I am VERY pleased to note that the Serra Boston site is now live at: www.serraboston.org

As noted on the home page, Serra Boston’s mission is “to assist the Vocations Office of the Archdiocese of Boston in any way possible to foster, promote and support vocations to the priesthood and religious life.” The first meeting is Saturday, January 19, 2008 at 8am at St. Mary’s Parish in Waltham, MA.

This is one of the best sites I’ve done; the code is very well structured and I’ve used Google Sitemaps to (hopefully) increase traffic.  Hopefully it’ll serve as a good portfolio piece in addition to an important web presence for this new (but growing) organization.

In honor of the Feast Day of Blessed Miguel Pro, I’ve uploaded a few images to Flickr showing the site of his martyrdom in present-day Mexico City. The photos were taken in 2005.

Here is a cartoon showing the basics of Blessed Miguel Pro’s life and martyrdom. There are other biographies available on the web, but this gives the basics of his life and martrydom. It also seemed like an appropriate way of showing his life in a visual site like Flickr.

Here are actual photographs of Blessed Miguel Pro’s martrydom.

There are 3 photos (clockwise from upper left):

1. Blessed Miguel Pro’s last request was to be allowed to kneel and pray before his execution.

2. Declining the customary blindfold, Blessed Miguel Pro stands with arms outstretched in imiation of Christ on the cross. As he dies, he yells &161;Vivo Cristo Rey” (Long live Christ the King).

3. When the initial shots of the firing squad failed to kill him, a soldier shot him point blank in the head.

When in Mexico, we tried to find the actual site where this martrydom took place. As you can see in the next photos in this set, it can be somewhat hard to find.

The following photo iis a bank in Mexico – the site of Blessed Miguel Pro’s martyrdom is actually to the left of this building (as you’re facing it), down a side street.

The next photo shows the wall holding the plaque which commemorates the site of Miguel Pro’s martrydom.  It’s somewhat hard to find – the plaque is in the upper left, almost behind a metal pipe which contains electric wires running up the wall.

The next two photos show the plaque in more detail – the first shows the plaque itself, and the second shows the photo as it appeared in 2005.

The plaque is a bit misleading – the actual site of the martyrdom is across the street, below a staircase. Other than this plaque there is no indication that this is the site of Blessed Miguel Pro’s martrydom.

If you’re looking at the plaque and you turn around, you see the staircase shown in the photo below. Blessed Miguel Pro was apparently shot at the spot shown below, just below the staircase.

¡VIVO CRISTO REY!

For more information on Blessed Miguel Pro, see the following sites:

• Blessed Miguel Pro
• Wikipedia entry (with photos)
• Catholic Online entry on Blessed Miguel Pro

Serra Boston is now online: http://www.serraboston.org

More to come.

Last Thursday I had the pleasure of going to a “Theology on Tap” at Bad Abbott‘s in Quincy, MA, to hear Cardinal Sean O’Malley offer a few words for young adults. The Cardinal gave an excellent speech and Q&A, which covered his early priesthood, the need for courage and discipleship, the need for Catholic community, and quotes from Graham Greene and St. Augustine.

The local media coverage of this event (check out WBZ’s coverage here) tended to simplify the Cardinal’s excellent talk – “Cardinal Sean goes to local bar, tells kids to turn off the TV and go to Church.” While it’s impossible to condense all of the Cardinal’s speech into a single sound bite, I think the media tended to portray the event as Cardinal Sean’s attempt to simply “revive attendance at Church” (as Keller says in the clip above). Most of the media didn’t mention that a lot of the young adults were already pretty dedicated to the church and asked some excellent and thoughtful questions, rather than being surprised at a cardinal in their local watering hole.

I was fortunate to sit in the front row, and I took a few video clips of his speech. Here are some links:

Intro: http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=5817752200747168297&hl=en

Speech: http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=-2718382783437944078&hl=en (Speech is about 40 minutes long but is excellent)

Q&A 1: http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=5417439106441473392&hl=en

Q&A 2: http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=-3159251886096866001&hl=en

Q&A 3: http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=-1238687512562623979&hl=en

Q&A 4: http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=902358379646954255&hl=en

Q&A 5: http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=-4574755861908795577&hl=en

Visit Cardinal Sean’s blog for other great photos and video from Cardinal Sean. I especially like his pictures of the Orthodox churches in St. Petersburg.

Finished Harry Potter last Sunday. It’s the best book in the series; not without its flaws, but an incredibly engaging read.

Time posted an interesting editorial on the atheistic nature of Harry Potter:

Harry Potter lives in a world free of any religion or spirituality of any kind. He lives surrounded by ghosts but has no one to pray to, even if he were so inclined, which he isn’t. Rowling has more in common with celebrity atheists like Christopher Hitchens than she has with Tolkien and Lewis.

What does Harry have instead of God? Rowling’s answer, at once glib and profound, is that Harry’s power comes from love. This charming notion represents a cultural sea change. In the new millennium, magic comes not from God or nature or anything grander or more mystical than a mere human emotion. In choosing Rowling as the reigning dreamer of our era, we have chosen a writer who dreams of a secular, bureaucratized, all-too-human sorcery, in which psychology and technology have superseded the sacred.

More here.

I read this (spoiler-free) article before reading the book, and as I read the book I was struck by the “sacramental” nature of Harry Potter’s magic. Although it’s true there is no God (though Harry does say “Thank God” at least once, and the nature of souls is discussed at length), there is a strong emphasis on the idea that our actions have meaning beyond the physical world. Character’s choices and especially their decision to protect, love, and kill others factors heavily into the plot and the “magic” of the world.

Voldemort (like Milton’s Satan) is twisted into an evil form because of his choice to hate; Harry is protected and powerful because of his mother’s sacrifice of love. Characters in the novel often find that their actions (love vs. hate) dictate who they are, and the decision to perform “evil spells” (adava kedavra, imperio, etc) can have serious effects on one’s soul and outward appearance. Dark magic in the book is literally dark: the villains dress in black, appear in dark locations, and often have a snakelike or bedraggled appearance.

Often a character is surprised to learn that his or her actions have affected their personality, without their realizing it. I was reminded a bit of Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, which proclaims that our bodies are a sacrament and what we do with our bodies shows how we treat this sacrament. This is not to say that Theology of the Body is just a form of Catholic magic, but it’s interesting to see how this supposedly atheistic text reflects the sacramental nature of reality.