MISSION STATEMENT ... To celebrate where it's deserved! ... To take the Michael out of institutions and individuals where it's deserved! ...
Recently I had occasion to prepare my gravestone epitaph:
GENE...
Educator, Novelist,
Humanitarian and Humorist
- TO KNOW HIM WAS TO LOVE HIM -
Rest in Peace
....... But while I am still walking the earth do not hesitate to contact me at:
bobbyslingshot8@gmail.com
Exciting news for fans of this blog. An exclusive interview with Gene, conducted by Libby Purvis, will be published on here shortly. (Libby Purvis is not to be confused with Libby Purves, a journalist who works for one of the Murdoch tabloids.) Libby has been granted unprecedented access to Gene and his papers and working methods. An enthralling interview results. Stay posted folks and watch this space.
One of the delights of this blog is the unpredictability of the responses to each item. With the excellent blogger statistic facilities one can track things in great detail. Just look below at the eclectic nature of the most popular pageview items over the past hour:
A publishing industry that is notoriously ill-equipped to root out fraud. A magazine whose famed fact-checking department is geared toward print, not the Web. And a lucrative lecture circuit that rewards snappy, semi-scientific pronouncements, smoothly delivered to a corporate audience.
All contributed to the rise of Jonah Lehrer, the 31-year-old author, speaker and staff writer for The New Yorker, who then executed one of the most bewildering recent journalistic frauds, one that on Monday cost him his prestigious post at the magazine and his status as one of the most promising, visible and well-paid writers in the business.
An article in Tablet magazine revealed that in his best-selling book, “Imagine: How Creativity Works,” Mr. Lehrer had fabricated quotes from Bob Dylan, one of the most closely studied musicians alive. Only last month, Mr. Lehrer had publicly apologized for taking some of his previous work from The Wall Street Journal, Wired and other publications and recycling it in blog posts for The New Yorker, acts of recycling that his editor called “a mistake.”
By Monday, when the Tablet article was published online, both The New Yorker and Mr. Lehrer’s publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, made it clear that they had lost patience with him. David Remnick, the editor of the magazine who had reluctantly kept Mr. Lehrer on staff after his reuse of his own material was detailed last month, spoke with Mr. Lehrer on Sunday night and accepted his resignation. “This is a terrifically sad situation,” Mr. Remnick said in a statement, “but, in the end, what is most important is the integrity of what we publish and what we stand for.”
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt said it would recall print copies of “Imagine,” an expensive and arduous undertaking that suggested the publisher was taking Mr. Lehrer’s sins seriously.
In a statement released through his publisher, Mr. Lehrer apologized.
“The lies are over now,” he said. “I understand the gravity of my position. I want to apologize to everyone I have let down, especially my editors and readers.”
He added, “I will do my best to correct the record and ensure that my misquotations and mistakes are fixed. I have resigned my position as staff writer at The New Yorker.”
Through his literary agent, Andrew Wylie, Mr. Lehrer declined a request for an interview.
Mr. Lehrer, who majored in neuroscience at Columbia, rose to prominence writing about science in the mold of Malcolm Gladwell or David Brooks through his blog on Wired.com, which then moved to The New Yorker, and quickly became a popular paid speaker at conferences.
A spokeswoman for The New Yorker said that in addition to his work online, Mr. Lehrer wrote six articles for the magazine, beginning in July 2008. His last article for the magazine was published in March 2012. He became a staff writer in June 2012.
Mr. Lehrer might have kept his job at The New Yorker if not for the Tablet article, by Michael C. Moynihan, a journalist who is something of an authority on Mr. Dylan.
Reading “Imagine,” Mr. Moynihan was stopped by a quote cited by Mr. Lehrer in the first chapter. “It’s a hard thing to describe,” Mr. Dylan said. “It’s just this sense that you got something to say.”
After searching for a source, Mr. Moynihan could not verify the authenticity of the quote. Pressed for an explanation, Mr. Lehrer “stonewalled, misled and, eventually, outright lied to me” over several weeks, Mr. Moynihan wrote, first claiming to have been given access by Mr. Dylan’s manager to an unreleased interview with the musician. Eventually, Mr. Lehrer confessed that he had made it up.
Mr. Moynihan also wrote that Mr. Lehrer had spliced together Dylan quotes from separate published interviews and, when the quotes were accurate, he took them well out of context. Mr. Dylan’s manager, Jeff Rosen, declined to comment.
Mr. Lehrer’s publisher quickly moved on Monday to make “Imagine” disappear from the bookstore shelves. All of its retail and wholesale accounts, the publisher said, would be asked to stop selling “Imagine” and return unsold copies for a full refund. On Monday morning, “Imagine” was ranked No. 105 on Amazon’s Web site; by afternoon, it had been removed.
Since its release in March, “Imagine” has sold more than 200,000 copies in hardcover and e-book. On The New York Times hardcover nonfiction best-seller list of Aug. 5, “Imagine” held the No. 14 spot. Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia, said in an interview that not only had Mr. Lehrer carved out a career in the popular niche of brain science, but he had created a persona that is perfectly suited to a 21st-century media environment.
“Conjure me up a guy who talks science winningly, who shows you that everything is transparent, and does it in a self-help-y spirit,” he said. “In our age, a guy who looks cute and wonky is better positioned to get away with this than others.”
Olympic seminarian credits Medjugorje for vocation
Spanish hockey player Litus Ballbe’s big dream was to play the Olympics, until a visit to Medjugorje gave him the call to be a priest. Now he is studying, but still his first dream has come true: His seminary has allowed him time for hockey, and on Monday he played at the London Olympics.
Litus Ballbe
Spain presented a future priest in the field for the opening game of the Olympic hockey tournament against Pakistan in London on Monday.
Litus Ballbe’s dream of the Olympics has come true – but only after he gave it up four years ago because he had entered the seminary. Before that, a visit to Medjugorje in 2005 had radically changed his course in life.
Little in Ballbe’s childhood and youth had been hinting a future as a priest.
