This fine young woman’s work has Planned Parenthood in a sweat. A really amazing interview — and some incredible undercover footage showing PP covering up statutory rape, and urging a young woman to break her state’s parental notification laws.
The centenary of St. Elizabeth has come to an end. For me it started almost three years ago now, in February 2006. And how much has happened in that time! I will probably never be properly able to grasp it all, but here at least is what happened on this round in Hungary, during the General Chapter of the Secular Franciscans and the last of the centenary celebrations.
I arrived at Budapest airport on schedule on Saturday, November 15, but trouble soon developed. My luggage didn’t appear on the carousel. In fact, the luggage of a number of people on my flight didn’t appear. I had to get in line to report it missing. To make matters worse, my video camera and tripod were in those bags! I knew that volunteer drivers were supposed to be outside, and they wouldn’t know whether I had arrived or not or what was keeping me. I couldn’t go through customs until I was finished. Fortunately, the drivers were still waiting, holding up a sign announcing the chapter, and I went right over to them. They were meeting several of us from different flights at the same time. We got into the van and took of for the Manreza Spiritual Center in Dobogókö.
The northern part of Hungary between Budapest and Esztergom is mountainous and really gorgeous, even in gray November. The center is located in in a winter ski resort area, with a beautiful central lodge, where the conference hall is located. It has bedrooms on the upper floors, plus two other buildings with other bedrooms. There I met Michael, the cameraman, who had already arrived all the way from sunny California, and some of my fellow SFO’s who had appeared in the first interviews for the documentary back in 2007.
On Saturday and Sunday, we filmed the liturgies, chapter meetings and liturgical celebrations for the planned chapter video. Fortunately my luggage was returned Sunday afternoon, and I could take part in the filming of backup video from angles different than Michael’s.
Our first important work for the St. Elizabeth documentary was on Monday, November 17, when we attended the closing celebrations for her centenary in Esztergom, some 20 miles to the north. Esztergom was the seat and main residence not only of the archbishop, but of the medieval Arpad dynasty, and of St. Elizabeth’s father, King Andrew II. Elizabeth’s brother, Bela IV, eventually moved the royal seat to Budapest after the Mongol invasion devastated Esztergom in 1241. Only part of the castle remained and was given to the bishop.
The earliest basilica on the spot was built by St. Stephen, Hungary’s first Christian king and Elizabeth’s ancestor and dedicated to St. Adalbert; according to tradition, Stephen was crowned in the basilica in 1000. It was ruined and rebuilt several times because of invasions and other disasters. The building of the present church began in 1822. The beautiful fresco of the Assumption by Michelangelo Grigoletti over the high altar reflects its second dedication to Blessed Mary Taken into Heaven.
Unfortunately our group’s visit inside the castle before Mass had to be scrapped, because nobody had realized that the Castle Museum was closed Mondays. Even influential art expert Maria Prokopp, who was planning to go with our group as a guide couldn’t get us in. That was a tremendous disappointment (but it turned out well in the end, as you’ll see). So we had to be content with exploring around the outside of the cathedral and castle, where there is a beautiful statue of the crowning of St. Stephen.
The Mass in the cathedral concluding the centenary was celebrated by Laszlo Cardinal Paskai, O.F.M., the former primate of Hungary, and a Franciscan. The Franciscan priests of Hungary, and the Franciscan Conference of Spiritual Assistants to the SFO concelebrated and Hungarian SFO members were there, along with the whole the General Chapter of the SFO. Everyone was deeply moved by the Mass, and by receiving St. Elizabeth’s bread at the altar afterwards, a symbol of her generous kindness to others; we were also given a chance to kiss her relic. Since I was only filming backup video, I was able to enjoy this Mass much more than the one in Assisi.
