Write for God

Pro-life protests at Notre Dame University resulted in almost 40 arrests.

 

He made a whip out of cords and drove them all out of the temple area, with the sheep and oxen, and spilled the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables, and to those who sold doves he said, “Take these out of here, and stop making my Father’s house a marketplace.”

Our Father’s house is not a marketplace and Our Lady’s university is not a political arena, but that’s what it became this weekend when Notre Dame chose to invite President Barack Obama to deliver the commencement speech and to confer an honorary degree on him.

More than 360,000 Catholics signed a petition protesting the university’s choice, but both the President and Notre Dame’s president, Rev. John Jenkins, portrayed those who disagreed as anti-dialogue doctrinarians. The same nation that doesn’t trade with Cuba or doesn’t sit down with Iran or North Korea is calling for dialogue about abortion at a Catholic university instead of in Congress, where laws are made. Laws can be amended as political winds blow, but the Church is our rock because it remains true to the Gospel, which doesn’t change.  

I have nothing against President Obama. In fact, I voted for him despite his support for abortion rights because the alternatives — McCain and Palin –were infinitely worse choices on every other position on the platform.  I will never agree with the President on abortion, however. Dialogue is fine, as long as each side listens, reasons and can give on issues that are not life-or-death. The Church’s pro-life position is about life and death. Death is always death, no matter how much we discuss it. (As Gene Wilder puts it in Young Frankenstein, “Dead is dead.”)

Life is sacred and the pro-abortion protesters outside Notre Dame who proclaimed that a fetus is not a baby are plain wrong. No dialogue there. We cannot cut our consciences to fit this year’s fashions, to quote author Lillian Hellman when she refused to cooperate with Senator Joe McCarthy’s HUAC witch hunts in the 1950s. There was no common ground between naming names for HUAC and not naming names and I can’t see common ground between life and death, either.

A woman’s right to her body ends with another human being’s right to life. Protecting life to its natural end includes opposing euthanasia and the death penalty along with abortion. God does not give us the right to kill — period.

I can’t remember the last abortion rights group that asked pro-life people of faith to dialogue with them. We are pointy-headed yahoos for believing that life begins at conception and should be protected until its natural end. If there’s to be dialogue, it cannot be at a Catholic university graduation where obvious differences overshadow the fact that a Catholic education precludes supporting abortion.

It’s shameful that a university named after Our Lady arrested protestors reciting the Rosary. It’s shameful that Notre Dame couldn’t select a commencement speaker who could articulate the Church’s position on life. It’s shameful that Catholic parents who sent their children to Notre Dame for a religious education are discovering that they didn’t get what they paid for.

Free speech is for the marketplace, but our Church is beyond the Constitution and the conventions of Congressional debate. We believe, or we don’t. It’s that simple.

Any sort of dialogue at a Catholic university must first uphold the sanctity of life. If it cowers to political expediency or considers its stance on life to be something to bargain with, it’s not a dialogue, but a capitulation. Where is our whip out of cords and where is our demand to stop making Our Lady’s university a house of appeasement?

Unless we can stand behind our position on life, we cannot discuss its alternatives with those who consider life in the womb to be expandable. The dialogue begins and ends there, Mr. President.

“It is necessary for us to undergo many hardships to enter the kingdom of God.”

(Acts 14:22)

My favorite way to start the day

Sunday mornings were made for coffee and a newspaper. Not coffee and a laptop, or coffee and Kindle. Remember newspapers?

For much less than the cost of a cup of coffee in a cappucino palace, you could get news, features, circulars with sales that made you want to go shopping, a couple of puzzles to save for Sunday afternoon and even comic strips in color.  We could sit at the kitchen table and trade sections to read after throwing out the obvious junk bundled with the newspaper. The first items to go in the trash are those flyers promising a free, no-obligation lunch in exchange for an investment or retirement income pitch.

In 1981, I graduated from college with a degree in journalism. There were two good dailies in the Tampa Bay area back then, lots of weeklies and an evening paper that had its own columnists and staff. My first job was at a weekly where I wrote features, news, op-eds, film reviews and weepy stories designed to solicit donations for needy folks during the Christmas season. I met my future husband, the paper’s one-man sports department, there. He also wrote features and news, but he primarily covered the then-awful Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the long-departed Tampa Bay Rowdies. It was love at first deadline.

