Last Week In Life: April 26, 2021 – May 2, 2021

 FEAST DAYS ,HOLIDAYS AND LAST WEEK IN HISTORY

 Mon  April 26,  2021

Our Lady of Good Counsel

Confederate Memorial Day

• 1564 – Playwright William Shakespeare is baptized in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England (date of actual birth is unknown).
• 1802 – Napoleon Bonaparte signs a general amnesty to allow all but about one thousand of the most notorious émigrés of the French Revolution to return to France
• 1933 – The Gestapo, the official secret police force of Nazi Germany, is established.
• 1962 – NASA‘s Ranger 4 spacecraft crashes into the Moon.
• 1970 – Melania Trump, Slovene-American model; 47th First Lady of the United States is born.
• 1986 – The Chernobyl disaster occurs in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
• 1989 – People’s Daily publishes the April 26 Editorial which inflames the nascent Tiananmen Square protests.
• 2018 – American comedian Bill Cosby is found guilty of sexual assault.
• 1989 – People’s Daily publishes the April 26 Editorial which inflames the nascent Tiananmen Square protests.
• 2019 – Marvel Studios‘ blockbuster film, Avengers: Endgame, is released, becoming the highest-grossing film of all time, surpassing the previous box office record of Avatar.^[5]

Tuesday April 27,  2021

St. Zita of Lucca 

• 1861 – American President Abraham Lincoln suspends the writ of habeas corpus.
• 1994 – South African general election: The first democratic general election in South Africa, in which black citizens could vote. The Interim Constitution comes into force.
• 2006 – Construction begins on the Freedom Tower (later renamed One World Trade Center) in New York City.

Wednesday April 28,  2021

  Saint Peter Chanel, priest and martyr; or Saint Louis Grignon de Montfort, priest – Optional Memorial

• 1788 – Maryland becomes the seventh state to ratify the United States Constitution.
• 1789 – Mutiny on the Bounty: Lieutenant William Bligh and 18 sailors are set adrift and the rebel crew returns to Tahiti briefly and then sets sail for Pitcairn Island.
• 1869 – Chinese and Irish laborers for the Central Pacific Railroad working on the First Transcontinental Railroad lay ten miles of track in one day, a feat which has never been matched.
• 1881 – Billy the Kid escapes from the Lincoln County jail in Mesilla, New Mexico.
• 1952 – The Treaty of San Francisco comes into effect, restoring Japanese sovereignty and ending its state of war with most of the Allies of World War II.
• 1973 – The Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd, recorded in Abbey Road Studios goes to number one on the US Billboard chart, beginning a record-breaking 741-week chart run.
• 1996 – Whitewater controversy: President Bill Clinton gives a 41⁄2 hour videotaped testimony for the defense.
• 2004 – CBS News released evidence of the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse. The photographs show rape and abuse from the American troops over Iraqi detainees.

Thursday April 29,   2021

  Saint Catherine of Siena, virgin and doctor of the Church – Memorial

Pope Francis: St. Catherine of Siena is a gift to the Church and humanity

• 1429 – Joan of Arc arrives to relieve the Siege of Orléans.
  
• 1770 – James Cook arrives in Australia at Botany Bay, which he names.
• 1826 – The galaxy Centaurus A or NGC 5128 is discovered by James Dunlop.
• 1852 – Roget’s Thesaurus, created by Peter Roget, was released to the public. 
• 1861 – Maryland in the American Civil War: Maryland’s House of Delegates votes not to secede from the Union.
• 1953 – The first U.S. experimental 3D television broadcast shows an episode of Space Patrol on Los Angeles ABC affiliate KECA-TV.
• 1974 – Watergate scandal: United States President Richard Nixon announces the release of edited transcripts of White House tape recordings relating to the scandal
• 1986 – Chernobyl disaster: American and European spy satellites capture the ruins of the 4th Reactor at the Chernobyl Power Plant.
• 2011 – The Wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton takes place at Westminster Abbey in London.

