¡Viva Cristo Rey!

This year, the SJVTS seminarians (with the help of a few others, notably our own Fiona!) staged a production of ¡Viva Cristo Rey! written by Cathal Gallagher and Fred Martinez. According to the Quo Vadis Theater Company,

This play takes place in Mexico during the mid-1920's. It was the administration (1924-1928) of Plutarco Elias Calles, a ruthless anti-clerical and anti-religious individual who decided to put teeth into the anti-clerical laws that had been passed over a decade before. The era marked one of the most horrific chapters in Mexico's history. It was into this hellish environment that the fun-loving jokester and troubadour Fr. Miguel Augustin Pro was thrust. Fr. Miguel was the "secret agent" of Christ. While wearing different disguises (see right, as an auto mechanic when delivering a conference to a group of chauffeurs) he managed to bring the Sacraments, hope and Christ's loving mercy to many in Mexico City and other parts of Mexico.

Pope Pius XI (1922-1939) denounced Plutarco Calles and others in his 1926 encyclical, Iniquis Afflictisque (On the Persecution of the Church in Mexico) On September 25, 1988, Fr. Pro was elevated by Pope John Paul II to blessed.

Now because we're representing the library, there's a great bibliography of Fr. Pro on Fr. Raymond Bucko's website. You could also use the search terms "miguel" and "pro" in the Cardinal Stafford Library's catalog, to determine what we have locally, in addition to the links in this posting.

Learning a foreign language?

Are you interested in learning Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, French, or Russian? Online courses in these languages and many others are available to you to free! All you need is a library card. The Denver Public Library offers this service through a product called Mango Languages. Many other libraries offer similar services, ask your friendly librarian to show you how to determine if your home library offers this product.

For example, though, if you go to the homepage of the Denver Public Library, click on Reference Resources, then click on Databases A-Z, you can scroll down to Mango Languages, and learn away!

CPSIA and books

In case you haven't been following the news lately, there is a new law going into effect on February 10th that was passed in reaction to the lead in children's toys scare. Basically this law requires anyone selling or distributing items intending for children under 12 to have them certified to be lead free. Sounds good on the surface until those of us in the book and library world found out that this legislation has been determined to include books. The testing must be done by only select laboratories and even though books do not have lead in them, the publishers have been unable to get an exemption from this law. The American Library Association has also been unable to get a determination if libraries are exempt from the law either and if it goes into effect as written, will instruct libraries to either remove all childrens books or make libraries off-limits to children.

To read more about how this might affect you I recommend reading the blog, Musings from a Catholic Bookstore.

The law goes into effect on February 10th and if you have any kid’s products that haven’t been certified, you are required to destroy them. We have created this site to keep track of Catholic and other Christian vendor certifications so that you don’t have to contact everyone yourselves. If you do contact a vendor, please send us the information so we can update this site and save the vendors from having to answer the same question hundreds of times.

I could go on and on (and I do on my personal blog) but I thought it might be a good idea to give our faithful readers a heads up here too