The Hound of Heaven: November 2008

Friday 21 November 2008

Newly discovered blogs.

I know I have not been posting much lately but I've been reading other people's blogs.

Here's a new one to me Joe Versus the Volcano. http://joeversusthevolcano.blogspot.com/

There are some interesting musings on St. Francis and Chesterton, and on Dorothy L. Sayers and the act of creation, among other things. Oh and he likes cats, indeed he describes himself as " the domestic servant of two cats".

Friday 14 November 2008

Reminder

There will be a sung Requiem in the Classical Roman Rite for Cardinal Reginald Pole in the chapel of Magdalen College, Oxford, on Monday evening next, (17th), at 7pm. He was of course the last Roman Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury and one of the originators of the Council of Trent.

It has been brought to my attention that there is also a Sung Requiem for the cardinal at the Birmingham Oratory at 7.30pm.

There are a number of Masses organised for this evening for the cardinal details to be found on the LMS website. I specifically mentioned the Magdalen one because Cardinal Reginald Pole was a member of the college for a number of years and took his B.A. there.

Chickens

A friend of mine is a member, ( non active) of the Chicken Liberation Movement. This has nothing to do with south American Jesuits but rather liberates chickens from battery farms and finds homes for them. I have just spent a whole afternoon chasing two cockerels round and round his garden so that they can be "re homed". They were liberated a few weeks ago and he took them on along with about a dozen female chickens. They were making so much noise that, even though he is well away from other houses, his neighbours threatened to get a petition together. Apparently the crowing started at about 5 each morning. Chickens are stupid and only just intelligent enough to escape your grasp again and again, and again.

I should say that my helping to catch the cockerels was by way of payback for The Hound having killed one of his geese!

Now before any of you chicken lovers gets upset I should say that I am very concerned for animal welfare and appalled at what we do to God's creatures in the name of cheap food. I like eating chicken but will only buy proper free range birds. It is therefor an occasional treat rather than a staple. I buy a whole bird and joint it myself, ( this takes 5mins) and this will do for several days and the bits and bobs make divine stock. It's the only way to go where chickens are concerned.

Cartoons via Fr. Z.

Thursday 13 November 2008

Cats and Nuns.

I remember reading a newspaper article some years ago about a Orthodox convent in Greece where the nuns regard it as their religious duty to give shelter and sustenance to any cats that come their way and who found a women suffering from amnesia washed up on a beach near their convent. She had an immediate rapport with the cats so they allowed her to stay in the convent for as long as she wished. I cut it out of the newspaper but lost it of course; I don't know if there were any subsequent developments.

But now I've come across this Carmelite convent in Italy where the good nuns breed Maine Coon cats commercially as a means of generating an income for their community. The cats are superb and they even have a gym...