Peninsula awash in late-spring beauty

I am enjoying the blossoms, singing frogs and nature in general this beautiful time of year. The old Joe and Eva Kita orchard had the pink apple blossoms just opening with a carpet of white dandelions under it — that was just breathtaking.

Board meeting

The Gibraltar School Board will meet at 7 p.m. Monday in Community Room 266 at the school, 3924 Wisconsin 42, Fish Creek.

Speaker series

Next up for the Gibraltar Historical Association’s speaker series is “Yesteryear’s Fish Creek,” presented by Richard Lauder. Travel back in time to see and enjoy images of long-ago Fish Creek through postcards from 1903-50. The talk will be at 7 p.m. June 7 at the old town hall and the public is invited. Go to www .historicnoblehouse.org /calendar12.html to see more presentations planned and the schedule for Heritage Days, which will be June 7-9. More news on this will be coming.

Inspirational concert

National Catholic recording artist, musician and speaker Paul Koleske performed his music at all three Masses last weekend. He did a 90-minute concert Sunday afternoon at the Stella Maris St. Mary of the Lake site that was enjoyed by all who attended.

Paul’s music has been on EWTN and is known he is known throughout the nation for his music and speaking presentations. Koleske both composes and performs his own music.

I was among the attendees and was very inspired and enjoyed the music. His website is www.paulkoleske .com, which contains a clip of his music and more information.

Mass schedule

The Catholic Mass schedule will change this weekend for the interim before the summer schedule begins, with Masses at 4 p.m. Saturday at the St. Paul’s Fish creek site, 6 p.m. at the St. John the Baptist site. Sunday Mass is at 8 a.m. at the St. Mary of the Lake Baileys Harbor site, 10 a.m. at the St. Rosalia’s Sister Bay site and noon at the St. Michael’s Jacksonport site.

Ecumenical service

Save the dates of May 20 and May 23. An Ecumenical Baccalaureate Service is scheduled for 7 p.m. May 20 at the Fish Creek St. Paul’s site. Pastor Dawn Volpe of Ephraim Moravian and Pastor Michael Brecke of St. Paul’s Lutheran will join the Rev. David Ruby in celebration for graduates of Sevastopol and Gibraltar. All are invited.

On May 23, Spring Fling will be held at St. Rosalia’s Sister Bay site. The doors will open at 4 p.m. for a pot roast, with chicken dinner at 4:30 p.m.

This “all-you-can-eat” dinner includes real mashed potatoes, carrots, beans, salad and homemade desserts. Cost is $14 for adults, $5 for children 6-12 and free for children 5 and younger. Raffle for gifts starts at 7 p.m. (need not be present to win.) Everyone is welcome Carryouts are available.

Review: A night of soulful Beethoven

Don’t let the title of Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis” deceive you. It refers to how much of the Catholic Mass’s Latin text is included. It doesn’t mean that music should be solemn.

Sometimes the “Missa” gets treated as if the performers are confused about that. Caught up in seriousness, they weigh the music down or stretch it beyond the 80 minutes or so it typically takes. It ends up seeming like a penitential rite.

But Christopher Warren-Green gets its message.

Leading the Charlotte Symphony and Oratorio Singers of Charlotte on Friday night, he brought out the music’s drama, joy, warmth and soul. I suspect he even shaved off a couple of minutes, though I didn’t check the start time and can’t say for sure. However many minutes there were, they swept by.

That was partly because some of the music swept by. Warren-Green not only charged into the jubilation of the “Gloria,” but he set as speedy a pace as I’ve ever heard for parts of the “Credo” the setting of the Nicene creed that’s the Mass’s biggest block of text. This time, it sounded fervent and excited, not wordy.

No matter how quick the tempo, though, the orchestra and chorus were vital, ringing and clear. In Beethoven’s fugues, which are notoriously hard on choruses, the Oratorio Singers remained secure: The lightness of the closing fugue of the “Credo” complemented the gusto of the climactic one of the “Gloria.”

Even the music’s prayerful parts flowed. Warren-Green let the music’s lyricism and warmth express the devoutness rather than be sober about it. The choir’s mellowness and the orchestra’s poise told the story. Sometimes a few simple but sweet phrases from the woodwinds added eloquent punctuation to the grander sound of the chorus.

The four vocal soloists added richness and grandeur of their own. Soprano Tamara Wilson sounded pure and true no matter how high the music soared. Baritone Richard Zeller was resonant but smooth. Tenor Yeghishe Manucharyan contributed the bright, ardent sound that was so telling when he was one of the leads in Opera Carolina’s “Eugene Onegin” in March. Mezzo-soprano Nancy Maultsby’s hefty voice was especially telling in the cries of “Have mercy on us!” near the end, though she couldn’t always blend with the others.

Yet the most eloquent soloist of all was the orchestra’s concertmaster, Calin Lupanu. In the violin solo that threads all the way through the “Benedictus,” Lupanu’s playing grew sweeter and silkier the further aloft it flew. He didn’t need words to be spiritual.

The first holy conundrum

The Irish Times – Saturday, May 12, 2012

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• Photographs: Tiffany Zettlemoyer/FRF/Getty Images and Brenda Fitzsimons
• Msgr John Byrne: “You’re up there on your feet thinking, What do I do? You don’t know whether to get mad or ignore it.” Photographs: Tiffany Zettlemoyer/FRF/Getty Images and Brenda Fitzsimons
• Ready for her First Communion: Isabelle Byrne.

KATHY SHERIDAN

To some families it’s a holy sacrament, to others it’s an excuse for a party, and to many it’s an exercise in hypocrisy and mass delusion. So why is First Holy Communion a tradition we can’t let go of?

