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Angelus News | September 8, 2023 Vol. 8 No. 18

Howard Lolesio, maintenance man for Maria Lanakila Church and School in Lahaina, Maui, touches a statue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in the parish courtyard while surveying damage from last month’s deadly wildfires. On Page 10, Ann Rodgers hears from Catholics whose faith was tested by the horrific disaster but are seeing God’s providence at work in ways big and small.

Howard Lolesio, maintenance man for Maria Lanakila Church and School in Lahaina, Maui, touches a statue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in the parish courtyard while surveying damage from last month’s deadly wildfires. On Page 10, Ann Rodgers hears from Catholics whose faith was tested by the horrific disaster but are seeing God’s providence at work in ways big and small.

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ANGELUS<br />

MIRACLES<br />

IN MAUI<br />

How survivors are seeing<br />

God in the destruction<br />

<strong>September</strong> 8, <strong>2023</strong> <strong>Vol</strong>. 8 <strong>No</strong>. <strong>18</strong>


ANGELUS<br />

<strong>September</strong> 8, <strong>2023</strong><br />

<strong>Vol</strong>. 8 • <strong>No</strong>. <strong>18</strong><br />

3424 Wilshire Blvd.,<br />

Los Angeles, CA 90010-2241<br />

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Published by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese<br />

of Los Angeles by The Tidings<br />

(a corporation), established <strong>18</strong>95.<br />

Publisher<br />

ARCHBISHOP JOSÉ H. GOMEZ<br />

Vice Chancellor for Communications<br />

DAVID SCOTT<br />

Editor-in-Chief<br />

PABLO KAY<br />

pkay@angelusnews.com<br />

Associate Editor<br />

MIKE CISNEROS<br />

Multimedia Editor<br />

TAMARA LONG-GARCÍA<br />

Production Artist<br />

ARACELI CHAVEZ<br />

Photo Editor<br />

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Managing Editor<br />

RICHARD G. BEEMER<br />

Assistant Editor<br />

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Advertising Manager<br />

JIM GARCIA<br />

jagarcia@angelusnews.com<br />

ON THE COVER<br />

MARIA LANAKILA CHURCH<br />

Howard Lolesio, maintenance man for Maria Lanakila<br />

Church and School in Lahaina, Maui, touches a statue of<br />

the Sacred Heart of Jesus in the parish courtyard while<br />

surveying damage from last month’s deadly wildfires. On<br />

Page 10, Ann Rodgers hears from Catholics whose faith<br />

was tested by the horrific disaster but are seeing God’s<br />

providence at work in ways big and small.<br />

THIS PAGE<br />

VICTOR ALEMÁN<br />

Archbishop José H. Gomez blesses nine new<br />

seminarians beginning formation for the LA<br />

Archdiocese at the annual Summer Mass for<br />

seminarians at the Cathedral of Our Lady of<br />

the Angels Aug. 11. The Mass was followed by<br />

a lunch in the cathedral residence sponsored<br />

by the Serra Club. A total of 56 seminarians are<br />

studying for the archdiocese this year.<br />

ANGELUS is published biweekly by The<br />

Tidings (a corporation), established <strong>18</strong>95.<br />

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California. One-year subscriptions (26<br />

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publication may be reproduced without the written<br />

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Pope Watch.................................................................................................................................... 2<br />

Archbishop Gomez..................................................................................................................... 3<br />

World, Nation, and Local <strong>News</strong>.......................................................................................... 4-6<br />

In Other Words............................................................................................................................. 7<br />

Father Rolheiser............................................................................................................................ 8<br />

Scott Hahn................................................................................................................................... 32<br />

Events Calendar......................................................................................................................... 33<br />

14<br />

16<br />

<strong>18</strong><br />

20<br />

24<br />

CONTENTS<br />

Local teen goes to new heights for faith, his vocation, and service<br />

With eviction bans expiring, LA residents reach a breaking point<br />

John Allen: The African country Pope Francis hasn’t given up on<br />

Despite being anti-religious, Yeats created this poignant Catholic poem<br />

Charlie Camosy: California’s disturbing abortion distortion<br />

Sign up for our free, daily e-newsletter<br />

Always Forward - newsletter.angelusnews.com<br />

26<br />

30<br />

Grazie Christie pens an elegy for a child lost to abortion<br />

Heather King: A documentary on finding yourself when nobody’s around<br />

B • ANGELUS • <strong>September</strong> 8, <strong>2023</strong> <strong>September</strong> 8, <strong>2023</strong> • ANGELUS • 1


POPE WATCH<br />

A new ‘green’ document?<br />

Pope Francis revealed he is writing<br />

an update to his 2015 encyclical<br />

on the environment, “Laudato Sí.”<br />

The pope made the announcement<br />

while thanking a group of European<br />

lawyers for their attention to environmental<br />

protection laws during an Aug.<br />

21 meeting at the Vatican. While the<br />

pope provided no further information,<br />

Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni later<br />

confirmed to Catholic <strong>News</strong> Agency<br />

that “the pope is working on a letter<br />

updating ‘Laudato Sí ’ with regard to the<br />

recent environmental crises.”<br />

“ ‘Laudato Sí,’ On Care for Our Common<br />

Home” was the title of Francis’<br />

2015 encyclical letter on the need for an<br />

“integral ecology” that respects the dignity<br />

and value of the human person, helps<br />

the poor, and safeguards the planet. It is<br />

the second of three encyclicals published<br />

in Francis’ pontificate thus far.<br />

The title, which means “Praise be<br />

to you,” was taken from St. Francis of<br />

Assisi’s medieval Italian prayer “Canticle<br />

of the Sun,” which praises God through<br />

elements of creation like Brother Sun,<br />

Sister Moon, and “our Sister Mother<br />

Earth.”<br />

The pope made his latest remark in the<br />

context of thanking the lawyers for their<br />

“willingness to work for the development<br />

of a normative framework aimed at<br />

protecting the environment.”<br />

“It must never be forgotten,” he said,<br />

“that future generations are entitled to<br />

receive from our hands a beautiful and<br />

habitable world, and that this entails<br />

grave responsibilities toward the natural<br />

world that we have received from the<br />

benevolent hands of God.”<br />

Members of the group Francis met<br />

with represented presidents of European<br />

bars and legal associations who signed a<br />

declaration in 2022 calling on countries<br />

to uphold and respect the rule of law, especially<br />

in times of crisis like that created<br />

by Russia’s war on Ukraine.<br />

“These times of social and economic<br />

crisis, as well as a crisis of identity and<br />

security, challenge the democracies of<br />

the West to provide an effective response,<br />

while remaining faithful to their<br />

principles,” particularly the promotion of<br />

democracy and respect for freedom and<br />

human dignity, he said.<br />

“Fear of civil unrest and acts of<br />

violence, the prospect of destabilizing<br />

change, and the need to act effectively<br />

in confronting emergency situations,<br />

can result in the temptation to make<br />

exceptions or to restrict — at least provisionally<br />

— the rule of law in the effort to<br />

find easy and immediate solutions,” the<br />

pope said.<br />

Francis thanked the group for proposing<br />

the elimination of any crisis time<br />

exceptions to maintaining the rule of<br />

law.<br />

“For the rule of law,” he said, “stands<br />

at the service of the human person<br />

and aims to protect the dignity of each,<br />

which admits no exception.”<br />

The pope cautioned, however, that<br />

laws promoting the dignity of the human<br />

person must be based on the truth about<br />

human beings, their divine origin, and<br />

their ultimate destination. “Without<br />

the constant effort to pursue the truth<br />

about the human person, in accordance<br />

with God’s plan, individuals become<br />

the measure of themselves and their<br />

actions.”<br />

Reporting courtesy of Catholic <strong>News</strong><br />

Service Rome bureau chief Cindy Wooden<br />

and Catholic <strong>News</strong> Agency Rome<br />

correspondent Hannah Brockhaus.<br />

Papal Prayer Intention for <strong>September</strong>: We pray for those<br />

persons living on the margins of society, in inhumane life<br />

conditions; may they not be overlooked by institutions and<br />

never considered of lesser importance.<br />

On Aug. 26, Archbishop Gomez celebrated<br />

the annual Queen of Angels Mass<br />

and Mass for Cultures at the Cathedral<br />

of Our Lady of the Angels. The following<br />

is adapted from his homily.<br />

We remember the founding<br />

of our great city today under<br />

the mantle of Nuestra Señora<br />

de los Angeles de Porciuncula, Our<br />

Lady the Queen of Angels.<br />

Holy Mary is the Queen of Heaven,<br />

the Lady of All Creation! Clothed with<br />

the sun, the moon at her feet, all the<br />

angels and saints, the prophets, apostles,<br />

and martyrs pay her homage.<br />

And so do we.<br />

She is the mother of God, and we are<br />

her children, each one of us. She is one<br />

mother, and we are many peoples!<br />

Today we are celebrating once again<br />

the beautiful diversity of cultures, and<br />

peoples, and languages that make<br />

up the one family of God here in the<br />

Archdiocese of Los Angeles. And we<br />

come to her, from every nation, in faith<br />

and filial love.<br />

We turn our eyes to Our Lady today,<br />

just as St. Junípero Serra and his brother<br />

Franciscans did, and just as that first<br />

generation of Angelenos from San Gabriel<br />

Mission did, including our Tongva<br />

brothers and sisters, the first peoples of<br />

this land.<br />

We implore her intercession for our<br />

city, for our country, for all the countries<br />

of the Americas, and the whole<br />

world. We pray today especially for our<br />

families and our children. We ask her<br />

to turn her eyes of mercy toward us, to<br />

look upon us in her maternal care.<br />

Our Lady still longs for her Son to be<br />

born in every human heart. In your<br />

heart and mine. In the hearts of every<br />

one of our loved ones, and in the hearts<br />

of every one of our neighbors.<br />

NEW WORLD OF FAITH<br />

ARCHBISHOP JOSÉ H. GOMEZ<br />

May Our Lady’s wish become reality<br />

Pope Francis this week talked about<br />

the beautiful story of St. Juan Diego.<br />

“Let us dwell then on the testimony of<br />

St. Juan Diego,” he said, “who is the<br />

messenger, this young man, this indigenous<br />

man who received the revelation<br />

of Mary, the messenger of our Lady<br />

Guadalupe.”<br />

Our Lady Guadalupe came to Diego<br />

at the dawn of faith in the Americas,<br />

and she asked him to help her to spread<br />

the love of Jesus throughout the land.<br />

Our Lady spoke to Diego with such<br />

tender motherly love: “Listen, my<br />

youngest and dearest son … I have no<br />

lack of servants, no lack of messengers,<br />

to whom I can give the task of bearing<br />

my word. … But it is very necessary that<br />

you personally go … that my wish may<br />

become a reality.”<br />

I believe our mother is speaking those<br />

same words to you and to me, in this<br />

generation.<br />

It is very necessary that we go out, each<br />

one of us personally, and make our<br />

mother’s wishes real — in our time and<br />

in our place. Just as Mary said yes to the<br />

angel Gabriel in the Gospel today, she<br />

is calling each of us to say yes.<br />

We all know Mary’s beautiful words by<br />

heart: “Behold, I am the handmaid of<br />

the Lord. May it be done to me according<br />

to your word.”<br />

Today, let us ask for the grace to make<br />

these words our own, to live these words<br />

in our own lives. We ask for the grace to<br />

say yes, as Mary did — to do the will of<br />

God in our lives, and to bring Jesus into<br />

the world.<br />

Our Lady is calling us to continue the<br />

mission to Los Angeles, and we need to<br />

answer her call. It is urgent. So many<br />

souls are waiting to know Jesus, and so<br />

many are lost without him! And these<br />

souls may never meet Jesus unless we<br />

are the ones who introduce them.<br />

We are apostles, missionaries, we<br />

are servants and messengers. Just like<br />

Diego, just like Serra and those first<br />

Angelenos from Mission San Gabriel.<br />

You have a part to play that no one<br />

else can play! And it is so beautiful to<br />

speak to others about Jesus, to tell others<br />

about our love for him and our Blessed<br />

Mother. This is the true meaning of our<br />

lives: to love Jesus and to share our love<br />

for him with others.<br />

So let us ask for the grace today to truly<br />

be messengers of the love of God and<br />

the love of Mary, our Blessed Mother,<br />

for everyone.<br />

If we speak honestly to others from<br />

our heart, if we offer love with genuine<br />

affection in every situation, if we bring<br />

So many souls are waiting to know Jesus, and so<br />

many are lost without him! And these souls may<br />

never meet Jesus unless we are the ones who<br />

introduce them.<br />

peace wherever we can. If we do these<br />

things, Jesus will do the rest! He will<br />

make Our Lady’s wish a reality through<br />

each one of us.<br />

So, let us make that our prayer today,<br />

and every day. Holy Mary, Queen of the<br />

Angels and Mother of the Church, pray<br />

for us!<br />

2 • ANGELUS • <strong>September</strong> 8, <strong>2023</strong> <strong>September</strong> 8, <strong>2023</strong> • ANGELUS • 3


WORLD<br />

NATION<br />

■ Brazil: Theologian has<br />

regrets about liberation<br />

theology<br />

Friar Clodovis Boff, brother of famous<br />

liberation theologian Leonardo<br />

Boff and a former proponent of the<br />

movement himself, has written a book<br />

claiming that liberation theology has<br />

resulted in the decline of Catholicism<br />

in his native Brazil.<br />

“It is necessary for the Church to<br />

once again emphasize Christ as priest,<br />

as master and Lord, and not just the<br />

fight against poverty and the climate<br />

crisis,” writes the 79-year-old Boff in<br />

his new book “The Crisis in the Catholic<br />

Church and Liberation Theology.”<br />

“These are important questions,<br />

but without drinking from Christ,<br />

who is the source, everything dries up,<br />

everything dies.”<br />

Since the 1960s when the movement<br />

began influencing the religious<br />

thought of Brazil, the population of<br />

Catholics has decreased from 90% to<br />

51%. Only 8% of Brazilian Catholics<br />

attend Mass, the third lowest among<br />

36 countries analyzed by the Center<br />

for Applied Research in the Apostolate<br />

(CARA) published this January.<br />

Friar Clodovis Boff. | EDITORA DIVINA MISERICÓRDIA<br />

BRAZIL<br />

Here to see our mother — Cardinal-designate Grzegorz Rys greets pilgrims at the Jasna Gora Summit, the peak<br />

of a hill where the famous Black Madonna shrine is located in Czestochowa, Poland, on Aug. 24. Almost 5,000<br />

pilgrims walked to the shrine Aug. 21-24 in 10 different groups from the Archdiocese of Lodz. | OSV NEWS/<br />

