Sunday Reflection: Something out of next to nothing

The proverbial duel is between those who see the glass as half-full and those who see it as half empty. But what of the glass that is empty -- or nearly so?

Today's Old and New Testament readings take us into the mind of God, in which "reality" -- or perception thereof -- hardly matters. In the mind of people, success is built on probability. Are there enough resources? Is there enough time? Is there enough money? In God's mind, what matters is will -- do I want it to happen.

It's easy to give up on people or on history. Some people are so unrelievedly evil that it seems useless to work with them. Indeed some people seem to be moving at warp speed away from anything that even resembles goodness. Yet these stories remind us that God, at least, will work with invisibly small assets and grow his investments until they surpass even the most optimistic projections. Twenty barley loaves that satisfy an entire people -- a few loaves and fish that feed 5000 -- each time with baskets left over!

God's way is not constrained by the project manager's triple constraint -- time, resources, money -- that pre-occupies us on earth. When God is involved, starting points and resources and long odds do not matter. Mustard seeds grown into sheltering bushes. Wildernesses sprout life.

If we are doing God's will, we can start with next to nothing, and live to see our efforts yield amazing dividends.

8/5 Addendum: A decent homily today hined of another bread connection that eluded me: the Eucharistic meal. In the Eucharist, Christ continues to give himself to us, in a meal that never runs out. The small bit of nourishment we receive is an encounter with God, which grows into an abundance of justice, peace and harmony.

If we let it.
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Image from http://www.keyway.ca/htm2005/20051130.htm -- a daily Bible study site from the Church of God
Don't give up. Don't lose hope. Don't let up.

In the News: Cardinal Sean to meet with VOTF

This in today's Boston Globe:

Cardinal Sean P. O'Malley has agreed to meet Friday with local leaders of Voice of the Faithful, marking the first time in nearly three years that he has sat down with the lay reform group that has energized a group of active churchgoers but is viewed with skepticism by some conservatives.

O'Malley's office downplayed the significance of the meeting, and said the cardinal has not revised the Archdiocese of Boston's policy toward the group, which includes a ban on meetings in parishes by chapters formed after October 2002, when the group was first banned by Cardinal Bernard F. Law .

O'Malley last met with the national organization in November 2003 and said he would reconsider the ban, but he did not make any change.

Don't be fooled by the archdiocesan spin -- this is a significant meeting. O'Malley could have stiffed the group, which would have been red meat to his base, the baa-baas (unquestioning sheep) who don't have the brains or the guts to challenge the Church. SeE, if O'Malley played his cards right, alienating the Church's tiny progressive wing, he could achieve the Baa Baa Dream: a Church without dissenters. The only obstacle to that doomsday scenario is O'Malley's basic decency. If he has any heart at all, he'll see that a Baa-baa Church would be the meanest, snivveliest of organizations -- hardly worthy of the name Christian. Any hope for a Church that lives up to its name lies with the dissenters at this point.

The meeting between Cardinal Sean and VOTF could well be seen as historic. It may represent the first point at which the Church of the past meets the Church of the future. VOTF is a cautious group, but it is strong and growing. It may well be the nucleus for a Church in which lay people are taken seriously, bringing closer the unfulfilled reforms of Vatican II.

Or, it could be just one more betrayal of the lay faithful by the pathetic little boys who run our Church. My money is on Cardinal Sean, but I'm not making large bets just yet.
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Image from http://www.traditio.com/comment/com0409.htm -- a traditionalist site that makes The Cranky Catholic seem positively mild by comparison.

Book (cover) review: God's Choice

Bitter irony may well be the last refuge of the desperate. In this case, that means desperate to retain a vestige of their Church as having a connection with reality.

The title of papal biographer George Weigel's new book, "God's Choice -- Benedict XVI and the future of the Catholic Church" -- can be taken in many ways. Given Weigel's reverence toward B16's predecessor, John Paul II, one could reasonably assume that this book is another exercise in papolatry, making it as much an exercise in piety as in propaganda. But other interpretations are possible.

Without having read the book, my first reaction was that this book would only embolden those who see God’s hand in every action of the Church. These poor lost souls cannot imagine that the Church can be sinful, or that its leaders can be anything less than paragons of holiness and virtue. They will admit that, Sure, way back in the Middle Ages their were so very bad people on Peter's throne. But lately? Not so much.