SO YOU THOUGHT the meringue dresses, stretch limos and cash-stuffed envelopes were the worst of it? Think about the people behind the scenes. This weekend, the Catholic priests of Ireland will don their festive vestments, set their jaws to smile mode and pray they get through the season without having to arm-wrestle someone in the aisle.

First Communions can be trying affairs.

All the priests who speak to The Irish Times for this article mention the noise. That would be the loud conversations, the party atmosphere and the buzz throughout the ceremony. And that’s just the adults, the camera-toting wannabe Spielbergs, sussing out the best angles, strutting ignorantly around a church they use only for family rituals.

That’s not to mention the dilemma around the horse-drawn carriages. One parish worker wryly recalls being accused of discrimination against horses when she asked for them to be moved off the public footpath.

So do you ban them? Can you do that? With the moral authority of the Catholic Church eviscerated by scandal, is it wise for a priest to get uppity about people’s behaviour in what is clearly alien territory?

“We’ve had some really tough ceremonies. I remember concelebrating a First Communion a few years ago and coming in thinking I’d rather do 15 rounds with Mike Tyson,” says Msgr John Byrne, the well-liked parish priest of Portlaoise. “You’re up there on your feet thinking, What do I do? Throw a tantrum ? Say ‘Shhh’, which I hate? You don’t know whether to get mad, encourage them to be quiet or ignore it.”

Most parishes now have to police these occasions, says Fr Paddy Byrne, the 38-year-old curate in the vibrant Co Carlow parish of Bagenalstown.

How bad can it get? A priest based in a city admits to one incident involving “some, um, jostling around the altar”. This constituted giving a “small push” to a dad who was conducting loud exchanges while doing tracking shots up the aisle and who refused to sit down.

“Several nights afterwards, I woke up in a sweat, worried I’d be starring on Liveline,” the priest says with a wry smile.

Ann Buggie, principal of the 408-pupil Scoil Mhuire in Portlaoise town, attributes the increased noise and random movement partly to multicultural factors but also to a general social shift towards inappropriate behaviour. “It’s a reflection of what’s happening in the home,” she says.

“It’s to do with the number of people in the church who are not familiar with those surroundings any more and who are determined not to be respectful in those surroundings,” says Msgr Byrne. “I think there is a need in them to display their dissatisfaction with the church by not respecting the building.”

So why are they there? “They’re there for the child, and they’re not really interested. But it’s just not a lack of interest in the ceremony. They’re very uncomfortable at being there.”

“I think it’s a tradition that is followed – and the sense that, well, it’s not going to do them any harm,” says Des Sutton, principal of St Paul’s, the local 420-pupil boys’ school.

“I think there’s a touch of nostalgia to it, of ritual. I think it evokes memory,” says Fr Byrne, recalling his own big day in 1982, when he and his twin brother tore the knees out of their matching brown suits while pushing the car. It was a day ultimately distinguished by his first blissful memory of having chicken and chips at the Lord Bagenal.

THEY SAY NOTHING of religion. That’s because, to many, this month’s First Communion ceremonies will represent an exercise in mass delusion and hypocrisy. Only a minority will follow basic Catholic practice.

The priests soothe their own nerves by focusing on the positive, on the family-centred nature of the celebrations, or on the belief that some adults’ faith is rekindled by their involvement.

“It would be very simple for me to come out and give you the line that First Communion is about children growing up in the faith, that it’s about the fulfilment of the baptism promise the parents made eight years previously, and how rearing them in the faith and bringing them to receive Communion marks a very significant step on their faith journey”, says Msgr Byrne. “But does that bear truth when you examine it against the reality of what’s happened since the baptism and what’s happening around First Communion? Is that just a load of pious poppycock?

“Around 98 per cent will have come for the child’s baptism. In doing that, they’ve bought into a contract that we’re part of this worshipping community. Yet the vast, vast majority of adults have made the choice not to bring that child to church on Sunday,” says Fr Byrne.

“More than 300 children will receive their First Communion in our parish this year,” says Msgr Byrne. “What always worries me is, when will they receive their second?”

Fr Paddy Byrne quotes a survey a colleague of his conducted on 84 Confirmation candidates; of the 84, just four had attended Mass the previous Sunday.

In Portlaoise, the town that showed the most explosive growth in the country during the property bubble, 247 young people were confirmed this year. “I wouldn’t wonder how many have been with us since,” says Msgr Byrne. “I’d be thinking not even 50 per cent. These are children who went through a preparation programme and a ceremony that said they are now full members of the church. So you have to cope with the question yourself [as a priest]: how much are you co-operating with hypocrisy and a lack of authenticity, or a lack of integrity? And are you exacerbating the problem by co-operating with that?”

All this is said entirely without rancour. In a recent column for the Carlow Nationalist, suggesting it was “time to get real” in how young people were prepared for the sacraments, Fr Byrne wondered whether it might be better “for many families to have a baby party, a second-class party and a pre-teen, rite-of-passage party packed with bouncy castles, music and dance and simply forget the Church altogether.”

He admits he was being “a bit provocative”, but few would disagree with the premise.

Msgr Byrne says they are caught with the current system. “So much of it is outside our control . . . Maybe First Communion and Confirmation would benefit from being pushed on by five years. I do feel it needs to be universally accepted that these are not school events and that it’s not automatic that you make your First Communion just because you’re in second class.”

ANYONE TUNED INTO the public reaction around clerical child sex abuse might assume that parents would be withdrawing their children from such church rituals in huge numbers. Yet the oddest aspect of all this is that it is the parents who are fighting hardest to maintain it. Of the six Carlow schools in Fr Paddy Byrne’s purview, there hasn’t been a single opt-out.