ARCHDIOCESE OF LODZ<br />

■ Jesuits kicked<br />

out of Nicaragua<br />

The Nicaraguan government<br />

announced they would seize all the<br />

assets of the Society of Jesus in the<br />

country and revoke the order’s legal<br />

status Aug. 23.<br />

This act is the latest in rising religious<br />

persecution by the dictatorial<br />

Daniel Ortega regime, which has<br />

arrested or sent into exile dozens of<br />

clerics, including Bishop Rolando Álvarez.<br />

The government predicated the<br />

order’s dissolution with claims that it<br />

had not reported financial statements<br />

for three years.<br />

Predating the order’s legal dissolution,<br />

the state assumed the assets of<br />

Jesuit-run Central American University<br />

(UCA) and a neighboring residence<br />

on Aug. 15 and 19, respectively.<br />

“The Ortega-Murillo seizure of the<br />

Jesuit-run Universidad Central Americana<br />

represents the further erosion of<br />

democratic norms and a stifling civic<br />

space,” Vedant Patel, a spokesperson<br />

for the U.S. State Department, told<br />

EWTN <strong>News</strong> Nightly following the<br />

seizure of UCA.<br />

■ Vatican peace envoy<br />

urges Ukraine to negotiate<br />

The pope’s personal peace envoy for<br />

the war in Ukraine, Cardinal Matteo<br />

Zuppi of Bologna, made comments<br />

that appeared to prod Ukrainian officials<br />

toward peace talks.<br />

“A just and secure peace must be<br />

sought, not with weapons but with dialogue,”<br />

he said, adding that “dialogue<br />

is not a betrayal, it does not involve an<br />

unjust peace.”<br />

Pope Francis has long called for a<br />

cease-fire and negotiations between<br />

Ukraine and Russia, but Ukrainian<br />

president <strong>Vol</strong>odymyr Zelenskyy has<br />

so far rejected the Vatican’s offer to<br />

mediate peace talks.<br />

“We do not need mediators, we need<br />

a just peace,” Zelenskyy said in a TV<br />

interview following a May meeting<br />

with Francis. “Putin only kills. We<br />

don’t need a mediation with him.”<br />

But Zuppi cited a recent agreement<br />

that allowed Ukraine to resume exporting<br />

grain, saying, “If an agreement<br />

on grain was reached, the same can<br />

be done for putting an end to hostilities.”<br />

Mother Teresa Agnes Gerlach and Bishop Michael<br />

F. Olson of Fort Worth. | OSV NEWS/COURTESY<br />

MATTHEW BOBO/BOB ROLLER<br />

■ Texas: Did these nuns<br />

just excommunicate<br />

themselves?<br />

A Texas bishop said a community<br />

of Carmelites in his diocese may be<br />

excommunicated.<br />

The Monastery of the Most Holy<br />

Trinity in Arlington, Texas, has been<br />

at the center of controversy since late<br />

April, when Bishop Michael Olson<br />

of Fort Worth investigated allegations<br />

that the community’s prioress, Mother<br />

Teresa Agnes Gerlach of Jesus Crucified,<br />

had broken her vow of chastity<br />

with a priest. The investigation is<br />

awaiting Vatican review, and a related<br />

civil case was rejected by the Texas<br />

courts.<br />

On Aug. <strong>18</strong>, Gerlach announced<br />

that the community can “no longer<br />

recognize the authority of, and can<br />

have no further relations with” Olson<br />

or his officials.<br />

Olson suggested the prioress had<br />

placed herself in schism by publishing<br />

the statement, incurring upon herself<br />

excommunication.<br />

Days later, the nuns’ civil lawyer<br />

responded by stating that they “are not<br />

separating from the Catholic Church”<br />

but rather that they “do not and will<br />

not recognize this bishop’s unwarranted<br />

and unauthorized abuse and<br />

wielding of the complete power he<br />

suddenly is trying to exercise over the<br />

monastery.”<br />

Despite Olson’s orders that the<br />

Carmel be closed to visitors, the sisters<br />

have insisted their chapel will remain<br />

open to the public.<br />

■ Should Catholic schools take government funds?<br />

A Catholic writer fears the “Trojan Horse of Government Funds” used by a<br />

new Catholic charter school in Oklahoma could jeopardize Catholic identity.<br />

“Just because we can do something does not mean we should,” wrote Kathleen<br />

Porter-Magee, the superintendent of Partnership Schools, a network of urban<br />

Catholic schools in New York and Cleveland, in America magazine. “Those<br />

of us who are working to find innovative ways to sustain authentically Catholic<br />

education … would do well to pause before we rush to the government for aid.”<br />

The op-ed was in response to the Oklahoma Virtual Charter Board’s 3 to 2 vote<br />

that allowed the nation’s first religious charter school. The decision is now being<br />

reviewed by courts to determine if Catholic schools could be eligible for charter<br />

funding.<br />

By receiving government aid, the school could be bound by court rulings that<br />

recognize charter schools as public actors, Porter-Magee said.<br />

“If charters are public schools, could a religious charter require school leaders<br />

to be Catholic, as most parochial schools currently do?” she writes. “Would it<br />

be bound by state curriculum guidelines that violate Catholic teaching and<br />

beliefs?”<br />

■ Portland, LA part of incendiary FBI memo<br />

Multiple FBI field offices may have contributed to the bureau’s investigation<br />

into traditional Catholics earlier this year, the House Judiciary Committee<br />

claimed Aug. 9.<br />

The investigation, which targeted “radical traditionalist” Catholics that the<br />

FBI suggested were tied to a “far-right white nationalist movement,” was made<br />

known to the public via a leaked memo in February.<br />

The memo, which was published by the FBI office in Richmond, Virginia,<br />

involved information from the bureau’s Portland and Los Angeles offices, the<br />

Judiciary Committee claimed in a press release.<br />

Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, committee chairman, subpoenaed the FBI to turn over<br />

communications between the three field offices as it continues its investigation.<br />

A painful memorial — Catholics marked the 78th anniversary of the United States’ 1945 atomic bombings in<br />

Japan with calls for nuclear disarmament, prayers for peace, and a protest at the White House Aug. 9, which included<br />

a display of historical photographs documenting the effects of nuclear weapons. | OSV NEWS/KATE SCANLON<br />

4 • ANGELUS • <strong>September</strong> 8, <strong>2023</strong> <strong>September</strong> 8, <strong>2023</strong> • ANGELUS • 5


LOCAL<br />

IN OTHER WORDS...<br />

Hail for a hundred — Archbishop José H. Gomez poses with staff, employees, and religious during a centennial<br />

Mass to celebrate St. Mary’s Medical Center in Long Beach’s 100th anniversary. The hospital was established in<br />

1923 by the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word, the only Catholic hospital south of Los Angeles at the time. |<br />

PHOTO COURTESY OF DIGNITY HEALTH<br />

■ Sisters of the Holy Faith honored for 70 years in LA<br />

Angela Hallahan, Gabrielle O’Byrne, Joan Hogan, Paula Strohfus, Niamh O’Mahony,<br />

Dolores Maguire, and Miriam Harney were just some of the Sisters of the Holy<br />

Faith in attendance for the celebration at St. John of God Church in <strong>No</strong>rwalk. |<br />

SUBMITTED PHOTO<br />

The Sisters of<br />

the Holy Faith<br />

were honored<br />

at St. John of<br />

God Church in<br />

<strong>No</strong>rwalk on Aug.<br />

19 for 70 years<br />

of service to the<br />

Archdiocese of<br />

Los Angeles. The<br />

event included<br />

a fundraiser for<br />

the Margaret<br />

Aylward Center<br />

in Pico Rivera,<br />

where the sisters<br />

offer social, educational,<br />

and human development services to those in need.<br />

Several of the Sisters of the Holy Faith attended the event to be honored. Originally<br />

from Ireland, the sisters had intended to decline the invitation to come to<br />

Los Angeles, but the letter was never received. The sisters arrived in 1953 and<br />

helped at St. John of God’s school before branching out to other schools in the<br />

area, including Bishop Alemany in Mission Hills, St. Emydius in Lynwood, and<br />

St. Raymond in Downey.<br />

Their ministry eventually expanded to include archdiocese Religious Education,<br />

Catholic Cemeteries, pastoral ministry, and the Margaret Aylward Center.<br />

■ Beverly Hills parish<br />

earns historic landmark<br />

status<br />

The Church of the Good Shepherd<br />

in Beverly Hills was designated by the<br />

city’s Cultural Heritage Commission<br />

as a historic landmark, as the parish<br />

celebrates its 100th anniversary.<br />

The commission made the recommendation<br />

during its July 12 meeting<br />

and the City Council recognized the<br />

designation prior to the Church of<br />

the Good Shepherd’s centennial Mass<br />

with Archbishop José H. Gomez on<br />

Aug. 13.<br />

The anniversary Mass featured<br />

Father Ed Benioff, Good Shepherd’s<br />

pastor, as well as dignitaries including<br />

former California Gov. Gray Davis,<br />

Beverly Hills Mayor Julian Gold,<br />

and Beverly Hills Police Department<br />

Chief Mark Stainbrook.<br />

The church was founded in 1923,<br />

only nine years after the City of Beverly<br />

Hills was incorporated.<br />

■ Thomas Aquinas<br />

College survives rare<br />

‘hurriquake’<br />

Students at Thomas Aquinas College<br />

in Santa Paula were already bracing<br />

themselves for Hurricane Hilary when<br />

the Catholic college was jolted by a<br />

5.1 earthquake centered in nearby<br />

Ojai.<br />

Although no one was harmed, the<br />

tremor — along with several significant<br />

aftershocks — caused the bell<br />

in the 135-foot-high belltower of Our<br />

Lady of the Most Holy Trinity Chapel<br />

to become dislodged and a statue of<br />

St. Thomas Aquinas in the school’s<br />

dining hall to come down.<br />

Extensive plaster repairs will be<br />

needed “in most if not all campus<br />

buildings,” the college said in an Aug.<br />

21 release.<br />

The earthquake damage also forced<br />

the temporary postponement of the<br />

Mass of the Holy Spirit at the chapel,<br />

which marks the college’s beginning<br />

of the school year.<br />

V<br />

Letters to the Editor<br />

Finding grace for a tortured artist<br />

Thank you so much for publishing the marvelous article by Elizabeth<br />

Lev about Henri Matisse and the rosary chapel in Vence, entitled “An<br />

atheist’s chapel in France.”<br />

As always, Lev has such a beautiful way with words when it comes to describing<br />

anything to do with art and art history. The story itself conveys such a profound<br />

sense of hope — the reader can’t help but desire, and hope for, the salvation of<br />

this wayward artist, Matisse, to whom God gave a great creative talent, a heavy<br />

cross, and a unique opportunity for redemption — and who poured his heart and<br />

soul and waning strength into the creation of this sacred space.<br />

— Marilyn Boussaid, St. James Church, Redondo Beach<br />

Are large families welcome enough in church?<br />

I was sorry to read the Aug. 25 article by Faith Jablonski, “Parishes need to be<br />

more welcoming. They should start with large families,” on <strong>Angelus</strong><strong>News</strong>.com<br />

because it describes an unfortunate experience that has not been my family’s.<br />

Our parish is a bit of a Disney World for young Catholic families: eight altar<br />

servers at each Mass, and any family with less than five children is considered a<br />

small one. In each pew, there’s a holy card that says something to the effect of “a<br />

quiet church is a dying church. We welcome your baby’s crying and are glad that<br />

you are here.”<br />

Still, as the mother of a disabled child, I hope that the Church can do a better<br />

job of listening to the voices of families trying their best to pass on the faith to their<br />

kids, especially in the pews on Sundays.<br />

— Stephanie Thigpen, Stillwater, Minnesota<br />

Y<br />

Continue the conversation! To submit a letter to the editor, visit <strong>Angelus</strong><strong>News</strong>.com/Letters-To-The-Editor<br />

and use our online form or send an email to editorial@angelusnews.com. Please limit to 300 words. Letters<br />

may be edited for style, brevity, and clarity.<br />

Celebrating culture<br />

Cultural dancers perform at the “One Mother, Many Peoples” Mass<br />

at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels on Aug. 26. The special<br />

Mass and rosary service celebrated the rich diversity found within<br />

the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. | JOHN RUEDA/ADLA<br />

View more photos<br />

from this gallery at<br />

<strong>Angelus</strong><strong>News</strong>.com/photos-videos<br />

Do you have photos or a story from your parish that you’d<br />

like to share? Please send to editorial @angelusnews.com.<br />

“If Christ Jesus was here on<br />

this earth in the flesh, he’d<br />

be on Skid Row.”<br />

~ A person experiencing homelessness on Skid Row,<br />

in an Aug. <strong>18</strong> Commonweal article on “The Dirty<br />

Divide” documentary.<br />

“When I was born, the<br />

petrified forest was only<br />

mildly intimidated.”<br />

~ Sister Jean Dolores Bertha Schmidt, known simply<br />

as “Sister Jean,” in an Aug. 21 tweet on her 104th<br />

birthday. <strong>No</strong>w in Chicago, Schmidt taught in LA<br />

Catholic schools during the 1940s and 50s.<br />

“It was a once-in-a-lifetime<br />

experience. In a bad way.”<br />

~ Jilliam Furino, manager of the Westridge Market<br />

& Fine Foods in Ojai, in an Aug. 22 LA Times article<br />

on the city enduring a “hurriquake.”<br />

“It’s impossible to whiteknuckle<br />

your way to<br />

heaven.”<br />

~ Father Mike Schmitz, popular podcast host, in an<br />

Aug. 24 OSV <strong>News</strong> article on his speech for Catholics<br />

to “get back in the game.”<br />

“It was always wrong to<br />

believe that people are<br />

either saints or they’re<br />

sinners.”<br />

~ Larry Krasner, Philadelphia district attorney, in an<br />

Aug. 15 New York Times article on minors sentenced<br />

to life in prison as young people.<br />

“I died three times in the<br />

helicopter. I saw Jesus.”<br />

~ Ed Beckley, a stunt performer, in an Aug. 14 The<br />

New Yorker article on the aura of monster truck<br />

shows.<br />

6 • ANGELUS • <strong>September</strong> 8, <strong>2023</strong> <strong>September</strong> 8, <strong>2023</strong> • ANGELUS • 7


