Think Jesse Jackson deserves Holy Role Model? Or Al Sharpton, both are self ordained are they not - except after long years in disguise I guess Jackson did get some kind of "honorary" title making him a "honorary" preacher if you call that despicable thief worhy of any title at all, even Mr. The story here re Miracle of Fatima where the life of the Pope was spared - how many times has somebody tried to murder the pope - for there is a secret society who follows the path of the rose....ultimate goal is to murder the Pope but he must be slain, in the open sight of others and fall in the open field....like JFK did (see Ezekial 38 and 39.....and Daniel with the three high priests and 3 presidents) So the Cardinal might be trying for Sainthood - this man (Mahoney) pushed for immigration and it is said Los Angelos is now the Banana Republic's Capitol.....so who should be in charge of this mob? 7 million illegan aliens from Mexico and that is a lot of votes, right? No wonder the Republicans are wooing these potential voters.....and sing praises to the cheap labor it brings to this country - we can now all eat in fast food places and wonder if the employees will wash their hands when leaving the rest room - or how about that Tyson Chicken that is frozen and thawed and re frozen and I imagine that stuff is radiated good. Nice story about Miracle Number II at Fatima and when the Pope met with his would be assassin - I imagine he found out who really was behind that plot - saylike the black from Berkley California who murdered King Faisal in 1968 who said "I hate Zionists"..... Ah must not hate the sodomists or the zionists or the snow birds.....for these birds all flock together....ie. Marc Rich perhaps? Saba advertisement advertisement Holy Role Models By Michael Rust [EMAIL PROTECTED] In a world in which authentic heroes often are replaced with icons from the cult of celebrity, modern-day saints have a renewed appeal that says something important about us. As the world enters the third millennium of Christianity, it turns out that saints are anything but archaic even in the United States. During the last two decades, Pope John Paul II has elevated people to sainthood at a record-breaking pace and shows no sign of letting up as his pontificate moves into its twilight. At the same time, non-Catholics are joining Catholics in embracing heroic religious figures of both the distant and recent past as an antidote to the celebrity-choked culture of secular society. Indeed, in the era of Monica Lewinsky, the concept of sainthood has a definite countercultural appeal even to those who do not officially recognize the Roman Catholic Church's calendar of saints. "There's so much cruddy stuff you see about humanity, in the White House and everywhere," Methodist pastor James Howell tells Insight. "So much so that the adjective 'human' is now equal to doing embarrassing things 'I'm only human.'" Saints, says Howell, the author of Servants, Misfits and Martyrs, "exemplify that there's another view of being human." Of course, sometimes the humanity of saints has been posthumously overlooked. "So often saints are people who cause a lot of trouble when they're alive and challenge people and are a sign of contradiction," Robert Ellsberg, author of All Saints, tells Insight. "After their death they are equipped with a halo and put in a stained-glass window and held up for reverence." Ellsberg, whose 1998 award-wining book includes reflections on a number of non-Catholic heroes of the soul as well as traditional Catholic saints, says those who earned the title of sanctity "were ordinary human beings who simply took their faith very seriously. They took seriously the challenges of their moment in history; they took seriously the needs of their neighbors and took seriously a private intuition of holiness or mystery and beauty or truth." Of course, that sounds quite foreign to much of the current culture. "The idea of heroically standing up for something when it costs you, even if it's not your life if it costs you financially or brings ridicule from your friends even that seems alien because we're just so caught up in being successful and being popular," says Howell. "The price for that is superficiality, and if you're superficial you're not standing up for anything." Yet many fight through this cultural morass. When researching her book, Jude: A Pilgrimage to the Saint of Last Resort, veteran journalist Liz Trotta was surprised to find so much devotion to the patron saint of hopeless causes among younger people seemingly enveloped in an often-nihilistic age of postmodernity. "Of course, young people are searching so much for anything they can get their hands on just to stop being numb if you know what I mean," says Trotta. And, in fact, many do. Perhaps that is one reason for the current pope's reverence for the ancient church tradition of honoring men and women who fought the good fight and kept the faith. On April 9, the pontiff proclaimed the beatification declaring candidates for sainthood and recognizing them with the title of "Blessed" of five people during a solemn ceremony in St. Peter's Square. The pontiff now has presided at the beatification of 987 people and the canonization of 295. Since the Vatican Congregation for the Causes of Saints was established in 1588, all of the previous