Which pope?

You are Pope Pius XII. You're efficient and
dedicated, but not very approachable.


Which Twentieth Century Pope Are You?
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Life is life

... unfortunately. I've had a bad week. Luckily I'm off to Malta (the tiny country-island with as many churches as there are days in a (non-leap) year) the coming saturday.

I wish I lived in a catholic country.

If I ever get the money, I'll buy myself a house in the mountains of northern Italy, where it is never freezing, where noone is protestant, and where drinking a glass of wine to the food is part of the culture.

All I need is decent weather, a non-ugly catholic church, a thinking faithful-to-the-magisterium priest with a sense of humour, and a wife and/or close friends around me who want to become holy and help others achieve the same thing.

Am I asking too much?

I don't think so.

But will I ever get these things?

No.

How do I know?

I just know. Experience. God likes me, but unfortunately he seems to believe I'm a masochist. On the other hand - maybe I am - God is always right...

I'm just in a bad mood and/since I haven't received the sacrament of peneance in a too long time.

Why I left...

I don't think enough time has gone by to answer objectively to the question of why I left seminary. My present answer would be that I think I am called to some kind of community life. Either "community" as in "religious community", or in the sense of the "community" of a family.

The vocation of a diocesan priest is one of solitude, especially if you live in a country with few priests combined with long distances between the parishes. I'm not sure about humanity at large, but at least for myself, I can say that I am a "community creature". Not in the sense that I absolutely can't bear solitude, but I think my vocation is - just as everyone else's - to advance in holiness.

And from experience I must admit that I need (perhaps daily) help with that. So living alone in a parish with close to no contact at all with "holiness-helpers" I am assuming is not my vocation.

Still, God calls whoever he wants and takes them through things they'd never managed by themselves. So if God is of another opinion, I won't argue with Him. But He'll have to make it a lot clearer to my blind eyes if He wants me to go back.

For the moment I am assuming that marriage is the "main vocation" for me. But no "special one" has crossed my path yet, so who knows...

I guess I'll just wait the man upstairs out until he gets pissed on my faliure to understand His calling and just gives me a written note with exact instructions :P

Who am I?

Ouch! What a philosophical question! Someone just recently posed that question as a comment to one of my blog-entries. He also asked what I'm doing at the Vatican.

Ok. First things first: I'm not at the Vatican. It's not entirely false, though, since I used to be a seminarian living in Rome.

But since I am now an ex-seminarian, and Italy is not my country of origin, I am pretty much never at the Vatican anymore (unless I go there on vacation, which I don't, since I have close to no money).

Who am I?
I am a proud faithful-to-the-magisterium catholic. I am a resident of Gothenburg, Sweden. I am not as good as I pretend at philosophy and the Italian language. I am chronically incapable of finding new friends (especially of the other half of the human race), probably since I consider Church and God and stuff like that to be the most important thing in life. I am also childishly fond of telling people how illogical I find protestantism. But I try not to be to harsch.
That's pretty much me.
btw, I didn't know there were other people than myself and one or two friends that read my blog. If there are others, please let me know, and tell me wha kind of (catholicism or other-themed) posts you'd like to see!
/Simon

L'Italia

Från en vandring i bergen med f. W.
.