EXORCISM FOR TONY ROBERTSON? (Letter to Dom Post, July 30)

Certain aspects of Tony Robertson’s heinous crime (The Making of a Killer, July 29) suggest it is an instance of demonic possession.

I hope someone with responsibility for his care and treatment will take the initiative of consulting a properly qualified Catholic priest with a view to exorcism.

WOMEN WHO SPEND ALL DAY IN CHURCH (First published in 'NZ Catholic' July 26)

            I have it on good authority that a recent Sunday homily somewhere made fleeting reference to ‘women who spend all day in church’. I infer (wouldn’t you?) that these women are a bit of a liability.

I might be one. I’m at Mass, usually prefaced by the Rosary, most days, and at Adoration 2-3 times a week. There’s also my ‘organdizing’ (remember Winnie the Pooh?). As a tyro at the organ and having no instrument at home I practise in the church.

When a shortage of organists meant our Sunday Masses were sometimes compromised by CDs (think agonising pauses and occasional bursts of ridiculously inappropriate music), I started praying for our music ministry. Before long I was looking at the organ and thinking, ‘hmmm’.

I put the case to ‘im indoors for a piano. It could fit in the hall, I said. But ‘im indoors’ office is just through the door so that was never a goer. And when I realised I’d have to practise in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament I was delighted.

Because it’s killing two birds (practice and Eucharistic prayer) with one stone. St Teresa of Avila, whose amazing achievements were funded by profound contemplation, was a very busy and practical woman who spent hours every day in contemplative prayer and ‘in choir’. She knew the Eucharistic power to transform our lives on earth and raise us to sublime heights in heaven.

Every time we receive Holy Communion in awareness and a state of grace, our blood runs more with Christ’s and our soul joins more with his, giving us more grace, more benefit for our whanau, more progress towards peace on earth and if we keep that grace intact, more happiness in eternity.

‘Im indoors (who’s a fan for the national programme so the piano idea was pretty silly) tells me he heard a psychologist advising about teenagers and saying he was impatient, as if that were a fact of life and he (and his teenagers) had to live with it.

‘My ways are exalted above your ways’ (Is 55,9). Sadly, it’s typical of experts in human behaviour not to realise that any chronic behavioural problem can be solved by the Eucharistic Jesus. The changes effected in Christ’s Eucharistic companions today, not just in behaviours but in the nitty-gritty detail of their lives and in the people around them, are amazing.

Maybe Father had had pastoral experience of women with unwashed dishes, unmade beds and unhappy children, but love for the Eucharist isn’t something esoteric. It’s profoundly practical. In fact for Teresa, an important benchmark for spiritual growth is ‘the performance of ordinary duties’.

God makes me laugh, the ways he invents for spending time with him, like simplifying  your lifestyle, prompting people to help you, even finding great clothes on the cheap.

La Santa’s namesake, Blessed Teresa of Calcutta, knew the benefits. ‘The time you spend with Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament,’ she said, ‘is the best time that you will spend on earth.’

 

 

A DOCTOR'S EXTRAORDINARY STATEMENT (Letter to Dom Post, July 23)

‘Without our health we have nothing’ (The importance of self-acceptance, July 23.) Even for a doctor, with a doctor’s vested interest, that’s an extraordinary statement - even in our milieu, with our pathological obsession (and I use those words advisedly) with health.

 

What does Dr Libby’s attitude contribute towards the self-acceptance of the chronically ill? What does it do for the terminally ill? If these people ‘have nothing’, they may as well end their lives, or get someone else to do it for them. Dr Libby may not intend it, but she sounds like an advocate for euthanasia.

 

Such a mindset could hardly be called ‘Well and Good’, like her column. It’s sick and bad.

WE WERE JUST AS NAIVE ABOUT TV. DOH. (Letter published in the Dom Post, July 21)

‘We were naive in our initial expectations for the internet,’ says Reddit’s ex-CEO (Bullies and trolls are winning the internet war, July 21). ‘We focused on the huge opportunity for positive interaction’.

That’s exactly what we once thought about television. .

