Posted in category "Celebrities"
Commonweal’s February 27, 2009 issue had a short piece entitled “The Perfect Sinner” by Harold Bordwell. It was about Max Jacob, a French Jew born in Brittany, who was a painter, poet, novelist, playwright, and critic, who played an important role in the formative years of Cubism as well as in the new directions of modern poetry during the early 20th century. His poetry was made up of an amalgam of Jewish, Breton, Parisian and Roman Catholic elements.
Max Jacob alternated between a wildly bohemian lifestyle and periods of contemplation. He converted to Catholicism in 1915, after experiencing a vision of Christ a few years earlier. But his conversion did not save him from the Gestapo, who rounded him up and took him to Drancy internment camp. He died there of pneumonia on March 5, 1944, two days before he was scheduled to be sent to Auschwitz. He was 68. His body was eventually returned to his home of Saint-Benoit-sur-Loire near Orleans. 
Saint-Benoit was the site of a celebrated abbey church. Max Jacob first came to Saint-Benoit in 1921, and stayed there periodically until 1937, when he settled down permanently, living a quietly religious life–early daily Mass, evening prayer, and working as a church guide.
Max Jacob reminds me of David, a “man after God’s own heart.” Sensuous, a sinner, each man experienced periods of prayful contemplation and penitence. But in their full and vivid life each also held God in a loved and honored place.
Max Jacob chose Saint-Benoit to escape his disorderly and worldly life–he was homosexual, he took drugs, he liked to play the clown–and, as his biographer Beatrice Mousli notes, to be nearer to God and away from his temptations that he could never resist in Paris.
It was a very different life than his days in Paris, where his writings and gouache paintings led to friendships with Picasso, Jean Cocteau, anf Guillaume Apollinaire, among others. There were rumors that Jacob was a male lover of Picasso. “Oh, Picasso was absolutely having sex with Max Jacob. And everyone knew!”, said John Richardson, Picasso’s biographer. Even Picasso’s mistress, Fernande Olivier, noted upon first meeting Jacob that the two men were “toujours ensemble.”
In his journals, novelist Julian Green remembers how Max Jacob used to haunt the Cafe Select by night, and then the next morning hurry down the boulevard to Notre-Dame-des-Champs to confess his sins, with the priests hiding behind the church columns but knowing that one of them would eventually have to listen to the same sins they all knew by heart.
Green calls Max Jacob the perfect sinner because he was truly sorry for his sins, which didn’t prevent him from starting all over the next day.
Shortly after A Good Man is Hard to Find was published, a discerning reader in Atlanta wrote to author Flannery O’Connor to tell her she realized that God was the main subject in the short story collection. “You are very kind to write to me and the measure of my appreciation must be to ask you to write to me again. I would like to know who this is who understands my stories,” O’Connor responded in a letter dated July 10, 1955. 
It was the first of 274 letters O’Connor sent to Elizabeth “Betty” Hester, sparking a friendship that would continue until the Flannery O’Connor’s death from lupus in 1964.
Betty Hester, ”an agnostic obsessed with God,”was shy, a flirt, and a chain-smoker with a menagerie of cats who cared for a widowed aunt named Clyde. Although she never published any of her stories, Hester shared her writing with O’Connor. Hester wrote book reviews for the diocesan newspaper, The Bulletin, as did O’Connor.
The early letters center on the two women’s faith. In the course of their correspondence, Hester converted to Catholicism, asking O’Connor to be her sponsor. Flannery tried to help Hester in her understanding of the Catholic faith in hopes of giving Betty some spiritual comfort; but shortly after her baptism, Hester decided to leave the church. That disturbed O’Connor more than Hester’s admission she was a lesbian. 
After much intense correspondence and several visits, Betty insisted on telling Flannery her “history of horror” before the friendship went any further. At 13, Betty had watched her mother commit suicide. The neighbors, believing she was “playacting,” did not intervene. Betty also told O’Connor that she had served in the Air Force in Germany, but was dishonorably discharged for “sexual indiscretion” with a woman.
O’Connor responded to Hester’s revelations with this frank and nonjudgemental note: “Compared to what you have experienced in the way of radical misery, I have never had anything to bear in my life but minor irritations…If in any sense my knowing your burden can make your burden lighter, then I am doubly glad I know it. You were right to tell me, but I’m glad you didn’t tell me until I knew you well. Where you are wrong is in saying that you are the history of horror. The meaning of redemption is precisely that we do not have to be our history, and nothing is plainer to me than that you are not your history.”
