bye, barney

Today, the longest Saturday in recent history (my recent history), happy hour is convened in honor of Jesse Donald Knotts (1924 - 2006).

He had me laughing out loud before I was 6 or 7 years old.
To your fond memory I lift this glass of Maker's Mark.

Rest in peace, Deputy Fife.

lent and golf

Yesterday the Chancery office sent us two items in the same envelope: guidelines for Lent and Holy Week and promotion of the golf tournament coming up in May for the benefit of the KofC vocations fund.

Lent and golf.
The sublime and the mundane.
Incense filled sanctuaries and sunlit putting greens.

Hmmm...

Anyway, among the guidelines there were a few truly small details that caught the Exorcist's eye.


In April of 2002 the Holy See reallowed the veiling of images in church, but only from the fourth Sunday of Lent till Holy Saturday.

No exposition of the Eucharist is permitted from before evening Mass on Holy Thursday until after the Easter Vigil on Holy Saturday. This applies even to parishes and religious communities authorized for perpetual adoration. The Blessed Sacrament is taken to an altar of repose after the Mass of the Lord's Supper where it is reposed only in a closed tabernacle or pyx, but not a monstrance. Adoration may be held, but only until the stroke of midnight on Holy Thursday. I wonder how that will fly in the LC centers...

Parish priest have the faculty to confirm at the Paschal Vigil unless the candidate is a baptized, uncatechized Catholic. In that case, specific permission must be requested from the Archbishop.

It may seem strange, but that exception actually says a lot about how the Catholic Church perceives itself. On Holy Saturday, without consulting the bishop, I could confirm an unbaptized adult (after baptizing him, of course), someone baptized in a non-Catholic church, a baptized Catholic who - by no fault of his own - was brought up in a non-Catholic community and therefore, never confirmed and an apostate who has returned to full communion with the Church.

It is only in the case of the negligent, lax or indifferent Catholics (or Catholics brought up by negligent, lax or indifferent parents) that the bishop's specific permission must be sought.

Get it?

OK. Now let's go play golf!

omens

My interest in decapitated chickens is waning.


Haitian vodun, Caribbean santeria and Brazilian macumba all allow for the sacrifice of small animals in their rituals. There are certainly Haitians, Caribbean hispanos and Brazilians on this side of the city, but the Exorcist can not recall pissing any of them off.


I have a short attention span. My feathered horror is fading, fading, fading...


Besides, there have been other, less creative omens around the parish lately.
The rear side window of our mini-van has been smashed. Twice in ten days. Once on the street, once in the parking garage.

The genius who did it made off with roughly $3.47 in change and left us replacing a $650 piece of tinted glass. Twice in ten days.

Hey, hater! If you're reading this, next time try ringing the doorbell! We give out food, clothes, AND money to help folks all the time!!!

fowl play

Last night, as the wind howled through the church steeple, I watched The Birds. Alfred Hichcock's dramatization of Daphne Du Maurier's story casts our commonplace feathered friends in their most sinister light: winged terrorists with an anti-human agenda.


I now believe there is something terribly prescient in Hichcock's horror.


As the avian flu scare swells in many regions of the world, it is believed by some to be a harbinger of even greater evils hovering on the horizon of humanity's future.

A fowl's head was found inside a can of pinto beans in DeKalb, IL. As if that weren't scary enough, the lot number of the recalled cans is 5348 MF. Unreal.

Our Vice President was recently implicated in a threat to homeland security when an Al Quaeda cell, cleverly infiltrated in a flock of quail, duped him into shooting an attorney. Several of the quail were shipped off to Gitmo for interrogation, but this thing is far from over.

And now the birds have appeared on the Exorcist's doorstep. Literally.


On February 15, I opened the curtains in my bedroom and saw, by the door of the rectory two large roosters. One white, one red, both headless. They were laid out on either side of the steps with a border of pennies carefully arranged around them in the snow. No blood. No other message.

Very wierd.

On February 16 I left the church in the early morning hours for a meeting downtown and later had a funeral and a burial. When I returned to the rectory at around 1 pm I found the head of the white rooster at the base of the gate that opens from the street to the front lawn. I did not see it earlier and I am sure it wasn't there the day before.

Scary.

On February 17, fully expecting the red rooster's head to be nailed to the church door, I discovered instead, a meticulously placed row of red candy hearts on the bottom step of the rectory front porch.

What does all this portend for the Exorcist and his parish?
The birds know...

postmortem

The Exorcist finds vague solace in the occasional media piece that casts the Catholic priest in a favorable light.

Two such articles caught my attention over the past few days.



1. The story of Father Andrea Santoro, a 60 year old priest of the Diocese of Rome serving as a missionary in Turkey. He had recently been transferred from the town of Urfa, on the border with Syria, where there is no Christian population, to Trabzon on the Black Sea where he ministered to a Catholic community of 15 people.


Kneeling in prayer in St. Mary's church, the Capuchin parish that was entrusted to his care, he was shot twice in the back at point blank range by a 16 year old Muslim youth apparently distraught over the Mohammad cartoon controversy.


Many testimonies have surfaced, by Christians and Muslims alike, recognizing the stature and healing presence of Fr. Santoro. This is the type of man on whom the salvation of humanity ultimately depends.



2. The same day that Fr. Santoro was murdered, the Boston Globe ran a story about a local miracle worker, Father Patrick J. Power. An orphan at four years of age, he was sent to Massachusetts from Ireland to live with an older brother. He entered the seminary at Laval University in Quebec and was ordained a priest in Boston in 1867. At his first parish assignment, in Chicopee, Fr. Power contracted pneumonia and died, a little over a year after his ordination.

He is buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in Malden. By 1929 over one million pilgrims and miracle seekers had visited his grave. To this day there is an endless stream of visitors who leave letters of thanks, petitions, photos and other symbols of their personal world on the site of the good Father's resting place. He was young, joyful, caring and holy and people still flock to him.


See that? All the complaints about the media bias against Catholic priests is pure nonsense.
If you're a good priest, you can still make the papers.
As long as you're dead.

The Exorcist has found something to look forward to.

innocent voices

It seems that heavy snowfall gives us cause to cancel activities - meetings and the like - even when the storm is well over and travel, strictly speaking, is possible. For reasons less than obvious to me, this weekend's snow was someone's excuse for cancelling on me this evening.

I decided to celebrate by seeing a movie that a Mexican friend had recommended to me some months ago. I was not disappointed.

See Voces Inocentes, staring the beautiful Chilean actress Leonor Varela and a cast of children actors that draw even the most detatched viewer into the story.

The movie tells the story of Oscar Torres, a young boy growing up in a small town in El Salvador in the 80's, as his country languishes in the throes of the conflict between the US supported Salvadorean army and the equally ruthless Farabundo Marti guerrilla. The indiscriminate and unforgiving effects of the violent civil war are vividly reflected through the lives of Chava (Oscar), his friends and his family.

Although the story and setting are very different, in a way Voces Inocentes reminded me of Fernando Mierelles' City of God.

Both movies seem to transmit a basic truth about our world: if you want to know the reality of the world we've made and what we've become, look through the eyes of the children.

it's the economy, Cupid!

Hardline hindus have gone on a bloody rampage to protest the celebration of Valentine's Day in India as "shameless and totally contrary to Indian culture".

Great. All this from the folks who brought us tantric yoga and the kama sutra.

Once again, the Exorcist is baffled.