Should Acutis later be credited with the second miracle necessary for sainthood, supporters have suggested he could become the Patron Saint of the internet -- though there already is one, 7th-century scholar Isidore de Seville.Here's the Wikipedia article on Isidore de Seville. It says: "The Order of St. Isidore of Seville... a chivalric order formed on 1 January 2000. An international organisation... aims to honour Saint Isidore as patron saint of the Internet...." So I wonder if it's true that this man of the 7th century is already the Patron Saint of the Internet. There's a link to this 2002 Wired article:
A group of Vatican elders is angling to give the Internet a patron saint – a holy helper with a dedicated connection to the Divine. The church's leading candidate is a seventh-century Spanish encyclopedist, Saint Isidore of Seville (560-636). A theologian and a scholar, Isidore was best known for his massive, 20-volume Etymologiae, an attempt at compiling all the world's knowledge, covering grammar, medicine, law, geography, agriculture, theology, cooking and all points between....
Discordantly enough, Isidore was "the last scholar of the ancient world," according to the Wikipedia article. Most impressive to me is that he invented 3 punctuation marks: the period, the comma, and the colon! Is that really true? I found this — "The mysterious origins of punctuation" (BBC):
Aristophanes’ breakthrough was to suggest that readers could annotate their documents, relieving the unbroken stream of text with dots of ink aligned with the middle (·), bottom (.) or top (·) of each line. His ‘subordinate’, ‘intermediate’ and ‘full’ points corresponded to the pauses of increasing length that a practised reader would habitually insert between formal units of speech called the comma, colon and periodos. This was not quite punctuation as we know it – Aristophanes saw his marks as representing simple pauses rather than grammatical boundaries....
When the Romans overtook the Greeks as the preeminent empire-builders of the ancient world, they abandoned Aristophanes’ system of dots without a second thought.... The cult of public speaking was a strong one, to the extent that all reading was done aloud: most scholars agree that the Greeks and Romans got round their lack of punctuation by murmuring aloud as they read through texts of all kinds.... Whereas pagans had always passed along their traditions and culture by word of mouth, Christians preferred to write down their psalms and gospels.... Books became an integral part of the Christian identity...
In the 6th Century, Christian writers began to punctuate their own works long before readers got their hands on them in order to protect their original meaning. Later, in the 7th Century, Isidore of Seville... described an updated version of Aristophanes’ system in which he rearranged the dots in order of height to indicate short (.), medium (·) and long (·) pauses respectively. Moreover, Isidore explicitly connected punctuation with meaning for the first time: the re-christened subdistinctio, or low point (.), no longer marked a simple pause but was rather the signpost of a grammatical comma, while the high point, or distinctio finalis (·), stood for the end of a sentence.
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Sorry, have you not heard of St. Al of Tennessee?
As a Christian and a Roman Catholic, I have to say that it saddens me how much enjoyment the poor man who is Pope Francis takes in making and repeating insults.
If you do not know much about his history, he is famous for being one of the most foul-mouthed Popes in history, and that is not a good thing. He is also well-known for engaging in vicious insults, and that also is not a good thing. He speaks often of mercy and of love, but he betrays himself when he comes up with, or excitedly repeats, hurtful insults.
"people want to be originals but die as photocopies" is one thing from a 15 year old dying from leukemia, from whom it is sort of eloquent - one can imagine him seeing himself as dying that way, as a lucky original - but an old fat (and, one fairly assumes, gluttonous) man should not gloatingly repeat it.
Actually, all of us, no matter who we are, are ready at any moment to listen to the call of God. There are great saints who were, as poor Bergoglio so coldly repeated, "photocopies" until the last moment of their lives, at which point they accepted the fact that they were created by God and were always loved by God.
It does no good to make fun of people as "photocopies": every sinner is unique in the eyes of God, and there are very few saints among us, and even those saints are not so wonderful that they should mock people as "photocopies":
I don't think a saint would do so, unless the saint was a teenager ---- any grown-up saint who did so would be someone who is, with pride unbecoming an adult, mocking creatures - children of God - who, at this moment, are just a moment away from being true children of God.
And none of us know what the state of anyone's soul was at the moment of death. So let's not mock those who have passed away.
Memento etiam Domine famularum .... qui nos preacesserunt ....
(Let us remember the fellow souls who passed away before us)
So, the best plan is not to become known as an unkind old man who rejoices in, and repeats, every new insult he comes across in his old-man reading and in his elderly conversation. If you have a Christian point to make, and you are a well-fed old man, you should make it with kindness, not with words of scorn.
Call not your sibling Raqqa.
[Individual] Diversity, progress, and convergence.
I believe Dr. Evil’s father invented the question mark.
This reeks of the kind of desperation to be relevant to the kids I witnessed in the 60s, mostly from youngish Protestatnt ministers (though obviously, as noted by Paul Simon, Catholics had their radical priests desperate to get on the cover of Newsweek, too).
