Pope Leo's views on LGBT Catholics are a mystery — but we have clues
Michael J. O'Loughlin is executive director of Outreach, an LGBTQ Catholic publication, and author of 'Hidden Mercy: AIDS, Catholics, and the Untold Stories of Compassion in the Face of Fear.'
My husband and I stood in St. Peter's Square waiting for white smoke, our eyes darting from the giant screens near us to the tiny chimney in the distance. As minutes ticked by, the crowd grew in size, but expectations seemed to diminish. Yet shortly after 6 p.m., white smoke appeared. The cardinals had elected a pope.
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Chicago Tribune
19 hours ago
- Chicago Tribune
Peter H. Schwartz: Why nostalgia for the 1950s of ‘Leave it to Beaver' persists in America's religious right
Anyone looking to drench themselves in the 1950s nostalgia currently favored by the religious right in America should consider watching 'Leave It to Beaver' stoned. Which is what I did with an old friend in the 1980s while attending graduate school at the University of California-Berkeley. Nostalgia for the '50s — that land beyond time where Catholic traditionalists such as Notre Dame political theorist and post-liberal prophet Patrick Deneen dwell — idealizes imaginary communities of yore such as Mayfield, the setting for 'Leave it to Beaver,' where the values of faith, family, friends and flag all flourished. According to this narrative, late-stage liberalism and the globalization of markets, with their characteristic rootlessness, dissolve this communal existence. When I was at Berkeley in the 1980s, a large number of my childhood friends from Princeton, New Jersey, somehow found their way to the Bay Area. One afternoon, one of my Princeton buddies was house-sitting for an uncle in a Bay Area suburb. The uncle, whom I'll call Uncle Jim, had been my Cub Scout pack leader in Princeton when I was in elementary school. One sun-drenched afternoon, my friend and I settled into a couch, he rolled some joints and we flipped the TV to 'Leave It to Beaver' reruns. The series, on the air from 1957 and 1963, is a resonant symbol of '50s nostalgia, one to which conservative Catholics have returned as a template for modeling natural law. To Catholics who moved to the suburbs in the '50s and '60s, 'Leave It to Beaver' was a 'medieval morality play,' as Jerry Mathers, the Catholic actor who played young protagonist Theodore 'Beaver' Cleaver, put it. The show was a guide for young souls more tethered to television than to the suburban church. Michael De Sapio, writing in the online journal The Imaginative Conservative in 2017, states that, according to Mather, Beaver Cleaver 'repeatedly succumbed to temptation, suffered the consequences, and was guided back on the path of virtue.' In other words, these archetypal storylines and characters represent a moral imagination that 'elevates us to first principles as it guides us upwards towards virtue and wisdom and redemption,' in the words of American philosopher Russell Kirk. De Sapio continues: 'The emphasis on decorum and good manners in the Cleaver family conveyed a vision of the good, true and beautiful.' Mathers shared that the casting directors for the show selected him to play Beaver when they asked where he would prefer to be after they noticed he was uneasy at the audition. His guileless reply: his Cub Scouts den meeting. Notably, the mission of the Scouts is to 'prepare young people to make ethical and moral choices over their lifetimes by instilling in them the values of the Scout Oath and Law.' Which returns us to Uncle Jim, my former Cub Scouts leader. He was an electrical engineer who ended his first marriage and moved to California in the 1970s, where he married a woman several decades younger and shed the trappings of his formerly decorous identity. 'Leave It to Beaver' mirrored and shaped the aspirations of millions of Catholics moving to the suburbs after World War II, and it has lingered as an idealized — and exclusive — depiction of the American Dream. The only nonwhite characters to appear in the show's 234 episodes were a Black man exiting a dairy truck in the episode 'Eddie, the Businessman' (1962) and a Black actress who plays a maid in the 1963 episode 'The Parking Attendants.' Within months of its final episode in June 1963 — following the March on Washington, D.C., in August led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the November assassination of President John F. Kennedy — 'Leave It to Beaver' had become a charming artifact of midcentury optimism, more a product of nostalgia and romantic imagination than a realistic model for America's future.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Yahoo
The Satanic Grotto sets date for ‘Witching Hour' protest
Context: The above video initially aired on May 29. TOPEKA (KSNT) – The Satanic Grotto has announced a new protest after a 'Black Mass' demonstration in the Kansas Statehouse resulted in its leader, Michael Stewart, being arrested. The new protest The Satanic Grotto has planned for the Statehouse will be called the 'Witching Hour Protest', according to the event listing. The Satanic Grotto said that it will include live music and speeches from community leaders. 'The Grotto calls to all that walk the paths of magic, the moon, and the night,' the Satanic Grotto wrote on social media. 'We will gather together at the halls of power and together our spirit will shatter their walls.' City has spent over $10 million on Hotel Topeka The event will last for three hours and start at 9 p.m. on Aug. 2, according to the event listing. The Satanic Grotto reported that permits are pending and some details may change. 'The goal behind this new one [Witching Hour Protest] I think is to start getting solidarity between these fringe religions and groups here in Kansas that might feel isolated and feel like they don't have any power on their own,' Stewart told 27 News in late May. Officers tackled Michael Stewart, president of the Satanic Grotto, to the floor inside the Kansas Statehouse rotunda on March 28 as he attempted to hold a Black Mass ceremony. He entered the building to hold the event after being warned by Kansas Governor Laura Kelly to move the ceremony to the outer grounds. An officer told Stewart as he entered the Kansas Statehouse that he was welcome to enter the building, but could not hold an event or cause a disruption, or he would be arrested. Another individual who was involved in the physical altercation with Stewart, a 21-year-old man, was also arrested, in addition to a handful of other Satanic Grotto members. Prosecutors haven't filed charges against Stewart at this time. Rainfall reports for northeast Kansas Shawnee County District Attorney Mike Kagay told 27 News that his office has yet to make a decision on whether or not charges will be filed in connection to the Black Mass event on March 28. A total of four people, including Stewart, were arrested as Stewart tried to hold the ceremony inside the Statehouse building. Dozens of Catholics and Christians gathered at the Kansas Statehouse to protest the planned Black Mass. Both Kansas lawmakers and the Catholic Archdiocese of Kansas City condemned the Black Mass in the days leading up allegedly due to the anti-Catholic nature of the ceremony. For more Capitol Bureau news, click here. Keep up with the latest breaking news in northeast Kansas by downloading our mobile app and by signing up for our news email alerts. Sign up for our Storm Track Weather app by clicking here. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
