✣ Highlights from the week online
How to transport a saint’s severed arm The secular media was intrigued this week by St Francis Xavier’s severed right arm, which is travelling across Canada on a 14-city tour. “This might be the most goth thing the Catholic Church has allowed,” claimed Vice News, perhaps unaware of the range of weird and wonderful relics venerated by the People of God. Canada’s CBC radio featured an interview with Angèle Regnier, co-founder of Ottawa’s Catholic Christian Outreach. She said she was “very nervous” about exposing the saint’s arm to Canadian temperatures. “I enlisted some women to make me a coat for him,” she said. In the end a church provided a foam-lined duffel bag. Regnier said that St Francis would be an inspiration to Canadian university students, as the saint had a conversion experience at the University of Paris. “He was the cool guy. He was the athletic guy,” she said. “Probably partying more than doing his schoolwork.” But then he met St Ignatius of Loyola, who helped “bring him alive in his faith”. A Protestant finds holiness in a sung Mass Chaz Muth of Catholic News Service also told a conversion story – of one Gabe Bouck, who was pushed to become Catholic after hearing a Mass sung in Gregorian chant. “There was something about it that immediately brought to my mind, ‘I am experiencing something that is holy right now. There’s something very solemn and very reverent going on in a way that I have never experienced in a Protestant church,’ ” Bouck recalled. After his reception, he became a music director at his parish, and is now a seminarian. Catholic books and the trouble with grittiness Catholic publishing welcomes writing by female authors, said Simcha Fisher at I Have To Sit Down – “as long as it’s 90 per cent uplifting, joyful, and encouraging, Amen”. For instance, Fisher’s book about Natural Family Planning was rejected by “several Catholic publishers” as “too dark, too negative, too discouraging, too snarky, too problematic. It frankly acknowledged the struggles of living the faith, and that was unacceptable. It might possibly lead people astray. “No one claimed it was heterodox,” Fisher pointed out. “It simply wasn’t joyful enough.” When Fisher published the book herself, it sold very well, and only then did Catholic publishers become interested. The experience suggested to Fisher that Catholic women writers are encouraged to “stuff down anything ugly, anything problematic, anything risky, anything that doesn’t end up with an edifying bow on top.” It’s understandable, in a way – Catholic publishers have to please their audiences, and they don’t want an author to be exposed as leading an immoral life – which makes them nervous about writers who are too “gritty”. But men seem to be “given more latitude” than women.
