feminine-genius

A chivalrous man

I was saddened to read of the death of Jesse Helms, who--fittingly-- passed on to His Maker early this morning.

"We'll never forget how he battled, especially during those first lonely years, to protect our liberties, preserve our family values and keep America strong. There he was, standing day after day to a government Goliath, crying out like a voice in the wilderness," former President Ronald Reagan said in a 1983 speech. "Bit by bit, he became more than a lonely crusader. He grew into a lionhearted leader of a great and growing army."

Many political observers credit Helms' support for catapulting Reagan to the presidency in 1980 and accelerating the conservative agenda – cutting taxes at home, fighting communism abroad and opposing many government social programs – at the national level. He also served as Reagan's right flank for years, allowing the president to make political compromises as needed. "(I decided to) stay to the right of the president's right and make it easier for Reagan to be Reagan," Helms wrote in his memoir.

We all owe him a debt of gratitude. It will take courage for someone to take up this mantle--and yet in the time since his retirement in 2002, there has been no singular replacement. RIP, from an appreciative bystander.

She'd just drive...

Sometimes after dinner, Mrs Ward would just get in the car -- without telling her 17 children where she was going. Any wonder? (Aren't they lucky she always came back...!) Regardless of these short absences, they adored her and thought she was loads of fun.

Mrs. Ward, 81, a devout Catholic, died Friday, June 13, in her Kankakee home of complications from congestive heart failure, family members said.

To make ends meet on her husband's salary, Mrs. Ward improvised. She made a gallon of milk last longer by mixing it with powdered; had the children sleep in triple bunk beds; and gave out star-shaped stickers as steps toward a present, instead of an allowance, as a reward for completing chores on time.

But she also had fun, belting out "My Wild Irish Rose" on the ancient piano in the family room, taking some of her children to the zoo and speeding up the family station wagon over a particular bump on Lake Shore Drive to make their stomachs drop. The family home at was a neighborhood hangout.

The family was paramount, but it did help that "the village" was entirely supportive. May the angels greet her with a hearty, "well done!"

Two deaths of note

The foundress of La Leche League has died at age 93, being a dynamic force supporting nursing mothers. She had her first child at age 35, when she was told that she was too old to produce breastmilk for the babe. Nonsense, said Edwina Froehlich.

At a time when most pediatricians encouraged formula and bottle-feeding and when there were few scientific studies demonstrating the health benefits of breast milk, Mrs. Froehlich chose to breast-feed all of her babies, said another La Leche founder, Mary White.

“We used to tell the mothers the three main obstacles to successful breast-feeding were doctors, hospitals and social pressure,” Mrs. White said.

There were seven women in all who banded together to make a dent in the prevalent mindset in 1956, in which only 18% of women nursed their babies. She and others were responsible for writing The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding, which has gone through numerous editions since its inception.

In Poland, another mother has prioritised the needs of her child over her own.

Agata Mroz, who was originally known for her athletic prowess, was buried in her hometown of Tarnow. Mroz was pregnant with her first child when doctors discovered she had a fatal case of leukemia. After consulting with her husband, Mroz delayed a bone-marrow transplant until after she gave birth to her daughter Liliana on April 4, 2008.

Polish fans dubbed the national team which Mróz led the "Golden Girls," due to their looks and their successes in international competitions. The national team won the European women's volleyball championship in 2003 and 2005.

Auxiliary Bishop Marian Florczyk of Kielce, Poland has said that Mroz's testimony is an example of "love of life, motherhood, the desire to give life, the heroic love of an unborn child." On June 4, a few hours after Mroz's death, Polish President Lech Kaczynski announced that she will be posthumously awarded the Polonia Restituta, one of Poland's highest awards for extraordinary and distinguished service.

She has been likened to Gianna Beretta Molla for her selfless generosity. May her husband and daughter find strength in her gift -- and may the souls of both these heroic women rest in peace.

Passing of a fine writer

News crossed my desk today that Anne Ball died over the weekend. We'll await an obituary, and meanwhile offer prayers for her soul and remaining family.

We were all impressed, my dear

Miss Harriet McBryde Johnson died suddenly, having lived a vibrant life of courage for 50 years. She was known for her disability rights work that took on both Jerry Lewis (for his "pity-based" advocacy) as well as Peter Singer (for his "death to the disabled" stance).

He insists he doesn't want to kill me. He simply thinks it would have been better, all things considered, to have given my parents the option of killing the baby I once was, and to let other parents kill similar babies as they come along and thereby avoid the suffering that comes with lives like mine and satisfy the reasonable preferences of parents for a different kind of child. It has nothing to do with me. I should not feel threatened.