So why do they do it? A city-based teacher whispers that the supplementary welfare allowance for First Communion (a discretionary payment that has been reduced) might have had a hand in it. One family managed to get a First Communion allowance for the same child in two parishes before being rumbled.

But the most common view is that opting out is unfair to the child. Anne Buggie, the principal of Scoil Mhuire in Portlaoise, believes it is more complex than that. “Grown women with several master’s degrees, who haven’t set foot in a church for decades, still insist on getting married in a white dress in a church – and then we’re asking parents who mightn’t even have finished secondary school to make that huge social leap and decide their children should opt out of their Communion day? Human beings are social animals. People need to belong, and only a very small percentage are going to behave completely differently to their socioeconomic grouping,” she says.

Yet, for those who rail against the church and all its pomp, the fact is that in many areas it was never easier to opt out.

Two years ago, Donal, an architect living in Dublin, and his wife decided that their daughter, who was attending a Catholic school, would not make her Communion along with most of her classmates. “She was in a class of about 26. Five of them, all Irish children, opted out.”

Though raised as Catholics, he and his wife had left all that behind long before. They discussed it with their daughter, a bright child, who understood they were not practising Catholics and accepted it easily, as some of her friends were in the same situation.

“There were no negative social consequences, within the family or among friends, or for our daughter at school,” he says. The single annoying downside was that there was no alternative curriculum for the opt-out children, who were sent off to do some colouring in the considerable time given to Communion preparation. “From an education point of view, it was a waste of time.”

Ideally, says Donal, their daughter would be in a school where every faith is treated equally, but there was a long waiting list for the local Educate Together school. “So, short of setting up our own school, we had no choice.”

Priests readily acknowledge the problems inherent in tying Communion preparations to the school rather than to the parish. Portlaoise parish has employed Margaret Dooley, a primary-school teacher and catechist on a five-year secondment, to devise a First Communion programme, among other things. They unhitched the event from the school, placing the preparations – religious, ceremonial and decorative – firmly back with the parish and the family. It is made clear to parents that the responsibility for preparing their children, including regular Mass attendance, lies with them, not with the school.

Children are invited to five hour-long, after-school, pre-Christmas Time Out sessions in the parish centre on Fridays. These include gentle tutorials on how to bless themselves and how to behave in the church. They are encouraged to get involved in the Sunday-morning child-friendly Masses by bringing along tokens such as a small stone to represent the stepping stones of Lent. Only after these sessions are parents invited to enrol for the sacraments and to choose a date from six parish ceremonies.

Although Mass attendance is not policed, some parents suspect that the tokens are a way of registering the attendance. They can hardly complain.

This system contrasts with the Do This in Memory programme conducted elsewhere in the country, whereby parents must sign up to attend Mass on specific Sundays with their children. “The problem is that this is now interpreted as meaning you have to go [only a few] times,” says Msgr Byrne.

On one occasion, Fr Paddy Byrne had to cancel a special Sunday Mass but forgot to inform one of the schools. Afterwards, three mothers, who felt they had been duped into attending what turned out to a regular Mass, came to him complaining bitterly that they “had to sit through this”.

Although Portlaoise seems to be getting it right, not everyone is enamoured of its methods. Because the parish has reclaimed the preparations, teachers, for example, have been deprived of their leading role in what is traditionally a big show day for the school.

The elaborate, competitive, precision-engineered pageantry of music, movement and reading often associated with the day has also been abandoned by Portlaoise, on the basis that this is a sacred ritual.

Des Sutton, the principal of St Paul’s and choirmaster for three of the six parish First Communion ceremonies, agrees with this approach. “The pageantry is grand, but you have each parent nearly waiting for their own child to perform. At the end of the day, you have to question what it’s all about.”

He also sees the value of the preparations taking place outside school hours and the religious instruction being contained within regular class programming. His gut feeling, though, is that parents would prefer the old way. “They go and see the lovely productions in the Dublin diocese and ours is ordinary by comparison. But, in their hearts, they know why they’re doing it this way.”

Isabelle Byrne has been saying her prayers devoutly since first class and took her First Penance very seriously this year, choosing her best dress for the occasion. Her mother, Sarah, is slightly bemused.

“I hadn’t been a regular Massgoer apart from family occasions. I made my own First Communion here but grew up in Dubai, so we were not in or around churches. Then my niece made her First Communion last year in Naas, and it was beautiful. I was there with tears in my eyes feeling, Oh yes, we have to get involved.”

While Isabelle and her brother race around the yard of Scoil Mhuire in Portlaoise, Sarah looks back on the year and her early reservations about the inconvenient Time Out children’s sessions after school on Fridays and the required Mass attendance.

“I definitely wouldn’t be wanting to go every Sunday. We got married in February, and trying to fit all that in would have been very hard.”

But in hindsight she wouldn’t change a thing. “Parents have to decide if it’s worth doing and, if it is, to put in the work, even if they have to rearrange things.”

Isabelle took the Mass requirement so seriously that when she was hospitalised, and couldn’t attend, she became very anxious that she might be excluded from the First Communion ceremony.

The parish has been in constant touch by text. To the amusement of Sarah and her husband, one text discouraged extravagant displays such as horse-drawn carriages or stretch limos. It was sent after another parent had asked whether such carriages were allowed.

Meanwhile, the satin dress has been acquired from TK Maxx, complete with beads, diamante and all the accoutrements. There will be a bouncy castle, supplied by Sarah’s grandfather, and about 38 guests for a party at home.

Sarah’s mind moves on to the aftermath. “We haven’t heard anyone talk about a follow-up. Will this all just stop then?”

It’s a thought echoed by another mother, Marie Cushen from Stradbally, Co Laois, whose daughter Jill made her First Communion last year. It was “a great family occasion, and it’s a milestone at that age”.