IN EXILE<br />

FATHER RONALD ROLHEISER, OMI<br />

Oblate of Mary Immaculate Father<br />

Ronald Rolheiser is a spiritual<br />

writer; ronrolheiser.com<br />

Unfinished relationships<br />

A<br />

colleague of mine, a clinical therapist, shares this<br />

story: A woman came to him in considerable distress.<br />

Her husband had recently died of a heart attack. His<br />

death had been unexpected and came at a most inept time.<br />

They’d been happily married for 30 years and, during all<br />

those years, had never had a major crisis in their relationship.<br />

But, on the day her husband died, they had gotten<br />

into an argument about something very insignificant and it<br />

had escalated to where they began to hurl some mean and<br />

cutting words at each other.<br />

At a point, agitated and angry, her husband walked out<br />

of the room, told her he was going shopping, then died of<br />

a heart attack before he got to the car. Understandably,<br />

the woman was devastated, both by the unexpected death<br />

of her spouse but by that last exchange. “All these years,”<br />

she lamented, “we had this loving relationship and then<br />

we had this useless argument over nothing, and it ends up<br />

being our last conversation!”<br />

The therapist led off with something meant in humor.<br />

He said, “How horrible of him to do that to you! To die<br />

just then!” Obviously, the man hadn’t intended his death,<br />

but its timing was in fact awfully unfair to his wife, as it left<br />

her holding a guilt that was seemingly permanent with no<br />

apparent avenue for resolution.<br />

However, then the therapist went into a different mode.<br />

He asked her, “If you had your husband back for five<br />

minutes what would you say to him?” Without hesitation,<br />

she answered: “I’d tell him how much I loved him, how<br />

good he was to me for all these years, and how our little<br />

moment of anger at the end was a meaningless epi-second<br />

that means nothing in terms of our love.”<br />

The therapist then said, “You’re a woman of faith, you<br />

believe in the communion of saints; well, your husband is<br />

alive still and present to you now, so why don’t you just say<br />

all those things to him right now. It’s not too late to express<br />

all that to him!”<br />

He’s right. It’s never too late! It’s never too late to tell our<br />

deceased loved ones how we really feel about them. It’s<br />

never too late to apologize for the ways we might have hurt<br />

them. It’s never too late to ask their forgiveness for our negligence<br />

in the relationship, and it’s never too late to speak<br />

the words of appreciation, affirmation, and gratitude that<br />

we should have spoken to them while they were alive. As<br />

Christians, we have the great consolation of knowing that<br />

death isn’t final, that it’s never too late.<br />

And we desperately need that particular consolation,<br />

that second chance. <strong>No</strong> matter who we are, we’re always<br />

inadequate in our relationships. We can’t always be present<br />

to our loved ones as we should, we sometimes say things in<br />

anger and bitterness that leave deep scars, we betray trust<br />

in all kinds of ways, and we mostly lack the maturity and<br />

self-confidence to express the affirmation we should be<br />

conveying to our loved ones. <strong>No</strong>ne of us ever fully measures<br />

up.<br />

When Karl Rahner said that none of us ever have the “full<br />

symphony” in this life, he isn’t just referring to the fact that<br />

none of us ever fully realizes her dream, he’s also referring<br />

to the fact that in all of our most important relationships<br />

none of us ever fully measures up. We cannot not be disappointing<br />

sometimes.<br />

At the end of the day, all of us lose loved ones in ways similar<br />

to how that woman lost her husband, with unfinished<br />

business, with bad timing. There are always things that<br />

should have been said and weren’t and there are always<br />

things that shouldn’t have been said and were.<br />

But that’s where our Christian faith comes in. We aren’t<br />

the only ones who come up short. At the moment of Jesus’<br />

death, virtually all of his disciples had deserted. The timing<br />

here was also very bad. Good Friday was bad long before it<br />

was good. But, and this is the point, as Christians, we don’t<br />

believe there will always be perfect endings in this life, nor<br />

that we will always be adequate in life. Rather, we believe<br />

that the fullness of life and happiness will come to us<br />

through the redemption of what has gone wrong, not least<br />

with what has gone wrong because of our own inadequacies<br />

and weakness.<br />

G.K. Chesterton said that Christianity is special because<br />

in its belief in the communion of saints, “even the dead get<br />

a vote.” They get more than a vote. They still get to hear<br />

what we’re saying to them.<br />

So, if you’ve lost a loved one in a situation where there<br />

was still something unresolved, where there was still a<br />

tension that needed easing, where you should have been<br />

more attentive, or where you feel badly because you never<br />

adequately expressed the affirmation and affection that you<br />

might have, know it’s not too late. It can all still be done!<br />

8 • ANGELUS • <strong>September</strong> 8, <strong>2023</strong>


SIGNS TO<br />

CARRY ON<br />

Even after wildfires caused untold<br />

death and destruction, survivors say<br />

God hasn’t forgotten about Maui.<br />

BY ANN RODGERS<br />

At dawn on Tuesday, Aug. 8,<br />

Hurricane Dora churned 600<br />

miles off Hawaii, but its winds<br />

had already torn a solar panel off the<br />

roof of Sacred Hearts School at historic<br />

Maria Lanakila Church in Lahaina<br />

on Maui. Principal Tonata Ah Lolesio<br />

sent her maintenance man husband<br />

up a ladder to attempt repairs, but he<br />

was nearly blown over.<br />

As she and the pastor, Father Kuriakose<br />

Nadooparambil, discussed the<br />

options, they saw a utility pole down<br />

in front of the church. School was<br />

canceled.<br />

By dusk, the school building was in<br />

ruins.<br />

The town had been immolated by<br />

wind-whipped wildfires that incinerated<br />

at least 2,000 homes and businesses.<br />

So far, 115 bodies have been found<br />

and about 380 people remain missing.<br />

At Maria Lanakila, the school was<br />

half gone, the convent and parish hall<br />

destroyed. But the church, founded in<br />

<strong>18</strong>46 and later served by St. Damien<br />

of Molokai, was untouched.<br />

Some have called it a miracle, and<br />

there were more to come.<br />

Around 4 p.m., a sister called Lolesio<br />

to say that the priests and parish staff<br />

were evacuating to Maria Lanakila<br />

Mission Church in Kapalua, also<br />

called Sacred Hearts. Lolesio expected<br />

to meet them in a few minutes.<br />

Instead, she worried and prayed for<br />

two hours before they arrived with<br />

a harrowing story of barely escaping<br />

the flames after stopping to pick up<br />

fleeing residents.<br />

Some of Lolesio’s faculty and staff<br />

had lost homes, but they quickly<br />

began checking on all 220 students —<br />

without modern communications.<br />

Missionaries of Faith Father Kuriakose<br />

Nadooparambil, pastor of Maria Lanakila<br />

Church in Lahaina, Maui, touches a statue of<br />

the Virgin Mary, which still stands amid foliage<br />

untouched by the wildfire that scorched<br />

trees across the street and destroyed the<br />

entire town of Lahaina. | MARIA LANAKILA<br />

PARISH<br />

“I’m sure you can imagine how<br />

much anxiety that caused. We were<br />

just praying that all the kids would<br />

come back as accounted for and safe,”<br />

she said.<br />

They were. It was another miracle.<br />

However, about 120 students have<br />

been displaced to other parts of the<br />

island, state, and nation. Joining<br />

about 100 returning students will be<br />

125 newcomers whose public school<br />

burned down. Plans are in the works<br />

to subsidize tuition for those who lost<br />

homes and jobs.<br />

School resumed Aug. 28, initially at<br />

Sacred Hearts Mission Church, and<br />

eventually at an office park that the<br />

diocese will lease and renovate into<br />

classrooms. Because Maria Lanakila<br />

is in a condemned zone, Lolesio does<br />

not expect to teach there again for<br />

years.<br />

The students “are moving from hotel<br />

to hotel, from family home to family<br />

home,” she said. “We want to be able<br />

to provide some sense of stability.”<br />

They will bring a few grades back at<br />

a time, starting with the youngest. A<br />

childhood trauma specialist will have<br />

each child “adopt” a weighted teddy<br />

bear, in which they will be encouraged<br />

to confide their thoughts and<br />

anxieties.<br />

Visible proof of a miracle?<br />

About 25 miles away, on Aug.<br />

8 Msgr. Terrence Watanabe had<br />

thought his biggest challenge that day<br />

would be the roof damage at Sacred<br />

Hearts School. The wind was calm on<br />

his side of the island.<br />

Then news channels erupted with reports<br />

of wildfires consuming Lahaina.<br />

Watanabe, the vicar forane for Maui’s<br />

10 parishes and pastor of St. Anthony<br />

of Padua Church in Wailuku, began<br />

to pray hard.<br />

“We asked God to be with those people.<br />

We couldn’t run in there to help<br />

because of the fires,” he said.<br />

For days he was unable to reach the<br />

pastor and staff of Maria Lanakila.<br />

Phone lines and cell towers were ash<br />

and molten metal. He didn’t know if<br />

An aerial view shows the community of Lahaina<br />

after wildfires driven by high winds burned across<br />

most of the town in Maui, Hawaii, on Aug. 10. |<br />

OSV NEWS/MARCO GARCIA, REUTERS<br />

the priests, sisters, and lay staff were<br />

alive.<br />

Eventually the pastor called from<br />

a hilltop with a weak cell signal. He<br />

obtained a police escort to inspect<br />

Maria Lanakila, whose name means<br />

Our Lady of Victory.<br />

What the priests found awed them.<br />

The convent, parish hall, and most<br />

of the school were destroyed, the trees<br />

in the cemetery next to the church<br />

charred and withered. But the church<br />

wasn’t even smoke-stained.<br />

The interior walls and mosaic of St.<br />

Damien were pristine. Days after the<br />

inferno, flowers gracing the altar, statues,<br />

and an image of Divine Mercy<br />

appeared fresh-picked.<br />

“The church of Maria Lanakila<br />

stands as a sign of hope. It wasn’t<br />

singed or scorched,” Watanabe said.<br />

It “was completely surrounded by fire,<br />

so the heat must have been incredible.<br />

But the grass was still green in front of<br />

the church.”<br />

<strong>No</strong>w, the priest is helping Catholic<br />

Charities of Hawaii erect 350 miniature<br />

“palette homes” on church property<br />

for relief workers and displaced<br />

residents.<br />

Each unit holds just two sets of bunk<br />

beds. Shower and laundry facilities<br />

will be in separate portable buildings.<br />

A donor in Oregon offered them to<br />

Catholic Charities and the Matson<br />

shipping company will deliver them<br />

for free, Watanabe said. Catholic<br />

Charities is also sending trauma<br />

counselors.<br />

As survivors emerge from the initial<br />

shock, “we’re starting to see some call<br />

for spiritual support,” he said.<br />

A long road to healing<br />

Catholicism on Maui has a remarkable<br />

history. The first Catholic<br />

priests to arrive in Hawaii in <strong>18</strong>27<br />

were persecuted and forced off the<br />

islands four years later. Hundreds of<br />

Hawaiian Catholics were imprisoned.<br />

But lay catechists on Maui were such<br />

powerful evangelizers that the priests<br />

who returned in <strong>18</strong>46 found 4,000<br />

converts eager for baptism.<br />

Today, Catholicism is the largest<br />

religious body in Hawaii. Its traditions<br />

have been enriched by waves of immigrants<br />

from Portugal, Puerto Rico,<br />

and the Philippines. Many homes<br />

destroyed in Lahaina belonged to<br />

first-generation Filipino immigrants.<br />

On Aug. 8, Angela Baraquio Grey,<br />

the Hawaiian daughter of Filipino immigrants<br />

who became the first Asian<br />

10 • ANGELUS • <strong>September</strong> 8, <strong>2023</strong> <strong>September</strong> 8, <strong>2023</strong> • ANGELUS • 11


