Avatar: Will Academy reward what Pope denounces?

Every so often, the Pope makes a decree about some pop culture phenomenon, assuming that A) we can't already guess what the Pope would say and that B) it matters not just to Catholics but to the rest of the world. Personally, I am more interested in what the Pope thinks we should do to deter rampant sexual abuse than his opinion on Avatar, but since it's Oscar night, let's consider the Pontiff's latest media commentary relevant for the time being.

The Vatican's newspaper and radio station denounced Avatar because they say it elevates nature to the status of the divine. (A good account from the Huffington Post here.) While director James Cameron has latched onto the pro-environmental interpretation, he has also been able to sit back from the debate and watch gleefully as different theories over the film's thesis have driven his 3-D spectacle to the highest grossing movie of all time. Others have pointed out, as in this NY Times article, that the movie is just generic enough to appeal to widely diverse audiences who apply it to their own circumstances and political beliefs.

Essentially, Avatar is what you make of it, and I find it doubtful that any practicing Catholics have converted to animism as a direct result of watching it. If a fun night out at the movies makes people less likely to use paper plates or think twice about carpooling, how is that bad for Catholicism, God or the world at large?

You've spoken! For St. Pat's, drink Guinness in a Midtown bar with live Irish music and...

The people have spoken. According to the majority votes, it looks like I will be spending my St. Patrick's Day by (drum roll, please)...

Engaging in Here are the results in high-tech pie chart form:

Help gays or hurt orphans: Catholic Church decides

Well, I was going to write about Ash Wednesday, and how I forgot about it (bad Catholic!) until I noticed a friend at journalism school with the telltale black smudge on her forehead, and then asked her if she regularly goes to Mass, which she doesn't, and then thought how interesting it is that on the one day a year when being Catholic becomes publicly visible, so many non-practicing Catholics still walk around with the equivalent of a sign on their heads reading "I'm a follower of Jesus Christ" - but then a friend from college alerted me to this little gem from the Washington Post which I deemed much more important.

Michelle Boorstein writes:

"The Catholic Archdiocese of Washington has ended its 80-year-old foster-care program in the District rather than license same-sex couples, the first fallout from a bitter debate over the city's move to legalize same-sex marriage."

St. Patrick's Day 2010: Prepare to party

Well folks, it's February, and St. Valentine's Day approaches, but I'd like to turn our attention to the next hallowed saint day, that of our own dear Patrick. I'll be ruminating on this Irish holiday leading up and following March 17, but I need a game plan for the day of, and that's where you come in. This is much too serious an event to leave up to fate or my bad time management skills.

I'll leave this poll up until March 15 or so, when I'll discuss the results. You'll hear from me between now and then, not to worry. Have at it, and feel free to spread this around and get others to vote. Cheers, readers!

Irish teen sells virginity; Irish paper sells ethics

I saw this first on The Huffington Post and followed it through to a couple of UK papers. The original (as far as I can determine) is from the Belfast Telegraph. Read it It was not enough to verify with by speaking with her, of course. The "reporter" then had to continue the ruse until he was the highest, and winning, bidder. Why, you ask? Well, those lay people not familiar with journalist ethics might be curious, but the reason is obvious! To stop some sleazebag from winning, of course! Then the girl would be humiliated. It's not like the reporter and his editors could have just called her parents, or contacted the (most likely) unknowing auction service, or the proper authorities to report child - the girl is 16 - prostitution, or simply publish the story right away to ensure the girl's retraction. The ONLY viable option here was to continue with the charade.

Here are some great excerpts:

"Sunday Life [a section of The Telegraph] spent two weeks checking how genuine the teen’s offer was. During that time, she calmly bombarded our reporter with dozens of texts, many of a sexual nature."

On not helping Haiti

"We fly out at 12:15 tomorrow."

"Oh wow, I wish I could go, I'd be there in a heartbeat," I type back on G-chat.

"Give me your passport info, I'll see if there are still seats on the plane."

What's good enough for Switzerland is good enough for gays

Posted by MeganFinnegan at 12/5/2009 8:17 PM EST

A few days ago the New York State Senate finally voted on a marriage equality bill – and killed it. Any immediate hope for making gay marriage legal in the state was dashed by the 38 to 24 vote against the bill, which the State Assembly passed 89 to 52 back in May.

In response to the vote, the New York State Catholic Conference released the following statement, which can be found on their website:

Calling all married Catholic priests

Posted by MeganFinnegan at 10/25/2009 5:39 PM EDT

So many Catholic issues, so little time!

Though I don't have much to say (yet) in the way of commentary on these issues, I cannot help but point out the recent frenzy of media attention given to the Church as it introduces some radical new changes.

