St. Anthony’s to host exhibit of sacred relics

St. Anthony Catholic Church in Temperance will have an exhibition of sacred relics from 7 to 9 p.m. Wednesday in Kenna Hall, 4605 St. Anthony Rd.

More than 150 artifacts, some thought to be more than 2,000 years old, will be displayed. They will include what are described as pieces of the veil of the Virgin Mary and one of the largest fragments of the True Cross.

Visitors who bring articles of devotion such as holy cards and rosaries will be able to touch them to reliquaries containing the artifacts as a means of intercession. For more information, call the parish office at 734-854-1143.

Relics On Display At Temperance Church

St. Anthony Catholic Church will host an exhibition of sacred relics later this month.

The “Treasurers of the Church” event will take place at 7 p.m. May 22 at Kenna Hall, 4635 St. Anthony Rd., Temperance.

Presented by Father Carlos Martins of the Companions of the Cross, more than 150 relics will be shown with some dating more than 2,000 years old.

Relics are available from St. Maria Goretti, St. Thérèse of Lisieux, the “Little Flower,” St. Francis of Assisi, St. Anthony of Padua, St. Thomas Aquinas, and St. Faustina Kowalska.

A piece of the veil of Our Lady as well as one of the largest remaining pieces of the True Cross in the world will be available to see.

Visitors are encouraged to bring articles of devotion such as rosaries, holy cards and pictures of ill friends and family member, which visitors will be able to touch to the reliquaries as a means of intercession, a news release said.

For more information, call the parish office at 854-1143 or visit www.stanthonytemperance.org.

No to Novena

This is a syndicated post from The Curt Jester. [Read the original article...]

One of the problems I have with novenas is being able to remember to pray them during each of the nine days of if you are doing a novena of novenas during that time frame. So last Friday being a traditional day of starting a novena I remembered that I had recently seen an iOS app designed for novenas and so purchased it. Simply called Novena and priced at $2.99.

There are many ways a mobile application could help with praying a novena as far as scheduling goes. Unfortunately this app came up with none of these ideas. No push notifications. No scheduling. Nothing to track what day of a novena you might be on.

Neither was I impressed by the design of the app. Apparently not much effort went into design and it only worked in portrait mode in one orientation. Being a universal app for the iPhone and iPad it at least supported both platforms. Yet on the iPad the menu was apparently the same as for the iPhone or so just took up a small area at the top right part of the screen.

On the plus side novenas were grouped in several ways that could be useful in finding the one you want. You could also favorite one to easily come back to later. The artwork seems to have been taken from German holy cards and I did like the look of these cards and they did give the look of the app some consistency. Once selecting a novena you were presented with the individual novena and you could select or swipe to a history of the saint involved.

One nice feature was that for each image you could select Symbols to show a text overlay explaining some of the symbolic components in the image.

Overall I was disappointed by this app for missing obvious features and having a poorly designed interface and menu. So if anyone knows of an iOS novena app with push notifications and/or some form of scheduling please let me know.

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Jeffrey Miller (341 Posts)

Patrick Kuhl: I can picture her on the back porch steps

There have been 31 Mother’s Days since my mom died in 1981.

I’m afraid I’m forgetting some of the little things I love about her.

Like the pins and needles I had to watch out for whenever I crawled up in her lap to get a hug. She always had some sewing project going. Making all of her own dresses. Hemming and unhemming and re-hemming hand-me-down pants. Patching holes in jeans knees. Even sewing my sister’s wedding dress.

With eight kids, she never could sit down and do a lot of sewing at one time. Whenever she was interrupted, she just stuck the needle through her dress top, with the thread hanging down, and went about her business. Sometimes there would be two or three needles. You had to be careful when you got close to Mom. But, boy, it was worth it.

There was that homemade soup she always made. I have her recipe and I’ve been trying to duplicate it for all these years. But it’s just not Mom’s Soup. Her most important ingredients were ones you can’t buy in grocery stores.

I can picture her on the back porch steps, snapping snap beans picked fresh from the garden while she watched us play in the backyard.

