When we had the basic noun declensions and verb conjugations under a degree of control, Fr. Galeone fed us a series of ditties to facilitate our memorizing other basics of Latin grammar. These days, I sometimes can’t remember what I thought to do a minute ago (my brother the physician tells me that the clinical name for this is “Benign Senescent Forgetfulness,” which is only mildly reassuring). But to this minute, and without the slightest hesitation, I can rattle off his “Put the ablative with de/cum and sine, ab and e(x)/ coram, tenus, pro, and prae/sub and in go either way.” That our teacher would lead us in these chants with an enthusiasm bordering on glee, his voice rising at the end of a rather silly mnemonic that nonetheless got the grammatical point into our adolescent skulls, made learning elementary Latin more a pleasure than a chore.
Looking back on those innocent days from the retrospective of more than half a century, one other characteristic of Fr. Galeone remains firmly in my memory: the extraordinary reverence with which he celebrated Mass—a first indicator, perhaps, that we were dealing not only with a gifted linguist and language teacher but with a saintly man on fire with love of the Lord Jesus.
Fr. Galeone wanted to share that love with others, so when our high school closed in 1969, he did two five-year stints in the Peruvian missions. He was already fluent in Spanish, but he mastered at least one native language and evangelized the poorest of the poor in circumstances full of danger, as Peru in those days was being torn apart by the Maoist maniacs of the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path). That decade of missionary service was of a pattern with his pastoral approach to every situation in which he found himself: Find the poorest, or neediest, or most hurting people and serve them first. Thus, when he was named bishop of St. Augustine in 2001, Victor Galeone spent hours ministering to death row inmates, a practice he continued in South Carolina when, after his retirement as a diocesan bishop, he lived with the Trappist monks of Mepkin Abbey.
(His episcopate embodied his determination that the Novus Ordo be celebrated with dignity, including musical dignity. Thus a few years after he went to Florida, he called me one morning and said, “Hi, George, it’s Vic. You would have been very proud of me this morning.” To which I replied, “Victor, I’m always proud of you, but why should I be even more proud of you today?” “Because this morning I called the diocesan liturgy director and told her, ‘If the bishop ever hears “Gather Us In” at the beginning of a Confirmation Mass again, there will be no Confirmation!’”)
Feeling down about the Church? This might help – the 2023-4 Catholic Extension Lumen Christi nominees.
Also, how about these:
The Echo program out of the McGrath Institute at Notre Dame welcomed its new class this week:
Echo students are a gifted and diverse group of recent college graduates with a sincere desire to grow in knowledge, faith, and service through personal, communal, and professional formation. While living in community with others and working in their assigned parish or school, students live, learn from, and serve the mission of the Church and develop as leaders in evangelization and catechesis.
And what about Seton Teaching Fellows, about to break for a bit as the schools they staff wind down, but ready for next school year?
Or this – a North Dakota Catholic school was on the verge of closing – then it went Montessori – and now has a waiting list. The story is from the University of Mary which is now offering an MA in Catholic Montessori education.
An LATimes review of Sir James MacMillan’s “Fiat Lux,” commissioned by the Diocese of Orange (California) for the reconsrcration of the former Crystal Cathedral – now Christ Cathedral.
MacMillan — who has always centered his music on his devoutness even back in his more avant-garde days and who has written much nonthematic instrumental music along with much that is specific to his faith — operates with a wider palate. Whether religious or not, he asks us to share in his wonder. And as his catalog of instrumental, orchestral, choral and operatic has grown, so has his call to glory.
“Fiat Lux,” which was written in 2020 (the premiere was delayed, like so much else, because of the pandemic), was preceded the year before by his massive choral Fifth Symphony, “Le Grand Inconnu” (The Great Unknown). The 45-minute epic is a work of unfettered exultation and radical religiosity, as weird as it is wondrous.
“Fiat Lux” picks up where the symphony lets off, but it is not so “unknown.” The text is by the California poet Dana Gioia, who seamlessly localizes paradise as a place to be preserved. Through the verses, Gioia’s gaze deflects the light of our “August sky” and “human eye” to a “crystal spire/ built in a land/ of quake and fire.” The amen that follows reaches deep into a Californian’s soul.
“Donald Triplett, first person diagnosed with autism, dies at 89”
I highlight this, not simply because of the story of Triplett’s life itself, but because of what it says about community:
Mr. Triplett went on to make medical history as “Case 1,” the first person formally diagnosed with autism. His upbringing and behavior were described at length in a 1943 scientific article by Austrian American psychiatrist Leo Kanner, “Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact,” which outlined the developmental disability now known as autism spectrum disorder, or ASD.
The article went on to describe 10 other autistic children, most of whom were locked away in state schools and hospitals while experiencing communication and behavior challenges. Checking in with his former subjects almost 30 years later, Kanner would write that institutionalization was “tantamount to a life sentence … a total retreat to near-nothingness.”
Mr. Triplett, by contrast, gained acceptance and admiration while remaining a part of his community. With support from his family, which could afford to send him to Kanner and which later set up a trust fund to look after him, he graduated from college, got a job as a bank teller and found companionship in a morning coffee club at City Hall. He played golf, sang in a choir and traveled the world, visiting at least three-dozen countries and making it to Hawaii 17 times.
