Frequently Asked Questions
Question: Who are you guys and why are you doing this?
Answer: I am one person and I do it because I love the Roman Catholic Church. I am Margaret O’Connor Flanigan and I publish CatholicTide.com out of my home in northern Wisconsin. I am semi-retired and I guess you could say that this is a hobby for me. CatholicTide.com is a one-person, part-time, low-budget project. The platform is a self-hosted WordPress blog. I started CatholicTide.com on June 6, 2010 because I wanted a site like this and I couldn’t find one. So I just went ahead and made one myself.
Q: Can you link to my Catholic blog and/or feature my Catholic content on CatholicTide.com?
A: We have a new policy regarding links. Please view this policy on our links page.
As far as featuring your content… maybe… You are more than welcome to submit your blog url (http://www.myblog.com) and I will certainly take a look at it and consider it. Please use the form on the contact page.
However, if your blog is extremely narrow in scope I will probably not feature your content. I see a LOT of very nice blogs written by very devout Catholic people, but many of them are so tightly focused on their own kids or their own parishes or their own crafts etc, that their content is just not of interest to most of my readers. I am sorry.
Also, I am as deeply pro-life as anyone but I cannot have pictures of aborted babies on my blog. I just can’t handle it. So if you publish these kinds of images or videos then I will not be able to feature your content on CatholicTide.com.
Q: Why don’t you allow readers to leave comments?
A: Because I am not the author of 99% of the material on this site. If you want to discuss the news, commentary and videos you see here, you should follow the links above and below the excerpts back to website where the material originally appeared. Those sites will often have a place to leave comments and frequently you will discover a lively discussion already in progress. If you find that the original website does not allow comments you can go to one of the many Catholic forums and share your opinions there. There is no forum at CatholicTide because I don’t have time to moderate one and because there are already so many excellent ones out there.
Q: Do you accept article submissions?
A: No. CatholicTide.com does not publish original material. Everything on CatholicTide is an excerpt from something published somewhere else. Our purpose is to find and present news, opinion and video of interest to American Catholics. We post a short excerpt on our site with links to the original material and then we tweet about it to our followers on Twitter and Facebook. We also link to blogs and websites of interest to American Catholics.
I feel that including original content on CatholicTide.com might confuse some readers. I don’t ever want to give the impression that the material we publish is anything other than excerpts meant to guide readers to the author’s websites.
If you have a blog or website where you are currently publishing your articles, send us the link and we may include it and feature your content. If you don’t know how to do this, we could show you how to start a blog of your own.
If you regularly publish videos on YouTube please send my your YouTube username and I will gladly feature your videos.
Q: Why is this website called “Catholic Tide?”
A: I had just been to the beach with my dog and I had watched how he kept trying to bite the tips of the waves. Of course the waves just continued coming and I was reminded of the old saying “The dogs bark but the caravan moves on.” The Catholic Church is like that; the dogs keep nipping but the Church never stops, not even for a moment. Sometimes in and sometimes out but always present and always in motion.
I also liked the association of “tide” with “time” and “news” as in Yuletide and tidings. “Catholic Tide” just resonated with me in a lot of ways.
Q: What does the “PX” symbol mean?
A: It is actually a Greek “Chi Rho” symbol. The Chi Rho is one of the earliest forms of christogram. It is formed by superimposing the first two letters in the Greek spelling of the word Christ in such a way to produce the monogram. Although not technically a cross, the Chi Rho invokes the crucifixion of Jesus as well as symbolizing His status as the Christ.
The Chi Rho symbol was also used by pagan Greek scribes to mark, in the margin, a particularly valuable or relevant passage; the combined letters Chi and Rho standing for chreston, meaning “good.”
Read more about the Chi Rho at Wikipedia.
I originally intended to have a logo made for this site with some kind of wave graphic to symbolize the tide in CatholicTide. But I was in a hurry and more concerned with the content than the style so I just grabbed the Chi Rho to get things started. Well now CatholicTide has a lot of users who are accustomed to the Chi Rho so I hesitate to change it. And I love the Chi Rho for its dual association with Christ and with marking a particularly valuable piece of text. It sums up everything I hope for in this website.
Q: Why do so many of the posts seem to be militantly traditional and conservative? Why does your Catholic Web sites section notably leave out publications like the National Catholic Reporter, America, U.S. Catholic, and Commonweal, publications that are generally considered to fall on the progressive side of things? Why don’t you announce upfront that you are so biased?
A: You are correct that I do not feature material from leftist or progressive sources. I don’t make a big fuss about my position because my views spring directly from the solid bedrock of the Magisterium of the Church and the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. So these views are essentially the default or expected views of an American Catholic.
I suppose if I took a position that was in defiance of the Magisterium or the Constitution then I would be obligated to announce that very prominently on my website. I believe that the websites you mention are deliberately deceptive in describing themselves as Catholic while promoting positions not in accordance with the Magisterium.
There is a lot of foolishness on the internet but we are lucky that we have a resource to guide us when we are unsure of the validity of material describing itself as Catholic. I urge you to visit this site: http://www.catholicculture.org/culture/reviews/ If you read the reviews of the websites you mentioned you will find a detailed explanation of the ways in which they are in conflict with the teaching of the Church.
Q: Why don’t you blog about your daily life and your kids and your parish and personal stuff like that?
A: Actually, I don’t do that because I think that kind of thing is utterly narcissistic and creepy and pointless. Why would anyone want to read about my birthday cake or my garden or my recipes or my favorite TV show or my favorite anything or any other details about me? This blog is about the Catholic Church and Americans living their Catholic faith. It is not about me. The thought of making a blog about me and all the precious details of my daily life makes my skin crawl. I wish I had a nickel for every time someone has recommended “a great Catholic blog” and when I visit it I find pictures of pies and babies and flower baskets! I assume these people (almost always women) find meaning in publicly documenting the minutia of their lives but it is hard for me to see these blogs as anything other than an expression of extreme self-involvement and pride. So anyway, no, CatholicTide.com is not that kind of blog. I do have a personal blog at MargaretFlanigan.com but I seldom post there any more. I built it several years ago to give the people I was working with a way to get to know me. But I think the point is that here on CatholicTide.com it really does not matter who I am.
