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statements, opinions, or views in the articles may not necessarily reflect that of the Goan Voice Canada. |
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A Lenten penance
that lasts
February 23, 2009
BY CHRIS MILLER
WESTERN CATHOLIC REPORTER
http://www.wcr.ab.ca/news/2009/0223/penance022309.shtml
Don't be bothered with
'fiddly things;' aim for reconciliation, conversion,
say local Catholics
 The
2 purposes of Lent
Message from Canadian
Conference of Catholic Bishops Lent has two major
purposes:
It recalls or prepares for Baptism and it emphasizes
a spirit of penance. Through 40 days of closer
attention to God’s word and of more fervent prayer,
believers are prepared to celebrate the paschal
mystery.
Lenten penance should aim to bring about a lasting
change in behaviour, says a retired pastoral
associate.
"What are the things you're doing that are causing
problems at home, disruptions at work?" asks Sister
Ada Toner. "Those are the things you should be
giving up," instead of giving up eating chocolate, a
practice that will resume as soon as Lent is over.
Toner, a 91-year-old long-time pastoral assistant in
Fort Saskatchewan, said penance takes many forms,
from apologizing to an injured party to healing
divisions in our families.
Lent's purpose is not to diminish life but to enrich
it, she said. Too much time is wasted correcting the
"little fiddly things" like not saying our prayers
or disobeying our parents, whereas its focus ought
to be more on the positives God has done in one's
life.
Toner, a Sister of Charity of the Immaculate
Conception, is one of several local Catholics who
spoke with the WCR about their practices for Lent,
which begins with Ash Wednesday, Feb. 25.
"In the old days, Lent was about giving up all of
the bad things you did," she said. But Lent should
be more about reconciliation with those we have
hurt.
"God forgives us totally, and we have to forgive
ourselves. Make peace with what you have done to
others and what others have done to you."
Lent, of course, is also about avoiding the daily
inevitable temptations.
Toner said that Jesus was tempted to 1) turn a rock
into bread during his 40-day fast, 2) rule the
world, and 3) throw himself from the temple roof to
see if the angels would catch him.
"These temptations are ours too," she said.
Sister Gloria Keylor, provincial superior of Sisters
of Providence, said her Lenten penance aims at a
growth in holiness, a spiritual renewal.
"I'm trying to love kindness more and be less
critical of others," said Keylor.
For Roni Iwanciwski, pastoral assistant at Our Lady
of the Foothills Parish in Hinton, personal penance
is to spend more time in prayer.
But there are many activities in her parish too. The
Catholic Women's League hands out Lenten crosses
with its activities. And the parish has adult
education classes in the evenings, four nights a
week. The last two years those classes have focused
on the Nicene Creed.
Catholic schools throughout Alberta are also active
with Lent. Through the Positive Choice Leadership
Program at Lloydminster's Holy Rosary High School,
students find a deeper conversion of their hearts to
the Lord.
"We usually have our student leadership council in
charge," said principal Tim Brochu. "This can take
on multiple forms, such as service projects, local
fundraisers or global awareness."
About 50 students with the school's worship and
praise bands have been on the road recently. Brochu
said the students have been putting on shows,
starting Feb. 21 in Fort Saskatchewan, at 10
different schools. These shows include music and
skits.
Holy Rosary High School is closely connected with
St. Anthony, the Border City's sole Catholic parish,
he said. "It's a really unique situation, one parish
in a small setting."
Oblate Father Mike Dechant said his BEARS Team will
be active in junior high schools during Lent.
BEARS stands for the five beliefs that junior high
students need: belonging, excellence,
accountability, respect and safety.
The school-based program is about "students
animating students," Dechant said. During Lent,
students lead Morning Prayer in the classrooms. |
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Lenten
discipline allows us to get our priorities straight
By: Glen Argan
From:http://www.wcr.ab.ca/columns/editorials/2009/editorial022309.shtml
Contemporary Western society is not the easiest
place to grow closer to God. Our unparalleled wealth
makes it easy to focus on fulfilling an endless
array of material desires; a culture saturated in
sex makes it easy to live a life addicted to sexual
pleasures; an ideology of personal freedom
legitimizes one’s ignoring of traditional morals.