Michael was interested in some outdoor shots of Esztergom, especially the castle and cathedral. So that night he made arrangements to have Jozsef, one of the SFO volunteer drivers, take us back into town the next morning and drop us off on his way into Budapest to pick someone up at the airport. We were told that the Castle Museum would also be open, and that we could stop in there, but whether we could get permission to shoot was anyone’s guess. We set out shortly after 7:00 and to our delight, Jozsef told us that he didn’t have to pick anyone up after all, and that he could drive us around for the whole morning if we wanted.
Our first goal when we arrived back in Esztergom was to get a good shot of the castle from the river. As it happens, the Danube river there is the border line between Hungary and Slovakia. We drove to the middle of the bridge, and just before you get to the Slovakian border guards, there is a little place you can park on the bridge, just perfect for taking pictures and video. The light was rather hazy and Michael would have preferred a night shot when the castle was lighted up, but the view was still spectacular.
After that, we had a stop for coffee and juice at a little cafe. (We had left before breakfast at the center; I hadn’t had anything to eat but my St. Elizabeth’s bread). Then we decided to look for a hilly area where Michael could get panoramic shots of the town, since the museum didn’t open until 10:00. I We went up a steep road, stopped at a level spot, and shot the castle and cathedral. I took this photo, though the castle isn’t really visible. 
But Michael believed there was an even higher elevation. We drove up a very steep hill and found that by going up an even steeper path you could reach a spot that offered a splendid bird’s-eye view of the city. A torn toenail that had become infected was bothering me, so I stayed below in Jozsef’s van while he and Michael took the path and got the shot.
Then it was on to the museum. The permissions question worked itself out miraculously and soon we were exploring the museum with our video cameras. We spent around two hours there, much more time than the 20-30 minutes we would have had with the group, though unfortunately this meant we didn’t get to incorporate any shots of the group in the video.
Here is a room from the 12th-century part of the castle, a room Elizabeth might have played in as a child. The Romanesque architecture is quite similar to the rooms of Wartburg Castle, Elizabeth’s home after she was engaged to Ludwig of Thuringia and left to go to Germany at the age of four, around 1211. 
Michael also shot some video in the castle courtyard. This is just before we went into the other, more recent side of the castle complex. 
Inside, we filmed the Knight’s Hall; at one end of it was a replica of the crown of St. Stephen; the original is jealously guarded in the Hungarian state treasury; a very precious symbol of the nation. It seems from recent studies that a part of it does date back to the early 11th century, the time of St. Stephen; this part was incorporated into the later crown. Jozsef told us that a later king of Hungary was once being pursued on horseback by an enemy while wearing the original crown, when he fell off his horse and his crown was damaged: the cross on top was bent. When the copy was made, it reproduced everything exactly, including the bent cross! 
We then climbed the stairs to the top floor of this newer part, and went out onto a balcony with a spectacular view of the Danube river that flowed right under the castle walls. Michael tooks some more video from here, but he had already taken some film of the river from every window we came across. We ended our visit to the castle reluctantly, and Michael took some more shots inside the cathedral before we went back to the conference center. We told Jozsef that he deserved a spot in the credits of the completed film!
Our day-long tour of Budapest on Thursday, November 20, was splendid. Once again we got on the buses, and it didn’t seem long before we were there. As we drove along, Suszanna, one of the Hungarian chapter members, gave us a brief explanation of the sights. One of the most impressive was the Hungarian Parliament building across the river; another was the famous Chain bridge with the stone lions at the entrance. We stopped at the Royal Palace and from the terrace in back got a splendid view of the city and the Danube river. We then stopped in Holy Trinity Square, where the Church of Matthias is located. The Church is actually dedicated to Our Lady, but gained its name because the marriages of King Matthias Corvinus were celebrated there. It is also the coronation church of the Hungarian kings,The church was unfortunately largely covered with scaffolding, but King Matthias himself was there, represented in a fine equestrian statue in the nearby square. We looked in a few souvenir shops, then on to our next stop, St. Elizabeth’s Church in Roses Square. On the way, we passed Margaret Island, where Elizabeth’s niece, St. Margaret of Hungary (1242-1271), lived in a Dominican convent, imitating her aunt in lowly service to the poor.
