Category: Religion

The Notorious Baxters

At the dawn of the First World War, New Zealand surveyed its draft-age men and asked if they would be willing to fight. One out of six said they would not. When it came down to a choice between joining the army and going to prison, many changed their minds, but many others spent the war in detention. Of those imprisoned, fourteen were deported to Europe, three of them brothers: John, Archibald, and Sandy Baxter.
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Seeing eye to eye with Radiohead

Peter Maurin, Radiohead fanOn October 9, the British rock band Radiohead shook up the music industry by offering its new album, “In Rainbows,” online for whatever fans wanted to pay. The next morning, The Boston Globe reported not only that tens of thousands of CDs had been downloaded under the risky plan, but that the album was pretty good to boot. On the BBC news, lan Youngs admitted: “I paid precisely £0.00 – for research purposes, just to see if it could be done. And it could – the ordering process skipped the credit card section and went straight to the confirmation screen. But soon my conscience was nagging me to be a bit more equitable and give them a fair price . . . . I decided to pay £9.82 because that was the average price paid for a CD in the UK in 2006.”

My son Patrick and I went online that night and paid £3.45 (about $6). We were listening to the album less than nine minutes later.

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Fr Bernie Gilgun’s homily, October 19, 2007

This is a recording of a homily by Father Bernie Gilgun, from his weekly Mass at the Mustard Seed in Worcester, Massachusetts. He begins with an anecdote about Dorothy Day, then discusses the North American Martyrs.

You can download the mp3 (6MB) or see other formats. You can also subscribe (RSS) to the podcast.

Reading for October 19, 2007.

Honoring Franz Jägerstätter

Franz Jägerstätter, who was killed for refusing to fight for the Nazis, will be beatified on Friday, October 26. There are at least 2 Worcester-area events honoring him on that day. At 1pm at Anna Maria College in Paxton, Massachusetts, at the Zecco Audiorium, there will be a screening of the Jagerstatter documentary “The Refusal,” followed by a discussion. Then at 7:15pm there will be a mass celebrated by Fr Bernard Gilgun at the Mustard Seed, 93 Pleasant St, Worcester, Massachusetts. After mass (8pm) we’ll be watching “The Refusal” there. All are invited to these events.

If you are planning a Jagerstatter event or teaching about him, here are some useful resources.

Holy cards: These can be ordered from the Catholic Peace Fellowship. They’re asking a 25-cent donation per card. There’s a funkier card available from Pax Christi for $1.25.

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I’m distributing the CPF version of the holy card around Worcester.

DVD: You can order a DVD of the Jägerstätter documentary “The Refusal” from the Center for Christian Nonviolence for $5. I haven’t seen it yet.

Handouts: The Catholic Peace Fellowship has two handouts, in PDF format. In Sign of Peace vol 2.3 (pdf) is the article “In Light of Eternity: Franz Jägerstätter, Martyr.” They also have a lesson plan: Following Christ in a Radical Way: Conscientious Objection and the Story of Franz Jägerstätter (pdf).

Articles: The Wikipedia page on FJ could be much better. I believe that the standard book on FJ is Gordon Zahn’s In Solitary Witness.

I took many of these links from the Catholic Peace Fellowship. I hope the other Pie and Coffee editors will revise this article as they see fit.

Dorothy Holds Forth

This interview, by Jeff Dietrich and Susan Pollack, was originally published in the December 1971 Catholic Agitator. You may want to compare this with the portrait drawn of her in Cardinal O’Connor’s application for her sainthood.

CATHOLIC AGITATOR: I’d like first to ask you, are you an anarchist? And what does that mean to you in terms of your daily action?

DOROTHY DAY: Do you want me to go back into history? When I came from college, I was a socialist. I had joined the socialist party in Urbana Illinois and I wasn’t much thrilled by it. I joined because I had read Jack London—his essays, The Iron Heel, and his description of the London slums. I also read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. All of these made a deep impression on me. So when I was sixteen years old and in my first year of college, I joined the Socialist Party. But I found most of them “petty bourgeois.” You know the kind. They were good people, butchers and bakers and candlestick makers—mostly of German descent—very settled family people. And it was very theoretical. It had no religious connotations, none of the religious enthusiasm for the poor that you’ve got shining through a great deal of radical literature.

Then there was the IWW moving in, which was the typically American movement. Eugene Debs was a man of Alsace-Lorraine background. A religious man, he received his inspiration from reading Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. That started him off because he could have been a well-to-do bourgeois, comfortable man. But, here you have this whole American movement. The IWW has this motto: “An injury to one is an injury to all.” That appealed to me tremendously because I felt that we were all one body. I had read scripture, but I don’t think I’d ever really recognized that teaching of the “Mystical Body”—that were are all one body, we are all one.
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Interfaith speaker series in South Bend (2007)

As reported in this morning’s Tribune, the Unity Church of Peace is hosting an interfaith speaker series in August 2007, Sundays at 10am.

  • August 5: Imam Mohammed Sirajuddin of the local Islamic Society
  • August 12: David Cortright of the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, former executive director of the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE)
  • August 19: Deborah Dwyer, member of the Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of South Bend
  • August 26: Rabbi Eric Siroka, spiritual leader of Temple Beth-El in South Bend

More about the Unity Church, including their practice of not complaining for 21 days.