It may be that other societies also had such a full
table of temptations. But in the West today, a
powerful mass media also places that table at centre
stage.
The discipline of Lent offers a different focus. It
is an opportunity to respond to St. Paul’s plea: “Do
not be conformed to this world, but be transformed
by the renewing of your minds, so that you may
discern what is the will of God — what is good and
acceptable and perfect” (Romans 12.2).
In considering the Lenten disciplines of prayer,
fasting and almsgiving, we need to overcome the
notion that such disciplines are life-denying. Other
religions can give the impression that the body and
even the individuality of the person are evil. While
there certainly have been ascetical excesses in
Christianity, the goal of Christian penance is the
fullness of life. Jesus’ words hold fast for all
time: “I came that they may have life and have it
abundantly” (John 10.10).
Moral theologian Germain Grisez notes that the
Lenten disciplines contribute to our ongoing
conversion in that “sin alienates the sinner from
God, upsets the order of the self and damages human
community; but prayer draws one nearer to God,
fasting imposes order on oneself, almsgiving
expresses love of neighbour which forms community.”
The decline in ascetical practices in recent decades
has not been a form of liberation. Rather, it shows
a lack of awareness of how sin diminishes us and how
the fullness of life comes through the love of God
and love of neighbour.
In his letter Reconciliation and Penance, Pope John
Paul II noted that “the moral conscience of many
people (has) become seriously clouded” in our time.
“The restoration of a proper sense of sin is the
first way of facing the grave spiritual crisis
looming over man today” (n. 18).
This declining awareness of sin is, in turn, due to
a declining awareness of God. We have too often
privatized God and made him subject to my plans and
desires. We do not let God be God, the one who is
outside and above us, the one who has great love for
us, but also the one who calls each of us to
fullness of life. Our call is to respond to his
love, not to expect he will be obedient to our
whims.
Lent is an opportunity to get our priorities
straight. It is a time to take another step in that
lifelong task of conversion. Its rich resources in
the call to prayer, fasting and almsgiving are an
opportunity to enter into the fullness of life. |
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Fight Poverty to
Foster Peace
Editorial from:
http://examinerindia.blogspot.com/2009/02/editorial.html
Adapted extracts from
Pope’s Message for World Peace Day 2009
Pope Benedict XVI has called on nations of the world
and individuals to play an active part in fighting
poverty as a means of building world peace, in his
message for the Word Day of Peace. The Message
stresses that poverty is often a contributory factor
or a compounding element in conflicts, including
armed ones. “Our world” he said, “shows increasing
evidence of another grave threat to peace: many
individuals, and indeed, whole peoples are living
today in conditions of extreme poverty.”
Poverty is often considered as a consequence of
demographic change and hence there are international
campaigns to reduce birth rates. Many methods fail
to respect the right to life, exterminating unborn
children in the name of the fight against poverty,
constituting destruction of the poorest of all human
beings. But recent studies show that those with
higher birth rates enjoy better opportunities for
development. The Pope’s message points out that
population is proving to be an asset, not a factor
that contributes to poverty.
An important area that requires attention in the
fight against poverty, is child poverty. “When
poverty strikes a family”, the Pontiff says, “the
children prove to be the most vulnerable victims:
almost half of those living in absolute poverty
today are children. Working for the welfare of
children means giving priority to those objectives
which concern them most directly, such as caring for
mothers, commitment to education, access to
vaccines, medical care and drinking water,
safeguarding the environment and above all,
commitment to defence of the family and the
stability of relations within it.”
Another aspect of poverty is the current food
crisis. “This problem”, the Pope says, “is
characterised by difficulty in gaining access to it,
and by a structural lack of political and economic
institutions capable of addressing needs and
emergencies.” Pope Benedict said food shortages and
high food prices were “not created by a lack of
food, as much as by the phenomenon of speculation
and the inability of economic and political
institutions to deal with needs and emergencies.”
