Posted in June, 2008
In the center of Rome, near the Piazza Navona, is the church of Saint Apollinare. It houses a crypt where popes, cardinals and martyrs are interred.
Also buried there is Enrico De Pedis, also known as Renatino, one of the most powerful bosses of the Magliana gang. He was assassinated on February 2, 1990. De Pedis’ internment at the church is unusual procedure for a common citizen, and even more so since he was a gangster. 
Authorizing the internment at the time was Cardinal Ugo Poletti, then Vicar of Rome, who gave his permission. Cardinal Poletti died in 1997, and was eulogized by Pope John Paul II. 
Former members of the Magliana gang have said De Pedis was “very religious” and gave “huge donations” to the Church before he died, perhaps to atone for his crimes.
The church is next to a building that houses the Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music. On June 22, 1983, a young girl was kidnapped after her flute lesson at the Institute. Emanuela Orlandi, the daughter of a Vatican employee, was 15 years old when she disappeared. She was spotted by a policeman getting into a dark green BMW with a man, the last time she was seen alive. Her body was never found. 
In 2006 an anonymous caller told an Italian tv program on missing persons to “take a look” at the tomb of De Pedis in the Saint Apollinare crypt. There is a persistent theory that the tomb contains the remains of Emanuela Orlandi, or some clue to her disappearance.
Police said the church was under Vatican control and therefore considered “extraterritorial” Vatican property. Permission for the white marble tomb to be opened would therefore have to be given not only by the Rome diocese but also by the Holy See, as well as by De Pedis’ widow, Carla Di Giovanni.
But the investigation into her disappearance was reopened last week following the leaked testimony of Sabrina Minardi, ex-wife of Italian soccer star Bruno Giordano and later girlfriend of Enrico De Pedis.
Minardi, who the press painted as a “recovering drug addict,” alleged in a statement to Italian police that De Pedis had kidnapped Orlandi, put her in a sack and threw her into a cement mixer in Torvaianica, an area of sand dunes on the coast near Rome.
Minardi also alleged that Orlandi had been seized and killed on the orders of Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, then then head of the Vatican Bank “to send a message to someone,” she said, without revealing more. She claimed that De Pedis had taken her to lunch in Torvaianica and told her he had two sacks in the car.
“He said he had the body of Emanuela Orlandi with him,” Minardi claimed in the police statement.
De Pedis and his driver “went to a building site. I stayed in the car. They threw it all into a cement mixer. That’s how they got rid of all the proof.”She added: “This was not a killing for money, it was a symbolic kidnapping. They seized Emanuela to give someone a message.”
Archbishop Paul Marcinkus’ catchall phrase - “You can’t run the Church on Hail Marys” - must have served him well as president of the Institute for the Works of Religion, also known as the Vatican Bank, which he headed from 1971 to 1989. He died in Sun City, Arizona in February 2006. 
As head of the Vatican Bank, Marcinkus became embroiled in legal trouble and sensational speculation because of his business ties to two notorious Italian financiers: Michele Sindona, who was poisoned while serving a jail term for fraudulent transactions; and Roberto Calvi, who was found hanging from London’s Blackfriars Bridge in 1982.
The Vatican angrily reacted to the news the investigation was being reopened. A Vatican spokesperson said “defamatory and baseless accusations” had been made against the Archbishop, “who has been dead for some time and is unable to defend himself.” The Vatican went on to criticize the media outlets reporting the story.
“We in no way wish to interfere with the duties of the magistrates in their rigorous verification of the facts and responsibilities. But at the same time, we cannot but express our extreme regret and reproof at methods of information that owe more to sensationalism than to the requirements of seriousness and professional ethics.”
Huh?
A a further postcript, Lorenzo Radogna, lawyer for the De Pedis family, announced on Italian tv channel La7 News ”the corpse of Enrico De Pedis will be cremated and removed from the grave in the Sant’Apollinare’s church,” but he did not provide any further information regarding the future place of the remains.
There was no mention if the police would be able to examine the coffin before it (and any evidence) was turned into ashes.
