Celibacy Cookie Crumbles

For the second time in 2013, a Catholic leader has called for review and revision of the Roman Catholic Church's policy that priests are not allowed to marry.

Fr. Anthony Musaala, a charismatic priest and evangelist in Uganda, wrote to the Archbishop of Kampala and reported his own abuse by priests as a 16-year-old as well as cases of priests who keep secret wives and have abused children of both genders.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-africa-catholic-abuse-20130505,0,4578310.story

For being honest and calling for an end to required celibacy, Musaala was suspended from his ministry as an evangelist traveling through east, central and south Africa.

Scottish Cardinal Keith O'Brien told the BBC last February that he feels priests should be allowed to marry.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/22/alllow-catholic-priests-marry-cardinal

Soon afterward he admitted sexual misconduct and resigned as a cardinal.  Pope Benedict had known about O'Brien's misconduct since December, but he was not asked to resign until he spoke out against mandatory celibacy.

In Austria Fr. Helmut Schueller led some 300 priests last year in a "Call for Disobedience" to press the Catholic church toward ordination of women and allowing priests to marry.

http://www.associationofcatholicpriests.ie/2012/12/vatican-punishes-austrian-call-to-disobedience-priest/

For his trouble, he was stripped of the title "Monsignor" and another title but not defrocked.

Also last year Fr. Roy Bourgeois was defrocked and forced out of the Maryknoll Missioners after participating in the ordination of a woman priest and calling for an end to celibacy for priests.

We have turned a corner.  The Vatican is like some giant swatting at flies, but eventually its leaders will be forced to return the church to the policy of the first thousand years, when marriage was an option for priests.

When the happens, ordination of women will be not far behind.

Women & the Boston Marathon

For 70 years women were not allowed to run in the Boston Marathon.

In 1967 one woman had a bigger impact on the Marathon than the two bombers had on April 15 of this year.

Kathrine Switzer, then a student at Syracuse University, entered the all-men's race without revealing her gender, and the Marathon's director, Jack Sempel, literally tried to push her off the street.

http://espn.go.com/espnw/more-sports/7803502/2012-boston-marathon-how-kathrine-switzer-paved-way-female-runners

"He grabbed me and screamed at me 'Get the hell out of my race and give me those numbers!'" she remembers.  

Her boyfriend, however, running with her, was an ex-All-American football player and gave Sempel a cross-body block.  

From that moment on, Switzer was determined to finish the 26-mile race, which she did in 4 hrs., 20 min.

Her fellow runners cheered her on, but later people asked, "Are you a suffragette?  Are you a crusader?"

"I'm just trying to run," she would answer.  "I often say that I started as a girl, but I finished the Boston Marathon as a grown woman."  

Today's young women take for granted their right to run marathons, but once upon a time it was an all-men's event.

See the opening scenes of Makers: Women Who Make America, where Kathryn Switzer is highlighted.

Another woman priest...

A 70-year-old former nun was ordained a priest on April 27 in Louisville, Kentucky, by Roman Catholics defying the ban on women priests.

This brings to about 150 the number of Roman Catholic women ordained as priests all over the world.

http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/04/28/17959215-kentucky-woman-ordained-as-priest-by-dissident-roman-catholics?lite

When asked if she is worried about being excommunicated from her faith, Rosemarie Snead replied, according to NBC News, that excommunication is "a medieval bullying stick the bishops use to keep control over people and to keep the voice of women silent."

"I am way beyond letting octogenarian men tell us how to live our lives," she added.

Watch out, Francis.  We are popping up all around.

You can't keep us down.

Joyce Carol Oates and Lynching

Joyce Carol Oates at the LA Times Festival of Books

Lynching and its effect on the small community of Princeton, N.J., in 1905 is the subject of Joyce Carol Oates' new novel just released.

Its title, The Accursed, says it all.

Speaking at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, she explained how she came to write this book.


She is especially interested in the way Christian pastors at the seminary in Princeton did nothing about a lynching that occurred locally.

These events did not even get into the newspapers.  "Lynching is a secret that white people don't know or pretend they don't know," she said.

