Blog by the Sea has a interesting story on The "Refoundation" of the Lisieux Carmel which has a nice ending to it.
And for a St Therese to Saint Faustina to seqway. Saint Faustina writes in her diary that one of the saints who she had a vision of was St. Terese and she writes at one point that once St Therese told her that one day she too would be "raised to the altar", that is to be declared a Saint.
Archbishop Antonio Franco, the Vatican’s nuncio in Israel, has announced that he will attend the annual Holocaust Memorial day event at Yad Vashem, Israel’s main Holocaust museum, after the museum indicated it is willing to reconsider a caption of Pope Pius XII that Franco found offensive.
Avner Shalev, President of Yad Vashem, sent a letter to Franco late in the week stating that the museum will “reconsider the way in which Pius XII is presented.” In response, Franco indicated that he will be present for the events Sunday evening.
“Because my action was not intended to disassociate myself from the celebrations, but to call attention to the way in which the pope was presented … my goal has been reached,” Franco said. “I don’t have any reason to keep this tension open” and therefore “I will take part in the ceremonies.”
Earlier this week, news broke in Israel that Franco had told Yad Vashem he would not participate in the annual commemoration of the Shoah due to a caption of Pope Pius XII which catalogs various alleged silences and omissions of the wartime pope with regard to Nazi attacks on Jews. Both the previous nuncio in Israel, Archbishop Pietro Sambi, and Franco had complained about the caption to Yad Vashem.
…Among the statements in the caption, which has been on display at Yad Vashem since 2005, are the following:
Pius XII’s reaction toward the killing of Jews during the period of the Holocaust is controversial. In 1933, as the Vatican Secretary of State, in order to maintain the rights of the Church in Germany, he signed a Concordat with the Nazi regime even at the price of recognizing the racist Nazi regime. When he was elected Pope in 1939, he put aside an encyclical against racism and anti-Semitism prepared by his predecessor…. Although reports about the assassination of Jews reached the Vatican, the Pope did not protest either by speaking out or in writing. … In December of 1942, he did not participate in the condemnation by members of the Allies regarding the killing of Jews. Even when the Jews were being deported from Rome to Auschwitz, the Pope did not intervene. … He maintained a neutral position except toward the end of the war when he appealed on behalf of the government of Hungary and of Slovakia. His silence and the absence of directives obliged the clergy in Europe to decide independently how they should behave toward the persecuted Jews.
Even some Jewish leaders critical of Franco’s boycott acknowledged that the caption may be one-sided.
Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, told NCR that the caption is "too judgmental, too conclusory" based on what is presently known, calling it "inappropriate" and saying, "I can understand the nuncio’s displeasure." He insisted, however, that this does not justify refusing to attend the memorial, calling Franco’s planned absence "an insult to the victims."
In a previous story from last year.
In a remarkable historical find, testimony has emerged revealing that, in 1941, Pope Pius XII received a German Jewish visitor at the Vatican who was seeking help for certain Jews who were being held in an Italian internment camp. After welcoming the young man and promising him help, Pius told him not once but twice–in emotional language, in front of a large group that included German soldiers–"Be proud to be a Jew!"
The amazing testimony, written as a first-hand account by an anonymous Jewish author in wartime Palestine, originally appeared on April 28, 1944 in The Palestine Post (now, The Jerusalem Post), the most influential Jewish publication in the world at that time.
According to longtime Inside the Vatican contributor William Doino, who discovered the testimony in an archive, maintained by Tel Aviv University, "the testimony has apparently been forgotten, because, as far as I know, no leading Holocaust authority or biographer of Pius XII has ever cited it."
Christopher Blosser has a roundup of articles covering Pope Benedicts’s 80th Birthday (April 16, but being celebrated today in Rome) and his upcoming two year anniversary as Pope (April 19th).
Included in his roundup is a link to a Vatican webform used to send the Pope a Birthday Greeting
Julie at Happy Catholic passed on this latest meme to me which is surprisingly difficult to answer and limiting your choices to just three. Plus there is the fear of what a psychologist might make of the choices.