Of course, Churchmen are more than eager to presume participation in God’s mighty plan of salvation. There is more than a whiff of infallibility in the actins and attitudes of priests and bishops. They act as though ordination gives them an invisible shield against error. I do so hate to burst their bubble.

When that aura of invincibility is attached to a papal conclave, the results must always be assumed to be God's. I have no doubt that the Holy Spirit does work in the election of a new pope (as it does in all things) but is that to say that the cardinals listen? Can it be said that the bishops whose papal candidates end up on the losing side were resistant to the Spirit’s urgings? And that those who won were attentive to it? Nonsense. Bishops are as prone to sin and error as an other son of Adam. Why should their choices be infallible? Can't they (as they did in the Middle Ages) make terrible mistakes? While the medieval Church was vulnerable to violence and outright bribery, aren't today's bishops and cardinals vulnerable to vanity, misplaced loyalty and plain mistakes in judgment?

I certainly think so, which is why I react viscerally to any intimation that equates the actions of a man or of a group of men with the will of God. In my world view that is not only dangerous and presumptuous, but blasphemous.

Sunday Reflection: Bishops and priests beware!

If I was a priest of the early 21st century, listening to these readings this Sunday, I would be terrified.

Woe to the shepherds who mislead and scatter the flock of my pasture, says the LORD...You have scattered my sheep and driven them away. You have not cared for them, but I will take care to punish your evil deeds."

Hits pretty close to home, yes? The priests of today have lost interest in fighting for their sheep. Those sheep who leave, leave. The 99 who leave are less important than the 1 who stays. Of course, this situation is exacerbated by the fact that there are so few priests, but this is also a sin to lay at the feet of the shepherds! The so-called conservative Catholics (who are really not interested in conserving the Church's strength or its patrimony) prevent the Church from dealing with long-standing issues by insisting on old answers to current questions. They are very happy to have a smaller Church, since they will be running it. The liberals, on the other hand, are incoherent in their attempts to craft new philosophical arguments to replace the outdated ones of the past. The bishops and priests persist in old models of authoritarian rule all the while preaching inclusion and sharing of responsibilities.

God answers:

"I myself will gather the remnant of my flock from all the lands to which I have driven them and bring them back to their meadow; there they shall increase and multiply. I will appoint shepherds for them who will shepherd them so that they need no longer fear and tremble; and none shall be missing, says the LORD."

Let's keep in mind that God is in no hurry to fix the Church. The Church after all, is ours. To the degree that it does God's will, it prospers. To the degree that it finds itself arguing about celibacy, homosexuality, birth control and other matters of little consequence, it will wither. It is the special duty of the shepherds to keep the Church together. Not by mindless and inane repetitions of past teaching, but of a new teaching that translates the old teaching into new circumstances. Why are we arguing about condoms when people are dying of AIDS? Why are we still trying to pin the sex-abuse scandal on homosexuals, when the issue is power and the corruption of the clerical caste? Why do we exclude married me and women from ordination when we know there is no Scriptural basis for it? Why do we continue to confirm people in the faith and ask them to stand up for it courageously, when the shepherds will not expend an ounce of energy to courageously stand up to authoritarianism, clericalism and stupidity?

These issues are not meaningless distractions, but have become the engine that drives people out of the Church. Some end up as agnostics or functional atheists. Some rift to the protestant or fundamentalist churches, depriving the Catholic Church of its strength and vitality. Meanwhile, the bishops pray and ponder, seemingly powerless to lead.

If I may prophesy: The Catholic Church will wither away to almost nothing. But as Jeremiah says, it is God who will rebuild it. I hope to be there at least when He lays the foundation.
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photo from http://home1.gte.net/jerstew/sheep.html, Jerry Stewart's site about his sheep breeding program. Aren't they adorable? Do bishops find we are just as wonderful?

In the news: Bush's stem cell "Bingo!"

We at TCC are not big fans of George Bush. In spite of his purported Christian sympathies, he violates many basic tenets of Catholic teaching, including capital punishment, unjust war and solicitude toward the poor. I won't even get into his political sins, which are not appropriate for this venue.