Miss America in 2001, was preparing<br />

for the first day of school at St. Anthony<br />

of Padua in Gardena, where she<br />

is the principal. Her son sent a news<br />

story about the fires, then her social<br />

media blew up.<br />

A high school friend in Lahaina was<br />

begging for prayers. Her uncle was<br />

missing, and would later be found<br />

dead.<br />

“So it wasn’t just an article anymore.<br />

It was something very close to home,”<br />

Grey said.<br />

Despite her losses, her friend was<br />

raising money to help her neighbors.<br />

Days later she watched a video of her<br />

friend walking through the apocalypse<br />

of her neighborhood. She passed<br />

scorched skeletons of trees, cars with<br />

melted tires, cinderblock pillars<br />

marking the graves of houses. A metal<br />

bed frame or seared refrigerator might<br />

be the only discernible belongings.<br />

Birds chirped incongruously in the<br />

background.<br />

Grey, who has maintained a speaking<br />

platform on character education<br />

and pro-life issues, is using her media<br />

presence to help where she can.<br />

“I would ask first and foremost for<br />

prayers and the offering of Mass for<br />

the repose of the souls of those who<br />

How to help Maui<br />

Catholic leaders in Hawaii are offering advice and<br />

opportunities to help fire survivors.<br />

Cash and gift cards to major chain stores — Target,<br />

Walmart, Macys, and Safeway among them — are<br />

needed most. They are begging people not to send clothes,<br />

which are a logistical nightmare to sort and distribute.<br />

And they are aware of how much help the Catholics of the<br />

Archdiocese of LA are giving.<br />

“I want to thank the archdiocese for everything they are<br />

doing. I know everyone is praying for us and that support<br />

is coming from many parishes. We are really grateful,” said<br />

Msgr. Terrence Watanabe, vicar forane of Maui and pastor<br />

of St. Anthony of Padua Church in Wailuku.<br />

• The Archdiocese of Los Angeles designated Aug. <strong>18</strong>-19<br />

and 26-27 for second collections to benefit the fire survivors.<br />

Donations can also be made through an ADLA QR<br />

Retired LA priest Father<br />

Ken Deasy helps out at<br />

an aid distribution center<br />

on Maui after the August<br />

wildfires. | SUBMITTED<br />

PHOTO<br />

perished,” she<br />

said.<br />

She asks people<br />

to carefully<br />

choose reputable<br />

charities that will<br />

deliver their gifts<br />

to the survivors.<br />

And she castigated some callous real<br />

estate developers.<br />

“It’s shocking,” she said. “People are<br />

trying to figure out where their loved<br />

ones are and how they are going to<br />

live and eat and drink on this day,<br />

and they are getting calls saying, ‘Do<br />

you want to sell your land?’ That is<br />

an extremely insensitive way to treat<br />

grieving people.”<br />

Her school is committed to helping,<br />

but will take time to choose the right<br />

relief project.<br />

“It will be a long road to healing<br />

for the victims, and we just need to<br />

spread love and aloha at this time,”<br />

she said.<br />

Hawaiians helping each other out<br />

On Maui the pulse of helicopters no<br />

longer signals sight-seeing flyovers,<br />

but supply drops. Boats haul emergency<br />

supplies close to a beachfront park,<br />

where volunteers riding Sea-Doos or<br />

rowing dinghies unload them, said<br />

code or at missionsla.org/product/donate and selecting<br />

“disasters relief” and specifying “Maui wildfires” in the<br />

memo box. Every cent donated will benefit those affected<br />

by the wildfires.<br />

• Your gifts will be channeled through the Archdiocese of<br />

Honolulu’s Catholic Foundation of Hawaii. It has a separate<br />

fund for Maui wildfire relief, recovery, and rebuilding:<br />

tinyurl.com/MauiCatholic.<br />

• Catholic Charities of Hawaii is also providing both<br />

immediate relief and long-term recovery operations at<br />

catholiccharitieshawaii.org.<br />

• St. Anthony of Padua in Wailuku has a fund to assist survivors<br />

of the wildfires. It is able to quickly deliver specific<br />

assistance to local people without delays for grant-writing<br />

or other red tape, Watanabe said: osvhub.com/stanthonymaui/giving/funds/maui-disaster-relief<br />

Father Ken Deasy, a retired priest of<br />

the Archdiocese of Los Angeles who<br />

shares a house with friends about two<br />

miles outside the disaster zone.<br />

“I’ve been picking up supplies because<br />

I have a truck,” he said.<br />

“The response is Catholic in every<br />

sense of the word. I’m not sure it’s<br />

very Roman, but it’s very universal.<br />

Everyone is helping one another out.”<br />

He visited the makeshift morgue,<br />

filled with about 100 bodies. “I went<br />

just to provide a little comfort to those<br />

who are grieving and waiting outside<br />

to find out if the ones they are missing<br />

are in the morgue. It’s very slow going<br />

— it will take a long time to find out,”<br />

he said.<br />

Another LA priest, Father Preston<br />

Passos, pastor of St. Mary Magdalen<br />

Church in Camarillo, had gone home<br />

to Honolulu for his 50th birthday on<br />

Aug. 8. <strong>No</strong>ne of his relatives on Maui<br />

were directly affected, although they<br />

are out of work.<br />

His home parish of St. Augustine<br />

Church by the Sea in Waikiki sprang<br />

into action with prayer and relief<br />

work. It is a sister parish of Maria Lanakila,<br />

since both are churches of the<br />

Congregation of the Sacred Hearts<br />

of Jesus and Mary, the first priests to<br />

evangelize in Hawaii.<br />

Hawaiian Catholics are calling on<br />

Sts. Damien and Marianne Cope,<br />

who cared for lepers on the island of<br />

Molokai.<br />

“Right now there is definitely a sense<br />

of closeness to them, and interest in<br />

asking for their intercession. But, as<br />

a people here in the islands there’s<br />

a very spiritual connection to each<br />

other, a devotion to helping people,<br />

regardless of what faith that they<br />

follow,” Passos said.<br />

On the Sunday after the fires, Bishop<br />

Larry Silva of the Diocese of Honolulu<br />

celebrated Mass at the mission<br />

church of Sacred Hearts. Few knew<br />

of his coming, but 200 were at 8 a.m.<br />

Mass.<br />

They came “because they were just<br />

happy to be with one another, to<br />

support one another, to hear each<br />

other’s stories,” Watanabe said. The<br />

bishop “was there to pray with them<br />

and console them.”<br />

He thought that the bishop’s homily<br />

said what people needed to hear.<br />

“He spoke about how important it is<br />

for us to continue trusting God, who<br />

promises to be with us in good times<br />

and the bad,” Watanabe said. “At the<br />

same time,” he said, “we shouldn’t<br />

be giving God the silent treatment.<br />

If you’re angry with him, it’s OK.<br />

Because God can handle it. The worst<br />

thing would be for us not to talk to<br />

Maria Lanakila Church in Lahaina on the Hawaiian<br />

island of Maui is pictured Aug. 16, untouched by the<br />

wildfire that destroyed the entire town of Lahaina<br />

Aug. 8-9. | OSV NEWS/MARIA LANAKILA PARISH<br />

God during these times. He will continue<br />

to give us the strength and courage<br />

that we need to work through this.”<br />

Ann Rodgers is a longtime religion<br />

reporter and freelance writer whose<br />

awards include the William A. Reed<br />

Lifetime Achievement Award from the<br />

Religion <strong>News</strong> Association.<br />

12 • ANGELUS • <strong>September</strong> 8, <strong>2023</strong> <strong>September</strong> 8, <strong>2023</strong> • ANGELUS • 13


An LA teenager has found a higher calling in<br />

becoming an Eagle Scout and being of service<br />

to others.<br />

BY GREG HARDESTY<br />

A<br />

50-pound pack on his back,<br />

Matthew Krzewinski slogged up<br />

the steep mountain trail, rain<br />

and mud making the 3,000-foot climb<br />

even more taxing.<br />

By the time the 16-year-old had<br />

made it to camp at the top, he and his<br />

hiking group had covered an arduous<br />

10 miles.<br />

Physically, the sojourn in the Sangre<br />

de Cristo mountains in northern New<br />

Mexico last summer certainly was<br />

grueling. But as one of two Boy Scouts<br />

selected by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles<br />

to participate in the St. George<br />

Trek, that tough hike — as well as<br />

others during 12 days of backpacking<br />

totaling about 75 miles — was also<br />

spiritually extraordinary.<br />

“I learned so much about my faith<br />

and life vocation,” said Krzewinski,<br />

now 17 and an incoming senior at<br />

FINDING HIS PEAK<br />

Granada Hills Charter High School,<br />

an independent school known for its<br />

students’ high academic achievement.<br />

Being extraordinary is kind of common<br />

for Krzewinski.<br />

In addition to being selected to<br />

participate in the St. George Trek —<br />

which partners high school teens from<br />

around the country to discern their<br />

vocation with priests, religious, and<br />

seminarians — Krzewinski is a super<br />

achiever in the Boy Scouts and at his<br />

home parish, Our Lady of Lourdes<br />

Church in <strong>No</strong>rthridge.<br />

It probably would be easier to list<br />

what Krzewinski hasn’t done at Our<br />

Lady of Lourdes.<br />

When he was 6 years old, he started<br />

in the church choir, then became an<br />

altar server. Krzewinski has also served<br />

as a cantor, lector, and an actor in the<br />

Theatre Repertoire of Our Lady of<br />

Matthew Krzewinski, an Eagle Scout and parishioner<br />

at Our Lady of Lourdes Church in <strong>No</strong>rthridge, poses<br />

during the 2022 St. George Trek in New Mexico. |<br />

SUBMITTED PHOTO<br />

Lourdes (TROLL).<br />

And since first grade, Krzewinski has<br />

been a member of the Boy Scouts<br />

of America (BSA) and three of its<br />

programs: Cub Scouting, Scouts BSA,<br />

and Venturing.<br />

Faith is closely integrated into the<br />

Boy Scouts, with its 12th point of<br />

Scout Law being reverence. Every<br />

Scout can earn five special Catholic<br />

awards, and — no surprise — Krzewinski<br />

has earned them all.<br />

Each one can take a lot of work.<br />

One of those awards, the Ad Altare<br />

Dei Religious Emblem, required intensive<br />

study of the seven sacraments.<br />

Another, the Pope Pius XII emblem,<br />

required perfect attendance for more<br />

than four months and a board of<br />

review. Krzewinski was one of only 12<br />

Scouts throughout the archdiocese<br />

to earn this emblem in the 2021-22<br />

Matthew Krzewinski poses with<br />

the 3D-printed prosthetic hands he<br />

produced for the nonprofit Different<br />

Heroes, as part of his Eagle Scout<br />

project. | SUBMITTED PHOTO<br />

school year.<br />

“Matthew is an asset to the Catholic<br />

Scouting community and a great<br />

contributor to the community as a<br />

whole,” said Lori Sorensen, Krzewinski’s<br />

Scout religious award teacher for<br />

two of his religious awards.<br />

“The Boy Scouts of America defines<br />

honor as ‘the core of who you are:<br />

your honesty, your integrity, your reputation,<br />

the ways you treat others, and<br />

how you act when no one is looking.’<br />

Matthew is someone who exemplifies<br />

this honor. He has always shown an<br />

inquisitive nature and a good disposition.”<br />

It was Sorensen, also Krzewinski’s<br />

junior high school adventure backpack<br />

instructor, who encouraged him<br />

to sign up for the St. George Trek.<br />

Although the physical hikes are the<br />

focus of the St. George Trek, the heart<br />

of the trip is centered on vocations.<br />

“We talked about how God is calling<br />

you, and the priests and deacons<br />

would speak about their role in the<br />

Church and how God’s call affected<br />

them,” Krzewinski said. “Exposure to<br />

them in this context was interesting<br />

and special.”<br />

Maureen Brown, chair of the Catholic<br />

Committee on Scouting for the<br />

archdiocese, was one of two people<br />

who interviewed candidates applying<br />

for the St. George Trek.<br />

“During the interview,” Brown said,<br />

“we mention that the St. George Trek<br />

is designed to help Scouts determine<br />

what God is calling them to. It’s an<br />

awesome backpacking trip, but it’s<br />

also a lot more.”<br />

St. George Trek participants are<br />

asked to commit to two other events<br />

following the backpacking adventure.<br />

Krzewinski gave a talk at the annual<br />

Catholic Scout Retreat in October<br />

2022 and at an Adult Awards Banquet<br />

this March.<br />

“Matthew has been very gracious<br />

about volunteering for other events<br />

when asked, including serving as a<br />

lector at our Awards Presentation<br />

Mass at the cathedral in May,” Brown<br />

said.<br />

His father, Kevin Krzewinski, noted<br />

that Matthew’s name means “gift from<br />

God — and we truly believe that.”<br />

He and his<br />

wife, Janice, had<br />

two miscarriages<br />

before their only<br />

child was born.<br />

“We thank God<br />

for him every day,”<br />

Kevin said.<br />

Matthew Krzewinski,<br />

center, stands with his<br />

mother, Janice, and father,<br />

Kevin. | SUBMITTED<br />

PHOTO<br />

When Krzewinski was baptized later<br />

than usual, at age 2, he answered<br />

“Amen” to the priest’s prayer.<br />

“He knew all the prayers at age 4,”<br />

Kevin said. “We are proud of his<br />

academics, proud of his Scouting<br />

achievements, but most of all his relationship<br />

to God and the Church.”<br />

Krzewinski earned his Eagle Scout<br />

rank last year. His project: making<br />

56 prosthetic hands for children on a<br />

3D printer for the nonprofit Different<br />

Heroes, which helps kids with missing<br />

limbs.<br />

“I wanted to do something interesting<br />

that involved technology,”<br />

Krzewinski said.<br />

Since he was a child, Krzewinski has<br />

been fascinated with robotics and his<br />

favorite subjects are math and science.<br />

His dream college is Caltech.<br />

So far, Krzewinski has earned 121<br />

merit badges out of a maximum of<br />

135 in the Boy Scouts — and is working<br />

on earning more before his <strong>18</strong>th<br />

birthday in October. Most Scouts earn<br />

a couple dozen.<br />

“I still have to learn how to play the<br />

bugle,” he joked.<br />

After he ages out of the Boy Scouts<br />

on his <strong>18</strong>th birthday, Krzewinski plans<br />

to keep participating in his troop as a<br />

scoutmaster or assistant scoutmaster.<br />

Said the highly motivated, highly devoted<br />

Catholic teenager: “I wouldn’t<br />

have been as involved in Scouting as<br />

much as I have been if it hadn’t been<br />

for my faith.”<br />

Greg Hardesty was a journalist for<br />

the Orange County Register for 17<br />

years and is a longtime contributing<br />

writer to the Orange County Catholic<br />

newspaper.<br />

14 • ANGELUS • <strong>September</strong> 8, <strong>2023</strong><br />

<strong>September</strong> 8, <strong>2023</strong> • ANGELUS • 15


THE CRISIS NEXT DOOR<br />

As COVID-era eviction bans expire, Angelenos living on the<br />

poverty line are running out of options.<br />

It’s an increasingly familiar sight in many U.S. cities and<br />

towns: piles of personal belongings unceremoniously<br />

dumped curbside, as another family loses their home.<br />

With coronavirus-era eviction protections expiring across<br />

the country and rent payment waivers not far behind, the<br />

already-precarious situation of many low-income Americans<br />

is about to get worse — particularly in Los Angeles,<br />

where housing costs are some of the highest in the nation.<br />

“We’re really dealing with a domino effect of what should<br />

have been addressed a few years back — or even more so,”<br />

said Michael Donaldson, senior director of the Office of<br />

Life, Justice, and Peace in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.<br />

