Monthly Archives: December 2011
And from the Albanian Side of the Family
in Uncategorized No Comments Tags: Albania, Christmas
(You will no doubt note that this in the Gheg dialect, in which the -t ending is not plural)
A traditional tree in Tirana:
And a different Christmas tree outside Tirana:
“A Christmas tree made of spaghetti sticks in the national park in Tirana December 28 2006. A local restaurant used roughly six million spaghetti sticks building the sixteen meter tree weighing 1 ton.”
Feliz Navidad
Santa in España
in Uncategorized No Comments Tags: Santa, Spain
Señor Rafael Cavero of Madrid is a collector, indeed the foremost collector of Papá Noel (Santa Claus) in all of Spain.
In the door which gives access to the garden of the house in which he has lived more than thirty years, a heap of little men with white beards receives visitors. They hide themselves, climb the balconies, go up the lanterns, laugh. And once you have crossed the threshold of the residence, the spectacle surpasses all expectations. “Lola, my wife, is a fan of the Three Kings, and what she hates most of all in the world, although you won’t believe it, is Santa Claus. At this time of year she is always annoyed and wants to leave the house. For this reason, and in revenge, she installs a nativity scene of gigantic size,” he explained.
A collector of many things, among which are music boxes and masks, his fondness for Santa Claus began by accident. He discovered the oldest piece of his collection at a fair and it pleased him so much that since then he looks for pieces here and there, everywhere in the world, on the internet, in catalogues, in shops…”The last ones which I acquired came from Denmark. And especially the best are those from there and from Norway. They are the most expensive; they cost almost as much as a car! Nevertheless, today many are made in China and the quality is evident. Of those which I possess, many have almost five movements. Others read stories and there are even those who sing thirty Christmas carols with the voice of Ray Charles.”
The display in the Cavero house involves emptying the living room over three days of intense work (“I do it with two of my daughters, Ana and Piedy, with a guitarist and a carpenter”). Lola’s collection of boxes and porcelain dogs “disappears” in their place there is put up an incredible scene of crystal balls, gnomes, rabbits, and reindeer. And thousands of Santa Clauses in all postures and attitudes: playing the saxophone, getting on a motorcycle, with eyeglasses like Stevie Wonder, soaping up in a bathtub, swinging, crossing the room at high speed, juggling on the swing, on the stairs…and all this in the middle of a great racket of songs, laughs, and train whistles.
And what does Señor Cavero want from Santa Claus? “That when in Spain almost everything is lost, that the hope in Santa Claus is not lost and to assure the whole world that the Three Kings exist. Ours (i.e., Spanish royalty] are in La Zarazuela [the royal palace], but they have some pages [Spanish politicians?] who leave much to be desired.”
Nu Ar Det Jul Igen
When the children were small and less self-conscious, we did this at our house
You may remember the Christmas scene from Fanny and Alexander and here is a modern version.
- Nu är det jul igen, och nu är det jul igen
Och julen varar väl till påska
Nu är det jul igen, och nu är det jul igen
Och julen varar väl till påska
Men det var inte sant och det var inte sant
För däremellan kommer fasta
Och det var inte sant och det var inte sant
För däremellan kommer fasta
- Now it’s Christmas again, and now it’s Christmas again
And Christmas lasts well into Easter
Now it’s Christmas again, and now it’s Christmas again
And Christmas lasts well into Easter
But it was not true and it was not true
For in-between will be Lent
And it was not true and it was not true
For in-between will be Lent
The Countdown
My Icelandic is a little rusty, but I am sure almost everyone would recognize this
especially from the Christmas Cat
French Liturgical Dancing
in dance No Comments
Let us turn to bishops who had some standards.
I have been researching the two-thousand-year war on dancing. The anti-dancing clerics come off as a bunch of spoilsports and wet blankets. Every now and then, however, one can see that a bishop might have legitimate objections. After he stopped laughing, the bishop tried to put an end to this French custom:
The bishop of Grasse prohibited the jouvines de Câreme, a Lenten festival with beribboned boys and girls dancing as a preliminary to a competition for who could piss the furthest, to the encouragement of rolling drums. (from John McManners, Church and Society in 18th Century France)
Just the boys, I hope. Trés français.
A Bishop’s Spiritual Reading
in clergy sex abuse scandal 13 Comments Tags: decadents, Lahey, pornography
Edelson and Lahey
Bishop Lahey was NOT a pedophile, his lawyer Edelson and his psychiatrist Bradford have emphasized.
Lahey, who has been involved in a 10-year romantic relationship after a number of one-night stands, imagines himself in a “submissive role” in his sado-masochistic sex fantasies, Bradford said. (Ottawa Citizen)
However, Bradford acknowledged he gave little consideration to the fact Lahey was carrying a bag of sex toys when he was stopped by border agents or had travelled to countries known for the child sex-trade, such as Thailand.
A Newfoundland man has filed a civil suit against Lahey for allegedly fondling him repeatedly at the Mount Cashel orphanage, but the unproven allegations contained in the lawsuit were not considered in criminal court Monday.
