#WaitForIt ...
New Rule: Breeders' Choice
| Real Time with Bill Maher
9:51 min.Aug 23, 2024
Having kids isn’t a triumph. It’s just a choice – and procreating doesn’t make you a better citizen than people who don’t.
#WaitForIt ...
New Rule: Breeders' Choice
| Real Time with Bill Maher
9:51 min.Aug 23, 2024
Having kids isn’t a triumph. It’s just a choice – and procreating doesn’t make you a better citizen than people who don’t.
Embracing my humanity.
Not that there's anything wrong with it ...
Embracing my humanity.
He made a blunder this evening. We don’t know why…
Was this flight just a stopover? In any case, he’s in custody.
Telegram founder Pavel Durov arrested at French airport
for 'lack of moderation' on messaging app
The Economic Times
2:26 min.
Aug 24, 2024
The founder of the Telegram messaging app, Pavel Durov, who had an arrest warrant issued against him, was detained by the French authorities at an airport outside Paris, CNN reported. Officers from France's anti-fraud office, attached to French customs, took the French-Russian billionaire into custody on Saturday evening after he arrived at Bourget Airport on a flight from Azerbaijan, according to CNN affiliate BFMTV. Durov, 39, was wanted under a French arrest warrant due to the lack of moderation on Telegram, which allegedly led to the platform being used for money laundering, drug trafficking and sharing pedophilic content. According to BFMTV, the Telegram founder had not regularly travelled to France and Europe since the arrest warrant was issued.
Embracing my humanity.
#ApparentlyStillRunning
Perhaps from himself ...
One can only wonder.
RFK Jr. On Joining Trump
Robert F Kennedy Jr
9:40 min.Aug 25, 2024
Thanks @ShannonBream @FoxNewsSunday for my first interview on this new chapter of my work to Make America Healthy Again.
Embracing my humanity.
Seeing this trend more and more ...
And yes i still attend Mass ...
Noting i live in a Catholic university town, with a growing Eastern European population.
Why are so many young Catholic women across America, showing up to church wearing a veil? It’s easy to dismiss them as superficial millennials, drawn to something that’s pretty (and trending on tradcath Instagram). But, Maddy reveals, their reasons cut to the very heart of why we worship. Here’s where faith and fashion collide.
Nicole Moore inside the Church of St. Vincent Ferrer on the Upper East Side of New York. (All photos by Adrienne Grunwald for The Free Press)
The Young Catholic Women Bringing Back Veils
A new generation of worshippers is longing for a ‘lost type of Catholicism.’
By Madeleine Kearns
August 25, 2024
“I definitely don’t feel like the odd woman out anymore.”
Nicole Moore, 30, wears a veil to church every Sunday. Sometimes called a mantilla, these sheer head coverings are usually made of lace or silk; Nicole’s is gray, with a floral-like pattern. Worn by women throughout the Catholic church’s history, chapel veils fell out of favor during the late twentieth century, but in recent years there’s been “an explosion of veiling,” says Moore, who attends St. Vincent Ferrer Catholic Church in Manhattan.
Her pastor, Father Peter Martyr Yungwirth, 39, tells The Free Press he has also noticed an increase in veiling over the last two decades. Indeed, Veils by Lily, a website that sells mantillas, has gone from filling 30 to 60 orders per month to an average of 900 in the last ten years. And it seems to be young Catholics driving the trend. “I have definitely noticed an increase of women, especially young adult women, wearing veils,” says Father Roger Landry, 54, Catholic chaplain of Columbia University. He interprets the veiling trend “as an attempt to be maximally reverent to God at Mass and in receiving Holy Communion.”
That may be the ultimate reason for veiling, but it’s not the only one. To better understand what’s behind the boom, I reached out to over a dozen Catholic women, ranging in age from 19 to 42, who choose to wear a veil to church.
Havens Howell, 26, of Virginia, tells me that donning the mantilla does indeed remind her that she’s entering a sacred space, “with things that are holy and don’t happen anywhere else.”
Initially at least, the appeal can be aesthetic. “I just thought it was really pretty,” Bernadette Patel, 27, of New York, says. Meanwhile Amanda Kengor, 22, from New York, tells me she began veiling because “everyone started doing it.”
