HIV: An African View

An interview with Jesuit Father Michael Czerny, founder of the African Jesuit AIDS Network.

The worldwide Church is the major caregiver for those who are HIV positive and those who are suffering from AIDS as well as also caring for those affected -- especially widows, orphans and others who are carrying the burden. So there is a wide range of work that the Church does.

If you look at it medically, perhaps worldwide, the Church offers 25% of AIDS services. My guess is that the average in Africa is closer to 40%, maybe even 50%. The further away you get from the big cities, the closer it gets to 100%. Often the only AIDS services in the remote areas are the Church clinics.

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The Rise and Fall of the Shopping Mall

Can the holidays save them? As populations shift and tastes change, many malls have become empty and obsolete. I was never a fan of malls; I always preferred shopping in a place where there were windows and natural light and access to fresh air. According to the Wall Street Journal:

In a pattern repeated at urban malls across the country, Metrocenter deteriorated as wealthier families moved to outer suburbs and upscale shopping palaces cropped up there to cater to them. Big-box stores lured away Metrocenter's increasingly blue-collar customers and gang incidents damaged its reputation. Then came the housing crisis.

"It's scary in there," says 19-year-old Kayla Polifko, who works at a nearby PetSmart yet rarely ventures inside.

The challenge of aging malls is made harder in places such as parts of Nevada and Michigan where unemployment tops the national average, or here in Arizona, where the housing market has been ravaged.

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Bore-geous Writing

Author Ayelet Waldman advises on how to avoid pointless, empty prose, saying:

Good narrative writing must defend itself. Every sentence, even every word, must be there for a reason beyond its beauty. It must move the story along, pushing it toward what comes next. Good writing can and should be beautiful, but it must never be only beautiful. Bore-geous is always too much, and never enough.

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The House of Plantagenet

A genealogy. Share

Sacred Music

How it has been vulgarized. To quote:

Today the fashion in the churches is for pop-inspired songs and the strumming of guitars, but the fault lies above all with the pseudo-intellectuals who have engineered this degeneration of the liturgy, and thus of music, overthrowing and despising the heritage of the past with the idea of obtaining who knows what advantage for the people. If the art of music does not return to its greatness, rather than representing an accommodation or a byproduct, there is no sense in asking about its function in the Church. I am against guitars, but I am also against the superficiality of the Cecilian movement in music – it’s more or less the same thing. Our motto must be: let us return to Gregorian chant and to polyphony in the tradition of Palestrina, and let us continue down this road!

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Cimetière de Picpus

The Polignac mausoleum. Stephanie Mann reports. More HERE. Share

Napoleon’s Devoted Aide-de-camp

General Philippe de Segur.

He was born in Paris on November 4, 1780 into a family of a military man, whose father, in turn, served as the Defence Minister under King Louis XVI of France. Philippe’s father, Louis de Segur, was sent in the early 1780s as the Minister Plenipotentiary to St.Petersburg, where he became Russian Empress Catherine II’s favourite, and wrote some comedies for her theatre. She appreciated his gallantry and quick wittedness, something that added significantly to some of his plays gaining popularity in Russia and beyond at the time. Louis de Segur could not even imagine that his son will also arrive in Russia in the not-so-distant future to try and fulfil his military mission.

In the late 1790s, Philippe de Segur served as a freelance correspondent with a Paris-based newspaper, which also saw a publication of his literary pieces from time to time. An about-face in his career took place in the wake of Napoleon coming to power in France in 1804, an event that prompted Philippe to start piling praise on the country’s new Emperor, whom he called “a charismatic person and renowned military commander”.  “I must be by Napoleon’s side,” Philippe used to tell his relatives and friends in wishful thinking that finally came true. He enlisted in the cavalry in 1800, and forthwith obtained a commission thanks to his brilliant personal record.  He served with General Macdonald in the Grisons in 1800-1801, which witnessed him being wounded and then taken prisoner. Afterwards, he was freed by the French forces, and took part in an array of military campaigns in the early 1800s. By the influence of Colonel Duroc at the time, he was attached to the personal staff of Napoleon, who quickly appreciated the young officer’s zeal. His brilliant conduct in the cavalry charge at Somosierra in 1808 won him the grade of colonel, and, later, general of brigade-turned-Napoleon’s personal aide-de-camp. 

