Leon J. Podles :: DIALOGUE

My eldest son is marrying Yerina Hajno, a young Albanian woman who was his sister’s roommate at Wellesley. So we are all off to her hometown, Saranda, for an Albanian Orthodox wedding  at the monastery in which she was baptized.
Be back in a few weeks.

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I have occasionally let anger blind me and have let myself become confused about the facts of a case, so I will not be too hard on a critic by posting his intemperate and inaccurate criticism (he should watch his language)
 
He claims that I called a leader of the Sancta Muerte cult a “Catholic Bishop.”
 
If [...]

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When we were at my wife’s college mini-reunion in Sedona, my brother-in-law gathered up brochures from the visitors’ center. 
The first is from “Down to Earth Psychic Readings.”  These are “famous for being authentic, accurate, and fun” (I can’t abide inauthentic psychic readings). 
The Center for the New Age offers Aura Photo, 15 (count’m, 15) Certified Psychic [...]

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 Richard Cross at Catholic Culture has dose some thoughtful guessimating about the rates of sexual abuse among the clergy in the Catholic Church and the clergy in the Anglican Church. 
It has to be guess work because the Anglican churches are not very forthcoming with statistics. However, I have collected material on the Anglican Church in [...]

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Mothering Sunday
 
It is the day of all the year, of all the year the one day,
When I shall see my mother dear and bring her cheer, a-mothering on Sunday.
It is the day of all the year, of all the year the one day,
And here come I my mother dear, to bring you cheer, a-mothering on [...]

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I read this as grace for our family Easter dinner, and for some reason it made a big impression on my now-adult children, perhaps because they have lived long enough to have people they love die, and therefore to realize what it means that Jesus has conquered death.
Christ is Risen!

If anyone is devout [...]

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Here are wife’s favorite Rembrandts. 
The passage it illustrates is
But Mary stood w But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb, and as she wept she stooped to look into the tomb; and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had lain, one at the head and one at the feet.  They [...]

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The inimitable Bishop Milingo (APA):
 

Zambia’s controversial Roman Catholic Church archbishop Emmanuel Milingo, who has been defrocked (dismissed) from the church’s leadership after years of controversial actions, on Friday demanded that the Vatican should pay him his pension for the years he served the church.

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This pays the bills

But his heart is here
Once we were in the Ritz-Carlton in Montreal while a Bar Mitzvah of spectacular bad taste was going on. Workmen carried 12 foot models of the Oscars through the lobby. While we were waiting to talk to the concierge, we overheard the conversation between the concierge and black [...]

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Deo volente, I will do the Camino de Santiago, or at least as much of it as an aging body will take, in the fall of 2010. 
In preparation I have been reading accounts of other pelegrinos, some likely, like Father Kevin Codd , the rector of the American seminary at Louvain (To the Field of [...]

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Anti-Semitism has the ability to flourish in the absence of Jews. Reality had never troubled anti-Semites. I remember reading about the world system of a primitive tribe in Central America. Their mental map placed themselves (naturally) at the center, then neighboring tribes, then Spaniards, then Americans and in the outermost fringes and darkness witches and Jews (Not that [...]

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My computer is under some sort of attack

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In my wanderings around the West, I encountered a flash point of Gay-Mormon relations.
In the center of Salt Lake City is Temple Square, which is adjacent to the Latter Day Saints Temple. It was a public square until ten years ago, when it was sold to the LDS who maintain and control it. As it [...]

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A Jew decides to go to Rome to see what the center of the Church was like. He investigated the papal court. He realized that

Not only did they indulge in normal lust but without the last restraint of remorse or shame even in sodomy and to such an extent that the influence of whores and [...]

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