How she laughed so hard at Red Skelton and rooted so hard for Chester on “Gunsmoke.” I remember how surprised she was years later when she saw Dennis Weaver on another show and he didn’t walk with a limp. I think she might have prayed for his leg to get better.

Being the baby of the family, I had the best seat in the car on summer drives in the country. On Mom’s lap. That was before they invented child car seats.

Who can forget the time she dyed her gray hair and it came out greenish? Or the time she decided to help out Pop and used his clippers to cut my brother’s hair. He wore a cap to school for a week.

I can hear her humming as she hung wash on the line or did any of her endless chores. I think I inherited that. Sometimes my neighbors make fun of me when I’m finished mowing the grass. Who would have thought they could hear “Eight Days a Week” over the roar of the mower?

Every morning, Mom would get up early and make breakfast for Pop and whichever of us eight kids were home at the time, wash the dishes, get kids off to school, maybe start some laundry or other chores. Then everything stopped.

Mom slipped away to the top drawer of her dresser and pulled out a small black book. It was well worn and bulging with stuff that wasn’t part of the book at all. She carried it carefully, with both hands so none of her treasures would fall out, to the kitchen table.

For the next half-hour or so you had to be absolutely quiet. It wasn’t that she demanded it. You did it because you could tell by the look on her face that there was something very important going on here.

Mom would close her eyes and say a prayer or two. She didn’t really need the little black prayer book because she knew them all by heart. Then she opened her eyes and dealt out on the table all the holy cards and letters she had stuffed into the book. Each in its own turn. Each in its own place, like a big game of solitaire.

As she put down each one, she paused and mumbled something. They were little prayers of her own that weren’t printed anywhere in any book.

When I was little, sometimes she let me climb up in a chair and pick them up. She told me about all the people who were in the papers and in her heart.

There were cards in the stack, many with the names of people who had died. She had picked up the cards at their funerals. Her dad. Grandma and Grandpa Kuhl, who died before I was born. A childhood friend. Neighbors. Relatives. I don’t know what she said for each one, but she told me a lot of them were saints now and helping God look after us.

Later on in her life, there were photos of grandkids. A picture of our house in Texas from when they came on a Greyhound bus to visit.

My favorites were a couple of handwritten letters and a photograph of her best friend who became a nun and went off to be a missionary in Africa.

It was my first geography lesson. The nun was in Tanganyika, which isn’t even a country anymore, on the East Coast of Africa.

If I asked, she read me part of a letter. The nun wrote that Tanganyika must be the most beautiful place in the world. She wrote about exotic animals and plants. She talked about how nice the people in her world were even though they were poor and endured much suffering. She asked Mom to pray for them. And she did.

Mom said she thought about becoming a nun and being a missionary, too, when she was young.

I’m glad she didn’t.

In the Nation – Philly.com

A Purple Heart 68 years later

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. – As Army soldier Charles Bledsoe was being loaded onto a Jeep with a gunshot wound to the abdomen nearly 70 years ago, he heard someone say: “Give him his last rites.”

“I looked around to see who that was getting the last rites,” Bledsoe recalled. “I went, ‘The hell.’ It was me.”

Bledsoe recovered, but the April 19, 1945, wound was never recorded on his discharge papers so he hadn’t received a Purple Heart. The oversight was corrected Wednesday, as Sen. Tim Johnson (D., S.D.) presented the 88-year-old World War II veteran with a Purple Heart and Bronze Star in Sioux Falls.

Bledsoe had not really pushed for the medal until about a year ago when he tried to become a member of the Sioux Falls chapter of the Military Order of the Purple Heart.

– AP

Coin toss decides race

CHICAGO – The political fortunes of David De Leshe took a turn for the better Wednesday thanks to a quarter.

De Leshe and Lea Torres were among six candidates vying for three village trustee positions in Stickney, Ill., in the April 9 election, and the two tied for the third spot with 573 votes each.

So a coin toss – won by De Leshe – decided the winner.

