Here it is Ash Wednesday in the Latin Rite. Some of our Eastern brothers and sisters have already begun Lent on Monday and some are going to next Monday. I think it’s time to say a word on the subject of fasting. I know from experience that fat people like me tend to take our lives in our hands if we talk about food on the internet, so let me get this out of the way first: yes, I am... Read more
I don’t know about you, but I’m not really feeling in the mood for Lent this year. After the display we’ve witnessed for nearly a year now, from the Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report last summer to that useless Vatican Summit a week ago– and, for me, the recent knowledge that a priest I knew and trusted had abused as well– I am not feeling pious. I don’t even know how I’ll be able to go back into a church at the... Read more
We went to a beautiful parish when I was growing up. It was quite a ways away from our house in Columbus. The parish didn’t have its own school, so it became the meeting place for Catholic homeschooling families all over Central Ohio. It looked the part of a perfect Catholic parish. The architecture was a proper and just Norman Gothic vault with a choir loft at one end and a Communion rail on the other; the windows portrayed... Read more
It has been yet another hell of a week. The rolling panic started on Saturday afternoon, and the fibro flare-up that always follows left me so sick I physically couldn’t go anywhere on Sunday morning. People who have been spiritually abused often have panic at the thought of going to church. Even if they’re in a church where they feel perfectly safe, let alone right in the diocese where some of the abuse took place. And last weekend was not... Read more
I will be back online later today with an actual blog post, this is just a periodic rattle of the cup. For the many of you who are new in the past month, Steel Magnificat, and my family, are almost entirely run on gratuities. I work from home as a writer due to my chronic illness, churning out three to seven literary art projects per week here, my husband copyedits for me, and he’s also the homemaker who takes care of... Read more
I was at that point in February where the uptick in fibromyalgia combines with the seasonal anxiety and despair until I don’t even feel human anymore. I was taught that you’re supposed to start an essay or an article by thinking of something you’re burning to tell somebody else– one fact you’d like to make the whole world understand. So this is what I want you to understand today: people who suffer from depression, anxiety or a weird synthesis of... Read more
I woke up to find out that I had been screenshotted, again. Specifically, this time, a sometime deacon now on a leave of absence in the Archdiocese of St. Louis, who is famous among my friends for facebook stalking through sock puppets and harassing us, had taken a screenshot of a public comment I’m not ashamed of. I said that neither a tax return nor a legal marriage certificate are a sacrament, and that letting people who are legally married,... Read more
Once again I am exhausted. The Vatican has finished the four-day summit on sexual abuse with what looks to me like absolutely no plan going forward. I wonder if it accomplished anything at all. I hope my cynicism is proven wrong. And now we’ve got this Sunday Gospel reading, which is bound to be interpreted in the worst ways in the light of the week’s news: Jesus said to his disciples: “To you who hear I say, love your... Read more
We’re in the middle of the summit on sexual abuse now, and I don’t feel particularly hopeful. We’re hot on the heels of once-Cardinal McCarrick being laicized, and everyone’s still talking about it. They’re saying funny, witty things that aren’t very accurate. An especially astute friend of mine observed, “If the worst punishment that can be made to a cleric who has done serious wrongs is to become a regular lay person, geesh, what does that say about laity?” And... Read more
Today I saw three tweets that enraged me, and then they made me sad. I was enraged because they comparison they were drawing was so ridiculous. And then I was sad, because the error made plain to me so much about what caused the priestly sexual abuse crisis in the first place and why I have little hope that it can be stopped any time soon. These tweets were composed by the famous apologist Patrick Madrid, of which a... Read more
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