The power is finally back at our friary here in Griswold. Deo Gratias! Our prayers go out to all who have not gotten their power back or have suffered more tragic losses. Even with our small problems here we now have a much greater appreciation for the wonders of electricity which we normally take for granted.
It was mighty hurricane Irene, one of the biggest hurricanes (if you count size alone) which knocked out our power.
But it was a little tiny mouse which prevented our standby generator from coming on. (more…)
We are out of power here at Air Maria after hurricane Irene came through and knocked out power to about half the residents in the state of Connecticut. Our town of Griswold and the surrounding towns have 100% power loss and it could be a full week before it is restored. No definitive estimate has been given.
In the meantime, we are trying to find power whenever we can, using inverters to get power from our cars. We may get tomorrows homily up but there will be none from today and yesterday. All other posting will be reduced as well.
We do have good sized generator and even got it running the night before in a fevered, pitch battle against time, but in the morning when the power went out, the generator started up but the switch gear failed to hook into the generator. So now we are waiting to get an electrician but these, of course, are hard to find when they are so busy restoring power. Our friary only has two days of stored water so hopefully we will back on line soon. Keep us in your prayers. You will be in ours.
Fi News #116 – Bloomington on air (05min) >>> Play
Ave Maria!
Our newest radio station, With Our Mother Blest, in Bloomington, IN – WOMB 89.9 FM Ellettsville (the community of license) – is now on the air at full power! In fact, it was cranked up to full power a few weeks ago, but we have been so busy with three AirMaria road trips for conferences and then to World Youth Day in Madrid, that we have not been able to get this post up until now.
This is the 3rd radio station on the air belonging to our AirMaria Radio Network, the first being Holy Virgin Mary Radio, 91.9 FM Owego, NY, and the second being CorMariae, WPMW 88.5 FM Bayview, MA.
We are still fighting to find a tower location for Holy Name of Mary Radio, WHNM 89.5 FM Pawcatuck, CT.
With Our Mother Blest, WOMB 89.9 FM, is a very strategically located radio station because it reaches the 42, 000 college students and 3,000 professors that are at the University of Indiana in Bloomington. Simply put, for the first time Catholic radio content will be delivered via this station to one of the major intellectual centers of the United States and of the world.
We are currently an EWTN repeater, rebroadcasting the EWTN Radio satellite feed 24/7 with our own top of the hour ID’s chiming in every hour to comply with FCC regulations, but we plan to build our own studio at the new friary in the winter and to begin to add more of our own content as we become more capable.
The AirMaria team is in Madrid and will start posting video soon – hopefully. After a long flight, with a long layover, and travel time (36 hours all told) we finally arrived on Monday at the hotel in Madrid late in the afternoon, but there seems to be great confusion reigning here and a few technical mishaps that have delayed getting things on AirMaria.
We have, in fact, been quite productive but we are doing multilingual videos for some of the European sites through Fr. Alfonso Bruno, the FI communications director and this has taken most of our time as well as spending a good hour to get anywhere on the Metro Train. We may even be doing some live streaming at some point, again, hopefully.
The Pope will have his first Mass this evening and they expect upwards of a million people coming for the final event at the Madrid Aerodrome. So far the trains are already packed full of super energetic Catholic youth from around the world.
I cant imagine how busy and crowded it will be later on and how enthusiastic they will all be now that the Holy Father is in Madrid.
Packed likes Sardines.
Viva Italia!
Go America!
We will be attending the first public showing of the John Duns Scotus film at 5:15pm this evening where we will do an interview. The Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate produced this movie in conjunction with TVCO in Italy. It is the official World Youth Day film and won the Vatican’s Silver Fish Award.
A map showing the incidents of persecution against Catholics at the Photographic Presentation of Christian Persecution at St Jerome’s parish in Madrid set up by the . This was narrated for our French site by Cristina Tatu of Aid to the Church in Need. Wait for the Video.
Catholic and Marian Radio — Radio CorMariae — is poised to make its official debut on the airwaves at 88.5 FM in the greater New Bedford, Massachusetts area, and on the internet at www.radiocormariae.com!
