Author: Richard Chonak

From the Whys Guys.

It was a pleasure to hear and to meet David Morrison at Boston College Monday night. He spoke in a two-man panel discussion with Andrew Sullivan on “Homosexuality in a Catholic Context: What Has Been Said About It? What Else Can Be Said?”
Homosexuality has probably been much talked about at BC lately, given that the school has recently given approval to a “gay-straight alliance” student group. Assurances that the group won’t reject Catholic teaching on chastity don’t give much confidence to skeptics, and neutrality on this subject is simply not enough.
Morrison did an able job of setting the Church’s teaching in a larger context, or rather two larger contexts. The teaching on homosexuality has to be seen as part of the larger picture of sexual ethics, and the decision to pursue chastity has to be seen as part of Christian discipleship. The story of his conversion to Christ and to the Catholic Church drew the attention of the audience, and his personal testimony of how he chose chastity out of love for his partner — and maintained their close and supportive relationship afterward — stood in contrast to Sullivan’s claim that the Church was commanding gays into a despairing, lonely life.
Early in his talk, Morrison read a quote from the Catechism that could well serve as the banner of Courage:

Homosexual persons are called to chastity. By the virtues of self-mastery that teach them inner freedom, at times by the support of disinterested friendship, by prayer and sacramental grace, they can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection.

Who else is out there telling the world that people who experience same-sex attraction can, with the help of grace, seek to become saints?

(Thanks for the link, Eric.)

In the Roman rite, the Easter Vigil service of Holy Saturday night starts with the blessing of fire and the lighting of the Paschal candle. The Orthodox churches have a similar rite in the Divine Liturgy said on Great and Holy Saturday, called the “Blessing of the New Light”: “Shine, shine, O new Jerusalem, for the glory of the Lord has shone upon you.”
In Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulcher (a/k/a the Church of the Resurrection), the arrival of the New Light is taken as an annual miracle in which fire descends from Heaven to the candle of the Orthodox patriarch who prays for it in the tomb of Christ; and from there it is given to the faithful in a rush of candle-lighting. The miracle, so it is said, happens in various forms.
The Telegraph says that tensions between the various churches sharing the basilica were a bit high this year, understandably enough:

Relations between the clergy who preside over the miracle have been inflamed since last year when the ceremony was marred by a brawl within the shrine.
Out of sight of the faithful, the two churchmen – the Armenian participating for the third time, the Greek for the first – fiercely disagreed on a matter of precedence. Should the Greek patriarch emerge first with the Holy Fire or the Armenian? Would the Greek or the Armenian Orthodox community be first to receive the light?
When Patriarch Irineos fought his corner by twice blowing out the Armenian’s candle, the Armenian felt obliged to resort to a shameful expedient to obtain some Holy Fire.
“In this worst situation I had to use my emergency light, a cigarette lighter,” he later admitted.

Happily, Voice of Russia radio mentioned in its news today that the bishops worked out a last-minute compromise to conduct the rite, and when they did so, the candles of the faithful spontaneously and simultaneously took fire. So they say.
As the Telegraph writer mentions, Catholics do not participate in this rite, even in years when our Holy Saturday falls on the same day as that of the Orthodox; and I don’t think Catholics are obliged to believe any related claims of miraculous goings-on. In fact, an inside participant has given his description of what really happens at the tomb.
(But if you are looking for a visible miracle to celebrate, let’s just rejoice in the fact that the old Soviet Communist station Radio Moscow has been sufficiently converted that it reports this Christian event favorably.)

Where would you like your heart buried? Apparently it used to be a grand romantic gesture to ship it off someplace else when you die. That’s why Chopin’s heart is in a church in Warsaw, while the rest of him’s in France.
This sort of thing is out of fashion now, but maybe it’ll make a comeback, at least as this week’s animal-rights stunt (last week’s having gone nowhere). PETA founder Ingrid Newkirk wants to give animals her last full measure of devotion by having her body cooked and recycled into protest props, but she wants to save her heart for use in an homage to auto racing. There’s a country song in here somewhere: bury my heart with Pennzoil, but roast me with A-1.
By the way, since “pet” is not the politically correct term for a companion animal, why does her group still have such a retrograde name?