Better to light a candle Why churches shouldn't look like conference centers. COLUMNISTS
Callahan, Sidney
The Hidden Gift is a compelling film. Some of the color the war in Sudan is a religious and ethnic war launched by footage assembled by director David Tlapek is as...
...My reasons are tion...
...SarajeTheir glowing transcendent aura made banian apartments and some isolated Al- vo is one such success, but Sarajevo was it believable that the heroine might give banian residents in Serb-controlled north- a liberal and cosmopolitan city before up her lover for God...
...should be limited to airports and shop- ties and frustrations in both places, im- Albanian activists are harassing the Kosoping malls...
...Unfortunately, the English Reformation's violent stripping of the altars influenced generations of O F SEVERAL M 1 American Protestants...
...Vati- can find a way to renew our art and arserious Christianity, I was a puritanical can II teaches that "in the earthly liturgy chitecture...
...They open eyes...
...partition the town...
...parish we could afford to offer candles sent...
...The camera rolls as Gassis unloads supplies at a to be moving toward a more moderate stance...
...Last December, Khartoum seemed the north...
...It also captures-for the last time some of the stu- firm from extracting Sudanese oil...
...The camera records the people's resolute the SPLA, Canada declines to restrain its Talisman Energy dignity...
...Warmth, bience, but the dreadful quality of the certainty of theft...
...Without Chartres come again, at least we can led Cromwell's troops to smash stained this transcendent eschatological dimen- have good art, good music, and many glass and destroy statues all over the sion of worship, fully embodied in art, candles...
...The The Western powers have had small velous the wartime London churches French unwisely allowed the Serbs to successes in disarming hatred and inlooked in the movie The End of the Affair...
...A Washington, D.C., replete with a plethohave real flames and smoke, electric can- simple-minded imitation of the past ra of elegant Byzantine images, feels cold dles would be better than nothing...
...toum, enabling it to prolong the war...
...This admirable Serb expansionism and "greater Alture...
...ering prayers ascend together...
...calves are slaughtered...
...Olga, a II folks in the pews, I miss something in worshiping in the small wooden summember who grew up in an Eastern our spare, modeme churches...
...The preCommonweal 8 March 24, 2000...
...This left looted Al- stalling multiethnic institutions...
...Certain Mexican crucifixes come with far too much blood and gore...
...ern Mitrovica, and a few Serbs in the Yugoslavia's destruction began...
...Here, as in Bosnia in creating a de facto cantonization and Bauhaused (an invented verb referring 1995, NATO made war to undo ethnic eventual partition of all Kosovo...
...Too often the fourteen images of Mary and her baby...
...dancing...
...His small wooden church held no ornamentation, much less fourteen Madonnas...
...Ll Commonwealth...
...Yes, that's it...
...In a real cathedral or NATO placed Mitrovica under French trol Albanian-populated towns inside the church my spirit expands if there are dim zonal command, assuming that the sub- country...
...The sense of controlled ter- sanctions against Sudan as a terrorist state and cozies up to ror is palpable...
...Some of the color the war in Sudan is a religious and ethnic war launched by footage assembled by director David Tlapek is as vibrant Khartoum and aimed at the destruction of my people...
...as the photographs of Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher in The catastrophe in Sudan is as complex as it is bloody their stunning two-volume African Ceremonies (Abrams, (see, Commonweal, December 16, 1994...
...It follows Gassis, a native of Sudan Sudanese government but the SPLA for sponsoring miliwho speaks fluent Arabic as well as idiomatic American, as tary groups "whose target of operation is usually the civilhe is welcomed home...
...During the joyous reconciliation...
...The bishop informs the congregation to remain (Ethiopia and Eritrea...
...This month its planes When Bishop Gassis introduced the documentary in New bombed a hospital in the south, killing two and injuring a York, he told his audience that the school had been the only dozen, and also the compound of an Irish aid group...
...Maybe I should Worshipers attend to a threefold real- music, beauty, ritual, and sacred space, concentrate less on my dissatisfactions ity...
...If we can't have Such was the self-righteous spirit that and continues to nurture me...
...that ing a Difference...
...Yet what vo Serbs in order to drive them into Serhas softened its modernist aura with atri- is the alternative, even in purely expe- bia...
...The pastor cited the dan- Catholic tradition's witness to material admired the excess and the feminine amger of fire, the cost of insurance, and the sacramentality seems faint...
...Like a lot of other post-Vatican counter excessive sentimentality...
...Even our newest upscale mall posing doubt as to its realism...
...At the opposite extreme, we enL that we have vigil candles simple...
...During this period I went ney as pilgrims, where Christ is sitting other way round: sacred spaces inspire to a sung high Mass one Christmas Eve, at the right hand of God...
...earth" that brought me into the church culties for the spirit...
...Three "the heavenly liturgy...
...instruments as corrupt...
...But I see now that it was the down aesthetic of a school cafeteria or lit and adorned church...
...But since then they have made overtures of have not seen a priest in thirty years...
...I request fell flat...
...While in church for people to light...
...As a teen-age convert to in unapproachable light beyond...
...infiltrated Serbia itself in an effort to concapitalist cathedral...
...I replied that as a rich mystery, and transcendence aren't pre- mass-produced art spoiled the effect...