“It really goes to say that every vote does count,” De Leshe, a police officer in Lyons, said minutes before the toss at the Cook County Clerk’s Office in downtown Chicago.

Torres, an incumbent, went to the coin toss with a few items she thought would bring her luck – holy cards stowed in her purse, but it was not to be.

– Chicago Tribune

Elsewhere:

People in parts of Colorado and Wyoming pulled puffy jackets out of the closet Wednesday for another round of wet spring snow. Nearly 3 feet was possible in the foothills and mountains of northern Colorado, while about a foot was expected at lower elevations in parts of both states.

With flip of a quarter , tie vote for Stickney village trustee is broken

So a coin toss — won by De Leshe — decided the winner.

“What are the odds (the vote would end in a tie)?” De Leshe, a police officer in Lyons, said minutes before the toss at the Cook County clerk’s office in downtown Chicago. “It really goes to say that every vote does count.”

De Leshe, who is a member of the local school board, was making his first run for the Village Board.

Torres, an incumbent, came to the coin toss with a few items she thought would bring her luck — holy cards stowed away in her purse.

“I carry them with me all the time,” she said.

Before the toss, the candidates’ names were put into two pill bottles, which were placed into a fishbowl. De Leshe’s name was pulled out first, so he got to choose between heads and tails.

When Cook County Clerk David Orr, the designated coin-tosser, was handed a quarter, he joked that more valuable currency should be used for the occasion.

“Where’s the silver dollar, huh?” Orr said. “We’re getting cheaper. I guess we can’t afford the silver dollar.”

De Leshe called heads as Orr flipped the coin, which tumbled to the carpeted floor. And heads it was.

“From this point forward, I’m just going to try breathing a little easier,” De Leshe said. “Most importantly, the village is at stake here.”

Torres still has the option of calling for a discovery recount or filing a lawsuit to contest the election, Orr said. But Torres, a retired Stickney police reserve officer, said she would need to consult first with her attorney. She wasn’t sure if she would continue in politics but planned to remain active in the community and spend time with her nine grandchildren and great-grandchild.

By law, ties are decided in Illinois by “some sort of lottery,” Orr said. “We tend to flip a coin. The good news is it doesn’t happen too often,” though races are often decided by “two, three or four votes,” he said.

In the race for village president in Stickney, Deborah Morelli won by seven votes — a relative landslide.

It’s not the first time a coin toss has decided a tie in Cook County. Orr also flipped coins to determine election winners in 2011 and 2007.

rlevy@tribune.com Twitter @rachael_levy

With flip of a quarter, tie vote for Stickney village trustee is broken

The political fortunes of David De Leshe took a turn for the better Wednesday thanks to a quarter.

De Leshe and Lea Torres were among six candidates vying for three village trustee positions in west suburban Stickney in the April 9 election, and the two tied for the third spot with 573 votes each.

So a coin toss — won by De Leshe — decided the winner.

“What are the odds (the vote would end in a tie)?” De Leshe, a police officer in Lyons, said minutes before the toss at the Cook County clerk’s office in downtown Chicago. “It really goes to say that every vote does count.”

De Leshe, who is a member of the local school board, was making his first run for the Village Board.

Torres, an incumbent, came to the coin toss with a few items she thought would bring her luck — holy cards stowed away in her purse.

“I carry them with me all the time,” she said.

Before the toss, the candidates’ names were put into two pill bottles, which were placed into a fishbowl. De Leshe’s name was pulled out first, so he got to choose between heads and tails.

When Cook County Clerk David Orr, the designated coin-tosser, was handed a quarter, he joked that more valuable currency should be used for the occasion.

“Where’s the silver dollar, huh?” Orr said. “We’re getting cheaper. I guess we can’t afford the silver dollar.”

De Leshe called heads as Orr flipped the coin, which tumbled to the carpeted floor. And heads it was.

“From this point forward, I’m just going to try breathing a little easier,” De Leshe said. “Most importantly, the village is at stake here.”

