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Today (Friday, August 2) is the feast of Our Lady of the Angels
…of the Portiuncula. From a Chapuchin site:
This is the patronal title of the Blessed Virgin under which St. Francis placed the Order. St. Francis had great devotion to Our Lady under this title due to his repairing of the little chapel of the “Portiuncula” (little portion) in the woods outside Assisi and becoming devoted to it as a place of prayer and meditation in which the earliest brothers gathered and St. Clare was first received into her vows, where St. Francis had a number of visions on Our Lady and the Angels and received the famous privilege of the “Pardon of Assisi” from the Pope, (a plenary indulgence that anyone may receive under the usual conditions in any church throughout the world in honour of Our Lady of the Angels.)Finally, it was at the Portiuncula also that Francis greeted Sister Death and passed to the Lord in the year 1226.
I mention it because the Portiuncula provides the setting for one of the scenes in Adventures in Assisi.
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Here’s the painting by Ann Engelhart.
Visit her website here, and her Instagram here, full of lovely art.
More about Adventures in Assisi here.
Elsewhere in Italy – from City Journal:
In San Donato, a man found sleeping on the streets would suggest a moral scandal. The village would shame the homeless man’s family into taking him in to provide financial, practical, and psychological support. The reason that nobody sleeps on the streets here isn’t medical or technical—it’s cultural. Despite massive economic and social change over the past century, Italians have retained a culture of family and responsibility that strictly limits the expression of pathological behavior and enforces a standard of dignity that encourages addicts and the mentally ill to participate in society despite their condition.
It’s true that a small village like San Donato can’t be compared with an urban environment like San Francisco, but the dislocation and devastation in small-town America is arguably worse than in its cities. The difference is not only a matter of scale. Some might argue that higher taxes and more generous public-welfare programs prevent Italians from falling into homelessness and despair—but America actually spends more per capita on social services than Italy, with worse outcomes.
The dominant policy prescriptions for addressing addiction and mental illness in the U.S. involve professionalization, medicalization, and destigmatization. Despite mounting evidence of failure over the past half century, we continue to add social programs, to treat addiction as a disease, and to destigmatize everything from heroin consumption to homeless encampments. Yet America is more addicted, more despairing, and more disordered than ever before. Public administrators and academics treat the suggestion that family and cultural norms are key to solving the addiction and homelessness crisis as naïve or even immoral. But San Donato presents a case that traditional societies have a superior understanding of social problems, with cultural expectations playing a decisive role in curbing the most destructive human tendencies.
Many years ago, a friend referred to San Donato as a manicomio all’aperto—an open-air madhouse. He captured the poetic truth that we all fall somewhere on the spectrum of human irrationality, and that a good society integrates the sane and the insane into its common cultural institutions. Though a traditional shame culture exists in San Donato, residents express compassion toward the addicted and mentally ill—actually living with them and looking after them—while remaining intolerant of the pathological behavior accepted by American progressives.
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That highlighted phrase – a good society integrates the sane and the insane into its common cultural institutions – stuck with me. It resonates with my sense that a healthy society is, among other things, one that is realistic about the human condition – ideals exist, but everyone understands that this is earth, not heaven, and that we must live where we are with who we are and what we have.
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That story might prompt you to remember a similar story that made the news a couple of years back about Geel, Belgium:
The Catholic Church canonized Dymphna in 1247, and in the 14th century Geel built a church in her honor. Families started to come to Dymphna’s church from across Europe.
When they left, they would leave behind family members with mental health conditions, quickly overwhelming the church. In the spirit of Dymphna, Geel’s residents started to welcome the mentally ill into their own homes.
So began the tradition that would make Geel famous as “the charitable city.”
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In contrast – somewhat – this story that I bookmarked this week – about the impact of professional regulations on physician availability in the US. I knew the basics, but some of the details stood out this time:
The great victory of the AMA, however, came with the wildly influential Flexner Report. The report, entitled Medical Education in the United States and Canada, was written by educator Abraham Flexner and sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation in 1910. It called unabashedly for a massive reduction in the number of medical schools. The rationale was that higher standards would produce better conditions of care and that superior qualifications would be a benefit to society. (It is an irony of history that Abraham Flexner was not a doctor and had no medical qualifications — merely a stooge for the medical guild.)
The results were severe. Following the report, the AMA lobbied lawmakers to shut down many medical schools. Standards did improve, but the number of schools fellby 80 percent. Graduations of physicians fell each of the following 20 years, and by 1940 the per capita number of physicians fell from 175 to 125 per 100,000 persons.
The Flexner Report greatly harmed women, blacks and Jews. It turned out that 1910 was the high watermark for women doctors. By 1940 the number of women in the profession was lower than it was before the Flexner Report came out even though the population had raced ahead.
Likewise, the number of black medical schools fell from 7 to 2, and blacks were rarely admitted to white medical schools in the years that followed. Unsurprisingly, it was impossible to develop a critical mass of professional black doctors. Jews also had far fewer spots to apply for, and almost all elite institutions continued to discriminate against Jews until long after World War II.
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Oh, how about some music for your Friday? Try this – one of the songs in mysteriously heavy rotation around here these days. I mean – at least it’s in Spanish, right?
Also – check out my son’s novel!
And his film writing – posted almost daily – here.
Also – here he reviews Ron Chernow’s biography of Grant.
For more Quick Takes, visit This Ain’t the Lyceum!