The unknown girl who inspired Fulton Sheen
At Padre Peregrino, Fr David Nix retold a story which inspired the Venerable Fulton Sheen, the great American bishop and TV evangelist.
When Mao took over China, in one district a priest was imprisoned in his house; vandals broke open the tabernacle and scattered the consecrated Hosts on the floor.
A small girl saw what had happened. Every night for the next 32 days, she returned to the church, sneaking past the guards, and made a holy hour, before kneeling down and consuming a single Host. (At the time, lay people would never touch the Blessed Sacrament with their hands.)
On the 32nd day, just after she had consumed the final Host, she accidentally made a noise. A soldier heard and beat her to death with the butt of his rifle.According to Fr Nix, this story inspired Archbishop Sheen’s devotion to the Blessed Sacrament, and his whole ministry.
JFK and the Pope he called ‘a great man’
Pope Pius XII and John F Kennedy had an “intriguing relationship”, wrote Paul Kengor at the National Catholic Register. Pius XII died in 1958, before Kennedy became president, but they met several times. Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli visited the Kennedy home in New York during his first trip to America in 1936. The next year, at the Vatican, a 20-year-old JFK on a trip to Europe had a private audience with the cardinal. In his diary he wrote that Cardinal Pacelli was “really a great man”.
Kennedy then attended Pius’s 1939 coronation, describing it as “very impressive”. The two met again in future years.
Kengor said he wrote in the hope of prompting Catholic scholars to “dig deeper”. Both figures, he wrote, were “united in history and tragedy”: one, smeared as “Hitler’s pope” in a “disinformation campaign launched by the communists”; the other, America’s first and only Catholic president, assassinated by the communist-leaning Lee Harvey Oswald.
Two cool heads against the mass of poltroons
At Essays in Idleness, David Warren praised two individuals who combined “intelligence with integrity”.
One is Jacob Rees-Mogg, who “has a cool head and a steady hand, and he is not the sort who can be corrupted”. A similar description could be applied to Londsay Shepherd, a Canadian teaching assistant who was brought before a university disciplinary body for teaching that there is a diversity of views about transgenderism. She secretly recorded the interview and revealed the “cowardly attack” she was under.
“One little person,” Warren mused, “against the massing ranks of drivelling poltroons, ‘dressed in a little authority’. One small, quiet, honest, and courageous person, willing to take the consequences for doing the right thing. And she has set in motion their worst nightmare: the truth, on public display.”
✣ The owner of a cornershop has surprised his old Catholic school by leaving it $13 million (£9.7 million).
Leonard Gigowski, a Catholic who considered becoming a priest, lived a frugal life. A friend, Jeff Korpal, told USA Today that he would “buy shoes on a discount, even if they didn’t fit him, just to save a buck”.
The bequest will fund a scholarship programme for needy students at St Thomas More, a private high school in Milwaukee.
✣ The pop singer Katy Perry has won a legal battle over the purchase of a convent.
A judge awarded her $1.6m (£1.2m) in legal fees after ruling against a rival buyer, restaurant owner Dana Hollister. Ms Hollister claimed that nuns sold her the property in Los Feliz, Los Angeles, but a judge ruled in March that this was invalid.
Ms Hollister told the Hollywood Reporter she was “using back channels in Rome to appeal to the Vatican and Pope Francis with her $30 million offer”.
Perry, whose first hit was called I Kissed A Girl, had agreed a sale with the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. But Sister Catherine Rose Holzman, one of two nuns objecting to the sale, said: “We feel we are forced to violate our canonical vows to the Church.”
✣The week in quotations
Liberalism has eaten itself Tim Farron says that, in rejecting Christianity, liberalism has become intolerant Theos lecture
The principle of a parent’s right to choose a Catholic education is under threat Petition to the Education Secretary Bishops’ conference website
True friends are not those who flatter the Pope Cardinal Müller says his job is to help Pope Francis Corriere della Sera
It was a harp in the shape of a boat, not in the shape of a goat The New York Times corrects its report on a present given to the Pope in Myanmar
✣Statistic of the week
27% Americans who call themselves ‘spiritual but not religious’, up from 19% in 2012 Source: Pew
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