Jewish community feels the pain of Catholic priest abuse

Posted by MeganFinnegan at 10/21/2009 6:09 PM EDT

A fellow journalism student sent me the link to this article, published in the New York Times on October 13, “Orthodox Jews Rely More on Sex Abuse Prosecution,” knowing my interest in all things Catholic and knowing that for the next several generations at least, any type of child sexual abuse perpetrated by religious figures will be linked, deservedly or not, to the Catholic Church.

The article describes the recent and unusual spate of prosecutions by the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office against members of the Hasidic Jewish community for varying offenses of sexual abuse of children. It is unusual because the Hasidic community rarely reaches beyond its own systems of law and authority to redress crimes.

The Church vs the Italian media machine

Posted by MeganFinnegan at 9/18/2009 11:38 AM ED

A few weeks ago, there was a media uproar in Italy. If you don't have the details, you can read the scintillating version from Gawker here or the straightforward version from the NY Times here. The basics:

The Roman Catholic newspaper of the Italian Bishop's Conference, Avvenire, ended its tradition of silent disapproval for Prime Minister Berlusconi's naughty behavior (he's BFF with many an 18-year-old hottie) and flagrant disregard for the Catholic principles that the Bishops, and many Italian citizens, hold dear. Editor Dino Boffo penned an piece calling out the PM for his unseemly actions and attitudes, which are well known but largely left alone by the Italian media.

Catholic journalist: oxymoron or perfect match?

Posted by MeganFinnegan at 8/25/2009 1:21 PM EDT

This week, I started at City University of New York's Graduate School of Journalism. As one professor put it, I am now a reporter going through a graduate program. "Student," while technically the correct term, feels too much like college and not serious enough. So I'm wearing a name tag and learning video editing software and journalistic ethics and how to stretch student loan dollars as far as possible. I'm no longer a part-time writer or freelancer; I'm a reporter in training. Today the thought occurred to me, what does it mean to be a Catholic journalist?

There is a certain category of writers who could be classified as "ex-Catholics" - those raised in the faith but who no longer practice it. Then there are writers who are Catholic first - those who write mainly religious books or for Catholic publications. My goal is to finagle myself somewhere between these two categories.

Is Google God?

Posted by MeganFinnegan at 8/9/2009 1:53 PM EDT

MY fellow blogger Father Tim receently posted a piece on whether we should consider Facebook the Satan of the Internet. The good Father's conclusion is a thoughtful "no" - in other words, don't blame the medium.

The Modern Love column in this Sunday's New York Times is about a woman tempted to invade her birthmother's world via Facebook when the face-to-face doors have shut. She ultimately decides that she can't be a part of her mother's cyberlife unless she is invited into her actual life.

In enemy territory

Growing up Irish Catholic in New Jersey during the 90's did not make me stand out. I had lots of Protestant friends and one Jewish classmate, but just as many families in my neighborhood were Catholic. For St. Patrick's Day, my mom made me and my sister leprechaun shirts out of iron-ons and puffy paint, complete with buttons sewn in that played "When Irish Eyes are Smiling." At college, which was Lutheran by historical affiliation and Jewish by student population, I relished the 9PM Sunday Masses held in the dim Chapel, far away from the overly cheerful and bright Christian service in the afternoon. I, unlike my ancestors, could afford to be proud of my Irish Catholic heritage, and never felt like a minority.

Then I found myself living in London for a semester, and suddenly, I was in the minority. Don't get me wrong - southeast London is no bastion of old English Protestantism, though there were many Methodist churches in the area. There were also Egyptian and Ethiopian immigrants and their children, first generation British citizens, walking to mosque in the evenings. There was no Catholic church. This shocked me. Even on vacation in Disneyworld there had been a nearby Catholic church! I had assured my anxious father that I would find a church straight away and fit weekly Mass into my schedule. My dad's philosophy was that as long as he was paying my way in life, I was to attend Mass every week without fail. He didn't ask for a tally and had no way of knowing when I skipped at college, but being in another country, away from everything else familiar, made me determined to stick to his mandates.

I attended the student fair held in the Union at Goldsmiths College, where I was registered for the semester, and searched for a man in a collar, or at least a sweetly dorky group of students who constituted the Catholic Students' Association. Instead, I found a table marked "Religion" and asked the guy where I could find a Catholic Mass in these parts. He directed me to a regular street address and told me to be there at 5:15PM that Sunday.

Blessed be the LGBT

Posted by MeganFinnegan at 6/15/2009 12:23 PM EDT

Last Sunday, I heard a word uttered in the sanctuary of a Catholic church, a word that I would never have expected to hear spoken aloud during Mass, and that word was “transgender.”