This Thursday the Suffolk Times completed a four-issue series about gays and lesbians on the North Fork. When Lori and I got to the house last night, I saw that Anne MacKay of Orient was interviewed about the growth of the North Fork Community.
“It was a wonderful place, not as expensive as the South Fork, and lesbians began coming out and buying property in the 1960s,” MacKay said. As a fourth-generation summer person, “I’m not really a local,” she added wryly.
A retired theater professor, MacKay moved into her home in Brown’s Hills in 1959, and summered there until she retired “in about 1990″ when she moved to Orient full-time.
In the article MacKay described the beginning of the North Fork women’s community. Early on, the women would have gatherings in one another’s homes. “At first, we’d all just fit into a living room,” but over the years the group expanded. The North Fork Women for Women Fund now has a mailing list of about 500 names.
Lori and I met Anne MacKay at a NFWFWF event earlier this year. Engaging and energetic, she carried the perspective–but not the weight–of her 80 years. Her eyes are lively and intelligent. She is still a charmer.
Shortly after the event I made a point to go get copies of her books of poetry, Salt Water Days and Sailing the Edge. The Orient General Store carries them, in an old fashion wood and glass case. Women, nature, water, myth, and memory run and blend together in the poems, which is just perfect for me. 
Prominent special interest lobbyist and evangelical preacher, James C. Dobson, is back in the news. He sharply attacked presidential candidate Barak Obama, accusing him of having “a fruitcake interpretation of the Constitution” and twisting the meaning of both the Old and New Testaments. 
“I think he’s deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own world view, his own confused theology,” Mr. Dobson said in one of the recent radio broadcasts for the group he leads, Focus on the Family.
He’s some kind of Biblical authority?” Mr. Dobson also asked.
Mr. Dobson’s remarks focused on a June 28, 2006 speech in which Mr. Obama mentioned passages from the Bible that he suggested were in conflict with present-day practices. Mr. Dobson made his criticisms shortly after Joshua Dubois, the Obama campaign’s religious affairs director, offered to meet with Focus on the Family leaders.
“Young conservative evangelicals seem more open to Obama’s ‘Christian’ message of caring for the poor, fighting genocide, health care for all and climate change,” David Brody, senior national correspondent of the Christian Broadcasting Network noted.
But so far, the attack seems to have backfired. Obama issued a strong response, and one supporter quickly created a website - jamesdobsondoesntspeakforme.com - that quotes Old Testament prophets, giving Dobson a Biblical wallop of his own.
It seems as if the Democrats have finally figured out what to do, when the Dobsons of the world try to paint them as faithless or anti-religious.
In the words of Jim Wallis, a politically liberal Christian activist, you have to go toe-to-toe with fundamentalists, carrying a Bible in one hand, and the Constitution in the other.
Fr. Henri Nouwen (1932-1996) was the author of The Wounded Healer and dozens of other books. He is famous for his religious meditations and his guides to spiritual development. 
BBC producer Michael Ford met Nouwen while interviewing him for a TV program. He later took at leave of absence to write the book, The Wounded Prophet - A Portrait of Henri J.M. Nouwen.
Ford said it is impossible to “understand the complexity and anguish of the man” without considering his homosexual orientation, something he was aware of from the time he was a boy, but started to come to grips with only in the final years of his life.
He wrestled with his homosexual leanings, which he regarded as a disability, a cross to bear. While he taught at Harvard in the 1980s, he was hard on gay students, telling them homosexuality was an evil state of being.
In time, Nouwen became friends with some gay people, and was under pressure to go public. Other friends, however, counseled him to keep his secret, saying he would lose all credibility as a famous and widely admired Catholic if people knew he was gay.
Nouwen never publicly came out during his lifetime. He did acknowledge he was gay in private conversations and in his diaries.
Nouwen was deeply troubled by the possibility that people would reject him if they knew about his sexual orientation. “This took an enormous emotional, spiritual and physical toll on his life and may have contributed to his early death,” Ford said.