Yet all the women I spoke to say veiling has become a profoundly meaningful religious practice in their lives."
Amanda Kengor inside the Church of St. Vincent Ferrer. The veil’s resurgence traces that of the Traditional Latin Mass in recent years.
"Veiling ceased to be the norm after the Catholic Church’s modernizing reforms of the 1960s, commonly known as “Vatican II”—which, among other things, placed restrictions on whether parishes could offer the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM).
In the following decades, these regulations were gradually relaxed. But the roots of the mantilla’s resurgence lie in 2007, according to Father Landry. That’s when Pope Benedict XVI increased younger generations’ exposure to the TLM by officially lifting the restrictions on it. Pope Francis reversed this decision in 2021. By that point, however, it had caught on. The year before, a survey found a “high volume of participation” in the TLM among 18- to 39-year-old practicing Catholics in the U.S.
Veiling at the TLM is the norm, but many women “just kept veiling,” Father Landry says, even when they attended the modern Mass.
Maria Grizetti, 42, a religion teacher at St. Vincent Ferrer’s all girls high school, explains that before Benedict XVI, “there was the Pope John Paul II generation that had grown up without” the TLM. Then that generation learned what worship was like before Vatican II. “They learn that their grandmother prayed this way,” said Grizetti, “and they’re like, ‘I want to pray like this.’ ”
She does not wear a veil herself, but several of her teenage students have recently approached her to ask where they might acquire mantillas."
Wearers note the biblical basis to veiling as a practice of modesty and distinguishing the sexes.
"The veil boom is organic—occurring neither at the direction of, nor in defiance to, church authorities. There is a social element to it. When Cora Scheib, 24, from Maryland, saw young college women veiling, she found it “intriguing and mysterious because I didn’t really know what requirements that you had to meet. Were they, like, part of a group?” When she realized there were no “requirements,” she bought herself a veil.
Kengor told me that most of her friends, and her sister, are “really traditional Catholics”—and when they started veiling, Amanda wanted to follow suit. It was only after she started wearing it that someone told her the veil had a scriptural basis.
In his first letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul instructs women to cover their heads, to both comply with contemporary standards of modesty and emphasize a distinction between the sexes.
“When I realized it was biblical,” Amanda said, “I was like, ‘Oh, well, there you go. That’s my reasoning.’ ”
Veiling prepares worshippers to the enter sacred spaces, “with things that are holy and don’t happen anywhere else.”
But over time, Amanda’s appreciation for veiling deepened. “I reached a point where I feel it’s a kind of mystical thing,” she said. For her, stepping into church and “putting on my veil just reminds me of the fact I’m in a different place. I don’t do this anywhere else.”
The same is true for Patel, who converted to Catholicism in 2016 when she was at college in California. She moved to New York in 2019. There, she saw other young, traditionally minded women veiling, which she thought was “pretty.” But after she got her own veil, she “fell in love” with it as a way to show that “Jesus is really present in the Blessed Sacrament”—that is, the bread and wine Catholics believe is transformed into Christ’s body and blood at Mass.
Now, she never leaves her apartment without her mantilla: “I always carry my veil, my phone, my keys, my wallet.”
***
"Catholicism is experiencing a wave of nostalgia for an ancient, more solemn and reverent form of the religion—the kind that inspired Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
Even many Catholics who attend the modern Mass remain attached to the pre-Vatican practices and help to preserve some of the church’s reverent traditions. Among the laity, this might mean wearing formal attire instead of jeans, or kneeling at communion and having the priest place the host directly on one’s tongue rather than standing and receiving by hand. Among priests, it might mean facing the altar as opposed to the congregation, or insisting on male-only altar servers.
And among women—it might mean wearing a veil."
For certain devotees, the veil has become a comforting accessory to prayer, helping them connect to God.
"Ann Clare Levy, 28, of Virginia, is one of an increasing number of Catholics who are drawn to the forms of worship that were common before Vatican II. She tells me that veiling “just kind of fits this entire aesthetic” in parishes with Gothic and Baroque architecture, “which you don’t see in as many modern parishes.”