But when it came to stem cell research, W got it right. The Church teaches that life begins at conception. So far, I have not heard a single argument that persuades me to think otherwise. So if human life starts at conception, growing a fertilized egg with the express purpose of obtaining stem cells from it is immoral, even if the cells could be used to save lives.

An analogy. Your mother has a rare kidney disease and needs a transplant. You know (don't ask how, this analogy is hypothetical!) that Mr. Smith, your across-the-street neighbor, has a kidney that would match your mother's. Is it moral to ask Mr. Smith to cross the road, fully intending to run him over so you could harvest the kidney for your mother? Of course not.

The only leg that the stem cell supporters have to stand on is their insistence that a fertilized egg is not a human being. But their argument is based on a belief, just like mine is. Science cannot prove that a fertilized egg is not human, or that an embryo only becomes human after a certain number of days or weeks. If science could, there would be no argument. But it can't. SO given the lack of proof, it is prudent to give the embryo the benefit of the doubt.

If I found a large box in the middle of the woods, would it be moral to shoot a bullet into it? What if a child was hiding under it? What if a friend said, "I am sure the box is empty" -- would you shoot? What if your friend was wrong? Or crazy? Or homicidal? What if you yelled" Hey! Is there anyone under the box?" but got no answer? Would you shoot? Perhaps a deaf child was hiding under the box. Perhaps a frightened child was under there.

The point is this: until you could lift up the box and ascertain that there was no child under the box, it would be immoral to fire a bullet into it. You would have to act as though there was a child under there. Similarly, the current state of science does not allow us to determine with certainty whether there is a human being in an embryo. Until it can, it would be prudent to act as though there was a human being "in there."

God help me to say it: Bush was right to oppose further stem cell research. It is immoral to destroy what might be (and is, according to Church teaching) a human being, even in an effort to save others.

Kooky Choirs: "And a phony at the mike!"

And with that "Three Stooges" reference (preceded by "Hey, look! A microphoney!!) I ask the age-old question, "Why, O why can choirs not mike themselves properly?" Guitars are either over-amped or under-amped, lead singers are miked but the choirs are not, levels are all over the place, etc.

Actually, I have a bit of compassion on this score. I used to run a small choir and had an awful time with sound. We used a very elaborate board (too elaborate actually) that could do just about anything...in the right hands. Unfortunately, we never had these hands. Try as we might, we tested and changed levels and wrote down settings and fretted and worried. But week after week, the levels were never right.

We were missing two key ingredients: 1) someone who knew about sound and 2) someone who would adjust levels from the vantage point of the listener. Unfortunately, the first was expensive and the second one was obtrusive. Who wants to sit through Mass next to a guy with headphones fiddling with a soundboard?

So we set the sounds as best we could and struggled along, knowing that every Sunday, our output was a roll of the dice. But at least we tried.

Fie on the groups that don't bother trying to get the sound right! Where the guitar is miked perfectly one week and is inaudible the next. Where a ten-person choir goes unheard.

Solutions?
1) Use a professional setup and a mixer in the middle of Church, as above.
2)Do #1 once and figure out how to replicate the settings with a computer mixer, a cardboard template or by writing down the settings with pencil and paper.
3) Eschew electronics and worship in a space that will project sound naturally.

Or (what's easier) keep driving me crazy!

Kooky Choirs: The Changing of the Acclamations

Just about any composer worth his/her salt (and quite a few who are not) have written Mass acclamations -- the Sanctus, Mystery of Faith and the Great Amen. Some of these are noble and singable. Examples are Marty Haugen's Mass of Creation and David Haas's Mass of Light, version that are pretty common up here in the Northeast. As a member of the assembly, I almost never tire of singing the same acclamation every Sunday. Like the intro music to a favorite news station or TV show, their very familiarity is comforting.

So why do choir leaders change them so often?

There are some legit liturgical reasons. Some acclamations may be more suited to a particular season. Richard Proulx, for instance, wrote acclamations based on "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel" -- clearly appropriate only at Christmas.

But are there bad reasons for changing acclamations? Sure.