His homosexual feelings may also have contributed to a midlife nervous breakdown. When his close friend Nathan Ball pulled back from their platonic relationship, Nouwen went into a tailspin and had to seek treatment for an emotional breakdown.
Ford believes this brokenness within Nouwen was the key to his ability to reach out to those in need, those who are suffering and wounded. Ford writes, “He discovered that it was from the wounded places in himself that he could reach the wounded places in others.”
Henri saw the 1987 film, Maurice, based on E. M. Forster’s novel of classism and homophobia in England. After the movie, Henri collapsed. His companion’s description of what happened is recounted by Ford:
“…he had to stop on the highway because he was sobbing uncontrollably. He was so caught up with the story and the dilema the two main characters were living, because it was his. All I could do was hold him and let him cry. He was really in pieces.” 
“Today the small rejections of my life are too much for me,” Nouwen writes. “A sarcastic smile, a flippant remark, a brisk denial, a bitter silence, a failure to be noticed, a coldness from a colleague, an indifference from someone I love, a nagging tiredness, the lack of a soulmate, a loneliness I can’t explain. I feel empty, alone, afraid, restless, unsure of myself, and I look around for invitations, letters, phone calls, gifts, for someone to catch my eye in sympathy, for some warm gesture that can heal my emptiness..And right now I don’t particularly want God, faith, church or even a big and gracious heart. I want simply to be held, embraced, loved by someone special, made to feel unique, kissed by a soulmate. I’m empty, a half-person. I need someone to make me whole.”
George Carlin passed away over the weekend. He was a funny guy. I’ll miss him and his outrageousness. Bill Maher, another ex-Catholic comedian, could take a cue from him to be sharp but not slashing. It’s funnier, and even more devastating, if you really want to nail institutions and people.
Carlin’s dissembling of the “Ten Commandments” is one of the most entertaining, uplifting scriptural explanations I ever heard. I always played whenever I needed to lighten-up a deary mood, especially from bad organized religion news. Anyone who took the Bible literally–or totally respectfully–probably would pass out if they heard it.
“I Used To Be Irish Catholic” from the Class Clown album is still my favorite.
He was also “Cardinal Glick” in the comedy, Dogma. The movie is set in my old home state - New Jersey! (You know, that was a good choice!)
The June 9th New York Post ran the opinion piece “Marriage Fight Wastes Gay Dollars” by a man named David Benkof, who was identified as a “columnist for several gay newspapers and a blogger at GaysDefendMarriage.com. 
Benkof, 38, wrote he was against spending gay community dollars on the upcoming California vote on marriage. He believes the gay community, and the Human Rights Commission in particular, should use the cash they have raised for California PR to “achieve rights for same-sex couples who live in states that are much more hostile to gays and lesbians than California.” He dismissed the marriage initiative battle by saying “HRC is pushing for gays in San Francisco to be able to use their favorite term for their relationship.”
He chided the gay community for not routinely raising funds like “Catholics and African-Americans” to help out the poorest members of their communities. “We in the gay and lesbian movement have done a lousy job of paying attention to people who share our identify but lack the resources to hobnob at fancy diners.” He insinuated that now that the faces of AIDS and HIV infections are not wealthy white men, but poor and black men, the movement has moved on to other “more relevant” issues.
Since Mr. Benkof did not say anything about himself or his experiences in the article, one would assume, as I did, that he is a regular gay guy, someone active in the movement as a columnist, but who chooses to sound ideologically out-of-step, peevish or both. Since his righteous attitude both annoyed and piqued my interest, I decided to dig. Here’s what I found:
-David Benkof (born David Bianco) is not a columnist for several gay newspapers. He’s a freelancer who submits articles and opinion pieces. He does not have a regular gig with anyone, including the Dallas Voice.
-In 2003 Benkof, who had been raised as a Conservative Jew, became Orthodox. He stopped saving sex with men, and professed that “the liberal…approach to homosexuality and Judaism was completely bankrupt.”
