Or whatever you want to call it. Sometime last night or today, my site had its 100,000th visitor!
Thanks to my readers for making it happen.
I’ve been scarce because I’m still finishing the St. Elizabeth documentary - one more week to go!
I have admittedly been remiss in posting updates here since the big announcement. But I haven’t been idle. On Saturday, I filmed the last little scene needed for the recreations, with Elizabeth as a child, thanks to Elaine Mogollon and her little daughter Isabel.
The scene is Elizabeth being discovered with her father with bread she is carrying for the poor, which turns into roses. (I discussed the various versions of this story here). We had a really windy day to contend with, but the shoot was a success!
Here’s a peek (unfortunately, since these are actual stills from the videotape, and because they are of someone in motion, unless they’re extreme closeups, they’re inevitably going to be a little fuzzy):
Now that tax time is (whew!) over for another year, I want to catch up on a few things.
My two stories on the Pope’s (non)-scandal have gained a tremendous amount of interest for this blog, but because of all the time I had to spend on them a few other things suffered.
Here’s a roundup:
Documentary
One project that suffered was actually beyond my control. The work on the St. Elizabeth documentary, which I had hoped would soon be far enough along for me to show a fairly good amount of completed footage with a temporary narration and music track, has been stalled for almost a month. It started with the computer crash on March 20 that I’ve already mentioned. It was a week before the store would condescend to back up the files from disk, though I in fact had most of them backed up already. In the meantime, I was able to use my spare laptop, but it was useless to think of working on video there, because the hard drive was so small.
Well, the hard drive was defective, so the store allowed me to trade in my computer. Then when I got my new laptop (and 500GB hard drive!) home, and all the files had been painstakingly copied back to the right directories — the documentary project file would either refuse to open or would indicate it couldn’t find any of my files. Another frustrating couple of weeks. I first tried to do this on Holy Saturday, at the same time I was helping Jimmy with the famous article.
Right after Easter, I was online with the tech geeks at Adobe, but it was some time before I got the problem solved. And unfortunately, the solution was to re-link all the video in the edited project to the original files, one at a time. That took a lot of time, but fortunately, all my original editing decisions had been saved, and I didn’t have re-do any of that. All the same, a good amount of time has been lost. I feel that I really owe an explanation to everyone who has been waiting patiently for the documentary to be done.
I do expect to have more news soon, including the date(s) I will be showing the footage in the New York area, and some more interesting news I hope as well.
Find out more about the film and donate to its completion HERE
As a consolation, here are a couple of more stills, from the famous scene of the roses:
Book News
In other news, the original print run of The Greatest of These is Love, my biography of St. Elizabeth, has just officially sold out (except for maybe 3-4 copies on Amazon). Get the last ones while you can! I do hope, when I have time, to put out an updated digital edition for Kindle, E-Pub and the like.
Our Patron
And, in all my attention to scandals and taxes, I missed the feast day (in the old Church calendar at least) of the patron saint of this blog, St. Justin Martyr, on April 14. I’ve got to find a picture of him and put it up, but in the meantime here is my imaginary letter to him that serves as the blog’s mission statement:
Update: Here’s something even better — a video on him!