Patt Morrison interviewed Joyce Carol Oates

Oates did extensive research to understand lynching and life in Princeton in 1905.

"It took decades just to get a law against lynching," she said.  "But then the men [accused of lynching] were usually acquitted."

Efforts to pass an anti-lynching law in Congress were defeated by the filibustering of Southern senators.  A federal law was never passed, but the civil rights legislation of 1960 helped to stop lynchings.

Oates compared this history to efforts this week to pass gun control legislation, again stopped in the Senate by the threat of filibuster.

The Cross and the Lynching Tree by James Cone, a theologian at Union Seminary in New York City, was an important influence on her new novel. 

Her 2006 novel Black Girl, White Girl is about a young black woman in the post-Vietnam War era who knows that someone in her family was lynched in 1949.

In The Accursed, she includes real historical characters, such as Woodrow Wilson, Upton Sinclair (who lived in Princeton in 1905), and the man who was then president of Princeton Theological Seminary, who says at one point in the novel, "We do not entertain any new ideas here"  (words she found in official descriptions of the seminary in the early 1900s).

"Not having new ideas was considered a good thing," she said.  "You can send your boy here--there will be no atheism, no Darwinism in the courses."

During the question-and-answer period, two people came forward with questions about "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?," her most famous short story.  

She said that its original title was "Death and the Maiden" and that her writing was influenced by a medieval painting of "a beautiful girl with blonde hair looking in a mirror--with Death standing behind her."  (Three murders in Arizona profiled in Life magazine in 1966 also prompted this story.)

She changed the title as a tribute to Bob Dylan and his song "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue."

The second questioner asked, "What does the writing on Arnold Friend's car door mean?"  

"It's up to the individual reader," she said, noting that a reader's experience of a story is a separate event from the story itself as written.  Readers complete details of a story for themselves.

One person asked why Oates has joined the community on Twitter.

"It's a short genre," she said. "140 characters," and thus challenging.  Tweets are "a terse, short way of communicating."  They're "like aphorisms, the last line of a poem."  She added that some of her tweets are trivial but that she is "trying to do Twitter with more poetic resonance."

Oates said that she along with most of the nation had been riveted by last week's bombing at the Boston Marathon and the ensuing search and capture of the suspects, and Twitter was one way of responding to that.

"Twitter is a community of people who are committed to thinking about something," she concluded.

Issues that are "roiling, seething" in the US and that she cares deeply about are gun control, terrorism, and the mistreatment of women in social media.

Joyce Carol Oates signing The Accursed

The Accursed is a Gothic novel and includes the supernatural.  Oates likes to try writing in various genres.  She promises that the mystery is solved by the end of the book--unlike some novels that leave the reader guessing.

However, she says, the narrator cannot bring himself to talk specifically about the details, so the reader does have to guess a little.

http://www.latimes.com/features/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-joyce-carol-oates-20130331,0,3635471.story

She began this novel thirty years ago but set it aside for other projects. 

Her husband died unexpectedly in February, 2008.  After writing a book about losing him (A Widow's Story), she was grateful to move on and have a big researching and writing project to work on, this book just published.  See this review with a photo of the couple early in their 47-year marriage:

http://archives.newyorker.com/?i=2010-12-13#folio=070

Shura's Artifacts

A baby bottle... a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt... The Diary of Anne Frank in Spanish... The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous... shoes, purses, water bottles.

Shura Wallin, one of the founders of the Green Valley/Sahuarita Samaritans, displays these items lost by persons trying to cross the desert on Arizona's southern border to enter the United States.

"Why would people leave these things behind?  Why would they be dying out here?" she asks in her public lectures, prompting people to imagine the desperation of persons who try to cross the deserts south of Tucson.  

See more photos by clicking on this link:

https://picasaweb.google.com/102150538747404124091/ShuraSArtifacts?authkey=Gv1sRgCJLq4MTu2avWHg

In less than one year, 214 people died in two counties south of Tucson (October 1, 2009, to July 31, 2010).

The Samaritans make daily drives into the desert to leave water bottles and aid people who are lost or left behind by the group they were walking with.

