New Catholic (online) Journal

From the Editor-in-Chief:

"The journal is an endeavor which attempts most of all to be Catholic, in both senses of the word: faithful to the authoritative teaching of the Magisterium of the Holy Catholic Church, and applying that faith universally, to everything written. Our goals are to recognize and promote the truth, regardless of who says it, to facilitate an honest dialogue amongst those of differing opinions both outside and within the Church, and to acknowledge the uniqueness of the Church: that it, and it alone, by the salvation it offers, professes the fullness of the truth, on heaven and earth. It is hopefully within the folds of that truth that Veritatis Praeco publishes articles discussing the first principles, politics, man, the state, the university, philosophy, theology, history, literature, and the liturgy." [Visit the blog here.]

He says they plan to update daily over the summer.

Glancing back at July, looking forward into August

July was a very robust month for AmericanPapist, it's second-busiest month ever, in fact, behind only April 2008, when Pope Benedict visited and I was making regular media appearances.

August might be a bit slower for a couple reasons.

First, Pope Benedict is on vacation, so the amount of Vatican-related news decreases when most of the Vatican curia (and basically the entire city of Rome, for that matter) take off work as well.

Second, to mirror that lull, I'm planning on being on the road from about now until August 11th.

Blogging from the road will be light, and I've found that the story content and sources tends to switch disproportionally during these times from topics I go out and find to topics you find and send to me.

That's right, instead of the time-intensive task of combing the news feeds and bugging the regular AmP-sources for quality content, I'll be looking at my email inbox for tips when deciding what to post, during those occasional moments when I steal myself away from beaches, boats and friends.

The upswing of this is that such stories tend to stay on the mainpage longer because updating is less frequent.

So: "thomas [at] americanpapist [dot] com." Help me keep AmP humming along even as the summer wanes!

Thank you.

Photos: Inappropriate advertisements help finance Church upkeep in Italy

Reader Joe writes:

My daughter just returned from a semester in Rome. She was with a group of students and seminarians, mostly from Saint Thomas University in Minnesota, all of whom enjoy your website. She shared some of your humorous captions with me, so I thought you might like to see a couple of photos that I took recently in Milan.

The first place I went was the famous Gothic cathedral. You can imagine how shocking it was to find large (40-50 foot) billboards plastered on the sides of the cathedral! One of them reminded me of a 'B' rated sci-fi movie from the 1950's-the Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman. Apparently, in Italy, many churches are actually owned and maintained by the government with the stipulation that the faithful can continue to worship at these sites. Scaffolding space is rented out to advertisers when renovations are underway. That is because the Church can't afford to maintain all of the priceless artwork and architecture.

I couldn't agree more with this gentleman's reaction. When I was in Milan several years ago to see the Milan Cathedral, these advertisements were not in place. I do remember, however, often seeing inappropriate advertisements featured to the scaffolding at other Catholic Churches in Italy (and Austria).

I wonder if these Churches could think up some sort of workaround. For instance: how about starting a fund to buy out the advertisement space with Catholic ads? Parishioners and tourists could add money to this fund, which would enable Catholic outfits to compete against the mainstream promoters. I'd have gladly donated a couple euros to such a fund when I was visiting.

Anyway, it's the first solution that came to mind. What do you think?