Frank McCourt, a former New York City schoolteacher who turned his miserable childhood in Limerick, Ireland, into a phenomenally popular, Pulitzer prize -winning memoir, Angela’s Ashes, died on Sunday, July 19, 2009. He was 78 and lived in Manhattan and Roxbury, Conn. 
“When I look back on my childhood,” McCourt said in Angela’s Ashes, “I wonder how I survived it at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: The happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.”
The book’s hilarious and irreverent chapter on Mr. McCourt’s preparation for First Communion is reminicent of pre-Vatican II lessons on both sides of the pond.
“He tells us we have to know the catechism backwards and forwards,” Mr. McCourt writes. “We have to know the Ten Commandments, Divine and Moral, the Seven Sacraments, the Seven Deadly Sins. We have to know by heart all the prayers, the Hail Mary, the Our Father, the Confiteor, the Apostles’ Creed, the Act of Contrition, the Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary…He tells us we’re hopeless, the worst class he’s ever had for First Communion, but as sure as God made little apples he’ll make Catholics of us, he’ll beat the idler out of us and Sanctifying Grace into us.”
The day for First Communion finally arrives. He’s late to church.
“We ran to the church. My mother panted along behind with Michael in her arms. We arrived at the church just in time to see the last of the boys leaving the altar rail where the priest stood with the chalice and the host, glaring at me. Then he placed on my tongue the wafer, the body and blood of Jesus. At last, at last.”
“It’ s on my tongue. I draw it back.”
“It stuck.”
“I had God glued to the roof of my mouth. I could hear the master’s voice. Don’t let that host touch your teeth for it you bite God in two you’ll roast in hell for eternity.”
“I tried to get God down with my tongue but the priest hissed at me, Stop that clucking and get back to your seat.”
“God was good. He melted and I swallowed Him and now, at last, I was a member of the True Church, an official sinner.”
In fact, Frank McCourt ended up to be one of the Church’s principal public antagonists. He delighted in delivering bawdy riffs against what he saw as the church’s hypocrisy, cruelty and joylessness. “I was so angry for so long, I could hardly have a conversation without getting into an argument,” he once said.
Peter Quinn, the novelist and a practicing Catholic, wrote in an email that his friend was neither “contemptuous of believers in general nor Catholics in particular. On a trip we took together in 1998, he went to Mass with me on the Sunday morning that we landed. He respected the fact that I had reached my own peace with the Catholic Church. ‘It’s a good thing,’ he once told me, ‘that you’re raising your kids in the Catholic faith. At least they’ll have a map to follow or throw away. In either case, they’ll know where they are.’”
Mr. McCourt felt it was impossible to fully divorce himself from the church. So when he stood before Pope John Paul II in 2002, accompanying a delegation of 40 mayors from around the world, the little Irish Catholic boy in him took over. He knelt, took the pope’s hand, and kissed his ring.
“I got up and he’s looking at me with his dazzling blue Polish eyes and extraordinary complexion,” Mr. McCourt told the Commonwealth Club of California, “I had a feeling he knew. He knew what a fraud and phony I was. Then I walked away. And I have to admit, as turbulent as my relationship with the church has been (although they don’t know and they don’t care), I was walking on water practically. I was walking on air.”
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.”
While researching conservative/ultradox Catholic sites for comments on the recent papal encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, I came across this news item on American Papist:
“Jim Corcoran, the owner of one of Canada’s largest and most lavish spas, has launched a human rights complaint against the Bishop of Peterborough Ontario for refusing him permission to continue to serve as an altar server. 
Corcoran admits that he is homosexual and lives with another homosexual man, but says that he follows the Church’s teaching and lives a chaste lifestyle. According to the Catholic Register, Bishop Nicola De Angelis asked Corcoran to accept his decision that he not serve on the altar based upon the bishops’ desire to avoid public scandal.
Corcoran is seeking monetary damages of $25,000 from the bishop and $20,000 each from 12 parishioners who complained to the bishop about Corcoran and his roommate having been invited by the local priest to serve on the altar at Masses.”
Here’s what the American Papist blogger, Thomas Peters, had to say about the issue:
“The matter is tricky because Corcoran claims to be living chastely with his live-in boyfriend.