In the field: Litus Ballbe sacrificed his dream of playing professional hockey outside of Spain, buthis dream of the Olympics has come true
“I already believed in God and the Virgin and all that, but Medjugorje went beyond that. On that trip I realized how important it is that God exists, because until then I had been believing in God, but as if He were me” Litus Ballbe says.
“Not like that in Medjugorje. There you realize that God is more than an ideal, that He is with you, that you are His child, and that He is there for all, but you are not at all. I do not know how to put it, but I started taking it seriously.”
A covenant with God
From Spain’s opening 1-1 draw with Pakistan in the Olympic hockey tournament on Monday
Litus Ballbe came to Medjugorje by what first seemed a coincidence. Bad results in the field opened him to following his father who planned a pilgrimage.
“My father was reading a book about Medjugorje. He invited me, but I was not any attracted to the idea. That summer of 2005 we played the World Cup, and we started the under-21 tournament very badly” Litus Ballbe tells.
“It was so bad that one Sunday I went to Mass and offered a covenant to God. I told Him that if He managed that World Cup, I would go to Medjugorje with my father. And He did. We made history. Never before had we had an under-21 medal, and we were third. So I went back to Medjugorje with my father and my brother.” No happiness in spite of success
Riverbank Arena in London, the Olympic hockey stadium
Unlike many others, Litus Ballbe did not experience an immidiate conversation during his first stay in Medjugorje. First, he went back to his previous pastimes, partying and women.
“But from that trip on, I felt something inside me telling me: “Litus, you are free and can do whatever you want, but you are not happy” he tells.
Litus Ballbe returned to Medjugorje in the summer of 2006. After that pilgrimage, he began living the message of Medjugorje, frequenting the Sacraments and praying the Rosary daily. His best hockey season followed, and the best team in Europe made him an offer.
Litus Ballbe in the field for Spain
Before he went to Medjugorje, the Spanish hockey player also dreamt of playing abroad. Now he revised his plan, and got the offer postponed by a year, until after the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.
“At that time I had it all. I felt fully fulfilled. It was at that moment, when I was on the crest of the wave, that I started getting a subtle message about the plan that God had for me, becoming a priest ” Litus Ballbe tells.
Surrender on third Medjugorje visit
A few days after the German club’s offer, Litus Ballbe went to Medjugorje for the third time. This time, the pilgrimage was more difficult.
“I presented myself to the Lord and said, “I do not know what happens, very rare things are happening . I want to play fairly with You, so here I am, do what You want” Litus Ballbe tells.
“That trip was the radical change in my life. I began to pray quietly, to get into God. I just gave Him one condition: “Let me fulfill my dream” he says.
From Spain’s opening game against Pakistan in the Olympic hockey tournament on July 30
When he returned home, Litus Ballbe entered the seminary. His dream of playing the Olympics seemed gone until his seminary reached an agreement with his Spanish hockey side, Club Atletico Terrassa, enabling Ballbe to keep on playing hockey while studying.
And so, he played along when Spain opened the Olympic hockey tournament against Pakistan on July 30. Living in the Olympic village is a great joy to Litus Ballbe.
“I am living an incredible and beautiful experience, trying to bring “more value to the Games, not only winning, but also growing in my life of faith, and sharing it with people from many parts of the world. “
Polish Model Ania Goledzinowska Amazing Medjugorje Conversion
Many Italians- though not many outside of Italy- already know the story of the Polish girl, Ania Goledzinowska who had a difficult childhood and who arrived in Italy as 16 years old teenager, and soon became known to audiences for her television appearances as a showgirl on RAI and Mediaset. Ania dreamed of the "star system", a comfortable life, famous friends, and fun. She was highly successful. She lived in Milan where she led a lifestyle that is tempting for many girls. Then she met a journalist Paolo Brosio who is working hard to spread the message and the reality' of Medjugorje through the medium of television. This meeting was to change her life. Ania had everything, but in reality she was never happy. Up to then she had absolutely no time for the Church or priests.
When she met Paolo, he convinced her to attend church each morning for a month with him. It was Paolo who taught her to pray in Italian. Thanks to him she made her first pilgrimage to Medjugorje, and realized that she had never been truly happy in her entire life. Ania fell in love with that little town in Bosnia-Herzegovina, so that on her return to Italy she began to feel depressed. "I had a privileged life that I no longer liked, I wanted things simple, normal, then one morning I called Paolo and I asked him to help me to return permanently to Medjugorje. I left Italy with two suitcases without telling anyone."
Now I live in a community with Marian priests and nuns. I wake up at five, I recite the rosary climbing Mount Podbrdo and then return to the holy Mass. I clean rooms and bathrooms, ironing and cooking. What I do for the sisters, until a few months ago was done for me by my maid! We also have a vegetable garden and chickens. In the afternoon there is rest and at six we have the prayers. "Certainly, here in Medjugorje I do not need the shoes of Chanel." Then, Ania adds: "My boyfriend (Paolo Beretta, grandson of Silvio Berlusconi, ed.)was initially shocked by the decision. For two weeks he did not know where I was and we met only a month after I moved to Medjugorje". He accepted her decision. She sees himself as "the first among sinners," and now works for the association CUORI PURI (Pure Hearts), which guides those who choose to live in chastity until marriage.
On June 25, 2011, the 30th anniversary of the apparitions in Medjugorje, the PURE HEART initiative arose. It was inspired by Father Renzo Gobbi, who then held the position of "Chaplain to the Italians" and had heard of a similar American movement. The first person to adhere to the guiding principles was Ania Goledzinowska , who has also assumed the responsibility to personally take care of the organization.
For most Bob Dylan historians, his infamous motorcycle wreck on July 29, 1966 marked a real turning point in his career and it changed the way he lived his life for much of the ensuing decade.
Dylan cut his hair, took up painting as a serious avocation, started referring to the Bible in earnest in his songs and morphed into the most dedicated family man around.
His music went through a stunning transformation as well after the crash, moving from a heavy rock and roll tone to a swinging-country sound. Before the accident, he had been making incendiary rock and roll music on stage with The Hawks. Although it was remarkable stuff, Dylan got booed for his trouble all over the world.
