Thursday, February 20

Articles like this make a hiatus waaaaaay too difficult.

Oh, and keep those lenten reading suggestions coming. I have about 15 so far, but I want more! More! More!

Update:I'm getting some nice suggestions of traditional "spiritual reading." I'd like to have some diversity though. Poetry? Fiction?

Wednesday, February 19

Fasting from food, nourished by the Spirit

I'd like to put together a page dedicated to good reading for Lent. Please send your suggestions to lentenreading@yahoo.com. Include the title, author, and whatever comments about the book (or a particular section of a book) that you have. If you want me to publish your name and a link to your website/blog, please do.

I want to pull this together by the last weekend of February, so get me your information before then.


Several people have asked how my father's doing. He's doing very, very well. He's out of ICU, and will probably head home on Saturday. He's being gradually weaned of tubes, pipes and wires, and is doing breathing exercises. Thanks for asking, and thanks for your prayers.

Speaking of prayers, they're in order for radio host and author Al Kresta. You can follow the details at HMS Blog, but here's the latest as of Wednesday, mid-morning:

As you may suspect, there is much speculation circulating as to Al's condition. Please help stop rumors. This is very simple at this point. Al has blood Poisoning, Al lost his leg to save his life, Al is responding to treatment, Al's condition is critical and will remain so for a few days. And most importantly, Al needs your payers.

Monday, February 17

Condolences to cyber-friend, neighbor and inspiration Nancy Nall on her father's passing today.

Friday, February 14

Update on Dad:

The surgery lasted about 7 hours--the entire upper left lobe of the lung was removed and the esophagus re-sected. The pathology report says that the margins are clear, which I'm told is very good news. He is off the ventilator already, his color is good, and he was alert enought to express a preference for FOX over CNN on cable. He'll be 3-4 days in ICU.

The healing process will be challenging - in addition to half of the esophagus being removied, one-third of his stomach was as well. But if his early good progress is any indication, he'll meet the challenges well.

Thanks for your prayers!

Update: As of this morning, he was asking for his glasses, newspapers, and for the television to be on CNBC so he could watch Blix and the market at the same time.

Monday, February 10

Monday Update:

I've decided to come here on Mondays to point you to articles of mine that are newly available, either on my own site or elsewhere, as well as other important news.

Over the weekend I cleaned up my main webpage a bit.

I added a review of Sisters by John Fialka here.

and

review of Celluloid Saints, a study of sanctity in film (duh), here.

I posted two columns:

That Damn Rabbit Column that's gotten people so riled up

and

Ghettos and Gerunds

I’m scheduled to be on Al Kresta’s radio show Tuesday, February 11 at 4:30 Eastern.

I fiddled with the left rail over there. I restored the email link – I had removed it last Monday because I didn’t want to be inundated with mail. I got about 100 emails, anyway, and that was enough.

I’ve also restored the “current reads” section. That’s a bit of myself that I’ve had on the web in various forms since I started in 1998, so why not keep it here? I also added links to the various categories of articles, essays and reviews that you can find on my website.

Although I really miss the kind of blogging I was doing, I’m already finding the hiatus to be of great benefit. I’m re-accessing parts of my imagination that had been blocked by the intense news and instant commentary I was engaging in, and, by the way, enjoying. I hope I can bring it all into balance and return in some limited way in the late fall, as I have told several of you in emails.

But in the meantime, keep showing up here on Mondays for updates and and a cup of coffee. Or, if you’re like me, Diet Coke.

Most important:

I ask your prayers for my father, who is having major, major surgery on Thursday.

St. Luke, Pray for us.

Sts. Cosmas and Damian, pray for us

St. Peregrine, pray for us.

Fellow bloggers...if you could spread the word about my limited continuing existence, I'd appreciate it.

God bless!


Thursday, February 6

We interrupt this hiatus....

to tell you that I've posted a look at the Vatican's statement on the New Age here.

Bye.

Monday, February 3

Announcement:

I've decided to go ahead and do something I've been toying with for a while:

I'm shutting down da blog.