By choice, he traveled alone, surprising relatives when he would announce at Sunday dinner that he had recently returned from seeing a golf tournament in California or, in search of an oyster dinner, driven his Cadillac to New Orleans.
Mr. Triplett, who was known as D.T. or just plain Don, was 89 when he died June 15 at his home in Forest, Miss., where he lived virtually his entire life. The cause was cancer, said his nephew, O.B. Triplett.
“Donald was given the opportunity to pursue his passions and his interests, and he was able to build a very happy life for himself on his own terms,” said Christopher Banks, the president and chief executive of the Autism Society, an education and advocacy group. “He was known in his community, he was accepted in his community, and he was celebrated in his community. All of that demonstrates the importance of building an inclusive society.”
It reminded me of Geel, Belgium – featured on NPR here,
The integration of people with mental disorders into Geel society has fascinated scholars for centuries. In 1862, Dr. Louiseau, a visiting French doctor, described it as “the extraordinary phenomenon presented at Geel of 400 insane persons moving freely about in the midst of a population which tolerates them without fear and without emotion.” Nearly 100 years after that, an American psychiatrist named Charles D. Aring wrote in the journal JAMA, “The remarkable aspect of the Gheel experience, for the uninitiated[,] is the attitude of the citizenry.”
Early psychiatrists who observed Geel noticed that the treatment prescribed for mental patients was, in fact, no treatment at all. “To them, treating the insane, meant to simply live with them, share their work, their distractions,” Jacques-Joseph Moreau wrote in 1845. He and others advocated for that communion. “In a colony, like in Geel, the crazy people … have not completely lost their dignity as reasonable human beings.” In the next half-century, many would uphold Geel’s model as the best standard of practice for mental disorders.
This story is a very useful antidote to the current popular notion that it’s only recently that Catholics have learned how to be merciful, that in the past, the Church was all about building walls and elevating doctrine above pastoral care and looking inward.
How interesting that somehow, in this doctrinally “strict” culture in which no one supposedly understood what it really meant to follow Christ because the Mass was in Latin said quietly by the priest with His! Back! To! The! People!...this happened.
In contrast to these measures was the Geel way, in which the mentally ill, who were called “boarders” instead of “patients,” became a valued part of the community. Many of the boarders helped with agricultural labor. They were allowed to go about the village, and some even became regulars at local taverns. Some boarders stayed in Geel for only a few months; others stayed for the rest of their lives.
The boarder population peaked in the year 1938, when the number reached 3,736. About 1,600 remained by the late 1970s. Geel now has some 500 boarders and a total population of about 35,000.
For hundreds and hundreds of years, Geel was heavily influenced by purported miracles and the supernatural influence of Dymphna. This changed when St. Dymphna Church was closed by French revolutionary armies in 1797. Although the church would reopen, there was a paradigm shift after the French Revolution, as mental illness became the “concern of doctors, and not of pastors,” according to Eugeen Roosens, author of Mental Patients in Town Life: Geel — Europe’s First Therapeutic Community.
On a related, slightly darker, but ultimately hopeful (I hope) note, Charles Camosy on the fight against physician-assisted suicide in the US.
Happily, disability rights activists are still winning the day, again, even in deep blue places on the east coast. But playing a strictly defensive game of knocking down legalization attempts—especially as the United States secularizes and becomes more like Canada—seems like an untenable strategy for protecting the most vulnerable from this deadly violence. Locking in the dignity and radical equality of all human beings will require more. In short, it is time to go on offense.
A broad and diverse coalition of folks is doing exactly that: seeking to make PAK unconstitutional and therefore permanently off the books in this country. The Euthanasia Prevention Coalition in the United States recently reported on a lawsuit filed in the State of California by the United Spinal Association, Not Dead Yet, Institute for Patients’ Rights, Communities Actively Living Independent and Free, Lonnie VanHook, and Ingrid Tischer. These plaintiffs are all organizations with members who have disabilities, individual persons with disabilities, and/or organizations that advocate for persons with disabilities.
The lawsuit has the goal of reaching the Supreme Court and overturning California’s law protecting physician-assisted killing. They argue that this law is unconstitutional because it treats suicidal persons with disabilities (which according to the Americans with Disabilities Act includes those with a terminal disease) differently from other kinds of suicidal persons. If the suicidal person does not have a disability, then the state of California protects her and restricts her ability to kill herself. But if the person has a disability, then California has a special set of discriminatory rules that imply that her life is worth less and (like Canada) even refuses care and supportive services in favor of steering her toward her death. This, the plaintiffs argue, is a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection and Due Process clauses.
In my view, this a brilliant strategy on multiple levels, aligning “conservative” pro-life human dignity concerns with “progressive” disability rights concerns in a way (to this non-lawyer’s mind, at least) that makes a powerful legal, moral, and rhetorical case against legalized PAK. Again, it is long past time for us to go on offense in this battle. And the horror show we see unfolding with our secular neighbors to the north indicates just how much is at stake if we lose.