”

You see, they have a new method of “creation” of the future enlightened “human” race, cloning-which is the scientific “manufacture” of new beings with no real mother or father, no family. In their new account of the beginnings of our race, they maintain that were manufactured by a race of aliens - not created out of love by a loving God.

The continuation of creation does not come about through the mutual gift of self, a free expression and exchange of committed love between a married man and a woman who give themselves to the other, always open to life, as is the claim of the Jewish and Christian Revelation. Rather, both the propagation and the perpetuation of this race are actually all about chemical manipulation and manufacture. Humans can be re-made by genetic manipulation. In a sense, in a profane reverse of the Christian creed, they claim that we are made and not begotten.

Conjugal love therefore has no real meaning to these folks, it is outdated and restrictive. They are about only unrestricted copulation - no, actually just unrestricted libertine sexual license and the degradation of another person who becomes an object to be used in a vain attempt at sexual self satisfaction.

It is no accident that their first claimed “clone” of the new “master race” is named “Eve.” It is a part of their plan. She was the first to be made by their technology. Apparently from her a “new world” and “new race” will be manufactured.

It is easy to see how cloning is such a “fit” in the Raelian worldview, involving as it does the making of a replica of the mother by taking DNA from one cell, implanting it in egg that has been emptied out and making a replica with no need for sperm from a father at all. The family is no longer necessary.

Allegedly, after all, this kind of “manufacture” is how it all began. The alien who revealed himself to the founder of the group, who is their new “Messiah” of sorts, claimed to have made all of us through genetic manipulation of D.N.A. molecules.

Now, admittedly, this is the stuff of a bad science fiction novel, right? Well, let’s be careful not to dismiss the underlying concepts in our rush to write off the kookiness of their claims.

When one examines some of the underlying philosophical tenets of their teachings and their lifestyles, you must ask some questions. Are their teachings and practices really all that different than what has masqueraded as “freedom” in many circles for the last fifty years?

Oh, I know, Raelianism has space aliens, kooky “bishops” and strange characters out of a bad Star Trek episode. However, as it relates to their view of the human person, human sexual activity and “liberation, is it not eerily familiar?

In a culture that has turned persons into objects, separated sexual acts from conjugal love and sought to “liberate” itself from both nature and the God who created it , isn’t it actually just one more, albeit more bizarre, sad expression of the “culture of death” and the utilitarian narcissism of the age?

Is it not one more promised “enlightenment” that, if left unchallenged and unchecked, will lead the gullible to empty despair? However, the only difference is that the technology that can be used by its proponents can and will open the proverbial “Pandora’s box” if we do not act quickly. What they claim will lead to the “enlightenment” of the human race, could lead to the end of civilization and civility.

Blaise Pascal was one of the “fathers”of what has been called the modern “enlightenment”. Born in 1623, he was a French philosopher, mathematician and chemist. He was followed in birth by another mathematician and Frenchman, Rene DesCartes who also championed a new ‘way”, called the “scientific method”.

Descartes is known for the oft quoted (and misquoted) maxim, the “cogito ergo sum” (I think therefore I am). Both men sought to find a ‘deeper” meaning to life and promised that science could liberate a waiting world.

DesCartes “threw off” what he perceived to be the “old way” of religious faith. His “method” of discovering knowledge involved a process of breaking everything into smaller parts and, in a sense, putting them on a rack for examination. Perhaps it is not a bad approach if you are dealing with science, math and maybe frogs, but not human persons. It has all too often led to devastating results.

We are not machines. Nor are we simply an amalgam of chemicals to be manipulated.

The classical world view that Descartes rejected actually had it right when it claimed a special place for the human person in the order of the universe precisely because of a special relationship between all human persons and God. We were made “Imago Dei” in the “image of God.”

In mid-life, unlike Descartes, at least Pascal became interested in religion and wrote the phrase now so often attributed to him "Within each one of us there is a God-shaped vacuum that only God can fill."