I began it for a purpose, and that purpose has been fulfilled. But now, it's taking up too much time, and I'm experiencing a real pull to direct my energies elsewhere. I was going to put it on hiatus for Lent anyway, but there is a project for which I got a strong, specific idea in early December that I really want to give some serious attention to (besides the Bible study guide which is due in two months), and I could be doing that in the time I blog. Thought I'd have made real progress on it by now, but I haven't, and I need to. I have that much faith in the idea. I don't want this one to be just one of the other good ideas that I've started and not been able to finish. I'm almost 43, and it's time to get serious about another direction in my career. I don't know what I'd do if, as has happened every time in the past, a year were to pass and I had one more lost project on my conscience, all because the pull of posting links to weird articles and posting my inconsequential thoughts was so tempting! What it is is that blogging has a weird way of both expanding and contracting your vision. You hear the experiences and insights of other people, but at the same time, the temptation is always there to just think in terms of those who making up the blogging community. I need to free up my brain and my imagination. So,...farewell to the 1600+ who come here every day. Or the 160 who come here ten times a day. Whatever! God bless.

(Besides, there are so many blogs out there, there's plenty to read. For news, you can depend on Holy Weblog and Relapsed Catholic, and Mark Shea, Eve Tushnet, and Peter Nixon at Sursum Corda and others offer far more thoughtful insight than I ever could...)

Update. Well, thanks a lot. I've been sitting here all morning reading mail and trying not to cry, unsuccessfully. This is just insane.

And seriously - I should have mentioned this above - thanks to the many, many, many wonderful readers who have made this blog what it is. You come to chat with each other, and I've been honored to provide that space and give you fuel for the discussions. I've also learned a great deal, and I am in awe of your wisdom and experience. God bless all of you. And thanks, Rod - you're a prince among crunchy cons, truly.....!

Update #2: My husband and others convinced me not to delete - I need to keep the archives. They're right. The only additions to this space at least until late fall will appear when I have something interesting published either in article or book form.

Sunday, February 2

A WaPost article on Anne Buening's first Sunday as a parish administrator

For the moment, Buening and her parishioners aren't focused on breaking barriers. Instead, they are busy trying to repair the spirit and the infrastructure of their church community after their pastor left last year following allegations of solicitation of a male prostitute.

.....She has her work cut out for her. The church, at the heart of the community of wooden shingle houses surrounded by chain-link fences, for the past nine months has been sick with its scandal. Buening's predecessor, a popular pastor known for community activism, was removed in March. He was sentenced in August to a year of supervised probation for filing a false report of a carjacking.

.....The pastoral council meeting minutes from November conveyed a sense of desperation: "It is time to start fixing what needs to be fixed. God is preparing us for something good -- something good and great can come out of this mess, and we can experience resurrection."

Where others might have seen a run-down parish, Buening saw an opportunity. As she drove around the parish neighborhood south of Baltimore, she said, "I liked its comfort -- it felt like the Midwest," where she grew up. "What I saw was a community that lives its faith."

At the 11 a.m. Mass yesterday, she was the first to speak after the organ stopped playing inside the gray, boxy, modern church, where the stained glass is made up of rectangular figures.

"This is my very first weekend here, and I want to thank everyone for your kind notes and warm hugs," she told the 100 or so churchgoers by way of introduction. "My commitment is to walk with you."

Without further preamble, she listed the parish's most pressing problems: The boilers are malfunctioning. The roof is leaky. The school is in debt. And the church financial records are in a shambles.

"It's your community, it's your parish, and you have the right to know," she said. "I can't do this alone. I need you. I need your help."



An American Prowler piece on Catholics and eulogies

In the wake of sex scandals whose devastating effects upon the faithful will likely ripple for decades, the Newark Archbishop took it upon himself to rearrange the proverbial chairs on the Titanic. In doing so, he exhibited a gift for the unfortunate phrase, as when he explained that his decision was motivated by a desire to cut down on the "growing abuse" of eulogies by parishioners.

Abuse is not a word that Catholic priests should throw around these days, particularly in New Jersey, where Rev. John Banko was convicted in December of molesting an altar boy. To use the word in reference to parishioners still wishing to bury their dead in the Church is shoddy semantics and abysmal public relations. Catholics in the New Jersey dioceses must feel as if something else is being taken away from them, as if trust were not enough.

Beyond its awful timing, the anti-eulogy initiative also illustrates the continuing confusion in roles between priests and laity in the wake of Vatican II. Eulogies slowly came about as a result of Vatican II, and have become a staple of funerals since. But if some in the Church now want to limit or abolish laity eulogies, why are they are not equally interested in reforming the role of laity in giving communion? Isn't that a much more obvious priestly function?