One silly (if honest) choir leader once told me that the acclamations are changed so the choir would not get bored. Yikes! As liturgical ministers, should not the choir ask whether the assembly is bored? In this particular parish, just as soon as the assembly caught on to a new set of acclamations, they were changed again. The assembly was in a constant state of flux, and spent more time focusing on the changing acclamations than on the Mass.

Another classic sin is to allow home-grown acclamations. Now, unless you are a Haas or a Haugen or a Proulx or a Joncas or a Hurd (and sometimes even then!) you should never sing your own acclamations. Why? First of all, because they are probably nowhere as good as you think they are. And second, what about the visitors and the occasional Mass-goers? Shouldn't they get to sing-pray too?

In my ideal world, the basic acclamations would change yearly, with easy-to-learn versions maybe thrown in for Advent, Lent or Easter.

Hokey Homiletics: A parlous state of affairs

It bears repeating that the state of Catholic homiletics is appalling. It's pretty clear that Catholic seminaries don't spend much time preparing candidates to deliver high-quality homilies, in spite of the renewed focus that Vatican II put on them. Sacrosanctum Concilium, the V2 document on the Sacred Liturgy has this to say in paragraph 52:

By means of the homily the mysteries of the faith and the guiding principles of the Christian life are expounded from the sacred text, during the course of the liturgical year; the homily, therefore, is to be highly esteemed as part of the liturgy itself...

So does this make the homily a place for the priest to tell jokes, or to talk about Bible verses not from the reading or to spout random pieties? I don't think so. Given the abysmal state of Catholic understanding of the Holy Scriptures, the least the priest could do is to open the text that was just read, let it breathe a bit and explain the circumstances of the writer.

Some favorite examples of homiletic idiocy:
1) After reading from the gospel of Mark, the homilist preaches the version of the same gospel from Matthew, which has more of the details he wants to discuss.
2) A homilist gives a synopsis of the entire life of Christ, with unrelated asides about scholarly debates over the birthplace of Jesus. The asides are neither explained to the curious, nuanced for the fundamentalists, relevant to the homily nor related to the readings.
3) A homilist prone to "throwing bombshells" -- remarks that inflame but do not inform -- states that "The US Constitution is full of sin!" without at least qualifying his statement as to exactly which parts in particular are sinful.
4) A homilist turns his homily into a Q&A session in which he asks the assembly to imagine that Jesus just walked in and would answer any question put to him. The homilist then proceeds to "answer" these questions as Jesus, with short, trite answers that could hardly have passed the lips of the Son of God.

Perhaps I am being unfair. Priests work at a double disadvantage. First, many of them are really not students of the Scriptures. They don't have the intellectual tools needed to break open the text and peer into the life circumstances of its authors. Secondly, neither do they have useful real-life experience. They don't cook for themselves, they don't have to deal with wives or children, and they have not had to struggle to gain prestige and experience. From age 26, they are "Father". Yet they never worked for the privilege, and most do little to earn the right to that title after ordination. No wonder that homilies are so tepid: priests don't understand the Scriptures and they are ill-equipped to apply them to circumstances of their people.

But the assembly colludes in this as well. The priest who truly challenges his flock to follow the gospel message is considered "political" or "radical" or "liberal." Without support, such a homilist will soon start toning down his message to inane pieties and cryptic sentiments that can mean anything.

The solution should be apparent from the discussion above. Homilists must know the world of their assembly. They must be students of the Scriptures. They must hold fast to the direction of Sacrosanctum Concilium that the homily is the Word of God, not a joke session. And assemblies must expect to be challenged and inspired by God's Word, not coddled or lulled to sleep.

If I were a betting man, I'd play the ponies. Better odds.
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Photo from http://maristretreathouse.com/photo-gallery/chapel-homily.html. Students at a retreat in Esopus, New York listen in rapt attention. Or did the homilist lose his page again?

Sunday reflection: Weary feet

This Sunday's reading compares the mission of Amos with that of the Twelve. Amos is being kicked out of Bethel, and told he is no longer welcome there. The priests say, Go back to Jerusalem and earn your keep with prophesying there. Amos responds that he is not a professional prophet, but a "dresser of sycamores" -- a tree pruner -- by profession. The implication is that when he speaks, it is the Lord who speaks, since Amos has no personal, monetary interest in the matter. His words, then, should be heeded all the more since he will not profit from them.

