Jamie L Manson's blog

Just in time for the Thanksgiving holiday, Hollywood offers us two big-budget disaster films that are sure to fill us with the spirit of the season.

Both "2012," which opened last weekend, and "The Road," which opens on the eve of Thanksgiving, are two of the latest cinematic forays into a world ravaged by apocalyptic catastrophes. Where extreme special effects of "2012" may be more reminiscent of the graphic destruction depicted in "The Day After Tomorrow" and "I Am Legend," the weightier contemplation of the erosion of humanity in "2012" is more in line with 2007's "Children of Men." (Both films are the cinematic realizations of contemporary literary gems, penned by Cormac McCarthy and P. D. James, respectively.)

On Friday, Oct. 16 the most e-mailed article on The New York Times Web site was the story of Pat Bond’s fight to receive financial support for the terminally ill son that she conceived with a Franciscan priest over 20 years ago.

Four days later, the eighth most e-mailed Times article told of the Pope’s new initiative to welcome larger numbers of Anglican priests and seminarians, regardless of marital status, into the Roman Catholic clergy.

The more I read the gospel, the more I am struck by the idea that God loves a good scandal.

The gospels give us narrative after narrative of unlikely heroes, people who live on the margins of society who become model disciples. Those who hear God's word and see God at work in the world are almost always those that you would least expect. It's likely that the ancient communities who first heard these stories were very much aware of how radical they are. How did we come to forget this vital lesson?

I had my first real insight into pornography when it was taken out of the context of sex.

My understanding came from a somewhat unlikely source: a Jesuit priest. Nearly forty years ago, in a vitally important, seldom heard-of text titled Images of Hope: Imagination as Healer of the Hopeless, Jesuit Fr. William Lynch describes a cultural phenomenon he terms “the pornography of violence.” For Lynch, one of the highest purposes of the imagination and its creative power is to help human beings cope with the fragmentations of relationships and the absurdities of life -- most especially death.

After my last essay about Michael Jackson was published, I received a number of interesting follow-up messages by phone, e-mail and Web posting. But I wasn’t prepared for an indirect response that I received after our soup kitchen one night in early July.

America's obsessive relationship with celebrities hit a fever pitch this past week with the death of Michael Jackson.

The NBC and ABC networks cancelled their evening programming to offer impromptu "remembering Michael Jackson" retrospectives. On news radio, nothing else seemed to be happening with the exception of the requisite traffic and weather notifications. It even made the cover of The New York Times, and NPR had it as one of their top stories.

Seven years after the crisis first broke, the Catholic church’s sex abuse scandal finally hit home for me.

It came with a call from my mother, who told me that a priest from my childhood, Fr. Brian McKeon, was dead. It had made the local television news.

It’s the question I get more than any other: Do you still consider yourself a Catholic?

It’s the critique I most frequently receive on this blog site: Just leave the church if you’re so unhappy.

Spending seven years at a Protestant divinity school, first as a student and later as an employee, enriched and expanded my understanding of what it means to be Catholic. Before arriving at graduate school, I grew up on Long Island in an Italian Catholic family that rarely went to church. Though I went to religious instruction, received the sacraments with the rest of the girls and boys, and attended church on the big feast days, the influence of the institutional church (involvement in parish life, connections with priests and nuns) was distant at best.

I first felt called to the priesthood at the age of 13. It was my first Holy Thursday liturgy. And at that moment, at the close of the liturgy, when the "Pange Lingua" is chanted and every fragment of the Eucharist is carried outside of the church, I experienced something that was both irresistible and quite scary.

For Roman Catholics seeking reform in their church, it might be fair to call this season the winter of their discontent.

In early February, the front page of The New York Times reported on the church’s new offering of indulgences. This piece came on the heels of another cover story about the pope’s decision to lift the excommunications of four schismatic bishops who reject the reforms of the Second Vatican Council.

These actions arrived after a summer highlighted by the placing of a severe interdict against Sr. Louise Lears that banished her from her ministry and from receiving the sacraments, and an autumn colored by the excommunication of Maryknowll Fr. Roy Bourgeois . Both were punished as a result of their open support of the ordination of women.

A few summers ago at a conference on the prophetic voice, I heard a well-known priest tell a story that gave me an insight into the depth of harm -- both to God and humanity -- that the ban on women's ordination has created. He was celebrating Mass on a pueblo in New Mexico. To honor the culture of the people gathered with him, he used a tortilla for the eucharistic bread. This got reported to the diocese, and the priest received a call from the bishop's office. The chancellor asked, "Is it true that you used a tortilla at the Mass on the pueblo?" "Yes," the priest said. The chancellor replied, "I hope there was no baking soda in that bread!" The priest responded: "Are you telling me that if there was baking soda, God ceased to be present in that bread? Are you really going to place those kinds of limits on God's power to work in this world?"

Every few months, I pay a visit to the East West Bookstore, which sits ensconced on an especially tony stretch of 5th Avenue, perfectly situated on the periphery of Manhattan's Union Square and West Village neighborhoods.

The store is aptly named. It offers a chic, two-level emporium of Eastern spirituality's finest smells, bells, and talismans. Strands of prayer beads, rows of holy cards, collections of statues and piles of incense line the shelves. Books with cover photos of monks garbed in elegant, flowing robes spin around on a rack. A young woman asks a sales person for assistance with selecting a crystal that will aid her in recovering from the pain of a bad break-up.

This line from the antiphon “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” runs in my mind and heart throughout Advent. Its haunting melody at once evokes loneliness and longing. It expresses exile, an isolation that runs so deep it seems that no human presence can bring any comfort. That such a profoundly personal experience is attributed to the group of people we know as Israel never ceases to fascinate and move me -- especially since I have been restless with loneliness and longing for most of my life.

My own personal mourning in lonely exile is in many ways a repercussion of a life-long battle with depression. I remember being caught in the throes of one particularly severe bout while I was in graduate school. I was sitting alone in my apartment, my head in my hands, feeling completely lost and alone, unable to think of one person to whom I could reach out.

For more than 15 years now, I’ve felt starved by the Roman Catholic authorities. But lately I wonder if they haven’t done me a favor.

Since the age of 14, I have felt called to the priesthood. The only real opportunity I’ve been given to discern this call was through my studies for my master of divinity degree (at a Protestant divinity school, of course).

Perhaps it was the insurmountable heights of the ivory tower’s walls or the unshakable hope of feminist theology that clouded my judgment, but it wasn’t until graduation that I realized that an openly lesbian, unapologetically liberal Catholic woman with a M.Div. had somewhat limited career possibilities.

It would take years to find a Catholic community that would hire me as their pastoral associate. When the chance finally arrived, I was welcomed to the staff of a Jesuit parish in New York City noted for its ministry to the poor and the gay and lesbian communities.