Month: December 2019

Dolores Madlener died. Here’s as good a eulogy of her as you will find.

It’s by Heidi Schlumpf, in a January, 2016 Natl Catholic Reporter article about Catholic journalists in Chicago, posted just after Grant Gallicho of Commonweal had joined the Catholic New world as executive editor.

Though readers of national Catholic media may know Gallicho’s name, they may not have heard of Dolores Madlener. But she is well-known and loved throughout the Chicago archdiocese. Last month, she retired after 37 years with the archdiocesan paper.

I have been lucky enough to have been mentored by her, both professionally and personally, since I met her in the mid-1990s. Although she started as the editor’s secretary, Madlener quickly took on other jobs around the paper, including the compiling of the weekly calendar page and the writing of a benevolent gossip column.

But she was more than a colleague to me; she is a role model. We’re very different: She’s a South Sider, I live north, and she is more conservative than I. But she taught me how to be open to whatever life throws you. She counseled me after my first marriage ended, and has cheered me on as I pursued graduate school, other jobs, marriage and children.

Madlener was the first person I knew who had her own email address and was exploring this new thing called the “World Wide Web.” Despite her 80-some years, she is the epitome of “young at heart.”A member of the Focolare movement, she is deeply spiritual and Catholic, but with a touch of, shall we say, clerical “suspicion,” if not anticlericalism.

She has a reporter’s nose for news, and I suspect if she had been born in a different generation, you would definitely know her name as a top Catholic journalist.

I remember her introducing me to NCR, explaining that this is where the real story of what’s going on in the church is. I can’t let her retire without mentioning her in its pages.

Thank you, Dolores, for all you’ve done for the church, for Catholic journalism and for me.

[Heidi Schlumpf teaches communication at Aurora University, outside Chicago.]

This story appeared in the Jan 15-28, 2016 print issue under the headline:  Journalists find a home in Chicago archdiocese | National Catholic Reporter

Vatican hearts Greta T. A little child will lead them . . .

. . . over the cliff . . . of the panic-stricken of the world . . . 

ROME – On Thursday top Vatican officials hailed Swedish teen Greta Thunberg, recently named TIME Magazine’s “Person of the Year” for her environmental advocacy, as a “great witness” of Church teaching on care for creation and the human person.

They believe in God the cruel mischief-maker, punishing His children with an early end of the world as we know it.

via Vatican calls Greta Thunberg ‘great witness’ of Church’s environmental teaching

Pope further cements his reputation for slash-bang wrecking-crew rough dismissal of things he does not like . . .

And for letting us never forget his contempt for ideas and their adherents.

ROME – Pope Francis appeared to flatly reject proposals in some theological circles to add “co-redemptrix” to the list of titles of the Virgin Mary, saying the mother of Jesus never took anything that belonged to her son, and calling the invention of new titles and dogmas “foolishness.”

“She never wanted for herself something that was of her son,” Francis said. “She never introduced herself as co-redemptrix. No. Disciple,” he said, meaning that Mary saw herself as a disciple of Jesus.

Mary, the pope insisted, “never stole for herself anything that was of her son,” instead “serving him. Because she is mother. She gives life.”

“When they come to us with the story of declaring her this or making that dogma, let’s not get lost in foolishness [in Spanish, tonteras],” he said

Ipse dixit.

via Pope calls idea of declaring Mary co-redemptrix ‘foolishness’

Time to wonder whether Vatican people should be allowed to handle any amounts over pocket change . . .

If that.

Vatican City, Dec 10, 2019 / 03:50 pm (CNA).- The Italian businessman responsible for investing millions of Vatican funds owned a stake in an online options trading company fined in 2016 by the Securities and Exchange Commission for misleading investors.

Raffaele Mincione, through whom the Vatican’s Secretariat of State has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in donations from the faithful, bought in 2015 a 5% stake in EZTD Ltd, an Israeli-based company known as EZTrader.

Through a privately arranged sale, instead of on the open market, Mincione paid only $.25 per share for his stake in the company, while the publicly listed share price was $5.10. For only $1.6 million, he acquired a stake in EZTD valued on the market at $32 million.

Etc.

Outside auditors were fired several years ago.

And Francis remains in see-no-evil mode, ranting about helping poor people.

via Vatican’s investment manager Raffaele Mincione backed company that ‘misled investors’

The pope of the poor shorts them for sake of running his organization

Unsuprisingly, we must fear. Has he been virtue signaling, or is he over his head as a CEO?

VATICAN CITY—Every year, Catholics around the world donate tens of millions of dollars to the pope. Bishops exhort the faithful to support the weak and suffering through the pope’s main charitable appeal, called Peter’s Pence.

What the church doesn’t advertise is that most of that collection, worth more than €50 million ($55 million) annually, goes toward plugging the hole in the Vatican’s own administrative budget, while as little as 10% is spent on charitable works, according to people familiar with the funds.

Woe.

via Vatican Uses Donations for the Poor to Plug Its Budget Deficit – WSJ

Hot title here from Fr. Rutler: Meditations from a man on whom his erudition hangs lightly . . .

Dominus Vobiscum: Notes from a massgoer's underground

Sample bon mot from chapter about what to do with your imagination.

Narcissus [a] moral idiot. He became enamored of his reflection in the water. He wanted to discover, in the jargon of our day, his “inner child.”

But anyone who wants to find his inner child without locating the source of life in God is condemned to a perpetual infancy, an arrested development of the soul. The autonomous self ignores the voice of the other, all others.

And so it was with Narcissus, for Echo called to him, bidding him to come and be her lover. Narcissus was so involved with himself that her voice fell, literally, on morally deaf ears. She dissolved into nothing but her voice, which is how we get the word “echo.” Narcissus ended up dissolving into a plant that is named for him.

Wit, gentle humor, pointed, memorable, from pages of this book:

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Francis makes his mark on the church with bad appointments

In a story about financial skulldudgery/ incompetence in Francis’ Vatican is this key comment:

It was also bewildering that Pope Francis kept promoting scandal-plagued prelates to offices for which they possess little or no qualifications.

Oh my, a key to the Francis effect. He consistently dumps on Holy Mother the Church these people who do not belong — Francis’ kind of people, apparently.

Memento Mori: Facing Death as a Fount of Life

Anne (of Green Gables) meditates on her friend’s facing death with fear at its being nothing she’s used to:

How often do we fail to long for Heaven and instead fear that it will be unfamiliar? Do we consider the beatific vision and worry that eternal worship may be boring rather than glorious? If we are living for this world, the next world cannot attract us. If we build our lives around the temporal, the eternal will not be, as poor Ruby explained, what we are used to.

She clings to the lesser thing.

via Church Life Journal | University of Notre Dame