In Stradbally, the parents took the lead in the preparations, creating new friendships and closer community links. “It was a wonderful day and a time Jill will remember, but when you look for a follow-up, where do you go with it? I think it’s really all about family and what we did in childhood.”

“Emma is very excited about the day, but she knows that it’s not about the dress or the celebrations or the money: it’s about what you believe in,” says Tracey O’Sullivan. She has experienced tragedy recently and finds huge comfort in going to Mass and dropping in to light a candle during the week. “You feel different coming out.”

Marian Naughton is also a woman for whom Sunday “doesn’t feel like Sunday to me if we haven’t been to Mass”. There will be a bouncy castle for her little boy, Peter, who has never had one because his birthday is in October. His cash will probably go on a set of Lego for himself and his brother, and there will also be money for a child the family sponsors in Ethiopia, his mother says with quiet pride.

A mother on opting out of Communion ‘Emma was the only one who didn’t have any religion’ 

My daughter Emma, who is now 15, went to Scoil Bhríde, a Catholic primary school in Kill, Co Kildare. Though my partner and I were both reared as Catholics and I went to a convent secondary school, I had gradually turned away from religion. We didn’t marry, and Emma wasn’t christened.

I investigated sending her to a multidenominational school, but we live a stone’s throw from Scoil Bhríde, so I went to talk to the principal. From the outset I wanted to be very clear that there wouldn’t be any issue with Emma not taking religion classes. His only concern was that my daughter would feel left out, but he was understanding and said she could go home during religion class or could do other work instead.

We discussed religion with her as she was growing up. I explained to her that she hadn’t been baptised and that she wouldn’t have Holy Communion. I did encourage her to read about religion, but nothing seems to have appealed to her any more than it did to me.

When it came to Communion age, there were one or two children in her class who didn’t make it as they may have been of other denominations, but I think Emma was the only one who didn’t have any religion.

We did make a bit of an effort to make her feel comfortable. Because of the dresses and all the fuss that was being made of the other children, we opted to go on holiday at that time. The school agreed this was wise.

I was very glad I sent her to the local primary school.

Emma is now in a Catholic secondary school where, again, we explained our position in advance to various teachers, and there has been no issue about it at all.

Veronica Bennett

 in conversation with Conor Goodman 

What Communion means to families ‘Parents have to decide if  it’s worth doing and, if it is, to put in the work’ 

Isabelle Byrne has been saying her prayers devoutly since first class and took her First Penance very seriously this

year, choosing her best dress for the occasion. Her mother, Sarah, is slightly bemused. “I hadn’t been a regular Massgoer apart from family occasions. I made my own First Communion here but grew up in Dubai, so we were not in or around churches. Then my niece made her First Communion last year in Naas, and it was beautiful. I was there with tears in my eyes feeling, Oh yes, we have to get involved.”

While Isabelle and her brother race around the yard of Scoil Mhuire in Portlaoise, Sarah looks back on the year and her early reservations about the inconvenient Time Out children’s sessions after school on Fridays and the required Mass attendance.

“I definitely wouldn’t be wanting to go every Sunday. We got married in February, and trying to fit all that in would have been very hard.”

But in hindsight she wouldn’t change a thing. “Parents have to decide if it’s worth doing and, if it is, to put in the work, even if they have to rearrange things.”

Isabelle took the Mass requirement so seriously that when she was hospitalised, and couldn’t attend, she became very anxious that she might be excluded from the First Communion ceremony. The parish has been in constant touch by text.

To the amusement of Sarah and her husband, one text discouraged extravagant displays such as horse-drawn carriages or stretch limos. It was sent after another parent had asked whether such carriages were allowed.

Meanwhile, the satin dress has been acquired from TK Maxx, complete with beads, diamante and all the accoutrements. There will be a bouncy castle, supplied by Sarah’s grandfather, and about 38 guests for a party at home.

Sarah’s mind moves on to the aftermath. “We haven’t heard anyone talk about a follow-up. Will this all just stop then?”

It’s a thought echoed by another mother, Marie Cushen from Stradbally, Co Laois, whose daughter Jill made her First Communion last year. It was “a great family occasion, and it’s a milestone at that age”. In Stradbally, the parents took the lead in the preparations, creating new friendships and closer community links. “It was a wonderful day and a time Jill will remember, but when you look for a follow-up, where do you go with it? I think it’s really all about family and what we did in childhood.”

“Emma is very excited about the day, but she knows that it’s not about the dress or the celebrations or the money: it’s about what you believe in,” says Tracey O’Sullivan. She has experienced tragedy recently and finds huge comfort in going to Mass and dropping in to light a candle during the week. “You feel different coming out.”

Marian Naughton is also a woman for whom Sunday “doesn’t feel like Sunday to me if we haven’t been to Mass”. There will be a bouncy castle for her little boy, Peter, who has never had one because his birthday is in October. His cash will probably go on a set of Lego for himself and his brother, and there will also be money for a child the family sponsors in Ethiopia, his mother says with quiet pride.

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A model Catholic

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Reading Eagle: Bill Uhrich 

Gregory Lynch, 61, of Exeter Township had a physician father who was an inspiration in life and also in the realm of religious art in the early 20th century.

A model for the artist Charles Bosseron Chambers, known as the Norman Rockwell of Catholic art, the handsome Thomas F. Lynch (1911-1979) posed for a series of portraits in the the late 1920s and early 1930s encouraging young men to enter the priesthood.

The works of art, mostly charcoal drawings but some paintings, were often hung in Catholic homes and institutions in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s and quickly became popular.

These days, Chambers’ religious paintings have become highly collectible, his most famous being Jesus portrayed as a young boy in “Light of the World.”