-He now identifies not as a gay man, but as bisexual. “I believe that within a couple of years I’m probably going to be married with a growing family.”
-Benkof views heterosexuality as an integral part of the teachings of Judaism. “I rejected all the unsuccessful attempts to reconcile traditional Judaism with gay sex and gay relationships. And I decided to take more seriously the demands that I believe G-d has made on the Jewish people in terms of how we live out our sexual feelings.”
“I happen to believe that G-d has been clear to the Jewish people that we should be pursuing opposite-sex relationships, and particularly not having intercourse between two males.”
Since his orthodox awakening Benkof has become a strong opponent of same-sex marriage: “It insults the millions of Americans whose traditional faiths call on us to defend marriage as a central institution in society defined as a union between a man and a woman.”
Why didn’t he raise any of this in the Post article?
If it’s not made-up, Benkof has at least one Christian that agrees with him. “Mark” writes:
“David-thank you for creating this website and putting into words exactly what my partner and I believe. I am so sick of “gay” people acting like gayness is our one defining attribute. I am also an American and a Christian, to name a few. Demanding that marriage, which is a religious institution, be afforded to gay people regardless of the wishes of a vast majority will only cement in the minds of many that gays care only about their own self interests regardless of the potential or perceived damage our behavior and pet issues might have on society. Such egocentricity, thus, could lead to a great backlash by the vast majority of people, who regardless of what we want and hope, still find homosexuality disgusting on a personal level–not to mention immoral on a religious level–I fear that someday, in the not too distant future, my partner and I will have to pay a great price for the indulgences and egotism of the annointed leaders of today’s gay movement.”
Note: I haven’t been able to google any articles by David, five years now as a self-identified bisexual, on how the love and physical intimacy with a woman has been a gift of God for him.
Read more on David Benkoff here and here and here.
Demanding what he calls greater “transparency and accountability” from the controversial religious order known as the Legionnaires of Christ and their associated lay movement, Regnum Christi, Archbishop Edward O’Brien of Baltimore directed both groups to disclose all activities within his archdiocese, and to refrain from one-on-one spiritual direction with anyone under 18. 
The ban on counseling minors, O’Brien said in an interview with NCR, is related to concerns that the Legionnaires and Regnum Christi practice “heavily persuasive methods on young people, especially high schoolers, regarding vocations.”
In a June 11 interview on the margins of the spring meeting of the U.S. bishops in Orlando, Florida, O’Brien said he is prepared to take the “next step” of barring the Legionnaires and Regnum Christi from the archdiocese entirely if they do not comply.
The directives came in the form of a June 6 letter from O’Brien to Fr. Alvaro Corcuera Martinez del Rio, the Superior General of the Legionnaires. The letter capped a lengthy series of contacts between the Legionnaires and the Baltimore archdiocese, O’Brien said, which began under his predecessor, Cardinal William Henry Keeler, who resigned in July 2007 at the age of 76. 
The June 6 letter, O’Brien told NCR, represents a last-ditch effort to repair relations. O’Brien said he actually reached a decision two to three months ago to ask the Legionnaires and Regnum Christi to leave the archdiocese, but was persuaded to stay his hand by three Vatican cardinals who asked him to meet first with Corcuera.
That meeting, O’Brien confirmed, took place earlier in June.
In the NCR interview, O’Brien also expressed skepticism that the Legionnaires will be able to implement needed reforms until they come to terms with the seemingly persuasive evidence that Fr. Marcial Maciel, the founder, engaged in activity that was “less than honorable, and maybe even sinful.”
Bishop Geoffrey Robinson, the retired auxiliary bishop of Sydney, Australia, and former head of a panel investigating sexual abuse in that country, wrote a book in which he explores what he sees as the roots of abuse in the Church. Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church was published in the fall of 2007.
The book’s genesis, according to Robinson, came from his work as a member and then chairman of the Australian bishops’ commitee charged with addressing the sexual abuse crisis.
