Joe Ferullo's blog

I put my 11-year-old daughter to bed every night. After prayers, and after I turn off the light, she always begins a rapid-fire recap of the day's major events -- usually involving other girls in her class, her teachers, or what she did during recess.

But a few nights ago, we talked about heaven instead.

"Did you ever hear about a book called '90 Minutes in Heaven,'" she asked.

"I did."

"What do you think heaven is like, Dad?"

"I'm not sure. I think it could be like the best day you ever had, but it never ends."

"I think it is very crowded. All the good people go there and I don't know where there would be room." She yawned and turned on her side. I paused a moment to see if we were done. But her eyes were still open and she said, "Very crowded."

"You figure there are a lot of good people?"

She stared off in the distance, as if surveying all the people she knew, and calculating the totals. "Yep," she said finally. "Too crowded."

"Well, may be we're not bodies up in heaven, hon. Maybe we're spirits, just feelings and emotions and we are just there like that."

She thought about that for a minute, nodded silently. We seemed done now.

But no.

Grant Desme was well on his way to baseball fame and fortune -- until fate intervened. Now, the 23-year old minor league phenom is on his way to the priesthood.

A fascinating, detail-filled profile in Sunday's Los Angeles Times tells Grant's story: a kid consumed with baseball since childhood who suddenly found himself, almost against his will, considering the larger questions of life and his place on the universal canvas.

No one had seen Robina Dumas at church, but everyone knew why. She had fallen ill, and things did not look good. Craig, her husband of more than 60 years, still came every Sunday, sitting by himself at the edge of a pew. We'd always said hello to him and his wife on Sundays, but really got to know them when their daughter Kathy started teaching our kids piano.

We'd always ask Craig about Robina, and he'd smile some and say she seemed better or stronger or livelier. Until he would just smile and shrug slightly. We'd learned from others how much she had done for parish in decades pass, as she was raising her children and even long after they had grown. She was a fixture, people said, in 1950s, 1960s and on.

We got the call from Kathy one night not long ago -- her mother had passed. The funeral was set for that Saturday.

My wife and I wondered how Craig was taking it -- and how the parish would respond. Robina had been a key figure there years ago, but would anyone remember now? Life, especially in places like Los Angeles, is always in motion -- people move out and move on, taking their memories with them.

It was an experiment in nostalgia that backfired, badly -- and I'm still trying to recover.

Many years ago, I thought it would be fun to save my annual employee photo identification cards, and keep them in a neat stack. In my much younger mind, I imagined a day far off in the future when I would happen upon them in surprise and delight, shaking my head at the flood of happy memories each year brought forth.

Not so much.

Nearly every Academy Awards season, the Oscar nominations bring to the forefront a small film deemed to be "socially important," a film of supposedly searing insight into the human condition, a film that - in short - cannot be ignored. These movies often tell us more about the Hollywood elite (i.e., Academy voters) than they do about any real social condition.

This year's anointed picture is "Precious," often described in reviews as a fairly brutal depiction of the life of an obese and illiterate black teenager who has two children by her father. Films like "Precious" garner critical attention and Academy nods not as films -- the acclaim is not really for script, plot, direction or cinematography. "Precious" is celebrated for what it allegedly reveals to us about the hidden sides of society we choose not to see. But does it?

Amid the hype and hard-sell of Super Bowl Sunday this weekend, there's another bit of TV sports viewing that stands out as an island of serious reflection: it called "Faith Bowl III."

The half-hour program is produced for the third year in a row by the Hollywood-based Catholic production company Family Theater -- it's a thought-provoking roundtable discussion by three prominent Catholic athletes, discussing the challenges of living as a Catholic and raising a family in the high pressure world of professional sports.

Last year around this time, I sat in church for the start of Catholic Schools Week next to my mother and sister. They were visiting L.A. from Florida, where most of my family (being good New Yorkers) moved a few years ago. They were part of a packed church -- always filled during this week with young parents and their four-year old children, investigating our parish school.

Hollywood has always had a taste for disaster -- each generation of these films tells us something new about the way we fear our world will end. This year, it seems, random threats that annihilate everything are all the fashion. And they may indeed reflect a dark corner of our national psyche.

This weekend's box office saw Denzel Washington's new apocalyptic movie, "The Book of Eli," finish a strong second (with $38 million in tickets sold), behind sci-fi juggernaut "Avatar." That follows on the heels of two similarly-themed films this season, "The Road" (from the beyond-bleak Cormac McCarthy novel) and "2012," which plays global destruction as wide-screen spectacle. They all speak to our times in common ways.