“We’re dealing with families; we’re dealing with children<br />

— who need this affordable housing,” Donaldson<br />

explained. “They’re working multiple jobs — but housing<br />

is so expensive.”<br />

Monthly rent for a small, one-bedroom LA apartment<br />

can be $2,000-$3,000, said Donaldson, “and that doesn’t<br />

BY KIMBERLEY HEATHERINGTON / OSV NEWS<br />

A man holds up his eviction notice from his apartment in Los<br />

Angeles in this file photo. | CNS/LUCY NICHOLSON, REUTERS<br />

work for a family, so you go to two to three bedrooms,<br />

you’re dealing with a $4,000, $5,000 payment — just for an<br />

apartment.”<br />

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development<br />

considers $66,750 per year “low income” for a<br />

one-person household in LA County. A March <strong>2023</strong> study<br />

by financial website SmartAsset — using MIT’s Living<br />

Wage Calculator — estimates a childless Los Angeles<br />

resident needs $76,710 after-tax income for housing, food,<br />

transportation, medical care, and more.<br />

The Public Policy Institute of California notes occupations<br />

with the highest rates of poverty — cleaning, farming,<br />

food prep, and personal care — have a median hourly<br />

wage of $20.14 statewide, or $41,891 annually.<br />

Median rent in Los Angeles, according to Zillow Rental<br />

Manager, is $2,950 per month for all property types, or<br />

$35,400 per year.<br />

The disparity is obvious, and the impact profound.<br />

In June <strong>2023</strong>, the University of California San Francisco<br />

released the largest representative study of U.S. homelessness<br />

since the mid-1990s, the California Statewide Study of<br />

People Experiencing Homelessness. The report observes,<br />

“For most of the participants, the cost of housing had simply<br />

become unsustainable … and most believed that either<br />

rental subsidies or one-time financial help would have<br />

prevented their homelessness.”<br />

In the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, officials have emphasized<br />

a network-based approach to helping people facing<br />

eviction. Among the Office of Life, Justice, and Peace’s<br />

partners is LA Voice, a multifaith social services organization<br />

based throughout LA County, spanning five county<br />

supervisorial districts, 28 cities, and 65 congregations.<br />

“It’s all these things colliding together — general economic<br />

instability for working families and the ending of<br />

the pandemic protections,” said the Rev. Zach Hoover,<br />

LA Voice’s executive director and an ordained minister in<br />

the American Baptist Church. “Even in the city of LA —<br />

where you have some of the best protections in the state —<br />

you’re seeing folks who are going to be at risk of eviction,<br />

because there’s no way they can come up with $6,000 on<br />

their own even if they’re able to pay their month-to-month<br />

right now.”<br />

In March 2020, Congress passed the CARES Act, which<br />

included a moratorium on eviction filings for tenants in<br />

certain rental properties with federal assistance or federally<br />

related financing. These renters represent 28% of the<br />

nation’s approximately 43 million renters.<br />

Since 2020, experts have warned of a spike in evictions at<br />

the end of the moratorium. For Hoover and his colleagues,<br />

that surge of evictions is now. In response, the strategy of<br />

LA Voice and other affordable housing advocates involves<br />

what Hoover calls “the three Ps”: production of new<br />

housing; preservation of affordable housing; and protection<br />

from eviction.<br />

The National Low Income Housing Commission reports<br />

that “no state has an adequate supply of affordable rental<br />

housing for the lowest income renters.” In the Los Angeles-Long<br />

Beach-Anaheim area, there are 20 affordable<br />

and available rental units per 100 extremely low-income<br />

households, a housing deficit of -392,156 units.<br />

“If you don’t build affordable housing near people’s jobs<br />

— housing that they can afford with the jobs that they’re<br />

doing — what the system is basically saying is, we actually<br />

don’t care if they can live close by,” said Hoover.<br />

State Sen. María Elena Durazo, a Democrat who represents<br />

California’s District 26, has proposed a bill that would<br />

“close loopholes that allow illegal evictions” in the state.<br />

“We’ve had a 10% rise of people becoming homeless<br />

between 2022 and <strong>2023</strong>, and 31% since 2010. In addition,<br />

COVID-era tenant protections have just ended and<br />

thousands of eviction notices were filed by landlords in my<br />

district,” Durazo told OSV <strong>News</strong>. “We<br />

urge people in the LA area to seek<br />

help through services available by the<br />

city and tenants’ rights organizations<br />

before packing up and leaving their<br />

homes.”<br />

Father Brendan Busse,<br />

SJ, at Dolores Mission<br />

Church in 2021. |<br />

VICTOR ALEMÁN<br />

Durazo’s district includes the Boyle Heights neighborhood<br />

where Father Brendan Busse, SJ, is the pastor of Dolores<br />

Mission, a parish which — since 1925 — has served<br />

the poor and immigrant community in Boyle Heights.<br />

“I think the evictions crisis has really been the crisis of<br />

people right on the edge of becoming homeless for a long<br />

time,” said Busse. “And if income and wage gaps aren’t addressed,<br />

then you have this constant population that’s been<br />

living right on the edge, and it doesn’t take much to make<br />

them homeless — especially when eviction protections are<br />

being removed.”<br />

Eviction protections ended Aug. 1 in Los Angeles. The<br />

day before, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass advised citizens,<br />

“Our message today to Angelenos is clear: Do not self-evict.<br />

If you receive a notice, file a response — and most importantly,<br />

reach out to the city for support.”<br />

Busse noted that lost in all the talk about creating more<br />

“affordable housing” is actually defining what counts as<br />

“affordable” in a place like Los Angeles.<br />

“If you’re calculating ‘affordable’ by mean income in Los<br />

Angeles,” he explained, “that’s not going to get anywhere<br />

close to the deeply low income folks who live in a parish<br />

like Dolores Mission.”<br />

Such poverty creates a ceaseless procession of difficult<br />

choices.<br />

“Do I get milk, or do I get eggs?” said Busse. “Do I get any<br />

of this? I know I’ve got a medical bill coming up.”<br />

While there are no easy answers, Busse’s experience with<br />

the poor makes him certain of a few things.<br />

“It’s not just a social problem; it’s not just a political problem<br />

— it’s really a spiritual challenge to open ourselves up<br />

to the needs of our sisters and brothers,” said Busse. “And<br />

more and more, it’s obvious that they are our sisters and<br />

brothers — it’s not someone suffering on a distant shore;<br />

it’s clearly right in our own cities.”<br />

Kimberley Heatherington writes for OSV <strong>News</strong> from Virginia.<br />

16 • ANGELUS • <strong>September</strong> 8, <strong>2023</strong> <strong>September</strong> 8, <strong>2023</strong> • ANGELUS • 17


Old problems in<br />

a new nation<br />

Amid South Sudan’s ongoing nightmare, Pope Francis<br />

keeps giving the African country flickers of hope.<br />

BY JOHN L. ALLEN JR.<br />

ROME — In a sense, the nation<br />

of South Sudan was born on the<br />

back of the Catholic Church.<br />

Roughly half of the country’s population<br />

of around 12 million is believed<br />

to be Catholic, President Salva Kiir<br />

is a Catholic who spearheaded the<br />

secessionist movement, and, in a<br />

country where only 1 in 4 people can<br />

read and write, immensely popular<br />

Catholic radio stations served as a<br />

critical voice for the drive that led to<br />

independence from Sudan in 2011.<br />

Perhaps that background helps<br />

explain the enormous interest the<br />

Vatican has shown in South Sudan,<br />

and why the Church has so much<br />

invested in whether the country can<br />

survive the interlocking series of crises<br />

it presently faces.<br />

Recently Italian Cardinal Pietro<br />

Parolin, the Vatican’s secretary of<br />

state and thus Pope Francis’ top aide,<br />

recently made his third visit to South<br />

Sudan, using the country to reject<br />

“the plague of vengeance.”<br />

Also recently, Francis revealed that<br />

Archbishop Ameyu Mulla of Juba, the<br />

Pope Francis greets the crowd before celebrating<br />

Mass at the John Garang Mausoleum in Juba, South<br />

Sudan, Feb. 5, <strong>2023</strong>. | CNS/PAUL HARING<br />

national capital, will be made a cardinal<br />

on Sept. 30. Though there are<br />

21 new cardinals set to receive their<br />

red hats in the consistory, the fact that<br />

Francis was especially keen on Mulla<br />

is clear from the fact that he made the<br />

announcement on July 9, which is<br />

also the anniversary of South Sudan’s<br />

independence.<br />

The gesture came on the back of the<br />

pontiff’s own trip to South Sudan last<br />

February — an outing he took in the<br />

company of Archbishop Justin Welby<br />

of Canterbury, head of the Anglican<br />

Communion, and the moderator of<br />

the General Assembly of the Church<br />

of Scotland, Rev. Iain Greenshields,<br />

representing an almost unprecedented<br />

display of ecumenical solidarity<br />

during a papal voyage.<br />

In turn, that trip capped a papal<br />

peace offensive that also included<br />

inviting Kiir and his main rival, Vice<br />

President Riek Machar, to a retreat at<br />

the Vatican in October and <strong>No</strong>vember<br />

of 2019, where he knelt and kissed<br />

their feet and asked them to honor<br />

a 20<strong>18</strong> peace agreement, which has<br />

been subject to repeated violations.<br />

God knows, South Sudan can use<br />

whatever help the pope and his team<br />

can provide.<br />

What started as a political spat<br />

between Kiir, an ethnic Dinka, and<br />

Machar, an ethnic Nuer, has become<br />

an intermittent cycle of brutal ethnic<br />

violence which, according to the<br />

United Nations, has left more than<br />

400,000 people dead overall, and at<br />

least 400 just in the period between<br />

January and March of this year.<br />

In addition, South Sudan also faces<br />

one of the world’s most severe hunger<br />

crises, with an estimated 7.8 million<br />

people projected to fall short of their<br />

food needs in <strong>2023</strong>, meaning almost<br />

three-quarters of the country’s population,<br />

according to the World Food<br />

Programme.<br />

Floods in late 2022 and early <strong>2023</strong><br />

also affected more than 900,000<br />

people and led to outbreaks of cholera<br />

and malaria. Such natural disasters,<br />

which some observers believe to be<br />

related to the consequences of climate<br />

change, are especially threatening in a<br />

country that lacks the infrastructure to<br />

respond effectively.<br />

As if those problems aren’t enough,<br />

South Sudan also faces a worsening<br />

economic crisis. Oil represents 95%<br />

of all exports but production has<br />

dropped dramatically, in part due<br />

to the violence, and the country’s<br />

currency lost 60% of its value between<br />

2021 and 2022.<br />

According to statistics from the<br />

World Bank, South Sudan remains<br />

one of the most impoverished nations<br />

on earth, with 82% of the population<br />

living on less than $1.90 a day. Only<br />

half the population has access to safe<br />

drinking water, only half have access<br />

to health care, and only about 10%<br />

are estimated to have access to basic<br />

sanitation.<br />

In a word, South Sudan appears to<br />

be living a nightmare. Is there any<br />

reason to believe the pope’s initiatives<br />

can make any difference?<br />

Clearly, a pontiff does not possess a<br />

magic wand capable of making social<br />

and political problems disappear. If<br />

he did, for instance, Francis would<br />

have wielded it already to end the war<br />

in Ukraine, but instead that conflict<br />

grinds on with all its lethal intensity.<br />

Yet the right question may not be so<br />

much whether the pope’s efforts have<br />

made the situation appreciably better,<br />

but rather how much worse things<br />

might be without them.<br />

That’s a point that may apply in a<br />

special way to the elevation of the<br />

59-year-old Mulla as a prince of the<br />

Church, who’s now positioned to act<br />

as perhaps the single most authoritative<br />

voice of South Sudan on the<br />

global stage — with a credibility likely<br />

exceeding that even of Kiir, who may<br />

be the official head of state but whose<br />

moral credentials are, to say the least,<br />

contested.<br />

Truth to be told, there’s much the<br />

outside world does not understand<br />

about the Catholic Church. Yet one<br />

point everyone seems to get is that a<br />

cardinal is a big deal — and, as a result,<br />

there’s a sort of E.F. Hutton effect<br />

that comes with the office: When a<br />

cardinal talks, people listen.<br />

Mulla didn’t get to where he is without<br />

difficulty. When he was appointed<br />

to Juba in 2019, various clergy, laity,<br />

and indigenous groups protested,<br />

objecting that he’s not from the dominant<br />

ethnic group in Juba and had<br />

only a limited command of the local<br />

language. They also claimed he had<br />

fathered six illegitimate<br />

children<br />

Pope Francis greets Archbishop<br />

Ameyu Mulla of<br />

Juba, South Sudan, as<br />

the pontiff celebrates<br />

Mass at the John Garang<br />

Mausoleum in Juba Feb.<br />

5. The pope announced<br />

during his July 9 <strong>Angelus</strong><br />

that Mulla will become<br />

a cardinal. | OSV NEWS/<br />

CATHOLIC PRESS PHOTO,<br />

VATICAN MEDIA<br />

with two different<br />

women, although<br />

a Vatican<br />

inquest apparently<br />

cleared him of<br />

those charges.<br />

<strong>No</strong>w, however,<br />

the pope has set<br />

him up to be<br />

the tribune of<br />

his people. That<br />

may not be a<br />

game-changer,<br />

but it’s at least<br />

something —<br />

and in a country so accustomed to<br />

nothing, having even something may<br />

well represent a slight flicker of hope.<br />

John L. Allen Jr. is the editor of Crux.<br />

<strong>18</strong> • ANGELUS • <strong>September</strong> 8, <strong>2023</strong> <strong>September</strong> 8, <strong>2023</strong> • ANGELUS • 19