“For nine years it completely dominated my life,” he said of his committee work from 1994 to 2003. “It was an experience that changed me in so many ways that even if I wanted to, I could not now go back to being the person I was before.” 
Meeting and speaking with abuse survivors and their families convinced him that the roots of clergy sexual abuse lay in fundamental church attitudes toward power and sex, and that the only solution was first to examine and then to change those attitudes.
“Sexual abuse is all about power and sex, so to counter abuse, we must be free to ask serious questions about power and sex in the institution of the church,” he said. “Without this freedom, we would be attempting to respond to abuse while handcuffed and blindfolded.”
On a personal note, Robinson said his work with abuse survivors created an inner conflict between his loyalty to the pope and his “loyalty to that portion of God’s people that the Australian bishops had assigned to me, the victims of abuse.”
“It was the conflict between being a pope’s man and a victims’ man,” he said with emotion. “At all times, I would have loved to be both.”
“The conflict eventually became a genuine crisis for me when the pope of those years (Pope John Paul II) gave no real leadership in relation to abuse,” he said. 
In a May 8 statement, the Australian Catholic Bishops’ Conference listed its concerns with the book. The bishops said that “after correspondence and conversation” with Bishop Robinson, “it is clear that doctrinal difficulties remain.” Chief among them, they said, is Bishop Robinson’s “questioning of the authority of the Catholic Church to teach the truth definitively.”
In a brief statement dated May 15, Robinson responded, “In their statement, the bishops appear to be saying that in seeking to respond to abuse, we may investigate all other factors contributing to abuse, but we may not ask questions concerning ways in which teachings, laws, and attitudes concerning power and sex within the church may have contributed. This imposes impossible restrictions on any serious and objective study, and it is where I have broken from the bishops’ conference,” he said.
Before he left Australia for a book tour, Bishop Robinson sent a letter notifying several U.S. bishops of his speaking engagements in their dioceses. His May 16-June 12 tour included stops in Pennsylania, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Connecticut, Ohio, Massachusetts, Washington State and California.
Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, prefect of the Congregation for Bishops, and 10 U.S. bishops asked him to cancel his speaking tour. Bishop Tod D. Brown of Orange, CA and Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles refused him persmission to speak in their dioceses.
Bishop Robinson said the call in his book for confrontation is a “confrontation of issues, not of people,” adding that “confronting bishops will not achieve change.”
“The major changes we seek cannot at present come from any source other than the pope, and we must be aware of the relative powerlessness of the bishops before the power of the papacy and the Vatican systems that support it,” he said.
“I suggest that we must, therefore, learn to work with the bishops rather than against them,” he said. “It will be a lengthy process in which we engage them in conversation, gradually show them there are problems in the culture they have been living in and that the new culture we would like to introduce to them has a real beauty and freedom in it.”
His book, he contended, was not an attack on the church, “but the beginning of a debate which will eventually lead to a better church.”
“This is a truly naughty book, but it is also a strangely moral one.” Talk
That was the description of Joe Eszterhas’ book, American Rhapsody, with its globs of dirty gossip about Hollywood celebrities and the Clinton presidency, including the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
But the point isn’t about the book, its about the writer. It seems to me, that many times the person who leads an envied sex life, has all kinds of colorful exploits, drinks, smokes, ingests, lives life like a wild man or woman, ends up with religion. Look at St. Augustine. Or, a person who makes a living writing about these people. Look at Anne Rice.
Joe Eszterhas has written screenplays for 16 films that have made more than a billion dollars at the box office. Among them are Basic Instinct, Flashdance and Showgirls.
A former editor at Rolling Stone, he is the author of six books, including American Rhapsody, Hollywood Animal and Charlie Simpson’s Apocalypse, which was nominated for the National Book Award.
Joe Eszterhas looks like his reputation. Thick, grizzled mane of hair, biker brawler face, ex-boozer–my father would have called him, “a man’s man.” 
Eszterhas left Hollywood and returned to the home of his youth–Ohio. He lives with his second wife, Naomi, and their four sons just east of Cleveland.
