seminary

The 'Souls and Goals' soccer match is now in its third year! The Kenrick-Glennon Seminary Lions will battle against the Clergy and Company team (comprised of a bunch of priests and a few friends, like me!).

The game will be held at St. Dominic High School on Thursday, November 5, with a kickoff at 7 p.m. The game is free to anyone, and concessions will be available. More info is available on the Souls and Goals website (with a fresh new design for 2015).

I'll be playing in goal again this year (as part of the 'and Company' on the Clergy side), wearing my Vatican-yellow jersey! The Seminarians won the past two Cups—we'll see if we can pull off a victory this year!

Update: Photographs from the game were posted online by one of the game's photographers: 2014 - Souls and Goals.

Yours truly, sitting down on the job. Image from the St. Louis Review.

It's almost time again for what is now an annual tradition—the 'Souls and Goals' soccer match in St. Louis, where the seminary soccer team will play against a team of 'clergy and company'; last year's match was a close game until late in the second half, when the Kenrick-Glennon Seminary Lions took a 2-0 lead and with it, the cup.

[Update: There is now a simple website where the latest information can be found: Souls and Goals.org.]

On November 7, 2013, there will be a soccer match between 'clergy and company' (archdiocesan priests, a bishop, and some of their friends) and the Kenrick-Glennon Seminary Lions (the seminary's soccer team) at St. Dominic High School.

The match is free and open to all the faithful in the Archdiocese, and will be a friendly match with concessions, some special visitors, and prayers for vocations.

Details:

Through Facebook, I discovered this great video on one young man's experience as an altar server:

I definitely agree that the altar server can distract from the liturgy if he is not focused on his duty, and that priests should encourage the use of cassocks and surplices instead of albs. A large reason for my joining the Seminary was my experience as an altar server, assisting some very humble priests who were great representatives of the Church and very close to Jesus—and this was reinforced by how reverent and dedicated they were to the celebration of Holy Mass.

Starting today, I'm going to be slowly working on:

1. Upgrading some of my older sites to a newer version of Drupal.
2. Rethinking where I post about certain things.

With regard to the latter point, I'm going to start focusing more on life, religion, philosophy, and such things on this particular blog, while I will focus more on technology (and web development in particular) on my Midwestern Mac, LLC site.

I've hit a point where I think I'll start putting a few sites I maintain on mothballs (much like I have my old 2002-era Latin website, the Duel of the Seminarians site, et all).

I finally had time to read through a brief article on St. Thomas Aquinas (great patron!) major seminary in Nairobi, Kenya—a seminary with computers disconnected from the Internet, mostly because the $8,000 USD fee to wire the building is outside the limits of the seminary's budget.

I'm guessing the post's author decided to focus on the Internet (or lack thereof) in order to draw readers' attention (I guess it worked, since I'm mentioning the article...), but the best part of the article was in the last paragraph.

Msgr. Francis Blood (director of the Mission Office here in the Archdiocese of St. Louis) asked Cardinal John Njue about what his priorities should be for sending missionary support to Nairobi. Cardinal Njue responds:

Well, at long last, here is the posting I promised earlier. I'll begin with our morning Mass:

The Morning

After departing from the hotel, all the 100+ seminarians from Kenrick-Glennon Seminary went over to Archbishop Stepinac High School for Mass; the chapel was very nice, especially considering how little room for decoration there was. We then proceeded to the Yonkers raceway, which was converted from a raceway into a large parking lot full of charter busses and youth waiting to be ferried over to St. Joseph's Seminary (also called Dunwoodie).

At the Seminary

(Note: I wrote this posting on the bus, but only recently was able to post it to the blog due to a lack of Internet access...) I'm back on a bus again, and just three hours ago I was saying hello to Pope Benedict along with around 25,000 seminarians, religious, priests and youth at the Youth and Seminarian Rally at St. Joseph's Seminary in Yonkers, New York. I don't have the time (or the energy) to work on all the pictures right now (including pictures of all the performers on stage before the Pope's arrival), but I will post them all as soon as I can. For now, please pray for a timely and safe return for al those travelling back home today.

I received in my mailbox this morning:

Please be aware that you've exceeded 75% of your .Mac data transfer quota for the current period. At the current rate you may exceed your quota, especially if you have received this email towards the start of a two-week monitoring period (the 1st or the 16th of the month).

So, I've moved the Duel of the Seminarians video file to another server, and I have made the 'Watch the Movie' page a little less bandwidth-intense, by simply putting three links: one for a Google Video version, one for a YouTube version, and one for a direct video download.