The Holy Father attributed the current global
financial crisis to the fact that: “financial
activity is only focussed on itself without any
long-term consideration of the common good’’. He
called for a “common code of ethics” to counter the
trend in a globalised world in which the gap between
rich and poor was widening, instead of being
narrowed.
The “conscience of humanity” could no longer ignore
economic differences that had become more marked,
even in the more advanced countries. He also urged
governments to spend less on armaments and more on
development, saying that “immense military
expenditure is diverted from development projects
for the poor’’.
Pope Benedict argued that every form of externally
imposed poverty has at its root a lack of respect
for the transcendent dignity of the human person,
adding: “when man is not considered within the total
context of his vocation, and when the demands of a
true human ecology are not respected, the cruel
forces of poverty are unleashed.”
Pope Benedict highlighted that development needs to
be oriented towards a goal of profound solidarity
that seeks the good of each and all. “In this
sense”, he affirmed, “globalisation should be seen
as a good opportunity to achieve something important
in the fight against poverty, and to place at the
disposal of justice and peace resources which were
scarcely conceivable previously.” Our axiom should
be ‘fight poverty to foster peace’. |
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They
aren't Dogs, in those Slums
(Juan Cole, Global Americana Institute)
http://www.juancole.com/2009/02/they-arent-dogs-in-those-slums.html
From:
goanet-news-bounces@lists.goanet.org
February 24, 2009 To:
gn-news@goanet.org
By Julian Cole
The following comments may contain spoilers.
Directors Danny Boyle's and Loveleen Tandan's "Slumdog
Millionaire" swept the Oscars this year, in a
remarkable sign of globalization. The creative team
behind the film was largely British (Tandan began as
a casting director and the screenplay was by Simon
Beaufoy). But it was based on an Indian novel (Vikas
Swarup's Q & A), set in India with Indian actors,
and deployed the cinematic techniques of Bollywood,
the massive Indian film industry based in Bombay (a
city that Indian television news anchors now call
Mumbai but almost no one else does).
Globalization is implicit in the story from every
direction. Author Swarup is an Indian diplomat as
well as novelist, and has had postings in Turkey,
the US, Britain and Ethiopia, and he is now Indian
High Commissioner in Pretoria, South Africa. So the
story springs from the mind of an inveterate
expatriate who knows Ankara and Washington as well
as Delhi.
And, the audience reception of the film was global,
with Indian slum dwellers mounting angry protests,
especially against the title. ("Dog," or kutta is a
highly derogatory thing to call someone in Hindi,
maybe as pejorative as "pig" in the US. Most Indians
don't keep dogs as pets, and they are therefore
often street animals and go feral. I tried to keep
some dogs around as watchdogs in Lucknow by feeding
them, but it was always a crap shoot whether they
would attack me or the burglars). Just imagine if a
film came out in the US about inner city minorities
called "Ghetto Pigs." Anti-globalization writer and
acclaimed novelist Arundhati Roy slammed the film
for neglecting to depict the real working class and
its struggles, instead holding out the false hope of
sudden riches.
If poverty-stricken urbanites were upset by the
title, the concentration on Indian poverty disturbed
middle and upper class Indians who have seen their
country advance from fourth-world poverty to the
elements of an advanced economy. (Within India's
more than one billion population, there is a
middle-class country of 80 million, the size of
Germany--with satellite televisions, nice cars,
well-appointed homes, and white collar jobs hooked
into the world economy). I can't tell you how tired
middle class South Asians get of the Western
depiction of their region as destitute, or the use
of it to make Western children clean their plates.
That the film was feted in Hollywood even as it was
reviled in parts of India was anyway a huge change.
As recently as 1992, legendary Bengali director
Satyajit Ray received a lifetime achievement Oscar
as a nod to the cognoscenti. Ray and other Indian
auteurs were in some sense in another universe,
off-stage, and so could be symbolically honored at
the Oscars. "Slumdog" was the life of this year's
party. India has arrived in American arts.
Boyle, the director of "Trainspotting," brings his
dark vision to this depiction of Indian slum life.