He has just finished a book about himself and his relationship with Jesus, called Crossbearer. The title refers to himself, not Jesus; Eszterhas carries the cross at Mass at his church.
He came close to dying from his additions to drinking and smoking. The contracted cancer, struggled with a tracheotomy. He had an epiphany. It is this transformation that he describes in his new book, along with differing on what he sees as the church’s “wimpification” of Jesus.
“I didn’t even really know how to pray…Part of it was that I felt myself to be presuming God’s favor in our new relationship. I thought to myself: Yeah, right, I reject Him so long ago, and then, after forty years of not just ignoring Him but trashing Him in my writings, I’m suddenly back and talking to Hi as though nothing had interrupted our relationship, syaing “How ya doing, God? Haven’t seen you in a while..what up? Everything cool?…”
“And now here I was trying to speak to God whom I had marginalized and mocked and lampooned. How do you approach someone to whom you’ve done that? I didn’t know what to say, so one of the first things I said was ‘I’m sorry. I’ve acted like a colossal A-hole. I’m really, really sorry. I don’t deserve to be forgiven, but please try to forgive me.”
For Pepperdine law professor Douglas Kmiec, a constitutional lawyer who often writes on religion in the public square, the situation had uncomfortable echoes of the last presidential election cycle –a priest refusing to give Communion to someone based on their political views.
This time, though, the stunned Massgoer turned away by a priest was Kmiec himself.
The former dean of Catholic University Law School was an architect of the Reagan administration’s stance against abortion. His pro-life credentials include serving as a keynote speaker at March for Life’s annual Rose Dinner a few years ago.
The story begins with Kmiec’s March 2008 endorsement of Barak Obama for president in an article published in Slate magazine.
“I take him at his word that he wants to move the nation from beyond its religious and racial divides and that he wants to return the United States to that company of nations committed to human rights,” Kmiec wrote. He noted that he and Obama disagree on “important fundamentals” including legislation about traditional marriage and that life begins at conception.
He followed up that piece by writing May 15 for Catholic Online. There Kmiec said his Obama endorsement “baffled my political pals; it infuriated some of my fellow Catholics.” Some bloggers declared he was “self-excommunicated,” he wrote, and Kmiec went on to describe being denied Communion at a meeting of a Catholic business group.
At the event, Kmiec wrote, the priest “excoriated my Obama-heresy from the pulpit at length and then denied my receipt of Communion.”
He said he was pleased to hear that Los Angeles Cardinal Roger M. Mahony had weighed in on the matter, in comments by his spokesman, Tod Tamberg, first included in a National Public Radio report.
Tamburg told Catholic News Service that the priest’s action in refusing Communion to Kmiec “was absolutely indefensible” both as a matter of canon law and the policies and practices of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. “The archbishop’s office is well aware of the situation and will be responding in an appropriate manner,” he added.
Kmiec has drawn attention as one of the nation’s leading “Obamacons”-conservatives who find Obama’s call for a new approach to politics appealing.
Kmiec started life as a Democrat, but like many Catholic Democrats, he said he was profoundly attracted to Ronald Reagan. For Kmiec, five words in Reagan’s 1980 acceptance speech summarized the essence of a Catholic view of politics: “family, work, neighborhood, peace and freedom.”
But Kmiec has expanded that original view: “To think you have done a generous thing for your neighbor or that you have built up a culture of life just because you have voted for a candidate who says in his brochure that he wants to overturn Roe vs. Wade is far too thin an understanding of the Catholic faith,” he said.
A critic of the Bush Administration’s Iraq policy, Kmiec added that Catholics should heed “the broad social teaching of the church,” including its views on war.
Kmiec said his pastor convinced him not to let the Communion incident go unanswered.
“He told me, ‘You may be resilient, but another person to whom this happens, it may destroy their entire faith,’” Kmiec said.
By a vast majority, he said, most U.S. bishops and church leaders are consistently good teachers on the range of political responsibilities expected of Catholics. However, he added, “if we continue to use religion as a political weapon than we’ve failed.”