In fact, the phrase is probably better attributed to an early Church father named Ambrose. It is a great summary of the existential angst revealed throughout all of human history. That hunger, found within every human person, cries out for a deeper meaning to our life. Beginning to search for this deeper meaning is the prelude to authentic religious conversion and the path to becoming fully human.

The great western Church father Augustine spent his youth dabbling in his centuries versions of libertinism. He succumbed to an earlier set of Raelian- like teachings from a group called the Manichees. They taught that matter was ‘evil” and promoted sexual libertinism, abortion, contraception as a path to a promised “liberation.”

This empty way also failed to liberate. In fact it enslaved. After years of degradation, Augustine came back to the Christian faith of his mother. In his reflections on the journey called “the Confessions”, he wrote the now famous insight that: "Our hearts were made for Thee, O Lord, and will not rest until they rest in Thee."

Ambrose (and Pascal) aptly referred to that restlessness, that hole in the soul, as a vacuum. It has a force behind it and it will suck up anything to fill it. That is partly why the bizarre teachings of this esoteric sect filling our news since Christmas, actually find receptive listeners, at least fifty thousand of them, who have “itching ears” in this “clone age”. People are hungry for meaning. The problem is that these bizarre claims are not true and, they are dangerous.

The Christian claim is that we can all “know the truth and the truth will set us free”. Only Truth can fill that hole - that vacuum- in every soul. The Christian claim is that Truth is a person, who can be known, the God who became man, Jesus Christ.

In his encyclical letter entitled "The Gospel of Life", John Paul II speaks of a "profound crisis of culture" which permeates the contemporary age.The disturbing claim of the Raelians that they have manufactured a new “Eve” certainly confirms that this crisis is getting worse.

We live in an age of scientism and utilitarianism wherein we are losing the sense of any respect for human dignity, a holy and healthy view of human sexuality and the sanctity of the human body. We have also lost our sense of the true deeper meaning to human existence and the higher destiny of every human person.

The contemporary void of authentic spirituality has produced a cultural vacuum. It is into the empty culture that contemporary Christians are now sent on mission of evangelization. We must understand the cultural climate in order to effect its transformation.

The Raelian ideas are not really unusual in a world where the dignity of the sexual act has been completely undermined by the separation of the “unitive” and the “procreative” dimensions of the conjugal act. That great “prophet”, Pope Paul VI, in his encyclical letter, “On Human Life” (Humanae Vitae) warned of the trajectory that would follow the acceptance of abortion, contraception and the rejection of the fundamental Christian teaching concerning human life and dignity.

The “new” form of hedonism evidenced in our contemporary culture is not that different than the old forms of hedonism and paganism that the Christian message both confronted and transformed in both the first and the second millennium. We think that abortion, contraception and the “culture of death” are a new malady. They are not. The early Christian church entered a world where all of these, along with ‘exposure” (leaving unwanted fully born children on rocks to be eaten by birds of prey) were practiced.

This post “Humanae Vitae” world has again devolved into accepting a view of the body as an object to be used. The fractured relationships, that always accompany the breakdown of the family, have led to the real loss of the beauty of faithful married love as the only proper environment for sexual activity. It has always been the Christian claim that the complete gift of self sexually belongs within the marriage relationship. It is in the “marriage bed”, that the couple participates in the full beauty of the nuptial mystery.

There also where their love unites and, in their gift of self to the other, they participate in a wonderful way in the nuptial mystery of God’s love. There also where pro-creation occurs, where mere mortals are invited to participate with the God who created us in the continuing work of His creation. It is in that sacred relationship that the wonderful mystery of the fruit of love, a child, is, in a sense “begotten not made” when conceived. There also, in the beauty and stability of a family where that child learns to live and to love in the first society, the domestic church.

Rather than being ‘antiquated” these are the very teachings that have liberated barbarians throughout the ages and the only ones that can lead us to a future of authentic freedom.

Yet, the new barbarians abound as we enter the Third Millennium. Though they may not look like their forbears, they are cut from the same stock. Their lies are old hat and all symptomatic of both the loss of a Christian (in fact a Judeo-Christian) worldview and the lack of a Christian influence in the ‘world”.

