A How-To (Kinda)

Coat of Arms of St. Stephen of Hungary

Q: "Can individuals request to be excommunicated? I was baptized in
Chicago."

A: "You cannot request excommunication from the Catholic Church, nor can one erase one’s baptism. It would be like denying an historical event. Excommunication is reserved for those who, in a very public way, and a way that gives great scandal, indicate through their words or actions that they to not accept the tenets of the faith.

This is what you can do in order to make your desire to leave the
Catholic Church official.

You can prepare a letter stating your intent to remove yourself from
any identification with the Catholic Church and the reason(s) for this.
This must be more than the simple, “I’m fed up the Catholic Church
and I no longer identify with it.” If you know where you were
baptized, that should be included.

This letter can be sent to the Office of Canonical Services, whose
staff will send a form to you to fill out. When that form is returned,
it can be included in your record of baptism. If you do not know where
you was baptized, you may keep the form for your own records.

Office of Canonical Services
Archdiocese of Chicago
835 N. Rush Street
Chicago, IL 60611

God Fever

My daughter showed me this: (click on pic for HUGE but not giant, version)

They feature many highlights of religion, like:

Son killing as bluff-

The mass killing of those who failed to toe the line, or as god looked at it a "do over":

Infanticide based poker style conflict resolution:

The creation of countless widows and orphans:

Moses gets found featuring Margaret O'Brien:

Susan Hayward and Victor Mature:

Menacing Egyptians (a "don't touch my lunch !" sticker)

...and my fave Station of the Cross, Veronica !

Vatican Forgives Lennon; Lennon Unresponsive

Vatican forgives Lennon for "Bigger than Jesus" remark.
Way to forgive! Yeah! Just a short 42 year wait! Like 5 minutes in purgatory, really....

Pope vs. Frog

Ratzinger comdemned this sculpture, because - hey - that's what Popes do ! Well, that and advising third world Catholics not to wear rubbers despite rampant AIDS. He's obviously never lived in a wealthy white sururban community with Goth Teens and graveyards!



I gotta say, compared to Piss Christ and Manure Mary this is kinda lightweight, more like something and old lady would put in her garden so the froggies could pray.....

NYT has the tale of the toad headed for hell here.

Kippenberger's work, which I quite enjoy, (sort of a Yokoo/Warhol influenced pop based exploitation of reproduction methods, amongst other things...) can be found here at SFMOMA (quite tiny images, but hey, they kick photographers out now, so the usual care to display properly may have just gone by the wayside.)

Lastly three things:

1. Yeah I know it happened while back but nobody talked about it except the press and

2 & 3. Here's two frog songs!

08 - Froggie Went a-Courtin'.mp3

Really this second one's about Frenchmen (Hey Phantom - everybody secretly want to be French!)

george formby - I'm a froggie.mp3