Hester and O’Connor remained friends and corresponded until O’Connor’s death. It is through the correspondence with Hester published in The Habit of Being that scholars are able to get a clear view of O’Connor’s thoughts on writing and her Catholic faith. 
In 1998 Hester committed suicide with a hollow-nose bullet aimed at her skull. She died after eating a late afternoon Christmas dinner and playfully mocking her friend, William Sessions, “for taking the Church seriously.” She was 76.
My post, New Fr. Marical Maciel Degollado Sex Scandal, prompted a few comments. One came from Greg Krehbiel, who writes the blog, Crowhill Weblog. Mr. Krehbiel wrote, “I don’t think people have yet come to grasp with the real significance of this story. If a manifest fraud like Maciel was able to deceive so many devout, serious people (including the pope!) what does that imply?”
Mr. Krehbiel included a link to his excellent article on Google, “The True Significance of the Fr. Maciel Story.” Some key excerpts:
“Those of us who believed the accusations against Fr. Maciel were scolded and lectured in stern tones from on high, with brows furrowed in anger and the accusing finger wagging. We were told that Fr. Maciel was being persecuted by people who hated the church, but he, saintly fellow, was taking it all in stride, bearing it like Jesus, glad to be a martyr and take his part in the sufferings of Christ.”
“Specifically, what does this story tell us about movements, leaders, followers, charlatans, con artists and enablers of various sorts, and how does that affect our reckoning of the history of the church and the evidences of Christianity? How were so many people, including Pope John Paul II, fooled by this guy?”
“This is not an idle question for Christians, for although it’s certainly true that Fr. Maciel’s sins say nothing directly about the truth of Christianity, they have indirect but important implications for Christian apologetic and epistemology, and I think these implications haven’t been seriously addressed.”
An article to read next to Mr. Krehbiel’s is the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus’s defense of Fr. Maciel, “Feathers of Scandal“ which was published by First Things in March 2002.
Fr. Neuhaus’ withering reflection was inspired by the fallout from a 1997 story in the Hartford Courant, a Connecticut newspaper, that was reprinted in the National Catholic Reporter, “a left-wing tabloid,” Fr. Neuhaus called it. Read the NCR article here. It is about the testimony of several of the men who claimed Fr. Maciel sexually abused them as seminarians, and how the Vatican put a protective wall around the Legionaires founder, refusing to investigate any of their charges.
The Hartford Courant story had been coauthored Gerald Renner, formerly the religion writer for the paper, and Jason Berry, a freelance writer in New Orleans, the author of the books Lead Us Not Into Temptation: Catholic Priests and the Sexual Abuse of Children (1992) and Vows of Silence: The Abuse of Power in the Papacy of John Paul II (1996).
Here’s what Fr. Neuhaus had to say in Fr. Maciel’s defense:
“I am not neutral about the Legionaries. I have spent time with Fr. Maciel, and he impresses me as a man who combined uncomplicated faith, gentle kindness, military self-discipline, and a relentless determination to do what he believes God has called him to do. They are qualities one would expect of someone who at age twenty-0ne in Mexico vowed to do something great for Christ and his Church, and has been allowed to do it. In the language of the tradition, they are qualities associated with holiness; in his case a virile holiness of tenacious resolve that has been refined in the fires of frequent opposition and misunderstanding.”
“Nonetheless, because I care about the Legion, and because I was outraged by what I suspected as a gross injustice, I decided to go through endless pages of testimony, counter-testimony, legal documents, and other materials related to the Berry/Renner attack on Fr. Maciel. It was not an edifying experience. For Berry/Renner, it is worth noting, the case of Fr. Maciel is not all that important in itself, but it serves another purpose. ‘To many,’ they write in the recent NCR article, ‘the case against Maciel is important because it tests the Vatican’s resolve to pursue charges related to sexual misconduct at the highest levels of the Church.’ The ‘many’ includes, first of all, Berry and Renner. That is clearly the reason for the latest re-raking of the muck of their 1997 article. They report nothing substantially new in the allegations themselves; the only new thing is that the Vatican has again considered the charges and found them without merit. A cardinal in whom I have unbounded confidence and who has been involved in the case tells me that the charges are ‘pure invention, without the slightest foundation.’”
“It counts as evidence that Fr. Maciel unqualifiedly and totally denies the charges. It counts as evidence that priests in the Legion whom I know very well and who, over many years, have a detailed knowledge of Fr. Maciel and the Legion say that the charges are diametrically opposed to everything they know for certain. It counts as evidence that Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger and others who have looked into the matter say that the charges are completely without merit. It counts as evidence that Pope John Paul II, who almost certainly is aware of the charges, has strongly, consistently, and publicly praised Fr. Maciel and the Legion. Much of what we know we take on trust. I trust these people. The suggestion that they are either deliberately deceiving or duped is totally implausible.” (My emphasis) 
A last point from Mr. Krehbiel’s article: “Christianity was spread by personal testimony. There was no Wall Street Journal or–God forbid–New York Times to verify the information. People believed the Christian testimony because they respected the lifestyle of the people they heard it from.