Today, it seems nothing but insane that “fans” so strongly showed their disapproval of their hero as he was presenting the greatest live music that anybody had ever heard — and all because he had the audacity to turn his back on the folk-music scene and follow his muse to rock and roll. Insane!
Dylan concluded a punishing world tour at the end of May 1966 and retreated to Woodstock, with his wife Sara and their two children (one of whom, a five-year-old daughter, had originated from Sara’s first marriage). He needed to recharge his batteries but instead faced a very busy summer ahead. He had tasks ranging from rehearsing with his band for another extended U.S. tour that fall — while girding for the inevitable loud booing at home — writing new songs, polishing off a book for MacMillan and editing an hourlong TV show for ABC about the just-finished series of concerts in England.
But Dylan was fried. He just wanted to live a normal, non-celebrity life in upstate New York as a 25-year-old family guy. Lots of luck.
On that fateful day of July 29, he had a motorcycle spill in Woodstock. The severity of his injuries has been widely debated ever since. But he was hurt badly enough to be able to shelve all of his upcoming obligations.
For nearly a year, he didn’t record any songs. He wouldn’t step on a stage until January 1968. As a writer pointed out about Dylan in that period, he was more proficient at cranking out babies than new albums. He remained as popular with his fans as ever. They continued to buy his old records and waited anxiously for any news of his recovery. Dylan, perhaps unwittingly, found that the more reclusive he acted, the more curious the public became. As he observed to Cameron Crowe in a 1985 interview for the “Biograph” liner notes, “there is power in darkness.”
When Dylan emerged from the shadows, he had a different sound in mind, something rootsy, which the music critics said smacked of Americana (whatever that may be). He and his friends in The Hawks were content to work in the country, at their pace, not the record company’s. They made music to please themselves. This creative approach was revolutionary (and soon-to-be oft-copied: see Traffic).
But…
What if Dylan hadn’t crashed?
We would have had his book Tarantula, his TV show Eat the Document and, probably, a batch of new recordings to puzzle over, not to mention the Dylan sound unleashed on the American heartland in a scheduled 65-concert swing that fall, kicking off with a big how at the Yale Bowl.
We just might have gotten, too, a fantastic rock and roll record as a follow-up to “Blonde on Blonde.” The musicians had gotten both tight and expressive on stage during their world your. It’s likely that they shared a sense of simpatico that would make it a relatively un-stressful task for them to make a new album in the studio.
Or, maybe Columbia, would have released the first Dylan live album in time for the Christmas rush.
Dylan might have stayed in the rock and roll phase of his career a while longer. Who knows. If he hadn’t suffered the accident, he might never have thought to create an album that sounded anything like like “John Wesley Harding.”
Or he might have continued too live on the edge of sanity and become a casualty of the celebrity fast lane — “another accident statistic,” as he would sing on “Slow Train Coming” in 1979.
He admitted in a subsequent interview, “I deserved to crash.” But he didn’t crumble and fade away. He had the strength and support system, in his wife Sara, to see the wisdom of slowing down (listen to “Shelter from the Storm”).
We’ll never really know whether Dylan manipulated people by claiming to have a serious motorcycle crash in 1966. It seems cynical and calculating to make this suggestion at all. But we still have to wonder.
It’s fascinating to ponder what kind of new music Dylan might have recorded in the autumn of 1966 or the winter of 1967. Just as “Blonde on Blonde” had been a departure from the bluesy sound of “Highway 61 Revisited,” we can suppose that Dylan would have again carved out a new musical territory for himself. Who would he have chosen to record with? The Hawks? And where? New York City or Nashville once again? Would he have been capable of continuing the electric winning streak that had begun in early 1965 — a lifetime ago, by mid-1966 — with “Bringing It All Back Home?”
Would there have been the by-then requisite long, album closer, too?
Mostly, I wonder where his head was at, musically, at that time. He would have heard and consumed “Revolver” and “Pet Sounds” and the other groundbreaking albums coming on to the scene. How might those records have influenced Dylan, if at all?
Bob Dylan probably would have declined to spend hours and hours in the recording studio, as his peers had been doing to brilliant results. He’d prefer to be out playing somewhere.
What if … his motorcycle hadn’t crashed? I still wonder about that.
20,000 Expected to Attend Traditional Irish Pilgrimage
Pilgrimage Follows the Footsteps of St. Patrick
COUNTY MAYO, Ireland, JULY 26, 2012 (Zenit.org).- Thousands of pilgrims are expected to attend the annual Reek Sunday pilgrimage on Ireland’s Croagh Patrick in the Archdiocese of Tuam this weekend. The yearly event has been carried out uninterrupted for over 1,500 years. Croagh Patrick has over 100,000 visitors annually with up to 20,000 people expected Sunday.
Pilgrims young and old travel from across the country to follow in the footsteps of their ancestors, stopping at various stations on the climb to pray before celebrating Mass on the summit. The Croagh Patrick pilgrimage is associated with St. Patrick who, in the year 441, spent 40 days and nights fasting on the summit, following the example of Christ and Moses.
The name ‘Reek Sunday’ comes from Patrick’s ability to christianize many pagan customs including the festival of Lughnasa, which previously had heralded the start of the harvest festival honouring the ancient pagan god Lugh. This festival’s tradition became absorbed into the new Christian beliefs and locally become known as 'Domhnach na Cruaiche' (Reek Sunday).
The pilgrimage will be led by Archbishop Michael Neary, Archbishop of Tuam, who will be joined this year by the Apostolic Nuncio to Ireland, Archbishop Charles Brown.
"It is a very penitential exercise, there's no doubt about that," said Archbishop Neary in a video invitation to the pilgrimage.
"But it is an opportunity to enter into contact with God. You’re deprived of some of the luxuries of life, the opportunity to sit back and enjoy, to become passive. Whereas on pilgrimage you’re active, you’re participating, you’re sharing with others and you’re also sharing with God, because you’re conscious of the fact that you are on the pilgrim path of life. You’re endeavoring to acknowledge the faults and the failures and to bring all of those to a merciful and forgiving God," he said.