While also an illustrator of classic books and a society portrait painter, Chambers’ religious work earned him renown in the Catholic community along with paintings depicting Christ, the Blessed Virgin and various saints.

The paintings, made into prints, sometimes were handed out as holy cards at parochial schools as rewards for good behavior.

Lynch’s wife, Michelle, 50, recalled attending Central Catholic High School in the 1970s and walking past the school’s main office and seeing one of Chambers’ framed prints on the wall titled “Christ Calleth Thee” next to another painting promoting the sisterhood.

“I must have walked past it hundreds of times in the four years I spent at the school there, never knowing that I was destined to marry the model’s son,” she said.

The Lynches said that when they toured the school shortly before it closed last year, they discovered Lynch’s father’s portrait still hanging on the wall.

“I have this memory of my father at about 50 years old, always in a suit, jumping a fence and running to help people who were in a car accident,” said Lynch, a certified prosthetist and orthotist, owner of Prosthetic Orthotic Service, 114 N. Ninth St. “He was a pretty straight, fair-minded, stand-up guy

“His big thing was always to say, ‘Share the wealth,’ ” Lynch said.

Lynch, who grew up in Teaneck, N.J., and came to Reading in 1987, said his father came from a large Irish-Catholic family of 11 siblings, six of whom survived to adulthood.

“My father became a doctor, but two of his four brothers became priests, and a third intended to become one, but ultimately left the seminary because he felt he wasn’t a good enough speaker,” Lynch said. “He decided to become a social worker.”

His fourth and oldest brother wound up as a highly skilled blacksmith who did restoration work on the Statue of Liberty, made bronze lamps for Louis Comfort Tiffany and baptistry gates for St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City.

Another religious connection with Lynch’s blacksmith uncle, Kenneth Lynch, was via Hollywood.

According to Michelle, quoting a 1985 New York Times article, Kenneth Lynch also designed movie props, including halberd blades, for director Cecil B. DeMille’s 1935 film, “The Crusades.”

Lynch, himself, was one of seven children, with two older brothers, two older sisters and two younger brothers.

He said his own career dreams tended toward the field of law enforcement rather than religion.

“I thought about being a priest for five minutes,” Lynch said. “I wanted to be a cop.”

But a 1971 accident he had with another vehicle while riding his motorcycle led to injuries that resulted in the amputation of his left leg above the knee.

His own experience ultimately took him down a medical path, not as a doctor like his father, but in the supportive field of prosthetics and orthotics, He is credentialed in all fitting techniques and componentry for artificial limbs.

When Thomas Lynch died in 1979, Lynch and his siblings each inherited one of the series of inspiring paintings that featured his father.

For Lynch, it was “May Thy Way Be My Way” (Lynch’s father kissing the feet of Christ), mounted on wood and in a gilt-colored plaster and wood frame.

Over the years, the Lynches collected other unframed prints in the series and either had them framed or gave them as gifts to nieces and nephews.

Michelle said she has seen some of Chambers’ original charcoal drawings featuring her husband’s father listed at auction with opening bids of $500 and estimated values at between $1,800 and $2,800.

“Greg and I were having a discussion regarding all the various items available for sale on eBay,” Michelle said. “I half jokingly said to him, ‘I could buy anything on eBay; I bet I could even buy your dad’s picture on eBay.’ “

And she did just that after finding some mint unframed copies for reasonable prices that were copyrighted in 1933 by the St. Anthony’s Guild, a religious association now in East Rutherford, N.J., guided by Franciscan friars committed to Sts. Francis of Assisi and Anthony of Padua.

“The only printed example of the color print ‘Christ Calleth Thee’ that I know of is the one that hung on the wall at Central Catholic,” Michelle said. “I have never found it on eBay. However, I was able to purchase a high-quality digital copy from a dealer of Catholic images online – for $5.”

Contact Bruce R. Posten: 610-371-5059 or bposten@readingeagle.com.

Un-Sebelius Commencement Address

Delivered today at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas:

Defending Religious Freedom in Full: A Generation’s Challenge 

Your Excellency, Archbishop Joseph Naumann; members of the Board of Trustees; President Minnis and members of the faculty and staff; Benedictine fathers and sisters; parents, grandparents, and family members of the graduates — and especially mothers of the graduates, who celebrate a double-header today; and my fellow-classmates of the Class of 2012 of Benedictine College:           

Thank you for inviting me to join you on this great day. Thank you for honoring my work with the gift of a degree. It has been one of the great graces of my professional life to have been given the opportunity to work regularly with young men and women of intelligence, wit, and character — after their parents had done the heavy lifting! So a special word of thanks, today, to the parents of today’s graduates — and the grandparents, and the other family members — who have helped bring you, the Class of 2012, to this pivotal moment in your lives.

Today is, by its nature — and I think at Benedictine College we can still speak of the “nature” of things! — a day of celebration, a day of remembrance, and a day of thanksgiving. Permit me to take a few minutes to suggest that you consider it a day of challenge as well: a challenge that might lead to a certain kind of vocational commitment.

We share, today, a unique and critical moment in the history of the Catholic Church in the United States. At the time of the American Revolution, Catholics accounted for less than one per cent of the population of the thirteen colonies — a tiny population clustered primarily in my native Maryland and a few Pennsylvania counties. Yet within a few decades of the Founding, the great tides of European immigration that began to wash onto the shores of the new nation  – those “huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” as they are memorialized on the Statue of Liberty — brought millions of Catholics to the New World: at first, Irish and Germans; later, Italians, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Ruthenians, and the many others who wove their lives, their traditions, and their aspirations into the rich tapestry of American democracy. Those 19^th century immigrants felt the sting of anti-Catholic prejudice, even anti-Catholic violence. But notwithstanding that bigotry, Catholics have, I believe, almost always felt at home in these United States.

