Wednesday, November 4, 2009
All Souls and All Saints: Why?
In this Buested Halo clip, Father James Martin, SJ, author of My Life with the Saints (published by Loyola Press), talks about the connection between All Hallows Eve (October 31) and All Saints Day (November 1).
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Public monument no place for opinion
Published in Cumberland Times-News Thursday, October 1, 2009.
To the Editor:
The county commissioners and their monument committee do well to reject Jeffrey Davis’ (and his Citizens for a Secular Government’s) viewpoint, as an inscription for a courthouse lawn tribute to the U.S. Constitution. As Justice Samuel Alito summarizes (Pleasant Grove City, Utah vs. Summum), a public monument is no place to post a personal opinion.
Our local leaders will do best to reject any inscription, other than a quote from the Constitution. Our Founding Fathers’ legacy -- not Jeffrey Davis’ wish -- echoes through the ages.
Signed Sept. 17, 1788, the U.S. Constitution united 13 states into one nation and established a framework for growth and stability. Over the summer months, at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, 55 educated and distinguished patriots, men of influence and integrity, esteemed lawyers, judges, governors, theologians, military officers, merchants from New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, deliberated and debated and negotiated.
General George Washington chaired the convention. Gouverneur Morris penned the document. Benjamin Franklin, 82, was the eldest delegate; Jonathan Dayton, 26, the youngest.
William Pierce, delegate from Georgia, says of General Washington, in his Character Sketches of Delegates to the Federal Convention (Library of Congress): “Having conducted these states to independence and peace, he now appears to assist in framing a Government to make the People happy.”
In their Soldier-Statesmen of the Constitution (U.S. Army Center for Military History), Robert Wright and Morris MacGregory say that, as a soldier and member of the Continental Congress, Gouverneur Morris was “convinced” that “a strong central government was needed” to preserve liberties and expand opportunities won in the Revolution: “In an age when most (early Americans) still thought of themselves as citizens of their sovereign and separate states, Morris was able to articulate a clear vision of a new and powerful union.”
Facing opposition that seemed likely at times to extinguish the assembly’s efforts, Washington placed his trust in God. In an Aug. 31, 1788 letter to Annis Boudinot Stockton (University of Virginia) -- a Revolutionary War patriot in her own right and widow of Richard Stockton, Declaration of Independence signer and Continental Congress delegate -- Washington expresses his awe and gratitude for the graces and great gift bestowed upon our nation by the benevolent Being: “I can never trace the (interconnection) of causes, which led to these events, without acknowledging the mystery and admiring the goodness of Providence. To that superintending Power alone is our retraction from the brink of ruin to be attributed. A spirit of accommodation was happily infused into the leading characters of the Continent…for the reception of a good government.”
Of Gouverneur Morris -- graduated from King’s College (named Columbia University in 1784) and buried at St. Anne’s Episcopal Churchyard in the Bronx -- Wright and MacGregory say: “During the Convention debates, he defended ideas that had been associated with him ever since he had helped write the New York constitution in 1776: religious liberty, opposition to slavery, the right of property as the foundation of society, the rule of law, and the consent of the governed as the basis of government. His aims were ambitious and reflected his vision of a government that would serve as an example to the rest of the world.”
Especially now, as efforts seem under way to circumvent the framework of our Constitution and to deny its source and sense, if a monument is to be erected in its honor, then we must urge our commissioners to accept only a quote from the Constitution, to enshrine the inspired vision of our faithful forefathers -- not the skewed view of Jeffrey Davis.
Nancy E. Thoerig
Mount Savage
copyright Sept. 25, 2009, Nancy E. Thoerig
"Our local leaders will do best to reject any inscription, other
than a quote from the Constitution. Our Founding Fathers’ legacy -- not Jeffrey Davis’ wish -- echoes through the ages."
To the Editor:
The county commissioners and their monument committee do well to reject Jeffrey Davis’ (and his Citizens for a Secular Government’s) viewpoint, as an inscription for a courthouse lawn tribute to the U.S. Constitution. As Justice Samuel Alito summarizes (Pleasant Grove City, Utah vs. Summum), a public monument is no place to post a personal opinion.
Our local leaders will do best to reject any inscription, other than a quote from the Constitution. Our Founding Fathers’ legacy -- not Jeffrey Davis’ wish -- echoes through the ages.