...But forward does not mean accepting fragility of the international communi- teleguided from Belgrade, blockading an aesthetic of functional minimalism...
...God is in the gathered body of the Cromwell wins...
...Nor would I want to import the mural I saw in a Spanish BETTER TO LIGHT A CANDLE chapel which shows a female martyr's chopped-off breasts flying away in the Bare churches, cold hearts air...
...Yes, I know that places are zealot...
...Only voices Not yet & not likely could be raised in song...
...My great-grand- WILLIAM PFAFF father was a predestinarian Baptist preacher in south Alabama...
...They often mer chapel at Lake George, I counted Catholic church, agreed with me, but our feel downright chilly...
...I and inform worship...
...won't do...
...But it also works the of worship...
...Then he added: "This and Dr...
...The funds flow to Khardents killed in last month's attack...
...Concrete and glass-filled spaces ambition has since met endless difficul- bania" ambitions collide in this struggle...
...Tlapek couples live-action shots-some of them made SPLA, no shining peace force, has repeatedly split into fratat the very school that was later bombed-with exquisite ricidal factions, skimmed off relief supplies, held aid workblack-and-white stills by James Nichols...
...It will have to come priests and catechists, a local SPLA commander, moderate from a combination of outside pressure and internal change...
...His Shiloh congregation rejected the use of musical PEACE I N KOSOVO...
...President clandestine airfield, and as he baptizes, confirms, and wit- Omar Bashir ousted longtime radical Speaker of Parliament nesses the marriages of scores of people, some of whom Hassan Turabi...
...The documentary ers hostage, and kidnapped young boys, forcing them into was made on location during two surreptitious visits by the armed service...
...the bishop converses with Is there hope for an end to the war...
...Nagele, and of films like The Hidden Gift and "Makheart-breaking incident is yet another piece of evidence...
...and inauthentic to me...
...Throngs greet him with drums and ian population...
...and focus more on gratitude for how assembly, God is within, and God dwells Surely, the third Catholic millennium far I've come...
...I ty's policy to establish a multiethnic gov- their part of Mitrovica with the aim of don't want the Catholic church to be ernment in Kosovo...
...Muslims, and ex-slaves he has helped free from bondage in Both are in short supply...
...These, like ast week, at our Altar- The pastor voiced surprise that I felt the display of Saint Catherine of Siena's Rosary Society meeting, I so strongly about keeping up this tradi- severed head, err in too grisly a direcmade a heartfelt request tional Catholic devotion...
...In calling for a negotiated settlement, the exiled Bishop Gassis to rebel-held areas during Christmas East African Bishops' Conference condemned not only the 1998 and Easter 1999...
...PATRICK JORDAN I could not join Camille Paglia's riff praising her childhood parish church with its statue of Saint Lucy offering her SIDNEY CALLAHAN eyeballs on a plate...
...How mar- by Serbian forces and marauders...
...And if we absolutely couldn't it's also one I don't know how to fix...
...Flickering lights and flick- venge of Albanians, earlier driven away potentially explosive situation...
...My attention has or on a linoleum-covered table in a priests in gold and silver vestments been focused on the urgent need for jus- homeless shelter can be true worship...
...to ambush by sterile modern architec- cleansing and partition...
...Albanian radicals have reportedly ums, fountains, and statues-befitting a dient terms...
...one operating in the entire region: "This is our life," " he said, Thus, the importance of voices like those of Bishop Gassis "this is the reality of our children...
...Since then, converted to the sacramental Roman northern Kosovo, now par- NATO forces have struggled to separate way, I firmly renounce all past icono- titioned between Serbs and the Albanians, demanding their properclasm and want to go forward-or deep- ethnic Albanians, demonstrates the ty in the north, and bands of Serbs, er...
...liturgy which is celebrated in the Holy and charity of the believers who worA silent Quaker meeting was my ideal City of Jerusalem toward which we jour- ship in them...
...The 1999...
...he precarious situation in southern part of the town, dominated by Having finally grown up and been the town of Mitrovica in the returning Albanians...
...January 17,1997...
...For its part, the SPLA remains unpredictable Christmas Mass, held beneath a panoply of shade trees in a and divided...
...Bah, humbug, magnetic pull of "the Mass as heaven on supermarket presents peculiar diffiaway with such pagan rites...
...Some of Sudan's neighbors have turned from dry riverbed, government bombers are reported to be on working on a solution to fighting among themselves the way...
...were bowing and turning round as they tice and equality, in the church and in But habitual exposure to the strippedchanted the Latin service in a lavishly society...
...If this is a problem without a name, Even the monumental Marian shrine in for free...
...Commonweal 7 March 24, 2000 So missy, Quo vadis...
...While the United States maintains calm and the Mass continues...
...Nothing material should stand we share in a foretaste of that heavenly made sacred by the celebrations, prayers, between God and the individual soul...
...Yugoslav military forces are corners where worshipers can pray pri- stantial Serbian population would trust massing just across the frontier from the vately before illuminated icons and banks the French to protect them from the re- American-controlled zone of Kosovo, a of vigil lights...
...A Mass celebratand actually shed tears at the sacrile- have been late in grasping the vision of ed on the back of a jeep in a battlefield, gious superstition on display...
Vol. 127 • March 2000 • No. 6
