Being a Catholic Geek

I've realized this week just how big of a geek I really am as far as being Catholic is concerned.

First of all there are several apps that I use on my iPod. First of all I have Laudate, which has everything imaginable in it, including daily readings, the liturgy of the hours, rosaries, chaplet, and a ton of different prayers. I also have Catholicpedia, put out by divineoffice.org, which also is a good general reference. I also have by them a Prayers app. I have the Roman Catholic calendar put out by Universalis. I have several rosary apps. These include iRosary, The Rosary app by the Daughters of St. Paul, and the Divine Mercy App by the Congregation of the Marian Fathers of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. I also have a couple of apps which help to do and examine of consciousness before confession. And my favorite, a simple little Pocket Angelus app from Objective Products, LLC. All of these can be found in iTunes. I'll give the links down at the bottom later for some of the app info sites.

Here's the big geeky thing, and it involves that Angelus app. It's a very simple thing. You can set up alarms so that it rings up to three times per day at the hours of the Angelus. You can pick a couple different kinds of bells to ring. My favorite is the Angelus bells. I usually have my iPod with me, and sometimes the Angelus bells go off while I'm in public. This week, I had two very interesting conversations when my Angelus alarm went off. It went off while I was checking out at Leaflet Missal, and I ended up showing the cashier all my apps. The second one was yesterday during Easter dinner at my sister's. So I ended up showing all my little Catholic apps to some of the people there, including my sister's dad, his wife, and Father Fitzpatrick and his mom. The good father is a mega-geek himself (he played Angry Birds with my son earlier), but he didn't know there is all that out there. So it was cool that I could show him all that stuff.

Here though are a couple of my complaints. First of all I was kind of shocked that a tech savvy priest and a store with an online presence had no idea about these apps. There's got to be a better way of getting the word out that there are really awesome apps out there to enhance a Catholic's spiritual life. Second, the reason I was at Leaflet Missal in the first place was to try to find a CD of a beautiful chanted version of the Angelus that I found on YouTube. When I'd originally gone to the site for the nuns who had recorded this Angelus, they had no way to order the CD from iTunes, which would've been my preference, so I ran over to Leaflet to see if they had it.

Please, please, please, if you have gorgeous music you want to sell to support your congregation or your cause put it on iTunes or Google play so people can buy it more easily.

Fortunately, at least there are some websites that either have discussions about Catholic apps or are dedicated to listing Catholic apps. I'll get the links for those as well. Since I'm the one sitting here complaining about lack of general knowledge regarding Catholic apps, I should at least do my little bit by adding those links.

13 essential Catholic Apps
http://catholicapps.com/
Pocket Angelus
http://daughtersofmary.net/music.php
Universalis web store
DivineOffice app store
Leaflet Missal
iRosary
Laudate at iTunes
Daughters of St. Paul, Pauline Books and Media App Store
DvineMercy.org App Store