Posted in category "Humor"
Oscar Wilde, whose torrid affair with Lord Alfred Douglas scandalized Britain in the 19th century has won an endorsement from the Vatican. 
In a review of a new study, The Portrait of Oscar Wilde by Italian writer Paolo Gulisano, L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, said that Wilde was much more than “an aesthete and a lover of the ephemeral.”
“What a surprise!” La Repubblica said. “A homosexual icon has been accepted by the Vatican.” Orazio La Rocca, a Vatican watcher, described the book as a bombshell.
The paper added that Wilde was often celebrated by “the gay world” as an example of an artist persecuted because of his homosexuality. But he was also “a man who behind a mask of amorality asked himself what was just and what was mistaken, what was true and what was false.”
Two years ago, some of Wilde’s best known aphorism were included in a book of witticisms for Christians collated by the Vatican’s head of protocol, Father Leonardo Sapienza. The book includes: “I can resist everything except temptation”, and “The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.”
Hardly orthodox Catholic teaching.
Father Sapienza said that he had devoted the lion’s share of Provocations: Aphorisms for an Anti-conformist Christianity to Wilde because he was a “writer who lived perilously and somewhat scandalously but who has left us with some razor-sharp maxims with a moral.”
Father Sapienza said that he wanted to “stimulate a reawakening in certain Catholic circles.” “Our role,” said Fr. Sapienza, “is to be a thorn in the flesh, to move people’s consciences and to tackle what today is the No. 1 enemy of religion–indifference.”
Wilde married Constance Lloyd in 1884 and they had two sons, but in 1891 he began a relationship with the much younger Lord Alfred Douglas. 
In April 1895, Wilde sued Douglas’ father, the Marquis of Queensberry, for libel, after the Marquis had accused him of being a sodomite. Wilde lost, and after salacious details of his private life were revealed during the trial, was arrested and tried for gross indecency. He was sentenced to two years of hard labor in Reading Gaol. 
The way for Wilde’s rehabilitation by the Vatican was paved six years ago by Jesuit theologian, Father Antonio Spadaro. On the centenary of Wilde’s death, he raised eyebrows by praising the “understanding of God’s love” that followed Wilde’s imprisonment in Reading.
Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854 to a Protestant family but became attracted to Catholicism at Oxford. In 1877 he made the journey to the Vatican for an audience with Pope Pius IX, but declared: “To go over to Rome would be to sacrifice and give up my two great Gods: Money and Ambition.”
During his time in prison he read the works of St. Augustine, Dante and Newman. When he was released in 1897, with his reputation destroyed and in frail health, he moved to Paris. He was received into the Catholic Church shortly before he died, three years later.
L’Osservatore Romano described the writer’s conversion as a “long and difficult path”…”a path which led him to convert to Catholicism, a religion which, as he remarked in one of his more acute and paradoxical aphorisms, was “for saints and sinners alone–for respectable people, the Anglican Church will do.”
Thousands of Irish people have flocked this week to a County Limerick church to pray at the stump of a recently cut willow tree that many observers say has the silhouette of the Virgin Mary. 
The phenomenon at St. Mary’s Church in Rathkeale, population 3,000, harkens back to decades when Catholic devotion and pilgrimages were part of life in rural Ireland.
“People have been crying out for something good to happen. And this is all good for the soul,” said Noel White, who has been supervising a church project to cut down trees in the parish cemetery dangerously overhanging the neighboring school playground.
When one willow was felled near the church entrance Monday, he said, a major branch cracked off and made “a funny shape.” One worker cut through the stump at a near vertical angle, revealing a wooden relief that inspired some to see the Virgin Mary.
“One of the lads said, ‘Look, our Blessed Lady in the tree,” said White. “One of the other lads looked over and actually knelt down and blessed himself, he got such a shock. It was the perfect shape of the figure of Our Lady holding the baby.” 
Anthony Redden was clearing trees when he spotted what his saw had produced from the willow. “There were only two limbs and it’s just the way the grain of the two limbs came out,” he said.
“You can depict what you want out of it. It was another man who noticed it and just said it was the image of Holy Mary. I see it as a grain of a tree.”
Nevertheless, word of mouth brought about 100 people to inspect and pray at the stump that first night. Numbers swelled to several hundred the next night. By Wednesday, more than a thousand came and went as a makeshift shrine of candles, rosaries and miniature statutes of Mary grew.