An Irish contradiction<br />

Despite his lifelong problems with the Faith,<br />

William Butler Yeats produced one of the most<br />

moving Catholic poems of his time.<br />

BY MSGR. RICHARD ANTALL<br />

​William Butler Yeats. | SHUTTERSTOCK<br />

One-hundred years ago, William<br />

Butler Yeats won the<br />

<strong>No</strong>bel Prize for Literature.<br />

He was the first of four Irishmen to<br />

be awarded the distinction, the others<br />

being George Bernard Shaw, Samuel<br />

Beckett, and Seamus Heaney.<br />

Of them, only Heaney was born a<br />

Catholic. He once said about his faith<br />

background, “the older I get, the more<br />

I remember the benediction of it all.”<br />

It is odd that the most famous writers<br />

of this most famously Catholic of<br />

countries were not only not Catholic,<br />

but also anti-Catholic. Yeats was an<br />

occultist whose affection for the mythology<br />

of the Irish peasantry did not<br />

stop him from assuming a neo-paganism<br />

called Theosophy.<br />

Shaw had so little use for the Church<br />

that he associated Joan of Arc with<br />

the Reformation, and Joyce was an<br />

apostate who gloried in his rebellion<br />

against the Church. Beckett was an<br />

Anglican agnostic.<br />

Irish high culture has always labored,<br />

to some degree, in the shadows of<br />

the Anglo colonizers. This, despite<br />

the high culture’s often nationalistic<br />

opposition to the English. Dublin’s<br />

Abbey Theater was founded by Yeats,<br />

among others, to be the forge of an<br />

Irish culture independent of the British<br />

Empire, but it did not participate<br />

in the revival of the Gaelic language.<br />

In his <strong>No</strong>bel Prize address, Yeats acknowledged<br />

that English, not Gaelic,<br />

was the language in which modern<br />

Ireland “thinks and does business.” He<br />

was of the landlord class but identified<br />

with the tenants, and he loved<br />

Cathleen ni Houlihan, the heroine of<br />

a play he wrote, who was his personification<br />

of the Irish motherland.<br />

His co-foundress of the nationalist<br />

Abbey Theater, Lady Gregory, learned<br />

Gaelic and collected and translated<br />

many books of folktales but herself<br />

was Anglo-Irish. Once she admitted to<br />

Yeats that her identification with the<br />

country people had made her think of<br />

becoming Catholic, but she thought<br />

that to be closer to the peasants, it<br />

was better for her to remain a kind of<br />

neo-pagan.<br />

She accepted all the ghost stories<br />

and faery tales of the country people<br />

as true, as did Yeats. But Yeats went a<br />

bit further than her because he was<br />

bewitched, according to Chesterton,<br />

by the extravagant Madame Blavatsky,<br />

a spiritualist fraud of international<br />

renown.<br />

Chesterton knew and admired Yeats<br />

a great deal. He wrote of the Irish<br />

revival in his essay, “Celts and Celtophiles”<br />

in his book “Heretics,” and<br />

of his friendship with the poet in his<br />

autobiography. In fact, he knew the<br />

poet’s whole family, and praised the<br />

eloquence of John Yeats, William’s<br />

father, an artist and a famous talker.<br />

Chesterton saw in Yeats a kindred<br />

spirit and applauded his romanticism,<br />

and his belief in the supernatural<br />

spirits and faeries that the Irish<br />

country people considered a part of<br />

their cosmos. Nevertheless, Chesterton<br />

realized that Yeats had gone too<br />

far in his swing away from Victorian<br />

materialism.<br />

The Catholic writer loved Yeats’<br />

play, “The Land of Heart’s Desire,”<br />

in which a faery tempts a newly<br />

married woman away from husband<br />

and home, but said at the end he was<br />

surprised he was more on the side of<br />

the family than the faery folk Yeats was<br />

extolling. “There is only one thing<br />

against ‘The Land of Heart’s Desire,’ ”<br />

Chesterton wrote. “The heart does not<br />

The Ballad of Father Gilligan<br />

BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS<br />

The old priest, Peter Gilligan<br />

Was weary night and day;<br />

For half his flock were in their beds<br />

Or under green sods lay.<br />

Once, while he nodded on a chair<br />

At the moth-hour of eve<br />

Another poor man sent for him,<br />

And he began to grieve.<br />

“I have no rest, nor joy, nor peace,<br />

For people die and die”;<br />

And after cried he, “God forgive!<br />

My body spake, not I!”<br />

He knelt, and leaning on the chair<br />

He prayed and fell asleep<br />

And the moth-hour went from the fields<br />

And stars began to peep.<br />

They slowly into millions grew<br />

And leaves shook in the wind<br />

And God covered the world with shade<br />

And whispered to mankind.<br />

Upon the time of sparrow chirp<br />

When the moths come once more<br />

The old priest, Peter Gilligan<br />

Stood upright on the floor.<br />

“Mavrone, mavrone! the man has died<br />

While I slept on the chair.”<br />

He roused his horse out of its sleep<br />

And rode with little care.<br />

He rode now as he never rode<br />

By rocky lane and fen;<br />

The sick man’s wife opened the door:<br />

“Father! you come again.”<br />

“And is the poor man dead?” he cried.<br />

“He died an hour ago.”<br />

The old priest, Peter Gilligan<br />

In grief swayed to and fro.<br />

desire it.”<br />

The mythic heroes and spirits that<br />

Yeats celebrated in his poetry did not<br />

have much to do with Catholicism,<br />

but there is one brilliant exception. In<br />

the poem, “The Ballad of Father Gilligan,”<br />

the poet wrote of<br />

The old priest Peter Gilligan / Was<br />

weary night and day; / For half his<br />

flock were in their beds, / Or under<br />

green sods lay.<br />

Father Gilligan is called to the<br />

bedside of a dying man, and complains<br />

a bit about his lack of rest. He<br />

was so ashamed of his reaction (“my<br />

“When you were gone, he turned and died<br />

As merry as a bird.”<br />

The old priest, Peter Gilligan<br />

He knelt him at that word.<br />

“He who hath made the night of stars<br />

For souls who tire and bleed<br />

Sent one of His great angels down<br />

To help me in my need.<br />

“He who is wrapped in purple robes<br />

With planets in His care<br />

Had pity on the least of things<br />

Asleep upon a chair.”<br />

20 • ANGELUS • <strong>September</strong> 8, <strong>2023</strong> <strong>September</strong> 8, <strong>2023</strong> • ANGELUS • 21


ody spake, not I”) that he knelt down<br />

asking pardon, and then fell asleep<br />

leaning against the chair.<br />

He woke near dawn in panic and<br />

“rode as he never rode,” trying to<br />

reach the man before he died. He<br />

reaches the farm and is met at the<br />

door by the man’s wife.<br />

“Father! You come again!” she said<br />

in surprise, and explained that her<br />

SHUTTERSTOCK<br />

husband had died “merry<br />

as a bird” after the priest<br />

had left his bedside.<br />

The priest kneels down<br />

again and says:<br />

He who hath made the<br />

night of stars / For souls<br />

who tire and bleed, / Sent<br />

one of His great angels<br />

down / To help me in<br />

my need. / He Who is<br />

wrapped in purple robes, /<br />

With planets in His care,<br />

/ Had pity on the least of<br />

things, / Asleep upon a<br />

chair.<br />

This sounds like a real Catholic miracle<br />

story, a folk tale with compassion.<br />

The poor priest, the dying man, the<br />

new widow are all three bound together<br />

in the mystery of God’s grace.<br />

I am sure it was a story that Yeats<br />

heard from either his family’s tenants<br />

or servants or those of Lady Gregory<br />

in the Irish countryside. God’s providence<br />

penetrates the nitty-gritty of<br />

life, the fatigue that makes a priest fall<br />

asleep on his chair and the faith of a<br />

people that will not go unattended.<br />

Yeats, as Chesterton said, was a great<br />

poet, lyrical like few others and many<br />

of his poems are better poetry perhaps<br />

than this ballad, but none move me<br />

the same way.<br />

He won the <strong>No</strong>bel Prize, he said,<br />

because of his nationalist theater and<br />

because his Ireland was finally an<br />

independent nation, but his poems<br />

live on.<br />

The French theologian, Charles<br />

Journet, said that Percy Bysshe<br />

Shelley’s poetry was redeemed even<br />

if the poet did not achieve redemption.<br />

I love this poem and, maybe it’s<br />

because I can relate to having half my<br />

parish in the cemetery, I hope that, in<br />

the case of Yeats, both the poetry and<br />

poet achieved redemption.<br />

Msgr. Richard Antall is pastor of<br />

Holy Name Church in Cleveland,<br />

Ohio, and the author of several books.<br />

His latest novel is “The X-mas Files”<br />

(Atmosphere Press, $17.99).<br />

22 • ANGELUS • <strong>September</strong> 8, <strong>2023</strong> <strong>September</strong> 8, <strong>2023</strong> • ANGELUS • 23


The abortion<br />

distortion<br />

Will California be<br />

held accountable for<br />

misleading claims<br />

about Prop 1?<br />

BY CHARLIE CAMOSY<br />

Pro-lifers, I’ve argued before, are disproportionately<br />

more likely to take facts and science seriously when it<br />

comes to abortion. From prenatal pain to the prenatal<br />

heart, the biology related to many of the contested issues in<br />

the abortion debate point in a direction that troubles many<br />

positions which reflexively permit abortions.<br />

There are intellectually honest pro-choice people, of<br />

course, who reckon with these facts (one of the most famous<br />

articles ever written on abortion rights presumed the<br />

full personhood of the prenatal child), but in my experience,<br />

those who have pro-choice positions are either largely<br />

unaware of the facts or are intellectually dishonest in how<br />

they speak about the “products of conception.”<br />

Abortion law was in the headlines earlier this summer<br />

around the first anniversary of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s<br />

Health Organization, the Supreme Court decision that<br />

wrested the issue of abortion from the hands of an unelected<br />

court. As a result, legislatures have greater latitude to<br />

enact laws that reflect the will of the people on abortion.<br />

SHUTTERSTOCK<br />

But to do so responsibly, voters not only need to know<br />

their prenatal biology, they must be told the truth about<br />

what a proposed law would do.<br />

Unfortunately, the well-known phenomenon of “abortion<br />

distortion” means that misleading statements and outright<br />

lies are par for the course in the war over public policy.<br />

Consider, for instance, the public debate leading up to<br />

the passage of “Prop 1” in California this past year. Opponents<br />

of the law, including the California Conference<br />

of Catholic Bishops, pointed out that the new language<br />

would override the current law restricting abortion (with<br />

exceptions) after viability and instead make it legal for any<br />

reason — including the third trimester of pregnancy.<br />

The state’s voter guide points out that, unlike state law,<br />

which limits late-term abortions unless medically necessary,<br />

“Proposition 1 has no limit on late-term abortions.”<br />

Even Dr. Forrest Smith, a long-time provider of abortions<br />

himself who nevertheless rejects third-trimester abortion,<br />

was deeply disappointed that drafters of Prop 1 intentionally<br />

left out the language of California’s “Reproductive<br />

Privacy Act,” which reads [emphasis added]: “the state shall<br />

not deny or interfere with woman’s or pregnant person’s<br />

right to choose or obtain an abortion prior to the viability of<br />

the fetus.”<br />

Just this summer, the Los Angeles Times reported that<br />

“legal experts say there is little consensus on whether California’s<br />

viability standard still holds” since Prop 1 did not<br />

mention the word “viability” once.<br />

Last month, Gallup found that only 22% of Americans<br />

broadly support legal abortion in the third trimester. If California<br />

voters knew or suspected that they were voting to<br />

make such abortions broadly legal, Prop 1 almost certainly<br />

would have failed.<br />

At pains to avoid this fate, a seemingly endless supply of<br />

public figures and organizations insisted that the proposition<br />

would only ensconce existing abortion law into the<br />

state Constitution. It would in no way make way for the<br />

wildly unpopular position that abortion would be legal in<br />

the third trimester.<br />

Despite fierce opposition from pro-lifers — who, once<br />

again, were fighting for intellectual and factual honesty<br />

in the debate — Prop 1 was passed handily by California<br />

voters.<br />

But we may now have proof that they were misled.<br />

According to reporting from Politico this past week, the<br />

$20 million the state put into expanding abortion in Los<br />

Angeles made it a hub for people coming in for abortions<br />

from out of state. Significantly, some of that money is being<br />

used to build a clinic that “provides abortions during all<br />

three trimesters.” In fact, the new Dupont Clinic coming to<br />

the city of Los Angeles is quite public about the “need” to<br />

provide “all-trimester abortion care.”<br />

Does this prove that Californians<br />

were lied to? Maybe not. One could<br />

argue that Dupont is coming in<br />

merely to perform medically necessary<br />

third-trimester abortions. But for<br />

several reasons this is unlikely.<br />

California is already saturated with<br />

abortion clinics and companies doing<br />

abortions. There was no need to bring<br />

a specialist in late-term abortions like<br />

Dupont, unless this is what California<br />

wanted — or, perhaps more precisely,<br />

what Los Angeles County (a self-described<br />

abortion “safe haven”) wanted.<br />

Furthermore, Dupont is quite direct<br />

in rejecting the<br />

idea that third-trimester<br />

abortions<br />

should be limited<br />

to those that<br />

are medically<br />

necessary. On<br />

Abortion demonstrators<br />

in Los Angeles May 14,<br />

2022. | CNS/AUDE<br />

GUERRUCCI, REUTERS<br />

the contrary, they “do not require any<br />

particular ‘reason’ to be seen [for abortions<br />

between 26 and 32 weeks gestation]<br />

— if you would like to terminate<br />

your pregnancy, we support you in that decision.”<br />

Why would Dupont, which rejects the idea that abortion<br />

needs any reason at all, suddenly be interested in coming<br />

to a state which limits abortion after viability only in cases<br />

where it is medically necessary?<br />

In what is unfortunately an all-too-common practice in<br />

the abortion wars, it appears that California voters were<br />

misled about a central aspect of Prop 1. They were not<br />

told that they were about to make California an extremist<br />

state when it comes to abortion: Even the The Washington<br />

Post was forced to admit that only six other countries in<br />

the world allow broad access to abortion after 20 weeks of<br />

gestation. Thirty-two weeks, or beyond, is mind-numbingly<br />

extreme.<br />

Again, such a policy would never have been approved by<br />

Californians if they had known what was being proposed.<br />

Voters everywhere deserve a chance to vote for or against<br />

a proposition about which they have full and accurate<br />

information.<br />

Here’s hoping pro-life organizations challenge the validity<br />

of the law in court and get it struck down. Doing so would<br />

pave the way for an intellectually and factually honest<br />

conversation about what their abortion law should be. An<br />

overwhelming majority support limiting abortion in the<br />

third trimester to saving the mother’s life. They should be<br />

informed in such a way so they can move to have their laws<br />

reflect this.<br />

Charlie Camosy is professor of Medical Humanities at the<br />

Creighton University School of Medicine. In addition, he<br />

holds the Monsignor Curran Fellowship in Moral Theology<br />

at St. Joseph Seminary in New York.<br />

24 • ANGELUS • <strong>September</strong> 8, <strong>2023</strong> <strong>September</strong> 8, <strong>2023</strong> • ANGELUS • 25