Signed Sept. 17, 1788, the U.S. Constitution united 13 states into one nation and established a framework for growth and stability. Over the summer months, at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, 55 educated and distinguished patriots, men of influence and integrity, esteemed lawyers, judges, governors, theologians, military officers, merchants from New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, deliberated and debated and negotiated.
General George Washington chaired the convention. Gouverneur Morris penned the document. Benjamin Franklin, 82, was the eldest delegate; Jonathan Dayton, 26, the youngest.
William Pierce, delegate from Georgia, says of General Washington, in his Character Sketches of Delegates to the Federal Convention (Library of Congress): “Having conducted these states to independence and peace, he now appears to assist in framing a Government to make the People happy.”
In their Soldier-Statesmen of the Constitution (U.S. Army Center for Military History), Robert Wright and Morris MacGregory say that, as a soldier and member of the Continental Congress, Gouverneur Morris was “convinced” that “a strong central government was needed” to preserve liberties and expand opportunities won in the Revolution: “In an age when most (early Americans) still thought of themselves as citizens of their sovereign and separate states, Morris was able to articulate a clear vision of a new and powerful union.”
Facing opposition that seemed likely at times to extinguish the assembly’s efforts, Washington placed his trust in God. In an Aug. 31, 1788 letter to Annis Boudinot Stockton (University of Virginia) -- a Revolutionary War patriot in her own right and widow of Richard Stockton, Declaration of Independence signer and Continental Congress delegate -- Washington expresses his awe and gratitude for the graces and great gift bestowed upon our nation by the benevolent Being: “I can never trace the (interconnection) of causes, which led to these events, without acknowledging the mystery and admiring the goodness of Providence. To that superintending Power alone is our retraction from the brink of ruin to be attributed. A spirit of accommodation was happily infused into the leading characters of the Continent…for the reception of a good government.”
Of Gouverneur Morris -- graduated from King’s College (named Columbia University in 1784) and buried at St. Anne’s Episcopal Churchyard in the Bronx -- Wright and MacGregory say: “During the Convention debates, he defended ideas that had been associated with him ever since he had helped write the New York constitution in 1776: religious liberty, opposition to slavery, the right of property as the foundation of society, the rule of law, and the consent of the governed as the basis of government. His aims were ambitious and reflected his vision of a government that would serve as an example to the rest of the world.”
Especially now, as efforts seem under way to circumvent the framework of our Constitution and to deny its source and sense, if a monument is to be erected in its honor, then we must urge our commissioners to accept only a quote from the Constitution, to enshrine the inspired vision of our faithful forefathers -- not the skewed view of Jeffrey Davis.
Nancy E. Thoerig
Mount Savage
copyright Sept. 25, 2009, Nancy E. Thoerig
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Bishop D'Arcy speaks on Notre Dame controversy
"It was only right that the bishop be with (the students), for
they were on the side of truth, and their demonstration was disciplined, rooted in prayer and substantive. ...[T]hey chose to give public witness to the Catholic faith contrary to the example of a powerful, international university, against which they were respectfully but firmly in disagreement."
Bishop John M. D'Arcy (Fort Wayne-South Bend, Indiana) clarifies, in an Augusut 31 reflelction in America Magazine, his decision to support the students at Notre Dame. And he calls all Catholic universities to consider anew their relationship with their students and pastoral leaders and with the church in toto.
Monday, August 3, 2009
Cumberland's Confederate history sure to fascinate
Published in Cumberland Times-News Monday, July 27, 2009.
Opposition to education about the Confederate flag is misguided. Knowledge about our Confederate heritage is important, in classrooms and the community.
The Confederate flag flew over Cumberland only once, when Union occupiers briefly retreated, but Southern sympathies ran deep.
Slavery was the states’ rights issue that led to the Civil War. A turning point was the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. It permitted the South to expand slavery into new territories. The Republican Party formed in opposition and soon was the voice and force of the North.
Abraham Lincoln enunciated the North’s position on “slavery agitation” in his 1858 debates with Stephen Douglas. Then between Lincoln’s November 1860 election and his March 1861 inauguration as president, seven states seceded. (Maryland planned to join them.) The following year, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
Confederate activities in Cumberland and Maryland and oppression under Union occupation come home in The McKaig Journal.
Public interest surrounded the 1984 publication of this Civil War-era diary. Now just one generation past, the Journal is forgotten, and our Civil War heritage is maligned. Perhaps The McKaig Journal should be required reading in Allegany County schools.