Giving a eulogy, by contrast, seems to be an act uniquely suited to the faithful, especially in the frequent and unavoidable cases where the priest does not know anything about the deceased. One does not hear any outcry about priests giving generic eulogies for people they have never met. Nor do we hear anything about the disastrous eulogies priests sometimes give, such as the one I had the misfortune of hearing for an aunt some years back. In a supremely haughty, almost angry manner, the priest dismissed any notion that my aunt had actually died a few days earlier because she had "died with Christ 70 years ago." To the family's grief in her loss, he thundered, "I beg to differ." Nice theology, terrible eulogy. And this from a priest who knew her, in the church she had attended for most of her adult life. You never saw so many angry Irishmen exit a funeral.


Circus was okay. Wasn't Ringling Brothers - Shriners. Not as many animals, not quite as polished - probably better, then. Joseph was tired -(note to self: next year, don't schedule circus during nap time)

and was primarily interested in the elephants which he described as going "night-night" when they lay down as part of the act.

So that was the afternoon, now it's dinner time, and later will be going over 60 remaining pages of single-spaced manuscript text so I can finally get it out of my life tomorrow - at least until the copy edits come back. Always a fun time.

But then I will be free, free, free - free to write two columns this week and start my next project - a volume in Loyola Press' Six Weeks With the Bible series, this one on the Passion and Resurrecction narratives in Matthew. (The one I did on the Parables of Jesus is coming out this fall).

We have lots o' commentaries on Matthew, and I plan on getting the Raymond Brown study, but if anyone has any other suggestions on helpful volumes that Loyola can add to my collection, please let me know. Time's a'wastin.

Today so far we have been to Mass, gone to get my battery changed out and Michael's oil changed (in our cars, of course, silly), eaten lunch, done the first of the two daily digging-out-of-crumbs from the floor, and now we're...off to the circus.

Later!

Saturday, February 1

From the WaPost: A rabbi and abuse

Peggy Noonan on the Columbia

Well, it's February, which means it's almost Valentine's Day, which also means it's almost "V-Day" which sort of doesn't mean Valentine's Day.

Which means it's time to take stock of the Catholic colleges that are joining in what has become a yearly event, the presentation of a certain play with the initials "TVM"

(You know, I get enough hits to my blog from people entering weird, scary combinations of words in search engines. I'm trying to minimize that.)

Now, I've actually seen much of this play - as it was presented on HBO last year, I think. If you can get past being offended by it, you'll find that it's really just....stupid. And the part that isn't stupid is almost criminal, and the celebration of this scene - which is really an approving account of statutory rape - reeks of hypocricy.

Anyway, here's the list of 43 Catholic colleges that are sponsoring presentations of this play this year - that's up from 28 last year. Un - believable. The page, courtesy of the Cardinal Newman Society, includes contact information for college presidents, for your hellraising pleasure, especially if you're an alumn or a parent...or a student.

I continue to wonder why local news even bothers to exist. Or – if it does, why it doesn’t actually report news, which must be happening in a city of 150,000, surely. As the local newscasters finished the top story tonight, summarizing the details of the Columbia tragedy, I said to Michael, “Now it’s time for them to go to the mall and get local reaction.” I was wrong. It was an electronics store – not the mall. An electronics store so the intrepid journalists could get video of customers watching the news on the store televisions, return to their studios with the footage and put “Witnessing Tragedy” under the interviewees’ names.

What followed was – I’m serious about this – a report that there were no Purdue graduates on this flight. In case you were wondering.

When I lived in Florida, there was a patch of road between Bushnell and Wildwood that I used to drive regularly. Every twist and turn of that road became numbingly familiar, and every permanent roadside rummage sale a landmark.

One of the businesses along that road was a body repair operation, and for some reason, for their signage, they had the burned-out shell of a van posted high on a pillar. Every time I would drive by, I would contemplate this, wondering why the business thought this was a good advertisement, wondering how they got it up there.

Until one day, the obvious hit me. People had been in this miserable wreckage once. They were hurt and perhaps even died, judging from the condition of the vehicle. I couldn't imagine that someone would hoist the site of a death up on a pillar and use it for advertising, but you never know. But the possibility burrowed into my head and would not leave, and re-emerged every time I drove past: Someone died in there.

Which is why the constant replaying of the breakup of the Columbia is so particularly horrible and macabre. The anchors use their pens to circle the parts breaking off, saying triumphantly, "See - there's a puff of smoke," when perhaps, all they should be saying, or better, all they should be letting us think as they fall silent is Some people died in there.