popes had combined to beatify 808 people and canonize 296. A saint is a Christian who is canonized after an infallible declaration by the pope that a person who died as a martyr or led a heroic Christian life is in heaven and is worthy of honor and imitation by the faithful, according to Sister Mary Ann Walsh of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington. For more than two centuries, Butler's Lives of the Saints has been an unofficial but highly regarded register of Catholic saints; there are close to 2,600 currently listed. In 1996, then 85-year-old Cardinal Silvio Oddi said in his memoirs that the pope was elevating too many people; the Vatican "has become a saint factory," the elderly prelate groused. There could be many reasons for Pope John Paul's high numbers. The pope has spoken eloquently about the "culture of death" which he sees pervading the modern world, and saints, through example and (according to Catholic belief) divine intercession, can serve as a bulwark against destructive tendencies of the age. At the same time, the pontiff may have been reacting against a tendency in some post-Vatican II Catholic theological circles to downplay the importance of saints. "Vatican II was very clear about how devotion to saints was not being changed," Trotta says firmly. A woman pioneer in TV news and currently New York bureau chief for the Washington Times, Trotta adds, "It's the so-called liberal Catholics who basically are apostates in my book who have misinterpreted what the council said and, in the interest of being so pseudointellectual, have decided to call them playful little figures instead of men and women of great courage and stature." But at the grass roots, devotion to saints appears to have survived the theological tumult of recent decades. Last October the nation's capital was the first stop of a 120-stop tour of the relics of St. Therese of Lisieux, the beloved "Little Flower" whose quick canonization just 28 years after her death in 1897 at age 24 set a modern record. In two days at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception an estimated 10,000 viewed the relics, far exceeding the expectations of the tour's Carmelite organizers. Therese's autobiography, Story of a Soul, was published after her death, giving Catholics around the world insight into her "little way" of holiness in ordinary daily life. Soon, miracles around the globe were reported, leading to her quick canonization. In 1997, the pope made her a doctor of the church the 33rd in all of history and only the third woman ever to be so honored. Popular demand helps move the canonization process along. The drive to canonize Mother Teresa, the founder of the Missionaries of Charity, began within days of her death in 1997 when Roger Cardinal Mahoney of Los Angeles urged the pope to make the 1979 Nobel Prize winner a saint within three years. Traditionally, however, the process to sainthood cannot begin until five years after the candidate dies. (Two prominent exceptions were St. Francis of Assisi, who died in 1226 and was made a saint two years later, and St. Anthony of Padua, named a saint only a year following his death in 1231.) In 1983, John Paul II reformed the saint-making system. The emphasis has shifted from a strictly judicial board the "devil's advocate" who sought to belittle the candidate was phased out to a more academic model. The process now has more in common with researching, writing and defending a dissertation than it does with appearing before a court. After the passage of five years, there is an investigation of the prospective saint. Usually, the local bishop appoints a "promoter" to direct the process, interview witnesses and gather evidence about the quality of the candidate's life. When all the documents are complete, they are reviewed by a panel of nine theologians. If at least six believe the candidate is worthy of beatification, the case goes to the cardinals and bishops of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints in Rome. An advocate argues before a panel of judges in favor of the person's sanctity, while an opposing advocate argues against. The findings of the judges are sent to the pope. This is not a brief process. Years, even generations, can pass. If the evidence seems clear, the pope declares the candidate "venerable" having led a life of heroic virtue. To get beyond that point, a miracle has to be attributable to the candidate and approved, although it can be waived in the case of martyrs. And, despite the skepticism of a secular world, this is not an easy process. Indeed, John Henry Newman, the 19th-century English intellectual giant and cardinal, was one of the most cited sources in the papers of the Second Vatican Council and a personal favorite of the current pope. Yet his cause has not advanced beyond "Venerable" because of the lack of a miracle. For a medical miracle to be confirmed, medical witnesses must testify that there is no natural explanation. Then, a panel of medical specialists appointed by the Vatican must examine the evidence and agree the healing only could be a miracle. After one miracle is confirmed, the candidate is formally beatified, or blessed, and may be locally honored. Another miracle that happens as a result of people praying for help to the now blessed candidate is necessary for