Bradford said Lahey explained he was indiscriminately downloading what he believed to be gay adult pornography from the Internet and must have downloaded the child pornography there. Edelson argued many of the websites have provisos saying the models depicted are over the age of 18. (Ottawa Citizen)
Lahey is merely interested in this type of improving literature and imagery:
They included 588 pornographic pictures of adolescents and boys as young as eight. Some were engaged in explicit sex acts, including intercourse. Lahey also possessed several pornographic stories, including one featuring a character named Father Raymond. (Ottawa Citizen)
Lahey likes to mix sex and religion. The images
included young boys and teens engaged in sex acts including bondage and torture. A Crown prosecutor said Tuesday some of the 588 images that were later discovered on Lahey’s laptop computer included graphic images of nude boys wearing rosary beads and crucifixes.
Police also located 63 child pornography videos and several stories with themes of slavery. (Ottawa Citizen)
The Crown prosecutor Elhadad noticed the peculiarities of Lahey’s tastes:
Elhadad however pointed to images of torture in the collections seized from Lahey in 2009 at the Ottawa International Airport and noted a number of the images included victims wearing rosaries and in one case a man dressed as a monk paddling a young male. Elhadad said the religious and torture imagery relates directly to stories that were also discovered on Lahey’s laptop computer. (Metro News)
This is all too reminiscent of Huysman and the Catholic Decadents of the nineteenth century. It also makes the highly unreliable Malachi Martin’s stories of black masses in the Vatican altogether too believable. The mixture of perverted sexual torture and religion gives the ultimate frisson.
This Is Supposed To Be Comforting
in clergy sex abuse scandal 9 Comments Tags: Bishop Lahey
CBC reports from Canada
Disgraced former Roman Catholic bishop Raymond Lahey is not a pedophile and does not pose a risk to the community, his lawyers argued at his sentencing hearing Monday.
Lahey, 71, former head of the diocese of Antigonish, N.S., pleaded guilty earlier this year to possession of child pornography for the purposes of importation to Canada.
—————-
Bradford said Lahey is not a pedophile and presents virtually no risk to commit a hands-on sexual offence.
Bradford said Lahey has a homosexual interest in adolescent males — aged 14 to 17 — and young men, as well as sadomasochistic interests.
But, he said, a pedophile is someone who is attracted to children under age 13 for more than six months.
“I evaluated him for pedophilia and I don’t think he has it,” said Bradford about the psychiatric disorder.
We can’t always get saints as bishops, but couldn’t they get someone of slightly higher caliber than this man. Is it just possible that the Vatican’s screening methods need some work?
Sacred Cows and Sexual Abuse
in clergy sex abuse scandal, Holland, homosexuality 8 Comments Tags: Catholic Church, Deetman report, Holland, homosexuality, sexual abuse
The Deetman commission is Holland that investigated sexual abuse has concluded that since 1945 between ten and twenty thousand children were sexually abused by Catholic priests and religious. This is in a country that currently has about five million Catholics.
The commission also suggested that homosexuality was a major factor in the abuse. FAZ reports:
Homosexuelle Subkultur ein entscheidender Faktor
Schilderungen der Kommission über sexuellen Missbrauch von Jungen speziell in Ordenseinrichtungen lassen indes darauf schließen, dass eine homosexuelle Subkultur ein entscheidender Faktor für Übergriffigkeit war und ist.
The descriptions of the commission of the sexual abuse of boys, especially in institutions run by religious orders suggests that a homosexual subculture was and is [my emphasis] a crucial factor for the abuse.
I have surveyed the press in the languages I know, and this seems to be the only article that mentions this conclusion of the report. I do not read Dutch, so I must rely upon this German report, but FAZ is generally accurate.
In the United States boys constituted the vast majority of victims abused by priests; in Germany it was more 50-50 boys and girls.
Homosexuals constitute less than 5% of the general population. One would therefore expect about 5% of the victims to be boys. But the percentage is much higher both in society in general and very much higher in the Church.
Why are boys disproportionately victims?
Some claim that pedophilia (sexual attraction to small children) has nothing to do with homosexuality or heterosexuality. Boys are more often victims because they are more accessible. Parents protect their daughters more than their sons.
But much of the abuse is not really pedophilia but rather pederasty, the type of relationship between an adult male and a pubescent boy by that the Greeks cultivated, and this is definitely a form of homosexuality, and was championed by the gay rights movement before they realized it was poison.
I think that one reason for the disproportion is the desire of young males to stay away from church as soon as they achieve some independence. Young women go to church, and provide adult targets for heterosexual priests; young men do not go to church. The young males in church are therefore boys and adolescents who are forced to go to church or attend church institutions. Young men, even in present in church, are also likely to react violently to unwanted homosexual overtures; boys are safer targets.
Men who entered the clergy in the past (less so in the present) used celibacy as a way to escape their homosexual desires, but celibacy is not a panacea for sexual problems. Their sexuality remained unconfronted and adolescent, and when they started acting out sexually they turned to adolescents.