We have felt at home because we have thrived here; with the exception of immigrant Jews, no religious group has prospered more in America than the Catholic community. Yet Catholic “at-homeness” in the United States has had a deeper philosophical and moral texture. One of the great Catholic students of American democracy, Father John Courtney Murray, described that side of the Catholic experience of America in these terms, in We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition, a book published fifty-two years ago:

“Catholic participation in the American consensus has been full and free, unreserved and unembarrassed, because the contents of this consensus — the ethical and political principles drawn from the tradition of natural law — approve themselves to the Catholic intelligence and conscience. Where this kind of language is talked, the Catholic joins the conversation with complete ease. It is his language. The ideas expressed are native to his universe of discourse. Even the accent, being American, suits his tongue.”            

In this second decade of the third millennium, there are many grave questions be debated in America: the question of the legal protection of innocent human life from conception until natural death; the question of long-term strategy and morally worthy tactics in the war against Islamist jihadism; the question of how we attend to the sick and how we manage immigration; the question of fitting public policy ends to fiscal means; the question of building an appropriate regulatory structure around the biotech revolution so that the new genetic knowledge leads to genuine human flourishing rather than to a stunted and manufactured humanity; the question of the health of American civil society and of the American national character; the list goes on and on. The very question of what should be on “the public policy agenda,” and what ought to be left to the private and independent sectors, is being as vigorously contested in our country today as at any time since the Great Depression and the New Deal. Yet amidst all this churning, the gravest question for our public culture is whether what Father Murray called the “American consensus” — that ensemble of “ethical and political principles drawn from the tradition of natural law” — still holds.

There are reasons to be concerned.

In October 2009, the nation’s political newspaper of record, the Washington Post, ran an editorial condemning what it termed the “extremist views” of a candidate for attorney general of Virginia who had suggested that the natural moral law was still a useful guide to public policy. The Post, determined to nail down the claim that homosexual orientation is the equivalent of race for purposes of U.S. civil rights law, deplored this as “a retrofit [of] the old language of racism, bias, and intolerance in a new context.” Yet the Post’s own claim was, to adopt its language, “extremist.” For it suggested that the label  “bigot” ought to be applied to notable historical personalities who had appealed to the natural moral law in causes the Post would presumably regard as admirable: figures such as Thomas Jefferson, staking America’s claim to independent nationhood on “self-evident” moral truths derived from “the laws of nature”; or Martin Luther King, Jr., arguing in his Letter from Birmingham Jail that “an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law”; or Pope John Paul II, who, at the United Nations in 1995, suggested that the truths of the natural moral law — “the moral logic which is built into human life,” as he put it — could serve as a universal “grammar” enabling cross-cultural dialogue.

Appeals to the natural moral law we can know by reason underwrote the American civil rights revolution. Appeals to that same natural moral law underwrite the pro-life movement, the successor to the civil rights movement. And appeals to the natural moral law have underwritten U.S. international human rights policy for the past thirty years. Until, that is, December 2009, when the Secretary of State of the United States, in a speech at Georgetown University, emptied the concept of religious freedom of everything save the “freedom to worship” while asserting, in a catalogue of what she claimed were fundamental international human rights, that people “must be free…to love in the way they choose” — which “choice” must, presumably, be protected by international human rights covenants and national and local civil rights laws.

This speech, as things turned out, was one harbinger of an assault on religious freedom that continues to this day — an assault that imagines “religious freedom” to be a kind of “privacy right” to certain leisure-time activities, but nothing more than that. This dramatic misconception of religious freedom was evident in the present administration’s attempt to re-write federal employment law by dissolving the “ministerial exemption” that had long protected the integrity of religious institutions. It was evident in the administration’s refusal to continue funding the U.S. bishops’ efforts to help women who had been victims of sex-trafficking (because the Church refused to provide abortion as part of that work). And it has been most dramatically evident in the January HHS mandate that requires all employers (including religious institutions with moral objections and private-sector employers with religiously-informed moral objections) to facilitate the provision of contraceptives, sterilizations, and abortifacient drugs like Plan B and Ella to their employees.                       

All of this suggests that one of the great challenges of your generation, my fellow-members of the Class of 2012 of Benedictine College, will be to rise to the defense of religious freedom in full. And, indeed, what could be a more apt challenge for the graduates of a college named in honor of the saint whose inspired vision and evangelical vision saved the civilization of the classical world when it was in danger of being lost? What better challenge for the graduates of Benedictine College, named for one of the patrons of Europe, whose life-work saved the West as a civilizational enterprise built from the fruitful interaction of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome?

For the defense of religious freedom in full which you must mount must be both cultural — in the sense of arguments winsomely and persuasively made — and political, in that you must drive the sharp edge of truth into the sometimes hard soil of public policy.

What is this “religious freedom in full” that you must defend and advance?

It surely includes freedom of worship, but it must include more than that; the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is content with freedom of worship, so long as the Christian worship in question takes place behind closed doors in the American embassy compound in Riyadh. Religious conviction is community-forming, and communities formed by religious conviction must be free, as communities and not simply as individuals, to make arguments and bring influence to bear in public life. If religiously informed moral argument is banned from the American public square, then the public square has become, not only naked, but undemocratic and intolerant. If, on the other hand, religiously informed moral argument is welcome in public life, then we have the possibility of rebuilding, not a sacred public square (a goal the Catholic Church rejected at the Second Vatican Council), but a civil public square, in which tolerance is rightly understood as differences engaged within a bond of civility formed by a mutual commitment to reason.