Both films contain disgusting immersions in toilets
in fulfillment of an obsession, whether with a
cocaine high or the autograph of Indian acting giant
Amitabh Bachchan. Both contain scenes of gratuitous
violence, whether the smashing of a patron's face by
a beer bottle carelessly and indiscriminately thrown
from an upper story in a pub, or the cocky gunplay
of a budding Bombay gangster. (It is one of the
flaws in the argument of figures such as actor
Amitabh Bachchan that the film is unfair to India,
that Boyle did not exactly portray a Western place
like Scotland in a complimentary way, either; he is
interested in the downtrodden and hopeless, wherever
they are.)
"Slumdog Millionaire" also draws heavily on
Bollywood tropes. While most such films are 3-hour
melodramas about star-crossed lovers who have to
outwit their hidebound parents to get married, "Slumdog"
substitutes a gangster brother and his gangster
fictive family for the meddling groom's parents as a
plot device for keeping the lovers apart. While
greed or perhaps a drive to escape existential
boredom drove "Trainspotting," Jamal Malik's (Dev
Patel's) unceasing search for his beloved Latika (Freida
Pinto) drives "Slumdog."
But Bollywood themes are also sidestepped. Whereas
in most Indian films, a love affair between a Muslim
boy like Jamal and a Hindu girl like Latika would be
impeded by caste conventions that make such unions
socially difficult, in this film that they are
orphans and slum dwellers deracinates them to the
point where caste and religion are irrelevant. The
only one who practices religion in this film is
Jamal's gangster older brother Salim, and even this
dallying with mainstream belief and practice has the
distinct disadvantage for him of endowing him with a
belated conscience. The other context in which
religion appears is the Shiv Sena Hindu mob that
attacks Jamal's family and neighborhood, imprinting
on his mind the appearance of the God Ram (which
otherwise a poor Muslim boy might know little
about).
The film is plot-driven, not character-driven. In
fact, it is puzzle-driven, since each episode in
Jamal's life, in almost picaresque fashion, is told
around the answer to a question on the Indian
version of "Who wants to be a Millionaire?" (The
other side of globalization is that such television
phenomena typically have iterations in each major
country around the world; Indian Idol is now very
popular).
Jamal's character, with his quiet stubborn
integrity, never alters from childhood to adulthood.
Salim is a fighter throughout. And Latika is never
defined, swinging between easy coquetry, realistic
debauchery, resigned domestic slavery and the
high-mindedness of having a one true love. It is the
failure of character development and the
concentration on puzzle-solving that are the least
satisfying and least realistic elements of the film.
Would Jamal really never have learned to compromise,
ethically or otherwise, in the conditions under
which he grew up? Would not Latika have been warped
and neurotic and disease-ridden after those years of
sexual bondage?
The glamorization of the poor in the film was among
the elements that provoked howls of outrage in India
itself, drawing charges of "poverty porn" and the
promotion of ghetto tourism on the part of the
Western affluent.
That the film depicts an one-dimensional view of the
poorer areas of Bombay is undeniable. There are
Fagins and pimps, gangsters and corrupt building
contractors, courtesans and orphans. But poor
neighborhoods in India are a dense thicket of social
and economic networks, with a working class,
shopkeepers, peddlers, and other responsible if poor
citizens toiling to eke out an honest living. The
film eschews the urban working class for an
unrealistic focus solely on the criminal element.
Extortion rackets exist. But they prey on small
restaurants and shops. If there were no honest
workers or businesses, there would be no way to
extract protection money.
Both the celebrations and the protests, the bouquets
and the brickbats attest the increasing
connectedness of the human world, in what Teilhard
de Chardin called the "noosphere." Only in a
cyberspace-enabled noosphere could worker activists
in the poor areas of Bombay mount real-time protests
even as a plethora of golden Oscars were handed out
in the poshest venue on the planet. And if the
workers in Bombay can as a result of the success of
the film draw the attention of the world to the
costs of unregulated "flat" globalization, if they
can counter Friedmanism from the heart of the
displacements caused by Neoliberalism, then the saga
of Jamal Malik will have had an impact far beyond
the realm of cinema. They aren't dogs. They are
productive human beings. And their struggle is not
over. |
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