Cumberland’s place in the Civil War is certain to fascinate any history teacher. Students might engage in thoughtful discussion about ancestors who could have been among the 800-or-so slaves in Allegany County, or who might have fought either with the North or South in the Battle between the States.
Published by the Allegany County Historical Society, with a grant from the 350th Maryland Birthday Committee, The McKaig Journal was penned between 1851 and 1866 by Priscilla Beall McKaig and her husband, Cumberland businessman William Wallace McKaig.
In the introduction, Michael Mudge recounts events that escalated, after the April 12, 1861 battle at Fort Sumter, to poise Maryland to secede in September. Leading the delegation in that direction (until his arrest by Union troops in Cumberland on August 26) was Mrs. McKaig’s brother-in-law, State Senator Thomas Jefferson McKaig.
President Lincoln squelched Maryland’s secession, because it endangered the federal capital. On September 11, he ordered all the legislators’ arrests.
Mudge elucidates President Lincoln’s decision to station up to 8,000 federal troops at Campobello (the site of Allegany High School) on June 8, 1861, and to put the entire state under martial law.
Mrs. McKaig, who had two sons Confederate officers and another a prisoner of war, was banished from town for three months. The “underground railroad” that passed through our countryside went above board, as slave catchers in Cumberland lost their jobs, and Negro house servants and farm workers fled freely to Pennsylvania.
Communications went underground, as “ladies whose hearts were with the South” operated a secret Confederate post office in the rear of a store on Baltimore Street. They also donated money and provisions to Confederate soldiers who were on their way to prison in Ohio.
Mudge mentions Constance Cary, who left Cumberland prior to the occupation to go to the estate of her grandmother, Lady Fairfax, in Alexandria. Her two cousins, who faced arrest in Baltimore, joined her there. The trio was popular in Richmond for singing “My Maryland,” which memorializes the first Confederate blood shed in the streets of Baltimore on April 19, 1861.
Mudge writes of the Cary cousins: “upon the (Confederate) War Department’s approval of the design by General Pierre G. T. Beauregard, these three Maryland belles completed the first three Confederate battle flags.” Beauregard was one of three Confederate generals to receive them.
While Allegany County filled Union ranks, as well, Mudge notes, its sympathies were Confederate. Let’s know and honor our heritage.
Opposition to education about the Confederate flag is misguided. Knowledge about our Confederate heritage is important, in classrooms and the community.
The Confederate flag flew over Cumberland only once, when Union occupiers briefly retreated, but Southern sympathies ran deep.
Slavery was the states’ rights issue that led to the Civil War. A turning point was the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. It permitted the South to expand slavery into new territories. The Republican Party formed in opposition and soon was the voice and force of the North.
Abraham Lincoln enunciated the North’s position on “slavery agitation” in his 1858 debates with Stephen Douglas. Then between Lincoln’s November 1860 election and his March 1861 inauguration as president, seven states seceded. (Maryland planned to join them.) The following year, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
Confederate activities in Cumberland and Maryland and oppression under Union occupation come home in The McKaig Journal.
Public interest surrounded the 1984 publication of this Civil War-era diary. Now just one generation past, the Journal is forgotten, and our Civil War heritage is maligned. Perhaps The McKaig Journal should be required reading in Allegany County schools.
Cumberland’s place in the Civil War is certain to fascinate any history teacher. Students might engage in thoughtful discussion about ancestors who could have been among the 800-or-so slaves in Allegany County, or who might have fought either with the North or South in the Battle between the States.
Published by the Allegany County Historical Society, with a grant from the 350th Maryland Birthday Committee, The McKaig Journal was penned between 1851 and 1866 by Priscilla Beall McKaig and her husband, Cumberland businessman William Wallace McKaig.
In the introduction, Michael Mudge recounts events that escalated, after the April 12, 1861 battle at Fort Sumter, to poise Maryland to secede in September. Leading the delegation in that direction (until his arrest by Union troops in Cumberland on August 26) was Mrs. McKaig’s brother-in-law, State Senator Thomas Jefferson McKaig.
President Lincoln squelched Maryland’s secession, because it endangered the federal capital. On September 11, he ordered all the legislators’ arrests.
Mudge elucidates President Lincoln’s decision to station up to 8,000 federal troops at Campobello (the site of Allegany High School) on June 8, 1861, and to put the entire state under martial law.
