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.
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.
If I had to pick one pro-life organization for you to support it would be visitation house:
You would think that a place that has taken in pregnant woman and housed then and educated them through their pregnancies’ and their child’s 1st year and has done so for a decade would be better known.
That’s not allowed, because it shatters the narratives of the left to pieces
Their web site his here. Their big fundraising dinner is April 18th. Go yourself or pay for someone to go.
4th Doctor: I was thinking in terms of a psychological barrier. It’s cheap, efficient and energy saving,
One of the great advantages of being Sicilian ,other than the excellent genes that you get when your ancestors come from an area that just about everybody in the world conquered at one time or another, is the fear factor.
There are still a few Italians in general and Sicilians in particular who get angry that when people hear “Italian” or “Sicilian” they think “Mafia” because they don’t like the stereotype of being considered gangsters applied to them.
Most of the Sicilians I know not only don’t care but actually like it for two reasons.
They don’t give a damn what other people think
There is a large advantage in life if nobody wants to mess with you
If any person who might cheat or harm you is afraid that there is a large organization that might choose to take revenge on them for doing so and that said organization may take said revenge even years after the fact in a most unpleasant way said people tend to decide it’s a much better idea to look for easier marks.
It takes away the tension every time you have to start your car.
Now consider for a moment Jews in General and the State of Israel in particular.
From 70AD till 1947 a period of 1877 years there was no state of Israel or Jewish state. Even when Israel had kings and rulers it’s status as an international power pretty much ended with the death of Solomon centuries before the Romans or the Greeks or even the Persians extended their empires to include the Holy Land.
As for the Jewish people while you might have some Jewish quarters in cities in various countries Jews as a total population of most areas were in fact nominal. The only reason why you tended to notice Jews in quantity in an area is the same reason why most Americans notice Rhode Island license plates on cars. While they might be common in Massachusetts & Connecticut in the rest of the country they’re a rare sight.
Even today the total number of Jews in the world based on 2023 figures is only 17 million. That’s barely over 3/10’s of 1% of the worlds population. Even in the US which has the highest number of Jews in the world (barely edging out Israel) has only 7.4 million Jews out of a population of over 330 million people, under 3% of the population. Even in Israel Jews make up only 80% of the population of the Jewish state.
Meanwhile as a population that was hated by many and collectively blamed for the crucifixion of Christ based on a bad interpretation of a gospel verse (Matt 27:25) that went beyond Christ’s prophecy (Luke 18:41-44) on it’s effect, Jews who excelled tended to stand out in a population again because there were so few relatively speaking.
And none of those points even touch on the holocaust.
So consider. You are the Jews, you’ve somehow become the only ancient nation to survive to the 20th century. Your capital falls during the days of the Roman empire but you stay united as a people. You finally get your nation back seventeen centuries later in 1948 after a bloody war and you finally regain your historical capital Jerusalem in 1967 after beating three enemy armies in six days but you remain a nation and people who are:
Historically hated
Incredibly tiny both in population & size
Surrounded by nations whose populations want you dead
Marked for death by one of the worlds largest religions
BUT considered sly
How do you keep from being destroyed?
Well having a strong sponsor with the largest population of Jews in the world (the US) helps but they are thousands of miles away. You can develop an excellent war industry and tech industry and various innovations to make your country wealthy but even that is not enough. You need to convince people that you have an almost superhuman reach to get to your enemies.
That’s where a Tucker Carlson et/al come in.
If you want to convince the world that your tiny nation is a nation of bad asses who you don’t want to mess with it really helps a lot if you have a member of the media widely known with a huge following telling anyone who will listen that you are this insidious power who manages to manipulate all kinds of things in the world and responsible for all sorts of things.
While Carlson’s rants might increase hatred among a population that already doesn’t care much for you what it also does is reinforce the idea that messing with you might not be the wisest move in the world.
It’s true that if your enemies are part of a giant suicide cult which is a fair description of radical Islam it might not completely stop the odd bomber or assassin but there is a reason why millions of Muslims men of military age who hate Israel and Jews are in England and Europe rather than in the middle east carrying weapons.
It’s because thanks to those ops and the loud “Israel controls the world” crowd like Tucker they would rather scream “Death to the Jews” far far away from a safe distance. It’s a psychological barrier that only a few dare to cross.
Frankly if folks like Tucker didn’t exist I’d expect the Mossad to create them.
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