✣ Highlights from the week online
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.”