If that previous sentence didn’t quite make sense to you, you’re on to something. Corcoran would be an object of scandal if he was a heterosexual man claiming to be living a “chaste lifestyle” with his live-in girlfriend. The fact that he is an open homosexual exacerbates the problem.
As I’ve said before, the homosexual agenda cannot be reconciled to biblical Christianity, and the two movements cannot co-exist peacefully in society (they certainly do not appear to be co-existing well now). This episode, to my mind, is one more case which proves the truth of that claim.”
Another Catholic blogger, Terry Nelson of Abbey Roads, had this to say:
“Corcoran says that he follows the teaching of the Church regarding homosexuality and that he lives a chaste life with his friend:
.
“I’m a chaste homosexual and practise my faith,” he said. While Corcoran does live with another gay man, they are devout Catholics who refrain from sexual activity in accordance with church teaching, he said.
Nothing wrong with that and besides, that is all the Church asks – aside from requiring same-sex attracted people to refrain from promoting the homosexual lifestyle. Which may explain further why the bishop felt it necessary to intervene – I trust the men themselves had no intention of doing that – flaunting their orientation or promoting it – however other parishioners may have understood it differently.
This issue is not a matter of housing or job discrimination, but doctrine and the spiritual care of souls – scandal can drive people away from the Church, as this case may have already done.”
I agree with both these men—scandal has certainly driven many good people away from the Church.
- the scandal of hypocritical bishops and priests, who promise to treat with dignity and respect lesbian and gay Catholics who live in accordance with Church teaching. That is a lie. What they really mean is that homosexuals must live alone and stay in the closet. Otherwise, they are “flaunting” their lifestyle by acknowledging their sexual orientation.
-the scandal of bishops who moved pedophile priests around from parish to parish like a street con man doing a three card monty. Too bad about the kids. A pervert priest is better than a woman priest or married priest.
-the scandal of Pope John Paul II, who should have publicly knocked the biretta off the head of Bernard Cardinal Law to show the whole world he would not tolerate clerical sexual improprieties and abuse…did no such thing. Instead, he expressed his “sadness,” got Law out of the country and protected by Vatican immunity so he wouldn’t be invited to testify at any of the 450+ lawsuits against the Archdiocese. Cardinal Law is now the Archpriest of the Papal Basilica di Santa Marie Maggiore.. JPII was also a big fan of Legionaries of Christ founder, Father Marcial Maciel. Obviously, his interest in comely seminarians and hunky priests didn’t bother the pope. The money and men he brought in cancelled out any whisper of scandal. 
Finally, the scandal of the 12 parishioners of St. Michael’s parish who petitioned the bishop to remove a gay man as an altar server because of who he is. In their mean-spiritedness they did not give him the benefit of doubt when he said he lived in accord with church teaching. I guess expressions like “Christ’s love” and “God’s love” and “remove the log in your own eye” bounce off their righteousness like flies off a screen door.
I will remember Mr. Corcoran in my prayers. And I hope he wins his lawsuits. Better still, I hope he is reinstated as an Eucharistic Minister with apologies from all concerned starting with the bishop.
Read Mr. Corcoran’s account of what happened here.
Read a letter from another parishioner to Mr. Corcoran here.
Read William F. Buckley’s famous article on Bernard Cardinal Law – “Lawless in Boston” here.
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.”
There were no chorus of ”Huzzahs!” from American Catholic conservatives for Pope Benedict XVI’s latest encyclical, Caritas in Veritate (“Charity in Truth”). The Vatican released the document on July 7, 2009 – just a day before the opening of the Group of Eight meeting in Italy and the week of president Obama’s visit with the pope.
In fact, there was very little coverage of it at all in conservative Catholic blogs and websites, except for a few who thought Pope Benedict had been hijacked by the Peace and Justice crowd, and that the liberal media gave short shrift on the pope’s passage on family protection and bioethics. In fact, in this document the pope linked economics to modern cultural issues. And ethics.
The pope used Caritas in Veritate primarily to criticize the current economic system, “where the pernicious effects of sin are evident” he growled. The pope urged financiers in particular to “rediscover the genuinely ethical foundation of their activity” and also called for “greater social responsibility” on the part of business. “Once profit becomes the exclusive goal, if it is produced by improper means and without the common good as its ultimate end, it risks destroying wealth and creating poverty.” 