This is an important equation that lies at the root and foundation of Christianity–i.e., the fact that you live a decent life makes me want to believe what you say about God.”
Justin Green is a comic artist who grew up in suburban Illinois in the 1950s and early ’60s. He is best known for his 1972 autobiographical comic, Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary. 
Green was the typical Catholic boy: hormones firing away to produce a continual barrage of random impure thoughts. But most of the nuns who taught during those decades were steeped in Jansenism – a rigid, puritanical Catholicsm with a heavy emphasis on the body as the source of sin, depravity and a shortcut to the pains of hell. ”Homo thoughts about Christ!! I better do some penance,” Binky chokes.
Green’s Catholicism was also influenced by his then undiagosed obsessive-complusive disorder.
Binky begins to develop an elaborate system of obsessions based on the fear that he will contaminate religious sites with his sexual thoughts. These “rays” come from his fingers, feet and of course, his penis. He takes extreme care to make sure a ray never crossed the path of a church, or intersected with anything sacred, especially statutes of Mary.
Green equated Catholicism with scrupulosity – a neurotic obsession about committing sin. At the time he drew the book Green did not know about his obsessive-complusive disorder and described his condition as neurosis, which he blamed largely on his Catholic upbringing.
But time has softened Green’s stance a little.
“I no longer consider myself to be a warrior against the church,” he said. “Here in Sacramento we have a very liberal church. They offered a weekly program for lapsed, embittered Catholics. I attended out of curiousity. I needed to thoroughly understand the dogma that I had rejected; I wanted my latest material to have a ring of authenticity.”
“From the lively discussions, I progressed to an experimental look at the Mass. The church is in transition. Like Surrealism, there is no ultimate version (though the far right of the church claims utter and inviolable orthodoxy, as always). There is too much baggage in the organization for me to return, though somewhere along the way I lost my righteous anger.”
“I came to see how the church provides a need that is very real and good for a lot of peoples’ lives. Jesus is not the sexual bogeyman. Many repressive doctrines have been grafted onto his teachings.”
“It has been hard for me to disentangle which are uniquely my own misconceptions and which are inherent in the institution,” he goes on. “According to the latest findings of behavior psychology, my Obsessive Compulsive Disorder would exist even if Iwere never exposed to Christianity. OCD gave me a unique vantage point, though; if I was able to address symbolic content that is hidden to most people, then the behavior disorder was a gift.”
As an older artist, Green has to some extent made his peace. He feels the church is not the same monlith it was in the 1950s. Voicing his concern that Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary is a “sin of youth”–and his concern as a parent that some child might get a copy of it–he nevertheless says, “I hope to retain the quality of the voice, because it was done out of internal necessity.”
Every so often, Catholic conservatives take a breather from liberals to beat each other up. When that happens, it usually provides some great vaudevillian slapstick comedy. Here’s a recent instance:
On October 22, 2008, the Long Island, NY newspaper, Newsday, reported an uproar at the ultra conservative parish, Our Lady of Lourdes in Massapequa Park. The new pastor has cancelled a few parish traditions that have some parishioners steaming.
Our Lady of Lourdes has been described as “a sanctuary from the ravages of the Spirit of Vatican II.”
For 32 years, the Rev. Robert E. Mason, 77, celebrated a children’s Mass that attracted a loyal following among some families at the parish. He also heard confession on Saturday night.
Fr. Mason retired earlier this year. He was replaced as pastor in June 2008 by Msgr. James Lisante, the telegenic conservative commenator at Fox News. Earlier this year, Msgr. Lisante attracted attention by endorsing Sen. John McCain and leading a prayer for his election.
Lisante’s first clash with his new parishioners came in early in the summer when–without official permission–he brought in a priest from the Northern Mariana Islands in the South Pacific who had worked with him every summer since 2000 at his former parish, St. Thomas the Apostle in Hempstead.
Who knows that happened, but the priest, Rev. Matthew Blockley, was sent packing back to the Mariana Islands by Bishop William Murphy in July.
Next, Msgr. Lisante cancelled Father Mason’s Mass and confessions. He also rescheduled his Sunday Latin Mass to 1:30 pm from the morning time. When some parishioners complained Lisante said they were overreacting.