The Twelve are sent out penniless and vulnerable. They get to wear sandals and use a walking stick, but "no food, no sack, no money in their belts." And no second tunic! This is to demonstrate their utter reliance on the people to whom they will preach. This is risky business, and puts them entirely at the mercy of the people -- and of God's will. If the people's hearts are hard, the Twelve will starve and freeze. But if their people have been touched by God's benevolence, the message will take root. The Twelve found success -- they "drove out many demons, and they anointed with oil many who were sick and cured them." Such actions require the acceptance and trust of the recipients. The hard-hearted are not open to cures and do not receive them. But the Twelve found an audience that was ready for God's work to be accomplished.

Did Jesus know this would happen? Was this exercise an excuse to have the Twelve learn dependence on the people of God for their sustenance -- and actually get it? Did they need to be "brought down a peg" to realize that without the Lord's work in people's hearts, their preaching would be of no account?
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Lord Jesus, do we trust our neighbors enough to make ourselves completely vulnerable to them? Do we trust that there is enough goodness in the world that we can be sustained by it? Or do we truly believe that we must be in control of everything and that everyone is a rat and a thief? Do we believe in a God that is at work in all people? Are we ready to trust that God has turned the earth that is our neighbor and is ready to receive the seed of the Word?

Make us trust in others beyond ourselves. Make us believe in the power of your presence in our own lives, but in that of others as well. Amen.
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photo from http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~colleen/Ireland2004/pages/DublinWearyTravelerFeet.htm, a site about Colleen Everett's trip to Ireland in 2004

The Frustrating Four reasons that smart people think the Church is crazy

It may surprise everyone to hear it, but I love the Church. It is rich with beauty and scholarship and love of God. But there are a few items that are constant irritants. I believe that some of all of these items actually drive people away from the Church, and will have to be dealt with before the Church recovers from its recent slide into irrelevance.

Here are the four, in no particular order.

1) Sexual ethics

The Church is going to have to crack this most hard of nuts before anyone takes it seriously ever again. The Rabid Right has latched onto these issues and is using them as litmus tests of who is a real Catholic. To boot, they are using spurious science to buttress their case, leading even more people to think that Catholics are half wits.

The Church will have to make up its mind about purpose of sexuality and figure out how to defend -- philosophically and theologically -- statements including the following:

Openness to children: For the good of the husband and wife, marriage as a whole needs to be open to children. But the Church must reject the idiotic notion that every sexual act be open to procreation.

Homosexual marriage: Redefining its sexual ethics must allow for sexual expression within homosexual relationships. the Church should encourage stable homosexual couples by extending marriage rights to homosexual couples and allow them to adopt children.

Stem cell research: the Church needs to distinguish between stems cells taken as the result of abortion (which should not be allowed) and stem cells obtained through other means. Stem cells should be used to grow new limbs and organs, but never complete human beings due to the ease by which such beings could be exploited and prevented from exercising their full human dignity.

Birth Control: Birth control methods that do not cause the destruction of a fertilized egg should be allowed. These include tubal ligation, vasectomy, condoms, hormones and other chemical approaches. Birth Control should be allowed to prevent disease and unwanted pregnancy. The Church's current position promotes death, disease and unwanted pregnancy and supports racist and genocidal tendencies among the faithful.

2) Divorce: The Church's teaching on divorce is punitive and wrong. Divorce is not a good. But the current annulment process is a farce, and exists mainly to allow couples to separate while keeping priests' hands clean. This is phariseeism at its finest.

3) Married men should be allowed to become ordained. There should be few limitations on whether a widowed man can remarry should his first wife die. "It is not good for man to be alone," said the Lord.

4) Women should be allowed to be ordained. The Holy Spirit has been working through other churches to demonstrate that a female priesthood is not only possible but even desirable. The Church will need to grapple with its simplistic notion that Christ ordained only men to lead his Church. This interpretation is not only out of character for Jesus, but at odds with the known history of the early Church.