“Today’s international economic scene, marked by grave deviations and failures, requires a profoundly new way of understanding business enterprise,” Benedict stated. “In the search for solutions to the current crisis, development aid for poor countries must be considered a valid means of creating wealth for all.”
John Sniegocki, a professor of Christian ethics at Xavier University in Cincinnati, said one of the most controversial elements of the encyclical, at least for some Americans, would be the call for international institutions to play a role in regulating the economy.
“One of the things he’s saying is that the global economy is escaping the power of individual states to regulate it,” Mr. Sniegocki said. He also said the encyclical also contained elements “very critical” of how the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank “have required cuts in social spending in the third world.”
Caritas in Veritate has infuriated George Weigel, a conservative Catholic intellectual close to Pope John Paul II. Weigel ventured that this social encyclical is a hybrid, “blending the pope’s own insightful thinking on the social order with elements of the Justice and Peace approach to Catholic social doctrine…There is also rather more in the encyclical about the redistribution of wealth than about wealth-creation–a sure sign of Justice and Peace default positions at work.”
“Indeed,” he goes on, “those with advanced degrees in Vaticanology could easily go through the text of Caritas in Veritate, highlighting those passages that are obviously Benedictine with a gold marker and those that reflect current Justice and Peace default positions with a red marker.” (Get it…red marker…commie, pinko, socialist, bleeding heart liberal…sigh.)
Trying to come to terms with this awful document, Weigel opines: “Benedict XVI, a truly gentle soul, may have thought it necessary to include these multiple off-notes, in order to maintain peace within his curial household.”
However, that pat on the head for Pope Benedict doesn’t change anything. In fact, a clue to how he really feels about our unbridled, Bush-era American capitalistic system–and how that opinion is reflect in Caritas in Veritate, came several months before the release of the encyclical during a question-and-answer session with 400 priests ministering in Rome. This session was reported by Zenit, the official Vatican new agency.
A pastor from a poor neighborhood asked how church members could do more to push for a real reform of the global economic system. Pope Benedict said he did not want to give a simplistic answer to a complicated question about the reality of global finance and said that, in fact, the complexity of the current situation is what delayed the publication of his social encyclical, tentatively titled Caritas in Veritate.
On the level of global economic systems, the pope said almost every person in every country is feeling the consequences of “these fundamental errors that have been revealed in the failure of the large American banks; the error at the basis of it is human greed.”
“We must denounce this (system) with courage, but also with concreteness because moralizing will not help if it is not supported by an understanding of reality, which also will help us understand what can be done concretely to change the situation,” he said.
While the global financial system must be reformed, the pope said, individuals also must accept the fact that they will have to make some sacrifices in order to help the poor and move the world toward justice. “Justice cannot be created only with economic reforms, which are necessary, but it also requires the presence of just people,” Benedict said.
Zenit reported that Lesley-Anne Knight, the secretary-general of Caritas Internationalis, a Catholic agency ”committed to combating dehumanizing poverty that robs people of their dignity and to promoting the rights of the poor,” said in a press release that the encyclical, which reflects on Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Populorum Progressio (“The Development of Peoples”) “highlights how a blind pursuit of profits over ethics had become detrimental to people and the planet.”
Knight continued: “The crisis exposed systemic failures generated by careless speculation for the benefit of a handful of people and at the expense of millions of poor families. But the crisis offers a unique chance to refashion globalization to work for the majority.”
Read Caritas in Veritate here.
Saint Oran, also known as Odhron, Odhran, Odran and Otteran, proceeded Saint Columba as a Christian missionary in Iona. His death is recorded in 548 A.D.
Irish Martyrologies relate that he was a kinsman of St. Columba through their ancestor, Conall Gulban, and that he was variously described as a companion, brother or son of Columba.
It is said he was the first Christian to be buried in the ancient pagan cemetery on Iona. Norsemen carried their dead chieftains to be buried there. It is also the last resting place of 48 kings of Scotland, 4 Irish princes, 8 Norwegian kings, a king of France and many great Highland chiefs. Both Duncan and Macbeth, of Shakespeare’s Macbeth fame, are buried there.
The Vikings chose St. Oran, the titular guardian of their ancestors’ ashes, as patron of the city of Waterford in 1096 A.D. Later he was chosen as patron of the Diocese.