New San Francisco archbishop, who led fight against gay marriage, appointed by pope
Bishop Salvatore Cordileone at Cathedral of Christ church the Light in Oakland in 2009.
The Vatican on Friday named a prominent religious official who has been a leader in the fight against same-sex marriage as San Francisco's new archbishop, the latest in a string of conservatives to lead Catholics in one of the country's most liberal areas.
Salvatore Cordileone, 56, organized religious leaders and helped raise significant sums of money to get Proposition 8, the 2008 initiative that banned same-sex marriage in California, on the ballot and spoke forcefully in support of it. He is also chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Subcommittee for the Promotion and Defense of Marriage.
In his first statements after the Vatican's announcement, Cordileone, the current bishop of Oakland, touched on a range of topics, from cultural diversity to immigration reform. But reporters barraged him with questions about same-sex marriage. His response was resolute.
"Marriage is the union of a man and a woman, because children can only come about with the embrace of a man and a woman together," he said. "I don't see how that's discriminatory against anyone."
Cordileone follows two other conservative archbishops: George Niederauer, 76, who is retiring, and, before him, William Levada, who in 2005 was elevated from archbishop of San Francisco to become the Vatican's top enforcer of doctrine.
Adoration and outrage
The new archbishop's stance on marriage has earned him adoration as well as outrage within the church.
"If people like him don't defend it, it's going to be lost very soon," said Ed Silva, 59, a father of three and a member of Holy Spirit Church in Fremont, which is under the Diocese of Oakland. "In my daughter's lifetime, you may be able to marry your dog. That's how lost this society is getting."
But for others, the elevation was disappointing.
San Francisco is "one of the hearts of the gay liberation story," said Michael Harank, 59, a lifelong Catholic who founded an independent Catholic agency in Oakland for homeless people with HIV. "He may be pastoral, but his work as one of the financial fathers and creators of Prop. 8 is clearly a slap in the face to the gay community."
Cordileone said he wouldn't shy away from the struggle of being a conservative voice in a liberal area, but it left him perturbed that marriage would be so much of a focus of his appointment.
"To be honest, I'm kind of frustrated," he said. "I wish I didn't have to expend so much time and energy on something that should be self-evident.
"But this is the high-profile issue," he said. "It's a foundational issue. For whatever God's reason, it's the issue he's given us at this point in history, so I'm not going to run from it."
3 conservatives
Niederauer also played a pivotal role in the Prop. 8 campaign, not just with his public statements, but also by actively courting the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints to participate in the campaign. Mormons contributed more than $20 million, and Mormon officials said they wouldn't have done so without the encouragement of Niederauer, the former bishop of Salt Lake City.
In Levada's role as the Vatican's prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he has tried to rein in U.S. nuns for challenging church teachings on homosexuality and the male-only priesthood, among other things.
Though it would be impossible to find a Catholic bishop in favor of same-sex marriage, Reese said conservatism today includes a particular focus on marriage.
"Clearly, the pope and the Vatican are very concerned about the issue of same-sex marriage and are very opposed to it, and that's reflected by the kinds of bishops that are being appointed in the United States," he said.
Cordileone will preside over an archdiocese that encompasses more than a half-million Catholics in San Francisco and Marin County and on the Peninsula. He will also oversee the dioceses of Oakland, San Jose, Santa Rosa, Stockton, Sacramento, Honolulu, Las Vegas, Reno and Salt Lake City.
Hours after he was named, Cordileone delivered a speech in San Francisco in both English and Spanish. The diocese is about 40 percent Latino, and he will be San Francisco's first fluent Spanish-speaking archbishop since Joseph Sadoc Alemany, a Spaniard by birth who was named San Francisco's first archbishop in 1853.
Cordileone, whose father was baptized at SS Peter and Paul's Church in North Beach, said he spent summers in San Francisco as a child. He was born and raised in San Diego, where he later served as bishop and led the effort against Prop. 8. He was ordained as a priest by Leo Maher, a former San Francisco Archdiocese official who also later was bishop of San Diego.
Cordileone will be installed Oct. 4, the feast day for St. Francis of Assisi, for whom San Francisco is named.
On Monday we celebrated the feast of St Bridget of Sweden, who is a patron saint of Europe. In fact she is one of six patrons of Europe. Here is the list.
Saint Bridget of Sweden St Benedict Saints Cyril and Methodius Saint Catherine of Siena Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, otherwise known as Edith Stein.
Saint Benedict, the founder of Western monasticism, was proclaimed patron of Europe by Pope Paul VI back in 1964. You can read the Papal brief here. It is interesting to see the reasons why Paul VI chose Benedict as patron of Europe, and the emphasis placed on cross, book and plough. That was in 1964 when the controversy over the preamble to the European constitution was still in the future.
All of the others were proclaimed patrons of Europe by the Blessed John Paul II. Cyril and Methodius became co-patrons of Europe in 1980, and the three female saints were proclaimed patrons of Europe by a motu proprio of John Paul II in 1999.
It is interesting to note that all six of these saints were religious, though one, Bridget, was married before she became a nun. The one that has attracted the most controversy is St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, Edith Stein, the Carmelite who died at Auschwitz. She is unique on the list in that she is the only one who died a violent death, and who is counted as a martyr. She was a particular type of martyr, though. Clearly not killed in odium of the faith like the martyrs, for example, of the Spanish Civil War, she was rather a martyr of love, one who offered her life out of love for her friends. As she herself wrote in 1939:
I beg the Lord to take my life and my death … for all concerns of the sacred hearts of Jesus and Mary and the holy church, especially for the preservation of our holy order, in particular the Carmelite monasteries of Cologne and Echt, as atonement for the unbelief of the Jewish People and that the Lord will be received by his own people and his kingdom shall come in glory, for the salvation of Germany and the peace of the world, at last for my loved ones, living or dead, and for all God gave to me: that none of them shall go astray.