Torres still has the option of calling for a discovery recount or filing a lawsuit to contest the election, Orr said. But Torres, a retired Stickney police reserve officer, said she would need to consult first with her attorney. She wasn’t sure if she would continue in politics but planned to remain active in the community and spend time with her nine grandchildren and great-grandchild.

By law, ties are decided in Illinois by “some sort of lottery,” Orr said. “We tend to flip a coin. The good news is it doesn’t happen too often,” though races are often decided by “two, three or four votes,” he said.

In the race for village president in Stickney, Deborah Morelli won by seven votes — a relative landslide.

It’s not the first time a coin toss has decided a tie in Cook County. Orr also flipped coins to determine election winners in 2011 and 2007.

rlevy@tribune.com Twitter @rachael_levy

Suburban board election to be decided by coin flip

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With flip of a quarter, tie vote for Stickney village trustee is broken

So a coin toss — won by De Leshe — decided the winner.

“What are the odds (the vote would end in a tie)?” De Leshe, a police officer in Lyons, said minutes before the toss at the Cook County clerk’s office in downtown Chicago. “It really goes to say that every vote does count.”

De Leshe, who is a member of the local school board, was making his first run for the Village Board.

Torres, an incumbent, came to the coin toss with a few items she thought would bring her luck — holy cards stowed away in her purse.

“I carry them with me all the time,” she said.

Before the toss, the candidates’ names were put into two pill bottles, which were placed into a fishbowl. De Leshe’s name was pulled out first, so he got to choose between heads and tails.

When Cook County Clerk David Orr, the designated coin-tosser, was handed a quarter, he joked that more valuable currency should be used for the occasion.

“Where’s the silver dollar, huh?” Orr said. “We’re getting cheaper. I guess we can’t afford the silver dollar.”

De Leshe called heads as Orr flipped the coin, which tumbled to the carpeted floor. And heads it was.

“From this point forward, I’m just going to try breathing a little easier,” De Leshe said. “Most importantly, the village is at stake here.”

Torres still has the option of calling for a discovery recount or filing a lawsuit to contest the election, Orr said. But Torres, a retired Stickney police reserve officer, said she would need to consult first with her attorney. She wasn’t sure if she would continue in politics but planned to remain active in the community and spend time with her nine grandchildren and great-grandchild.

By law, ties are decided in Illinois by “some sort of lottery,” Orr said. “We tend to flip a coin. The good news is it doesn’t happen too often,” though races are often decided by “two, three or four votes,” he said.

In the race for village president in Stickney, Deborah Morelli won by seven votes — a relative landslide.

It’s not the first time a coin toss has decided a tie in Cook County. Orr also flipped coins to determine election winners in 2011 and 2007.

rlevy@tribune.com Twitter @rachael_levy

Christian Brands Responds to Boston Marathon Bombing: Donates Rosaries to …

Phoenix, AZ, April 20, 2013 –(PR.com)– While horrific events like the Boston Marathon bombing can tear families and lives apart, they can also bring people and communities together. Such is the case for a Valley company, Christian Brands, which recently announced it will donate 3,000 rosaries and holy cards to the Boston Catholic Diocese to distribute.

Christian Brands has provided religious products and services to consumers, churches and faith-based organizations locally and nationally for more than half a century. Much of their success is attributed to their commitment and involvement in the community from every level of the company. When compelling events like the tragedy that unfolded April 15, in Boston, it left only one question for the company: how to respond in a meaningful way.

“We know how important it is to come together as a community when tragedies like this strike and we want to do what we can to help in the healing process,” said owner, Paul DiGiovanni.

DiGiovanni added, “If this small gesture can provide some comfort to the many who are struggling to cope physically and emotionally with the attack, we feel compelled to help. The entire Boston and marathon community is in our thoughts and prayers during this trying time.”

Christian Brands, Inc., and its family of inspirational product companies include Autom, Living Grace, Milagros, Heartfelt, Will Baumer and Creed is family owned and operated since 1948 and is located at 5226 S. 31st Place, Phoenix, Arizona and on the Web at www.christianbrands.com.