The legend of St. Oran begins with a chapel Saint Columba (also known as Colum Cille) wanted to build close to this sacred burial site. He was frustrated in his attempts to build, since the walls were destroyed every night. Finally, he was told by a voice that it could never be finished until a living man was buried in the foundation. So Oran was buried alive willingly, and the chapel was finished. He was promised that his soul will be safe in heaven. Some time after the burial Columba wants to see Oran once more and opens the pit under the chapel. When Oran sees the world he tries to come out again, but Columba has the pit covered with early quickly to save Oran’s soul from the world and its sin. 
But the legend has several versions.
Here is a 19th century Herbridean version of Colum Cille and St. Oran by Mrs. M. Macleod Banks: “The story of St. Columba and the burial of St. Oran under the wall of the church in Iona is well known, and frequently quoted as an instance in the belief in the efficacy of Foundation Sacrifice. It is notably absent in Adamnan’s Life, and it is an ugly tale, but it is recorded by Skene and given in many collections of saints’ legends.”
“I will first quote a version fairly popular in Scotland, collected by Dr. Maclagan at Clachan, Kintyre, in 1894, as follows: Saint Columba had a son whose name was Odhran (Oran), from whom the chapel of St. Odhran has taken its name; tradition says that, when this chapel was in the course of erection, no matter what they would do or how well the work was done, every morning all that had been built the previous day was found thrown down.”
“At last a voice came to St. Columba, telling him the only way to get the chapel completed was to bury a living man under its foundation; without that, the voice said, the chapel could never be finished. Columba decided that no one could be better put under the foundation than his own son, and accordingly got him buried at once and proceeded to build on top.”
“One day, however, Odhran raised his head, and pushing it through the wall, said, ‘There is no Hell as you suppose, nor Heaven that people talk about.’ This alarmed St. Columba, and in case Odhran should communicate more secrets of the other world, he had the body removed at once and buried in consecrated ground, and St. Odhran never again troubled any one.”
In the version recorded by William Sharp (1855-1905), a Scottish poet, author and editor who also wrote under the alias Fiona MacLeod, he noted that St. Columba’s biographer, Adamnan, “never mentions the episode, nor even the name of Oran, nor is there mention of him in the book by Colum’s intimate friend and successor, Baithene, which Adamnan practically incorporated. On the other hand, the Oran legend is certainly very old. The best modern rendering we have of it is that of Mr. Whitley Stokes in his Three Middle-Irish Homilies, and readers of Dr. Skene’s valuable Celtic Scotland recollect the translation there redacted.”
“The episode occurs first in an ancient Irish life of St. Columba. The legend, which has crystallised into a popular saying, ‘Uir, Uir, air suil Odhrain! mun labhair e tuille comhraidh” – Earth, earth on Oran’s eyes, lest he further blab” – avers that three days after the monk Oran or Odran was emtombed alive (some say in the earth, some say in a cavity), Colum opened the grave, to look once more on the face of the dead brother, when to the amazed fear of the monks and the bitter anger of the abbot himself, Oran opened his eyes and exclaimed, “There is no such great wonder in death, nor is Hell or Heaven what it has been described.” (Ifrinn, or Ifurin–the word used–is Gaelic Hell, the Land of Eternal Cold.)
“At this, Colum straightaway cried the now famous Gaelic words, and then covered up poor Oran again lest he should blab further of that uncertain world whither he was supposed to have gone. In the version of Mr. Whitley Stokes there is no mention of Odran’s grave having been uncovered after his entombment. But what is strangely suggestive is that both in the oral legend and in that early monkish chronicle alluded to, Columba is representing as either suggesting or accepting immolation of a living victim to consecrate the church he intended to build.”
“One story is that he received a divine intimation to the effect that a monk of his company must be buried alive, and that Odran offered himself. In the earliest known rendering, “Colum Cille said to his people: ‘It is well for us that our roots should go underground here’; and he said to them, ‘It is permitted to you that some one of you go under the earth of this island to consecrate it.’ Odran rose up readily, and thus he said: ‘If thou wouldst accept me,’ he said, “I am ready for that.’…Odran then went to heaven.”
A modern version relates the tale this way: There is an old tradition that when St. Columba attempted to build a chapel for the worship of the Christian God, their work was impeded by an evil spirit, and it was not until the human victim was sacrificed and buried under the foundation that the building stood firm.