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The Weight of Glory

 Not prison or the Terror, not threat of death or even the loss of her entire family had been able to rattle her steel-trap mind. All the sorrows were suddenly catching up with her, like hounds closing in upon their game. After a decade of maintaining a day by day façade of marital contentment, of suppressing her emotions of betrayal and disappointment, of fighting envy of women with children, of trying to build the confidence of a man whose soul was scarred beyond repair, she felt she had lost her former self-possession and was scrambling to cling to every vestige of peace and sanity that remained to her.

- From Madame Royale by Elena Maria Vidal

Here an extraordinary review of the novel Madame Royale by British author Gareth Russell. It is an entertaining read in and of itself, whether or not you have read (or plan to read) the book. I enjoy Gareth's writing immensely and especially in this case. Here are some quotes from Gareth's review:

I’m not ashamed to say that, in terms of nuances, Miss Vidal outstrips my characterisation of her in All Those Who Suffered, hands-down. It is a testament to her skills as an historical novelist and her passion for her characters that she has been able to take such a potentially difficult character as Marie-Thérèse and turn her into a figure worthy of being the eponymous heroine of a novel.

[snip]

Historically speaking, the real Marie-Joséphine was quite possibly a repressed lesbian; she was certainly an un-repressed alcoholic. Whatever the truth, being married to a man such as Louis XVIII was bound to have made her life miserable anyway. Eaten away by the charade of her married life, consumed by guilt for her jealousy of the now-dead Marie-Antoinette, robbed of her former lavish lifestyle by the Revolution and sinking further and further into an abyss of alcoholism and depression, Marie-Joséphine is the novel's most pathetic character and the scene in which she dies, begging Marie-Thérèse to forgive her for her jealous spite of her mother, finally made me feel sympathy for an historical character whom I had always previously dismissed as a gaudy, irritating irrelevance.

[snip] 

And, as far as I’m concerned, I would say that Madame Royale’s depiction of Talleyrand is one of the finest examples of historical characterisation currently in print. It’s a triumph. I never expected to feel anything but contempt for the former bishop, but, as with Marie-Joséphine, I found myself unexpectedly moved. And hats off to Miss Vidal for making that possible!

One thing I enjoyed very much in Trianon was Miss Vidal’s style of writing and I’m happy to say it returned again in Madame Royale. Whether it was intentional or not, I don’t know, but her approach of writing in a style very reminiscent of the memoirs of the actual period seemed to me to the perfect way of drawing you into the early 19th-century’s psychology, modes of expression and values. I've always loved that era's style of literary delivery and so Madame Royale was a treat to read, even from a stylistic point-of-view.

Thank you, dear Gareth, for the high praise. We anticipate your novel Popular which will be released in July 2011.

Marie-Thérèse and her uncles

Louis-Antoine and Marie-Thérèse

Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette giving alms

Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte of France 

Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte of France

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Bearing Witness

A magnificent piece by Jennifer Pierce on François Mauriac and Elie Wiesel. To quote: 

The result of that meeting between the elderly, Catholic Mauriac and the young, Jewish Wiesel resulted in La Nuit or Night, the Nobel Prize-winning testimony of Wiesel's experience in the camps and his career as witness -- to both the travesty of the Shoah and his unfailing belief in God in the face of ineffable horror. A witness supported and enabled through another man's loving witness, a man unafraid to say the name Christ into the blackest of pits. The original title for Wiesel's work was Un di velt hot geshvign, Yiddish for "And the World Stayed Silent" -- a link to Celan's despairing cry that no one bears witness to the witness. Celan, who entered his poetry into that silence, took his own life in the River Seine. Wiesel, however, still stands as a living witness, replacing the poison Mauriac drew from him with an intonation of the name we are promised will stop any deadly thing from doing us harm.

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