CLIPS

Little Notes
Letters

Confessions
Talk About Movies
Follow Me




Contents © 1999
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.

May 1998

"Try Every Condom" sings the mother superior, and later, instead of worrying about Maria, she sings "How do you stop the spread of gonorrhea?"...

Much more delicate in their humor were a pair of pieces by Lanford Wilson and David Mamet, presented by the same cast, all associated with the University of San Diego [theater program]....

-- "'98 Actors Alliance series gets off to a festive start," by Anna Marie Welsh, San Diego Union-Tribune, March 27, 1998


TWO YEARS AGO, 60,000 MEN attended the first and only Promise Keepers conference held in San Diego. The word was that Promise Keepers leaders in Colorado felt it was a good conference and would come back....

[Cliff] Taylor [head of the local PK task force] said a private individual was financially responsible for San Diego's start-up budget in 1996. He hasn't been able to find someone to handle the increased local commitment this year, so April 1, he's sending hundreds of letters to churches and Christian leaders in the region, asking for seed money

"I'm asking for 85 churches or individuals to contribute $1,000 each. If that happens, we'll have a conference here."

-- "San Diego still hoping to get Promise Keepers," good news, etc., April 1998


DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR, Pope Pius XII was lauded for his singular efforts to halt the carnage. And for years after, he was praised for the church's efforts in saving an estimated 700,000 Jews from the Nazi death camps -- mainly by issuing false baptismal certificates to Jews, disguising some in cassocks and hiding others in cloistered monasteries and convents. But last week, after the Vatican issued its long-awaited mea culpa for failing to do more, critics of the church greeted the Vatican's statement with the sound of one hand clapping....

Something shameful is going on. That Pius XII was silent in the face of the Holocaust; that he did little to help the Jews; that he was in fact pro-German if not pro-Nazi...all are monstrous calumnies that now seem to pass for accepted wisdom. Most of these accusations can be traced to a single source: "The Deputy," Rolf Hocchuth's 1963 play that created an image of Pius a moral coward....

As the Vatican's secretary of State in 1937, [Pius XII] drafted an encyclical for Pope Pius XI condemning Nazism as un-Christian. The document was then smuggled into Germany, secretly printed there in German and read from Roman Catholic pulpits. The Nazis responded by confiscating the presses and imprisoning many Catholics....

In February 1942, Protestant and Catholic leaders in Nazi-occupied Holland prepared a letter condemning the deportation of Jews to death camps in "the East." But only the Catholic bishops, "following the path indicated by our Holy Father," read the letter aloud from the pulpit despite threats from the Nazis. As a result, occupation forces swept through Holland's Catholic convents, monasteries and schools, deporting all Jews who had converted to Christianity -- something they had not done before. When word of this reached Rome, the pope withdrew a four-page protest he had written for the Vatican newspaper and burned it. As the 11 volumes on the war years published by the Vatican archives make clear, Jewish as well as Christian groups pleaded with the pope not to make a public protest because it would only intensify the Nazi persecution.

-- "In Defense of Pius XII," by Kenneth L. Woodward, Newsweek, March 30, 1998


EDITOR: MRS. MARSHALL SMELSER'S CONTENTION that there are so few young priests because of a low Catholic birthrate (Letters, October 1997) may be true for "progressive" dioceses and religious orders, but does not apply to those of us who attend Tridentine Latin Masses under the papal indult. The only reason we could provide for "so few" young priests is that the seminaries of orders such as the Fraternity of St. Peter and the Institute of Christ the King (both of whom celebrate the Latin Mass exclusively) are too small to accommodate all the qualified young men who wish to enter.

As for the Catholic population failing to reproduce itself, I would invite anyone to attend the indult Tridentine Mass here in San Diego and listen for the beautiful, omni-present sound of children fidgeting in the back of the chapel. You would rest assured that at least one portion of the Catholic population is doing its part to ensure sufficient vocations for the next generation.

-- "Doing their part," letter to the editor by Gary Gerken from Chula Vista, CA in Homiletic & Pastoral Review, April 1998


RELATING THIS NOTION [of "entertainment'] to the Mass, even some of the most ardent supporters of liturgical reform have asked whether the effort has wandered off course. They note that the peripheral elements eliciting feelings of togetherness -- in entrance processions, clasping hands furing the Lord's Prayer, exchanging greetings -- frequently overshadow the central and more religiously challenging parts of the Mass, the proclamation of Scripture and the offering of the Eucharistic Prayer. Liturgical planners seeking spontaneity and continual innovation often achieve no more than banality and weariness.

-- "Know What You Are Doing," Bishop Norman McFarland [of Orange], Adoremus Bulletin, April 1998


SINCE 1982, A YEAR AFTER a group of teenagers in the small Yugoslovian village of Medjugorje claimed to have received messages from the Virgin Mary, millions of American Catholics -- perhaps as many as 25 million -- have traveled to the site of the alleged apparitions.

By conservative estimates, these pilgrims, joined by pilgrims from Ireland and England, Australia, France, and Germany, have spent tens of millions of dollars in their search for a religious experience.

Where's the money going?

Besides fueling a lucrative travel industry which promotes the Medjugorje messages, some Medjugorje doubters now claim that the money is going to the Croatian army for weapons, grenade and bomb factories, concentration camps, and ethnic cleansing, as well as to the Croatian mafia and a clique of renegade Franciscans who intend to set up their own independent Croatian church.

A team of researchers led by California businessman Phil Kronzer, affiliated with Unity Publishing, Inc., and its subsidiary Catholic Cult Watch, and a British film crew, Network 5 International, returned from Croatia on March 9th. Two on the team of four investigators, a cameraman and a reporter, were arrested by Croat authorities, illegally detained, and interrogated over several days by 15 plain-clothes people, including two wanted for war crimes.

-- "Film Probes Underside of Medjugorje Industry," by Paul Likoudis, The Wanderer, March 26, 1998

TOP