In 1965, the Beatles pleaded, “Please don’t wear red tonight …” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poTf2Kg6cLo Thirty-five years later, on Election Night, the Democrats were hoping people hadn’t voted red. The woman about whom the Beatles sang may have gotten the message, but the voters were having little of what the Democrats were selling. Pollsters determined that Catholics voted 57-43 Republican on Nov. 2.

Sister Mary Honus? If members of the School Sisters of Notre Dame were still given new names when they professed vows, you can be sure some superior would be giving one of the sisters the name Honus, as in Honus Wagner. It’d be a great way to honor the man whose 100-year-old baseball card netted the community $220,000 when it was auctioned Nov. 4. According to Catholic News Service, the card was left to the sisters’ Atlantic-Midwest province by the brother of one of the congregation’s members.

Another “Laurel and Hardy” moment:  In June 1995, the U.S. bishops pulled the plug on their Catholic Television Network of America which they had subsidized with $14 million during a little more than a decade. Now comes word that another of the bishops’ expensive but poorly developed ideas has failed. They have sold the John Paul II Cultural Center in Washington, DC, to the  Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist who will use it as a house of study.
Conceived in 1988 by the then-bishop of Green Bay and later archbishop of Detroit, Cardinal Adam Maida, it was built at a cost of $60 million. No sale price was announced for the center, which includes a 100,000-square-foot building and 12 acres of land, but it is valued at $37.3 million. As Oliver Hardy used to say to Stan Laurel when the latter screwed up, “Well, Stanley, that’s another fine mess you’ve gotten us into.”

Now there are three: OK, Catholic trivia fans, name the three native Wisconsinites who have been members of the College of Cardinals. The first two were Milwaukeeans — Cardinal Aloysius J. Muench (1959-1962) and Cardinal Albert G. Meyer (1959-1965). The third is Cardinal-designate Raymond L. Burke of Richland Center, who will receive his red hat Nov. 21 at the Vatican.

Anniversary: This past Sunday, Nov. 7, marked the 10th anniversary of then-Fr. Jerome E. Listecki’s appointment as an auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Chicago. This Sunday, Nov. 14, is the first anniversary of Archbishop Listecki’s appointment as archbishop of Milwaukee.

Thank you: Veterans. This Thursday and always.