My connection with papers goes way back to a childhood days spent with my father’s family while my parents worked.  After midday dinner, my grandfather read the newpaper and everyone discussed what he read. At some point, their rocking chairs would stop creaking as they fell into their siestas and it would be my turn to look through the newspaper I couldn’t read yet.

I so wanted to be a part of their discussion that it made me want to learn to read early. At four, I could read as well as any second-grader. Papers have always been magical items to me, especially after we moved to New York in 1966, where there were so many dailies and so many great reporters available for about a dime a copy.

I first read my favorite columnist, Jimmy Breslin, in the Long Island Press, which is now Newsday as a kid in the library. There’s never been anyone better at capturing the human side of a story and in expressing anger at those who take advantage of  the poor. Breslin is still my hero to this day. “Rage is the only quality which has kept me, or anybody I have ever studied, writing columns for newspapers,” as he once put it.

Journalists who work their way up to a twice-weekly column or a Sunday spot and waste it on being clever or doing easy pieces betray the legacy of Breslin. I still remember how well he captured the fear and hysteria on the streets when Son of Sam, the serial killer, was terrorizing New York.

Breslin is in his late 70s, but he still writes an occasional column for Newsday with his usual flair for covering a story from the ground up. He talks to ordinary people instead of to spokespeople and poobahs. Here’s one he wrote in 2004 during an antiwar protest in New York. He talked to a little person who was suffering instead of covering the event itself with the rest of the press corps. The little person’s sorrow is often the forgotten angle when all camera lenses at pointed at protests and natural disasters.

Collecting books for their own sake isn’t my thing, but one of my eBay triumphs was scoring a first edition of Breslin’s The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight with his signature on the title page. I treasure it. Another favorite Breslin quote: “Media–the plural of mediocrity.”

Andrew Sarris’ film reviews in The Village Voice and the wonderful op-eds in The New York Times were some of my other favorite reads, even though the Times was above my reading level then.  And why did they use ”Mister” in their attributions even if they were talking about Jimi Hendrix? He never seemed a “Mister” to me, but Times style ruled.

Most of the time, our daily newspaper consisted of the New York Daily News that my Dad bought because the liked their sports columnists.  Dick Young and Phil Pepe covered his beloved Yankees. Bill Gallo’s cartoons were easy enough to get, unlike the Herblock-style editorial cartoons that I was too young to understand.

I have fond memories of loving newspapers and working for them during a time when print still mattered. These days, the medium is changing into online versions of papers I read then and millions of blogs that have provided all of us with our printing presses.

Bloggers and alternative news sites are changing news coverage. The big publications became too expensive too maintain, too static in their coverage of breaking news and too stodgy in their corporate coverage of issues. Without the Internet, we’d be stuck with local papers or no papers at all. The Web allows us to find citizen journalism, issues that the networks and the corporate publishers won’t cover and even columnists who express the same rage that made Breslin my favorite.

I know an older gentleman who insists that print is already dead. He reads The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and his local paper on his computer every morning.  He gets his books on Kindle and his news updates via  iPhone. Paper never reaches his breakfast table.  Very few people I know still read daily papers or even care that they’re withering away.

To me, there’s still something satisfying about starting the day with a newspaper and a cup of strong coffee. Even if I’ve read the stories on the Web the evening before, turning pages and scanning items is a relaxing way to wake up and face the day. The city columnist in my daily paper isn’t very good, which means that I miss reading Breslin every morning. 

More ink is used in covering pro sports in Tampa Bay than on human interest stories, but the beauty of any paper is that you can turn the page if there’s something you don’t want to read. I love good photography and our local paper is strong there. Sometimes a single photo can tell a long story.

Those of us who read newspapers are in the minority these days, but there will always be a market for print, in my view. Try folding your computer screen in half to do a crossword on your lap while sitting in your screened porch on a Sunday afternoon or clipping out part of your Kindle to post by your desk when a photo in print captures your eye. Long live newspapers!

My youngest daughter with our two grandsons, July 2008

There’s nothing more beautiful than holding your newborn for the first time or holding your child’s newborn for the first time. I’ve had the privilege of having four wonderful children and three lovely grandchildren and nothing I’ve done has ever compared to the joy I felt each time.

To all mothers and grandmothers, enjoy your special day and remember that we have changed the world just by loving our little ones. May God bless you all today and every day!

Father Alberto Cutie

Update on 5/28/09: Father Cutie announces at a press conference that he has joined the Episcopal Church and will preach his first sermon on Sunday, 5/31/09. Archbishop John Favalora wasn’t notified before the news conference took place at Father Cutie’s new church.

