Why should I be the only one to have this song running through my head ALL DAY on this feast every year?

The Weekly Roman Observer has posted a fifth podcast interview with me on Apple’s iTunes service. They’re all downloadable from the same page.

Apologies for the lateness of this notice. While I was traveling around the eastern United States, my fellow patristiblogger Al Kimel went and got ordained to the Catholic priesthood.

Patristic Carnival is open for browsing at Phil’s place.

Son Michael wants you to know that he has upgraded the main image on my home page. (He’s the photographer.) Now it has gray hairs.

Through this month of October, Father Z has been running a series of profound meditations from the Fathers on the mysteries of the Rosary. He calls it The Patristic Rosary Project. His most recent number is the second Sorrowful Mystery, Scourging of Our Lord, and for this he calls to witness Augustine, Ambrose, and Cyril of Jerusalem. Please don’t miss this outstanding work.

I hereby risk my standing as a patristiblogger — since Father Z himself coined the term! — by issuing the positively retrograde, pre-blogospheric challenge for him to move these meditations into book form.

Happy Catholic tagged me for this All Saints/Halloween Meme.

If you were invited to a Halloween/ All Saints Day Costume Party, which saint would you dress up as and why? (The Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, is not an option.)
Well, since the BVM is out, I guess I’d choose Anthony of Egypt, because then I could just stay home.

Which saint or other person would accompany you to the party?
Assuming I was — as Anthony was, on occasion — dragged into the city despite my preference for staying home, I’d probably take Jerome. That way, we’d get thrown out of the party together, shortly after my companion’s first conversation.

What famous quote would help others identify you?
“A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him saying, ‘You are mad, you are not like us.'”

Describe your costume.
Whatever skins I could pull off road-kill, as clean as possible, stitched together in an orderly way. Abundant beard and hair.

Which movie or film best depicts the life of this saint?
Lots of paintings, but no movie that I know of.

What is your favorite book written about this saint or that he or she has written?
It’s a tie. Athanasius: The Life of Anthony and The Sayings of the Desert Fathers.

Last week, blogger Huw Raphael at Sarx noted the proximity of the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary in the Roman calendar (October 7) and the feast of the Protection of the Mother of God in the Byzantine calendar. An Orthodox believer who blogs for mutual understanding, Huw came up with an ingenious idea, which I heartily endorse:

These two feast seem to be to be analogues. And coming within a week of each other they form a seemingly logical period of prayer and intercession for Christians — of all denominations — who stand in need of the Blessed Virgin’s intercession. Go from 29 September, with the Feast of Michaelmas, including the feast of the the Holy Guardian Angels on the 2nd, and we’ve got a right handy ready-meade novena for protection.

Granted, this is irrelevant until next year. Maybe we can breathe with both lungs.

Auxilium Christianorum, O.P.N.!

A priest friend of mine, who teaches patristics at the local seminary, is mourning the passing of his father. Please pray for the repose of his father’s soul, and for the grace of consolation for the family.

Cradle of Christianity, the exhibit on Christian origins I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, is winding down, according to the Toledo Blade. The show closes October 22. If you can get to Cleveland, please don’t miss it. The displays are stunning. You won’t regret the trip. You won’t forget the show.

Those of you who are celebrating St. Francis’s feast day, take note: Our May 2007 pilgrimage proceeds from a week in Rome to an overnight in Assisi. While in Rome, of course, we’ll peek in on the dream of Pope Innocent III, in which he saw the tilting Lateran Basilica upheld by St. Francis. It’s memorialized in a statue outside the Lateran. Consider joining us for the trip!

The Curt Jester tagged me for this meme. But it’s only right to trace its lineage back to Michelle Arnold of Catholic Answers, who took her inspiration from no less than Brooke Shields. Brookie had bragged to a reporter that her family tree included Catherine de Medici and Lucrezia Borgia, Charlemagne and El Cid, William the Conqueror and King Harold II.

I did a little digging on genealogy sites a few years back. All my grandparents hailed from two little villages in Sicily, and a priest in the area told me that those villages had been settlements of refugees from Napoleon’s invasion of Malta. Since “Aquilina” is to Malta what “Smith” is to Pittsburgh, his history seems plausible. One of the leaders of Malta’s resistance against Napoleon was Salvo Aquilina, who was executed for his efforts. Maybe Salvo’s survivors weren’t as eager to go to the gallows, and so took the midnight boat to Sicily instead.

My correspondence with Aquilinas throughout the world has turned up an Aquilina in the rolls of Byzantine nobility, and a deed from the 1670s that refers to a parcel of land granted to the Aquilinas in the 1430s. If Malta still wants me, I’m ready to claim that land.

As for other famous forebears … Well, readers of this blog already know all about St. Aquilina of Byblos. She’s got the name, but we’ve yet to draw DNA from her relics. So I can’t claim her yet.

But all this is connected by dotted lines (or imaginary lines), since I didn’t do anything resembling real research. My father long ago warned me: “Don’t shake the family tree too hard, you never know what’ll fall out.”

As my “research” stands, it permits me to imagine a lineage even more illustrious than Brookie’s. Heck, everybody owned Sicily for a month — Athenians, Byzantines, Germans, Africans, Arabs. And how about Malta? St. Paul and St. Luke, the Knights Templar — I could be a walking Da Vinci Code.

Thus I proceed with this meme, assuming, like Dan Brown, that everything I declare is FACT.

1. Which famous person would you most like to learn that you are descended from? St. Mary Magdalene. Even in reality, what a bloodline that would be!

2. Which famous person would you hate to learn that you are descended from? Nero. He was about as creepy a guy as I can imagine. The London Observer recently summed him up as “a psychopathic, debauched, wife-beating matricide.”

3. If you could be ancestor to any living famous person, who would it be and why? My son Michael, because he wrote a great book on St. Jude, which made him world-famous on the street where I live.

4. If you could go back in time and meet any known ancestor(s) of yours, who would it be? My grandfather, Calogero. My accurate genealogical information ends with him. He was a coal miner and, later, a school janitor, who was so beloved in our town that his obituary was a full-page news item in 1926, thirty-seven years before I was born.

5. Tag five others: you, you, you, you, and you.