Fr. James Power of the Boston Archdiocese

admin — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 21:45:40 +0000

"What do you say to a priest who's been barred from pursuing his vocation for 7 years, if you realize there's no substantial evidence to support the disciplinary action taken against him? Oops? Sorry?"

I’m finally on Twitter

admin — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 23:42:40 +0000

I finally joined Twitter a few days ago when Father John Zuhlsdorf started experimenting with it. It's actually pretty neat. Twitter hosts millions of decentralized micro communities. I started to follow Father Zuhlsdorf and then started to follow some of his followers and then their followers quickly joining in a growing network of faithful Catholics. Many of these people started to follow me back. Quick Tip: Twitter makes it hard to search for people. The search link is way down in the footer of the page. There's a free application called Tweet Deck to organize the tweets on your desktop. Another interesting concept is the hash tag such as #catholic or #TCOT. I can enter #catholic in the Twitter search field and find tweets (posts of 140 characters or less) from people using that #catholic hash tag. This led me to other faithful Catholics. Many of these faithful Catholics also followed anything Mac. I'm a Mac geek, so I followed the big names in the Mac world from there. Another interesting use of Twitter happened right after the election on November 28. A couple of Reagan Republicans started the #TCOT hash tag. #TCOT is Top Conservatives on Twitter organized to link conservatives together to deal with the next four years of the Obama presidency. I'm planning a new website for first-time Catholic novelists and currently working with a site designer. In the meantime, I'm going to ask my Twitter followers pointed questions about what causes them to stop reading a novel or what keeps them turning pages. I haven't promoted the Priests in Crisis Blog blog on Twitter although I link to it in my Twitter profile. I looked at my web analytics software and saw a steady stream of targeted traffic coming in from Twitter.com Cool! One of my Twitter followers who discovered this Priests in Crisis blog mentioned it in her own blog: Homeschool Goodies - Resources for Catholic Homeschoolers Here's where some of the Catholic spark plugs are on Twitter Father John Zuhlsdorf @fatherz Father Roderick @FatherRoderick The American Papist @americanpapist The Curt Jester @CurtJester Patrick Madrid @patrickmadrid Our Sunday Visitor @OSV Pope Benedict XVI (ok, not really him) @popebenedictxvi EWTN @EWTN Me (not a spark plug) @SuzanneSadler TwiTip is a blog that explains anything Twitter Now I'm off to figure out Plurk . . . Leave a comment with your Twitter address or to recommend more faithful Catholic spark plugs!

Fr. John Zuhlsdorf: Christmas Gifts for Priests

admin — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 21:11:13 +0000

Fr. John Zuhlsdorf: "There are a lot of priests who bear a profound sense of isolation. Of course many are extremely active and social and sought after by their own families and others, but many have little or no family. They effectively have no one. Even other priests. So I say this not just for Christmastime, but for the whole year: Don’t forget your priests. Even small gestures toward them can make a difference."