saint louis

I would like to extend a very heartfelt congratulations to now-Bishop-designate Edward M. Rice, who will be ordained as the new Auxiliary Bishop of the Archdiocese of St. Louis on January 13!

Bishop-designate Rice is a very cheerful, fun, and friendly priest who is faithful, prayerful, and loving of all the people entrusted to his spiritual/pastoral leadership. I have had the honor of working with him from time to time as he has helped at Kenrick-Glennon Seminary and in his role as the Vocations Director for the Archdiocese of St. Louis, and I'm glad that I'll be able to work with him as the soon-to-be Auxiliary Bishop!

Here's a photo I shot of him for a Vocational Discernment pamphlet last year (it's on Flickr - click to view larger sizes):

The Archdiocese of St. Louis, and it's official publication, the St. Louis Review, have begun their comprehensive coverage of this year's Consistory of Cardinals, during which Cardinal-designates Burke and Wuerl (Archbishop-emeritus of St. Louis and Archbishop of Washington, respectively) will become Cardinals.

Check out the St. Louis Review's coverage of the Consistory, which also includes a ton of background information, such as the following articles, slideshows, and galleries:

The Archdiocese of St. Louis is celebrating the feast of its patron saint today, St. Louis IX. Saint Louis was a very generous man, always giving to the poor, helping charitable organizations and religious orders, and generally being the kind of king who tries to please God rather than man.

You can read more about the feast of St. Louis IX (and about the man himself) on the Archdiocese of St. Louis' website.

From the St. Louis Review's story, Archbishop Carlson makes an offer to the parishioners of St. Stanislaus:

In order to help get the parish re-established, I have committed that the archdiocese would provide the pastor for the first year of the reestablished parish without cost to the parish and would contribute up to $10,000 to pay the cost of the consultant for a fund drive to secure the finances of the parish corporation and the St. Stanislaus Corporation for the future.

This proposal has my full support and I will do everything in my power to make St. Stanislaus succeed as a personal parish for Catholics of Polish heritage.

I ask that you please join me in praying that reconciliation can be brought about and, with the help of God, healing will take place.

Just as with Archbishop Burke before, Archbishop Carlson seems to be willing to go to very great lengths to ensure the Catholicity of this once great parish—let us pray that this situation gets resolved sooner rather than later!

Finding guidelines for acquiring a marriage license in St. Louis County is somewhat a pain in the rear. Because it's a convoluted mess of links to get to the information you need, I thought I'd put it a little more succinctly, for those who, like me, just want to get it over with...

Found on LifeSiteNews:

By James Tillman

MISSOURI, St. Louis, June 23, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Planned Parenthood of St. Louis is planning to offer artificial insemination services in the fall of 2010.

A newly-released Planned Parenthood advertisement about the new services features two women hugging each other, with text above them stating "they just found out they're expecting, finally."

What Planned Parenthood is doing here (something they've been working on with all their other initiatives for many years now) is trying to remove parenthood and life-giving love from sexuality. They are very successful thus far. With this step, one need not even have intercourse with a member of the opposite sex to get pregnant.

So, instead of building up love for one another, and having a beautiful child result from that love... people are able to give a very misguided love to each other, then pay someone a sum of money to get a child that resulted from no loving relationship whatsoever. Pray for those children!

Read the story on LifeSiteNews.com »

It's always exciting to be a St. Louisan in the springtime. God puts on a very nice show about two times a week; right now I'm staring outside the window at some of the most beautiful lightning strikes I've seen in a storm! I'm also thankful I'm not in the crazy rain.

The Archdiocese of Saint Louis today upgraded its entire website to a new design and a new platform, allowing offices and agencies to more quickly and more easily communicate with the faithful in the Archdiocese (and around the world!).

I've been working on this project (with a lot of help from Palantir, a web development company in Chicago) and some local developers for the past year, and I am pleased with the result (I hope you are, too!). I've written up more information about the technical aspects of the site on Open Source Catholic (read more about the Archdiocese of Saint Louis' Upgraded Website), and I will continue writing some posts about specific details on the Open Source Catholic website.

Some of the highlights of the redesign:

Earlier today, I had lunch with a few good (mostly online) friends at Rigazzi's on the Hill (in St. Louis). The food was so-so, the company was great, and the atmosphere in the restaurant was pretty good. It's a little bit tucked away next to Kingshighway, but not too hard to find (plus there's plenty of parking in the area).

I met Snup (from Snup's view from the back pew) for the first time; she seems to have a most excellent plan in place for the rest of her parish visits. She's about 1/10 of the way through all the parishes in St. Louis, and she's chronicling her visits to various parishes on her blog (link above).

I also met (for the second time) Mark Scott Abeln, who takes many excellent pictures and writes for Rome of the West, an excellent blog looking at the historical and architectural heritage of Saint Louis (with an emphasis on its Catholicity).