“When you have a parish that’s filled with women wearing these finely made pieces of lace, it’s beautiful to look at,” she says, and this “tangible beauty” is evocative of a “lost type of Catholicism.”
Some Catholics who want the church to move in a more progressive direction find these practices archaic, or even threatening.
When Patel, who always carries her veil in New York City, visited a less traditional parish near her family’s California hometown, she recalls the priest “glaring” at her throughout Mass. She was wearing her veil, of course. On another occasion, at a liberal parish in New York, a priest smiled and welcomed her two veil-less friends but greeted her with uncharacteristic coldness. Patel’s friends later suggested to her that the priest was put off by her veil.
“Wearing a veil is making a doctrinal statement,” one Catholic writes on Reddit. “And I don’t really believe any younger woman who wears a veil today is unaware of that, protestations about prettiness aside.”
Another Catholic, who recalls his mother and sisters veiling before Vatican II, writes that “all the women I know doing this now are rabid tradcaths with a holier than thou attitude.”
Some women, aware of such sentiments, worry that their veiling will send a message of moral superiority. “My main concern was that people would think that I was trying to be holier-than-thou,” Moore told me, referring to her early days of veiling. Kengor said it was part of her hesitation too. And one of the frequently asked questions on the Veils by Lily website is: “Shouldn’t I avoid drawing attention to myself at Mass?”
Kengor was concerned that she would be perceived as holier-than-thou for wearing a veil. She explained that the practice has both scriptural and aesthetic meaning.
"Patel said that while she regrets being misunderstood, in some cases, the characterization may be partly true. Bernadette explains that she “got really into the TLM” during the pandemic, but she noticed a tendency among some TLM Catholics “to think they were better than” those who attend the modern Mass. Though she disagrees with Pope Francis’s restrictions on the TLM, which she finds beautiful, she understands why the Pontiff is concerned about “a splintering of the church.”
Likewise, Madeline Wiseman, a 19-year-old Columbia student who grew up veiling, has become aware since starting college in New York, that many women at Mass “feel like they’re being personally judged by veil wearers.” While she would still “love to wear a veil,” she refrains from doing so to be “more approachable” to less traditional or even non-Catholic students who might be attending Mass.
She’s not the only woman who feels conflicted about wearing the veil. I spoke to another, who didn’t want to be named, who said she was “forced” to wear a mantilla growing up, which she says left her with a “little bit of a sour taste in my mouth.” Her family were part of a sect of hyper-traditionalist Catholics, the Society of St. Pius V, which questions the legitimacy of post–Vatican II popes.
Now 26, she attends the modern Mass in a Virginia parish where there is no pressure to veil. She still does “from time to time,” but is still “trying to decide for myself” how she feels about the practice. She wants to “dig into the 2,000-year history and beautiful scriptural meanings that are associated with it.”
“I’m trying to rediscover my true devotion for veiling,” she says."
Adherents note that veiling resonates with the gothic and baroque architecture of many Catholic churches.
"In Corinthians, men are instructed not to cover their heads. Scholars debate the passage’s precise meaning, but one theological explanation for the asymmetry lies in Christian symbolism: Women represent the church, the submissive bride to Christ, while men represent Christ, the self-sacrificing groom.
Among progressives, the veil, representing distinct gender roles, is sometimes interpreted as a sign of female subservience. One op-ed writer for the National Catholic Reporter argues that it is “backward, if not downright repressive.”
But the women I spoke to rejected comparisons to the hijab, arguing that the mantilla is not mandatory. The decision to wear one is and ought to be freely made. They also note that the veil is not worn in all public places, but simply in church, to signify a difference between sacred and non-sacred spaces.
“People dress beautifully to go see the King or Queen,” says Nicole LeBlanc, 25, from Michigan—so it should be with the Lord.
Kathleen Stenlund, 34, a doctor and mother of five who’s also based in Michigan, thought veiling was “demeaning” at first. She changed her mind after reading the late Belgian American philosopher and theologian Alice von Hildebrand, who criticized feminists for considering mantillas “a sign of [women’s] inferiority.”
“My goodness,” the theologian wrote, “how they have lost the sense of the supernatural.”