If you live in the New Bedford area, you are invited to participate with us in a special celebration at Our Lady’s Chapel in downtown New Bedford on Friday, March 25, at 6:30 p.m. (EST). The Most Rev. George W. Coleman, Bishop of the Diocese of Fall River, will preside over Evening Prayer and Eucharistic Benediction in Our Lady’s Chapel and will bless the new studio for the radio station. A reception will follow downstairs in Blessed John Duns Scotus Hall.
This celebration will also be broadcast live on the radio, beginning at 6:00 p.m. on March 25. Tune in to 88.5 FM in the New Bedford area, or listen online live at www.radiocormariae.com.
We, the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate, express our sincere gratitude to the many people who have contributed so much of their time, talent and financial support in order to bring Catholic and Marian radio to New Bedford.We are also grateful to you, the friends of Radio CorMariae, for your patronage.
We encourage you to share the good news with your friends, and we ask you to remember us in your prayers and consider supporting Catholic Radio with your tax-deductible donations, in order to bring Jesus and Mary to all hearts!
Yesterday, 16 December 2010, was the unofficial birthday of Radio CorMariae. At around 5:30pm we jerry-rigged the newly installed antenna line, connected it up to the transmitter, and fired up the radio station for the first time. It was an incredibly joyful event as this was the culmination of over 2 years of hard work by a huge team of volunteers to get this radio station up and running – and we, the privileged few, got to enjoy the fruit of all that hard work – if only for a brief period of time.
Don’t get excited and tune in your radio to 88.5 FM yet! This was only our first test transmission and there is still a lot of technical and engineering work to be completed before we can go on the air full-time. Our official launch date is set for 25 March 2011.
It is no coincidence that momentous things in our order always seem to occur on the Feasts of Our Blessed Mother, it is after all, Her Order and we are Her possession and property.
Today, on the Feast of Our Lady of Loreto, Our Lady’s Radio Station, Radio CorMariae, WPMW, 88.5 FM New Bedford, MASS was granted a minor modification to our Construction Permit which allows us to install a highly directional antenna mounted on a cell phone tower overlooking the city center. It is a relatively small transmitter, with an effective radiated power of only 140W, but the location means that we should get a good strength signal covering most of New Bedford.
We will find out very shortly just how good our coverage is as Friar John will be arranging the installation of the antenna and the transmitter early next week and we will probably be testing our signal mid-week and be on the air and broadcasting (unofficially) on Thursday 16th December.
We rejoice with Our Blessed Mother on Her Feast day for the projected launch of the second radio station owned and operated by the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate in the United States and our heartfelt thanks goes out to all our benefactors without whom we can do nothing. Many thanks to the numerous volunteers who have worked tirelessly to fund raise for this project as well as work on the engineering and construction sides of the station.
Dennis also gave us this little snippet so appropriate to today’s Feast and the launch of Radio CorMariae:
“In reviewing today’s traditional Roman Martyrology, I found the following reference to the Basilica of the Holy House at Loreto, Italy, one of the more memorable Catholic shrines I’ve visited:
“At Loreto in Piceno, the Translation of the Holy House of Mary the Mother of God, wherein the Word was made flesh. Pope Benedict XV declared the same Blessed Virgin Mary, under the title of Loreto, to be the chief Patroness before God of all airmen“.”
Thanks to the generosity of our benefactors we ordered the new server. Deo Gratias and may he reward all who made this possible.
And it is being installed now. In fact, the site may be switching over to it tonight. I am not sure though. In theory it will be smooth. But we ask for your prayers.
Well, as many of you have noticed, we have been down quite a few times in the last 24 hours with a message something like:
Our generous benefactor who gives us the web space free (he owns a web design business) has told us that AirMaria has maxed-out the current server.
The Good News
This is good news in that we now have about double the traffic coming to the site.
The Bad News
But it is also bad news in that we now need to upgrade to a dedicated server! This will be about four times the price. Our benefactor would love to pay for the whole server but with EIGHT kids (truly a pro-life Catholic!) he has some pretty serious budget constraints. The cost will be $200 per month.
