Pentecost in the Year of the Priest: Spirit of Truth, Wisdom, and Understanding
. . . Up to that point, I had no idea of a blog's potential. They didn't exist when I came to prison nearly sixteen years ago. I read about them, and heard them mentioned on the news, but I had no idea how blogs worked. I remember sitting in my cell last May, knowing that I made a commitment with a deadline, but I had no idea what to write. I thought of my first night in prison, of that maddening, foot stomping chant that went on for hours. So I wrote . . .
A Prisoner, A Professor, A Prelate, Two Priests, and a Poet!
. . . In the corner of my cell where I type sitting on an empty bucket, my head is just six inches from the barred cell window. The window doesn't open - a fact that I deeply resent - but there is a little security grate with a knob that opens a small section of the grate for a little - very little - air. As I sat here early yesterday morning thinking of a title, I heard something unusual through the open grate. It was a song, and it came from a red-breasted robin perched atop the spirals of razor wire on the twenty-foot wall that has been my view of the outside world for sixteen years. I watched the robin for a long time, and listened as he sang. It instantly made me think of . . .
Breaking News: I Got Stoned with the Pope!
. . . Perhaps NBC sensed the line of decency was breached a few weeks ago when it apologized to The Catholic League and the world for a scandalous and libelous smear against Pope Benedict XVI on its affiliate news channel, MSNBC. We owe a debt of gratitude to Bill Donohue and The Catholic League for not letting this one pass. It is also no coincidence that the lurid stories of priestly sex abuse and papal complicity rose to a frenzy in the U.S. in the same weeks that tax-payer funded abortion was being argued in the Obama health care bill. Writer and art historian Elizabeth Lev made this same point in a brilliant essay on PoliticsDaily.com entitled "In Defense of Catholic Clergy (Or Do We Want Another Reign of Terror?)" Ms. Lev cited English statesman, Edmund Burke's 1790 commentary on Catholic witch hunts during the French Revolution: "What would Edmund Burke make of the headlines of the past few weeks …? In 1790, Burke answered ... 'It is not with much credulity I listen to any when they speak evil of those they are going to plunder.' What would he think of the insistent attempt to tie [a] sexual abuser to the Roman pontiff himself through the most tenuous of links … as the present sales of Church property to pay settlements swell the coffers of contingent-fee lawyers and real estate speculators …?" . . .
The Catholic League, Saint Patrick and the Labyrinthine Ways
. . . The part of St. Patrick's story about being carried off by marauders and forced into six years of slavery is seen through the eyes of Irish history as part of the "lucky charm" of St. Patrick's life. Think about that! I doubt very much that it felt that way at age sixteen. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time - or the right place at the right time depending on your point of view.Would Patrick be Saint Patrick without that awful six years of his life? I doubt it. We're in an unholy quagmire if we're hell-bent on shedding where we are in life, or where we've been. God's pursuit of us calls not just our halo, but our shadow as well. We can leave neither behind, and there's no point in running. Just as with "that look" my Irish mother mastered, resistance is futile. . . .