St. Mary’s School in Platteville Wisconsin – a Valuable Lesson in Humility?

Fr. John del Priore

Fr. Faustino Ruiz

                                                 

You can sometimes judge a story by the way the local press deals with a story as in the case of St. Mary’s School in Platteville Wisconsin which I believe is now closed.  I say the local press has not gone much beyond the handed out press releases or public letters of Bishop Morlino of Madison Wisconsin, Paul Ryan’s local bishop, because there are no good visuals or images of St. Mary’s available on the Internet.

The skinny and or gossip is that Bishop Morlino imported some nice looking white boy priests from Spain, some sort of Jesuits to man the factory floor, mass factories in his diocese.  Looking at a diocese site there they actually have pictures of the clergy there and the parish listing and a limited work history.  Kind of like an Internet dating or religious meat rack.  I guess you want to see what color the priest is in the local Catholic church before you set foot in.  Want you to feel all comfortable in your warm comfort zones and prejudices. 

Well the skinny on the skinny of that is that I only count one or two dark faces and the rest of the priests of Madison County Diocese are white even if they have Hispanic and or Spanish sounding names.  It’s the visual that Madison Avenue has us trained on these past decades.

I have read about South Asian Priests and African Priests being imported to places like the Allentown diocese. I have to wonder if the mail order catalogues the bishops get their priests overseas from have their pictures posted or maybe the importation fees listed next to the pictures is a more important consideration, the money that is and not the look, on that in every diocese devoid of native son priests.

That is why celibacy is not an issue with the locals RC bishops. Priests are an interchangeable part even if you can’t decipher their fractured English or strange outlooks on life based on their native cultures. Celibacy is not an issue.  If Americans don’t want to be priests, plenty of starving third world types to fill in the personnel gaps.

With St. Mary’s they say that the imported priests would have none of the altar girls in the sanctuary thing. The cultural preferences or prejudices of the Spanish culture get put under labels or categories like Conservative Catholics? Etc.

The people in the pews rebelled and voted with their pocket books, even signed a petition to the bishop and the Bishop’s response was a typical these days in America – Fuck You.

The dissenters at St. Mary’s get threatened with excommunication or something close to it – “interdict” – and Paul Ryan gets a free pass on his temporary masturbation love, flirtation with Ayn Rand atheism.

No money. They close the school. The respect the landlord, the bishop, the guy with the deed gets goes a lot to do with the bishop’s generosity in extending financial help to keep a school open. 

No respect, no kissing of Morlino’s stinky toes and the local Catholics in Platteville Wisconsin are taught a valuable lesson about Christ – the golden rule – they that have the gold make the rules. 

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St. Mary's Catholic School Platteville Wisconsin

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A New Global Future Priced at $35

The idea is not new. It has industrial models to draw upon.

Potentially, the way the whole human race sees itself will have profound effects into the future. This modern adaption of the computer to put in every person on the planet’s hands triggers an immeasurable amount of possibilities.

Computers have freed us from useless labor and ripped the heart out of the West’s traditional middle classes. The ability to use some of the tasks listed below is a smell of the future. Why does this idea and concept happen in India and not China? Good question? I don’t know.

Certainly India’s new middle class will expand faster than China’s class system and its recent industrial progress? Friction or cooperation is on future political and economic menus?

Individuals will now have more opportunity to define themselves against a global norm of other peoples and cultures. Peoples and cultures in some areas will dissolve away into a Global category of all things human.

Is this part of Intelligent Design and or the chaos of evolution making new species?

India's $35 PC is the Future of Computing

The Indian prototype is impressive--especially at a $35 price point. The device runs on a variation of Linux. It has no internal storage, but it is capable of storing data on a memory card. It has a built in word processor, video conferencing capabilities, and--most importantly for a cloud-based workforce--a Web browser. Oh--it can also run on solar power.


At $35, the Indian tablet is virtually disposable--far exceeding the $100 laptop developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and used in the non-profit One Laptop One Child program. In fact, in many ways the $35 tablet also makes the $500 iPad seem significantly over-priced.

Syria Bans The Veil

There would seem to be in some secular Muslim countries a global minimalist consensus existing that females should be treated with some level of equality with men. This, at least in the academic sense.

Syria bans face veils at universities

Female students wearing a full face veil will be barred from Syrian university campuses, the country's minister of higher education has said.

Ghiyath Barakat was reported to have said that the practice ran counter to the academic values and traditions of Syrian universities.

His ruling, published on the All4Syria website, was said to be in response to requests from students and parents.

The issue of full face veils has caused controversy in other countries.

While this is a small step, it is a step in the right direction for women’s rights somewhere in the middle between secular and fundamentalist Islamic nation state perspectives.

While the world will not change a great deal with this action at the universities in Syria, a secular Muslim country, it is the right start in recognizing something of a common global approach to interact with all the nations and cultures of the planet presently and into the future.

Perception as a Building Block of Reality

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We each build our own reality amid a stark universal background.

What came before came before. Only the present, the now, seems to matter most.

The culture surrounding us - instinct and mother's milk - sustains us or we drift to other perceptions of reality.

How big or small the universe is perceived relates to how we see our place in the scheme of things. The size of the building blocks of reality does or does not matter. It all depends on the individual to determine the measure.

Recognition and comfort with self flows into and out of cosmic tides, like our breath keeping time with the heartbeat of THE ALL!

It is so easy to miss a beat.

We all live our lives in canyons of sorts - small walled off areas with a small view of the world.

Sometimes the water is in a difficult place to reach within our little canyons.

Sometimes the water is within reach.

How difficult sometimes to perceive, to see, to reach or to touch.

If we travel away from the canyon and into another canyon we keep on seeing the first canyon in our brains since most canyons tend to look alike.

Some can see beyond the personal prejudice that states that all canyons look alike. While others, no matter where they travel, only see the one canyon.

We all build our own reality. Nobody really knows what is inside the next guy.

Go with social flow or get jettisoned into the storm.

Wash up on a deserted beach and start all over again.

And what might we find there?

New perceptions?

New faith?

New realities?

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