The best non-decision my wife and I ever made still remains not moving to the Portland Oregon area after our Honeymoon there 33 years ago but I’m thinking giving Anna Maria a miss twelve years ago comes in as a pretty solid second.
We interrupt our coverage of Pintastic NE to revisit an issue from the very earliest days of this blog.
Back in 2009 my oldest son was looking at colleges. Having gone to a Catholic Grammar school and a Catholic High School the idea of attending a Catholic College like Anna Maria which offered him a scholarship seemed attractive…right up until I visited the place.
There were pictures celebrating the new president all over the place, banners celebrating diversity, announcements of the woman’s study courses but nothing on the March for Life later this month in Washington. The concert was a “holiday” concert. In the Anna Maria in the news bulletin board at the admissions office there was an article talking about protesting the pope in the US. That was the extent of any recent mention of religion.
The Chapel is downstairs at basement level, its a nice enough place and the corridor leading once one goes downstairs does feel Catholic but it seems to be hidden in order to make sure it doesn’t offend anyone. It’s Gene Robinson all over again:
Whoever is ashamed of me and of my words, the Son of Man will be ashamed of when he comes in his glory and in the glory of the Father and of the holy angels.
It’s a real question how many out of 1100 students would know this quote from Luke. Actually the question isn’t that hard, we met with the campus ministry people just before leaving, there are 10 active people in Campus ministry and about that many show up for Mass regularly.
It would be nice if there was at least one picture of the Pope displayed prominently. It would be nicer if Catholic identity actually meant something. I’ve spent much more than I can afford over the last 10 years giving my sons a Catholic education. If I’m going to spend a whole lot more for a Catholic College then I expect a Catholic College.
They were very committed to deemphasize the faith & emphasize diversity, as I wrote to the Bishop after receiving a letter from him suggesting a Catholic education at Anna Maria:
I can’t reconcile your description of Anna Maria with what I saw and I can’t believe you would make that description after visiting the college yourself. While academically I believe it would be strong I don’t believe attending would foster his faith, in fact I suspect if he choose to wear his faith proudly it would go hard on him there.
Lucky for Sam and us Fitchburg State College has offered a full scholarship which will allow him to live at home and remain in our parish as well. This would seem to be much more conducive to both his Academic and spiritual development.
Well Sam ended up attending Fitchburg State, he has a good job and I’m pleased to say his Catholic faith and his brother’s who he shares a house with remains strong. In fact this past Easter Vigil his brother was sponsor to a new Catholic who was one of 8 baptized and 14 confirmed and welcomed into the faith, the most I’ve ever seen at such a mass in my life.
A second Massachusetts liberal arts college this month has announced it will close, underscoring the mounting financial strain facing small, tuition-dependent schools.
Anna Maria College in Paxton said Thursday that it will shutter at the end of the semester after what officials described as an “exhaustive review” of its finances. The decision follows a similar announcement earlier this month from Hampshire College in Amherst.
“Like many small, tuition-dependent institutions, Anna Maria has faced structural challenges driven by declining enrollment and rising costs in the years following the pandemic,” the college said in a statement.
You see Anna Maria is or was, as it soon will be described, indistinguishable from all the other secular colleges out there competing for students. Meanwhile as faith continues to surge in America Catholic parents are seeing Catholic colleges that actually promote the faith.
It speaks volumes that the article doesn’t initially describe Anna Maria as a Catholic college but as a liberal arts college which makes these paragraphs particularly ironic:
Founded in 1946 by the Sisters of Saint Anne as a women’s college, Anna Maria later became coeducational and operated for decades as a private Catholic liberal arts institution.
“The Board of Trustees reached this decision only after pursuing every realistic alternative. We are heartbroken,” Board Chair David Trainor said in a statement. “The legacy of the Sisters of Saint Anne, and of every faculty member and staff person who carried their spirit forward, will endure in every graduate this institution has ever produced.”
The college choose to place their bet on the secular world than with the Catholic traditions of the Sisters of St. Anne and at the time of my visit with the election of Barack Obama that might have seemed a good bet.
Alas they forget that Christ’s Catholic Church has outlasted the Roman Empire, the British Empire, the Spanish Empire, the Nazi Empire, the Soviet Union and the Napoleonic Empire whose Emperor once declared to Cardinal Ercole Consal his ability to destroy the Catholic church if he wished to. The Cardinal answered thus:
Your Majesty, you would be making a useless effort. You would be defeated. We, the priests and Christians, with our weaknesses and infidelities, have not succeeded in destroying the Church! And would you like to do it?.
Now it will outlast Anna Maria College. I can’t say the college’s fate is a surprise, but I will not cheer as any time the enemy manages to compromise a Catholic institution it’s a defeat for us all. That defeat predates the closing of the institution by many years.
The single most important thing about Pintastic NE are of course the pinball machines that people bring for others to play. The various pinball clubs (There were 4 at the convention) all brought their own machines for their club rooms. The extra ball lounge consists of games brought by Gabe D’Annunzio (whose interview will be the final Pintastic blog post I make in this series) and I’ve already talked about Tycoon Pinball out of NH and the games they brought.
But when it comes down to sheer volume of games EMP Pinball (Electromagnetic Pinball Museum) annually knocks it out of the park
You really need to go to Pawtucket and check them out: I never got a chance to talk to Michael & Emily this year as they were even more flat out than normal but as I mentioned in this video there are plenty of such interviews by me over the last decade that you can find. (Here is one from Pintastic 2021)
But one thing that you don’t see as much from EMP are the brand new games and that’s where the vendors who sell those new games come in. I talked to Matt one of those vendors. He just purchased Pixels and Pinball who had a bunch of new machines:
I have maintained that Pinball is an art, there is the actual artwork on the machines. The physical design of the machines, the art of the programing, the art of the story.
Today’s videos are of two different artists. One new to Pintastic Leo Reinhart:
I think it’s very appropriate for a pinball convention having a piece of art with balls being moved via gravity causing things to react. If they were pinballs instead of marbles it would have been perfect.
Our 2nd artist is someone who we have featured before and has been with Pintastic NE since the very start, our old friend Maggie the Clown:
As Pintastic has gotten bigger the number of kids have increased so Maggie becomes an even more important part of the show on Saturdays. She still owns the camera every time I see her there.
Yesterday we showed a video of a mod to an old EM Pinball machine. Today we see a significant mod to a much newer pinball machine, the excellent Fish Tales:
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