I’ve been a fan of the B-Movie Catechism for years enjoying his quirky sense of humor and rubber monster suit catechesis. I have also been in awe of his fairly-recent cartoon series “Pulp Catholicism” which continues to crack me up. Case in point.
![Pulp Catholicism 018_thumb[2]](http://www.splendoroftruth.com/curtjester/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Pulp-Catholicism-018_thumb2.jpg)
The Ear of the Heart: An Actress’ Journey from Hollywood to Holy Vows
Much has been made of the actress who was Elvis’ first kiss in a film that went on to enter a Benedicine monastery. Yet the Elvis aspect is probably the least interesting part of her story.
The format of this biography is a bit different in that her lifelong friend and Hollywood writer Richard DeNeut mostly tells the story along with her own comments and remembrances interjected throughout (especially in the second half of the book). Included are also direct stories from those who know her. These multiple contributors give this book more depth, but also at times leaves you confused about who is writing at the time.
The first half of the book looks back at her childhood and family life including her acting career. The term dysfunctional family is often over used, but this is quite accurate here. Her parents troubled mariage, divorces, and remarriages was a backdrop to her life. Often I was reminded of Mother Angelica’s story, although while different in many aspects, had a common thread. Her family was non-religious and yet her path led her to join the Catholic Church at a young age while she was attending a Catholic school for the education.
While she had a difficult relationship with her mother and often vacant father, there is frustration but not bitterness concerning these parts of the biography. Her parents are painted warts and all without being a one-dimensional portrait. The stories of her grandmother, who was quite a character, are also rather fun. She spent time shifting between living with mother and her grandparents.
It was rather amazing that despite these problems her entrance into Hollywood and also Broadway did not go down the paths that are so familiar. She describes Elvis as a total gentleman and this is mostly true regarding most of the men she worked with. The exception being Peter Sellers and the story she tells regarding him is worth the price of the book in how she handled this situation.
I quite enjoyed her reflections on this time of her life in Hollywood and Broadway and the people she got to work with who she so admired. Many of these friendships continued on after she entered the Benedictine Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Connecticut. There is much of interest in this period of her life and her friends and acquaintances including the period where she was engaged to be married.
As interesting as this period of her life was, what really draws you in is how she first learned of Regina Laudis and what kept drawing her back there despite here career being in full swing. The period of discernment and the acceptance of her vocation to the religious life was not a straight path, but a path we often hear of regarding such discernment. It is easy to imagine the reaction by those her knew her who could not understand this choice.
The second half of the book deals with her life in Regina Laudis. Parts of it could seem to come right out of a novel or screenplay. The young nun who adjusts to life in a strict monastery and the communication clashes they entail could seem like a setup. Yet this was a case where under obedience she learned and responded and was able to contribute with her own gifts regarding these communication clashes. I’ve read enough about religious life to have no idealized vision of religious life and the difficulites are certainly shown.
Mother Dorcas Roselund, in describing the pitfalls of monastic life, summed it up another way. A gastroenterologist before she entered Regina Laudis, she is now the Community’s baker. Life in a monastery is “the new martyrdom”, she said. “they used to throw Christians to the lions. Now they make us live together.”
An aspect of the second half of the book that I really liked was the portraits of the other nuns and their widely varied experiences and contributions they made to the monastery. They were encouraged to take what professional skills they had into community. I also found it fascinating that in the wake of the Second Vatican Council and the turbulence in so many religious orders, that there were smaller ripples at Regina Laudis. This was a monastery that did not just throw everything away, but also did not stagnate. There was an openness to new ideas, but evaluated in context of their Benedictine tradition. Their obedience provided an anchor that so many other orders had cast off.
This book just engaged me on many levels beyond the straight biographical storyline. There is a gentle humor throughout and an obvious attempt by Mother Deloris Hart to not airbrush out her own difficulties. I would have liked to have more details on Mother Deloris Hart spiritual life, but it is an area touched on at times and you do see the fruits of it. There are just so many stories packed in this book and while close to 500 pages there are not wasted pages.
By Fr. Federico Lombardi
VATICAN CITY, May 29, 2013 (Zenit.org) – The very great interest aroused by the Pope’s brief homilies in the course of the Masses celebrated every morning in the chapel of the Casa Santa Marta, poses and continues to pose often the question from different parts on the possibility to access such celebrations or such homilies fully and not through the syntheses published every day by Vatican Radio and L’Osservatore Romano.
The question is understandable and has been taken several times into consideration and made the object of profound reflection, and merits a clear answer. First of all, it is necessary to keep in mind the character that the Holy Father himself attributes to the morning celebration of the Mass at Saint Martha’s.
It is a Mass with the presence of not a small group of faithful (generally more than 50 people) but whose character of familiarity the Pope intends to preserve. Because of this, despite the requests received, he has asked explicitly that it not be transmitted live on video or audio.