Friday  April 30,  2021

 Saint Pius V, pope – Optional Memorial

Orthodox Good Friday

Arbor Day

• 1598 – Juan de Oñate begins the conquest of Santa Fe de Nuevo México.
• 1598 – Henry IV of France issues the Edict of Nantes, allowing freedom of religion to the Huguenots.
• 1900 – Hawaii becomes a territory of the United States, with Sanford B. Dole as governor.
• 1905 – Albert Einstein completes his doctoral thesis at the University of Zurich.
• 1939 – NBC inaugurates its regularly scheduled television service in New York City, broadcasting President Franklin D. Roosevelt‘s N.Y. World’s Fair opening day ceremonial address.
• 1945 – World War II: Führerbunker: Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun commit suicide after being married for less than 40 hours. Soviet soldiers raise the Victory Banner over the Reichstag building.
• 2000 – Canonization of Faustina Kowalska in the presence of 200,000 people and the first Divine Mercy Sunday celebrated worldwide.

 Saturday May 1   2021

  Saint Joseph the Worker – Optional Memorial

Orthodox Holy Saturday

• 1807 – The Slave Trade Act 1807 takes effect, abolishing the slave trade within the British Empire. 
• 1840 – The Penny Black, the first official adhesive postage stamp, is issued in the United Kingdom.
• 1844 – Hong Kong Police Force, the world’s second modern police force and Asia’s first, is established.
• 1930 – “Pluto” is officially proposed for the name of the newly discovered dwarf planet Pluto by Vesto Slipher in the Lowell Observatory Observation Circular. The name quickly catches on
• 1999 – The body of British climber George Mallory is found on Mount Everest, 75 years after his disappearance in 1924.

Sunday May 2  2021

 Saint Athanasius, bishop and doctor of the Church – Memorial

Orthodox Easter

• 1920 – The first game of the Negro National League baseball is played in Indianapolis.
• 1986 – Chernobyl disaster: The City of Chernobyl is evacuated six days after the disaster.
• 2011 – Osama bin Laden, the suspected mastermind behind the September 11 attacks and the FBI‘s most wanted man, is killed by the United States special forces in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
• 2012 – A pastel version of The Scream, by Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, sells for $120 million in a New York City auction, setting a new world record for a work of art at auction.

 Bishop Barron’s Weekly Homily

Last Week’s SPECTACULAR STORY OF WEEK

Chosen to Accommodate an Actor’s Limp

One of my best friends from my college days is Dave Patten. He is a strong individual who has seen many challenges and heartbreaks in his life. Last year his girlfriend and her mother and brother died which left him devastated. I also remember when his sister, mother and father all died also many years ago but at separate times. But yet he manages to live and carry on a positive attitude towards life.  He just doesn’t sit around being depressed. it helps that he has friends who really help support him. He writes a lot and has even been a guest editor at the Catholic Bard.  He presses on despite the challenges. Despite his disability.  Dave also happens to have Cerebral Palsy. He can walk with crutches and sometimes uses his power scoter.   Something that he has said to me before is that he is glad that the culture and the media are speaking out for those who are victims of racism and discrimination. African-Americans, Asians, LGBT, ect.  “But What About My People?”, meaning the disabled.

Well, actor Jordan Walker Ross is one such person who represents Dave’s tribe as a voice for them.  He is an example of a successful  disabled person who has a pretty good job getting to play pretend for big bucks. He has severe scoliosis and minor cerebral palsy and a pretty noticeable limp. And his latest acting gig was a role he was Chosen to play a part in telling the Gospel story.  He plays one of Jesus apostles ‘James the Less’ in the independently crowd sourced evangelical web series ‘The Chosen’.  He auditioned for the role and got cast in the ever popular drama. But it wasn’t till after he got cast that the shows creator Dallas Jenkins noticed his limp. However instead of firing him he took dramatic licence and accommodated the actor’s limp and rewrote St. James’s character to have the same limp his portrayer had. Just as Jesus took on our nature, the TV show took on Jordan’s nature.

“Rather than re-cast or try to hide it with creative camera angles, [Jenkins] embraced it and asked if I’d be opposed to him writing it into my character,” said Ross. “Now it has given a whole new layer to my role.”

Ross told Deadline that he found it “notable” not only that a disabled actor was cast in a fast-growing show, but also that his character was re-written to accommodate his disability. He described this act as “another level of inclusion and visibility” of disabled actors.

In a recent episode of The Chosen, James is asked why Jesus has not healed him of his limp.

Ross said that the scene features his “character’s struggle for self-acceptance and fighting his insecurities,” which he said would “lead him to the realization that not everyone needs to be healed.”

Looking ahead, Ross said that he hopes to use his celebrity to “help inspire others to chase their dreams, regardless of their mental or physical limitations.”

