Links.

1. No Cheap Churches - A thorough look at church buildings.

2. More on the Year of the Priesthood from Pope Benedict XVI [Thanks Rob]

God is the only wealth that, definitively, mankind wishes to find in a priest.

Beautiful.

3. The Anchoress really recommends NetTV, a Catholic channel from New York that you can watch online here. [Thanks Mom]

4. The president of St. Vincent College on St. Joseph:

Trivia question: which line in the Gospels is St. Joseph’s most famous quote? Answer: None. There is not a single word of St. Joseph recorded in Scripture. He was a man of silence. In an age when IPods and cell phones are ubiquitous and many students are plugged in to one or the other on nearly a constant basis, we can learn a good bit from the silence and contemplation of St. Joseph.

And even more, we can be instructed by his life of quiet, humble service. He was a man for others, a good shepherd, a servant who put the needs of others ahead of his own.

5. From Fr. Z: Harvard professor defends Pope Benedict on condoms and AIDS

“Theoretically, condoms ought to work,” he explained to CNA, “and theoretically, some condom use ought to be better than no condom use, but that’s theoretically.”

Condom proponents often cite the lack of condom education as the main culprit for higher AIDS rates in Africa but Green disagrees.

After spending 25 years promoting condoms for family planning purposes in Africa, he insists that he’s quite familiar with condom promotion. Yet, he claims that “anyone who worked in family planning knew that if you needed to prevent a pregnancy, say the woman will die, you don’t recommend a condom.”

Green recalls that when the AIDS epidemic hit Africa, the “Industry” began using AIDS as a “dual purpose” marketing strategy to get more funding for condom distribution. This, he claims, effectively took “something that was a 2nd or 3rd grade device for avoiding unwanted pregnancies” and turned it into the “best weapon we [had] against AIDS.”

The accepted wisdom in the scientific community, explained Green, is that condoms lower the HIV infection rate, but after numerous studies, researchers have found the opposite to be true. “We just cannot find an association between more condom use and lower HIV reduction rates” in Africa.