Posted in category "Lesbian in a Catholic Sort of Way"
There are three exposes I’m waiting for…
– The death of Pope John Paul I
– Pope John Paul II and the global sex abuse scandals
– The Legionaries of Christ
The Legionaries of Christ are suing a former priest, John Paul Lennon, in Alexandria, VA Circuit Court to recover some documents it alleges have been stolen. These include private letters from the group’s founder, Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado. The suit accuses Lennon of distributing stolen property and “malicious disinformation” by posting the materials on the web.
Some internal documents chronicle the conservative group’s strict rules of conduct, including directives on how a legionary, as the order’s members are known, must butter his bread, part his hair or sit in a chair. The documents also include the group’s “private vows,” which say that members must never criticize the order and must report anyone who does.
In the lawsuit, the Legion is also asking for the identities of individuals writing on the Regain site and on a Web discussion board exlegionaries.com that was once affiliated with it. Regain severed ties with the discussion board this year after pressure from the Legion, Lennon said.
In its January 23, 2005 edition the Wall Street Journal did a front page article on the Legion. It detailed the organization’s rise and clout-particularly in Mexico-and what an adroit and successful fund-raiser Father Maciel has been for the Legion and the church.
In 1997 eight men went public with complaints, made previously through informal church channels, that Fr. Maciel had sexually abused them when they were seminarians in the 1940s and 1950s. The Vatican department that investigates such charges-then headed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger-quickly tabled a formal complaint, filed with church authorities in 1998.
The investigation into Father Maciel seemed dead until 2004, when it emerged that Cardinal Ratzinger had revived the probe in the waning days of Pope John Paul II’s reign. In January 2005, soon after the probe began, Father Marcial resigned as head of the Legion, citing his advanced age. In April 2005 a top Vatican investigator went to New York and Mexico to interview Fr. Marcial’s accusers. The same month Cardinal Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI.
Exposes #2 and #3 seems to have a number of links.
www.regainnetwork.org
www.exlegionaries.com
www.life-after-rc.com
www.rickross.com
www.legionariesofchrist.org
We found this Nativity scene last year at the Eastern Long Island Hospital Thrift Shop. It was missing a few animals, so we went over and bought a bag of farm yard animals from Goldsmith’s toy store. It’s mostly complete, but we’re still on the lookout for a camel, donkey, and ox. If I decide to create something beyond historic, I’ll probably add a few Eastern Long Island type animals – deer, squirrels, sea birds, a racoon. Why not?
The angel came from Brooklyn. The little monkey drummer boy was a Christmas gift from a our next-door neighbors, the Foltinys, when I was about 11 or 12. He bangs away in joyful anticipation of the happy day to come.
My warmest wishes for a happy and blessed Christmas.
Last Saturday a friend unexpectedly handed us a Christmas gift at Mass. We unwrapped it when we got home and popped it into the CD player. We turned off all the lights off except the Christmas tree and let the music fill the living room. And us.
“With One Voice” was produced by the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Scranton, PA. (Not far from our old place in Milford, PA!)
“Music has been an integral part of the life of the IHM Congregation. Our rich musical heritage has been experienced in our liturgical celebrations as well as our varied places of ministry. Music creates a sacred moment to encounter our God, the source of all we do and are as IHM Sisters. We offer this recording in loving tribute to all IHM Sisters who graced our world and of whom we sing, ‘We hold the treasures of those who’ve gone before us, prophets of vision and pilgrims of the dream.'”
www.sistersofihm.org
We have two Christmas trees this year: one in the front yard and our decorated tree in the living room. Much to my delight, the golden star has stayed atop the little Norway spruce. Between wind and kids I thought it would be gone.
One Christmas in Pennsylvania we decorated a nearby fir tree with strings of cranberries, popcorn and some other food for the birds and deer. I never forgot my little shining Christmas sentinel in the woods.
A few years ago we were too stressed and exhausted to decorate a big tree. We went to a farm in Cutchogue to get a small potted tree instead. Everything was pretty picked over, except for a small tree missing branches on the side (Lori called it my “Charlie Brown” tree.)
After Christmas we put the tree outdoors and in the spring we planted it. It has grown and filled out enough to wear a star.
I love both trees: the magic and peacefulness of our indoor tree; and the connection to nature and creation that comes with our outdoor tree.
We’re ready for Christmas.
The only thing that remains is to order the shrimp for Christmas Eve, select the cheese, prepare the feast. My mother’s old bundt pan arrived yesterday, and I’ll use it to make pineapple upside down cake. It was my father’s favorite–a nice remembrance for Christmas dinner.
Our Christmas present won’t be under the tree-it will be boarding a jetBlue flight to Phoenix two weeks from today. We’re heading off Arizona for a much-needed and deserved vacation. We’ll plan each day when we roll out of bed. Some days we won’t roll much past the patio-just lounge, read, and breathe in deep the desert air.
Arizona is a favorite spot – if I hadn’t ended up with Lyme disease we probably would have retired there. But the intense sunlight and heat would be too much for me, now.
We have a few places lined up for a visit – Kartchner cave, some favorite places to eat, and the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. On the way from Tucson I’ll stop and hike out to the petroglyphs I used to visit on retreat. The ancient figures of bighorn sheep running towards distant peaks was a reminder of my spiritual journey-running hard towards something, faraway, unseen, but sensed.
I could also relate to the spirals scratched into the boulders-the endless circling back to relearn and revisit and encounter over and over again.
The retreats never settled the issue of the stronger call–yearning for stillness and yearning for distant peaks.
It seems we’re treated to one X-rated Christmas story every season.