Fr. Willie Russell, the summer replacement for the regular pastor of St. Mary’s Church, had mixed feelings about the stump. “It’s just a tree. You don’t worship a tree,” Russell said. The priest said he saw no harm in saying Hail Marys at the spot—so long as the faithful don’t actually find themselves praying to the stump itself. “I don’t believe in idolatry. That would be the danger,” he said.
The County Limerick diocese said it viewed the stump with “great skepticism.”
“While we do not wish in any way to detract from the devotion to Our Lady, we would also wish to avoid anything which might lead to superstition,” the diocese said in a statement.
White said he didn’t understand the church’s distinction between its love of statues and this natural discovery. “We pray in front of statues which are marble and chalk. What’s the difference if it’s timber?” he said.
Rathkeale shopkeeper Seamus Hogan is leading a petition drive to deter village authorities from uprooting and removing the stump, as they originally planned to do Wednesday. More than 2,000 people in the Rathkeale area have signed a petition to prevent the removal of the stump. “We won’t be removing the stump,” White said. “We’d remove it at our peril.”
“Nature has a funny way of showing things up and let it be a freak of nature or something else but whatever it is, surely it is a wonderful thing to see so many people coming out to pray, especially young people who have been saying the Rosary in the church for the past few nights,” he added.
The Virgin Mary stump news has prompted comments from wags around the globe. Here are two from New Zealand:
Ian: “Looks like a ten pin bowling pin to me. Clearly I haven’t been spending enough time in church.”
Ness: “How nice to see the Irish returning to their pagan roots after that long Catholic experiment! About time.”
The current book by my armchair is The Power and the Glory: Inside the Dark Heart of John Paul II’s Vatican by David Yallop. In the chapter, “The Marketplace” the author discusses the discreet, but powerful involvement of money in the popular Medjugorje pilgrimage site. A series of local bishops declared the apparitions a hoax and the visionaries liars, but so far the Vatican has declined to make a pronouncement.
On page 221 of the book the author quotes this gem from a member of the Secretariat of State about Medjugorje: “Of course its a fraud but the money is genuine.” 
On January 6, 2009, the conservative Italian Catholic website “Petrus” broke a story that Pope Benedict has instructed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to prepare a vademecum, or handbook, on how to deal with alleged Marian apparations and visions such as those at Medjugorje. It actually amounts to an update of a 1978 document on the same subject.
It would reportedly require individuals who said they have experienced appearances or visions of the Virgin Mary to remain silent while their claims are investigated carefully by Church authorities.
The document was also rumoured to specify that local bishops should set up commissions composed of psychiatrists, psychologists, theologians and priests to investigate the claimed apparitions.
The commission is supposed to establish whether the visionary seems psychologically unstable; whether trickery or economic interests may be involved; whether any alleged revelation is consistent with church teaching; and whether there are grounds to suspect demonic influence.
One interesting winkle: according to the Petrus report the alleged seers will be required to turn over their computers to investigators, who are supposed to determine if they’ve gone online researching miracles and wonders–suggesting that perhaps they wanted to minic other famed incidents.
In the background to these alleged new guidelines lurks the continuing controversy over Medjugorje, the Bosnian site where the Virgin Mary has been delivering revelation to a group of local seers since 1981. Medjugorje has become a pilgrimage destination for millions of devotees every year, despite the fact the church has never authenticated the visions. Pope John Paul II was a believer.
Vatican concern has also been shaped by ferment in Italy over the “Madonnina” or “little Madonna” of Civitavecchia–a small statute of the Virgin, originally purchased in Medjugorje, which has reportedly been shedding tears of blood since the mid-1990s. 
In May 2008, his excellency Andrea Gemma, 78, bishop emeritus of the Isernia-Venafro Diocese northeast of Rome and one of Italy’s best known exorcists, announced in Petrus that the Catholic Church had officially stated that the Blessed Mother had never appeared in Medjugorje and that the entire operation was the “work of the devil.” When asked to be more specific about the interests motivating involvement in Medjugorje, the bishop declared, “I’m referring to the devil’s shit, money.”
The fact that many priests from around the world continue to lead pilgrimages there is “a disgrace,” the bishop added. “The phony seers and their assistants make money hand over fist, while at the same time the devil creates dissension between the faithful and the Church.”
The well known theologian Rene Laurentin, after years of research, has recorded over 2,450 Marian documented events in the history of the church. But out of almost 300 requests for investigation initiated in the last 100 years, church authorities have officially certified as true only a dozen appearances. The most recent recognition is “Our Lady of Laus,” in France, which took place on May 8, 2008.
