In early August of 1990, about ten days before I left New York City and childhood for Arizona State University, I began hearing voices. By that I don’t mean I suffered auditory hallucinations. At no point did I imagine that literal, living people were speaking to me. Rather, I began arguing with myself about the direction of my life and the moral implications of every choice I faced. Nothing was beneath consideration; everything counted. Here I am, for example, critiquing... Read more
Three years ago, on my last visit home to New York, I re-read my mother’s first young adult novel, and was stunned to discover she’d mixed up her virgin martyrs. “St. Agatha lost her breasts, not St. Agnes,” I lectured. “And who’s this St. Theresa whose throat was supposedly slashed in a bathhouse? That’s St. Cecilia. Teresa, no ‘h’, was a mystic and reformer of women’s monastic life; Thérèse was a memoirist who wasted away from tuberculosis. Who let this... Read more
This past October, to mark the Feast of the Holy Rosary, one of my Facebook friends posted a link G.K. Chesterton’s braying ode to the Holy League’s 1571 naval victory over the Ottomans at Lepanto. Here’s a taste: Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far, Don John of Austria is going to the war, Stiff flags straining in the night-blasts cold In the gloom black-purple, in the glint old-gold, Torchlight crimson on the copper kettle-drums, Then the tuckets, then... Read more
After my father’s death, about a dozen years ago, I picked up the habit of asking my mother to call or e-mail me the minute she and Bob return from an out-of-town trip. It doesn’t matter whether their itinerary includes a flight across the Atlantic or a drive across the George Washington Bridge. Like many Manhattanites, the two of them seem like rare flowers that draw their sustenance from concrete, so it’s a stretch to imagine them transplanting themselves, even... Read more
In 1943, the UK’s Catholic Herald reports, Léon Degrelle was excommunicated by the bishop of Namur for “brutalising” a parish priest at his hometown of Bouillon, in Belgium. “Brutalising,” in this case, meant “beating the tar out of.” Home on furlough from the Eastern Front, where he’d been serving as an officer in the Waffen SS’s Wallonian brigade, Degrelle wore his uniform to Mass in defiance of a 1940 episcopal ban. The presiding priest refused to serve him Communion, and... Read more
It’s called a vierge ouvrante, or opening virgin, and the name doesn’t need much explaining. Like a one-window Advent calendar, this statue of the Mother of God pops open to reveal the Holy Trinity: an anthropomorphic, bearded God the Father hefting the horizontal beam of the Cross on which His comparatively tiny Son is being crucified. A note from the International Marian Research Center of Dayton, Ohio mentions “the dove of the Holy Spirit hovering over both of them,” but... Read more
On November 19, Salon ran a piece by a Catholic re-vert named Kaya Oakes titled “My Torment As A Catholic Woman.” The melodramatic title — probably the editors’ choice, not the author’s — does the work an injustice. When Oakes talks about the Church’s ban on women in the sacramental priesthood, it’s not so much agony she expresses as confused, weary resignation. At least that’s how it reads on balance. Visiting an Episcopalian church, Oakes does admit to feeling “a... Read more
Okay, I get it — you don’t approve of him. You got sick to your stomach when you heard the speech where he talked about believing in absolute separation of Church and state. You break out in hives whenever you think about how he let Bobby bother those poor Southerners, the salt of the earth. The memory of him winning accolades in Europe for pretending to be a donut makes your hair fall out in clumps. The last time the... Read more
So it turns out the guy Pope Francis hugged and kissed to such great fanfare last November 6 does have a name. It’s Vicino Riva. It also turns out he has a history. Now 53, Riva lives in Vicenza, just west of Venice. His tumors began growing when he was 15; both he and his sister, Morena, seem to have inherited neurofibromatosis from their mother, Rosaria. They now live with their aunt, Caterina Lotto, who supports them on her retirement... Read more
They tell me Brian Doyle is a Catholic. And it seems he’s conned an awful lot of people, including the editorial staffs of Soujourners, Commonweal, and This Christian Century, three of the many places the proliic author has published. But I don’t buy it. At some point, he must have taken Jesus’ Sacred Heart down from his wall and replaced it with a copy of the Heart Sutra. In his latest book, The Thorny Grace of It And Other Essays... Read more
Diary of a Wimpy Catholic
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