Those who survive but are arrested and deported may show up at an aid station in Nogales, the border city split into US and Mexican halves.

"You ought to see his shoulders: indentations, almost ulcerating" from being forced to carry heavy loads of drugs, reports Shura of one immigrant.  

Coyotes (smugglers) in business for themselves have been replaced by coyotes controlled by drug smuggling gangs, who force migrants to carry heavy loads of marijuana or other contraband.

"Many have burlap straps over their shoulders... about 50% carry weapons because if they have no drugs at the end of the line, they will be shot and killed," she explains.

Other deportees have blisters on their feet.  "I'll wash your feet and put salve on them and bind them up for you," say the volunteers at the aid station in Nogales.  

They advise deportees not to risk their lives by trying to cross again, but many say, "I don't have a choice."

They may be trying to rejoin family members in the US or they may be desperate to feed a family in Mexico by earning money they can send home.

What can you do?

Write to your US Senator and ask him or her to vote for the immigration reform bill written by the bipartisan group of eight senators and now receiving hearings in the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Immigration: Day of Prayer

Tomorrow is the Evangelical Day of Prayer and Action for Immigration Reform.

The National Association of Evangelicals, World Vision, Bread for the Word, Sojourners Magazine, and other groups are sponsoring this event.

http://evangelicalimmigrationtable.com/

By God's grace, this news appears on the front page of today's Los Angeles Times:

"After months of negotiations, a bipartisan group of eight senators is poised to offer a sweeping bill to rewrite the nation's immigration laws this week, taking advantage of a changed political alignment that, for the first time in nearly a generation, appears to have opened the way for comprehensive legislation."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-senate-immigration-20130416,0,3690780.story

 In many papers, this signficant news was pushed back to other pages by the attack on the Boston Marathon.

Let's pray that the Congress will be able to focus on the important legislation before it, both on gun control and on immigration.  May this immigration package be approved by a majority in the Senate and then in the House of Representatives.

Both prayer and action are needed.  Check to see how your senators and your representative in the House plan to vote.  

Call or send them an email.  They may vote whichever way the wind is blowing, and you can be part of that wind.

Here are the phone numbers, addresses, and email addresses:

http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm

Further resources:

·        Welcoming the Stranger by Jenny Hwang and Matthew Soerens  http://g92.org/resources/books-faith/

·        Talk by Jenny Hwang at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, MI, Jan 2013  http://new.livestream.com/calvin-college/TJS20130108

·        G92.org –website for immigration reform   http://g92.org/about/

·        Photos and notes on Nogales on my blog  http://marthaymaria.blogspot.com/2013/01/a-wall-runs-through-it.html

·        Immigration Act of 1924 and other milestones in US immigration history http://history.state.gov/milestones/1921-1936/ImmigrationAct

·        http://www.eewc.com/viewpoint/immigration-reform-christian-feminist-perspective/

Deliver Us from Evil

"Deliver us from evil" are the final words of the prayer Jesus taught his followers.  ("For thine is the kingdom..." was added later.)

Yesterday's attack on the Boston Marathon reminds us that we repeat these words every day for a reason.  Those who want to do evil are out there, seeking an opportunity to act.  Whether the bombs were placed by a domestic or international terrorist remains to be seen.

We forget that as we commute to work, enjoy our weekends, and struggle with our burdens, there are others around us suffering in isolation from benefits they think we enjoy.  

When mental illness or some ideology enters the equation, we see an attack like those on Sandy Hook Elementary School or the Twin Towers or the federal building in Oklahoma City.

Someone yesterday exploded the circle of his suffering to include hundreds of others--three dead, 176 hospitalized or treated in emergency rooms, and many in shock.  

The joy and excitement of completing the marathon on Boston's Patriots Day was erased.

Like Grendel in Beowulf, the person or persons who did it slipped away, temporarily satisfied with having been heard but doomed to be tracked down and killed.

Prayers for all those suffering in Boston.  

For those of us as yet untouched: deliver us from evil.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/17/us/officials-investigate-boston-explosions.html?hp&_r=0