This is my town. Scenes from our 4-year #brewery anniversary, celebrating #BirraNursia and our #Catholic faith. Ut Laetificet Cor. pic.twitter.com/vUlSBCt6At — The Monks of Norcia (@monksofnorcia) August 20, 2016 Was doing housework all day. Almost forgot. Buzzed down the hill and got to the Piazza at quarter past five. First thing I saw was a smiling monk who handed me a beer. And this is where I live!

Not a portrait of me. But seriously! What a weird coincidence, eh?! OK, I need suggestions. What places for good books (not talking about the kind you find in chain stores) do we know about that sell books online using Paypal. Paypal is the only means I have of paying for anything on the innernet. I’m trying to do more serious writing, and need to start collecting books for reference because I don’t have the innernet at home, and need often to look things up.

Let’s see how many people I can annoy today. (Someone I like and respect recently called me a “Catholic shock-jock” and my head got THIS BIG!) The Incredulity of St. Thomas, Caravaggio. Because, Caravaggio! One of the things that happens when you Trad (yes, it’s a verb now) is suddenly a lot of your Catholic friends start being inexplicably mean to you and start acting defensive around you. People on whose side you generally thought you were start saying that you’re trying to be “too Catholic” or that you’re going off some sort of deep end.

Priory Church from Benedictine Sisters on Vimeo. ~

Santa Scolastica, from the statue in the Basilica of Sts. Benedict and Scholastica, Norcia. By Hilary   This is the next essay, the more personal one, I just finished for the LateVocations.org site. There’s a ton of work to be done. I’m starting to contact communities and other groups to see if I can have permission to link to them. I’m asking some people in the ladies’ group if they could provide a “my story” kind of autobiographical thing.

What I’ve been working on while not posting much here. A friend has been helping me (…has been doing all the work…) to set up a website to provide information and support to older women seeking a way to live the religious life. It’s an area no one seems to care much about in the Church. I happen to be one of those ladies of a certain age for whom the window closed without resolution.

This just in via Twitter It’s from the twitter page of a school run by the Nashville Dominicans, one of Novusordoism’s “showcase” conservative religious communities. The note accompanying the photo of the half-dressed woman strumming a guitar in the sanctuary, “We celebrated the last iPray of the school year on Friday. Students enjoyed fellowship, adoration and confession!” A lady who follows my Twitter feed sent it to me with the despairing wail, “But these are the Nashville Dominicans!

There are some paintings that are so beautiful they make you want to climb in and stay there. The idea behind religious art is – or was – to depict a world, a reality, so much more important and so much more Real than ours that it reminds you that this world is not the one we’re supposed to desire. Happy Sunday.   ~  

Just some further reading. I’ve been pretty busy in the last week or so doing stuff for $$ on the new nun document. You can read my first bit on it at the Remnant here. “I believe that one of the major causes of the great collapse of Catholicism has been the torpedoing of the religious life. And make no mistake, that was done deliberately, consciously and with great malice. I believe that the two things that had to happen to effect the result we have seen, was the attack first on the Mass and then on the religious.

Made it in! Yeah, I’m using the hotel wifi again and it often inexplicably locks me out of the admin site. Sorry about the comments, if you’ve been leaving them. It’s going to be another week before I can get the wifi thing recharged at home, until which time I’m only doing little bits of things on Twitter and whatnot. But of course, as of yesterday, there’s a lot more to be said.