… After careful reflection, therefore, it was decided that the best way to make the richness of the Pope’s homilies accessible to a wider public, without altering their nature, is to publish an ample synthesis, rich also in original quoted phrases that reflect the genuine flavor of the Pope’s expressions. It is what L’Osservatore Romano is committed to doing every day, whereas Vatican Radio, on the basis of its characteristic nature, offers a briefer synthesis, but accompanied also with some passages of the original recorded audio, as well as CTV which offers a video-clip corresponding to one of the inserted audios published by Vatican Radio.
I can understand the reasoning, but am a bit disappointed. I really would have liked to see the full texts of these daily homilies for my own edification. I’ve seen more stories generated around these than his Sunday homilies.
There is a tension between the public aspect of the papacy and the more loose off-the-cuff daily homilies. Trying to make somewhat private what is not private I think will only lead to more difficulties. For example stories like last weeks “Atheists who do good works go straight to Heaven’ media-created flap will continue to be generated.
Yet like I said last week, most religion reporting never requires the context given by the full text. Just the juicy-bits that could generate a headline regardless of the facts.
This is the 11th volume of The Weekly Francis ebook which is a compilation of the Holy Father’s writings, speeches, etc which I post at Jimmy Akin’s The Weekly Francis. The post at Jimmy Akin’s site contains a link to each document on the Vatican’s site and does not require an e-reader to use.
This volume covers material released during the last week from 15 May 2013 – 27 May 2013.
The ebook contains a table of contents and the material is arranged in sections such as Angelus, Speeches, etc in date order. The full index is listed on Jimmy’s site.
- The Weekly Francis – Volume 11 – ePub (supports most readers)
- The Weekly Francis – Volume 11 – Kindle
There is an archive for all of The Weekly Francis eBook volumes. This page is available via the header of this blog or from here.
Omnibus Edition: In addition to The Weekly Francis I am also maintaining an Omnibus edition that contains all of Pope Francis writings, speeches, etc. At the end of the year an annual edition will be released along with maintaining the full omnibus.
It is quite easy to complain about something, quite another to respond in a positive way.
So props to Taylor Marshall Why I’m Starting a New Boy Scouts: My Catholic Scouting Manifesto.
It is sad that the Boy Scouts of America caved to political correctness.
Still I find it odd my own reaction since I quit the scouts as a kid. Even in grade school I was a fervent atheist. The boy scout oath started to annoy me with the “To do my duty to God” part. I had enjoyed the outdoor scouting aspects and was almost willing to subsume my atheism to take part. Thankfully what I said when I resigned has gone down the memory hold, although I do remember having worn my Boy Scout nekerchief that was threaded together with a peace sign at that last meeting.
Now I am mad at the scouts for a totally different reason. Funny how things change.
So how long until “Being prepared” for the Scouts means carrying a condom?
There is one thing the media is quite useful for regarding coverage of the Catholic Church. If I want to know what the Pope hasn’t said then they are my go to source.
The latest media coverage led to outrage from Protestants and Catholics suspicious of this pope along with more liberal elements being delighted. The media meme of the week is that Pope Francis said that atheists could be saved purely by good works.
As usual Jimmy Akin cuts through the errors regarding this with his thoughtful analysis.
Still this episode does illustrate a problem.
Pope Francis is in the habit of saying daily Mass for the people at St. Martha’s House and invited guests, and when he does so he gives an off-the-cuff homily (rather than reading from a prepared text).
This is actually something new.
John Paul II and Benedict XVI did not do this. They did not celebrate daily Mass as publicly as Pope Francis, and they did not have daily homilies published in this way. Instead, they occasionally delivered prepared homilies at public Masses on special occasions, and only these were published. As a result, if you look at the Vatican web site, there are surprisingly few homilies listed in their sections!
As a result, the Vatican web people aren’t scaled up for this volume of homilies, and–MADDENINGLY–you can’t find complete texts of Pope Francis’s daily ones on the site.
This is a problems considering also that there has been multiple instances where part of the content of the Pope’s unpublished daily homilies have generated news stories. Not only can’t you find them on the Vatican’s site, you can only find fragments quoted by sources covering the Pope and the Vatican.
These extemporaneous homilies certainly create a difficulty for the Vatican regarding both capturing exactly what was said and providing timely translations. They seem to have a hard enough time providing timely translations of his official homilies and speeches, especially the General Audience. Although this is more of a problem for those like myself who want to read what the Pope actually said then for the media. The media in covering the Church is not interested in context anyway and even with full texts almost infallibly gets things wrong.
Recently having read The Church Building as a Sacred Place: Beauty, Transcendence, and the Eternal
I realize in some ways I strived for an aesthetic that was fueled by my atheism. I use to think all government buildings should be the architectural equivalent of the big box stores. Functional and without a concern for beauty or anything that would add cost for merely appearance sake. Humans really didn’t need all that to do work so why bother. I would also have seen rows and rows of cubicles as an efficient no nonsense design.
Spending many years at sea onboard various aircraft carriers I found my aesthetics pretty much satisfied by the way military ships are designed. Wiring is all visible and the bulkheads and frames of the ship are uniformly haze gray. A design based on ease of maintenance with not other concerns. It also use to annoy me that one area that was not based on practical concerns was the linoleum tiled floors. Although part of this dislike was the time spent mopping and buffing such floors and the idea of making a warship pretty.