Spanish-language TV viewers are familiar with Father Alberto Cutié, the  telegenic Catholic priest who has a big following in the Miami area and in other markets, including EWTN’s network in Latin America. Father Cutié (his name sounds like a description of his good looks, but it’s pronounced Koo-tee-’ay) has TV and radio programs where he discusses family issues, much like a better looking, more positive, church-based Dr. Phil.

Father Cutié always seemed to me a movie star playing a priest rather than a priest. Tall, dark and handsome, he charmed ladies more than men. My father, a former altar boy who still believes priests should inspire quiet respect, always found him too slick.

Father Cutie on the cover of a tabloid

Father Cutié was in the news recently because a Mexican tabloid published several compromising photos of him on the beach with an attractive woman. In their swimsuits, they smooch and grab in a way that wouldn’t remotely suggest they’re priest and parishioner. As we used to say in another time, they’re making out.

Archbishop John C. Favalora removed Father Cutié from his parish in the Miami area and relieved him of his duties. ”Father Cutié made a promise of celibacy, and all priests are expected to fulfill that promise with the help of God,” said the Archbishop this week.

Father Cutié will present his side of the story during the Early Show on Monday. Before the photos surfaced, he had told a reporter that he wanted to marry and have children. His Web site is bare, except for a bilingual apology.

The odd part of this very public fall from grace is the cavalier attitude of Father Cutié’s supporters, who protested in front of the church yesterday and are planning another rally today. It’s no big deal, as many seemed to be saying. One protester, a middle-aged male, told the Miami Herald,

”He has the right to fall in love and start a family. They’re treating him as a sinner.”

Duh, Mister Protester! We lay people have the right to fall in love and start a family because we have not entered holy orders. Father Cutié has the right to renounce his vows, fall in love and start a family without being considered a sinner.  There’s a difference.

When we marry, our vow is to honor and cherish our spouse; we’re sinners when we violate that vow by being unfaithful. The point is that we married people and religious people make promises in the presence of God and we are sinners when we don’t fulfill our end of that covenant.

How far have some Catholics fallen in moral relativism when they think it’s okay for a priest forever in the order of Melchizedek, a holy representative of the lineage from Peter, to lock legs and smooch on the beach with a shapely woman? Whether the Church ever reconsiders the vows that religious people take is immaterial. Chastity is one of those vows now.

My husband couldn’t believe that a supporter of Father Cutié actually told a reporter that at least he hadn’t molested a child. Comments like that convince me that the Catholic Church needs the purification mentioned by Pope Benedict XVI and outlined in  Malachi 3:

But who will endure the day of his coming? And who can stand when he appears? For he is like the refiner’s fire, or like the fuller’s lye. 

He will sit refining and purifying (silver), and he will purify the sons of Levi, Refining them like gold or like silver that they may offer due sacrifice to the LORD.

An Alberto Cutié who smooches on the beach with a young woman might elicit a “get a room” comment from those around him on their lounge chairs, but nothing else. A Father Alberto Cutié who does the same is living a lie that is a sin against God. As a lay person, he would still be an entertaining TV personality and an affable radio host. As a priest, he is a source of shame.

The president of Paraguay, Fernando Lugo, is a former priest who’s been hit with two paternity suits by the mothers of children he fathered while he was still a priest. Lugo left the priesthood for politics.

Please pray for Father Cutié so that he may discern his true vocation in life, whether it’s in the priesthood or in marriage. If he lives his end of the bargain in either one, he will be serving God along the same rocky path that all of us take when we live the Christian life as sinners striving for God’s love. Father Cutié will be forgiven by the Father, as are we all.

Marriage and parenthood are beautiful ways to serve Jesus, and so is the priesthood, but they are not the same. The issue is not whether a married man may be a good priest or how we feel about celibacy:  It’s about being true to our word, our vows and ourselves.  There’s no moral relativism in that.

"Seven Pounds," now on DVD, is worth catching

Cinema has seasons, just like baseball and football. Qualifying dates for the Academy Awards, the advent of the summer blockbuster season and prestigious film festivals affect the release dates of movies in the theaters and on DVD.

That’s a roundabout way of saying that we’re in post-Oscars DVD season. The films that scored big are just now in home release, which means I’m finally catching them. (People who don’t know how to behave in a civil manner have ruined moviegoing for me. I always walk out more annoyed than entertained by boors who insist on talking, picking ringtones on their cells and endlessly crumpling cellophane wrappers.)