I am also reminded of the term that used to be used in aviation in such circumstances, I believe. I first heard it when golfer Payne Stewart's plane went haywire.. Five souls on board... I remember hearing.

Seven Souls On Board...all lost.

But of course, we pray that lost is not, in God's time, what they are.

Requiescat in pace

Last night, I finished Catherwood,, a brief, thickly written, intense novel about the deceptively simple event of a 17th century woman lost in the woods of New York with her 15-month old daughter. The prose is lush – a bit too lush at times for my simplistic frame of mind – but it is as powerful a presentation of mother love as you will ever find. Recommended!

Here's something we can all agree on:

Too damn many standing ovations

The author of this WSJ piece takes on big-time Broadway, opera and symphony productions, but I don't think I've been to a community theater production - or a school Christmas program, for that matter - that didn't end in a standing ovation.

The Toledo Blade profiles Pat Madrid

From NCR: What the bishops' Review Board is going to do:

and

a profile of its members.

Andrew Sullivan defends the DC judge

We've found in recent years that when the Church hierarchy covers up abuse, it is sometimes necessary for the laity to peacefully protest. And when the Church propagates doctrines that are cruel and discriminatory - such as the denial of communion to gay Catholics merely because they are openly gay - then it is also permissible for lay Catholics to express their sympathy for the victims of the Church's actions. This is not bigotry. According to the Church itself, openly gay people are not to be denied communion. They are part of the body of Christ. And no-one is questioning the right of the Catholic hierarchy to enforce whatever doctrines they want. What the judge said merely amounted to bearing witness to what many perceive to be injustice. You may disagree and support the exclusion of openly gay Catholics from the sacraments, but it's an over-reach to describe this conscientious objection as a form of bigotry.


Peter Steinfels on Pacem In Terris

The 40th anniversary of Pope John XXIII's encyclical "Pacem in Terris" ("Peace on Earth") is not until April, but the commemoration has already begun — understandably enough.

Pope John Paul II made it the subject of his World Day of Peace Message on Jan. 1 and of a message to journalists on Jan. 24.

"Pacem in Terris" reflected another moment of great international tension. John XXIII conceived of writing it in October 1962 — in the midst of the Cuban missile crisis — during the late-night hours when he passed back and forth from his writing desk to his private chapel, composing a message sent to Kennedy and Khrushchev in hopes of bringing them into agreement and preventing a war that might incinerate millions in its opening salvos.

When the encyclical emerged just before Easter in 1963, it was addressed not only to the Catholic bishops, clergy and faithful, as was customary, but also "to all men of good will." And "Pacem in Terris" was embraced by non-Catholic readers like no previous encyclical.....

But are there not "situations in which nothing short of war can defend or establish" such rights? That was one objection raised in 1965 by the theologian Paul Tillich at a major conference where a score of world leaders addressed the themes of "Pacem in Terris."

A refugee from Nazism, Tillich welcomed the encyclical but countered its optimism with a more tragic perspective. Other theologians, like Reinhold Niebuhr and even John Courtney Murray, a Catholic, also questioned the pope's optimism. Couldn't the ingredients in his recipe for peace — human rights, disarmament, equal respect for all nations, economic development, the peaceful resolution of differences by dialogue and negotiation — come into conflict with one another? Wouldn't hard choices be unavoidable?





Group pushes for Baltimore Archdioces to reconsider its rejection of the validity of Gianna Talone-Sullivan's reported visions

"I have a good impression of her messages. While it is difficult to say if they are authentic, there is nothing objectionable in them," said the Rev. Edward D. O'Connor, a retired theologian at the University of Notre Dame and a member of the Marian Research Institute at the University of Dayton in Ohio. "The mere fact that there is an apocalyptic tone should not exclude the messages."

O'Connor has written to Cardinal William H. Keeler to criticize the findings of an archdiocesan commission that found "no evidence of supernatural intervention" in Talone-Sullivan's messages. A petition with hundreds of signatures - including those of a half-dozen Marian scholars - was delivered early last month to archdiocese offices in Baltimore.

And although an archdiocese spokesman said there are no plans to reopen the investigation into the case, Talone-Sullivan's supporters say they will continue to collect signatures and push for more study.


Polish priest enters innocent plea.

Catholic high school students make 1,000 rosaries for servicepeople