Check out the full story at SQPN. And if you haven’t tried SQPN’s excellent audio and video podcasts, please do! There truly is something for everyone, of all ages.

Congratulations, Catholic Rockers, Praystation Portable, and Daily Breakfast! You deserve it… and we are keeping our fingers crossed for Catholic Insider too, though it makes it hard to type.

Oh, and if you’re a fan of that dysfunctional yellow family with a hit movie, do check out Catholic Insider’s Secrets of the Simpsons miniseries. Fr. Roderick and some of the other SQPN members get a behind-the-scenes look at the Simpsons animation process with animator Luis Escobar as their tour guide. In fact, even if you don’t follow the Simpsons, as I don’t, it’s a fascinating look at the process of animation in the 21st century. Well worth your time.

Today we recall the journey of Edith and her sister Rosa from Echt, throughout the Netherlands, to Amersfoort, where the Nazis had a transit camp. Because of the convoluted route taken (in order to round up more prisoners, the trip lasted until the early hours of the morning.

When I looked at this novena last year, I was surprised to see the mention of Amersfoort, a city that now a has more positive significance for me and many other people. Amersfoort is now the European headquarters of SQPN, the Star Quest Production Network, which is the birthplace of some very exciting and enlightening new Catholic podcasts.

The prayer below is my own:

St. Edith, Amersfoort was one of the stations on your personal Way of the Cross. Through God’s mercy and love, blessings are now flowing to God’s people from that same city. Add your prayers to ours, that we may likewise receive blessings from God in the places of our pain.

Here is a quote from the Mercator.net article linked above

Indeed, he is as likely to be recognised by the Church as much for his verbal defence of the human being — in whatever condition — as for his scientific work, since the one quickly became as necessary as the other. As he and colleagues turned his surgery at the Necker Hospital for Sick Children (Paris) into one of the largest cytogenetics centres in the world, studying more than 30,000 chromosomic cases and treating more than 9000 patients with genetically-linked intellectual disabilities, the medical profession became involved in a great betrayal, using the new science for prenatal diagnosis leading to abortion. By the 1990s as many as 90 per cent of Down’s syndrome babies in Britain were deliberately aborted. Since 2003 every pregnant woman in Britain is offered a screening test whose main purpose is to make abortion possible.

This trend was a source of tremendous anguish for Lejeune and drove him to defend his patients publicly from what he called “chromosomic racism”. This put him in demand as a speaker and expert witness for the pro-life movement — adding to his already enormous workload of teaching, research and clinical work — but led to his being ostracised by many of his peers. “Medicine has become mad,” he said, “when it attacks the patient instead of fighting the disease. We must be on the patient’s side, always.” Fighting on two fronts his life must have become a kind of martyrdom — albeit one marked by joy and good humour — shared by his staunch wife and five children.

I think I’ll next go looking for Life is a Blessing, the memoir written by his daughter. You can find it at a library near you here.

Five minutes of your time, and I promise you will learn something.

SQPN, or Star Quest Production Network, is an alliance of Catholic podcasters from around the world. It was started by Fr. Roderick Vonhögen of Amersfoort, in the Netherlands. Father Roderick is a man of many languages and many interests. He’s also excited about the Catholic faith, and passionate about being a priest. It will make you happy just to hear his joy and enthusiasm.

But Fr. Roderick isn’t the only interesting person at SQPN. You can also enlist in the Rosary Army, with Greg and Jennifer Willits (”Make them, pray them… and give them away!”); find out what it’s like to be Catholic in a Small Town with Mac and Katherine Barron; or discover the Sweeney family’s Catholic Family Podcast and Catholic Family Kids. These are real Catholic families, dealing with money and job problems, trying to grow spiritually, being interrupted by kids and pets and sudden emergencies.

Nourish your faith by discovering the example of the saints at Paul Camarata’s SaintCast. Get audio Morning and Evening Prayer of the Divine Office form Praystation Portable, or the daily Mass readings from Verbum Domini. Get your computer singing along with Catholic Rockers and Catholic Praise Cast from George Leite. Catch an extra Sunday homily with the aid of the Technopriest.

Want a unique way to evangelize? SQPN has several podcasts devoted to connecting popular culture to truths of faith. I’ve already mentioned Harry Potter, but you can also find out the spiritual secrets hidden in Narnia, Star Wars, the Pirates of the Caribbean, and more.

SQPN is expanding its video content, but I can’t tell you much about that, since I listen to podcasts while in motion, and don’t follow a lot of video content. I hope they will consider adding captioning to their videos once their video production is a little more stable.

You don’t need a portable device; you can stream the podcasts from the web site. They also make subscribing easy.

I hope I’ve convinced you that you need to check SQPN out. What they do is amazing, especially when you consider that it is all volunteer produced and funded. And all free to the listener or viewer.

As you know, National Braille Press will be offering the seventh (and
last) Harry Potter book on the same day it arrives in bookstores across
the country. Many of you have already pre-ordered your hardcopy braille
and PortaBook editions – and now, for those of you who wish to download
the braille files from our site on July 21st, you can go ahead and
pre-order your copy too!

This is the kind of universal access that really counts in everyday life. Being able to read the popular books when they are popular is something print users take for granted, but has only recently been available to users of alternate formats.

Praise is due to J.K. Rowling and her publishers; if they had not been willing to release the manuscript to National Braille Press ahead of its general release, this would not have been possible.

(And if you read this blog mostly for the Catholic content, and are getting wound up to tell me how bad Harry Potter is, please go to SQPN and listen to the Secrets of Harry Potter Podcast. That should make you feel calmer.)