As in times past, what is needed most is a new generation of “missionaries, but this time sent into our universities, our marketplaces and our laboratories. We need authentically Christian scientists, artists, statesmen and women, poets, artists and artisans. When Christians leave science, commerce and other vital fields of endeavor to barbarians, they make a huge mistake!

In their feigned promises of liberation, all these modern Manichees proclaim a message that always leads to slavery. In claiming to liberate they lead human beings down the path to slavery.

For example, our bodies are not merely a carrying case. We are created as “body persons”. Our bodies actually talk. The real question is what are we saying through them? What are we saying when we speak the bizarre acts and practices that the raelians advocate?

Pope John Paul II coined a phrase in his extraordinary teachings on the “Theology of the Body.” He speaks of the "language of the body." In so doing he reminds us that our bodies are meant to be the vehicle through which we speak the language of love.

Serious mission- minded Christians need to understand that we are now sent to articulate the profound truth of the Christian revelation concerning the dignity and wonder of the human body and human sexuality to a world that has produced such oddities as the Raelian movement.

We need to be in the forefront of teaching the dignity of every human person, the dignity of sexuality, the beauty and destiny of the human body and the entire human race. We need to be demonstrating what we proclaim and leading humanity on the path “back to the future” by proclaiming a message of authentic freedom and asserting that true love is cultivated in the garden of married love and authentically human persons are begotten not made.

Manicheeism was only one of several heresies that infiltrated the early Christian Church. Manichees viewed the body, indeed all matter, as actually evil! Unfortunately, if we were to ask many contemporary folks what Christians believe about the body and human sexuality, they would probably say we Christians do as well.

Christians do not believe that matter and the human body are evil. Nor do we believe that sex is sin. To the contrary, Christians proclaim that the body is an expression of the "Imago Dei", the image of God. The Christian faith proclaims that our bodies will be raised from the dead and that we will live in a new heaven and new earth.

Because we value the beauty, purpose and dignity of sexuality we also proclaim that its fullness is designed to be expressed in the committed, indeed sacramental, relationship of married love. In the conjugal act, always open to life, husband and wife fully give themselves to the other and in the very act express symbolically the deeper meaning of all of life. We were all created to give ourselves away in love to God and to one another. It is in this gift of self that we become fully human.

The unitive and procreative dimension of the conjugal act must never be separated. The bad fruit of this effort to separate the two always leads to the kind of insanity revealed in the Raelian worldview and its resultant horrors. Though an extreme version, the Raelian worldview is simply one more expression of a culture of selfishness, death and sexual activity as use of another.

In an insightful document entitled "Toward a pastoral Approach to Culture", the Pontifical Council for Culture (A Vatican Missions Council) speaks to the challenges faced in efforts geared toward the evangelization of cultures:

"From the time the Gospel was first preached, the Church has known the process of encounter and engagement with cultures, (Fides et ratio n.70), for it is one of the properties of the human person, that he can achieve true and full humanity, only by means of culture (Gaudium et Spes, n. 53).

In this way, the Good News, which is Christ's Gospel for all men and the whole human person, both child and parent of the culture in which they are immersed, (Fides et ratio, n.71), reaches them in their own culture, which absorbs their manner of living the faith and is in turn gradually shaped by it.

Today as the Gospel gradually comes into contact with cultural worlds, which once lay beyond Christian influence, there are new tasks of inculturation (Ibid. 72). At the same time, some traditionally Christian cultures, or cultures imbued with thousand-year-old religious traditions are being shattered.

Thus, it is not only a question of grafting the faith onto these cultures, but of revitalizing a de-Christianized world whose only Christian references are of a cultural nature. On the threshold of the third Millennium, the Church throughout the world is faced with new cultural situations, new fields of evangelization"

This lengthy excerpt from this theologically dense document sets the framework for the task that we face in our missionary work in a de-Christianized America and western culture. We need a form of “inculturation” that will help us to re-Christianize the contemporary culture.

It has been my experience that those involved in the task of evangelization often fail to see the depth of the loss of even an echo of Christian influence in America. The current morass surrounding the area of human sexuality is only one more bad fruit of this corruption and loss.