To my further surprise, the word was not tossed out with disdain or incredulity, nor was it used as an example of the misguided or sinful. It was not put in quotation marks. It was not even a part of the homily. The lector merely included it during a prayer for intentions.

Devil in black flip flops

I've recently been spending my spare time as a minion of the Devil. Well, I've been portraying one during rehearsals for a play. When my boyfriend, currently a receptionist by trade and a writer and actor by passion and talent, said he wanted to put on a production of Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, I jumped at the chance to play Mephistopheles, the agent of Lucifer who secures foolish Faustus's soul. He reworked the text, bringing it back to its probable original form while also lending his own pen to fill in some gaps. We decided that he would play Faustus and I would play Mephistopheles, if only so that we could rehearse our scenes all the time. (Nothing like waking up and spouting off some lines about hell to start one's day.)

Immersing myself in this Elizabethan text about eternal damnation puts the nature of hell on my mind more frequently than normal. The play's take on hell is that it's not so much a specific place as the restriction from being in God's presence. Faustus conjures up Mephistopheles but still refuses to acknowledge that hell is a reality, until his final hour. Before that, he has thousands of chances to repent and turn to God. The trick of the play is that Faustus signs his soul over to the devil and believes it to be a binding agreement, but Mephistopheles knows that God's forgiveness is greater than any contract - if Faustus simply asks forgiveness, he will be allowed into heaven. In turn, however, a person's free will still trumps all, and God all but appears to Faustus to plead with him to abandon his commitment to the devil and avoid eternal damnation, but Faustus is too arrogant and foolish to listen until it is literally too late.

As a cast, we volley back and forth about the nature of hell, in reality and in the world of the play - not because we're concerned about the afterlife, but in order to create the right blocking and build theatrical moments. When we leave, though, the haunting verses of Faustus's dying lines linger in the brain, and I can't help but think of the reality.

Time's up on dark days

Posted by MeganFinnegan at 5/25/2009 11:01 PM EDT

This is not a good time to be an Irish Catholic. A few weeks ago, warring factions barely restrained themselves from fighting to the death in the name of Our Lady, and forced President Obama to speak about abortion rights during a college commencement ceremony. People were outraged, people were arrested, and all eyes were turned to a symbolic act that did not do one damn thing to advance the debate on abortion rights and laws in this country. Father Tim writes an excellent editorial on the subject, which you should read here. It is by far the most compassionate and thoughtful response to the subject I have ever heard from a member of the clergy. Since I am 24 and have been a generally active Catholic my entire life, I don’t know if that fact is comforting or disturbing.

Even worse, the Ryan Report brought to light scandal and abuse of Dickensian proportions within Irish Catholic institutions that went on for decades. The best part: the deal that the Irish government struck with the Church to not reveal the names of individual abusers. Great move.

Angels & Demons: Bad for film buffs, good for Catholics

Much has been and will be said about Ron Howard’s second attempt to translate Dan Brown’s novels to film. Angels & Demons, starring Tom Hanks as Robert Langdon the symbologist and Ayelet Zurer as Hot Brunette with an Accent, necessary not at all to the plot but to make Tom Hanks’ stiff performance more palatable, is a disaster of a film, but not for the reasons one would think, or the reasons most critics have laid out.

This movie has garnered almost as much hype as its (much worse) predecessor, The DaVinci Code. As has been reported on this web site, the Catholic League has come out loudly against the film, making one inclined to ask, Don’t they realize that will just make more people want to see it? Ron Howard has been accused of anti-Catholicism, of course; Meghan Sweeney considers, in her recent article, whether the movie perpetuates societally dangerous myths and stereotypes. After seeing the movie myself, I might agree that some people could buy into the plot as factually based and come away with a scornful view of the Church, but honestly, that’s nothing new.

The Church has wisely downplayed their reactions to this installment of Brown’s blasphemy on the big screen. They so vehemently condemned The DaVinci Code that it convinced many people its theories might actually be true – why else would the Church freak out?

Virgin / Mother

With Mother’s Day upon us, I thought I’d launch into a discussion on sèx.

Go with me here.

One could argue that the single most defining element of Catholicism is the belief in the Virgin Birth. You have to accept that Mary was a) without sin, b) impregnated by the Holy Spirit (however that works), and c) gave birth to the actual Son of God. The rest becomes moot if you don’t believe that. Motherhood, then, takes on a particularly holy appeal. And you can’t have mothers unless you have sèx.

Pop quiz: What makes Irish people mad?

Question: What makes Irish people mad?

A) The British

B) Stereotypes of drunkenness

Questioning God? Ask a Kennedy

Let’s book review, shall we?

