Dr. Magimai Pragasam, one of the presenters, highlighted the contribution of media to the growth of humanity but also discussed the damages media cause among children today and the practical strategies to develop healthy media habits so that children become critical consumers of media.

After Italian media alerted the international media to the fact that a 106-year-old American sister living in Rome was voting for the first time since 1952 and that she was casting her ballot for Barack Obama, Sister Cecelia Gaudette of the Religious Sisters of Jesus and Mary became an instant celebrity. She now is hoping to recede from the limelight, and continue what she does best, quietly hoping and praying for peace and an end to the war in Iraq.

http://www.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughNews/idUSTRE49C72F20081013?sp=true

At Holy Family Medical Center in Des Plaines, Illinois, chaplain and School Sister of Notre Dame Marlene Panko told Health Progress magazine, “we respect the integration of mind, body and spirit.” And she’s doing just that with her Loving Heart, Healing Hands program.

To the background of soft, instrumental music, Sister Panko gives hand massages to staff members and then talks and prays with them. She’s been providing this service for 10 years, starting it at a hospital in Santa Monica, California.

“I wanted a program that would not take away time from [the employees’] jobs,” said Sister Panko. “Soft music and touch, in my mind, are healing qualities. That’s an important part of this program. It just takes 3 to 5 minutes for this experience. That is what captivated the staff. They don’t have to miss out on their responsibilities, and they get a lift to help them get back to their work. You can see the peace and relaxation coming over them as I massage their hands.

“As a chaplain,” she said, “I see myself being available to patients, families, and staff members. I have many opportunities to work with patients and families, but my heart goes out to the employees and doctors and nurses. They work hard and carry heavy responsibilities. They deal with life-and-death situations every day. This weighs heavily on the staff. The helpers need help, too.”

The employees Sister Panko ministers to praise her for her work. “I firmly believe in the power of prayer,” said Eleni Harris, a psych intern-therapist. “Praying with Sister Marlene has provided me with a sense of inner peace, clarity, strength, and acceptance. I have witnessed miracles in both my personal and professional life. She truly touches and inspires all who come in contact with her.”

A Roma nun from Slovakia has said that membership of the European Union has done little to help eastern Europe's large Gypsy minority, despite pledges of support after most countries in the region entered the now 27-nation grouping in 2004.

"The [European Union] is supposed to have brought better conditions here but most Roma communities are still just as poor and downtrodden,” said Atanazia Holubova, a sister of Slovakia's Greek Catholic Church, which follows the Eastern liturgy but is in communion with the pope. "Although funds had been earmarked for Roma communities by the EU's governing commission, these were often diverted for other uses by local administrators," Holubova told Ecumenical News International.

SpiritCitings has featured everything from rapper martial-arts priests to ex-trucker religious sisters and Trappist monks who sell office supplies, so you shouldn’t be surprised when we bring your attention to a Capuchin Franciscan friar who's into heavy metal.

Brother Cesare Bonizzi, a 62-year-old friar from Milan, has been singing for over 10 years and fronts a band called Fratello Metallo (Metal Brother). The group has just released its second album and recently performed alongside bands such as Iron Maiden at Italy’s “Gods of Metal” festival.

Bonizzi, who calls himself a “preacher-singer,” discovered heavy metal about 15 years ago and says he was “overwhelmed and amazed by the sheer energy of it. I do it to convert people to life, to understand life, to grab hold of life.” To see Brother Cesare in action, here are two news stories about him, one in English, the other in Italian:

 

Answering a need to defray the costs of supporting their retired and infirm sisters, as well as to extend their traditional Franciscan ministry to the poor and marginalized, the Sisters of St. Francis of the Providence of God in Pittsburgh have gone into the fair-trade coffee business.

Their Franciscan Blend coffee is locally produced by Arbuckle’s Coffee Company in Verona, Penn., and the coffee beans are purchased from Fair Trade importers.

According to Nick Rodi, a spokesperson for the sisters, “Over half of the world’s coffee is produced on small family farms with only a few acres of coffee trees. Alone, a small family farm cannot compete with larger corporate farms that control the international market price for coffee. With no alternative source of income in rural and agricultural communities, these families often live in extreme poverty.

“Fair Trade certification helps small coffee farmers organize into cooperatives that link them directly to coffee importers and allow them to sell their coffee. Through Fair Trade, importers are encouraged to extend financial credit to cooperatives and develop long-term trading relationships. Fair trade farmers are also guaranteed a premium over the prevailing price paid for coffee on the international market, allowing them to earn an income that will support their families.”