The celebration of Martin Luther King Jr's birthday is still a fresh American tradition -- it seems to be evolving into something like a "peace day," an occasion when schools, religious groups, and commentators pause from their routines to cast an eye on the question of non-violence. Here's my contribution to the dialogue, thanks to a dear college friend:

Back in October when President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize was first announced, I wrote here about my 1979 interview in Moscow with Nobel Peace laureate Andrei Sakharov. My friend Mitch Martin and I were editors then of the daily student newspaper at Columbia University; Suzanne Moore was a reporter. We arranged the trip and interview on behalf of a consortium of Ivy League papers, which helped cover the cost. I tried to track down the original interview for my previous blog, but couldn't find it. Mitch did.

A little over a year ago, I agreed to volunteer as the parish council president at my church in Los Angeles. Swamped at work, overwhelmed with things to do, I was sure this obligation would make me miserable -- but at least earn me a few days less in purgatory.

I was wrong. Yes, I attend more parish functions than ever, volunteer at events, and drag my family along to help whenever I can. But it all makes me, for some reason, happy.

The elusive “why” in all this is hinted at in a recent deluge of articles and video, seeking to unravel the mystery of what makes us happy -- a mystery only because the things we expect bring happiness rarely do, and the real answer is too shockingly simple to believe.

In Thursday’s New York Times, columnist Nicholas Kristof writes about Costa Rica, home to people listed as the “happiest on earth,” according to a database compiled by a Dutch sociologist.

With the end of 2009, a lot of people scrambled around, looking for something that defined the decade: the housing bust, the war on terror, perhaps Katrina. But none of that worked for me – none crystallized in one clear moment what 00’s were all about.

And then I saw it.

In Sunday’s Los Angeles Times. Page One. An article about stomach surgery.

For so many reasons, the national obsession with weight seems to symbolize much about the decade just passed: too many Americans indulged in record amounts of processed calories and then sought the quickest way out. To the honestly desperate, the morbidly obese, that answer became stomach-reduction (or stomach-stapling) surgery. This took the need for control and discipline out of the hands on the individual and placed it in the hands of a willing surgeon.

But now, according to the Los Angeles Times, the not-mobidly-obese want in on the action -- people with some weight to lose but not a life-threatening amount or diabetics unable to follow a nutrition regimen.

A friend of mine is thinking of getting a "quickie confirmation" for her son down in Mexico. For decades, Californians have raced across the border for quickie divorces in Baja -- but fast-n-easy sacraments are something new.

An article in Monday's Los Angeles Times spotlights one priest from Baja California who's gotten in trouble with his archbishop. Seems Fr. Raymundo Figueroa from Rosarito Beach in Mexico's Baja California has a special way of raising funds for his parish: he comes over the border to the U.S. and sells sacraments to time-stressed Americans. According to the Times, Fr. Figueroa charges up to $180 for fast-tracked confirmations, baptisms and first communions.

No one accuses the priest of pocketing these proceeds -- he plows the funds back into his parish, which now has a stunning church that is the envy of all the surrounding towns. And maybe this would not be much more than an amusing tale -- except that it is apparently not at all unique.

As landmark healthcare legislation makes it slow way through Congress, the U.S. Catholic bishops are in danger of finding themselves on the sidelines of history, regarded as a single-issue constituency with no view toward the greater good.

That's a growing view among many Catholic writers -- expressed clearly in Wednesday's Los Angeles Times by columnist Tim Rutten, a Catholic. Rutten joins an evolving chorus of voices who note that the bishops have the influence to help push through a change in public policy they have sought for decades: universal health care coverage. Instead, they have become enmeshed in abortion politics, threatening to undermine a bill that would help ten of millions.

Rutten quotes Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, former Lt. Governor of Maryland, who spoke out on Tuesday: "As Catholics, are we so laser-focused on the issue of abortion that we are willing to join the 'tea-partyers' and the like to bring down the healthcare reform bill? And at the enormous expense of million of Americans who suffer every day" without healthcare?

Among a small but growing portion of Los Angeles' vibrant Mexican spiritual community, a new but troubling object of worship is emerging: Santa Muerte, or "Holy Death." It is the latest, strongest and strangest sign of the powerful hold that the narcotics trade has on Latino culture.

A report in the Los Angeles Times this week outlines the still-developing worship services surrounding Santa Muerte. According to the Times, a handful of storefront churches have been set up in poor Latino neighborhoods to honor Holy Death, portrayed as a female grim reaper dressed in white with a skull for a face. Rites at these services that in some ways mirror Hispanic devotions to Mary.