St. Elizabeth’s Church, where the people of Budapest honor their national patroness is a lovely, Neo-Gothic structure, built around 1900. It’s surrounded by a gate, and a beautiful green park in front. 
In front, there is a statue of St. Elizabeth in her most famous pose, holding roses. It recalls the famous story of her meeting her husband Ludwig as she was carrying some bread to the poor in her skirt. She didn’t want him to criticize her for her excessive charity, so when he asked what she was carrying, she said roses. When he looked in her skirt, he actually saw roses there. Modern scholars very much doubt this story because a) Elizabeth’s husband certainly never opposed her charities, b) the earliest versions give a different version of the story, in which she is a small child meeting her father, King Andrew II of Hungary; c) Elizabeth’s attitude and actions as portrayed in the story have much more in common with those of a small child and her father than a grown woman and her husband. Another reason for doubting the story is that it is a very common one, found in a number of saints’ lives, including that of Elizabeth’s contemporary, St. Rose of Viterbo.
Our last stop was at the Millennium Monument in Heroes’ squre, with its monumental statues of Elizabeth’s ancestors and relatives of the Arpad dynasty: Arpad himself, the tribal leader and his companions; King Stephen I, King Andrew II, and King Bela IV.
Later in the week, we did all of our interviews, though finding times when people would be available in the right schedule of the chapter was difficult. But in the end we got everything we needed. I was especially happy to interview the younger Secular Franciscans, who gave an appreciation of what Elizabeth means to young people.
It seemed almost incredible when the time had already come to go home.
Now with all this new footage, my next task is to edit a new trailer for the documentary, which I hope to have online soon. See keep watching this site!
(Note, click on any of the photos above to get the full-size version. The new image management on Wordpress has proved very difficult for me to master, and the full-size pictures don’t align properly).
Update on May 30, 2009. After many delays, the trailer is almost ready
The diocesan process for John Paul I has come to a close, and the documentation on the miracle attributed to him has also evidently been sent to Rome. Now more information has come out about the miracle and the man who was healed by the Pope.
Giuseppe Denora was a bank clerk from Altamura Italy. He and his wife had attended Pope John Paul I’s Angelus talk in Rome on September 3, 1978. Denora kept a couple of newspaper clippings of the Pope, one of which he had framed and hung on his bedroom wall. Then, fourteen years later, at the age of 44, with 4 young children, the youngest just four years old, he fell seriously ill. He tells what happened then:
“At the beginning of 1992. I went to the doctor here in Altamura. He did a gastroscopy on me. He said, ‘Here, unfortunately, things are looking bad, very bad, go and see this oncologist at Bari hospital’. The oncologist made me do another gastroscopy. Same result: ‘Non-Hodgkin’s gastric lymphoma’. I came home and started chemotherapy. . . In two months I was reduced to a shadow. I wasn’t eating, I could hardly get out of bed. I lay there, with the photo of this man in front of me. I’d look at him, I let him in on my worries and we’d talk in silence, in the way that I said: ‘Look at the state I’m in, I can’t work any more … What can I do? And Cecilia’s still small… the children are in need’. ‘I’m here, but you’re up there,’ I’d tell him other times, ‘you know them well, those upstairs, those that are higher up than you. You ask those who are higher up than you what I’m to do, if they’ll help me. If they can help me. You tell them’.
On the night of 27 March I felt I was dying from the pain. A furnace in my stomach, I felt it burning so much. And I was burning inside with the pain of having to leave my family. I looked at him and said again: ‘If I have to die now who’s going to think about feeding these children …’. The room that night was lit up as always by the lampposts in the street … I saw it at the foot of the bed: a dark shadow that came forward and passed alongside me rapidly with a hand stretched out, a hand, an instant, and in that exact instant it was as if that fire I had inside was dowsed with water. I fell asleep and in the morning I woke rested, reborn. As I woke up I heard my wife calling me shaking me a bit, ‘Peppe, Peppe have you got a temperature?’ I got up and went to have breakfast, the next day I went back to work. Nothing, from that moment on nothing more, I immediately felt just as I am now: in full health.” [Interviewer]: And you immediately re-did the clinical examinations? “Yes, seeing the results, the doctors wrote: ‘Complete Remission’”.