“Franciscan Blend Coffee is a wonderful blend of win-win,” said U.S.A. Provincial Minister Sister J. Lora Dambroski, O.S.F. “For us, as Franciscan Sisters, it is an opportunity to realize our life direction of extending the hospitality of God. For poor coffee farmers and their families, Fair Trade means a better income for their hard work, allowing them to hold on to their homes, keep their children in school, and invest in the quality of their harvest.”

The 12-oz. bags of ground regular coffee are available from www.osfprov.org/FranciscanBlend.htm or by calling 412-885-7223.

In June Father John McLaughlin left his parish north of Boston to become the first vocations director for the Archdiocese for the Military Services, which serves Catholics in the branches of the U.S. military, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and people in U.S. government service overseas. McLaughlin will travel to bases around the country to build relationships with the chaplains in closest touch with those considering a call to Catholic religious life. Retreats and correspondence with interested troops will follow. He will also speak to military personnel about the possibility of pursuing a religious vocation, said a June 12 Associated Press story by Jay Lindsay.

He and church leaders believe the armed forces offer a promising source of vocations. Members of the military service, he thinks, could be open to service in the church as well. “You start realizing how fragile life is,” he said. “And when people start thinking in those terms, they eventually start thinking about helping people in life.”

Besides facing questions of life and death, service men and women tend to have traits necessary for religious life, including self-discipline and a willingness to sacrifice, said Monsignor James Dixon of the Military Archdiocese.

Church officials estimate 11 percent of seminary students during the last three years have served in the military or had a parent who served. The archdiocese has for a long time reached out to service members but never had the money to hire someone dedicated to that job, Dixon said. “We finally got to the point where we think it’s become an absolute necessity,” he said.

McLaughlin believes he’ll be helping both the church and the troops in his new job. If he succeeds in recruiting more priests to dioceses, he said, those dioceses may be more likely to allow their priests to serve in the military, where the priest shortage is particularly acute.

In the Army, for instance, only 100 priests serve more than 105,000 Catholic soldiers, said Chaplain Ran Dolinger, a spokesman at the Army’s office of Chief of Chaplains.

Army chaplain Paul Hurley, who attended seminary with McLaughlin in the early 1990s, campaigned for his friend to get the job without McLaughlin’s knowledge. Hurley said McLaughlin has an authenticity and a knack for getting young people to talk about what’s important to them. Those characteristics are crucial when someone is deciding if life as a priest, sister, or brother is right, he said. “He’s got that special touch,” Hurley said. “He finds a way of connecting with people where they’re at.”

A former Boston College wrestler and later a high school coach, McLaughlin, 50, said his first major encounter with God came when he was stabbed in the liver at age 20 while walking near Boston’s Faneuil Hall marketplace. He and his brother were jumped without provocation, he said. As he lay on the street, McLaughlin prayed for forgiveness and for his family. “Even when I faced the worst hardship I turned to God,” McLaughlin said.

His commitment to the priesthood came more than a decade later, after experiencing an overwhelming peace during visits to a Marian shrine. “I thought, this is what God wants me to do, is to tell people about that and bring that peace of God to them,” he said.

“The hope is that they’ll think about it, talk to me about it, and then at the end of their [military] commitment, that’s when they’ll make the decisions,” he said. “All I know is that if I show them I enjoy the priesthood and believe in it, if God wants it to happen, it will happen.”

How do you think the church would best serve those in the military? What do you think are good ways for the church to recruit vocations to religious life among military personnel?

In the wake of the death of journalist Tim Russert, the public has found out a lot about his Catholic faith, including the influence of growing up Catholic in Buffalo, New York and of his grade school teacher Sister of Mercy Mary Lucille Socciarelli and Father John Sturm of Buffalo’s Canisius High School.

Before his death Russert had said of Socciarelli, “In the seventh grade at St. Bonaventure School in Buffalo, New York, Sister Mary Lucille, a Sister of Mercy, was both impressed and yet concerned by—shall we say—my excessive energy in class. She expressed that in her words, ‘We have to channel that energy, Timothy,’ because I was prone to mischief. One day she told me, ‘I’m going to start a school newspaper and you’re going to be the editor. This means that you have to give out assignments, you have to edit the copy, you have to write your own articles, you have to go around and interview students, teachers, and administrative people, and publish the paper. You have to distribute it. You have to decide whether you're going to charge for it, or if you’re going to have a fundraiser to underwrite the cost.’

“It became this extraordinary project that I threw myself into and so did all my friends. If left us little time to get in trouble because we were so devoted to the paper, called The Bonette after St. Bonaventure School. Then she said, “If you don't keep up your grades we're not going to be able to do the second edition of the newspaper.” That made us all committed to studying harder. It became a real class project.”