Something that passed almost unnoticed in these hectic days before Thanksgiving – for me and for many others – is the talk Pope Benedict XVI gave on November 21 to a group of over 260 artists in the Sistine Chapel. He wanted, among other things, to commemorate the tenth anniversary of John Paul II’s Letter to Artists (published on April 4, 1999) , and the occasion 45 years ago in 1964, when Pope Paul VI greeted artists in the same Sistine Chapel. After recalling those anniversaries, and reminding his listeners that they were in a place filled with some of the most famous works of art in the world, he said:
Dear friends, let us allow these frescoes to speak to us today, drawing us towards the ultimate goal of human history. The Last Judgement, which you see behind me, reminds us that human history is movement and ascent, a continuing tension towards fullness, towards human happiness, towards a horizon that always transcends the present moment even as the two coincide. Yet the dramatic scene portrayed in this fresco also places before our eyes the risk of man’s definitive fall, a risk that threatens to engulf him whenever he allows himself to be led astray by the forces of evil. So the fresco issues a strong prophetic cry against evil, against every form of injustice. For believers, though, the Risen Christ is the Way, the Truth and the Life. For his faithful followers, he is the Door through which we are brought to that “face-to-face” vision of God from which limitless, full and definitive happiness flows. Thus Michelangelo presents to our gaze the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End of history, and he invites us to walk the path of life with joy, courage and hope. The dramatic beauty of Michelangelo’s painting, its colours and forms, becomes a proclamation of hope, an invitation to raise our gaze to the ultimate horizon. The profound bond between beauty and hope was the essential content of the evocative Message that Paul VI addressed to artists at the conclusion of the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council on 8 December 1965: “To all of you,” he proclaimed solemnly, “the Church of the Council declares through our lips: if you are friends of true art, you are our friends!” And he added: “This world in which we live needs beauty in order not to sink into despair. Beauty, like truth, brings joy to the human heart, and is that precious fruit which resists the erosion of time, which unites generations and enables them to be one in admiration. And all this through the work of your hands… Remember that you are the custodians of beauty in the world.”
The whole of Pope Benedict’s talk in English, with links to the others, can be found here.
For anyone in the arts, including writers (like me), whether they are poets, playwrights, novelists or even screenwriters, for painters, sculptors, and those in the performing arts, these texts are a rich feast for meditation.
Could anyone express better than John Paul II (who was a practicing poet and playwright) the relation between an artist’s work and the contemplation of God?
6. Every genuine artistic intuition goes beyond what the senses perceive and, reaching beneath reality’s surface, strives to interpret its hidden mystery. The intuition itself springs from the depths of the human soul, where the desire to give meaning to one’s own life is joined by the fleeting vision of beauty and of the mysterious unity of things. All artists experience the unbridgeable gap which lies between the work of their hands, however successful it may be, and the dazzling perfection of the beauty glimpsed in the ardour of the creative moment: what they manage to express in their painting, their sculpting, their creating is no more than a glimmer of the splendour which flared for a moment before the eyes of their spirit.
Believers find nothing strange in this: they know that they have had a momentary glimpse of the abyss of light which has its original wellspring in God. Is it in any way surprising that this leaves the spirit overwhelmed as it were, so that it can only stammer in reply? True artists above all are ready to acknowledge their limits and to make their own the words of the Apostle Paul, according to whom “God does not dwell in shrines made by human hands” so that “we ought not to think that the Deity is like gold or silver or stone, a representation by human art and imagination” (Acts 17:24, 29). If the intimate reality of things is always “beyond” the powers of human perception, how much more so is God in the depths of his unfathomable mystery!
John Paul also said that Christ too was an artist on earth: “Christ himself made extensive use of images in his preaching, fully in keeping with his willingness to become, in the Incarnation, the icon of the unseen God.” (Both quotes from the Letter to Artists)
I posted here one of his predecessor John Paul I’s writings as a bishop on artists, though he never got to write a letter to artists as Pope. For him, a saint like Fra Claudio Granzotto, OFM Cap., had a similar idea:
Frau Claudio first remained in contemplation, he first heated his heart in the furnace of divine love, then, when he was well heated and had truly contemplated, only the did he set his hand to his masterpiece, and when his masterpiece was finished, he returned to contemplate and tried to bring what he had sculpted to life again.
The one art that Albino Luciani could lay any claim to practicing was that of a writer. And how did this insight work out in his life? One of his students at the seminary in Belluno, Don Aldo Belli, recalled that Luciani one day said to the class: “I don’t know what the prophet Isaiah did to find such clear and expressive images.” Aldo had the impression that Luciani wanted to learn his secret so as to imitate him. (Humilitas, Italian edition, November 1988, p. 15). That is, he saw the sacred writer first as a human writer, with the same difficulties in inspiration as all others. And he saw himself the same way.