A CHURCH SILENT ON ABORTION CAN'T EXPECT NEW PRIESTS (First published in 'NZ Catholic, June 28)

How we all must have prayed for Lecretia Seales! She died at home in Wellington, in a hospital bed obtained with concerted efforts by  the hospice, friends and family, from natural causes after Justice Collins said no to her bid for doctor-assisted suicide.

But TVNZ’s Sunday and TvOne News - both biassed reportage, the latter outrageously so - showed the poster girl for euthanasia had advanced that cause no end.

Then there’s the cause for gender well-being.

‘Pardon me?’ I hear you ask.

Two days before Lecretia’s death, at a café in Wellington I said to our daughter Rose, ‘Why do they call him ‘Shortie’?’

Rose works nights at Ivy in Cuba Street. Ivy is a gay bar. Shortie, the waiter at our table, works nights at Ivy too.

 ‘Why do they call them Shortie,’ said Rose.

‘Pardon me?’ I said, and Rose explained how the pronoun ‘him’ is sexist. We should eliminate such gender-explicit expressions. ‘Im indoors suggested that being singular, a better pronoun for Shortie would be ‘it’. Peace-loving Rose made no reply.  

As well as nights bar-tending at Ivy, Rose’s days are spent doing honours in theatre at Vic. Politically speaking her milieu is ultra correct, far removed you’d think from yours or mine, but gender well-being is coming to a school near you.  

The Ministry of Education is advising schools to consider non-gender toilets, changing rooms and uniforms. Five year-olds need to question ‘gender stereotyping’.  Canada, cited as our model for doctor-assisted suicide, puts posters promoting the eternal triangle with ’Love Has No Gender’ signs in school toilets. 

The day after Lecretia’s death, in Hastings outside the hospital the group praying for women arriving for ‘terminations’ questioned  the churches’ silence around abortion. Maybe it’s because probably one in three Kiwi mothers has killed her own child. ‘The ones who can’t bear to hear the word abortion’, says Dr Theresa Burke, founder of Rachel’s Vineyard, ‘they’re sitting in our churches.’

We’re all implicated. It’s a guilty silence.

Blessed Teresa of Calcutta’s statement, ‘abortion is the greatest destroyer of peace today’, is illustrated by violence especially towards women and children, sex and drug abuse, eating disorders and the breast cancer generated by abortion.

We lament the lack of priests, and so we should. The fewer the priests, the fewer the Eucharists and people attending, the more sorrows our families and communities will have to bear. But when the Church by her silence condones rejecting God’s gift of human life, she can’t expect to be granted the priests whose sole purpose is to make that life divine.

Our natural reaction to societal degeneration is fear. But we’re designed by God to become supernatural,  called to personal holiness, by contemplative prayer to live like a child as St Therese of Lisieux did, in the arms of Jesus.

As Luisa Piccarreta did, fifty years on.

‘Stay calmly in my arms’, Jesus told Luisa, ‘with your eyes closed.  Everything I let happen to you is directed by me for your greater good.’

 

CATHOLIC EDUCATION IS ABOUT COMMUNICATING CHRIST (Letter published in Dom Post, July 8)

Marian School principal John Coulam says (July 6) ‘the role of the Catholic schools is to support the parents.’ That’s subsidiary to their primary goal which is stated unequivocally by the schools’ proprietors, the NZ Catholic Bishops, as ‘Catholic education is above all a question of communicating Christ’.  

The fact that children are booked into Catholic schools before birth shows that even when inadequately done – as will always be the case – communicating Christ produces the results parents want.

A 'SMALL GROUP' OF 80 PROTESTORS (Letter to Dom Post, June 24)

Can’t your reporter count? Adding insult to the injury of outrageously biased television coverage of the sad demise of Lecretia Seales, The Dominion Post account of the petition for voluntary euthanasia’s presentation (Cross-party support for voluntary euthanasia petition, June 24) mentions ‘a small group of protestors’, which in fact numbered eighty.

 

Which was more than twice the number supporting the petition. 

New Zealanders are not so stupid as you make out.