Name up to three characters . . .
1) . . . you wish were real so you could meet them.
1. Paul Atreides (Dune Series)
2. Rincewind (Discworld series)
3. Ender (Orson Scott Cards’s series)
2) . . . you would like to be.
1. Drizzt Do’Urden (Iceland Dale Trilogy and other novels)
2. Able of the High Heart (Gene Wolfe’s Wizard Knight series)
3. Fr. Elijah (Michael D. O’Brien’s Children of the Last Days novels)
3) . . . who scare you.
1. The Psychohistorians in Asimov’s Foundation series (what can be scarier then hidden bureaucrats who think they know what is best for you)
2. The Elder Things in H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness (or pretty much anything by Lovecraft).
3. The Fithp in Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle’s Footfall.I inflict this meme on The Sci Fi Catholic, Claw of the Conciliator, and Video meliora, proboque; Deteriora sequor
"Pope Benedict adjusts his camauro as he prepares to crowd surf the Wednesday audience."
"The Pope pulls off his infamous Rocket J. Squirrel imitation."
Here is an interesting article called "Back in the habit, young nuns on the rise" which details such orders as Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist and others who are attracting vocations at an increasing rate.
McGlynn is one part of the new blood there that includes a former lawyer and bartender, with an average age of 24. The national median age for nuns is in the 70s, according to CARA.
"There’s time every day to be with God and not having all the distractions that are in the world that keep you from God."
The new nuns say they are looking for an alternative lifestyle in troubled times.
I very much doubt that these new nuns quite phrased their vocation as an "alternative lifestyle in troubled times."
They also mention some orders that are not exactly attracting vocations.
That attitude has helped their order, the Adrian Dominican Sisters in Michigan, attract a handful of new candidates in their 20s and 30s this year.
"We’re not selling ourselves like we’re worried we’re gonna die out," Scott said. "We’re evolving into something else."
Truer words have seldom been spoken and that something else of evolving is something other than Catholic.
Sister Julie Vieira’s popular blog, A Nun’s Life, isn’t meant as a recruiting tool, though plenty of girls and young women visit the site. Vieira, of Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Monroe, Mich., blogs about politics, enjoying a beer at a bar and her favorite bands along with religious content, hoping to dispel sister stereotypes.
She says nuns have to do a better job of marketing themselves.
"It’s very hard to do that sort of thing because you are talking about a personal relationship with God," she said. "And a personal relationship with a community, so it’s a hard thing to advertise."
A Massachusetts order is hoping to appeal to the broader public by restructuring memberships to include roles for married women and those with no formal connection to the congregation.
The Sisters of St. Joseph in Springfield have extended their roles to include associates, agregees, and partners in mission, along with vowed members. Each have varying levels of commitment. Four women are working to become agregees, said Sister Natalie Cain, coordinator of membership and association for the Sisters of St. Joseph.
"We realized we could be creative in ways in how people could be part of who we are," she said.
Of course the last thing they will do is to look at the orders that are growing and why. But faithfulness to the magisterium is not a bullet point they are willing to swallow.
Sister Julie Vieira has appeared on Good Morning America and NPR so that is not exactly a ringing endorsement and she recommends dissident groups like New Ways Ministry when answering questions.
A reader this week sent me a link to a Time Magazine article from 1979 called "The New Nuns" which is quite interesting in a time warp way.
They dress in everything from miniskirts to medieval mantles. They do everything from classroom teaching to police work. One has a job with Cesar Chavez, another with Ralph Nader. There is a deputy attorney general and an Air Force lieutenant. They live in inner-city slums, in posh suburbs, on farms, even in the desert. They come singly, by the dozen and in battalions. They are the new American nuns who, in the decade since the Second Vatican Council first provided the inspiration, have streamed out of their centuries-old enclosures into the modern world.