St. Oran, a faithful follower of St. Columba, consented to be buried alive in order to propitiate certain demons of the soil, who interfered with the attempts of St. Columba to erect a chapel. After three days, so it is related, Columba ordered the body of his friend to be disinterred, when Oran to the consternation and dismay of the assistants, declared that there was neither a God, a judgement or a hereafter. Oran ended his story with a bit of cautionary advice for his friend, Columba. Oran whispered, “The way you think it is may not be the way it is at all.” St. Columba, for fear of other and more direful revelations, ordered the earth to be once more shoveled over Oran.
In the Hebrides and Ireland, when someone mentions an uncomfortable subject, it is still common to silence them with the phrase, “Thow mud in the mouth of St. Oran.”
His feast day is October 27th.
The moral of this story is the same 15 centuries later. If even the most devoted follower of the faith reveals a revelation not in support of the preached version they are quickly silenced. And saints have their ugly or suspect actions edited out of their official biographies. 
The last time Bishop Gaillot was feted in the United States was at the 1996 Call to Action Conference in Detroit. The title of his address was, “My Option for the Poor.” You can read it here.
After that, I haven’t heard about him. He is a man who deserves never to be forgotten, although that is what Pope John Paul II hoped, when Gaillot was removed from the Diocese of Evreux, France and appointed to an ancient and fictitious see, Partenia.
The See of Partenia, now located in the desert of Algeria, has not existed in reality since the 5th century when it was in Mauritania. But, thanks to the web, Gaillot managed to outwit the Vatican and continues to teach and pastor via the internet as a “virtual bishop.”
“As Partenia does not exist anymore” says Gaillot, “it becomes the symbol of all who feel like non-existing in society or in the Church. It is a huge diocese without borders where the sun never sets.” Travel to Partenia here.
Bishop Gaillot didn’t start off as a radical. Little by little, his contacts with people who came to see him and events to which he chose to respond led him to some unexpected places:
He called on all Catholics to persist in dialog without condemnation so that the church can, as Jesus did, embrace the dispossessed: those marginalized by poverty; those living with AIDS, those in prison, those ostracized for homosexuality; and ultimately, those struggling on the borderlands of their own Christian faith. 
“If we take as our starting point the poor, everything will be renewed – liturgy, catechism, the life of the church. It changes the way we think, pray, our very lifestyle. But if we take as our starting point the Status Quo, we will never be able to catch up with the Good News.”
Gaillot infuriated members of the French Bishops’ Conference and the Vatican with his outspokenness on a number of issues including clerical celibacy, the use of condoms for the prevention of AIDS, ordination of women and married men to the priesthood, and especially, homosexuality.
“The church must be where there is need, and homosexuals have suffered innumerable discriminations. If the church doesn’t free people from oppression, what purpose does it serve?” he asked.
In 1988 Gaillot took the unprecedented step for a Roman Catholic bishop of blessing a homosexual union after the couple requested it in view of their imminent death from AIDS.
He was the only French bishop to participate in the ceremony of the transfer of the ashes of the Abbe Henri-Baptiste Gregoire to the Pantheon, a burial place for “the great men of France.”
Gregoire (1750-1831), a Catholic priest and bishop, was a leading French abolitionist at the turn of the 18th century, a participant in the Revolution of 1789, and a member of its governing assembly.
Gregoire was among the most active deputies of the Assembly, advocated abolishing Negro slavery and granting citizenship to Jews. He objected to some provisions of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, but agreed to swear the oath of allegiance and was the first member of the clergy to take it (1790). Because of this, the hierarchy of the church refused to give him the last sacraments. (Although he was given them by some sympathetic priests in defiance of the ban.)
After these and other “incidents,” Pope John Paul II relieved Bishop Gaillot of his responsibilities as bishop of Evreux on January 13, 1995. After being removed from his office Bishop Gaillot wrote the following statement:
“I had a dream: to be able to accompany the poor, the excluded, the ignored, without having to explain myself or justify myself to the rich, the secure, or the comfortable. To be able to go where distress calls me without having to give advance notice. To be able to show my indignation at destitution, injustice, violence, the sale of weapons, and managed famines without being considered a meddler in politics.”