I came of age in the 1970s, and always saw that as one of the worst decades of a not-so-upbeat century = Vietnam, Watergate, stagflation, KC and the Sunshine Band. The list goes on, and on.

But in today's Hollywood trade paper, Varietyeditor Peter Bart makes a good case for another lost decade -- the one we are about to leave.

Bart -- a former New York Times reporter and Paramount Pictures executive -- looks back on the last ten years and finds a list of infamy to rival the '70s: two stock market crashes, Islamic jihad, Hurricane Katrina, two wars that can't be won, and the near-destruction of the American auto industry. Kind of gives disco a run for its money to the bottom of history's barrel.

Bart's musings come as he looks at last night's Kennedy Center Honors program, which presented lifetime achievement awards to artists as diverse as Bruce Springsteen, David Brubeck, Robert DeNiro and Mel Brooks.

Can you move ahead by stepping back? Two articles in Sunday's New York Times seem to explore that question -- and present challenges to certain factions
of the church.

The first report is not about religion at all, but focuses on South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsay Graham. Not long ago, Graham was a darling of the far right when (as a member of the House Judiciary Committee) he helped lead impeachment proceedings against President Clinton. But recently, Graham has become a voice of centrism and civility on several issues -- and segments of the GOP in his home state is having none of that.

My wife and I finally got away this weekend to celebrate our twentieth wedding anniversary, and -- oddly enough -- I found myself thinking about the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Sylvia wasn't particularly flattered that the bishops popped into my brain, but it is all actually tied very closely to our wedding day.

As you know, the bishops recently approved a pastoral letter on marriage that has the words “intrinsically evil” peppered all over it. Some of this language was removed before final passage, but much remained -- divorce and gay marriage were among the items awarded the "intrinsically evil" label.

Since 9/11, "evil" has been tossed around a lot in our national conversation -- and I wonder if it's losing its power. To call something evil (let alone intrinsically evil) is strong stuff; you’d hope religious people most of all would recognize that and hold back.

Apparently not the bishops, not when it comes to marriage. Which makes me think of my wedding day.

I don't know what makes me more upset: my company-supplied Blackberry, or the insane commercials the smart-phone maker is now airing that tie their product to -- get this -- love and a classic Beatles song.

I despise my Blackberry. I hear it all the time: in my sleep, at church, on the beach -- when I am nowhere near it, I still hear it. It haunts me. That incessant buzz of my vibrating Blackberry, filled with email messages about something someone feels demands my immediate attention. Thanks to my Blackberry, I am never out of touch. Thanks to my Blackberry, vacations and weekends are not time off from work, merely a change in location.

Can you feel the unbridled happiness that is my life since Blackberry walked into it? Well, apparently the people who make this little slice of heaven actually do feel it, very very much.

Tragedy lingers, we all know -- but comedy seems more ephemeral. Laughs don't often leave a lasting mark. Comedy writers out here in Hollywood struggle with that: all the big prizes and awards go to dramatists, whose works enrich the soul and expound on the human condition. Laughter is just what we use to fill in the gaps between our various anxieties.

But not this past week. If you needed any proof that laughs last, you just had to check out the obituary sections of publications as diverse as The New York Times and Entertainment Weekly. They were filled with the news that David Lloyd had passed on.

Name doesn't ring a bell? No, probably not -- but he is venerated in television for writing arguably the funniest 30 minutes of comedy ever filmed: an episode of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" about the death of WJM-TV's kiddie show host, Chuckles the Clown.

Before my current job, which I took about three years ago, I was in the news business for nearly all my adult life. And throughout that time, fellow Catholics would regularly quiz me about why the news media so often "went after" the church.

I'm guessing an article by The New York Times' public editor this Sunday is going to have my phone ringing again.

In his Sunday piece, Clark Hoyt discusses the negative reaction a Times' feature and a Times' column has provoked from New York's archbishop, Timothy Dolan. The two works include columnist Maureen Dowd's recent brush-back of the Vatican's investigation into the lives of American nuns, and a front-page article about a priest who fathered a son after a long relationship with a parishioner.

Catholics in Hollywood are usually a low-key bunch. The networking we do is focused on the people we work with, not the folks we may see at church. But that's beginning to change -- Catholics are making a new play for higher visibility in the entertainment business.

The changes come at two venerable Hollywood Catholic institutions that are taking a fresh look at what they are and what they can be.

There are many hazards to working in the media: ego, self-indulgence, profit vs. creativity. But the biggest may be a certain loss of perspective, as the business chases after the newest new thing, convinced history is no guide and nothing is as it used to be.

Two articles in the Los Angeles Times are a quaint reminder that, wait-a-minute, human beings are always human beings and things really don’t change all that much.