Some Christians face all of this and pine for the past, others fear the future. Neither response is the proper one. Rather, what is needed is revealed in the now popular phrase coined again by John Paul II, a "New Evangelization."

In his apostolic letter "The Light Of The East" John Paul synthesizes his teaching on the theology of the body:

"Christianity does not reject matter. Rather, “bodiliness” is considered in all its value in the liturgical act, whereby the human body is disclosed in its inner nature as a temple of the Spirit and is united with the Lord Jesus, who Himself took a body for the world's salvation.... With the rejection of all dualism and every cult of pleasure as an end in itself, the body becomes a place made luminous by grace and thus fully human." (n.11)

The Raelian worldview is actually not new at all. It is simply one more expression of a return to a pagan worldview precipitated by the vacuum of authentic spirituality in our age. “Modern” men and women are still “restless”, they still have a “God shaped vacuum” deep inside.

The Raelian worldview and so many other contemporary expressions of the new paganism offer the same old counterfeit promise of freedom. They also offer a false anthropology - the study of the nature and destiny of the human person. They are dualistic, completely separating the physical and the “spiritual.”

It is the Christian worldview that proclaims that we are called to live a unity of life. Though the new paganism, like the old, promises liberation it actually promotes slavery to unbridled passion. In its misguided sensuality it has lost the sense of the beauty and dignity of the human person in his/her fullness as a "body person." It is completely at odds with a Christian anthropology and view of life.

We do not "have a body"- we are a body. The truth of the Christian revelation is that we will one day have resurrected bodies! We are en-souled bodies or em-bodied souls. The two cannot and must not be separated.

The body is not evil. It is beautiful! It is a part of how we image the God who created us! The mystery and marvel of the Incarnation is that God the Son took a Body and is at the right hand of the Father even now in a resurrected Body!

Pope John Paul II has done us a great service by re-presenting a classical Christian view of the body right at a critical time in history where the human race is being led into new forms of old heresies regarding the body and the entirety of creation. Understanding it, proclaiming it and living it is the only way we can expose and counter the insanity so fully obvious in the Raelian claim

I began with a quote from one of my favorite Catholic thinkers, G.K. Chesterton. It is fitting that I end with one:

“Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.”

Part of the blame for the confusion that actually opened the door to the “Raelians” and other bizarre contemporary ideologies is the very weakness of the Christian church. The philosophical errors at the root of these contemporary pagan claims have found a hearing, all too often, because we have been silent or have not lived what we profess.

We are still reeling from a year in which our Church has been rocked by scandal. The root of that scandal is the infidelity of a small minority of clergy. However, the actual sinful activities engaged in by these members of the clergy, their participation in what Pope John Paul rightly called the “Mystery of iniquity”, are rooted in the same misguided notion of human sexuality that gives room for the use of persons as objects.

The way out of the horrors that will result from the “clone age” lies at the feet of the Christian Church. We who are members of that Church must rise up, reclaim the truth and proclaim it afresh in both word and deed to a culture desperately in need of true freedom.

2003-01-01T09:04:00.000-06:00

Seismologists In India have launched an investigation into mysterious explosion-like sounds being heard in the western city of Rajkot. Tension has been high since riots earlier in 2002. Local residents have been complaining of these sounds, which they say are loud enough to shake houses. The "blasts" were earlier thought to be explosions but the authorities say they have not found any evidence of explosives being detonated. The case was handed over to seismologists from the Indian Meteorological Department after some experts suggested that seismic activity could have caused the loud reports. With tensions high since widespread communal rioting in the state earlier in the year, the mysterious loud bangs spread fear and anxiety.

2002-12-30T22:36:00.000-06:00

Holy roller let off car rosary charge

A devout Catholic driver got hit by an unholy traffic ticket in Illinois - for hanging rosary beads from her rear-view mirror. 'It's a rosary, for goodness' sake. It is for praying. It is supposed to protect you,' said Catherine Morris, 56, after an officer in the town of Westmont slapped her with a £48 fine for 'windscreen obstruction'.
But God sided with Morris when a judge in DuPage County dismissed the charge.

