Journeys of a Catholic Poster Girl

Padre Pio cookies… (h/t: Amy)

Padre Pio…cookies.

Down in Deerfield Beach:

Creating a cookie for a saint is not as far-fetched as it may seem. For baker Joseph Teresi and his customer Giacomo Piraino, it was a happy convergence of cuisine and faith.

It is significant that they met on St. Joseph’s Day, March 19. Piraino dropped into Teresi’s bakery, Joseph’s Italian Pastry Shop in Deerfield Beach, to pick up a special cream-filled pastry that Teresi produces each year to honor St. Joseph, or San Giuseppe.

Spotting the picture of Padre Pio on the wall of the bakery, Piraino began chatting with Teresi about the saint, who bled from wounds in the same places as Christ.

In no time, they came up with the joint inspiration to create a cookie for Padre Pio.

Teresi ordered special cookie cutters and concocted a thick, crumbly lemon-honey butter cookie in the shape of - and almost as big as - a man’s hand. In the cookie’s palm, he added a dab of raspberry jam to signify the blood that issued from Padre Pio’s hands most of his life.

Today - the 120th anniversary of the saint’s birth - Teresi and his brother Walter will be busy inside the shop selling Padre Pio cookies, along with their regular delicacies - a dizzying array of heavenly wheat cakes, cannolis, biscotti and picture-perfect pastries.

Outside, Piraino will be displaying his collection of Padre Pio relics for anyone who is sick or in need of saintly intervention.

“When they come out we’ll put the relics on the box of pastries and on them. We’ll pray over each one of the people,” said Piraino “It’s not so much the cookie. The most important thing is to touch people with the relics.”

Piraino has been known to sit for hours to accommodate people who queued up for the relics.

I have begun Jesus of Nazareth, and have managed to get through the forward, the introduction, and chapter one: The Baptism of Jesus. Whew.

So far the book is very readable and well-paced. Each chapter, of course, is full of historical and biblical interpretations that take familiar gospel texts, such as Jesus’ baptism, and make them come vibrantly to life for the read. The Pope says that he wants to show Jesus as he knows him and to place him in the context of a real, true man. If the first chapter is any indication, he will do that abundantly.

I am taking copious notes, so I will have more later based on the reading I did last night. The second chapter, which I hope to take up this afternoon, covers Jesus’ temptation in the desert.

I just finished Scott Hahn’s newest book, Reasons to Believe and, like all of his other books that I have been fortunate enough to read, found many good insights and came away with a new appreciation and understanding for certain aspects of the faith.

The book is a sort of “Apologetics 101″, teaching laypeople how to explain/defend Christinaity and catholicism to those who do not subscribe to these teachings. I would saw that most of the book deals with the former, since discussions with Protestants probably makes up a third or less of the book. The book starts with defending Christianity from a logical perspective, or a perspective that doesn’t use the Bible to make its case, which I particularly enjoyed, since I have a few friends who are atheists/agnostics, and it’s hard to have any sort of discussion with them about Christianity once the Bible comes into play. You have to use “natural law” sources, which Hahn discusses, as well as uses of logic and things like that. This was the part I found the most useful.

The parts that deal with talking with other Christians are good, but not as in-depth as I would’ve liked. There are chapters on Mary, the Mass and the Eucharist, and the Papacy, as well as praying to the Saints. I would’ve liked a bit more about the Papacy, but it’s such a deep topic I can understand why it wasn’t covered to more of an extent. The sections on the saints and the Mass/Eucharist were my favorite parts here, especially when it comes to the doctrine of Transubstantion. Hahn does a great job making this clear.  The section on saints also includes explanations of the doctrine of Purgatory. This can be tricky to discuss with Protestants since one of the main texts dealing with it is in Second Maccabees, a book Protestant bibles don’t have. Hahn, however, gives other Biblical proofs that would also work in a Purgatory discussion.

If you are interested in apologetics, or have a number of Protestant friends who ask you questions about the faith you have  hard time answering, this is a wonderful book for you. I enjoyed it and am glad to have it in my library; it will definitely be worth a re-read a few times so that I can better absorb all the proofs Hahn offers.