WITH GRACE<br />

DR. GRAZIE POZO CHRISTIE<br />

Dr. Grazie Pozo Christie is a mother of five<br />

who practices radiology in the Miami area.<br />

From guilt to grace<br />

It is an old grief — a dirty, draggled<br />

bird that perches in a corner of my<br />

mind.<br />

It keeps quiet, mostly, though his silence<br />

is heavy, a brooding silence that<br />

I can almost touch. Once in a while,<br />

less often, thankfully, than before, he<br />

SHUTTERSTOCK<br />

caws the guilt that only I can hear. I<br />

halt, whatever I am doing, and listen.<br />

I’m glad when the sound fades.<br />

I’m not complaining. There were<br />

years when the nasty beast sat on my<br />

shoulder, peering balefully at the<br />

doings of my life. I would feed him<br />

bits of myself, the bits that seemed to<br />

belong to him by rights. It was wrong<br />

of me to do this.<br />

I know it now although I certainly<br />

knew it then. Hadn’t I read the word<br />

mercy, written on countless pages and<br />

in many languages? Hadn’t I known,<br />

since childhood, of the forgiving flood<br />

that poured over the world? First on<br />

the torture-rock of Golgotha above the<br />

city, and ever since, ceaselessly repeating<br />

on sacrificial altars everywhere?<br />

I went seeking mercy, yes, and<br />

sounded out the litanies, soothed by<br />

their insistent rhythms. I assented eagerly<br />

and hopefully — I believe! Help<br />

my unbelief! In curtained tiny alcoves<br />

I knelt, waiting for the bath of grace. It<br />

flowed through the pierced veil from<br />

dimly seen lips, warm with the breath<br />

of man.<br />

Eo te absolvo…<br />

But my dingy, feathered tormentor<br />

waited just outside the sanctuary,<br />

cawing, knowing my hope would wilt<br />

in the hot sun.<br />

What did he cry in his cracked, evil<br />

voice but the simple truth?<br />

The young girl gifted with a staunch<br />

faith had grown up to disappoint. Her<br />

wings failed her in her first awkward<br />

sally into a degraded world. She who<br />

should have flown sank instead.<br />

<strong>No</strong>thing very strange here, you say.<br />

This is the self-same story of every human<br />

soul. Only one daughter of Eve<br />

walked with clean pure feet on the<br />

earth, only one woman had nothing<br />

to shake off her soles when she took<br />

wing.<br />

But that seedy crow in the corner<br />

speaks of the darkest things. There’s<br />

something blacker in its wings than<br />

the ink of space, gloomier than the<br />

moldy coat of a Dickensian undertak-<br />

er. The prophet reviled King David,<br />

but what is it, to my sin, the theft of a<br />

poor man’s only sheep?<br />

David sinned for beauty, at least,<br />

and the life he took was only that of a<br />

comrade-in-arms. <strong>No</strong>t that of his own<br />

hidden child.<br />

My prophet-bird croaks, accusing, of<br />

pointless shallow sins born of ennui.<br />

There was no overpowering burst,<br />

no pulsing love that ravished me into<br />

wickedness. I sold a high birthright<br />

for a mess of porridge — sticky and<br />

insipid, at that.<br />

I’m not alone, I know. Beside me<br />

march legions of women, and men. I<br />

hear their own dark crows sometimes,<br />

cawing in the space behind their eyes,<br />

in cocktail parties, or earnestly and<br />

sadly on the internet.<br />

The world goes on its brutal way, saying<br />

that what we hear is nothing but<br />

the clanging chains of scrupulosity,<br />

the iron drag of dusty traditions.<br />

The world is wrong. We of the black<br />

birds know it.<br />

For years now I’ve failed to chase<br />

my tormentor away from the shadowy<br />

places in which he lurks. But lately<br />

I’ve had grace-born glimmers of an<br />

entirely different hope. I’m starting<br />

to think that I am meant to keep him<br />

close, and that the Splendid One has<br />

a plan for both of us.<br />

I am beginning to believe, really<br />

believe, that He means to turn my<br />

dark prophet into a glorious thing —<br />

a shining singer of songs of joy.<br />

<strong>No</strong>t the messenger of doom but the<br />

herald of my transformed self; sorrowing,<br />

yes, but willing to think myself<br />

worthy of the promises of Christ,<br />

willing to be bathed by Him, made<br />

clean and new.<br />

Lord, help me let you. Let me let you.<br />

26 • ANGELUS • <strong>September</strong> 8, <strong>2023</strong><br />

<strong>September</strong> 8, <strong>2023</strong> • ANGELUS • 27


NOW PLAYING HAUNTED MANSION<br />

Twenty years after its last attempt<br />

starring Eddie Murphy, Disney<br />

has taken yet another swipe at a<br />

film adaptation of its “Haunted Mansion”<br />

ride. You’d be forgiven again for<br />

not remembering it, as it seems like<br />

all parties involved prefer it that way.<br />

And based on the poor reviews and<br />

disastrous box office of this iteration,<br />

this tradition will continue until 2043,<br />

when the time will come to forget a<br />

third revival starring a wrinkly Tom<br />

Holland.<br />

“Haunted Mansion” involves, if you<br />

could believe it, a family moving into<br />

a haunted mansion. The humble title<br />

of the film is not a sign of modesty,<br />

but rather an indicator of its creative<br />

reach. A doctor (Rosario Dawson) and<br />

her young son move into a dilapidated<br />

mansion outside New Orleans, hoping<br />

to spin the coding violations into<br />

character and turn it into a bed-andbreakfast.<br />

But the mansion has other<br />

EYES ON THE DEPARTED<br />

Don’t expect anything original — or spiritually edifying<br />

— from the latest adaptation of the ‘Haunted Mansion.’<br />

BY JOSEPH JOYCE<br />

plans, immediately haunting the new<br />

inhabitants with several ghosts, most<br />

of whom you will recognize from the<br />

Disneyland ride.<br />

To the movie’s credit, it does not drag<br />

this part out like many of its horror<br />

counterparts. The mom instantly believes<br />

her son and they skedaddle out<br />

that very night, not making the sunk<br />

cost fallacy like most recent haunted<br />

homeowners. But just like aunts on<br />

social media, the ghosts follow them<br />

no matter where they flee to. It appears<br />

they want them back at the mansion,<br />

but to what end?<br />

To solve this mystery, the mom invites<br />

several “experts” to provide their expertise.<br />

Ben Matthias (LaKeith Stanfield)<br />

is a widowed astrophysicist, who leads<br />

his wife’s old ghost tour while working<br />

on a dark matter camera to capture<br />

images of the afterlife he is quickly<br />

losing faith in.<br />

He takes the house call looking for<br />

Rosario Dawson, Tiffany<br />

Haddish, LaKeith Stanfield,<br />

and Owen Wilson<br />

in Disney’s “Haunted<br />

Mansion.” | IMDB<br />

an easy payout, only for his camera to<br />

finally come into focus. There is also<br />

Harriet (Tiffany Haddish), a psychic<br />

who squanders real talent flipping<br />

Tarot cards at Bar Mitzvahs, and a Tulane<br />

College history professor (Danny<br />

DeVito) old enough to be part of his<br />

curriculum.<br />

But the most intriguing of these is Father<br />

Kent (Owen Wilson), an exorcist<br />

with that ineffaceable Wilsonian optimism.<br />

<strong>No</strong>t frazzled in the face of his<br />

failed exorcism, he maintains a sunny<br />

disposition even while staring into the<br />

gaping maw of hell. Decked out in a<br />

black hat and gloves, he looks straight<br />

out of Vatican II-era Georgetown, yet<br />

he prays vespers and mutters about in<br />

Latin.<br />

That discrepancy makes narrative<br />

sense when we learn that he isn’t<br />

actually a priest, just a costume-store<br />

employee who wanted to help out.<br />

This explains the failed exorcism,<br />

while robbing us of perhaps the most<br />

delightful priest character in recent<br />

memory. Considering the candidates<br />

are between him and Father Stu, it<br />

isn’t exactly a horse race.<br />

The ghosts proceed to follow all the<br />

other invited guests home as well,<br />

which makes the haunted mansion<br />

their new home until they can figure<br />

out what the ghosts want. In their investigations,<br />

they learn that the original<br />

owner of the mansion mourned his<br />

late wife so much that he brought in<br />

medium after medium to try and summon<br />

her back. But a content soul has<br />

no reason to leave the beatific vision,<br />

so hundreds of more troubled spirits<br />

answered the call instead.<br />

The film is decently sound in its<br />

theology; not precisely right, but with<br />

the intuitive grasp of a righteous pagan.<br />

<strong>No</strong>ne of the ghosts are truly evil,<br />

because those who linger around are<br />

stuck in a purgatorial state. The true<br />

fiends head downward, and the good<br />

ascend. The residents of the haunted<br />

mansion are the B-students of the astral<br />

plane.<br />

This is why Matthias couldn’t contact<br />

his late wife, or the young boy his<br />

deceased father: a happy life leaves<br />

behind no unfinished business. But<br />

an explanation isn’t the same as an<br />

answer, and even with the confirmation<br />

that they’re in a better place, our<br />

heroes still reach out. It’s a pardonable<br />

selfishness; how often are our prayers of<br />

intercession just an excuse to talk with<br />

them again?<br />

But if there is a spiritual lesson to<br />

this corporate adaptation of existing<br />

theme park royalty, it’s that life is for<br />

the living, and death for the dead.<br />

Continuing to live and even enjoy life<br />

is not a sin against the departed, but<br />

rather their express wish. Christ told us<br />

to let the dead bury the dead. Which<br />

isn’t to say to neglect them, but rather<br />

to prioritize the journey while never<br />

forgetting the destination.<br />

Responsible parents have suffered<br />

through enough of my rambling just to<br />

hear if it is appropriate for their youngsters<br />

or not. My conclusion, as these<br />

things go, is:<br />

Sure, why not? It<br />

is certainly bright<br />

colors across a<br />

screen, sufficient<br />

distraction for a<br />

blessedly quiet<br />

two hours. It<br />

would be better<br />

for them to toss<br />

the pigskin<br />

outside or hear<br />

stories from their<br />

grandfather, but<br />

that is also true<br />

for good art and even HBO.<br />

Even more responsible parents will<br />

want to know if this is too scary for<br />

kids. The movie is hardly frightening<br />

at all, but even if it were, your child is<br />

made of hardier stuff than you imagine.<br />

Mine was a generation raised on<br />

“Texas Chainsaw Massacre” movies<br />

at sleepovers, and we emerged only<br />

A scene from the film “Haunted Mansion.” | IMDB<br />

negligibly traumatized. Your own child<br />

has probably inadvertently watched<br />

Ukrainian battlefield footage on an<br />

iPad over their cereal bowl; a couple<br />

hours with ghosts will feel like a<br />

vacation.<br />

Joseph Joyce is a screenwriter and freelance<br />

critic based in Sherman Oaks.<br />

28 • ANGELUS • <strong>September</strong> 8, <strong>2023</strong> <strong>September</strong> 8, <strong>2023</strong> • ANGELUS • 29


