The New York Times On Line has a great feature that captures the attitudes of American Catholics. Some of people ineterviewed are profoundly insightful and from Chicago.
Ms. Terry Sullivan, correspondant for Chicago Daily Observer, is the most thoughtful. Other Chicagoans featured are St. Patrick's Parish Pastor Father Tom Hurley, Jim Healy, Carlos Lourenco, Oralia Mascio, and Kirk Struhart. Click my post title to hear from your neighbors.
Well done ladies and gentlemen. The best gift the Pope can get in America is Honesty.
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Chicago Catholics Voice Welcome to Pope in New York Times
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4 comments:
God Bless the Pope
Long Live the Pope
God Bless America
May St. Pope Leo XIII author of Rerum Novarum and patron of the Pat Hickey High School
pray for us
What do you think about:
Seamus Heaney laments loss of Ireland’s ancient spirit to onward march of the Celtic Tiger
David Sharrock, Ireland Correspondent
Seamus Heaney has given warning that modern Ireland is in danger of losing its unique spiritual values to the brashly secular economy-driven values of the “Celtic Tiger”.
In a lament for a lost Ireland, the Nobel laureate said that the Celtic Tiger — the catchphrase that has come to stand for modern Ireland’s economic success — was attacking the ancient symbol of Ireland: the harp.
The focus of this battle between two visions of Ireland is Tara, an ancient site sacred to pagans and Christians that is under threat from the construction of a motorway.
Mr Heaney said that, if the controversial M3 were to be forced through Tara in County Meath, where the High Kings once sat, it “will be a sort of signal that the priorities on these islands have changed”.
He added: “The Tiger is now lashing its tail and smashing its way through the harp — the strings of the harp are being lashed by the tail of the tiger.”
Mr Heaney, who is a fixture of the national secondary school curriculum, said that Tara represented “an ideal of the spirit” that was fundamental to what Ireland meant. “Tara means something equivalent to what Delphi means to the Greeks, or maybe Stonehenge to an English person, or Nara in Japan, which is one of the most famous sites in the world,” he said.
“It’s a word that conjures an aura — it conjures up what they call in Irish dúchas, a sense of belonging, a sense of patrimony, a sense of an ideal, an ideal of the spirit if you like, that belongs in the place. And if anywhere in Ireland conjures that up, it’s Tara.”
The Irish Government faces international criticism from archaeologists, academics and conservationists, as well as the threat of legal action from the European Commission, but it is adamant that the M3 will be completed on schedule in two years’ time to tackle commuters’ anger over journeys of fewer than 70 miles to the capital that presently take two hours or more.
The route of the road, Mr Heaney added, breached the fundamental principles that lay behind the foundation of the modern state. “The Proclamation of the Irish Republic in 1916 summoned people in the name of the dead generations,” he said. “If ever there was a place that deserved to be preserved in the name of the dead generations from prehistoric times up to historic times up to completely recently, it was Tara.”
While it is unlikely that Mr Heaney’s protest will halt the construction, his comments will fuel a growing debate about values in modern Ireland. The 1995 Nobel prizewinner, who is believed to account for two thirds of poetry volumes sold in Britain, said that Tara appeared to have enjoyed more protection while under British rule. He said: “I discovered that W. B. Yeats and George Moore, two writers at the turn of the century, and Arthur Griffith [the founder of Sinn Fein], wrote a letter to The Irish Times some time at the beginning of the last century because a society called the British Israelites had thought that the Ark of the Covenant was buried in Tara, and they had started to dig on Tara Hill.
“They talked about the desecration of a consecrated landscape. So I thought to myself, ‘If a few holes in the ground made by amateur archaeologists was a desecration, what is happening to that whole countryside being ripped up is certainly a much more ruthless piece of work’.”
Mr Heaney said that the country’s present rulers had made “a savage choice, they have made a secular choice. The Government is acting under pressure from secular motives”.
Tara is on the World Monuments Fund’s list of the world’s 100 most endangered sites.
Dr Jonathan Foyle, UK chief executive of the fund, said: “This entire site is the equivalent of Stonehenge, Westminster Abbey for its royal associations and Canterbury for its Christian associations all rolled into one.”
He compared the Government’s decision to route the motorway through Tara with the actions of the Taleban in Afgahanistan, when it destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001.
Lines on the land
We have no prairies
To slice a big sun at evening –
Everywhere the eye concedes to
Encrouching horizon,
Is wooed into the cyclops’ eye
Of a tarn. Our unfenced country
Is bog that keeps crusting
Between the sights of the sun.
They’ve taken the skeleton
Of the Great Irish Elk
Out of the peat, set it up
An astounding crate full of air.
-From Bogland
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from A Little Book of Celtic Saints:
....Before long Patrick made his way to the Hill of Tara, Co. Meath, seat of the high king of Ireland. Arriving on the eve of Easter, he lit a paschal fire on the nearby Hill of Slane. At this time of year, it was pagan practice to put out all fires before a new one was lit at Tara. When the druids at Tara saw the light from Slane, they warned King Laoghaire that he must extinguish it or it would burn forever. Patrick was summoned to Tara, and on the way he and his followers chanted the hymn known as "The Lorica" or "Saint Patrick's Breastplate".
Although Laoghaire remained a pagan, he was so impressed by the saint that he gave him permission to make converts throughout his realm. Muirchu's Life of Patrick, written two centuries later, describes a contest of magic in which Laoghaire's druids had to concede victory to the saint. Patrick travelled widely in Ireland, making converts and establishing new churches, though he eventually made his headquarters at Armagh
I hope the Holy Father Our Pope, the Successor of Peter, the Vicar of Christ, the Sheperd, the Bishop of Rome, the Patriarch of the Latin Church of the West Benedict XVI excommunicates all the bad Catholic pro-abortion and anti-family pro Sodomite so called Catholic politicians.
But you on the South Side are in good company with many good pro-life Catholic Democrats who do not support gay marriage and also support the McBride principles (Alderman Ed Burke sold out to Britain as did Mayor Daley and many others because of MI6 influence)
But prolife Democrats in your area are:
Who also do not support gay "rights" and gay "marriage" are:
Kevin McCarthy (one of the best)
Kevin Joyce
Ed Maloney
Bresnehan
Dan Lipinski
Ed McGann
Good Irish Catholics defending the faith (even Danny Boy Lipinski has some Irish blood) and none of them have been co-opted by MI6 to sell out the memory of the genocide by the British.
Where is the reparations for the Irish from the British?
Phil Corboy's wife at the library whitewashed the history.
Alderman Ed Burke would rather take trips to England.
The blood of the unborn is on the hands of the pro-abortion Democrats even good Irish Catholics at one time.
THEY SHOULD BE EXCOMMUNICATED.
The Pope should stand strong and condemn historical sins (like Pope John Paul II did in apologizing and Alderman Tillman wanted slavery reparations) of the genocidal maniac Oliver Cromwell.
And so you don't think I am just pro-Irish or anti-Anglo:
The Pope should canonize
Blessed John Cardinal Fisher
and ask all these politicians to emulate
St. Thomas More
May all of the British be like Fisher and More
A curse upon Oliver Cromwell, his uncle, Henry VIII, and the whores Anne Bolyen and Elizabeth
and to be pro-Hispanic
an inner city Catholic school dedicated to
Katherine of Aragon
and an ROTC program in honor of the San Patricios
You papists are insane.
I do like the idea of how to control Irish population by that prelate. It was a good idea.
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