I don’t know if the words Luciani wrote came from a vision like those of Isaiah, or, as I think much more likely from his own constant contemplation of the Word of God, which no doubt Isaiah did too. And though Luciani was capable of writing, and quite well, in a more elevated and poetic style, the result of his contemplation of the Gospels was something very like the Gospel simplicity of Jesus himself. What writer could ask for more?
A story from Lifesite News gives the full details. The House Rules Committee is still trying to block a vote on the Stupak-Pitts amendment, which would remove the federal funding for abortion contained in the House healthcare bill. H.R. 3200. The bill may soon come to a vote, and is increasingly likely to pass unless we do something.
The story gives links for contacting the committee Chair, Rep. Louise Slaughterer (R-New York) and the other members. Please make your voices heard!
Update: To give an example of the kind of skewing of facts that the President and some Democrats are engaging in, here’s a transcript of the exchange between Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D.-R.I.) and CNS News:
Nicholas Ballasy: “There’s a letter written by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops to Congress saying that they believe all of the health care proposals right now – the one in the House and the ones in the Senate – they all fund abortion as it stands and unless there’s an amendment or a change to those bills that specifically prohibits it, they’re not going to support it. Do you agree with them or is there something – ”
Patrick Kennedy: “I can’t understand for the life of me how the Catholic Church could be against the biggest social justice issue of our time where the very dignity of the human person is being respected by the fact that we’re caring and giving health care to the human person – that right now we have 50 million people who are uninsured. You mean to tell me the Catholic Church is going to be denying those people life saving health care? I thought they were pro-life. If the church is pro-life, then they ought to be for health care reform because it’s going to provide health care that are going to keep people alive. So this is an absolute red herring and I don’t think that it does anything but to fan the flames of dissent and discord and I don’t think it’s productive at all.” (CNS News)
What skewed logic! It’s not the bishops who are going to be denying health care to people, it’s the President, the Democrats and the House Rules Committee, to name a few. They are willing to delay and possibly stop health care reform because they won’t give up on the federal funding for abortion that most Americans do not want. They keep saying that there is nothing about federal funds for abortion in the bill, but if that were so, they would be changing absolutely nothing and losing absolutely nothing by agreeing to the Stupak-Pitts amendment. The fact that they won’t do so is all the information anyone needs to understand that they are under the thumb of Planned Parenthood, and that the thing that they and the President are most concerned with is putting his long-promised abortion mandate through Congress (remember Obama’s pledge to Planned Parenthood during the campaign?)
The bishops are not opposed to a public health care plan — they have been urging one on Congress for decades. Didn’t Rep. Kennedy read all their statements from earlier this year urging Congress to adopt a universal health care plan? The bishops, unlike the Kennedys, are coherent in their beliefs. They believe that health care should be about actual health care, not about murder.
Update, October 24: My apologies for the server, which seems to have been down from yesterday evening until now. Otherwise I would have posted this much sooner.
Kennedy’s remarks have received a blistering reply from his bishop. LifeNews has the story.
The Most Rev. Thomas J. Tobin, the bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Providence, took exception to his comments in an email to LifeNews.com.
“Congressman Patrick Kennedy’s statement about the Catholic Church’s position on health care reform is irresponsible and ignorant of the facts,” he said.
He continued: “But the Congressman is correct in stating that ‘he can’t understand.’ He got that part right.”
“As I wrote to Congressman Kennedy and other members of the Rhode Island Congressional Delegation recently, the Bishops of the United States are indeed in favor of comprehensive health care reform and have been for many years,” the Catholic official said. “But we are adamantly opposed to health care legislation that threatens the life of unborn children, requires taxpayers to pay for abortion, rations health care, or compromises the conscience of individuals.”
Kennedy has a 100% pro-abortion voting record, according to National Right to Life, and Bishop Tobin said that makes him an embarrassment to the Catholic Church.
“Congressman Kennedy continues to be a disappointment to the Catholic Church and to the citizens of the State of Rhode Island,’ Tobin said.
Go, Bishop Tobin!