“I’m livid. I’m appalled,” huffed Chris Layer, 42, of North Massapequa. She called the Mass cancellation “a blatantly vindictive move” intended to silence those critical of Msgr. Lisante.
The the funniest part of the story was Msgr. Lisante’s choice for new music director at this ultra conservative, Latin-Mass-go-to-confession, type of parish….Peter Rapanaro, the director of the Off-Broadway play, “My Big Gay Italian Wedding.”
Lisante insisted that Rapanaro had “met with Bishop Murphy and assured the bishop of his fidelity to the Catholic Church on every issue of sexual ethics.” 
Whether the critics have been mollified remains to be seen…
Baseball stadiums are like cathedrals.
Storied, full of memorable events, they are also the scene of private moments of anguish and fierce joy. The interiors–the smells, the sounds, the surroundings–are immediately recognizable and familiar. You have your favorite place to sit. 
There are as many people praying, beseeching, pleading, bargaining, smugly satisfied or silently willing a miracle as you’d find in any pew. Most of all, it is a place of community–solidarity and belonging.
One of the grandest baseball cathedrals of all–Yankee Stadium–played its last game this past Sunday. A number of New York City celebrities, some Yankee fans, some not, were asked to comment on its closing.
Pete Hamill, an author and Brooklyn Dodgers fan, had this to say:
First visit: “In 1948. When Babe Ruth died. I was 13 and like all good Brooklynites, I hated the Yankees. My younger brother Tom and I traveled all the way to El Bronx, where the Babe was being waked in the Rotunda. We had a nearly theological debate before going, since it was like visiting another church. An act of betrayal. Almost as bad as turning Episcopalian.” 
“But we convinced ourselves that since the Babe had been with the Dodgers as a coach for a season in the 1930s, we would mourn Babe the Dodger. And so we did. We kept our purity by saying a prayer at the coffin, glancing into the green patch of th imperious park, and refusing to enter.”
“The Jesuits later explained to me that I was exhibiting what purists called ‘an elastic conscience.’”
Years ago, at the height of the Chef Paul Prudhomme cooking craze, Lori and I took a long weekend trip to New Orleans to go to K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen and sightsee. Walking around town, especially at night, we thought New Orleans was the spookiest, most haunted place we had ever been in. We were warned not to go to Marie Laveau’s tomb…
If New Orleans is covered in the miasma of the occult, it is layered with Catholicism. One isn’t separate from the other. Like the city mist it envelopes you…
Two of New Orleans’ most famous daughters of the occult were devout Catholics: Marie Laveau and Ann Rice.
Marie Laveau, a renowned Voodoo priestess, went to Mass every day, was renowned for her charity and generosity, and was laid to rest with the blessing of the Church. She was famous in her lifetime as the “Voodoo Queen” of New Orleans. 
Ann Rice has written a series of novels on vampires, witches, demons and humans who desire them. Her explorations of good and evil, love and alienation, darkness and light–certainly have their roots in her religious upbringing. 
Is it the “other worldliness” of Catholicsm that makes the occult so familiar; or it is the ritual, the symbols, and sexual allure?
With the beatification and probable canonization of John Henry Cardinal Newman, the church is being handed an opportunity to stand behind their statements about gay people–about being loved, and welcomed, and entitled to human dignity and all that. The church states it welcomes homosexuals to be full participating members as long as they are chaste and celibate.
Cardinal Newman could be a gay saint (beautiful lips, soulful eyes) - one that followed their rules to the letter and never engaged (as far as can be surmised) in any sexual relations with men. He was a vowed virgin when it came to women. 
He lived for many years with another priest – Fr. Ambrose St. John – and when he died Newman was clear he wished to be buried in the same grave.
How many football and hunting buddies ask to be buried in the same grave? Not many – so it’s not some male bonding thing.
So, why doesn’t the church claim him as a gay Catholic? Why don’t they promote him as our role model? John Newman would be a lot more famous, glamorous, and viable role model than the sad, depressing, guilty and ashamed members of Courage.
Here’s the reason: because homosexuals need to keep it secret. The church does not welcome any *out * homosexuals, whether we are celibate or sexually active. You can be a gay Catholic–just have the grace and good taste to keep it to yourself.
Last month, the Vatican announced plans to move Newman’s remains from his small, shared gravesite to a specially built sarcophagus in the Oratory Church of Birmingham, where, officials say, they will be more accessible for veneration by the faithful.
But British gay rights activist Peter Tatchell sees ulterior motives in exhuming the Cardinal: “embarrassment” because of his relationship with Fr. St. John. 