The reference to the unbelief of the Jews requires careful contextual interpretation. The concept of atonement,which underlies these words, however, is very clearly one drawn from the Old Testament. It is also a very strong theme in the New Testament where our Blessed Lord says: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13)
St Teresa Benedicta is the only twentieth century figure among the patrons of Europe. She is akin to St Maximilian Kolbe, who was starved to death in Auschwitz, and is also rightly venerated as a martyr of love, who laid down his life for his friends. But there is another martyr of the period of the Second World War, who is little known in the English-speaking world, who also offered himself as a victim to the Nazis so that the lives of others might be spared, namely the Servant of God Salvo d’Acquisto. I will post about him at a later date.
I think St Teresa Benedicta is an excellent choice to be patron of Europe. Auschwitz marks the low point in European history, the violation of every civilised and European value. There her dust lies, like so many, in an unmarked spot; and it is in the light of Auschwitz that we see the rebuilding of European civilisation as an urgent task. Such a civilisation can only be founded on love, the virtue that Saint Teresa Benedicta practised to such a rare degree. And some serious scholarship (she was a great intellectual) would not come amiss either.
Education secretary praises role of Catholic Church in education
The Education Secretary Michael Gove has said he has no plans to relax the rule which means that no more than half of places in free schools may be reserved for Catholics.
In an exclusive interview with The Catholic Herald Mr Gove said that he was not prepared to lift the cap, regardless of demands from Catholic parents hoping to take advantage of the new scheme.
He said: “Remember, there’s no reason why a new school with only 50 per cent Catholic students shouldn’t have a wholly Catholic ethos. Of course, by definition, free schools are free to choose their own curriculum.
“Traditionally, Catholic schools have been concentrated in certain parts of the country. But Catholic parents who want a Catholic education for their children now have a way of providing it. Free schools are a way of increasing capacity, not limiting it.”
The Catholic Education Service for England and Wales (CES) said that retaining a maximum quota on Catholic intake undermined parental choice. Responding to Mr Gove’s comments a spokeswoman for the CES said: “Our chairman, Bishop Malcolm McMahon OP, said before the 2010 General Election that he was interested in the idea of free schools established by local communities but after the election the Coalition Agreement introduced the 50 per cent quota on places for Catholic pupils and this has proved problematic for our sector.
“The 50 per cent quota policy undermines the Government’s own aim of increasing parental choice, since, in the case of an oversubscribed Catholic free school, Catholic pupils whose parents wanted to send them to a Catholic school would have to be turned away because they were Catholic.”
Dennis Sewell, a lay Catholic who is in the early stages of establishing a Catholic free school in Clapham, south London said: “I think Michael Gove is right. If governors and school leaders face up to the challenge, they can ensure that the inclusion of non-Catholic pupils does not dilute the Catholic character of a school.
“What really matters is that the Catholic faith is a reality at the heart of the school, permeating the curriculum, teaching and learning, the behaviour code and all the various social interactions of school life.”
Some Catholic parents who were hoping to take advantage of the free school scheme were put off by the quota rule. Opus Dei is sponsoring two new Catholic schools in London but is not using the free schools initiative.
In the interview, Mr Gove also praised Pope Benedict, calling him “a wholly authentic figure”. He also described the Catholic Church’s role in education as “global and enduring”.
The late Mary Tamm, who was Romana to Tom Baker’s Doctor Who, is the third of the actresses who played the Time Lord’s assistant to have died recently. It’s a sad reminder of just how long the programme has been running. I wonder how many young fans realise that the original Doctor was a grumpy old man who shared the Tardis with his granddaughter? William Hartnell would be 104 were he alive today – that is, 74 years older than his current incarnation, Matt Smith. And my beloved Jon Pertwee, greatest of all Doctors, would be in his nineties. I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but it makes me feel very old.
Fat chance
My colleague James Kirkup has a theory that Philip Tartaglia, Archbishop-elect of Glasgow, must be a fifth columnist. Why else would he speculate that the Labour MP David Cairns died of being gay? Mr Cairns, who had pancreatitis, was only 44 – terribly young, said Tartaglia, and have you noticed how homosexuals’ bodies shut down prematurely? There’s no answer to such nonsense. But there is an answer to the question of why certain middle-aged men keel over from a coronary. Like Tartaglia, they are very overweight. No offence, Archbishop-elect, but may I suggest that Rich Tea biscuits are a more appropriate accompaniment to your morning coffee than deep-fried Mars Bars?
Twisted logic from America
I’m warming to Mitt Romney. Not to the extent that I think Jesus visited America, but enough. The reason? I’m sick of Obama’s Amen corner in Britain’s Left-liberal press. The commentators I hate also hate Romney.
On the other hand, I’m falling out of love with a certain type of American conservative. I have a Twitter stream of US Right-wingers. Every so often I click on a link and find stuff like this: “The Theatre Shooter Is Caught, but the Real Joker Keeps Laughing,” by Oleg Atbashian of the website American Thinker. His point: the Batman killer “had been exposed to the 'social justice’ rhetoric in school”. Don’t ask why this fact was significant; the author was employing Tartaglia-style logic (see above).
You have to be pretty obsessive to enjoy America’s culture wars as a spectator sport. Both sides talk such dogmatic garbage. After I return from a trip to the US, I find myself strangely cheered by the familiar sound of our politicians’ evasive waffle.
Listen to this, if you’re feeling brave
I have just uncovered what is unquestionably the worst piece of classical music ever written. Like many great discoveries, it happened by accident. I was browsing iTunes and saw an oratorio called “The Peacemakers”, based on texts by Gandhi, Martin Luther King, the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela and – this I had to read twice – Terry Waite. It’s by Karl Jenkins, whose harmonic language draws deeply on the American school of elevator music, and who modestly employs a 1,000-strong chorus for this work.
That sounds gruesome, I thought, but bravely tapped my mouse. And out came… well, I’m sure you’re familiar with the phrase: “Oh. My. God.” Check it out. I dare you.