The local diocese declared the apparition as authentic in 1665. It only took the Vatican three and a half centuries to concur.
The AP story headline read: Vatican secret confessional tribunal opens up. “One of Vatican’s most secrecy shrouded tribunals,” the story began, “which handles confessions of sins so grave only the Pope can grant absolution, is giving the faithful a peek into its workings for the first time in its 830-year history.”
It’s known as the Apostolic Penitentiary, and its currently headed by an American, Cardinal James Francis Stafford.
“Even though it’s the oldest department of the Holy See, it’s very little known – specifically because by its nature it deals with secret things,” said Monsignor Gianfranco Girotti, the tribunal’s #2 official.
The sins this “tribunal of conscience” hears include:
1. Defiling the Eucharist.
2. A priest breaking the seal of the confessional by revealing the nature of the sin and the person who sought penance.
3. A priest who has sex with someone and then offers forgiveness for the act.
4. A man who directly causes an abortion–such as paying for it–who then seeks to become a priest or deacon.
5. Physically attacking the Pope.
6. A bishop who consecrates another bishop without permission from the Holy See.
These sins bring automatic excommunication. Once the pope has granted absolution, the excommunication is lifted.
Personally, I was surprised. I would have thought mass murder, child prostitution and pornography, stealing food from starving people, etc. would have been worse sins, but I guess not.
“Maximum Leader,” (who I assume is Catholic, given his comments and other posts on religion) weighed in on his blog, Naked Villany: 
“This was quite intriguing to your Maximum Leader as he’d never known such a tribunal existed. And he also never knew specifically that there were sins so grave that only the Pope could grant absolution. He had assumed that there were probably real “doozy” sins that required going to a Bishop. He supposes that at some level he might have assumed that there were sins so serious one would need to get in contact with Rome (at least) before granting absolution.
One wonders if the act of confession dealt with by the Apostolic Penitentiary actually ends with the penitant coming and confessing to the Pope personally. Your Maximum Leader would assume that it would have to be a face to face encounter. He doubts that the Pope would sit in a little confessional and open the screen to hear the confession.
This reminds your Maximum Leader of one time he went to confession. Many years ago he happened to be on the campus of Catholic U and walked into the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. It was during one of the times they offered Confession, so your Maximum Leader decided to make a confession. Up to this point in his life, he’d always gone into the little dark confessional and waited for the screen to open and get started. Well, there was some construction in the area where they normally have the confessionals. So he waited in a side chapel in front of a nondescript door. People would go in, and after a time would come out. When it was your Maximum Leader’s turn he walked in and found himself face to face with a priest sitting in a bright room with two chairs. There was a moment there when your Maximum Leader considered walking right out without opening his mouth. He was used to the dark. Used to the annonymity. Used to hiding what he was doing. But there was no hiding here. Bright light. Open chairs. Face to face (almost eye to eye) contact.
It was one of the most difficult things your Maximum Leader ever did; making his confession that day.
In retrospect it seemed the most fulfilling as well. There was something very comforting about seeing the priest and making a personal connection.”
Your Censor Librorum remembers the last time she went to Confession. The priest refused to grant absolution because she refused to promise to stop using birth control. She and her husband were students, and she told the priest that while she intended to have children someday, they could not afford them when they were in school. The priest asked her to leave the confessional, and she never went back.
Confession is good for the soul; secrets we are ashamed of, and carry around inside can be corrosive. It is a relief to unburden yourself, and ask to be forgiven. When we feel forgiven, it helps us to forgive ourselves.
But we need to make sense of the sins, so the emptying is not an empty gesture.
New Calvinist Mark Driscoll, 38, is the head preacher at Mars Hill Church in Seattle. He believes Christianity has gone soft on sin, women should submit to their husbands, and the Gospels have been watered down to a glorified self-help program. In regards to church music, “I’ll be happy,” he said, “when we have more than just prom songs to Jesus sung by some effeminate guy on an acoustic guitar offered as mainstream worship music.” 
Driscoll says he admires Martin Luther, the vulgar, beer-swilling theological rebel who sparked the Reformation. “I found him to be something of a mentor. I didn’t have all the baggage he did. But you can see him with a quill in one hand and a drink in the other. He married a brewer and renegade nun. His story is kind of indie rock.”
Driscoll was raised Roman Catholic. In high school he met a pretty blond pastor’s daughter named Grace who gave him his first Bible. He was “born again” at 19. “God talked to me,” Driscoll said. “He told me to marry Grace, preach the Bible, plant churches and train men.”