DESIRE LINES<br />

HEATHER KING<br />

Heather King is an award-winning<br />

author, speaker, and workshop leader.<br />

Tunnel rhythm<br />

“He Who Dances on Wood”<br />

(2016) is a documentary<br />

short, under six minutes<br />

long, produced and directed by<br />

Brooklyn-based, Mexican-Ethiopian<br />

filmmaker Jessica Beshir.<br />

You can watch it for free on YouTube.<br />

The backstory is that many years ago<br />

Fred Nelson was on the New York City<br />

subway with his young son, when the<br />

son disappeared. Turned out the kid<br />

had become mesmerized by some tap<br />

dancers who were performing on the<br />

train and stayed behind.<br />

So Fred bought his son a pair of<br />

tap shoes, and while he was at it, he<br />

bought himself a pair, too. The son<br />

never followed through. Fred’s own<br />

shoes remained in the closet until quite<br />

some time later when he was moving<br />

and came upon them again.<br />

A lightbulb went on.<br />

Fred started taking lessons but he<br />

didn’t have a place to practice. So he<br />

found a piece of wood and started<br />

taking it to Brooklyn’s Prospect Park.<br />

Enter Beshir who, in a conversation<br />

also available on YouTube, describes<br />

how the documentary came about.<br />

“When I first moved to Brooklyn I<br />

always used to see this man in the park.<br />

He was holding something under his<br />

arm and he had an amazing sense of<br />

purpose.”<br />

One day she saw that what he was<br />

holding was a piece of wood.<br />

Fred had started out practicing on the<br />

park’s big lawn, where he felt free to<br />

make the sounds and movements that<br />

he liked. But one day it rained. So he<br />

A scene from Jessica Beshir’s film “He Who Dances on<br />

Wood.” | SCREENSHOT VIA YOUTUBE<br />

ran under a bridge tunnel and began<br />

dancing there. The echoes, both of his<br />

tapping and the sounds he made while<br />

dancing, reverberated. He loved the<br />

effect. And the tunnel became “his”<br />

place.<br />

Says Beshir, “When I first saw him<br />

dancing under the tunnel, I was so in<br />

awe. He wasn’t doing a show. <strong>No</strong> one<br />

else was there. It was maybe 6 a.m. He<br />

was just enjoying himself so much.”<br />

Over time she started getting closer<br />

and closer and closer. What made<br />

her want to make the film was Fred’s<br />

passion: that he seemed to have made<br />

a pact with himself.<br />

“He was there every single day. <strong>No</strong>t<br />

on a stage, but for himself. For his<br />

practice. And it was right around the<br />

time in my life that I had started to<br />

want to make a film.”<br />

Beshir realized that she had to<br />

develop a similar purpose, rigor, and<br />

devotion. So she got herself a camera.<br />

She developed a relationship with<br />

Fred. She got his permission to film.<br />

And she made “He Who Dances on<br />

Wood,” a luminous homage to making<br />

do with what’s at hand, to the vocation<br />

of art, and most particularly to the<br />

glorious Fred Nelson.<br />

“His dancing connects him to the<br />

universe around him,” says Beshir.<br />

“There’s a spiritual aspect. He’s a very<br />

graceful, sweet, beautiful person.”<br />

Much of the film is shot in slow<br />

motion, showcasing the grounded<br />

simplicity of shoes, fallen leaves, a<br />

piece of battered parquet flooring that<br />

can hardly measure more than a square<br />

yard.<br />

The park is shown in every season:<br />

the filtered sunlight of spring, the trees<br />

changing color in fall, geese on the<br />

iced-over lake in winter.<br />

Rhythm, Fred maintains, is “all<br />

through” the world.<br />

“There’s nothing that gives me more<br />

joy than when I’m in there tap dancing.<br />

It’s a way of talking, speaking —<br />

the wood has a voice too,” he says.<br />

Exuberant, loose-limbed, simultaneously<br />

utterly focused and utterly free,<br />

Fred seems to channel the musical<br />

heartbeat of the universe.<br />

“Dancing cleans me out,” he says. “It<br />

gives me my personal strength.”<br />

Pedestrians amble through, a bike<br />

wheels slowly by, but Fred seems to<br />

have the tunnel, and by extension, the<br />

park, to himself.<br />

“I picked up a lot of things later in<br />

life. If I had started earlier, if I’d had<br />

my head on straight, or whatever. …<br />

But I guess it’s probably mean for me<br />

to learn things in my older age, just as<br />

I’m about to leave the world. There<br />

must be a reason for it, but I don’t<br />

know what it is.<br />

“When the right thing comes along<br />

something happens inside of us. I may<br />

not know it, but something happens<br />

inside of me. There’s a need to speak<br />

to God.”<br />

Fred has no need, however, to evangelize,<br />

nor to tell others what to do. “I’ll<br />

just be silent because I know I’ve found<br />

my joy.”<br />

To Beshir, the best thing about the<br />

film is Fred’s attitude toward life. <strong>No</strong><br />

matter how old we are, we can be<br />

inwardly vital, we can learn, we can<br />

embody hope.<br />

“You don’t have to be on Broadway.<br />

You can have so much joy tapping on a<br />

piece of wood under a tunnel.”<br />

“I learned so much from him,” she<br />

continues. Whatever you do, you want<br />

to bring joy. I wanted to make that<br />

my own practice. He taught me to<br />

be self-determined. That was my film<br />

school.”<br />

Or as Fred sums up: “That’s a glorious<br />

Fred Nelson in the documentary short “He Who Dances<br />

on Wood.” | SCREENSHOT VIA YOUTUBE<br />

story to have a rhythm that can go<br />

around the world — and come back<br />

to you.”<br />

30 • ANGELUS • <strong>September</strong> 8, <strong>2023</strong><br />

<strong>September</strong> 8, <strong>2023</strong> • ANGELUS • 31


Mama’s kids<br />

LETTER AND SPIRIT<br />

SCOTT HAHN<br />

Scott Hahn is founder of the<br />

St. Paul Center for Biblical<br />

Theology; stpaulcenter.com.<br />

For all my newfound piety, I was still 15.<br />

Months before, I’d left juvenile delinquency behind<br />

and accepted Jesus. My parents noticed the change.<br />

Zeal for my evangelical faith consumed me. But, one<br />

spring day, I was aware of something else consuming me. I<br />

had a stomach bug. The school nurse told me to lie down<br />

in her office while she phoned my mother. Instantly I<br />

dozed off.<br />

I awoke to my mother’s voice. She was there with me, and<br />

she was filled with pity. In her eyes I was her helpless baby<br />

again.<br />

I was horrified.<br />

Then it dawned on me: What if my friends saw my mom<br />

leading me out of school? What if she put her arm around<br />

me? I’d be a laughingstock — Mama’s Boy.<br />

“Mom,” I whispered. “Do you suppose you could walk<br />

out ahead of me? I don’t want my friends to see you taking<br />

me home.”<br />

Mom didn’t say a word. She walked out of the school and<br />

to her car. From there, she mothered me home, making<br />

sure I went to bed with the usual remedies.<br />

It had been a close call, but I was pretty sure I’d escaped<br />

with my cool intact. I drifted off to sleep again in peace.<br />

That evening my father visited my room to see how I was<br />

feeling.<br />

I told him I was fine. And then he looked gravely at me.<br />

“Scottie,” he said, “your religion doesn’t mean much if it’s<br />

all talk.” Then came the clincher: “What you did to your<br />

mother today was shameful. Don’t ever be ashamed to be<br />

seen with your mother.”<br />

I didn’t need an explanation. I was ashamed of myself for<br />

being ashamed of my mother.<br />

Yet isn’t that the way it is with many Christians? As Jesus<br />

hung dying on the cross, he left us a mother (John 19:26-<br />

27). He told his Beloved Disciple to take Mary home. And<br />

now we are Jesus’ beloved disciples! Yet how many are<br />

taking her to their homes?<br />

And how many Christian churches are fulfilling the<br />

New Testament prophesy that “all generations” will call<br />

Mary “blessed” (Luke 1:48)? Most Protestant ministers —<br />

and here I speak from my own experience — avoid even<br />

mentioning the mother of Jesus. To them, Marian devotion<br />

“exalts Mary at Jesus’ expense.” So you’ll sometimes find<br />

Protestant churches named after St. Paul or St. John —<br />

but almost never St. Mary. You’ll find pastors preaching<br />

on Abraham or David, Jesus’ distant ancestors, but almost<br />

never hear a sermon on his mother.<br />

This is not just a “Protestant problem.” Too many Catholics<br />

have abandoned their heritage of<br />

“Virgin Mary,” by El Greco,<br />

1541-1614, Greek. |<br />

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS<br />

Marian devotions.<br />

The proof of Mary’s maternity came,<br />

for me, when I took up the rosary<br />

one day and began to pray. I prayed<br />

for a seemingly impossible intention.<br />

On the next day, I took up the beads<br />

again, and the next day, and the next. Months passed before<br />

I realized that my petition had been granted.<br />

Sept. 8 is when the Church celebrates Mary’s birthday. If<br />

you’ve been away from the beads, please think about taking<br />

them up again.<br />

■ SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 2<br />

SCRC Catholic Renewal Convention: “Regather in Anaheim.”<br />

Anaheim Marriott Ballrooms, 700 W. Convention<br />

Way, Anaheim, 9 a.m.-6 p.m. More than 20 popular Catholic<br />

speakers, including Father Robert Spitzer, SJ, and Father<br />

Parker Sandoval. Three Masses and healing services offered.<br />

For more information, visit scrc.org or call 8<strong>18</strong>-771-1361.<br />

■ SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 3<br />

Holy Silence Contemplative Prayer Group. St. Andrew<br />

Russian Greek Catholic Church, 538 Concord St., El Segundo,<br />

12-1:30 p.m. Call 310-322-<strong>18</strong>92.<br />

■ WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 6<br />

Good Grief Bereavement Support Group. St. Bede the<br />

Venerable Church, 215 Foothill Blvd., La Cañada, 6:30-8<br />

p.m. Free six-week support group for those who have lost a<br />

loved one runs through Oct. 11. Bring a small photo of your<br />

loved one to the first session. To pre-register or learn more,<br />

call 626-840-7478 or 8<strong>18</strong>-949-4300.<br />

“Holy is his Name” Weekly Series. St. Dorothy Church,<br />

241 S. Valley Center Ave., Glendora, 7-8:30 p.m. Series runs<br />

every Wednesday through May 22, 2024. Deepen your<br />

understanding of the Catholic faith through dynamic DVD<br />

presentations by Bishop Robert Barron, Dr. Edward Sri, Dr.<br />

Marcellino D’Ambrosio, Dr. Brant Pitre, and Dr. Scott Hahn.<br />

Free, no reservation required. Call 626-335-2811 or visit the<br />

Adult Faith Development ministry page at www.stdorothy.<br />

org for more information.<br />

■ FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 8<br />

Beginning Experience Weekend Retreat for Widowed,<br />

Separated, and Divorced. Holy Spirit Retreat Center, 4316<br />

Lanai Rd., Encino. Retreat runs Sept. 8-10. Trained peer<br />

ministers will support and guide adults on their grief journey<br />

through loss. For more information, visit familylife.lacatholics.org/beginning-experience<br />

or beginningexperience.<br />

org. $75 deposit/person required in advance. Need-based<br />

financial aid may be available. Call Maria at 909-592-0009<br />

or email beginningexp.losangeles@gmail.com.<br />

■ SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 9<br />

St. Anthony’s 72nd Annual Croatian Festival and Picnic.<br />

Compton Hunting & Fishing Club, 1625 Sportsman Dr.,<br />

Compton, 11 a.m.-11 p.m. Call 213-628-2938 for more<br />

information.<br />

■ TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 12<br />

Memorial Mass. San Fernando Mission, 15151 San Fernando<br />

Mission Blvd., Mission Hills, 11 a.m. Mass is virtual and<br />

not open to the public. Livestream available at catholiccm.<br />

org or facebook.com/lacatholics.<br />

LACBA Unlawful Detainer Answer Clinic. LA Law Library,<br />

301 W. 1st St., Los Angeles, 12-3 p.m. Providing limited<br />

assistance with reviewing unlawful detainer complaints,<br />

jury demands, fee waiver requests, and more. Open to the<br />

disabled veteran community in Los Angeles County. Spanish<br />

assistance available. RSVP to 213-896-6536 or email<br />

inquiries-veterans@lacba.org.<br />

Women at the Well. Holy Spirit Retreat Center, 4316 Lanai<br />

Rd., Encino, 10 a.m.-12 p.m. With Sister Chris Machado,<br />

SSS. Group meets on the second Tuesday of each month.<br />

For more information, visit hsrcenter.com or call 8<strong>18</strong>-815-<br />

4480.<br />

■ WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13<br />

Young Adult Rosary. Morgan Park, 4100 Baldwin Park<br />

Blvd., Baldwin Park, 6 p.m. Rosary for young adults and<br />

youth groups. Meets on the 13th of every month through<br />

December. Wear your ministry uniform and bring a flag or<br />

banner.<br />

St. Padre Pio Mass. St. Anne Church, 340 10th St., Seal<br />

Beach, 1 p.m. Celebrant: Father Al Baca. For more information,<br />

call 562-537-4526.<br />

■ SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 16<br />

St. John’s Seminary Annual Gala. Cathedral of Our Lady<br />

of the Angels, 555 W. Temple St., Los Angeles, 5-9 p.m.<br />

Vigil Mass will be followed by cocktail reception on the<br />

Cathedral Plaza and al fresco dining. Distinguished alumni<br />

and Catholic leaders will be honored. For more information,<br />

visit lacatholics.org/catholic-la-events.<br />

■ SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 17<br />

Day in Recognition of All Immigrants Procession and<br />

Mass. Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, 555 W. Temple<br />

St., Los Angeles, 3 p.m. Archbishop José H. Gomez will<br />

celebrate a special Mass at 3:30 p.m., which will be in<br />

person and livestreamed via Facebook.com/lacatholics and<br />

lacatholics.org/immigration.<br />

■ MONDAY, SEPTEMBER <strong>18</strong><br />

Della Robbia: A Retrospective. Holy Family Church<br />

Holtsnider Pastoral Center, Galilee Room, 1527 Fremont<br />

Ave., South Pasadena, 9 a.m. Curator Anne Yee provides<br />

a portrayal of the Della Robbia families. Day includes<br />

refreshments, lecture, and guided campus tour. Free and<br />

open to the public. Select pieces of the artwork available<br />

for purchase in the bookstore. Contact maryhannon123@<br />

gmail.com or Diane.collison@outlook.com.<br />

■ TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 19<br />

<strong>18</strong>th Annual Los Angeles Catholic Prayer Breakfast.<br />

Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, 555 W. Temple St.,<br />

Los Angeles, 6:30 a.m. This year’s address will be delivered<br />

by Joe Sikorra, marriage and family therapist and host of the<br />

Joe Sikorra Show. To reserve a table or for more information,<br />

visit lacatholicprayerbreakfast.org.<br />

■ THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 21<br />

Theology on Tap. Newman Pasadena Center, 151 S. Hill<br />

Ave., Pasadena, 6-8 p.m. Father Robert Spitzer will present<br />

about near-death experiences. Event is open to 21+<br />

students and young adults only. For more information, visit<br />

youngadultministry.lacatholics.org.<br />

Children’s Bureau: Foster Care Zoom Orientation. 4-5<br />

p.m. Children’s Bureau is now offering two virtual ways for<br />

individuals and couples to learn how to help children in<br />

foster care while reunifying with birth families or how to<br />

provide legal permanency by adoption. A live Zoom orientation<br />

will be hosted by a Children’s Bureau team member<br />

and a foster parent. For those who want to learn at their own<br />

pace about becoming a foster and/or fost-adopt parent, an<br />

online orientation presentation is available. To RSVP for the<br />

live orientation or to request the online orientation, email<br />

rfrecruitment@all4kids.org.<br />

■ FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 22<br />

Feast Day of St. Padre Pio Vigil Mass and Relic Veneration.<br />

St. Dorothy Church, 241 S. Valley Center Ave., Glendora,<br />

6 p.m. rosary and exposition of the Blessed Sacrament,<br />

7 p.m. Mass and healing service. First-class relic of St. Padre<br />

Pio available for veneration. Celebrant: Father Ron Clark.<br />

Call 626-914-3941.<br />

Items for the calendar of events are due four weeks prior to the date of the event. They may be emailed to calendar@angelusnews.com.<br />

All calendar items must include the name, date, time, address of the event, and a phone number for additional information.<br />

32 • ANGELUS • <strong>September</strong> 8, <strong>2023</strong> <strong>September</strong> 8, <strong>2023</strong> • ANGELUS • 33

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