Part of my outlook was certainly appreciation of the “Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder” relativism. Since beauty was totally subjective we should not waste time and money on something so subjective. Yet at the same time I didn’t really believe this. I was forcing this view on myself to match my philosophy. I was committed to moral relativism, but not a relativism towards beauty. When it came to art and architecture I was drawn to beauty and totally frustrated with the lack of it in so much art and architecture. So-called modern art should have appealed to my atheism, but instead it repelled me. I could find many forms of art interesting, but I didn’t equate something being distinctive as being the same as it being beautiful.
Still my more utilitarian mindset wanted to appreciate function over form. That in a universe with no ultimate meaning it was ridiculous to try to bring meaning out of art. If I had known Andy Warhol’s quote “Art is anything you can get away with” I would have appreciated it from the mindset I tried to overlay on my thoughts. Yet time and time again I was drawn to what classically was called beautiful.
It was my conversion that led me to finally drop what I didn’t really believe. I did not have pretend to myself anymore that I preferred the utilitarian or that what I found ugly or what had repulsed me was just my own subjective view. That while there are subjective reactions towards beauty this is not to say that all beauty is purely subjective. It is not that you are as likely to find a painting or photo of a mountain scene than one of a garbage dump.
I remember once my late pastor had told me that often reporters assumed that his parish was the diocesan cathedral. Surely this was because it was the most beautiful church in the diocese created along more traditional lines with a beautiful high altar. What had drawn me to this parish church was it’s beauty. I had found it accidentally when driving when I saw the sign for the book store. When I went inside I was stunned by what I saw and recognized the beauty of it. At the time I had rarely been in a Catholic church and certainly not one that couldn’t have doubled as an auditorium. Hollywood also seems to be attracted to the more traditional architecture of Catholic churches in that when you see one in the media it is never of the fan-like auditorium type that unfortunately are so prevalent. They know instinctively what a Catholic church is suppose to look like.
This does make me wonder just how much the loss of the religious sense has contributed to so much utilitarian ugliness that pervades the world? So much art and architecture seems to exist to only glorify the architect or artist. A rebellion against beauty to force a new aesthetic into acceptance. This is understandable to some extent in the secular world, but unfortunately the same is true regarding sacred architecture and art. An attempt seems to be made to divorce themselves from the past instead of building on it. An individualism that creeps into everything yet at the same time an ugly sameness. Aesthetic relativism does not led to people arguing over what is more beautiful, but a destruction of the beautiful.
Considering that Pentecost is often mentioned as the birthday of the Church it is not surprising to hear a homily referencing the age of the Church. Today I heard the same and like I hear all to often it involves bad Pentecost math in that the Church is referred to as being 2,000 plus years old.
Now I can understand a bit of shorthand in referring to the Church as being 2,000 years old, but not 2,000 plus. The error seems to count the birth of the Church from the birth of Jesus and not Pentecost after his death. While there is some lack of precision on the year Jesus was born (theories ranging from roughly 1–7 BC) any such recalculation still does not make the Church 2000 plus years old in the year 2013. Now this is no big deal, just one of those little things that annoy me.
Still I wonder if in the years ahead if the Church will try to set some date as a 2,000 year anniversary of the Church? Jimmy Akin had an interesting piece this year exploring if we could know when Jesus died. He sets it with some precision as 3:00 p.m on Friday, April 3, A.D. 33. So in 20 years we really could be saying the Church was 2,000 years old.
The other bit of bad statistical math involved in the homily was the priest saying there were 2 Billion Catholics. The actual figure is somewhat over 1.2 Billion.
Since the priest wasn’t interested in precision of numbers I put in a donation envelope that said $20 on the outside, but contained a check for $5 inside. Well not really.
Speaking of math, here is something from post from 2006 The Mathsiah.
“Do you think that I have come to give peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division;”
“Be fruitful and multiply”
“Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log of x+1 that is in your own eye?”
“Go and sine no more.”
This is the 10th volume of The Weekly Francis ebook which is a compilation of the Holy Father’s writings, speeches, etc which I post at Jimmy Akin’s The Weekly Francis. The post at Jimmy Akin’s site contains a link to each document on the Vatican’s site and does not require an e-reader to use.
This volume covers material released during the last week from 6 May 2013 – 19 May 2013.
The ebook contains a table of contents and the material is arranged in sections such as Angelus, Speeches, etc in date order. The full index is listed on Jimmy’s site.
- The Weekly Francis – Volume 10 – ePub (supports most readers)
- The Weekly Francis – Volume 10 – Kindle
There is an archive for all of The Weekly Francis eBook volumes. This page is available via the header of this blog or from here.
Omnibus Edition: In addition to The Weekly Francis I am also maintaining an Omnibus edition that contains all of Pope Francis writings, speeches, etc. At the end of the year an annual edition will be released along with maintaining the full omnibus.