“In fact, you can often use your differences to inspire others,” he said. –Catholic News Agency 

His first big role was a uncredited orphan in Walker, Texas Ranger with Chuck Norris back in 1996. His latest movie besides The Chosen is the western Honor Among Thieves (2021).

Ross is host of a new podcast called @WhatsYourLimp.  In the podcast, actors, athletes, singers and other public figures discuss their insecurities, experiences with bullying & how they cope! 

He also has a YouTube channel  @CinemAddix where he talks about movies and does comedy.

 Last Week’s News of the World

Presidency of  Joe Biden Reaches 100 Days

I want to thank you and I want to thank the American people because I think we’ve gotten a lot done. I promised even before I was sworn in that I would get, in my first 100 days, 100 million COVID vaccine shots in people’s arms. We’ve lost over 550,000 Americans. Well, we delivered over 220 million COVID shots in the first 100 days.(09:30) We vastly expanded access and we’ve got 100 million doses of vaccine, enough for every single American. And we’ve done it by getting vaccines to some 40,000 pharmacies across the country, 700 community centers. And now everyone over the age of 16 is now eligible to get vaccinated right away. So please do it, get vaccinated now, now, now, now.(09:58) And we promised to deliver emergency relief to the millions of Americans who were in financial distress, and I might add through no fault of their own. So we got out $1,400 checks to the American people, and we kept that promise. 85% of the households in America have gotten those checks. We’ve already sent out more than 160 million checks out the door.(10:26)

While Covid seems to have been taken care of in our country, it is not the same case around the world. People reading this who think Covid is really not that big a deal, please take note of the suffering of your brothers and sisters who don’t have the fortune to have the same treatment of Covid that we do.

COVID Around the World

Brazil on Thursday became the second country to officially top 400,000 COVID-19 deaths, losing another 100,000 lives in just one month, as some health experts warn there may be gruesome days ahead when the Southern Hemisphere enters winter. April was Brazil’s deadliest month of the pandemic, with thousands of people losing their lives daily at crowded hospitals.

India: “The situation is very bad. No beds available anywhere in the hospital. Patients are on the corridors and many are dying because no beds, no oxygen. I have no place even in emergency (area) to give oxygen. Patients are just dying in front of my eyes. Feeling so distressed and frustrated and helpless. It is horrible and the disaster is beyond the imagination. Please pray to God (to) give us strength to save some lives.” –Father P.A. George, Director of the Holy Family Hospital in New Delhi

 As India faces a devastating surge of new coronavirus infections overwhelming its health care system, people are taking desperate measures to try to keep loved ones alive. In some cases they are turning to unproven medical treatments, in others to the black market for life-saving medications that are in short supply.

 “I have seven priests in hospital right now, and those are the lucky ones who found a hospital bed. I have another seven seminarians who are sick, lying in their beds in a house close to the hospital. I took them to a house for the aging because there was no place in the hospital.  I lost a priest, 30 years old, just one year of ordination … five days ago. And it hurts.  I fed him coconut water until the last. But what hurts more is what is happening all around us. There is a shortage of hospital beds. There is a shortage of medicine … People cannot find a place in any hospital in the city, and you can imagine what is the state of the poor. They can’t even think of rushing their sick to the hospitals.”
–Bishop Theodore Mascarenhas,  Auxiliary Bishop of the Archdiocese located in Jharkhand State

 Despite Covid

Thelma Sutcliffe, of Omaha, Nebraska has become the seventh-oldest person  in the world and the oldest living person in America at 114. What she wants most is to eat with her friend after a year of pandemic restrictions.

Despite Covid, The expected COVID baby boom may be a baby bust .

When most of the U.S. went into lockdown over a year ago, some speculated that confining couples to their homes — with little to entertain them beyond Netflix — would lead to a lot of baby-making. But the statistics suggest the opposite happened.  A majority of the babies born in 2020 were, of course, conceived in 2019, before the virus took hold in the U.S., so the numbers partly reflect the pre-existing downward trend. But births in December 2020 declined in 23 of the 25 states from the same month a year earlier, the exceptions being Alaska and Wyoming. They dropped about 11% in Massachusetts and Virginia; 10% in California; and 7% in Florida, Illinois, Indiana and Nevada.

Declines were even more dramatic in January 2021 in many of the 25 states.

Despite Covid In times of trouble, the church turns to prayer with Mary.