By tackling these four major problem areas, the Church will go a long way toward regaining its moral muscle and taking control away from the petty hate-mongers among its children. Unfortunately, the combined college of bishops has lost its nerve. None dare to challenge the status quo -- not because they believe in it so much (though some of the dimwits do) as they are just afraid of catching hell from their brother bishops.
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Like the megaliths on Easter Island, our granite-headed bishops walk in lockstep on every issue. They call this "Unity of Teaching." I call it using your head for a hat rack.

Book Review: Christ the Lord -- Out of Egypt

"Christ the Lord – Out of Egypt" by Anne Rice

Delightful depiction of Christ’s hidden life

It’s one of the paradoxes of modernity that the farther we get from the days of Christ’s earthly life, the more we know (or can accurately guess) about it. Anne Rice has done a creditable job of depicting 2 years in the life of the boy Jesus, in a way that illuminates his times and the influences on his later ministry.

Rice starts the story in Alexandria, where Jesus, now seven, and his family fled after the persecutions of King Herod. And when I say family, I mean not only Mary and Joseph, but a whole company of aunts, uncles and cousins. Joseph is accompanied by a couple of his brothers and their families, and Mary has her own brother and his family. All sleep together in a common room, work in a common industry, and share an almost cultish Jewish piety. The family is prosperous in Alexandria, doing work for the famous Jewish philosopher Philo. But they long to return home to Nazareth. Their journey back takes them through rebellions, mass executions, sickness and troubles of all sorts. Throughout all of this, Jesus (who narrates the story) seeks to understand who he is from the bits and pieces of stories that the rest of the family knows about his birth and identity.

“Out of Egypt” has much to commend it. It makes sense of scriptural attestations that Jesus had brothers and sisters, and it places certain mysterious gospel figures (for instance Mary of Cleopas) in a family matrix. Jesus is shown in the protection not of an American-style nuclear family, but as part of a loud and loving extended family. It’s the kind of close-knit family in which everyone knows everyone else’s business, with the advantages and perils of that arrangement. But it seems to truly reflect the kind of family that makes sense in 1st century Palestine.

Some quibbles. Rice combines the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke and treats both as history. While this may reflect reality, it may not be satisfying to those who see these tales as reflecting theological rather than historical reality. Rice also has borrowed from non-scriptural texts (like the proto-gospel of James) to fill in the story of Mary. She also borrows turns of phrase from the gospels to adorn unrelated stories. And most unfortunately, she gets settled history wrong, for instance, attributing a massacre the gospels blame on Pilate to Herod Archelaus. Rice sometimes goes overboard on the family theme, with Jesus seemingly related to many gospel characters. Finally, Rice puts miraculous power into Jesus as a child, when some don’t see it until after his baptism.

But quibbles notwithstanding, the book gives us a wonderful picture of what life in Nazareth may have been like. Not the antiseptic semi-suburban life that many of us imagine, but a life full of tumult, noise, crowding, fear and a shared hope that God was about to act in a new and startling way.

Narrator Josh Heine does a splendid job of voicing Christ, with just the right touches of youthful wonder and emotionality.

The Da Vinci Load: The Definitive Parody

Now that TDVC is coming to the end of its theatrical run, a wonderful parody with New England roots has appeared: "The Norman Rockwell Code." You can view this 30-minute film on the internet at http://www.thenormanrockwellcode.com/. If you're from Mass, Maine or NH, you'll enjoy the references to local towns. Filming took place in Dover, NH and Kittery Maine -- and local TV personality Fritz Wetherbee makes an appearance as well!

Plot? Jacques Fromage is found dead in the Normal Rockwell Museum at Stockbridge, Mass. Langford Fife, son of Mayberry, NC's Barney Fife, professor of symbology from prestigious Stockbridge Community College is called to help decipher a strange message. Assisted by Sofa Poisson, a cryptologist with the Quebec Secret Service, Fife toils to decipher the secret of Fromage's death -- and the astounding mission of the strange society to which he belonged.

Terrific and laugh-out-loud funny!!! So as we part, I urge you to elf jet hominy! That is to say, join Hefty Mel! OK! Enjoy the film!
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Anagrams courtesy of http://www.wordsmith.org/anagram/

The Death of Saint Joseph

I was doing some filing earlier today and ran across this image. It's a paper print, mounted on brown construction paper with a cardboard backing and faded even browner with age. It hung in my grandmother's bedroom for as long as I can remember. That's going on 50 years, and I'm sure it was there long before that.