Will there be a St. Carlo equivalent to the St. Christopher medal every surfer used to sport?
>>Internet and computer-mad youngster Carlo Acutis, who died of leukaemia in 2006 aged 15, was placed on the path to sainthood after the Vatican ruled he had miraculously saved another boy's life.
The Vatican claims he interceded from heaven in 2013 to cure a Brazilian boy suffering from a rare pancreatic disease.
That leaves him just one miracle away from becoming the world's first millennial saint.<<
No problem, they'll throw another miracle together right away. And certainly for a good cause - a hip computer saint.
What a preposterous load of contrived mystical cult nonsense.
This is why Catholics either aren't going to church, or are turning to traditional services.
The pope is a commie.
How do Catholics know when Satan is behind a miracle?
I had heard that the exclamation mark and question mark evolved from the rear view of a cat that was either startled or curious, depending on how it carried its tail.
It'd be a miracle if his website worked.
www.carloacutis.com
"EUCHARISTIC MIRACLES" Exhibition. Learn about the International Exhibition of Eucharistic Miracles created and designed by the Servant of God Carlo Acutis ...
"The connection has timed out
The server at www.carloacutis.com is taking too long to respond."
Most impressive to me is that he invented 3 punctuation marks: the period, the comma, and the colon!
Wiki says he "reported" on the Greek komma, kōlon and periodos.
Speaking of Greeks, "The ablest race of whom history bears record is unquestionably the ancient Greek, partly because their master-pieces in the principal departments of intellectual activity are still unsurpassed, and in many respects unequalled, and partly because the population that gave birth to the creators of those master-pieces was very small."
"'Whereas pagans had always passed along their traditions and culture by word of mouth, Christians preferred to write down their psalms and gospels.... Books became an integral part of the Christian identity...'"
Really? And the Jews before them? Those books, psalms, testaments, and writings had no influence on Christian identity? How about the penchant of Babylonian Scribes, who trained the great scribes (the SOPHRIM) of Jewish tradition and the Ionian Greeks?
Well, that's the BBC. Never miss a chance to write the Jews out of history.
I prefer to think of myself as a limited edition lithograph of a forgotten artist. My insignificance is not without depth or mystery.
If the Brazilian's pancreatic disease is so rare, how can they be sure that it didn't go into remission by itself? Nearly every disease does this, but often in a vanishingly small percentage of cases.
Answer: They don't want to be sure: Maybe Carlo was just lucky.
Parsimony is a terrible thing, if you're a religious believer.
Personally, I'd rather be lucky than a be saint.
For Catholic sainthood, three miracles are required, and at least one of them must not be a card trick.
Compare with Greta Thunberg.
@ Daniel Jackson
No kidding.
Well, that's the BBC. Never miss a chance to write the Jews out of history.
Tear down their temples, burn their books, scatter their children to the ends of the Earth. They're a deplorable minority. Bitter clingers. All the world's finest leftists have said that again, and again, and again.
Miracle is in the eye of the beholder. I'm not seeing it.
"...and at least one of them must not be a card trick.
: )
Or catching every green light between your house and the freeway when you're late for work...
So, do bears still shit in the woods?
When the saints come marching in...
It's little more that the Catholic Church's version of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (and me whose internet name is one of the great saints!). Good for Carlos!
This kind of thing makes me agree with many of the things Martin Luther had to say about what we now call the Catholic church.
The Sumerians and the Egyptians also had pretty long written traditions. Only the priests and scribal elite could read and write them, but that was much the case for Christianity in Western Europe until the late medieval/early renaissance when they finally started making Bibles in the local languages and not just Latin.
Blogger tcrosse said...
I had heard that the exclamation mark and question mark evolved from the rear view of a cat that was either startled or curious, depending on how it carried its tail.
That's so good it doesn't matter if it's true or not.
"He saw that many young people, wanting to be different, really end up being like everyone else... As a result, Carlo said, 'everyone is born as an original, but many people end up dying as photocopies.'"
Said
Carlo may have been a good person, his too early death a sad tragedy, but as a thinker, he sounds like a typical teenager. Of course our pope finds this sublime, he all too often thinks like a teenager too.
Barack should be a recipient of sainthood. He already has performed a miracle of world peace, and now would perform the miracle of getting a almost dead white man into the White House.
"He saw that many young people, wanting to be different, really end up being like everyone else” Well, yes: it remains cool to be a rebel, as it has for many decades. It’s just that so many of these rebels happen to be very conformist rebels: like all the other rebels they like their rebel tunes and their rebel attitudes and their sense of belonging to tribe "rebel."
I suppose there’s some insight here, yet the social pressures that generate these legions of conforming rebels are hardly new. It’s as though “rebel” become a brand, a popular brand, against which one can rebel against only at very high personal cost (at least as such costs are calculated by adolescents).
I was told by my pothead roomie in college that I should never do drugs, because I was already too weird. One of the best compliments I've ever received.
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