You can read the whole article here.
It’s been over a month since I last posted here and a great deal has happened. I spent November 15-22 at the SFO General Chapter in Hungary as an observer and documentary filmmaker . . . and attended the closing celebrations for the centenary of St. Elizabeth of Hungary. It was the experience of a lifetime. More about all that later.
I was delayed for an extra night in Paris, because of the airline being unable to find my reservation. As soon as I got home on November 23, I had a call from my mom telling me my Uncle Joe had died.
It wasn’t really unexpected, because he had been ill for some time. But it was a hard blow all the same. He had served in the Air Force like my dad and had been a resident for the past few years at the Iowa Veteran’s home. He continued to attend our family holiday gatherings and was faithful in attending Mass at our parish church until he became too ill to go out. He was one of the most warm-hearted men I knew and a devoted father to his children and stepchildren. I was also named after him; my full name is Lori Josephine. He was the one member of our family who could never remember how old he was. But we can. He died at the age of 79.
I went home immediately for the funeral, and to be with my family for an extended Thanksgiving vacation. Joe’s funeral Mass was at St. Mary’s Church. He got full military honors and the blowing of Taps when he was buried at the Veterans’ Home on November 26.
I was actually delayed another whole day in getting back to New York because of bad weather, finally arriving on December 2, and had to immediately set about making up all my lost work time. That was 10 days ago.
Today as I was finally sitting down to work on my blog, I got some more sad news: sad news for the whole Fordham University staff, students and alumni: Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J., longtime professor at the university and a brilliant and renowned theologian, died today in the Fordham infirmary at the age of 90.
I wasn’t privileged to have taken any classes with Cardinal Dulles while I was enrolled at Fordham for my graduate studies (1994-2001), but I did have a chance to listen to him speak on C.S. Lewis, 2 or 3 years ago, at a very crowded hall at the Lincoln Center campus. He was already very frail, but what a mind and soul! He got a tremendous ovation; the love and respect that flowed to him were palpable.
Cardinal Dulles had a most unusual path to the priesthood. The son of John Foster Dulles, who eventually became U.S. Secretary of State, he attended Harvard Law School before joining the Navy during World War II. He began life in a Presbyterian, became an agnostic in his late teens, then converted to Catholicism in his twenties. In 1946, he joined the Jesuits. After his priestly ordination in 1956, he taught at Woodstock College and the Catholic University of America; he became Professor of Religion and Society at Fordham in 1988. John Paul II, in recognition of his great contributions to theology, named him a cardinal, but he asked to be dispensed from becoming a bishop because of his advanced age.
I was very moved to learn that Pope Benedict XVI met privately with the ailing Cardinal at St. Joseph’s Seminary in Dunwoodie during his trip to New York this past April; the Holy Father addressed him not as “Your Eminence,” but — something that undoubtedly meant more to him — as “Herr Professor.”
Whispers in the Loggia has a great deal more about him here.
And there is a wonderful biographical interview on video here.
One more little anecdote that shows how much the Cardinal was the life and soul of Fordham: as a graduate student it often seemed to me that I had my own branch of Fordham library going at home with the large number of books I had checked out, not just for my dissertation, but on many other subjects I was interested in. In fact, I really went overboard, checking out books I didn’t have time to read. Once when I was at the circulation desk renewing my books, the student in charge said, “Wow — you’re the only person who has more books out than Cardinal Dulles!” Evidently they were keeping track there, and were proud of his record. I will freely confess than I managed to read less than half the books I checked out, so I am sure I didn’t real more books than he did. At any rate, I’m certain that checking out more books was the only thing I could ever have beaten that brilliant man at!
May he and my uncle Joe and all the faithful departed rest in peace.