Russert established the Sister Mary Lucille/Father Sturm Award, a cash prize provided to a Buffalo Catholic school teacher each year who has made a difference in a child's life by acting as a mentor.

At the memorial service for Russert, Socciarelli returned the favor:

A new book sheds light on a little-known branch of Catholic religious life: cloistered Dominican sisters. In fact, the book’s introduction says, they make up the oldest part of the Dominicans, predating the order’s official founding by 10 years.

A collaboration of Dominican monasteries in the United States under the sponsorship of the Association of Dominican Nuns of the U.S.A., Vocation in Black and White: Dominican Contemplative Nuns Tell How God Called Them has 23 stories of calls to this kind of religious life.

The book hopes, it says, “to aid those discerning a call to the monastic life, to recall the ‘first love’ of those who have chosen it, and to raise awareness of Dominican contemplative life. The following accounts are told by the nuns themselves. They are all true, although a few sisters prefer to remain anonymous. Given the many contributing factors and the mysterious element in every vocation, selection in what to tell is necessary. This choice was left to each nun.”

The book is available from iUniverse; a community of Dominican sisters; and the major online booksellers.

Msgr. Mark Giordani
on his Harley-Davidson Road King
 

On a flatbed truck parked between the Paterson, New Jersey County Jail and St. John the Baptist Cathedral, Monignor "Father Mark" Giordani (right) presides at the Annual Bike Blessing and Mass for the couple thousand bikers who stop in downtown Paterson on their way to the yearly Memorial Day Rolling Thunder event, when bikers assemble in Washington, D.C. to honor Americans who have died in wars, are missing in action, or have been prisoners of war.

When Giordani came to the United States from Italy, where he was born, he asked to be assigned to the poorest parish in the Paterson diocese. Today he is rector of the St. John the Baptist Cathedral parish, which numbers 3,000 mostly Latino members. He also serves as chaplain to the county prison, the Paterson police and sheriff’s offices, and the New York-New Jersey Port Authority—a job he took ten days before the 9/11 attacks. Giordani also founded the Christian Riders Motorcycle Club in Paterson in 1969 “to promote faith, dignity, and brotherhood through motorcycling.”

His arrival in the U.S. led him as well to move up from his Vespa motorcycle to a Harley-Davidson Road King (see above)—which is decorated with images of Christ’s life. “We have the Nativity,” Giordani told Lucky Severson of Religion & Ethics Newsweekly. “We have the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection, and, of course, the Holy Spirit on the tank, which branches out to the saddle bags.”

He loves riding. “It’s just exhilarating—the sense of freedom, the sense of enjoying the beauty of God’s creation, and it’s just a powerful and magnificent gift for me,” he said. But his involvement with motorcycles goes beyond personal enjoyment. He also ministers to people—bikers—who can feel unwelcome in churches. “We’re ostracized just for our hobby, our mode of transportation,” said rider David Bove, “and it’s nice to be in a group of people that kind of look like me. We all have the same mindset.”

Giordani attests to the faith of many bikers, even if they don’t belong to a church, let alone a Catholic church. “They read the Bible,” he says. “They say their own prayers, and they offer prayers for those who are sick, so there is a special connection with God in their own unique way. I mean, what does God want really want from us? A loving, humble heart. So uncomplicated.”

When Mercy Sister Joan Margret Schwager, R.S.M. isn’t teaching in a classroom in Whitefish, Montana, you may find her on slopes instructing 5 to 8 year olds in the basics of skiing. After beginning to ski 15 years ago, a friend who works a ski resort asked Schwager is she would be interested in teaching skiing. Now she coordinates instruction for about 40 young beginners each season. “It’s fun and an opportunity for great evangelization, too, during the great chats one has riding up and down the ski lifts!” she said.

Schwager is a member of the Cedar Rapids (Iowa) Regional Community of the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas and is part of the team in the Sisters of Mercy New Membership Office.

Brs. Igatius and Edward with their B&B awards

“All guests who present themselves,” Saint Benedict of Nursia wrote in his Rule for monks, “are to be welcomed as Christ, for he himself will say: ‘I was a stranger and you welcomed me’ (Matthew 25:25).” Fifteen hundred years later, a group of monks on Chicago’s South Side are continuing the Benedictine tradition of hospitality: a Benedictine Bed and Breakfast.