“Mary knows what suffering is,” and just as she was at the foot of Christ’s cross, she is at the foot of the many crosses other people bear, bringing them comfort, redemption and accompaniment in a self-centered world.” Servite Father Salvatore Perrella,  Professor of Dogmatics and Mariology at the Pontifical Institute Marianum.

News of the World Briefs

Texas bill proposes longer waiting limit for divorce: a small step to strengthen marriage? 

A Texas legislator has again proposed extending the waiting limit on no-fault divorce, a proposal that has drawn support from the Texas Catholic Conference.

The state Catholic conference told CNA April 27 that it supports the bill because it is “an incremental improvement in protecting the permanency of marriage in families with children.”

If H.B. 3190 becomes law, married couples seeking a no-fault divorce would have to wait six months if they have minor or school-age children or disabled adult children. “No-fault” divorces do not include cases in which domestic violence is involved.

Belarus bishop offers Mass for Chernobyl victims on 35th anniversary of nuclear disaster

Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz offered Mass for Chernobyl victims to mark the 35th anniversary of the nuclear disaster.

The archbishop emeritus of Minsk rang a memorial bell 35 times following the Sunday Mass for all who died or suffered health problems due to the Chernobyl disaster on April 26, 1986.

“It was the largest man-made disaster in human history. We feel its effects today,” Kondrusiewicz said.

“Our people, as well as others, especially neighboring Ukraine and Russia, have been fighting a radioactive pandemic for three and a half decades,” he said, according to Catholic.by, the website of the Catholic Church in Belarus.

How the visit from Pope Francis prompted the House Speaker to resign (catholicnewsagency.com)

 POPE FRANCIS’S FAMOUS LAST WEEK’S WORDS 

Today we will talk about the form of prayer called meditation. For a Christian, to “meditate” is to seek meaning: it implies placing oneself before the immense page of Revelation to try to make it our own, assuming it completely. And the Christian, after having welcomed the Word of God, does not keep it closed up within him or herself, because that Word must be met with “another book”, which the Catechism calls “the book of life” (cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2706). This is what we try to do every time we meditate on the Word.

The practice of meditation has received a great deal of attention in recent years. It is not only Christians who talk about it: the practice of meditation exists in almost all the world’s religions. But it is also a widespread activity among people who do not have a religious view of life. We all need to meditate, to reflect, to discover ourselves, it is a human dynamic. Especially in the voracious western world, people seek meditation because it represents a barrier raised against the daily stress and emptiness that is rife everywhere. Here, then, is the image of young people and adults sitting in recollection, in silence, with eyes half closed… But what are these people doing, we might ask? They are meditating. It is a phenomenon to be looked on favourably. Indeed, we are not made for rushing all the time, we have an inner life that cannot always be trampled on. Meditating is therefore a need for everyone. Meditating, so to speak, is like stopping and taking a breath in life.-Pope Francis: General Audience ,Library of the Apostolic Palace (Wednesday, 28 April 2021)

 BLOG/ARTICLES POSTS OF THE WEEK

Not only does Spock have a terrible track record—events he describes as “impossible” happen 83 percent of the time—but his confidence level is actually anti-correlated with reality. “The more confident he says he is that something will happen—that the ship will crash, or that they will find survivors—the less likely it is to happen, and the less confident he is in something, the more likely it is to happen,” Galef says.

Spock’s biggest weakness is his failure to understand that other people don’t always behave “logically.” He also makes no attempt to update his approach, even when his mistakes get his crewmates killed. Turns Out Spook is Bad at Logic

 

“It is fundamentally a question of integrity: to receive the Blessed Sacrament in the Catholic liturgy is to espouse publicly the faith and moral teachings of the Catholic Church, and to desire to live accordingly,” wrote Cordileone in his May 1, 2021 a pastoral letter. “We all fall short in various ways, but there is a great difference between struggling to live according to the teachings of the Church and rejecting those teachings.”- Catholic World Report

Pondering Podcasts OF THE WEEK

 

Book Em, Dano on your reading list

The Next Everest: Surviving the Mountain’s Deadliest Day and Finding the Resilience to Climb Again by Jim Davidson 

Sooley  by John Grisham

I think there is a lot to this. One of the things that people have to discipline themselves to cope with is the strain of rising expectations as they see more clearly the things that are wrong but fail to grasp that their very ability to see evils to which they were formerly blind is a sign of hope, not a sign of decay or a cause for despair.-Mark Shea