It is a matter of both political common sense and democratic etiquette that Catholics in public life should make our arguments in ways that our fellow-citizens, who may not share our theological premises, can engage and understand — which is to say, in our particular case, that Catholics should bring to bear in public life the moral truths we hold through arguments framed by the grammar and vocabulary of the natural moral law. That is what John Paul II did at the United Nations in 1979 and 1995. That is what Benedict XVI did at the in 2008 and in the German Bundestag in 2011. That is what the bishops of the United States, and lay Catholics in their millions, have done over the past four decades in defense of life. And if there are some who consider such appeals to the natural moral law a form of tarted-up bigotry, well, we shall simply have to inform them, politely but firmly, that they are mistaken, and then demonstrate why.

Religious freedom in full also means that communities of religious conviction and conscience must be free to conduct the works of charity in ways that reflect their conscientious convictions. This is neither the time nor the place to discuss the problems that have been posed by tying so much of Catholic social service work and Catholic health care to government funding — save, perhaps, to note that these problems did not exist before the Supreme Court erected a spurious “right to abortion” as the right-that-trumps-all-other-rights, and before courts and legislatures decided that it was within the state’s competence to redefine marriage and to compel others to accept that redefinition through the use of coercive state power. What can be said in this context, and what must be said, is that the rights of Catholic physicians, nurses, and other health care professionals are not second-class rights that can be trumped by other rights-claims; and any state that fails to acknowledge those rights of conscience has done grave damage to religious freedom rightly understood. The same can and must be said about any state that drives the Catholic Church out of certain forms of social service because the Church refuses to concede that the state has the competence to declare as “marriage” relationships that are manifestly not marriages.

My fellow-graduates, your defense of religious freedom is going to require the skills of reasoning and argument that you acquired here at Benedictine College. It is going to require that some of you accept the risk and challenge of public service in elective office. And it going to require all of you to support those who take, as their vocation, the defense and promotion of religious freedom in full.

This will be the work of a lifetime. But it must begin sooner rather than later, for the threats to religious freedom among us are great, and many of them are deeply embedded in postmodern American culture. This work will not be without cost. Some of you may suffer various forms of martyrdom in taking up this cause: the martyrdom of ridicule, of being labeled “intolerant” and “bigoted”; the martyrdom of career paths blocked and promotions denied because of your adherence to the moral truth of things; the martyrdom of political defeat, or a judicial case well-argued but lost. Fidelity to the truth can have its costs. Yet as Blessed John Paul II taught young people all over the world, those costs are worth paying because the truth sets us free in the deepest sense of human liberation. Thomas More, patron saint of Catholics in public life, was never more a free man than when he bent his neck to the executioner’s axe in free adherence to the truth.

Let us pray that it does not come to that for any of you, or indeed for any of us. But let us also be clear on the stakes for which your generation is playing, which are nothing less than the long-term integrity of American democracy. So: be the culture-forming heirs of St. Benedict that your education here has prepared you to be. Be the champions of religious freedom in full. In doing that, you will give America a new birth of freedom — freedom tethered to truth and ordered to goodness, freedom that sets us free in the noblest sense of human liberation.

Godspeed on your journey.

Pelosi: Catholic Faith "Compels" Me To Support Same-Sex Marriage

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Posted on May 11, 2012

Pelosi: Catholic Faith “Compels” Me To Support Same-Sex Marriage

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Reporter at Pelosi’s weekly mews conference: “You’re a Catholic that supports gay marriage. Do you believe that religion and the idea that you can support gay marriage can be separated? And how do you grapple with the idea that you support gay marriage as a Catholic?”

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi responds: “My religion has, compels me, and I love it for it, to be against discrimination of any kind in our country, and I consider this a form of discrimination. I think it’s unconstitutional on top of that.”

Posted By Ian Schwartz
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Eucharist Among the Brambles

Last weekend, we attended the ordination of the young man we have been supporting with our prayers as he moves toward the priesthood. He was ordained a transitional deacon, along with nine others. The liturgy was absolutely beautiful and it was very impressive to see the strong faith and dedication of these fine men.

Ed and I were “matched” with Lenny only a few months ago, but we have been praying for him much longer—ever since we signed up for an archdiocesan “adopt a seminarian” program. We didn’t know who we would be matched with, but we knew that the Lord did, so we began praying immediately. Finally, we had a chance to meet him, and we could tell right away that the Holy Spirit had a plan for this connection.

This program matches families with one of the 100 seminarians in our archdiocese; the families commit to following the seminarian through his discernment process with prayer and friendship—including him in our family events, and getting to know one another. We look forward to attending the milestones as he journeys toward the priesthood, and hope to continue beyond that, through prayer and friendship in his ministry. Priests need our prayers all through their lives.

On Sunday, we attended his first official Mass as a deacon. There were twenty children making their First Communion in that parish, and as such he geared his first homily to the kids, but he did a great job in reaching the adults as well—that’s not always easy to pull off.

Our seminarian has a Masters degree in education and taught math before entering the seminary, and it showed; he invited the kids to come up to sit on the top step so that he could talk with them as he explained the Gospel and how the Scripture related to making their First Communion.

The Gospel was John 15: 1-8, where Jesus says, “I am the true vine and you are the branches . . .” Lenny pointed out to the kids that Jesus says over and over, “Remain in me, and I remain in you.” He emphasized the word remain—stay with me . . . stay close to me.” Bringing out a vine he had dug up that morning to use as a concrete visual, he explained the Gospel in simple terms and involved the kids in a conversation that circled in to what they were doing in receiving communion that day, but the lesson had application for the adults as well. We were impressed; Lenny will make a fine priest one day, following the example of the Lord who taught in simple examples his listeners could relate to.