The Monastery of the Holy Cross’s Benedictine Bed and Breakfast has won national awards form the hospitality industry and is listed on several travel and food websites. Most nights from spring through early winter the bed and breakfast, which is housed in a former parish complex the monastery occupies, operates at full capacity. It is also available year-round. Drawing on an international as well as national and local clientele, the B&B has welcomed guests from countries on almost every continent, including New Zealand, Brazil, Singapore, Australia, Denmark, Russia, Finland, Wales, Croatia, Switzerland, the Philippines, Japan, the Middle East, South Africa, Italy, Germany, France, Spain, Ireland, England, Canada, and Austria.

For more information on the monastery, visit www.chicagomonk.org

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Universal Music was looking to get on the Gregorian chant bandwagon, but where to find monks to record some? Then company execs ran across a YouTube video (see below) featuring the Cistercian monks of Austria's Heiligenkreuz Monastery, and it was a deal. The monks join a Universal artist roster that includes Amy Winehouse and Eminem.

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Do you like chant? Would you buy a recording of it?

Ode and Body+Soul magazines goes out to people interested in "conscious" living—health, an environmentally friendly lifestyle, and peace. Now, alongside the ads for organic chocolates are those for the

, headquartered in St.-Mary-of-the-Woods, Indiana.

"It's the right audience for us," Diane Weidenbenner, the director of marketing for the sisters, told the Chicago Sun-Times. "The magazines appeal to women interested in a right relationship with God, other people, and earth."

The sisters devote more than 340 acres of their 1,200-acre grounds to organic farming and also host the White Violet Center for Eco-Justice. Located in a former laundry facility, this education center and meeting facility includes a wetlands restoration project, a trail of bluebird houses that is part of a Cornell University bird study, a herd of 50 alpacas, a straw bale retreat house, organic and biodynamic gardens grown for farmers' markets, a library, and a greenhouse where staff memebers produce seedlings for use in organic/biodynamic gardens.

The ads, said Sister Denise Wilkinson, vicar and first general councilor for the Sisters of Providence, are intended to appeal to anyone in need of spiritual nourishment. If someone is interested in joining the community or donating, all the better.

In 1964 Sister Lois Aceto, a Racine Dominican sister, had been teaching in that Wisconsin city for 14 years when her order gave her the opportunity to fulfill her dream as a foreign missionary: After spending five months in Lima, Peru learning Spanish, she and three other Dominican sisters went to Bolivia. The group had no specific instructions and “didn’t even have a place to stay,” Aceto told Racine Journal Times reporter Marci Laehr Tenuta. “I went there kind of naive about many things.”

After the sisters spent a period riding the buses of La Paz, Aceto started teaching religion in the public schools. There she organized high school and college students to work on justice-related issues—a delicate matter in a country then governed by a dictatorship. “You can’t talk against the government without getting arrested, which I was twice,” she said
Aceto also started a small library and hospital and a school for the blind, a task for which she learned Braille. Other activities included keeping young people out of brothels. “Boy, was that an education, let me tell you,” she said. “I’m always doing things I’m not prepared to do.”

Traveling outside La Paz, Aceto established an outpatient clinic for people with no medical care. She supervised orphanages and started a group for street children called New Hope. “It was beautiful,” she said. “It’s still going, by the way.” In an effort to be better prepared for her ministry, she even went to Madrid to study medicine.

When her father became seriously ill in 1981, Aceto returned to the United States. But she didn’t stop working on justice issues. She became involved in local programs like Restorative Justice and the Conflict Resolution Center housed at Neighborhood Watch, of which she is the director and where she trains others to be mediators and teaches conflict resolution in area prisons.

Aceto recently published a book, Journeying toward Justice, that recounts her time in Bolivia. “I feel driven to share my story,” she writes in the book. “For this is not merely one woman’s story: It symbolizes many of us—unknown, perhaps to all but a few—but people earnest, zealous, dedicated to serving God in the way we feel called, to engaging ourselves in the struggle for peace and justice in the world.”

Aceto says her work in Bolivia “changed me completely. I loved it, every minute of it. It taught me how to rely on the providence of God. You learn how to walk with God, all the time.”

Journeying toward Justice is available at

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Elias Mallon, S.A.

For more than 20 years Father Elias Mallon, a Franciscan Friar of the Atonement, has worked in Christian dialogue with non-Christians, Muslims in particular. His most recent efforts have been with Franciscans International, a nongovernmental (nonprofit) organization and the United Nations, where he is involved in issues of interreligious conflict transformation and peace building, including those in the Middle East. He also speaks and teaches widely.