“I dreamed of being able to live my faith within the church, but also in society, in my time and with my times. I dreamed of the freedom to think and express myself, to debate and criticise, without fear of the guillotine. I dreamed of the being different within the unity of faith, and remaining myself, alone and yet in solidarity with others. Ultimately, I hoped to be able to proclaim a Gospel of freedom without being marginalised.”
What makes a Catholic, a Catholic?
Some people believe an “authentic” Catholic is one who is totally anti-abortion.
Others believe a Catholic identity is found in our social teaching, with its emphasis on justice for the poor, the marginalized, the earth and all creation.
Various Catholic spiritual practices are experiencing a revival: retreats, saying the rosary, fasting and abstinence, parish fish frys during Lent, praying the Liturgy of the Hours, examination of conscience, following the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, and more.
Will venerating the body parts of saints and martyrs make a revival? For centuries a normal part of Catholic life was to revere and make pilgrimages to sacred places holding a skull, vial of blood, finger bones, toe nails or a hank of hair of a long-dead person believe holds a special place in Heaven.
Our holy dead.
This past Sunday was the Feast of St. John Vianney, the patron saint of priests.
Pope Benedict XVI has declared a “Year for Priests” beginning with the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus on June 19, 2009. The year will conclude in Rome with an international gathering of priests with the Holy Father on June 19, 2010.
The Pope has declared St. John Vianney the Universal Patron of Priests on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the death of the Curé d’Ars.
The Holy Father isn’t a stranger to St. John Vianney. The book, Rag and Bone: A Journey Among the World’s Holy Dead, relates that when Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI, he sequestered himself in his apartment with the heart of Saint Jean-Baptiste-Marie Vianney, patron saint of priests.
Three years ago in 2006 the heart of St. John Vianney traveled from France to Cure of Ars Church in Merrick, NY. More than 5,000 people visited from October 7-9 to pray before his heart, and the pastor expected thousands more before the heart left for a stop in Boston on its way back to France.
The heart and Vianney’s chalice was placed at the front of the altar. People could walk by the relics and pray, or see it during Mass. 
In life, St. John Vianney was a revered 19th-century French clergyman who was said to be blessed with the ability to read the hearts of worshippers. He was widely known to Catholics as the Cure (parish priest) of Ars. He won over the hearts of his villagers by visiting with them, teaching them about God and reconciling people to the Lord in the confessional. It was said he heard confessions 16-18 hours a day. He died in 1859.
When his body was exhumed in 1904 because of his pending beatification, it was found intact.
Fr. Charles Mangano of Cure of Ars Church said there’s a long-standing tradition in the Catholic Church of venerating relics such as the heart of Vianney. But for the uninitiated, he said, think of Elvis Presley.
“People get on eBay and they’ll try to get belongings or artifacts from like Elvis Presley, like people that they idolized, they admired,” the pastor explained. “Because having something of that person, you know, makes you feel close to them.”
He said for Catholics, “having a relic in our presence, it inspires us because this relic is from the body of a person whose body and soul was for God.”
Venerating the remains of saints and martyrs goes back to the earliest days of the Catholic church, said the Rev. Jean-Paul Ruiz, a professor of theology at St. John’s University.
“When we venerate the relics of saints, it puts us in touch with those persons who we believe are still alive beyond the death of their bodies.”
Fr. Mangano said he first saw the heart last year while on a retreat to Ars–inspired because he is a pastor of s church that honors Vianney.
“It’s an actual heart, 3-D, not in any kind of gel or formaldehyde,” he said. “It’s brownish color. When you get really close to it, the center is still pinkish-red. Everything else around it is all like browned with age.”
Some of the people who stood in long lines to see the heart described an overwhelming need to see a real miracle. Others said it was a historic moment. And still others–many seminarians and priests–came to thank the Cure of Ars, patron saint of parish priests, for answering prayers during times they struggled with their vocation or ministry.
“I came here to see a miracle,” said Laura Musto, 46, of St. Mary of the Isle Church in Long Beach, referring to the heart. “And we need miracles in today’s world.”
“I came to see the heart of a saint,” said Maria Gilmore, 82, of Sacred Heart Church in North Merrick. “I thought everyone turned to dust but I guess not.”
“We came here on a mini-pilgrimage to be close to his heart, to have a moment of intimacy with the saint,” said Charlie Gallagher, 23, a seminarian for the Archdiocese of Washington who was joined by two classmates, Ted Hegnsuer and Rick Nichols.