I prayed for the First Communicants that their day would be as powerful as mine was. If there is one day in my personal life I can point to as the first moment that it all came together for me in my relationship with God, it was that day. It was the day I knew that I knew, and I have never doubted. It is hard to explain how I felt, but at one moment I knew God was with me. Over the years, I have had been “pruned,” but each time it has only brought me closer to him; it has been necessary for growth and for the production of fruit in my life.

Last year at this time, we were in Rome, and it was very special for me to be able to receive communion and to attend Mass at the Vatican on the very anniversary of my First Holy Communion. I remember that day in a special way each year, but that was a real gift to me.

On our wedding day, besides the wonder of exchanging our vows, a most special moment came when Ed and I gave each other communion. The priest placed the host in each of our hands and we gave communion to each other. He then gave Ed the chalice, and he presented it to me; I did the same in exchange. It was a profound moment for us; it proclaimed that our marriage wasn’t just between Ed and me, but that the Lord was with us, and we always could count on Him to remain as a partner with us in our marriage. Whenever Ed and I walk up to receive communion together, it reminds us of the sacrament of our marriage and the gift of the unity with the Lord as we receive Eucharist together.

The Catholic Church’s Treatment of Nuns Is Polarizing and Alienating

I’m not a Catholic theologian or expert or activist of any kind. I’m just a mom who is getting increasingly uncomfortable with the Catholic Church in which my daughters are growing up. To me, the Vatican has become polarizing, extremist, and alienating. It seems like the true believers vs. the infidels. Now it’s the bishops vs. the nuns.

[Susan Milligan: The Vatican Should Exalt Catholic Nuns, Not Upbraid Them]

The LCWR’s leaders said they were “stunned” at the rebuke and asked for prayers as they respond, because as the nuns put it in their statement, “This is a moment of great import for religious life and the wider church.” They’re right: We have come to a moment, not just for the nuns but for the rest of us as well.

The central question is whether the church can regain its moral authority in the aftermath of the sexual abuse scandals. It’s not a question of whether women can fix the church. We know the answer to that. And it’s not a question of whether the bishops will let them. We now know that answer, too. It’s a question of whether women will choose to stick around and try.

Most of us believe that the most pro-life, truly Christian thing one can do is serve others. We admire American saints like Baltimore’s Elizabeth Ann Seton, founder of the nation’s first Catholic schools, and Frances Xavier Cabrini of Chicago, the patron saint of immigrants who started hospitals for the poor. We understand how important women have been to the history of the Catholic Church in America. The question is, will the role of women continue to grow and expand? Not if the bishops get their way. But I’ve got my money on the women.

While the number of women joining religious orders is down, these days there are still more nuns than priests in the United States. In today’s Catholic Church, women, whether as nuns or as lay people, serve as chancellors, vicars, tribunal judges, heads of Catholic Charities agencies, directors of hospitals and schools, theologians, liturgists, and finance directors. And that doesn’t take into account the sheer volume of Catholic women who volunteer on the front lines in underserved neighborhoods.

[Read Mary Kate Cary, Robert Schlesinger, and other U.S. News columnists in U.S. News Weekly , available on iPad.]

The number of men joining the priesthood has been declining for years, but it’s gotten so bad that of the some 17,000 parishes in all 50 states, more than 3,000 of them are without a resident pastor. The fact that women are barred from administering the sacraments and saying Mass, in this day and age, is becoming increasingly indefensible.

Yet, two years ago, the Vatican put out a directive that listed what the church considers to be the most serious crimes one can commit: heresy, schism, pedophilia, and … ordaining women. After the uproar by women’s groups, a Vatican official, Charles Sciciuna, tried to walk that back, saying, “This is not putting everything into one basket.” He was right. The men and women are treated very differently: Ordained women are quickly excommunicated, and priests who are abusing children are rarely excommunicated, the Christian Science Monitor reported.

Local police pay tribute to fallen comrades

By Brian Stanley
For The Herald-News

May 10, 2012 9:36PM

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Police officers salute during a Law Enforcement Memorial Ceremony near the Will County Law Enforcement Memorial Thursday, May 10, 2012, in Joliet. | Matthew Grotto~Sun-Times Media

Updated: May 11, 2012 2:43AM

JOLIET — Next week will be the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s establishment of National Police Week and designation of May 15 as Peace Officers Memorial Day.

Thursday marked the 31st time police departments throughout Will County gathered to remember local officers who made the ultimate sacrifice with a Catholic Mass and public memorial service.

Officers from Beecher, Bolingbrook, Channahon, Elwood, Frankfort, Joliet, Joliet Junior College, Lemont, Lockport, Mokena, Peotone, Plainfield, Rockdale, Romeoville, Shorewood, Tinley Park, the sheriff’s police and state police attended ceremonies that began with “Blue Mass” at St. Mary Magdalene Church.

The Rev. Chris Groh, Joliet police chaplain; the Rev. Vytas Memenas, the Will County sheriff’s chaplain; and the Rev. Greg Podwysocki, Romeoville police chaplain, led the religious service where Memenas spoke of remembrance and mortality.

“We (must) never forget the men and women who sacrificed their lives. Their lives were not given, they were taken,” Memenas said.

After Communion, which was presented to the priests by Joliet officers Richard Demick and Tom Ponce, a police procession moved to the Will County Courthouse. Honor guards, a bugler, pipes and drums and a rifle squad provided ceremony while a wreath was laid beside the police memorial on the courthouse lawn.

“Without your courage, there would be no security,” Chief Judge Gerald Kinney said.

Mokena Chief Randy Rajewski read the names of the 33 fallen officers inscribed on the monument, starting with Joseph Clark, a correctional officer killed at the Collins Street prison in 1865. Joliet’s Jonathan Walsh was the last Will County officer to die in the line of duty, in 2004.

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