canonization. The entire process can last a century or more. Elizabeth Ann Seton, the first native-born American saint, died in 1821 and was canonized in 1975. She began a school for poor children in Maryland, initiating the Catholic parochial-school system in this country. On Oct. 1, Katharine Drexel, a Philadelphia heiress who became a nun and devoted her family fortune to service to American Indians and African-Americans, will be the second American to be canonized. At 30, Drexel entered a convent and used her $20 million inheritance to establish the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, a missionary order. In her lifetime, the order established 12 American Indian schools and more than 100 rural and inner-city schools for black students, including New Orleans' Xavier University, the only historically black Catholic college in the country. The Vatican confirmed Mother Drexel's first miracle in 1998 curing a young man of deafness. Last fall, the Vatican researchers determined that there was no natural cause for the 1993 cure of the then 17-month-old Amanda Wall's deafness. On Jan. 28, the pope credited this unexplained cure to the family's prayers to Sister Drexel, who died in 1955 at age 96. (Philadelphia's Drexel University, founded by the saint's uncle, has offered the now 7-year-old Wall a full scholarship.) It's a process that can seem mysterious to outsiders, sometimes leading to misunderstanding. In 1998, some Jewish leaders vehemently protested the canonization of Edith Stein, a brilliant German Jewish philosopher who converted to Catholicism at age 29 and became a Carmelite nun in 1934, a year after Adolf Hitler took power. Because of her Jewish heritage she was smuggled from Germany into the Netherlands, where the Gestapo arrested her in August 1942 and shipped her to Auschwitz, where she was gassed. Although the pope combined the canonization with one of his strongest appeals to the world to guarantee that no "bestial plan" such as the Holocaust ever is repeated, some Jews protested that the canonization did not pay enough attention to Stein's Jewish background. Last year, critics of Pope Pius XII claimed the wartime pontiff had been too soft in his denunciation of the Nazis. Actually, the exploration into the career of Pius is far from complete, although his promoter, the Rev. Peter Gumbel, has rebutted much of the criticism. Pius XII is simply one of approximately 1,000 cases being investigated; there is no guarantee that his cause will advance. "I think the process can continue but it seems to me that the process for Pius XII has to be somewhat different" than the usual investigation into doctrinal conformity and moral life, says the Rev. John Pawlikowski, a Chicago Catholic priest active in Catholic/Jewish dialogue. "I really think you need to bring some serious historical scholars into this evaluation. You're dealing with a person who stood at the pinnacle of the church in one of its most critical periods in, certainly, the 20th century, but I would also say even in modern history." And contrary to the impression of outsiders, the see of Peter is no guarantee of postmortem honors. The only pope since the Renaissance to be canonized was Pius X, who reigned during the first decade of the 20th century. However, that could change soon. Last December, Pius IX, who led the church from 1846 to 1878 and who promulgated the Syllabus of Errors a list of 80 modern propositions he believed were undermining religion and moral values through the glorification of freedom and of reason without the balancing effect of responsibility and natural law and who convened the First Vatican Council of 1870-71, had a miracle confirmed by the Vatican. At the same time, Pope John XXIII, who convened the Second Vatican Council of the early 1960s, was pronounced "Venerable." Both men are expected to be beatified next fall. The linkage of Pius IX, a scourge of 19th-century liberalism, and John XXIII, beloved of liberals both in and out of the church, seem to some to be a too-convenient balancing. Yet both have gone through the investigative process and their joint inclusion just as well may indicate a transcendence of the labels of left and right. That also may be seen in the case of Dorothy Day, now the most prominent American candidate for sainthood. A remarkable woman by anyone's standards, Day cofounded with itinerant philosopher Peter Maurin the Catholic Worker, a newspaper which originally was meant to convince potential converts to communism that Catholicism offered a viable alternative to violent revolution and Marxist atheism. Day founded St. Joseph's House, a refuge in New York, and similar houses sprang up across the country, many existing to this day. A pacifist and self-described anarchist, Day was active in many social causes, suffering arrest and imprisonment for civil disobedience. At the same time, she was a devout Catholic whose theological tastes were strictly orthodox and whose liturgical and devotional tastes were quite conservative. As a young man, Ellsberg served as editor of the Catholic Worker, which still is available today at the original cost of a penny per monthly issue. Day once dismissed talk of her being a saint by saying she didn't want to be dismissed so easily. But then, sainthood is not necessarily grounds for quick dismissal. Ellsberg