Chilling stuff, of course, discussed dispassionately by those who are not immediately threatened, or over whom the sword of Damocles hovers not. It hit Harriet squarely between the eyes, and she couldn't remain silent.

Even as I am horrified by what he says, and by the fact that I have been sucked into a civil discussion of whether I ought to exist, I can't help being dazzled by his verbal facility. He is so respectful, so free of condescension, so focused on the argument, that by the time the show is over, I'm not exactly angry with him. Yes, I am shaking, furious, enraged -- but it's for the big room, 200 of my fellow Charlestonians who have listened with polite interest, when in decency they should have run him out of town on a rail.

. . .

He responds by inviting me to Princeton. I fire off an immediate maybe.

Of course I'm flattered. Mama will be impressed.

RIP, sweet sister.

"I did so little"

So sayeth Irena Sendler, who used her feminine genius to save 2,500 young Jews from destruction, using her position as a social worker with access to the Warsaw ghetto during Nazi rule. Christopher Blosser rounds up fascinating information about this Catholic woman, who has just died, including this account that children discovered by undertaking as study of her for a school project:

They found that Irena Sendler, as a non-Jewish social worker, had gone into the Warsaw Ghetto, talked Jewish parents and grandparents out of their children, rightly saying that all were going to die in the Ghetto or in death camps, taking the children past the Nazi guards (in body bags, saying they were ill, or using one of the many means of escape from the Ghetto-the old courthouse for example), and then adopting them into the homes of Polish families or hiding them in convents and orphanages. She made lists of the children's real names and put the lists in jars, then buried the jars in a garden, so that someday she could dig up the jars and find the children to tell them of their real identify.

Capture. Torture. Perseverence, because, as she said, "I was brought up to believe that a person must be rescued when drowning, regardless of religion and nationality." May choirs of angels come to meet you, dear sister. RIP.

The fruit of contemplation

Today, at Dorchester Abbey (near Oxford), a funeral Mass was celebrated for an extraordinary woman, Dr Mary Berry. From her obituary in the London Times:

In 1975 a colleague, Rosemary McCabe, experienced a Eureka moment which was to reconfirm the course of Mary Berry’s life. Lying in her bath one day with a copy of Early Music magazine, McCabe read it from front to back and then, springing from the bath, informed her startled colleague, “There’s nothing in it about the chant. You must do something!”

Berry often told this story of how the Schola Gregoriana of Cambridge was founded. Beaming at the assembled singers who gathered at the Schola’s singing weekends, workshops and pilgrimages, she welcomed all comers. From the Schola’s first service on Palm Sunday that year in St John’s College chapel, “our main aim was to tell people about this wonderful, virtually unknown, music”, and she did this by orchestrating medieval services, concerts and liturgical plays. She revelled in dressing up for the ancient liturgies with meticulous attention to detail and occasional wild improvisation.

As her work became known, her teaching of the chant took her all over the world — to France, Estonia, Canada, America and Australia, and places in between. Galvanised by her knowledge and encouragement, numerous local chant groups were formed, including a flourishing all-black choir from Dominica in the Windward Islands.

As icon of the Church, this consecrated soul would have lived out the mission to "build culture," and what a success she was!

Devout and erudite, Berry radiated a joyful and sunny blessing, occasionally interspersed with crisp commands if singers flat-footed a wrong note. There were no concessions to ignorance — either of the chant or the liturgy — but her bubbling humour leavened long hours of choir practice. With a fund of interesting and mildly scurrilous anecdotes delivered with a twinkle in her eye, she was fortunate to attract many fine cantors to sing at festivals and record CDs on the Herald label.

The cantors of the Schola, a professional group of singers interested in Gregorian chant and early music, specialise in the reconstruction and performance of liturgy from the 10th century to modern times. Led by Berry, they were the first in the field to record a reconstruction of a complete festal service based on the tropes and organa of the Winchester Troper, and this won the Michael Beazley Medieval Recording of the Year in 1991. Their work was, and continues to be, very significant in bringing early music to a wider audience.

In 2000 she was awarded the Papal Cross Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice for her work with Gregorian chant, and in 2002 she was appointed CBE for her services to plainsong and Gregorian chant.

Who says the Church doesn't recognise and appreciate the talents of women? The accolades came from around the world, as exemplified by these comments concerning her funeral.

In my opinion, this was a most fitting way to remember and pray for someone who had devoted her life to the study, promotion and prayerful singing of the Church's treasury of sacred music. Dr Berry deserves to be remembered as one of the leaders of the 'new liturgical movement' in England, although I doubt she would see herself in that light. Rather, she only desired to live out what 'Sacrosanctum Concilium' said about Gregorian chant; small wonder then that both Pope John Paul II and Queen Elizabeth II awarded her for her services to sacred music. However, I am sure that her greatest reward will be in heaven, and even in death she remains a shining example of the merits of Gregorian chant. Her holiness of life - which many people attest to - is surely the fruit of a life that contemplated the divine mysteries through the Church's music, and what better witness to the power of the Liturgy and of Beauty need we have than that?

Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon her. May your servant, Mary, rest in peace.

[Pictures are from the New Liturgical Movement website belonging to Shawn Tribe. I hope he doesn't mind me "borrowing" his excellent photos. His site is always a tremendous source of beautiful images.]

Jesus, mercy

Rush calls it the "drive by media" and so it is. It feeds on the voyeurism to which we're all prey, combined with the other appetites that are so "entertaining" in others. Those appetites are served up with polish and flair around the clock, tantalising so many with lifestyles that must be better than the "boring" ones bogged down by virtue. And yet, those who shine one day are taken out the next. We cannot place this body at their feet (given free will) but children be warned: the glamour and style that so many chase, the five minutes of fame and the vices that cling to it are often deadly. RIP, dear sister.

A house divided

Certainly, there are landmines and chasms in the Episcopalian world, which the members have to navigate regularly, beginning with finding a parish priest who has similar religious beliefs, and then finding a bishop who will dispense his authority in a way consonant with the Gospel. Those who hold to that confession (as opposed to "poping") have all sorts of headaches, but imagine the divide coming right down the center of your own dining room table.

A recent obituary highlighted by Get Religion showed that the family of Bishop Ronald H. Haines (a former bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, D.C) had just such a chasm, that his wife was forced to deal with, considering his support of all sorts of causes with which she disagreed.

Bishop Haines ordained the Rev. Elizabeth L. Carl, an open lesbian who was pastor at Church of the Epiphany in Washington. The move sparked a period of protests and internal examination, and the matter still has not been fully resolved within the church.

During the ordination ceremony June 5, 1991, Bishop Haines asked whether there was any “impediment or crime” to prevent Carl from becoming a priest. Two people, including a priest of 50 years’ standing, came forward to declare that homosexuality was inappropriate in a church leader.

He ordained her anyway -- making the question almost frivolous. (Better not to ask, then to ask and then ignore the answer, no?) But evidently his pro-abortion stance was also problemmatic in the family.

According to a 1992 article in The Washington Post, one of the bishop’s most vocal critics was his wife, Mary, an antiabortion activist who was vice president of the National Organization of Episcopalians for Life. She even favored her husband’s censure, which he narrowly avoided, at a national gathering of bishops.

“All our family opposed the ordination, except maybe one,” Bishop Haines’s son Joshua said in 1992.

(To follow that link above is to discover that there are all sorts of elements in the pro-life movement that one might not expect, proving that the Holy Spirit goes where He will.) But to the subject at hand, it must be admitted that a plethora of families suffer a philosophical divide, which gives impetus to our need to pray for marriage, and remember that the suffering at its very heart must be offered for ultimate union with Christ one day. Difficult. Very difficult.

The constellation of our day

These words at the funeral of Chiara Lubich should give tremendous hope in a generation that seems to find the presence of God diminished:

In his address Cardinal Bertone said that the 20th century was full of bright stars of divine love. “Notwithstanding its many contradictions,” he said, “the last century saw God inspire many heroic men and women; people who as they tried to relieve the pain of the sick and the ill and share the fate of ordinary people, the poor, those at the bottom, also shared the bread of charity that heals the heart, opens the mind, rebuilds trust and passion in lives broken by violence, injustice and sin. Some of these pioneers of charity are already saints and blessed for the Church; people like Fr Guanella, Fr Orione, Fr Calabria, Mother Teresa of Kolkata and many more.”

The last century “was also the century in which new Church movements were born. And Chiara Lubich has a place in that constellation with a charisma all of her own which distinguishes her character and apostolic action,’ he added.

“The founder of the Focolare Movement did not create a welfare or humanitarian association, but in her quite and humble way, she devoted herself to light the fire of God’s love in people’s heart. She inspired people to be love themselves, to live the charisma of unity and communion with God and their fellow human beings, to spread love and unity by making themselves, their homes and their work a focolare, a hearth in which a blazing love becomes contagious and lights up all that is around it; a mission that everyone can carry out because the Gospel is within everyone’s grasp: bishops and priests, children, teenagers and adults, the consecrated and the laity, married people, families and communities; all called to live the ideal of unity which is to let all be one! Indeed, in her last interview during her long agony Chiara said that “the wonder of mutual love ‘is the vital sap of the mystical Body of Christ’.”

“To us, especially to her spiritual children, falls the task of pursuing the mission she started. In heaven, where we like to think she was welcomed by Jesus her groom, she will continue to walk with us as well as help us.”

Be not troubled -- simply love. God will do the rest.