My wife is angry. She is telling everyone we know that she is angry. And she is angry because somebody is knocking her favorite children's books.

Now, I'm not talking about the books she read as a child -- when you become parents, your literary love moves from the books you read as a kid, to the books you read to your kids. And this is where the anger comes in.

In a new column called "Parenting on the Edge," Los Angeles Times, writer Madeleine Brand talks about how bad some of the best-known children's books really are -- not bad for children, mind you, bad for parents. Brand's column picks out for special mention The Rainbow Fish, The Runaway Bunny, Love You Forever, and (this is the one that really set my wife off) The Giving Tree.

All the wringing of hands that surrounds President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize reminds me of a very early morning breakfast I had thirty years ago with another Nobel Peace Prize recipient.

It was January of 1979, and I woke up at five o’clock on a dark bleak Moscow morning to hail a cab outside the enormous, Stalinesque Hotel Russiya. I was a senior in college at Columbia University then, and I climbed into the taxi with my friend Mitchell. We both ran the university daily newspaper and through a series of phone calls from supposedly secure lines, we had arranged an interview with Andrei Sakharov on behalf of Ivy League student newspapers.

He had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975 for his work on behalf of human rights in the Soviet Union. Sakharov spent his earlier years as a nuclear physicist, part of a team of scientists that developed the Soviet hydrogen bomb. That work lead him into a life of relative privilege in the USSR – but as time worn on, he could not look past the corruption and abuse that plagued his country’s political system.

I've been a Catholic for a long time -- but this Sunday, I'll witness something I've never seen before: the installation of a new pastor.

My childhood parish in the Bronx had the same pastor during all the years I was there, a Capuchin named Fr. Charles with a thick Italian accent and a few remaining wisps of gray hair -- lost, I'm sure, trying to keep his poor parish afloat.

The new television season began in earnest last week, and all around Hollywood so many executive fingers were crossed, it was hard to pound out even the simplest message on a Blackberry. The previous television season – marred by a months-long writers strike – was an unmitigated disaster, perhaps hastening the demise of television as a mass medium.

Would this season be different? Would the major broadcast networks lure viewers back into the fold? Would tough economic times bring people together around the electronic hearth to share stories once again?

It has been looming over the Los Angeles archdiocese for nearly a decade, like a dark cloud that won't move on -- the priest sex abuse scandal. And another chapter in this never-ending story appears in today Los Angeles Times.

Columnist Steve Lopez reports on a deposition made public last week by Msgr. Richard Loomis, in a lawsuit filed by priest abuse victims. In his testimony, Loomis asserts that, back in 2000, he pushed Los Angeles' Cardinal Roger Mahony to report to police abuse allegations made against a now-defrocked priest named Michael Baker. According to Loomis, Mahony at first agreed, then -- once he consulted with legal counsel -- decided against reporting Baker.

In a conversation with Lopez, a spokesman for the archdiocese insisted Loomis is a less-than-credible witness. That's because the monsignor -- the archdiocese's vicar of clergy who went on to become canonical investigator of sexual misconduct complaints -- is currently on leave due to allegation of, yes, sexual misconduct.

Throughout much of the oft-times misleading and incendiary campaign against health care reform, voices of authority within the church seemed fairly silent. But here in California, there are signs of a shift.

According to the Los Angeles Times, several Southern California religious leaders have begun to speak out in favor of health care reform -- and the need to include illegal immigrants in any plan.

Last week, more than a hundred parishioners from Our Lady of Angels Church launched a phone bank to tell officials of their support for an all-inclusive health reform plan. The parish -- also known as "La Placita" -- has been a center of immigrant activity in Los Angeles for decades. Parish pastor Fr. Roland Lozano, says he began the phone bank because "it's what God wants us to do."

A great look at the society-we-are by David Brooks in Tuesday's New York Times. Brooks uses some old radio broadcasts on the day victory was declared in World War Two to contrast where American society was then and where it has gone now.

Here's the problem with being around for 2,000 years: you tend to learn a few things. So as much as I get impatient sometimes with the glacial pace of change within the church, there are moments when I'm reminded that the institution has gleaned more than a few verities over the past couple of millennia.

For instance, greed -- and its modern-day significant other, consumerism. The financial collapse that marks its first anniversary today is one large "told you so" for a church that has often been a lonely voice against the American ethos summed up on the bumper sticker: "The one who dies with the most toys wins."

Sunday's Los Angeles Times presented a bracing look at how we have changed in the past 12 months. The report explores the possibility that Southern Californians may soon turn their back on ever-bigger houses that sit at the end of ever-longer drives from where we work.