I just finished reading Being Catholic Now: Prominent Americans Talk About Change in the Church and the Quest for Meaning (Crown Publishers 2008), which was compiled and edited by Kerry Kennedy, daughter of RFK. Kennedy interviewed 38 American Catholics (many of them of Irish heritage) – several priests and sisters, actors, activists, politicians, journalists, lay people, business people, and even Bill Maher – about their religion.

The idea is a vital one, pushing a concept that we should undertake more frequently: to question our religion. Each person was chosen, ostensibly, for his or her involvement with the Church; some are no longer practicing Catholics but have a history and an opinion about it. Written in the first person but obviously transcribed from interviews, the essays – for this is what they become when condensed onto the page without quotation marks – sometimes lack coherence and the specificity that comes from deliberately setting out to write something, rather than to aimlessly talk about it. Instead of reading the barely-differentiated details of each person’s Catholic upbringing, we could read the standout details that each person would discern as unique. Then again, people with important things to say aren’t always the best writers (and I better not get that statement turned around on me), and people can be freer with their thoughts when having a conversation.

Don't ask, don't tell Grandma

Posted by MeganFinnegan at 4/17/2009 5:49 PM EDT

Recently, President Obama and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates issued a statement that ending the unconstitutional “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy in the military is not a priority for the administration right now. They are putting it on the back burner.

All Catholics, gay or straight, are familiar with the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. In my family, it is unspoken policy that you can go about your heathen ways as long as you don’t tell Grandma. Family members actually instructed me to lie to my grandmother about the sleeping arrangements when my boyfriend and I moved to New York together. I chose to respect the head of our family by telling her the truth, but that’s just me.

Where the devil lives

So we all know that the Church stole Easter from the pagans, right? Well, not exactly. We just moved right in on celebrations of fertility and rebirth and said, Hey, let’s do the same thing but make it about Jesus!

Not that this is a bad thing necessarily, but it’s an important reminder that Christianity did not introduce the world to the concept of celebrating new life and rebirth. The older I get, the more I question if the details of that celebration matter. That is, after all, where the devil resides.

Catholic theology holds that even when people believe they are praying to Buddha, they are actually praying to Jesus. It’s like God has various channels set up to reach him, and eventually, they all bottleneck into a crowded one-way road to the Christian Lord, who in turn acts as the toll collector – negative 72 mortal sins, plus 93 good deeds, you have enough credit to get through. Bear left and then keep going and you’ll get to the Holy Father. He’s lit up like the Griswald’s house at Christmas; you can’t miss him. It’s an interesting perspective when viewed against the Church’s past tendencies towards overzealous conversion of heathens (Protestants included in that category). It’s also a very smug attitude, made more so by the fact that it can’t be disproven. All you Muslims might think you’re praying to Allah, but Jesus is sittingup there intercepting your prayers. Does that mean that a religious institution with a different prayer for literally everything thinks that in the end, the details don’t really matter?

The critically distanced Catholic - reality or impossibility?

Posted by MeganFinnegan at 3/28/2009 6:56 PM EDT

Let’s talk religion. When the powers that be at IrishCentral.com asked me to write about Catholicism on this blog, my first emotion was excitement, and my first question was, “Do I have to worry about offending people?”

I was raised as a good Irish Catholic, going to Mass every Sunday (even while on vacation), letting the gilt-edged pages of our family Bible rest undisturbed on the bottom shelf of the coffee table, ordering pizza every Friday during Lent and regarding the “CE” people (those who crowded our pews on Christmas and Easter only) with mild contempt and Jesus-sanctified superiority.

Why lie? I need a beer

Is it too late to discuss St. Patrick’s Day 2009?

Never! (Especially considering that President Obama declared March 2009 Irish-American Heritage Month.)

Let me preface this by saying that this year, I was determined to have the most clichéd and drunken evening possible, because SPD 2008 was a sorry excuse for a holiday, spent in the upstairs room of a bar in Midtown drinking substitute Guinness (they had run out of the real stuff) from a plastic cup. I wasn’t wearing green and I was home by 11:00pm, still cringing at the memory of college kids from Pennsylvania with emerald glitter on their faces trying to line dance to a Dropkick Murphys song. Not the best time.

"Irish Girl" - and what does that mean exactly?

Posted by MeganFinnegan at 3/18/2009 2:58 PM EDT

Irish American. I get the American part. I was born here, I’m a citizen, I speak English and my passport is stamped with the U.S. seal. But what’s with the Irish part?

With a surname like Finnegan, I can’t help but be identified as a daughter of Eire. When the HR guy at my office gave me my computer password, I asked him why there’s an “IG” at the end.