Thanks to Netflix, my husband and I will catch up with films worth watching months after they’re in theaters. That’s why we only recently saw Slumdog Millionaire, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Doubt, The Wrestler and The Reader. We also saw Seven Pounds, a Will Smith movie that received no nominations, but that was more interesting than some of the big winners at the Oscars. (See the trailer here.)

We were disappointed with Slumdog Millionaire, which is actually a pretty depressing film along the lines of an ultra-grim Satyajit Ray drama sprinkled with child prostitution, torture, a kid covered in excrement and children blinded for profit than the “feel-good” film that critics and friends proclaimed it to be. Unless you count feeling good that the guy wins money on a quiz show or that everyone breaks into a nonsensical song in a train station at the end (how could I make that up?), then Slumdog Millionaire is actually a very feel-bad movie.

The Wrestler was a very good character study of a broken-down performer whose life is in tatters. There’s rough language, sexually-charged nudity and a head-banging metal score that won’t be to everyone’s taste. The script and the performances by Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei were excellent, as was the sense of entering a world more exotic than a fantasy kingdom in Lord of the Rings. The pity and disgust that we feel for Rourke’s character is very real throughout the film. And I loved those scenes of the aging wrestler working at the deli counter!

Performances also made The Reader, although I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone offended by nudity in films. There’s a lot of it, some very explicit, by Kate Winslet and David Kross, who had to wait to turn 18 before he could be filmed nude. Winslet plays an older woman who sleeps with a 15-year-old student while she hides her past as a concentration-camp guard. Their scenes are integral to the plot but, again, they’re explicit. The issues explored in The Reader are complex and thought-provoking:  it’s actually about the postwar generations in Germany and how they have dealt with the specter of Nazism.  

To a parochial school kid like me, Doubt had the most frightening villain since Dracula. Actually, it was Meryl Streep as Sister Aloysius, a holy terror of a school principal who opposes the efforts of a progressive priest to open the Church to the changes coming during Vatican II. (When I was 11, I feared nothing more than our parochial school principal, Sister Renee.) The film is essentially a two-character play with the principal and the priest warring over her suspicions that he has molested the only African-American student in the school. 

The film succeeds in sparking discussions of what concepts like “doubt” and “truth” actually mean. With rich performances and a literate script by its playwright, John Patrick Shanley, Doubt also vividly captures the look and feel of Catholic schools in New York during the 1960s, even down to the candy store near the school and the hissed “Sit up straight!” admonitions from nuns.

We were totally flummoxed when it came to The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The film takes up hours you’ll never get back in your life. There was a lot of computer-generated trickery to age Brad Pitt backwards from birth as an old man to death as an infant and way too many flashbacks and flash-sideways.  (The latter is a funny term for confusing plots from Funny Farm, a goofy Chevy Chase comedy we love.) The aging of Pitt and the other actors is done with skill but, as my husband put it, “To what end?” There was nothing memorable about the film and not much beyond weirdness.

The film that we’ve enjoyed the most in recent weeks has been Seven Pounds, a very touching story that tackles big issues with more success than the overblown Benjamin Button. Will Smith plays an IRS agent who becomes a part of the lives of a gentle blind musician, a young woman with heart disease and several other characters who are ill. For most of its running time, the film is a mystery: We don’t know why the IRS agent cares about these people or how they figure into the plot.

(The film is more enjoyable if you don’t know anything about the plot; unfortunately, a snide reviewer from one the major dailies didn’t care for the film and he divulged one of the points in the story in a review I read. Watch the film not knowing much about it and you’ll enjoy it more.)

With patience, you discover the plan that the IRS agent has for the other characters and the reason for his quest. Along the way, there’s a sweet romance, redemption, sacrifice, soul-searching and the notion that one moment can change many lives. There was no foul language, no violence and a story that raised questions about life and death.

In fact, when a single act of mayhem occurs near the end, it’s shocking because it’s the only one like it. When we watch endless explosions, murders and shootings  in other films, we become innured to death and it becomes insignificant. In Seven Pounds, it’s never that.

The film didn’t score nominations at the Academy Awards, but it was an intelligent film for adults. That made it a prize winner in our book, whether the Academy agreed or not.

Our Lady of Guadalupe, Patroness of the Americas

Today is May 5.  If you speak Spanish, it’s el cinco de mayo. If you’re a party animal looking for an excuse to overdo tequila, Corona beer and homogenized versions of Mexican dishes, then today is Cinco de Mayo, dude!