San Francisco Chronicle
3 days ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Takeaways from AP's reporting on looming extinction of rare version of Christianity in rural Japan
IKITSUKI, Japan (AP) — On the rural islands of Nagasaki a handful of believers practice a version of Christianity that has direct links to a time of samurai, shoguns and martyred missionaries and believers. After emerging from hiding in 1865, following centuries of violent persecution by Japan's insular warlord rulers, many of the formerly underground Christians converted to mainstream Catholicism. Some Hidden Christians, however, continued to follow not the religion that 16th century foreign missionaries originally taught them, but the idiosyncratic, difficult to detect version they'd nurtured during centuries of clandestine cat-and-mouse with a brutal regime. On Ikitsuki and other remote sections of Nagasaki prefecture, Hidden Christians still pray to what they call the Closet God — scroll paintings of Mary and Jesus, disguised as a Buddhist Bodhisattva and hidden in special closets. They still chant in a Latin that hasn't been widely used in centuries. Now, though, the Hidden Christians are disappearing. Almost all are elderly, and as the young move to cities or turn their backs on the faith, those remaining are desperate to preserve evidence of this unique offshoot of Christianity — and convey to the world what its loss will mean. 'At this point, I'm afraid we are going to be the last ones,' said Masatsugu Tanimoto, 68, one of the few who can recite the Latin chants his ancestors learned 400 years ago. Here are some key takeaways from The Associated Press' extensive reporting on a dwindling group of faithful who still worship today as their ancestors did when forced underground in the 17th century. They rejected Catholicism even after the persecution ended Christianity spread rapidly in 16th century Japan when Jesuit priests converted warlords and peasants alike, most especially on the southern main island of Kyushu, where the foreigners established trading ports in Nagasaki. Hundreds of thousands, by some estimates, embraced the religion. That changed after the shoguns began to see the religion as a threat. The crackdown that followed in the early 17th century was fierce. Many continued to practice in hiding, and when Japan opened up and allowed Christianity, they emerged and became Catholics. But others chose to stay Kakure Kirishitan (Hidden Christians), continuing to worship as their ancestors did underground. Hidden Christianity developed when a lapse in secrecy could be deadly Catholics have churches, priests and centuries of hard-fought dogma. But Hidden Christians were forced to hide all visible signs of their religion after the 1614 ban on Christianity and the expulsion of foreign missionaries. Households took turns keeping precious ritual objects hidden safely and hosting the secret services that celebrated both faith and persistence. This still happens today, and one of the most remarkable things about the religion is the ease with which an observer can feel unmoored from time, transported by rituals unchanged since the 16th century. Different communities worship different icons and have different ways of performing the rituals. In Sotome, for instance, people prayed to a statue of what they called Maria Kannon, a genderless Bodhisattva of mercy, as a substitute for Mary. They take pride in clinging to the old ways Many Hidden Christians rejected Catholicism after the persecution ended because Catholic priests refused to recognize them as real Christians unless they agreed to be rebaptized and abandon the Buddhist altars that their ancestors used. Tanimoto believes his ancestors continued the Hidden Christian traditions because becoming Catholic meant rejecting the Buddhism and Shintoism that had become such a strong part of their daily lives underground. 'We are not doing this to worship Jesus or Mary," he said. "Our responsibility is to faithfully carry on the way our ancestors had practiced.' An important part of Hidden Christians' ceremonies is the recitation of Latin chants, called Orasho. The Orasho comes from the original Latin or Portuguese prayers brought to Japan by 16th century missionaries. Tanimoto recently showed AP a weathered copy of a prayer his grandfather wrote with a brush and ink, just like the ones his ancestors had diligently copied from older generations. Today, because funerals are no longer held at homes and younger people are leaving the island for work and school, Orasho is only performed two or three times a year. Hidden Christianity is dying, and the faithful know it There were an estimated 30,000 in Nagasaki, including about 10,000 in Ikitsuki, in the 1940s, according to government figures, but nobody has been baptized since 1994. Hidden Christianity is linked to the communal ties that formed when Japan was a largely agricultural society. Those ties crumbled as the country rapidly modernized after WWII, with recent developments revolutionizing people's lives, even in rural Japan. Hidden Christianity has a structural weakness, experts say, because there are no professional religious leaders tasked with teaching doctrine and adapting the religion to environmental changes. Researchers are collecting artifacts and archiving video interviews with Hidden Christians in an attempt to preserve a record of the endangered religion. Masashi Funabara, 63, a retired town hall official, said most of the nearby groups have disbanded over the last two decades. His group, which now has only two families, is the only one left, down from nine in his district. They used to perform prayers almost every month; now they meet only a few times a year. 'The amount of time we are responsible for these holy icons is only about 20 to 30 years, compared to the long history when our ancestors kept their faith in fear of persecution. When I imagined their suffering, I felt that I should not easily give up,' Funabara said. ___