Those were simpler days, faithwise, one that one could have a devotion to a saint -- kind of a spiritual quid pro quo, but in a nice way: I pray to you, you do me favors -- that even grown-up people didn't feel silly doing. Nowadays, our heads are too full of science, books, movies, politics and TV to be able to pull off such a devotion without causing our selves a major migraine. Anyway, I thought I'd share this with you all -- a prayer for those of us on the brink of death, who have experienced a death recently, who are care for the dying or who still mourn a death. May the blessing of Jesus on his own father give you comfort and healing and bring our suffering ones to holiness. Amen.

Book Review: My Parents Went Through the Holocaust...

I was channel surfing this morning when I came across a typical piece of daytime TV -- the interview of an author of a recent book. Hannah Strom of CBS's "The Early Show" was interviewing author Hanala about her new book with the appalling title, "My Parents Went Through The Holocaust And All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt." On the cover, as you can see, is a depiction of a young girl throwing a tantrum while wearing the prison uniform of the Nazi concentration camps. The book is supposedly a memory of Hanala's growing up. Her parents, both Holocaust survivors, evidently had little patience with their daughter's normal childhood and adolescent crises. "Nobody likes me!" Hanala would whine. "Do you think Hitler liked me when he was chasing me through the forests of Poland"?" would come the reply.

I'm all for true stories of living with Holocaust survivors. I am not of the opinion that surviving the Holocaust makes one a saint. The Holocaust swept up the entire range of human types, and since survivors testify that making it out alive was often a matter of dumb luck, survivors of all types (including selfish people who made bad parents) survived. Art Spiegelman captured the humanity of survivors in his masterful Maus graphic novels, depicting his father's bravery and cunning in the death camps as well as his niggardliness and bigotry afterward. If Hanala's book is in the same vein, her horrid title may be understandable. But if this some snarky, nose-thumbing get-rich memoir that trivializes the Holocaust, then shame on her.

As the number of living Holocaust survivors dwindles, the temptation to lose sight of the horrors of the death camps, and of the general human capacity to build them, increases. At that point, the Holocaust deniers will have won, and the human race will only need to wait a short time before it relearns the painful lessons of World War II.

In the News: Democracy resurgent?

Well, those rascally gays are in the news again, hogging the spotlight with their bourgeois ways -- getting married, settling down, having kids, blah, blah, blah. It's been 2 years since the Summer of Gay Marriages up here in the Commonwealth of MA, and our political and religious leaders are still looking for a way to undo the Horrific Damage perpetrated on the institution of marriage. Unfortunately, the MA legislature is controlled by the Sodomite Bloc and is using legislative rules (gasp!) to block a public vote on the subject.

But, our leaders have discovered another arrow in their quiver: Democracy!!! Our governor, wants to sidestep the legislature and send the issue of gay marriage to the people. And guess who his partner is in this noble endeavor? None other than our very own Cardinal Sean Patrick O'Malley!

Now, through I admit I am a dirty red liberal, I like the concept of democracy, generally. What I don't like is its selective application. In this case, Governor Mitt Romney is more than happy for a general show of hands when we knows he will win, but less so when his viewpoint is he less popular one. But that's politics.

And what of dear SPO? Since when did the Church want to hear from the people on anything? Don't they make decision on the basis of scripture and unchanging principles? Who cares what the people think unless a) they outrank us in the ecclesiastical hierarchy or b) can overturn a ruling that persuasion alone cannot affect?

Actually, I welcome the Cardinal's newfound love of liberty. I will be writing him soon to suggest that perhaps he can apply it to questions that have bedeviled the Church for decades: birth control, lay control of parishes and married/female clergy. Of course, we all know that like our secular leaders, the cardinal only wants to hear from the people when it is convenient, preferring to turn a deaf ear to us on all other issues.

But I rave. Ah "Camelot: for "one bright shining moment" we beheld our religious and secular leaders joining in a chorus for democracy. Too bad it is limited to the accomplishment of their selfish ends, to be discarded as soon as the victory is theirs.