“They were inseparable, they lived together for half a century, effectively like husband and wife,” says Tatchell. “There were repeated allegations during (Newman’s) lifetime about his circle of homosexual friends. It was uncertain whether or not their relationship involved sex. It is quite likely both men had a gay orientation but chose to abstain from sexual relations. But abstinence does not alter a person’s sexual orientation.”
Tatchell says the two men’s bond, and Newman’s abiding wish to have his final resting place next to St. John’s, make separating their remains “an act of dishonesty and betrayals by homophobes in the Vatican.”
In a 1990 address marking a century since Newman’s death, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger spoke about the profound impact Newman’s views had on young German seminarians in the wake of the Nazi regime. “For us at the time, Newman’s teaching on conscience became an important foundation for theological personalism, which was drawing us all into its sway,” Ratzinger said. “We had experienced the claim of a totalitarian party, which understood itself as the fulfillment of history and which negated the conscience of the individual.”
In her new book, Being Catholic Now, Kerry Kennedy interviewed famous Catholics from far left to far right; including Susan Saradon, Martin Sheen, Bill O’Reilly, speaker of the house Nancy Pelosi, Gabriel Byrne, Dan Aykroyd and Bill Maher. “I was struck by their raw honesty,” Kennedy said. 
She cried when Byrne told her his story about being abused by a priest as a boy, and spotting the abuser at a football game decades later. “I called him and asked if he remembered me,” said the actor. “He said,”No’– He didn’t make the connection, but I, of course, did.” Byrne blames the vows of celibacy, “which I regard as a sin against human life.”
Susan Saradon strikes a lighter note with a story of praying with rosary beads at age seven and not knowing they were glow in the dark. “I looked down and they were glowing and I thought, “Oh, my God, I’m about to have a vision! The Blessed Virgin is about to come in the door!”
Church officials have not yet seen the book, but a spokeswoman for the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, Sister Mary Ann Walsh, said in response to a description of the book, “A lot of Catholics are having lovers’ quarrels with the church.”
The Deacon’s Bench has a good post on this story.
Kerry Kennedy will discuss the book during a program at the Museum of the City of New York on Wednesday, October 22nd at 6:30 pm. 
Silent screen actor Ramon Novarro (1899-1968) was one of early Hollywood’s leading actors. He got his big break in the 1923 movie Scaramouche, and went on to play the title role in 1925’s Ben Hur and later appear with Greta Gardo in Mata Hari. 
Novarro was gay. Even under pressure from MGM studio head, Louis B. Mayer, Novarro refused to contract a “lavendar marriage”–something most homosexual stars did to keep their contracts and stay out of gossip columns.
He was also a devout Roman Catholic all his life, and at one time considered becoming a priest.
Ramon Novarro was murdered by two brothers, Tom and Paul Ferguson, whom he paid to come to his Laurel Canyon home for sex. Tom was 17 and Paul was 22. Novarro had slept with Paul a number of times before. On this night he brought along his brother to help him rob Novarro. The two young men believed that a large sum of money was hidden in Novarro’s house.
Paul had sex with Novarro, and then the brothers beat and tortured him looking for the money. After they left the house, he suffocated in his own blood.
To avoid Novarro’s slipping into unconsciousness, the brothers dragged him into the bathroom, slapping him awake with cold water. Novarro staggered into the bedroom. Collapsing on his knees, he sobbed: “Hail Mary full of grace.”
Tom’s defense attorney, Richard Walton, placed the blame for the murder on Novarro. “Back in the days of Valentino, this man who set female hearts aflutter, was nothing but a queer. There’s no way of calculating how many felonies this man committed over the years, for all his piety.”
Paul Ferguson blamed his Catholic background: “When he kissed me, I reacted like a Catholic, what they call homosexual panic. Some old guy in the desert says, ‘Kill homosexuals.’ It’s inbred…I was too drunk to be civilized. Whatever my most primitive moral standings were, I reacted. It had nothing to do with Novarro, nothing to do with his being homosexual. It all had to do with how I saw myself. And the fact that my brother was there. And that he could see me in that homosexual act. It all had to do with my Catholic upbringing, with my five thousand years of Moses. And that’s the only reason why this whole thing happened. Because that’s what society teaches you…I think after I hit Mr. Novarro…I turned around and sat down on the sofa. I got up and went to find (Novarro) in the bedroom. ‘This guy’s dead’…We didn’t go there to rob him.”
Novarro was interred in Calvary Cemetery in Los Angeles. His killers were released from prison after a few years.
Author John Rechy describes the murder in his blog, Speaking Out. The events he describes are drawn from the book, Beyond Paradise: The Life of Ramon Novarro. 