(President Obama tried to be cool by telling the media he was celebrating the day early yesterday when he called it “Cinco de Cuatro,” which means “fifth of fourth.” He meant to say “Cuatro de Mayo,” or “May 4th,” instead. Obviously, Spanish wasn’t the President’s foreign language in high school!)

Since St. Patrick’s Day and Mardi Gras, there hasn’t been a good justification for being drunk and obnoxious in public. Cinco de Mayo fills the gap between the day before Ash Wednesday and the inevitable overimbibing of Memorial Day cookouts. It’s a sure bet that 99.9 percent of those who will have hangovers tomorrow won’t know why they were partying in the first place.

As holidays in Mexico go, Cinco de Mayo is small potatoes. It’s not even a federal holiday there. Mexicans do more celebrating on Independence Day (September 16) and on the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe (December 12) than on this historical footnote of a day. Mexicans have a Constitution Day, a Labor Day, a Revolution Day and the birthday of liberator Benito Juarez to take pride in their nation’s history. 

How the celebration of the Battle of Puebla on May 5 became a day to drink Mexican beer has more to do with the United States than with Mexico:

In 1862, [the] Mexican army faced the French troops and defeated them. In memory of this victory, a spectacular parade is organized in the city, during which the battle is reenacted.

That’s it. Cinco de Mayo commemorates a battle in Mexico’s history during its colonial days. If Mexico were to celebrate the Battle of Gettysburg as a symbol of American pride instead of the Fourth of July, we would find it pretty silly, but here we are creating hoopla for the anniversary of the Battle of Puebla, which is celebrated in the region of Puebla and in the United States.

Cinco de Mayo has become a party day and a celebration of Mexican culture in the United States. As long as we know why we’re marking the day, that’s fine. It’s not a day for Mexicans in their native land and it’s not much more than a tequila day for those who like to get drunk and stupid.

On December 12, the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, congratulate your friends of Mexican origin. The Patroness of the Americas appeared to a devout Indian named Juan Diego and Catholicism took root in the new continent after Our Lady chose Mexico as its fertile soil. That is something every American of Mexican origin can point to with pride.

Instead of getting drunk on a day of war, let’s be prayerful on a day of miracles. Make “Doce de Diciembre” (December 12) your new Cinco de Mayo.

The swine flu virus

Our Florida county announced its first confirmed case of swine flu today and a friend and I had a quick chat about the issue. My friend is a server at a chain restaurant popular with tourists and families.

Some of her customers have mentioned that they really wanted to order pork, but they’re afraid of catching swine flu. We both laughed at how misinformed the public is about the issue: It’s a fact that you don’t catch the disease from eating link sausages.

She did tell me that her great-grandmother had died during the 1918 flu pandemic that wiped out an estimated 70 million around the world. They sure don’t make pandemics like they used to!

Another friend was on a conference call with health and emergency management experts this afternoon. After the call, I asked him what had been decided. The gist of it was that we should wash our hands more frequently, which is something we should be doing anyway. We Moms have been telling our kids that for centuries.

The public always needs something that evokes fear or panic. It used to be anthrax and now it’s swine flu. (During the anthrax hysteria, a post office in our county was closed after white powder was found on top of a box. It turned out to be powdered creamer that someone had spilled while fixing a cup of coffee.)

From Jay Leno’s monolog on April 27: “I wasn’t that sick, but some people are, because of this swine flu, which has knocked the torture stuff right off the front page. You notice that? So, it’s obvious who is spreading the swine flu. Dick Cheney.”

We can panic, we can laugh or we can wash our hands more frequently. The last one sounds like a plan.

Schoolchildren in Ghana

After Mass this morning, we went to a breakfast to raise funds for a young woman in our parish who will spend three weeks in Ghana this summer as part of a LifeTeen youth ministry program. She will join other college students and young adults in a coastal nation that is 69 percent Christian. They will be building a preschool, rebuilding homes and coordinating youth ministries.

The young woman needs to raise $3,000 for her mission trip, but she was also asking for something we can all provide no matter where we live or what our finances look like: She wanted prayer partners who could contribute novenas, intentions at daily Mass or Rosaries. I signed our family up as one of her prayer partners.

If you can pray for a Catholic young woman who will be far from home carrying the word of God to the less fortunate in Africa, please keep Kelly Brown and the LifeTeen mission she will be participating in this summer in your thoughts.

“I find television very educational. Every time someone switches it on, I go into another room and read a good book.”

Groucho Marx