thinks the move to canonize Day is appropriate. "She had a tremendous respect and veneration for the tradition of saints; I don't know anybody who took that more seriously than she did." The only drawback, he says, may be some who would use her sainthood "as a way of excusing themselves from not just the obligation to do as she did, but instead the obligation to look on sanctity as the vocation of all Christians." Are there still saints out there today? Howell looks at the very real persecutions taking place around the globe. "In other parts of the world there are costs for being good," he says. "If that still exists out there, maybe we have the peculiar challenge in our comfortable culture to be at odds with what everybody else seems to be doing." Fatima Has Added Significance for Pontiff By James P. Lucier [EMAIL PROTECTED] On May 13, Pope John Paul II, recently returned from an exhausting journey to the Holy Land, will make another pilgrimage, this time to Fatima, a sleepy Portuguese hill town 60 miles north of Lisbon. There he will conduct the ceremony of "beatification" one step away from a formal declaration of sainthood for two young shepherds, Jacinta and Francisco Marto, who died in the flu epidemic of 1918 at the ages of 7 and 9 respectively. On May 13, 1917, the pair, along with their cousin, Lucia dos Santos, then age 10, reported that they had seen a beautiful woman while tending their sheep in a fertile, bowl-like depression called the Cova da Iria. The woman, who floated down from heaven and was resting on the branches of a holm-oak tree, told them to return every month on the 13th, and on Oct. 13 she would perform a great miracle. Ridiculed by their families and the entire village, attacked by church authorities and anticlerical government officials alike and threatened with severe punishment to force them to recant, the trio nevertheless maintained they only could tell the truth: that the woman came every month as she said. She showed them visions of heaven and hell, called upon sinners to repent, urged them to make sacrifices and pray every day. She predicted that the World War would end soon, that Russia would become a great source of tribulation and spread her errors throughout the world but that, eventually, Russia would fall and the Holy Father would suffer much. The little seers, who had not yet learned to read and write, never had heard of Russia and of course did not know that Vladimir Lenin's October Revolution was about to begin. The beautiful woman also told the children a terrible great secret, which today is known only to Sister Lucia now a 94-year-old cloistered Carmelite nun and the pope. Both will attend the beatification ceremony. It is difficult to predict how many other people will attend the ceremony. "We don't know perhaps 800,000, maybe 1 million," an information officer for the government of Portugal, Carlos Diaz, tells Insight. They will be coming to a town with a population of 8,000 and 10,000 hotel rooms to receive visitors. Only the three seers were present at the first apparition. At the second, some 60 curious onlookers showed up. The numbers increased until, on Oct. 13, 60,000 people stood in a pouring rain in the muddy fields for hours, many coming the night before. Only the three children saw the woman, although on earlier occasions onlookers had noticed some unusual atmospheric phenomena. On this last occasion, they were stupefied. The leading anticlerical writer of Lisbon, Avelino de Almeida, editor in chief of O Seculo, wrote as follows: "What did I see at Fatima? The rain, at an hour announced in advance, ceased falling; the thick mass of clouds dissolved; and the sun a dull silver disc came into view at its zenith, and began to dance in a violent and convulsive movement, which a great number of witnesses compared to a serpentine dance, because the colors taken on by the surface of the sun were so beautiful and gleaming." Others were terrified because it seemed that the sun was about to fall upon them. Then they noticed that their clothes were perfectly dry. The solar phenomena were observed in other villages miles away by people not expecting to see anything. On May 13, 1981, Pope John Paul II was moving through the crowds in St. Peter's Square. A small girl held up an image of Our Lady of Fatima for him to bless. Just as the pope leaned down to give that blessing, a bullet whizzed over his head a missile that would have entered his skull if he had not inclined at that instant. The other bullet fired by Mehmet Ali Acga pierced his abdomen but narrowly proved not to be fatal. During his convalescence, he thought much about the meaning of May 13. One year later, on May 13, 1982, John Paul II made his first pilgrimage to Fatima and left the bullet behind at the great shrine where the two child shepherds are buried. "My life was restored by Our Lady of Fatima," he said. Now, under the pressure of time and a life too full for the time that God might grant, he hurries back to Fatima for another significant May 13. Click here for reprint information. Email this article to a friend. Print this article in an easy-to-read format. Return to top of page.Jump to home page. Copyright © 2000 News World Communications, Inc. Web site developed by Griffin Strategy Group
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