Jeffrey Miller

Please don’t indulge in godless modern paganism and set up homely, self-indulgent makeshift memorials with cheap flowers and teddy bears. Don’t hold hands and sing bad pop songs.

Go to church. That’s what it’s for. For centuries, people smarter than you and with more finely honed aesthetics worked on rituals that actually do what they’re supposed to do.

Those people who hung around outside the Palace after Princess Diana’s death looked like fools and you will too if you cave to the lure of cheap grace and post-modern superficiality. Those British mourners displayed as much gringe-inducing [sic], pan-generational learned helplessness as Katrina survivors, but their laziness and ignorance was spiritual.

Worse, you will still feel as empty as you did before, maybe more so, and wonder why.

Don’t make America look stupid and shallow to the whole world by Disneyfying your grief.

Kathy Shaidle says what most of us don’t have the wit or courage to say. The Disneyfying of grief is quite accurate, but what has also started is the hobby-horsing of this tragedy in that groups are once again using the pure evil or insanity of one person’s act as a bullet point for an agenda. The only agenda right now should be prayer.

Some churches in Waterloo Region are keeping an extra eye out on Sundays after a string of thefts during busy services in recent months.

The thieves don’t follow any denominational lines — they’ve struck Catholic, Pentecostal and Evangelical churches while parishioners gather for worship, taking keys from inside the building and stealing cars out of the parking lot.

Police feel there’s enough of a pattern they need to warn church-goers to keep an eye out for suspicious people hanging about during services.

After a busy Easter Sunday at St. Francis of Assisi on Blueridge Avenue last week, Rev. Peter Pelletier couldn’t find his silver Chrysler Cirrus. At some point during the Catholic church’s packed masses, someone entered the private room where the mass is prepared and stole his keys, he said.

These thieves have take ecumenism too far.

BRASILIA, Brazil – As her 8-year-old son, Enzzo, played on the balcony of her apartment, Sandra Grossi de Almeida held up an X-ray picture that she said proved that his very existence was a miracle.

The chemist pointed to a black wedge that she said was a wall of tissue dividing her uterus, a malformation that should have made it impossible for her to carry a baby for more than four months. Yet Enzzo grew for seven months in a space about half the size of a normal uterus until he was delivered by Caesarean section.

Grossi de Almeida attributes the miracle of her son’s birth to a paper "pill" inscribed with a prayer that she ate during her pregnancy. The Vatican agrees, pronouncing Enzzo one of the two miracles needed to declare the creator of the pills, an 18th-century Franciscan monk named Antonio de Sant’Anna Galvao, a saint.

The May 11 canonization of Galvao, Brazil’s first native-born saint, will be the centerpiece event when Pope Benedict XVI visits Brazil next month. Many say it also will be a watershed in the Roman Catholic Church’s battle to fight the loss of adherents to fast-growing Pentecostal churches.

Galvao’s pills reportedly have cured thousands of Brazilians of everything from depression to hepatitis. His elevation to sainthood will be long-delayed recognition of what many believe is an ongoing miracle that’s saved – or bettered – lives for more than two centuries.

Galvao’s pills contain this prayer: "After the birth, the Virgin remained intact / Mother of God, intercede on our behalf." They’re assembled in five locations around Sao Paulo state, including by women in Galvao’s hometown of Guaratingueta, who gather every afternoon in a room above the local cathedral. The pills also are made by cloistered nuns at the Convent of Light in Sao Paulo, where Galvao died in 1832 at age 83.

Believers swallow three seed-sized pills over nine days, during which they recite the prayer printed on the paper.

"It’s a vehicle of faith," said Grossi de Almeida, who miscarried twice, including losing twins, before Enzzo was born. "You take the pills, and you believe in them, you believe they will make you better, and you become stronger in your faith. You know there’s a God that helps you."