In the United States experts who talk privately about the problem of immature, arrested-development homosexuals in the clergy will publicly claim that homosexuality has nothing to do with the abuse. It seems that the Deetman Commission was willing to raise the issue, but almost all of the hundreds of articles about that Commission’s report have ignored that conclusion. Some things, like homosexuality, are too sacred to call into question.
Popular Religion and Reason
in Pope Benedict, Popular religion 5 Comments Tags: Guadaloupe, Popular religion, reason
For centuries Catholic reformers have looked with the hairy eyeball at popular religion, which seems to them a mish-mash of sensuality and superstition. The suspicion continues. A responder over at John Allen’s blog claims that Pope Benedict is not consistent in his insistence on the connection of religion and reason:
in Benedict’s case he is not addressing the Catholic Church’s flaws in this area. To illustrate my point; scholars have now come to the conclusion that Juan Diego who saw “Our Lady of Guadalupe” is a fictional person. If he is fiction, what does that say about the entire visitation? How does the church respond? They elevate the visitation to a solemnity. I submit that this is not a “reasonable” thing to do.
By promulgating these events, the church plays with fire. To so completely disregard fact, they leave the faithful to wonder what other teachings are based in reality and what are based on devotional whims. In this case, the end does not justify the means.
Our faith, in its pure simplicity, has a beauty and a truth that gets lost in all this other “STUFF.” We need people who will follow the teachings of Jesus and not just be dazzled by hocus pocus. And lest anyone get the wrong idea, I am not referring to our ritual and our liturgy or our virtue, habit and practice. Our Catholic identity has to be based on truth or we just wind up looking unreasonable.
Attacking the reality of the apparition of Nuestra Señora de Guadeloupe is no way to connect to the Hispanics who will soon be the majority of Catholics in the United States. But it would be dishonest for the Church to proclaim an event that never happened.
I wonder who these skeptical and unnamed “scholars” are. I have always thought that the tilma is hard to explain as a painting, and it suggests strongly that something miraculous occurred.
Feminist Language
in Uncategorized 7 Comments Tags: feminist language, Godspell
Retta Blaney at the National Catholic Reporter doesn’t like the new production of Godspell, but her chief beef is with the language of the King James Version that the script uses:
all the scriptural references featured the “God and men,” “every man who humbles himself” and “nurses a grudge against his brother” viewpoint.
I had this same complaint when I reviewed the 30th anniversary off-Broadway revival in 2000 for NCR. I mentioned this to Schwartz during a telephone interview then and he told me inclusive language “fails as art” and that he has always felt men represented everyone. I told him I had never felt included in the word men. Why would I? I’m not a man. I suggested substitutes like neighbor or brothers and sisters and he said he liked the idea of using neighbor and would speak to the director, Shawn Rozsa. I didn’t revisit that production so I don’t know if the changes were made, but here we are in 2011 for the trumpeted first Broadway revival, and the language is as exclusive as ever.
I have noticed that the New York Times and most journals use man and men to mean all human beings. Man is still current to mean a human being: ”man-eating shark,” “men-working,” “Age of Man” (National Geographic), “Hope in the Age of Man” (New York Times) “A Man-Made World” (The Economist),”The Museum of Man” (San Diego), etc.
If man or men is does cannot in any context include all members of the human race, nor can men and women, because that phrase des not include children. One would have to say male and female (really awkward) or use an abstraction or a collective noun. As Stephen Schwartz said, it fails as art.
The tortured syntax and plain bad-grammar in many alterations of hymns and biblical translations is a result of a feminist “church speak” that is more artificial than using thee and thou (which were ordinary usage at one point).
One example of feminist syntax is the greeting by priests of “sisters and brothers.” English has what Fowler called cast-iron idioms: Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters. When one alters them, it sounds very odd and unidiomatic.
Where Your Heart Is…
in clergy sex abuse scandal 17 Comments Tags: Chaput, finances, sexual abuse
Archbishop Chaput in Philadelphia knows he faces some very bad publicity in the spring when a trial for the archdiocese’s failure to protect children commences.
Chaput in a letter that is to be read this weekend in all churches in Philadelphia is announcing his strategy: to protect the treasures of the Church, not, as was said in apostolic times, the poor, but cash and other liquid assets. Chaput concludes his letter he concludes:
Finally, the resources of the Church do not belong to the bishops or the clergy; they belong to the entire Catholic people, including the faithful generations who came before us. The Church is a community of faith alive in the present but also connected across the years through time. The Church holds her resources in stewardship for the whole Catholic community, to carry out our shared apostolic mission as believers in Jesus Christ. This means that as archbishop, I have the duty not just to defend those limited resources, but also to ensure that the Church uses them with maximum care and prudence; to maximum effect; and with proper reporting and accountability.
But the bishops and the clergy have always behaved as if the resources of the Church belonged to them. The bishops have absolute control and no accountability; the laity have no say in the finances of the church. Their only duty is to cough up.