Religion at the Olympics, from ancient Greece to London
(RNS) A 600-foot footrace was the only athletic event at the first Olympics, a festival held in 776 B.C. and dedicated to Zeus, the chief Greek god.
Head from a colossal marble cult statue of Zeus, which was found at Aigeira, Achaia.
Pausanias tells us (in the 2nd century BC) that the statue was carved by the Athenian sculptor Eukleides, who was active in the second half of the 2nd century BC. The eyes were originally made of a different material and inlaid into the marble. Credit: RNS photo by Ian W. Scott via Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/ian-w-scott/4141716415/)
For the next millennium, Greeks gathered every four years in Olympia to honor Zeus through sports, sacrifices and hymns. The five-day festival brought the Greek world together in devotion to one deity.
What began in ancient Greece as a festival to honor a single god, Zeus, has now become an almost Olympian task, as organizers of the games navigate dozens of sacred fasts, religious rituals and holy days.
The London Olympics will try to accommodate religious athletes with 193 chaplains, a prayer room in every venue and a multifaith center in the Olympic Village.
Athletes at the ancient Olympics believed their training honored the gods, and victory was a sign of favor from a deity. As contests like wrestling, boxing, and horse racing were added to the Olympic roster, they supplemented devotional sacrifices, hymns, and ceremonies.
“The idea was that you were training to please Zeus. But part of the festival would be to visit the temple, visit the cult statues, making offerings, celebrating and seeing your family,” said David Gilman Romano, a professor of Greek archaeology at the University of Arizona.
The combination of Greek sport and worship led the Roman Emperor Theodosius I, a Christian, to ban the Olympics in 393 A.D.
Zeus' Olympic Stadium in Athens, Greece. Credit: RNS photo by Mark Wooten / courtesy Flickr
The Frenchman Pierre de Coubertin revived the Olympic Games in Athens in 1896 after excavations at Olympia renewed public interest in the athletics and pageantry of the Olympics.
Though not sectarian, the modern games began to take on their own quasi-religious rituals.
Coubertin borrowed ceremonies, hymns, and rituals from the ancient festival to shape a transcendent “Olympism,” uniting all athletes. Some scholars today refer to his creation as a “civil religion.”
“The civil religion was not so much the worship or devotion to the state, as it is often now understood,” explained Joseph Price, a professor of religion at Whittier College in California who researches sport and religion. Devotion “was to the civitas, the human group that transcended a particular religion.”
Over the years, the International Olympic Committee and host states introduced “new” symbols to bolster Olympism, said Stephen Mosher, professor of sport management and media at Ithaca College in New York.
Still, the modern games have touches from the ancient past.
Gold medals since 1928 have been imprinted with the image of Nike, goddess of victory. And though the torch relay existed in antiquity, it was not part of the ancient Olympics. “It was ‘invented’ by the Nazis for the 1936 Berlin Games in an obvious attempt to connect the modern German state with the ancient Greek state,” Mosher said.
Today, the IOC and host countries must tread lightly to accommodate modern religious expression in an often-hostile political climate.
Some situations present special challenges.
In 2008, Israeli President Shimon Peres received special housing accommodations at the Beijing opening ceremony so that he would not have to drive in a car on the Jewish Sabbath.
Peres will miss the opening this year, as the London Organizing Committee refused to make special accommodations.
Modern religious athletes also struggle with religious devotion and the Olympic schedule. Devout Jews and Christians must choose whether to compete on the Sabbath. Muslim athletes face a particularly difficult choice as the Olympics fall during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, when Muslims refrain from eating and drinking during the day.
Clerics in Egypt and the United Arab Emirates extended an exemption to their athletes, allowing them to make up their fast at a later time. Some athletes will take the exemption, while others will fast.
This Olympics marks a milestone for Muslim women as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Brunei will send female athletes to the games for the first time. They are the last Muslim countries to allow women to compete.
In this respect, the Olympics have advanced greatly since ancient times, when only male Greek citizens could watch and compete.
But Romano urges caution in comparing the ancient and modern games.
“There are many similarities, but there are also differences. And one of the biggest differences is religion.”
Rock fans hoping at long last for a reunion by brothers Ray Davies and Dave Davies of The Kinks, the greatest English rock band to emerge in the 1960s not named The Beatles, Who or Rolling Stones, are out of luck. The famously combative and frequently estranged brothers seem no closer to mending their differences, although Dave has rebounded from his debilitating 2004 stroke
“He’s doing very well, living in the West Country (of England) and devising all these plots against me. Sibling rivalry never goes away,” said Ray Davies, who performs in San Diego Sunday, July 22, at downtown’s House of Blues, where he’ll be accompanied by Bill Shanley and The 88.
But if no reunion is in store for The Kinks, which last performed as a band in 1996, Ray is far more optimistic about a potential rebirth for“80 Days,” the ambitious musical he wrote 24 years ago for the La Jolla Playhouse. It had its world premiere here in 1988 and paved the way for Playhouse Artistic Director Des McAnuff’s subsequent collaboration at the theater with Pete Townshend on the hugely successful musical adaptation “The Who’s ‘Tommy’.”
“It might be revived,” Davies said Friday, speaking by phone Friday as he rode between concert stops in San Francisco and Los Angeles. "Des is busy working with Andrew Lloyd Webber right now. But I spoke with Des a few years ago and he felt it was one of the best scores he’s ever worked on, so I’m going to resurrect it.”
Davies, now 68, is now at work on two new musicals and his first opera. In 1990, he was inducted by Townshend into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with The Kinks. The Who leader saluted him as “almost indisputably rock’s most literate, witty and insightful songwriter. He invented a new kind of poetry, a new kind of language for pop writing that influenced me from the very, very beginning.”
Davies and The Kinks’ influence extends to Van Halen and The Smiths to The Kooks and countless other bands on both sides of the Atlantic. The list also includes Metallica, the Bay Area heavy-metal champions that perform with Davies on a song his latest album, “See My Friends,” which finds him revisiting some of his best songs with help from such longtime musical admirers as Bruce Springsteen, Mumford & Sons, Lucinda Williams, Jon Bon Jovi, Paloma Faith and the late Alex Chilton.