2002-12-24T15:30:00.000-06:00

Mystery of blue and green bulbs baffles for 27 years

By SANDI GERJEVIC
Anchorage Daily News

(Published: December 20, 2002)

Since the 1970's, someone has replaced two of the nearly all-red bulbs at 1811 Lake Otis Parkway with a blue and a green bulb.

If you drive by Sue Hahn's house between now and Christmas, you might wonder why her white picket fence is completely decorated in red light bulbs, except for one yellow one.

Her explanation goes back to the 1970s.

One Christmas morning 27 years ago, Hahn and her family woke up to something slightly different. Something subtle. She noticed that on the string of red lights along her fence, someone had replaced two of her red bulbs with one blue bulb and one green bulb.

That's odd, she thought. She figured it was kids playing a prank. Some jokester's rebellion against total red.

But the next year, the same thing happened. One blue. One green. And the next year, again. The mystery visitor always appeared between midnight Christmas Eve and 6 a.m. Christmas Day.

Hahn, a retired teacher, has lived in her Lake Otis Parkway home since 1968. She runs a bed-and-breakfast there called Sourdough Sue's.

After a few years, the visitor began leaving cards as well as lights. They were always written in print and signed "B and G" with the words "Blue and Green," in parentheses. Then, each year, an ornament began to appear with the card.

She began leaving presents, too. Always something modest. Often something fun.

Some time ago, the visitor left one blue bulb, one green bulb and also one yellow bulb. In the card, the visitor explained that his or her mother had died. The yellow light was in remembrance. Repeatedly, Hahn has turned the mystery over in her mind. Who in the heck could it be?

"I kind of squint-eye at everybody going by," she said.

But after a while, Hahn decided she didn't really want to know the identity. "They're having as much fun as I am," she said. "It's just a little whimsical thing that somebody's doing and getting a big kick out of."

2002-12-14T11:06:00.000-06:00

600-Pound 'Ghost Pig' Terrorizes Town

GREENWICH TOWNSHIP, New Jersey - A New Jersey town has gone hog wild over sightings of an enormous pig.

The 600-pound porker has been spotted wandering the streets of Greenwich Township -- digging up gardens and being chased by dogs.

One woman says the pig ate some broccoli from her brother-in-law's garden.

Another tells The Press of Atlantic City newspaper that when she and her dogs encountered the pig one morning, the dogs gave chase. And she says the scary part is that the pig ran as fast as the dogs.

She described it as being white "like a ghost pig" and having football-sized ears.

The town's clerk says "if anybody has a big barbecue, we'll know who captured it."

2002-10-16T09:03:00.000-05:00

A super-sized bird in Alaska
By PETER PORCO
Anchorage Daily News
October 15, 2002

ANCHORAGE, Alaska - A giant winged creature, like something out of Jurassic Park, has reportedly been sighted several times in Southwest Alaska in recent weeks.

Villagers in Togiak and Manokotak say they have seen a huge bird that's much bigger than anything they have seen before.

A pilot says he spotted the creature while flying passengers to Manokotak last week. He calculated that its wingspan matched the length of a wing on his Cessna 207. That's about 14 feet.

Other people have put the wingspan in a similar range.

Scientists aren't sure what to make of the reports. No one doubts that people in the region west of Dillingham have seen a very large rapto-like bird. But biologists and other people familiar with big Alaska birds say they're skeptical it's that big.

A recent sighting of the mystery bird occurred Oct. 10 when Moses Coupchiak, a 43-year-old heavy equipment operator from Togiak, 40 miles west of Manokotak, saw the bird flying toward him from about two miles away as he worked his tractor.

"At first I thought it was one of those old-time Otter planes," Coupchiak said. "Instead of continuing toward me, it banked to the left, and that's when I noticed it wasn't a plane."

The bird was "something huge," he said. "The wing looks a little wider than the Otter's, maybe as long as the Otter plane."