The mainstream church, Driscoll has written, has transformed Jesus into “a Richard Simmons, hippie, queer Christ,” a “neutered and limp-wristed popular Sky Fairy of pop culture that..would never talk about sin or send anyone to hell.”
Driscoll takes issue with any group who would rename the Trinity (like “Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier”) “The One God has kindly told us who He is—Father, Son, and Spirit. But some chicks and some chickified dudes with limp wrists and minors in “womyn’s studies” are not happy because two persons of the Trinity have a dude-ish ring.”
“There is a strong drift toward the hard theological left. Some emergent types [want] to recast Jesus as a limp-wrist hippie in a dress with a lot of product in His hair, who drank decaf and made pithy Zen statements about life while shopping for the perfect pair of shoes. In Revelation, Jesus is a prize fighter with a tattoo down His leg, a sword in His hand and the commitment to make someone bleed. That is a guy I can worship. I cannot worship the hippie, diaper, halo Christ because I cannot worship a guy I can beat up. I fear some are becoming more cultural than Christian, and without a big Jesus who has authority and hates sin as revealed in the Bible, we will have less and less Christians, and more and more confused, spiritually self-righteous blogger critics of Christianity.”
Mark Driscoll certainly is up for a butch, rough trade Jesus. If he ever wants to come back to Catholicsm, he can always hook up with the Dignity leather group, The Defenders.
The web is loaded with praise, criticism and withering commentary on Driscoll, his church, and his brand of New Calvinism. Two of the funniest are Ultimate Fighting Jesus by Dan Savage, and David Goldstein’s Huffington Post blog, Who’s to blame for Pastor Haggard’s fall from grace? His fat, lazy wife.
Amen.
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.”
For many years December was the month I used to grit my teeth and endure hearing ”Happy Holiday!” “Season’s Greetings”–anything but “Merry Christmas.” Not anymore.
For the past several years, whenever someone offers a “Happy Holidays” I smile and say back to them, “You can wish me a Merry Christmas.”
For too many years merchants have co-opted Christmas to move their inventory and run up the sales figures for the last quarter.
With each passing year Christmas decorations, lights and bunting go up earlier and earlier. It’s not even Thanksgiving and already fake Holiday/Christmas decorations are up in Penn Station in New York. Advent hasn’t arrived, but plastic reindeer and Frosty the Snowman are blinking away and loudspeakers blast out tinny versions of Jingle Bells and Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree. I have Brenda Lee going off in my head for the rest of the day.
Some Christians, afraid, anxious and guilty that non-Christians might feel “left out” and have their feelings hurt by Christmas, try to minimize the religious meaning of the celebration and turn it into some kind of secular gift-giving holiday.
These people need to get over it.
One of the most breath-taking, touching, and eloquent defenses of Christmas came in the 1965 Charles Schultz special: A Charlie Brown Christmas. When Charlie Brown wonders aloud if he really knows the meaning of Christmas, Linus quotes this verse from Luke:
“Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord. This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.”
And that is the message of Christmas: That God so loved us, he came to be with us, share our life, and bring us the warmth of His love.
May that message continue to shine–brightly–through all the seasonal glitter. 
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…
France has withdrawn its nomination of an openly gay man as ambassador to the Holy See following objections from the Vatican.
The diplomat in question is Jean-Loup Kuhn-Delforge, former ambassador to Bulgaria, head of the Consular Affairs Directorate, and an outspoken critic of the Iraq war. 
According to the Italian daily La Repubblica, not only is Kuhn-Delforge out, he is “stably united with an official companion.”
I’m not *suprised* the Vatican said no. I am also not surprised the French couldn’t resist giving the Vatican at little tweak I hope it was not at Mr. Kuhn-Delforge’s expense…
Jean-Loup Kuhn-Delforge is ostensibly qualified for this diplomatic post. He is a cultural if not practicing Catholic. Why did the Holy See reject his appointment? Because he’s out; or because he’s in a committed relationship with a man? Either one would probably have gotten him blackballed.
Compare his situation to the pomp accused sex abuser Fr. Marcial Marciel, founder of the Legionaires of Christ, was accustomed to receive in Rome!
I guess the moral of the story is – be in the closet, and stick to forcing yourself on boys and young men. That’s ok. But don’t walk into a diplomatic function with a man on your arm—if you’re a man. That presents a moral infraction the Church cannot possibly accept.
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.’”