“This relic represents who St. John Vianney was and who we aspire to be. When I kneel before the heart, I will ask St. John Vianney to replace my heart with his heart so I can emulate him,” Gallagher told The Long Island Catholic, the newspaper of the Rockeville Centre Diocese.
But when I saw the a picture of the heart in a newspaper, it reminded me of a bear’s heart I saw in the refrigerator of an Indian family member in Alaska. Like most of the people in the village they mostly lived off the land in the traditional ways and and killed a bear for food. The heart was there in case anyone was hungry and wanted a snack.The Vianney relic looked just like the cold, cooked heart on white plate.
I didn’t go see the heart, even though I live about 45 minutes away from Merrick.
I was more morbidly curious to see a mummified heart than faith-filled, so out of respect I passed. Maybe if it was another body part, like a finger bone, I could have coped. Or, if I went with other people I knew I could justify the visit like a modern day Canterbury Tales pilgrimage. We could have all shared our stories of faith and doubt and sin en route.
But I didn’t know any Catholic who wouldn’t have given a “Huh?” response at the offer to go see a saint’s heart on the middle of Long Island.
The Vatican has approved a study which concludes that men and women sin differently.
When commenting on a new book dedicated to St. Thomas Aquinas’ teachings on the seven capital vices, Monseigneur Wojciech Giertych, personal theologian to Pope Benedict XVI, told Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano that “there is no sexual equality when it comes to sin.” 
In the article, “The Unsuspecting Resources of Weakness,” Mgr. Giertych referred to his own anecdotal experience at the confessional, and said his insights were supported by an analysis of confessional data carried out by the Rev. Roberto Busa, a 96-year-old Jesuit priest. Fr. Busa is the author of Index Thomisticus, a complete lemmatization of the works of St. Thomas Aquinas.
Mgr. Giertych asserts St. Thomas Aquinas taught that pride is humanity’s greatest enemy because it leads a person to believe he or she doesn’t need God and “hinders a person from having a relationship with God.” 
Lust and sins against chastity “are less dangerous because they are accompanied by a strong sense of humiliation and, as such, can be an occasion to return to God.”
Mgr. Giertych describes men’s sins as “difficult,” while women’s are described as “dangerous.”
“When one looks at capital sins not from the view of their opposition to grace but at the difficulty they create,” Mgr. Geirtych states, “it is clear that men experience them differently from women. For men, the most difficult to take on is lust, followed by gluttony, sloth, anger, pride, envy and avarice. For women, the most dangerous is pride, and then envy, anger, lust, gluttony and the last is slothfulness.”
A woman described as a founder of feminist theology has a different spin on sin and the sexes.
Valerie Saiving (married name – Goldstein), a religious studies teacher at Hobart and William Smith Colleges from 1959 to 1987, published an essay in 1960 in which she appeals for greater awareness of the ways in which concepts of masculinity and femininity shape the ways in which we experience sin. Her theories have been developed and refined by two generations of female scholars. 
In her article, “The Human Situation: A Feminine View,” she forms what can be called a feminine complaint against contemporary theologians who make the mistake, she believes, of assuming that a “thinking man’s theology is equally good for a thinking woman.”
The crux of Saiving’s argument is that the focus on pride–characteristic of traditional Christian interpretations of sin–reflects male experience in a way that is inappropriate to the experience of most, if not all, women.
A landmark in both feminism and religious studies, Saiving’s article was the first to insert gender in the study of religion. Within two months of its publication in the Journal of Religion, Time magazine ran a 700-word article on Saiving and her paper.
Read the Time article here.
I feel ashamed and very uneducated that I never heard of Valerie Saiving prior to researching this article. I’m grateful to have discovered her now. Her analysis was the starting point for the modern development of feminist theology. 20 years after her article, author and religious studies professor, Judith Plaskow, took up and developed Saiving’s analysis in Womenspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion.
I think it was intriguing for Mgr. Gierytch to partner with Fr. Roberta Busa, known for his usage of computers for literary and liturgical analysis. I was a little scandalized he used confessional data (I thought it was sacroscant?) and, the sampling was probably pretty small and select, since not that many people go to confession anymore, and most of the examples Mgr. Gierytech cites are nuns.