He is willing to pitch in $50 per month and a lot of his precious time in regard to free consulting and tech support. What we need is three more people to commit to supporting us with a $50 monthly donation. If you are willing, we can even set up an electronic payment feature that will make the entire process as easy as possible in the months to come.
With this server we will be able to keep AirMaria going well into the future, even with 20 times the traffic! It is something to seriously pray about. Let me know by sending an email to apostolate@airmaria.com
Well we’ve been very busy here at AirMaria. However, we admit that it has not always been directly posting videos as can be seen from a sparse period in our posting when we got behind on many of our video projects. But we have completed many of the side projects that were holding us back and we’re making up for lost time as you can see by by our many videos in the past week.
We have also gotten behind on fund raising and our budget is showing the strain. We are currently a few hundred dollars in the red and have several operating expenses coming up and there are several capital expenses that we need to make, including essential things like expanded storage. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
AirMaria has reached 500,000 visitors on our Site Meter. Deo Gratias and thanks to our loyal viewers.
A few weeks ago we also reached a Google ranking of 5 after being at 4 for a long time. This will drive more traffic to AirMaria when people do Google searches. This was brought about by many people linking to us from their websites. So, thank you, and please give us a link if you have not already.
Here is a sample of its output. You can also see it on Youtube where an extra-high quality version is available (click on the button at the bottom of the YouTube viewing window that says “360p” and choose “720p”, and then click full screen, could be slow on a DSL). It is amazing the quality not only from the camera but the fact that you can deliver such quality on the internet, truly a new era in internet video. After we finish some back projects we hope to make extensive use of it.
The camera is a modern equivalent of our aging fleet of Sony PD-150′s that are now almost ten years old and are only standard definition. They have served us well but now it is time to upgrade. As we get donations we hope to be able to buy two more of these. But with a cost of almost $5,000 with accessories we will be taking our time.
Urgent Need for Small Donations
Although we received a generous donation for the camera the unforeseen accessories set us back enough that we will need some extra donations for bills this month and buy some hard drives for our ever expanding collection of video. Any help will be appreciated.
Thank you for your continued generous support. Keep us in your prayers as we keep you in ours.
Today is AirMaria’s third anniversary of our official start on March 25th, 2007. Thanks be to God. And thank you, our viewers and benefactors, for your continued spiritual and financial support. It is a great day on which to have our anniversary because it is the Annunciation when St. Gabriel told Mary that she is to be the Mother of God and by her acceptance the Word became Incarnate for the salvation of the world. The goal of AirMaria is also to announce this good news to the world, teaching them about Jesus by teaching about His blessed mother.
This year it is also special in that we are carrying a live video stream from Rome for the first time. It will cover the Vatican Forum sponsored by Inside the Vatican magazine which will be on the timeliness of proclaiming the Fifth Marian Dogma of Mary as Coredemtprix, Mediatrix and Advocate. This is very exciting since it is the most prominent discussion on the issue ever with Bishops and Cardinals in attendance. It will be broadcasted by H2O News.
It has been quite a while since we made a general update. In that time most of 2009 and a good part of 2010 has passed by. In fact, I wanted to make this a New Year’s update. I also wanted to keep my New Year’s resolution to stop procrastinating, but as you can see I definitely missed the boat. Well, there is always next year. (more…)
You can now follow us on Twitter and Facebook. Whenever a post is made on AirMaria is will be posted to our Facebook page and to our Twitter stream. Let us know what you think.
I recently looked at the visitors stats for AirMaria and saw this chart of the last 100 visitors. It shows the far reach of AirMaria and its power to bring Our Lady to the world. Please help us continue this work with your spiritual and financial support.
United States Italy United Kingdom Philippines Korea, Republic of Australia Poland Indonesia Brazil Netherlands Croatia United Arab Emirates Netherlands Mexico China Sri Lanka India Canada Malaysia Kenya Austria Norway Switzerland Japan Thailand Puerto Rico Slovakia South Africa
05min) >>> 
Here is a 
