This pie is an apple pie with cranberry and ginger in the mix. It isn’t as sweet as your typical pie, leaning more towards a spiced wine taste but it sure tasted great on Christmas morning.

What better way to spend the Feast of the Holy Family than to get all dressed up and go to a dance with the whole family?

Each year a family in Colorado Springs sponsors a Holy Family Ball at the Air Force Academy. Everyone is encouraged to dress up as much as possible for the event. The dance is held early in the evening and only lasts three hours so that the kids don’t rot.

The ratio of kids to adults is about 5:1 and I counted at least nine 12-passenger + vans in the parking lot. The best thing about this event is that there are so many kids and the area is contained so you can actually enjoy the dancing without having to worry that your kids have run out into the forest to play with wolves.

The only thing I would have liked is to have more ball-type music. I thought that playing “Love Shack” by the B52’s was a little incongruent with a Holy Family Ball.

Pope St. Sylvester I was born in Rome to Rufinus and Justa in the late 200’s.

He was educated by a priest named Charitius or Carinus in literature and theology and was ordained a priest by Pope St. Marcellinus.

He witnessed Constantine’s triumph in 312 and upon the death of Pope St. Melchiades was elevated to the papacy in 314. The same year he sent four legates to the Western Council held at Arles. The Donatist schism and the Quartodeciman heresy were condemned at this council and Pope Sylvester approved the canons written at the council for the whole Church.

He was responsible for the building of the original Basilica of St. Peter’s and St. John Lateran and may also have been responsible for creating the first martyrology.

In 325 the General Council of Nicea was convened to deal with the Arian Heresy. The Arians professed that Christ was not truly God and this heresy became so prevalent that for a time most of the Christian world accepted the teachings. The Pope was not able to attend the council because of his age but sent three priests, Osius, Vito and Vincentius to act in his stead. Showing the importance of the pope’s representatives, these three priests are listed ahead of the Eastern patriarchs in the list of those attending the council. The council condemned Arianism and drew up the Nicene Creed which is recited at every Mass.

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Take 15% off all Papal Encyclicals and books by Pope Benedict today.

You can also take 25% off Upon This Rock. December 31th only!

The Feast of the Holy Family is dedicated to the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, commemorating their life together in Nazareth and calling us to focus on Catholic family life.

The feast is celebrated on the first Sunday after Christmas, unless Christmas falls on a Sunday, in which case it is celebrated on December 30. According to The Fisheaters this feast is placed where it is on the calendar “(B)ecause in Old Testament Law, a child wasn’t a son of Abraham or a true part of the family until his circumcision at 8 days of age, an event of Christ’s life that we celebrated on 1 January (from 25 December to 1 January are 8 days).” The feast was placed on the general calendar of the Roman Rite on October 26, 1921, by the Congregation of Rites under Pope Benedict XV.

The Church presents the Holy Family to us as a model for our own family life. Joseph was the head of the Holy Family and provided for Mary and Jesus with the work of his hands. He was obedient to the angel who told him to take Mary as his wife, what to name the new child and again when told to flee with them to Egypt. He taught Jesus the carpentry trade and what it was to be a man in the society in which they lived.

Mary took care of her family in the home. It was she who would have taught Jesus the Scriptures and prayers of their people when he was very young. It was through her example of managing the home that Jesus would formulate many of the examples he would later use in his teaching. Jesus saw work sanctified through the example of his earthly parents, who did all things well in the ordinary circumstances of daily life.

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Take 15% off all family related books today.

You can also take 25% off Mission of the Catholic Family . December 30th only!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Lf-EjIYhJo]

For those of you who follow such things, we are for the moment a “Large Mammal” in the blog ecosystem according to Truth Laid Bear.

Yep, that’s us down around 2500. Thanks for reading and thanks especially to Kevin at New Advent who helped get us there.

Superheroes meet the UN. Fantastic.

The comic, initially to be distributed free to 1 million U.S. schoolchildren, will be set in a war-torn fictional country and feature superheroes such as Spider-Man working with U.N. agencies such as Unicef and the “blue hats,” the U.N. peacekeepers.

The possibilities are endless.

The Fifth Day of Christmas - the Feast of St. Thomas Becket, Bishop and Martyr.

St. Thomas Becket is the OTHER St. Thomas, martyred for the Catholic Faith in England by a king named Henry over matters of Church governance.

Thomas was born in London on the 21st of December in either 1117 or 1118 to Gilbert Becket and Matilda Roheise. His parents were buried in Old St. Paul’s Cathedral.

When Thomas was 10 he learned to read at the Merton Priory in England and then traveled to the Mainland for further studies of canon and civil law in Paris, Bologna and Auxerre.

After his studies were concluded he returned to England around 1141 where he gained the attention of Theobold, Archbishop of Canterbury who sent him on several missions to Rome and ordained him a deacon in 1154. Soon after he was named Archdeacon of Canterbury.

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Take 15% off all books about martyrs today.

You can also take 25% off Becket. December 29th only!

Following up on yesterday’s post about the anti-holiness kids book published by Paulist Press, I thought it might be helpful to go through the various publishers we deal with to help you make decisions as individual readers and also as Catholic store owners when you are trying to choose titles to carry.

This is very important to us because of our Good Faith Guarantee.

Basically, we divide our publishers into five groups:

1. Pope Benedict’s Library. These publishers make a point of carrying books that promote and defend the Faith. You can pretty much order any book from them without worry that the content is questionably Catholic. These books are also distinguished by their substantial content - no fluff here.
2. The University of Steubenville Library - Very good books for the most part with a few fluffy titles and possible a stray questionable title in the mix. Ninety-five percent of the time you can buy from them without a worry.
3. The Parish Library - You can find some very good stuff here, you can find some very bad stuff here. It all depends on who the librarian was.
4. The Matthew Fox Circle of Energy Reading Room - Don’t buy anything from this publisher unless you find it on our site. They don’t have any problem publishing heresy with a few stray orthodox titles that somehow got mixed in.
5. The Marcus Aurelius Library - These are books from publishers that aren’t Catholic and the books may not necessarily be specifically Catholic but have a Catholic world view.

Before I actually provide the list, please be aware that we aren’t the arbiters of orthodoxy, we just go by what the Church teaches and make our own judgments based on that. If you happen to be a publisher and think you are being unfairly categorized please contact us so we can update our list. This list isn’t meant to be a blanket condemnation of any publishers either. There are always a few good books available from any of these companies and by buying those books you will encourage them to produce more good titles.

I have moved the list over to our bookstore so it can be kept current there.
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