The bird flew behind a hill and disappeared. Coupchiak got on the radio and warned people in Togiak to tell their children to stay away.

Pilot John Bouker said he was highly skeptical of reports of "this great big eagle" that is two or three times the size of a bald eagle. "I didn't put any thought into it."

But early this week while flying into Manokotak, Bouker, owner of Bristol Bay Air Service, looked out his left window and 1,000 feet away, "there's this big ... . bird," he said.

"The people in the plane all saw him," Bouker said. "He's huge, he's huge, he's really, really big. You wouldn't want to have your children out."

Nicolai Alakayak, a freight and passenger driver from Manokotak who was flying with Bouker, said the creature looked like an eagle and was as large as "a little Super Cub."

Comparison to an eagle, certainly. Super Cub? Probably not, scientists said.

"I'm certainly not aware of anything with a 14-foot wingspan that's been alive for the last 100,000 years," said federal raptor specialist Phil Schemf in Juneau.

Schemf, other biologists, a village police officer and teachers at the Manokotak School said the sightings could be of a Steller's sea eagle, a species native to northeast Asia and one of the world's largest eagles. It's about 50 percent bigger than a bald eagle.

2002-09-06T09:43:00.000-05:00

CBS News | The Benefits Of Breast-Feeding | September 4, 2002 12:38:23

(CBS) New information shows breast-feeding provides more than just sustenance for newborns.

The Early Show Medical Correspondent Dr. Emily Senay says there is a growing body of evidence that breast-fed children get a wide range of benefits that keep them on the right path later on in life.

“A new study of breast-feeding and cholesterol levels shows that breast milking early in life may pay off in adulthood with long-term benefits for heart health,” said Dr. Senay.

Research in England showed breast-fed infants had a higher cholesterol as babies but by adulthood their cholesterol was lower than adults who were formula-fed as babies.

One theory is that early exposure to breast milk as a baby may help to program fat metabolism later in life and produce the resulting lower cholesterol levels as an adult.

Breast milk contains vital nutrients for a newborn like fatty acids that are essential for proper growth. The nutrients are called DHA and AHA. They are important for brain and vision development. “Studies show that infants who get these fatty acids in their diet score higher on baby IQ scales and have increased mental development,” said Dr. Senay.

The fatty acids seems to be important for premature infants who miss absorbing them from their mother during the last trimester of pregnancy, which is when a lot of brain growth occurs.

2002-08-23T22:16:00.000-05:00

Oldest Woman, 114, Dies In San Diego

SAN DIEGO, August 23, 2002

Adelina Domingues, 114, in March 2002 picture. (AP)

(AP) Adelina Domingues, the oldest person known to be living in the United States, has died at the age of 114.

Born in the Cape Verde Islands on Feb. 19, 1888, Domingues died Wednesday at a care facility in the Spring Valley area of San Diego County, her family said Friday.

She died in her sleep, during an afternoon nap, said Rebecca Williams, administrator of the Brighton Place nursing home, where Domingues lived since 1995.

Though Domingues remained physically active and mentally sharp, her health had declined dramatically over the last month.

"I just think at 114, it was just her time," said Deborah Murphy, her granddaughter.

Until recently, Domingues had insisted that she was born in 1887, which would have made her 115 and the oldest person in the world. But a search of documents turned up a baptism date of 1888. That, combined with other documents, led the Guinness Book of Records to rule she was 114.

The oldest-person title then went to Kamato Hongo of Japan, who was born on Sept. 16, 1887.

According to the Gerontology Research Group, the organization which helped authenticate Domingues' age, her death would make John McMorran of Michigan the oldest American. Born on June 19, 1889, he is 113.

2002-08-23T22:05:00.000-05:00

CBS News | A Rare Bloom | August 23, 2002 19:44:18 (AP) For the first time in more than 100 years, human eyes have seen the beauty of a rare Central American passionflower, and now know what color it is.

The purple and white Passiflora nelsonii, which grows on vines high up in the trees in rain forests in southern Mexico and Guatemala, had never bloomed in captivity.