Previously Mallon was on the faculty of the Ecumenical Institute of the World Council of Churches in Bossey, Switzerland, where he also represented what is now the Catholic Church’s Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. He worked as well at the Graymoor Ecumenical & Interreligious Institute, a ministry of the Franciscan Friars of the Atonement, and was even interim dean for a year of Auburn Seminary, a Presbyterian seminary in New York City.

In addition to his ecumenical work, Mallon has taught Old Testament and Near Eastern Languages.

“How one asks a question greatly determines how one seeks the answer,” Mallon says. “For centuries Christians have been asking if non-Christians could be saved. Early on in my work with non-Christians the question which arose for me and continues to motivate me is: What is our good and loving Creator trying to tell us by the existence of different religions in our world? It is a question which fascinates me, humbles me, and drives me on.”

What do you think people can learn from dialoging with those from other religions?

Mother Dolores Hart, O.S.B.

Mother Dolores Hart, prioress of the Abbey of Regina Laudis, a Benedictine monastic community in Bethlehem, Connecticut, has helped bring about an arts and crafts renaissance of sorts at the monastery. The community has released its fourth CD of chant. It hosts a 200-seat open-air theater. Steel sculpture created by Mother Praxedes Baxter—a former printmaker who also helped designed the abbey’s church—adorns the grounds.

But then Regina Laudis is not Hart’s first foray into the arts. She gave Elvis Presley his first onscreen kiss.

Before entering monastic life in 1963 at age 24, Hart had appeared in 10 films, including Loving You—in which she kissed Elvis— King Creole, and Where the Boys Are. She had begun visiting Regina Laudis while performing on Broadway in The Pleasure of His Company, for which she received a Tony nomination.

“Acting was what I thought I always wanted to do, and there was nothing about it I didn’t like,” Hart said in a December 30, 2007 New York Times story by Cynthia Wolfe Boynton. “I loved the idea of playing different parts, of learning about other people’s lives. But then I came to visit the abbey and realized I belonged here. Like the theater, the monastery gives people a different view of life and inspires them to come alive, to fully live their story.”

The monastery combines contemplative life not only with the arts but also with with making products from the animals the sisters keep on the grounds: raw-milk cheese, ice cream, honey, jellies, leather, and other things that help support the community. Cheese-making is supervised by Mother Noella Marcellino, who has a doctorate in microbiology. “As an enclosed community, we have the time to contemplate, create and nurture our crafts, and then send the results out into the world,” she said. “That’s our gift to people.”

“She encourages us,” Marcellino said of Hart, “to tap into our emotions and to find a positive way to express them. Mother Dolores taught us that emotions are universal—that everyone experiences happiness, sadness, anger, joy, and passion—and that we can use them to better connect with people outside the abbey through our art, whether it be in the plays we host, in the songs we sing, or in the ways we celebrate God as we chant and read prayers during worship.”

“Music and the arts help people come alive,” Hart said. “They lift people’s minds and spirits, and in that enlightened state help people find God. God isn’t a whiskered old man. He’s alive and can be experienced in things that move us to feel love or beauty. That’s why we use the arts as a form of prayer, and then try to share those prayers with other people.” The sisters have also recorded several "Women in Chant" CDs (see their website).

Despite 45 years of religious life, however, Hart is still a voting member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and, according to the rules, keeps her Oscar votes a secret.

“I went from a lead role to a supporting role,” she said, describing her transition from actor to religious sister, “but it’s where I belong.”

How would the arts help you express your faith?

Lasallian Teacher Immersion
Program Participants

“This is my 35th year in education,” says Christian Brother Patrick Conway. “One thing I’ve noticed is the shrinking pool of male teachers, particularly as related to theology and religion teachers. In the United States today, 19 percent of all Catholic school teachers are men. In the public schools it’s 21 percent . . . .”

To address this shortage, the Midwest province of the Christian Brothers has initiated the Lasallian Teacher Immersion Program to guide more young men into teaching. The program draws on students from Christian Brothers universities and colleges and gives them supervised classroom teaching experience and chances to serve those in need, all while earning college credit.

The first group of Lasallians volunteered at an inner city middle school for at-risk young people and worked in shelters, soup kitchens, and day-care facilities. In addition, they took classes themselves at nearby Christian Brothers schools. A future semester will involve students in a five-week program in Guatemala. Other activities include community living and working at a Catholic Worker house.

The Lasallian program returns the Christian Brothers to their roots of working in inner cities among immigrants, Brother Patrick tells Catholic News Service. “We are now returning to our mission. We have been trying to become more attuned to the plight of the poor.”

Have ever thought being a teacher? What do you think would be the rewards and challenges of teaching?