Mrs. McKaig, who had two sons Confederate officers and another a prisoner of war, was banished from town for three months. The “underground railroad” that passed through our countryside went above board, as slave catchers in Cumberland lost their jobs, and Negro house servants and farm workers fled freely to Pennsylvania.
Communications went underground, as “ladies whose hearts were with the South” operated a secret Confederate post office in the rear of a store on Baltimore Street. They also donated money and provisions to Confederate soldiers who were on their way to prison in Ohio.
Mudge mentions Constance Cary, who left Cumberland prior to the occupation to go to the estate of her grandmother, Lady Fairfax, in Alexandria. Her two cousins, who faced arrest in Baltimore, joined her there. The trio was popular in Richmond for singing “My Maryland,” which memorializes the first Confederate blood shed in the streets of Baltimore on April 19, 1861.
Mudge writes of the Cary cousins: “upon the (Confederate) War Department’s approval of the design by General Pierre G. T. Beauregard, these three Maryland belles completed the first three Confederate battle flags.” Beauregard was one of three Confederate generals to receive them.
While Allegany County filled Union ranks, as well, Mudge notes, its sympathies were Confederate. Let’s know and honor our heritage.
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Faith transcends violence
An atheist views violence in the name of God as reason to reject faith (“There’s no compassion or pity in them,” May 6). A believer views all violence as godless.Published in Cumberland Sunday Times, June 14, 2009.
"...peoples’ evil acts do not warrant condemnation of religion, nor
skepticism toward humankind."
Evil reigns in peoples’ minds and hearts when they commit heinous acts against innocents. But peoples’ evil acts do not warrant condemnation of religion, nor skepticism toward humankind.
Believers plumb the depths of their relationship with God to find the transcendent in the midst of godlessness. God’s love protects souls, and it changes minds and hearts to overcome evil. Our hope in God and in the goodness of humankind overcomes despair, and it moves mountains (Mt. 17:20).
Anne Frank was 15 when she died of typhus in a concentration camp, seven months after her arrest in 1944. She and her Jewish family, hunted by Nazi soldiers, hid for almost three years in her father’s office building in Amsterdam. An accidental noise in their upper chamber revealed their whereabouts to an incidental burglar and betrayer below.
Otto Frank survived (Nazis killed 6 million Jews and 8 million more civilians in three years). He returned to his family’s hideout and found his daughter’s diary. Published in English in 1952, Anne’s poignant words tell of her love for God and her unfailing faith in people.
Immaculee Ilibagiza was 22, a Catholic Tutsi college student, when the Hutu government set out to exterminate her tribe in a power grab in Rwanda in 1994. A family friend, a Hutu Christian pastor, risked his own life to hide her and seven other Tutsi women in a tiny concealed bathroom in his home.
For the duration of the holocaust, hunted by Hutu killers, Immaculee shared meager table scraps, prayed her rosary, read her Bible, kept a holy silence, and fortified her spirit. She and her sister prisoners were about to be betrayed by a houseboy when the pastor, who also survives (Hutus killed 1 million Tutsis, and moderate Hutus, in three months), made a bold move to transfer his captives to their French liberators.
Published in 2006, Immaculee’s story is vivid testimony to the power of faith. Her words to the man who killed her family, but couldn’t extinguish her God or her dreams, were, “I forgive you.”
Violence is man’s injustice against man. Genocide is mass-hysteria violence. The cure for violence is a change of mind and heart. It is found in God’s love for all human life and in our forgiveness and joy in living.
Modern-day holocausts rage in systematized abortion and embryonic stem cell research. Justified in the name of compassion, abortion conveniently kills a targeted segment of our population. Promoted in the name of humanitarianism, embryonic stem cell research creates and enslaves nascent life with the sole intent to experiment with it and casually destroy it. Children these days are holocaust survivors.
Who tells the story of God’s mercy for good people gone mad in today’s holocaust? Norma McCorvey speaks in two books about the industry that appalls her and her own conversion rooted in God’s love. Locked for 20 years in her identity as Jane Roe, McCorvey now runs her own pro-life ministry.
Her 1973 Supreme Court case legalized abortion in all 50 states. Ironically, Jane Roe never had an abortion. She gave birth to the child in question and to two more. In 1995, McCorvey became a pro-life Christian. In 1998, she became Catholic.
Fifty-one percent of Americans now are pro-life. Let’s keep faith in God’s mercy, and hope that His love will reform minds and hearts and move them to bring the genocide of innocents to a peaceful end.
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