The most radical of the new nuns have abandoned their orders to form "noncanonical" experimental communities outside the reach of church authority. But they do not consider themselves "ex-nuns." A free-form, geographically dispersed group (32 states, Canada and England) called Sisters for a Christian Community (S.F.C.C.) was founded in 1970 to "experiment and pioneer new forms of religious life for the 21st century." Essential to the undertaking, says Founding Sister Lillanna Kopp of Portland, Ore., is the elimination of the bureaucratic, authoritarian structures that have driven American nuns out of traditional religious orders by the tens of thousands since the Vatican Council closed in 1965. Since that year, the number of U.S. nuns has dropped from 180-000 to 150,000—far more than can be accounted for by normal attrition. "We must be a pilgrim people on the road, unencumbered by luggage," says Sister Kopp, a sociologist and author, who left her order in 1969. "Marble mother houses are what destroyed the old orders."
…the new nuns are confident that they are moving with a historical tide. With secessionist Sister Anita Caspary, they maintain that the church "stands to lose the whole community if it stands in the way."
A reverse prophet if there ever was on. The problem was that many religious order followed that way and whole communities were lost or greatly reduced. Like Chesterton said "only a live thing can swim upstream" and it is certainly dead things that went with the flow of the times. Rather ironically the title of the Time article "The New Nuns" lead to the religious orders chronicled where a New Nun was rarity.
There has been a lot of commentary in the last couple of days due to the Imus flap and the coarsening of culture. But like many things that we notice today the roots go back much farther then just modern times.
For example the play turned book by Baroness Emmuska Orczy called the The Scarlet Pimpernel. Now I don’t recall if the Scarlet Pimpernel drove between England and France in pre-Chunnel times in a pink Cadillac accentuated with fur rescuing French Aristocrats, but introducing a hero who was a Pimpernel regardless of the color is hardly appropriat. I hear that a new movie remake will have the possible academy nominated song. "It’s hard out here for a Pimpernel."
Long before there was Rap music there was the Hoedown.
A reader let me know that that it looks like the new English translation has leaked. Fr. Sean Finnegan gave Fr. Finigan a PDF of the text which can be downloaded here (right click)
Following the values set forth by the Venerable Father Basil Anthony Moreau csc, the University of Notre Dame, Saint Mary’s College, and Holy Cross College are collaborating in the celebration of the Third Annual Eucharistic Procession on April 22, 2007 following the 11:45am Mass at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart Notre Dame, Indiana.
The Eucharistic Procession will be celebrated on the historical “God quad” at the University of Notre Dame stopping at four altars of Benediction before the statues of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Our Lady of the University at the main circle, Fr. Sorin founder of Notre Dame and Saint Mary’s, and concluding at the Golden Dome of the Administration Building. Students, faculty, religious, and staff of each institution, as well as the general public will give public witness of their faith and devotion to the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. The Eucharistic Procession will also be a public prayer asking God for three graces: a greater respect of and protection for the rights of all human life from conception to natural death; an increase of vocations to the religious life and priesthood especially in the Congregation of Holy Cross; and blessings for the students, faculty, staff, religious, trustees, and administration of the three institutions of higher learning. A picnic lunch will be provided by the generosity of the Notre Dame Knights of Columbus Council #1477.
Founded in 1835, the Congregation of Holy Cross serves in fifteen countries on five continents throughout the world. Fr. Moreau envisioned the brothers, sisters, and priests of Holy Cross united in their lives and in their work as a visible imitation of the Holy Family. Fr. Moreau will be beatified in LeMans, France on September 15, 2007. A proponent of Eucharistic adoration and devotions, this procession gives honor to Fr. Moreau and his vision for a religious community of educators in the faith. With a combined history of more than 369 years of education at St. Mary’s, Holy Cross and Notre Dame, the religious of Holy Cross have been educating the hearts and minds of children and young adults. It is the mission of Holy Cross to make God known, loved and served.
For more information about this Eucharistic Procession, please contact Fr. Kevin Russeau, csc at Russeau.3@nd.edu.
John Allen Jr. has a really interesting background story on the African country of Malawi where 15 years ago the regime was toppled largely due do acts of a courageous bishops conference there. The parallels are interesting considering how outspoken the bishop in Zimbabwe have been about Robert Mugabe and we can pray for the same effect.