Davies last performed in San Diego six years ago at the Spreckels Theatre. His concert mixed recent and vintage solo songs with such Kinks’ gems as “Till the End of the Day,” “Celluloid Heroes” and “All the Day and All The Night.” The once and forever head Kink promised that his Sunday House of Blues show here will be even more eclectic.
QUESTION: The great Duke Ellington, who was a remarkably prolific composer, was once asked what inspired him to write. He smiled, and said: “Give me a deadline.” How important are deadlines for you, whether self-imposed or imposed by someone else?
DAVIES: Deadlines are always interesting to have. I think most writers are lazy – your company accepted, of course! The other day I was going through a song I started to write 10 years ago. Some of them are worth finishing. Deadlines are important to have, not being the be-all and end-all.
Q: Did you do anything with that 10-year-old song?
DAVIES: Yeah, that’s the challenge. Finding the time to write is a problem. Last year I had two weeks off to write. I’m doing a book and an album this year.
Q: What kind of book?
DAVIES: Kind of a memoir. It has a couple of weird characters I put in weird situations. I put them in a tree, to see how they get down.
Q: Are these characters autobiographical in nature?
DAVIES: One is. I write a lot of (song) characters that way – ‘A Well Respected Man,’ ‘Sunny Afternoon,’ ‘Waterloo Sunset’ – fictiyious characters that I put real characters into and then it morphs into reality.
Q: How far along are you on the book? When will it be done?
DAVIES: I was commissioned to write it in 2008, but I’ve had two albums out and the collaborations album with Bruce, Mumford, Metallica, Lucinda and the others took a while. I’ve rented a place to stay at and work in at the end of the year.
Q: Have you been surprised by anything in your life you may have forgotten about that you’ve rediscovered as you work on the book?
Q: How similar or different is your impetus for writing songs now than it was 10 years ago or 40 years ago? Is the process easier, harder or very much the same, and why do you think that is?
DAVIES: It’s not more difficult, it’s just that I ask myself a question: ‘What’s different about this to make me want to write it?’ That’s the eternal question for a storyteller. In some ways, it’s easier now because there’s more technology available. When I started, people would say: ‘We need a new single to come out in a month,’ and I’d write something like ‘Sunny Afternoon.’ There was a streak in me, like a Madison Avenue mentality. I’m a very natural writer and a more poetic writer. I build up a reservoir of ideas for song so I can go: ‘What about this idea?’ The secret is not to become a hack.
Q: Did you ever feel like you were?
DAVIES: No, never. Writing, to me, is still a joy. I forget all my problems and get immersed in what I’m doing. Music is my hobby, as well as my job. If it hadn’t been a hobby, I wouldn’t still be doing it. After this (U.S.) tour is over, I go to Japan to play a festival there, then to the U.K. where I teach a writing course. I find it really stimulating to interact with young writers.
Q: The great American writer Grace Paley was once asked if she taught here students to write about what they know. She had a great response: ‘No, I teach them to write what they don’t know about what they know.’ How about you?
DAVIES: I remember once I freaked out, early on in my career, and they sent (legendary songwriter) Mort Schuman to talk to me. He said: ‘I’m not interested in what you wrote about and what you know. I’m interested in what you’re going to write about.’
Q: Did you and Mort ever collaborate?
DAVIES: No. We thought about that, but Morty died a short while after. He was a great writer; he wrote ‘Save the Last Dance For Me’ (with Doc Pomus). I would have liked to have collaborated with people more. Maybe with this next record, I’d like to collaborate with a few writers. It’s always good to see what other people have in mind.
Q: Any people in particular you’d like to collaborate with?
DAVIES: Sometimes you go to famous people. People think I’d connect with Pete Townshend.
Q: When you were a young man, was success or failure a greater source of artistic inspiration? How about now?
DAVIES: Well the classic story of The Kinks is they succeeded above all adversity. Because we couldn’t tour America for 3 years and then we came back in the late 1970s and put record after record out. And I wrote about miscasts, about society’s miscasts, like (on the albums) ‘Misfits’ and ‘Sleepwalkers.’ We regenerated our work by being outsiders. So one of my premises is that the muse comes from within and success isn’t always the best motivation. If you’re writing for success, you’ll inevitably be disappointed.
Q: In a 1992 interview, Andy Partridge of XTC told me...
DAVIES: Good band!
Q: Yes, they are. He told me: ‘I realize I’m not going to be a pop star, because I’m not cut out for it. But there are things I want to be -- for example, one of the world’s best songwriters. I have to climb over Burt Bacharach, be better than Ray Davies, put my foot in the wall to get over Lennon and McCartney. I have to feel I’ve written songs as good as some of the songs they did.’ When you were young, which artists made you feel the way Andy Partridge felt about you – that is, whose qualitative example did you aspire to match?
DAVIES: Um, I have to say everyone. I love great tunes and great songs and great writing. I hold nobody over anybody else. Because, you know, the secret is when you’ve written a song, you like to think it’s the best ever written.
Q: But were there any songwriters, like, say Hoagy Carmichael, that you held up as an example to emulate, in terms of the standard of their work?
DAVIES: Hoagy Carmichael was a target because my dad liked him. My dad liked jazz and dance music, and he liked vaudeville. Hoagy was in my spectrum, and also Big Bill Broonzy, who my dad also had albums by.
Q: Sounds like your dad had very good musical taste.
DAVIES: I like to think of him as a cool old guy.
Q: Art Blakey, the great jazz drummer and band leader, once said: ‘Music washes away the dust of everyday life.’ Do you agree?
DAVIES: Yeah, I do. I write about the ordinary, but that’s what I know. And I know that extraordinary things happen to ordinary people
A report in a Mostar newspaper claims that Lionel Messi, the best soccer player in the world, has recently made a pilgrimage to Medjugorje.
News of the Argentine and Barcelona striker’s private visit is revealed in Dnevni list. The newspaper quotes the visionary Ivan Dragicevic as confirming that Messi had visited Medjugorje and was his guest. He gave no other details.
