Look out below!
Date: 6/3/2009
From:
Anthony OPL 
Iz the font of life!
Saint Dominic de Guzman founded the Order of Preachers ("Dominicans") at the beginning of the 13th century to combat heresy and promote sound preaching of the Truth of the Catholic Faith. The friars who followed him into religious life were attracted first of all by his holiness, and tell us that "Brother Dominic never had a cell of his own, but would spend every night kneeling and praying before the tabernacle in the church".
Here we see his intercessions represented as Dominic standing at the foot of Christ's cross, participating in the passion itself. Dominic is both comforting the dying Christ, and presenting to him our own sins and penances, our petitions.
By the way, I neglected to mention that the little red blotch on St Dominic's head is not the Precious Blood, but a star. His contemporaries all wrote of a bright light shining from St Dominic's brow, and a star on or above that spot has become one of his iconographical marks.
See an old post by fellow Lay Dominican Cnytr for more.
Ordo Prædicatorum.
Laudare, Benedicere, Prædicare.
say Aaaave Maria...
Sorry, but I am not amused.
I really like most of the stuff you do, but it's funny because it plays on some of these things:
1. Human smallness when compared to God's glory.
2. Mocking the devil, the prideful spirit.
3. An affective proximity to the Saints, Mary, Angels.
4. The strangeness and incongruity to our modern eyes of some symbolism and expression in religious art of ages past.
5. The irony contained in so many biblical passages.
6. The universality of religious and human experience throughout the ages, shown by a bridge between centuries-old pious painting and 21st century text messaging semi-literate utterings.
7. etc.
I think all these are fine and good and even noble endeavours. I understand that you regard your work as a ministry of sorts, and I for one enjoy it very much, and get to learn about saints and such as well while having fun.
However, using Our Lord's Passion in such a light-hearted way is not the way to go. I understand there's a message hidden here also. However, not every means is good towards every end. What we see here first is that you have made a joke with Christ on the Cross - it might be a pious joke, it might have a good point, but this is just not appropriate. I really do not see who it helps:
- The pious will be turned off by a sense of blasphemy, or at least profaning the sacred, and I think they will be right.
- The un-pious will take this as license for any type of mockery of our Lord, his Passion, the Church, and all that is sacred. We already have South Park for that.
In sum, bringing the faith close to our culture, making it more intelligible and familiar is really awesome. But it should never be a familiarity that breeds contempt.
So please, for my sake and all those souls' who read or will read you, keep it clean, keep it respectful, and you will win hearts and souls for God, and make them laugh too!
@ Sebastian - thank you for your comment. It is a very important and wise posting, and I will try to keep this advice in mind for editing future postings.