Experts say someone plucked one of the rare passionflowers in Chiapas, Mexico in 1895 and pressed it between sheets of paper. It soon turned brown and the person who picked it never said what color it was.

That specimen is at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

"It's exciting to finally see what this flower looks like," said John MacDougal, formerly conservatory manager at the Missouri Botanical Gardens in St. Louis. "I've been teased and tortured by that brown specimen at the Smithsonian for so many years."

Butterfly World had the specimen nearly two decades before it bloomed. Five buds were found two weeks ago. Two fell off, two flowered and one is expected to flower within a few days.

The flowers live about a day.

2002-08-21T17:41:00.000-05:00

MADISON, N.J. — Drew University's libraries have received many unlikely donations over the years. The oddest may be a human finger that purportedly belonged to a noted English evangelist from the 1700s.

The donation came from an alumnus who also gave the school some rare Methodist books and engravings, according to librarian Ken Rowe. The finger came in a small box and was accompanied by a yellowed slip of paper that claimed the finger came from George Whitefield, a well-known charismatic preacher.

"I've had a medical doctor look at, and it is a human bone," Rowe said Tuesday. Whether it actually is Whitefield's finger, though, remains a mystery. (AP)

Seems to me that when protestants scoff at relics, they would do well to consider that even in secular society, it is not unusual for parents to collect a lock of hair, or for other items to be collected from famous people.

2002-08-20T00:51:00.000-05:00

Dominic seems to like only one person right now, and that is his mama! When he looks up and finds that papa is holding him, he grimaces and breaks out crying! How heartwrending that cry is! Someday, however, he will find a use for his papa.

2002-08-18T19:02:00.000-05:00

FOXNews.com KRAKOW, Poland — Addressing more than 2 million faithful gathered for Poland's largest open-air Mass ever, Pope John Paul II warned on Sunday of dangers posed when man ``puts himself in God's place.''
Modern man often ``lives as if God does not exist,'' the pope warned, ``and even puts himself in God's place,'' referring to genetic engineering and euthanasia.
``He claims for himself the creator's right to interfere in the mystery of human life. He wishes to determine human life through genetic manipulation and establish the limit of death,'' John Paul said.
The pontiff spoke from a dais overlooking throngs who cheered ``You are home''

2002-08-18T18:43:00.000-05:00

David & Jennifer Gabler ~ www.dgabler.com, home of Right Brothers Software

2002-08-16T19:18:00.000-05:00

'C' programming is very interesting. Its not what I'm used to, but I think I can handle it. I just need a project to get me going. Something I really want to do. Hmmmmmm.......

2002-08-15T01:18:00.000-05:00

Very hard day! Good company with Festus and Rosemary tonight! Miss Jennifer and Dominic terribly. I wish they would come home, but I'm glad they're having a good visit with MaMere.

Yesterday was my angel's feast day! I took him down to the chapel to see Our Lord. Tomorrow is the Feast of the Assumption. Holy day. I think I'll go to the 7:30 mass. That should be a good one to go to. They always have a choir there for the evening mass on holy days.

2002-08-14T01:36:00.000-05:00

I think it's fair to say that watching Fr. Fox on EWTN is the next best thing to being there. He's telling a story about St. Monica and St. Augustine. We must work to convert hearts, not just intellects. The intellect and the will are the two highest faculties of the soul. Love never fails. Your motive in bringing people back to the fullness of the true faith must be love of the other person. One must seek the good of the other person.

"A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still."

"Honesty is needed to reclaim others to the faith".

"Talk to Augustine less about God, and talk to God more about Augustine".

"Be willing to suffer and offer sacrifices for the conversion of others -- and listen to the other person!"

2002-08-13T16:29:00.000-05:00

Having seen other blogs, It made me want to have my own. My own to cherish, to utilize, to make known all my thoughts. My mind is racing now, trying to see which thoughts will float to the surface first. What a poet. And I didn't ..... well, you know.

2002-08-13T16:25:00.000-05:00

So, this is what blogging is all about? I thought it would be different, somehow. I thought it would be boring and monotonous. I never thought it could be this much fun!