Last season Messi set a new scoring record in the Champions Leage competition by scoring five goals in his team’s 7-1 win against German club Bayer Leverkusen.
The 24-year-old is not afraid to give public witness to his faith. He always points to Heaven and makes the sign of the cross after scoring a goal. Messi also acknowledges publicly that everything he has achieved in football is a gift from God.
Alexander Lucie-Smith is a Catholic priest and a doctor of moral theology.
As I suggested some weeks ago in the print edition of The Catholic Herald, one really does feel the need to reach for some weighty reading when summer comes, particularly if it is a long cold and wet summer, as ours has been so far.
Thus, on a recent trip to Foyle’s in London, I was delighted to spot the three volume paperback edition of Simon Raven’s Alms for Oblivion, published by Vintage. This roman-fleuve consists of ten novels, and I have just got to the end of the first four, completing the first volume.
Raven is not particularly well known these days. Wikipedia provides a useful summary of his career and output which you can read here. Despite the fact that I have been reading novels for a long time now, I was until recently only vaguely aware of his name, largely through people telling me that Raven was rather a better read than the great Anthony Powell.
In fact he is not. But he is still a very entertaining read. The first three novels are set in the nineteen-fifties, and the fourth provides the back story, which takes place in the summer after the War ends. It is essentially a farrago about love, jealousy and mutual back-stabbing. There is a lot of social climbing and people who are determined to get on in life at the expense of others; friends who will ruthlessly sacrifice friends for personal gain. All of this is quite enjoyable, but the plotting is rather careless, and none of the characters are particularly convincing. None of them compare to Widmerpool in A Dance to the Music of Time, for example.
The major character, who emerges by the fourth novel, is Fielding Gray, and he has the misfortune to be done over by his two best friends as well as to have two of the most ghastly parents imaginable. Yet it is never quite clear, at least not to me, why Fielding’s parents should be so utterly monstrous. There are motivelessly malignant parents in literature – the most famous one being Mr Ryder in Brideshead Revisited – but Mr Ryder is a comic masterpiece. Fielding’s parents are just shabby and spiteful without any true greatness of character. The same goes for the character of Somerset Lloyd-James.
There are in the course of the many pages of this rather shallow and brittle tale a few sideswipes at Catholicism. Somerset is Catholic who prays devoutly in Latin, but is nevertheless addicted to sordid sex with prostitutes, a man of the deepest and most self-conscious hypocrisy.
Raven’s books are interesting too as social documents. His characters are unchaste, with almost no exceptions. Raven’s own life was a rackety one, and perhaps the writing comes most alive when it is dealing with what society in the nineteen-fifties would have described as the basest of desires.
My judgements will perhaps develop as I tackle the two remaining volumes. I will keep readers posted.
Raffaella Mazzocchi was blind on one eye when her family persuaded her to go to Medjugorje. When she saw a sun miracle, she first turned blind on both eyes for five minutes. But she could see when she opened up her sick eye, and when she opened both, her inexplicable healing was complete.
The major sun miracle during visionary Mirjana Dragicevic-Soldo’s apparition on October 2nd 2011. After watching a similar occurence, Raffaella Mazzocchi’s sight was restored
Blinded on one eye without notice, then healed from one moment to the next. There is nothing gradual to the story of Raffaella Mazzocchi’s eye sight.
At age 16, on December 22nd 2001, the Italian girl completely lost sight on her right eye while she was at school. Doctors found her condition was due to retrobulbar optic neuritis, a virus that irreversibly destroys the optic nerve.
“It is a diagnosis without hope of recovery, and no treatment seemed to work. I was forced to leave school because I could not study. I could not even sleep, I went ahead with psychotropic drugs, and in this state I lived in a nightmare for eight years. I lost faith, and I stopped attending church” Raffaella Mazzocchi tells in her testimony:
“One day, my aunts, my mother and my sister decided to go to Medjugorje, and at all costs they wanted to take me with them. I was reluctant but eventually succumbed to the entreaties of my family, but I had no intention of praying for my recovery.”
Raffaella Mazzocchi and her family arrived in Medjugorje and went to climb Apparition Hill on June 26th 2009. On the way down, something unusual caught the family’s attention.
“My sister noticed that the sun moved in a non-normal way, and seemed to be dancing. So I grabbed the my sister’s sunglasses and with my good eye, the left, I first clearly saw the sun rotating and pulsating, almost approaching my face and moving back again, and then changing color constantly, becoming red, blue, orange, green” Raffaella Mazzocchi recounts.
The Blue Cross by the foot of Apparition Hill in Medjugorje where many apparitions have taken place, and where Raffaella Mazzocchi got her eye sight back
“I finally took off the sunglasses and started to cry desperately because I realized that I had also lost the sight on my left eye and had become completely blind. My screams attracted many pilgrims who gathered around me but I kept screaming more and more desperately because I felt a strong burning in my eyes.”
“This total blindness lasted five minutes, the longest of my life.When she saw I was in panic, my mom got me seated and somehow managed to calm me down” the young Italian woman tells.
“While I kept my head down and my eyes closed, suddenly I felt the urge to open my right eye, the sick one, and I realized that I could see my hands. I opened the other eye and I could see very well with that, too.”
The sun miracle that Raffaella Mazzocchi saw in June 2009
“By moving my hands back and forth before my eyes, I realized that I was healed, but instead of jumping with joy, I was overcome by fear and locked. From seeing my eyes, my mother noticed the change in me and ran up to hug me. So did all the many pilgrims” Raffaella Mazzocchi tells.
“From that day, my sight has been fully recovered, and even now I have a perfect view of 11/10. And, more importantly, I also picked up the faith again because now, finally, we see in all directions.”
While the story of Raffaella Mazzocchi is relatively well-known in Italy, it has not been told in English before.
The young Bob Dylan
Bishop Salvatore Cordileone at Cathedral of Christ church the Light in Oakland in 2009.
Ray Davies 
Alexander Lucie-Smith is a Catholic priest and a doctor of moral theology. 