Last year, the Daily News reported that a man in West Virginia had been caught (pants around his ankles) sodomizing one of the sheep in a “live” Nativity scene.
Yuck.
This year, we have a story about a Santa that was groped at a Danbury, CT mall. “Don’t touch my sack!” read the headline.
A 33-year-old woman was charged with sexual assault and breach of peace. The police quickly found and identified her because the woman was described as being on crutches.
Police did not give the name of the disconcerted Santa, but they said he is 65 and felt badly because children were waiting to see him. “He was apparently shocked and embarrassed by the whole incident,” a police officer said.
Double yuck.
I found this gem a few days ago.
“Life is tough. But Nuns are tougher. If you need helpful advice just Ask Sister Mary Martha. She’ll help you. Just don’t expect any sympathy.”
Enjoy!
Sister…if you read this….thank you and Merry Christmas!
http://asksistermarymartha.blogspot.com
Whenever I used to hear “Dominique” on the radio, I wondered what became of “the singing nun.” A drawing of her in last Sunday’s newspaper prompted some investigation via Google. “Soeur Sourire” had a sad ending.
This 30ish, Belgian, Dominican nun became an international star in 1964 with her #1 hit record “Dominique.” However, Sister Luc-Gabrielle-now billed as “Sister Smile”-felt uncomfortable with her new-found celebrity and quit performing in 1965.
Sister Luc-Gabrielle, who gave all residuals to her convent, soon left the religious life and fell in love with another woman (also an ex-nun). Twenty years later, they were found dead, apparently a double suicide caused by an overdose of barbiturates and alcohol.
What’s the song about? It eulogizes St. Dominic, founder of the Dominicans. Sr. Luc-Gabrielle’s Mother Superior, a little cranky, said the song “treated St. Dominic ‘with familiarity and a touch of impertinence.'”
In 1965, two years after her hit single, she left the convent to pursue a new life as a singer and artist (her watercolor-paintings adorned her album covers and were displayed annually by the Dominican order).
Together with her friend and lover, Anne Pescher, Jeanne Deckers embarked on a celebrity trail which openly criticized the church, supported birth-control and ultimately led to her demise into obscurity.
In the 1980s Jeanne and Annie purchased and operated a school for special-needs children. But it was ultimately ruined by financial troubles (she supposedly owed over $47,000 in back taxes from her “singing nun” days)
Destitute and depressed Jeanne and Annie committed suicide together in 1985.
A book by Georgetown University’s Theology Chair, Fr. Peter Phan, has ruffled a few feathers. “Being Religious Interreligiously: Asian Perspectives on Interfaith Dialogue” was reviewed by the USCCB’s Committee on Doctrine at the request of the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
The bishops, chessman under a Vatican hand, felt compelled to issue a statement identifying what they saw as problematic aspects of the book’s theology and reinforcing Catholic teaching on salvation.
And here is the crux of the emerging struggle – as faith and numbers shift from Europe and North America to Asia and Africa, cultural sensibilities will also need to change.
The major change will be to co-exist as respectful equals with other religions or religious practices-whether Buddhism, Islam, or tribal beliefs rooted in nature and the ancestors. This will necessitate abandoning the Christian insistence that forgiveness of sins and reconciliation of humanity with God is only possible through Christ.
I agree with Father Phan’s suggestion that religious pluralism is indeed a positively-willed part of a divine plan.
Father Phan, who grew up in Vietnam and arrived in the United States in 1975 as a refugee, laid the groundwork for his book by articulating a model for a global Church that is accountable to its culturally disparate faithful.
The theologian challenged the notion of a unified Christendom, calling the idea an example of Eurocentric ideology.
“I reject this,” Father Phan said. “Positively, we say ‘Christianities’- plural. In fact, in the first seven centuries the most successful fields of mission were not Europe but Asia and Africa, with Syria as the epicenter. And the most vibrant intellectual centers were located not in the Western part of the Roman Empire but in West Asian and African cities. Until the seventh century, there was more Christianity in the East than in Rome. Rome was as backwater.
“When we talk about the legacy of the early Church we always talk about Latin and Greek,” he said. “Please, look at the other side. There’s a whole Christian theological and liturgical heritage that usually disappears from the pages of Church history books.”
Father Phan offered the social structure of early Christianity as a model for a global Church in the 21st century.
“Early Christianity is not a single tree rooted in Rome,” he said. “The right picture is the rhizome that grows in the ground that spreads everywhere. There’s no trunk. It just spreads and spread and spreads. That’s a far more accurate picture of early Christianity.”
By 2050, Father Phan said, 80 percent of the world’s three billion Christians will live in the Southern hemisphere.
“By that time a white Christian is an oxymoron,” he said. “That is a shock. Wake up, this is the reality you cannot avoid.”
The Church should respond by building a new pluralistic social compact on the foundation of a century of modern Church teachings on human dignity, the preference for the poor in the exercise of Christian charity, justice, human rights, international relations and the environment, Father Phan said.
At the heart of the social compact must be a more open-ended view of ecclesiastical authority, he said.
“In globalization,” he said, “stratification has shifted to function. It doesn’t matter who you are, whether you are ordained or not ordained. It doesn’t matter. The question is, ‘Can you do and do it well?'”
This shift from rights and privileges to functional competition, he said, “presents the Church with huge challenges.”
“We must enter into humble dialogue with other subsystems, particularly religious subsystems, to learn from them new truths and new ways of living – not seeming to tell them we are the best, we are superior to them and they are deficient,” he said.
“Think about this in terms of clergy in the Catholic Church,” Father Phan concluded, “and you can see all kinds of problems arise.”