When I realized it was biblical,” Amanda Kengor said, “I was like, ‘Oh, well, there you go. That’s my reasoning.’ ”
"Von Hildebrand argues “whatever is sacred calls for veiling,” which includes the female body with its unique capacity to bear life. Reading her work, Stenlund came to believe that veiling signaled the glory of femininity—and adopted the practice. “The last God created was woman,” she says, “almost as if woman was his crowning creation.”
All the women I spoke to felt that the veil dignified them, and many say it helps them express their love for the Lord. Nicole Moore, from New York, put it best. For her, the veil has become a comforting accessory to prayer, and helps her connect to God.
“It’s like feeling I’m under a blanket,” she told me. “I can kind of shut other things out.”
Madeleine Kearns is an associate editor at The Free Press
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Embracing my humanity.
I was raised a Catholic, and I have attended Catholic schools. I've even worked in them. But then I came to realize that organized religions and prescribed rituals and prayers are all deception, and a means to allow an organization of some sorts to dictate the law — or a law — to the masses, either alongside of the already existing secular laws, or — as is the case in Sharia-ruled countries — in place of it.Originally posted by Gio
But that said, I still vividly remember the overwhelming sensation of sanctity, purity, love and righteousness that I felt — and could even smell — as a toddler in the Catholic preschool, whenever we went to visit the statue of Mary in the garden, which was also the garden of the adjoining Catholic elementary girls school. And we visited that elementary girls school — which was entirely run by nuns — as well, and that same scent of holiness was there too. And there was that similar feeling when we went to light candles for Mary or Jesus.
In the end, I don't think it has anything to do with the Christian mythology of Mary, Jesus and whoever, or with the Bible. Those names and places are symbols only, and their importance is far more metaphorical than their visual representation or the narratives around them.
What you sense and smell when you visit such a venue is the purity of the Divinity itself, regardless of how it is visually or physically represented. You experience sanctity, integrity, love, pureness, honor, immaculateness — all of the things that transcend this mundane existence, and of which the nuns and the priests at the time were trying to make us aware — regardless of whether they themselves understood it or not — so that it might become part of our psyche as we grew up into adults.
The connection with the Divine, and one's respect for that. Even though I abhor religion in and of itself, I will never forget how that connection felt at the time, and as a non-religious but spiritual person, I still cherish and honor those values.
I just wanted to say that.
= DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR =
Yes indeed ...
What you have eloquently expressed above, is a knowing that only comes from being of the Christ consciousness. Especially when realized at such a very young age - indicating you were already born (incarnated) upon this Universal plane fully instilled.
And as far as earthly religion (s) are concerned - Well (IMO) that's just all part of the man made creative narrative/dogma scam, and you and i know where that hail (s) from.
Embracing my humanity.
I will wind this thread down with this brief, but powerful item ...
One bus driver's simple act of kindness
CBS Sunday Morning
2:00 min.Aug 25, 2024
When Minneapolis bus driver Jayne Arendt-Verhelst saw a woman, apparently homeless, enter her bus barefoot, she broke a rule in order to help. Correspondent Steve Hartman reports on an act of kindness, as a result of seeing someone too often viewed as invisible.
Embracing my humanity.
Becoming the person he once despised ...
Malcolm Gladwell on "Revenge of the Tipping Point"
CBS News Sunday Morning
Sep 29, 2024
Bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell's latest, "Revenge of the Tipping Point," builds on a familiar idea from his books: You may think you know how the world works, but you're wrong! The provocative Gladwell talks with correspondent David Pogue about why he's refused to change his approach, his work ethic, or his contrarianism.
7:15 min.
Embracing my humanity.
#GetReady ...
25,000 Longshoremen East & Gulf Coast
Set to Strike on Oct. 1
NewsNation Live
4:35 min.Sep 29, 2024
A prolonged strike would force companies to pay shippers for the delays, and goods could arrive too late for the high point of holiday shopping season. On Friday, top Biden administration officials met with port operators and told them they should negotiate with the union ahead of Tuesday, according to a White House official who insisted on anonymity to discuss an ongoing meeting.
Embracing my humanity.
And speaking shipping news ...
Is Ruby Another Beirut
What's Going on With Shipping
September 29, 2024
14:42 min.In this episode, Sal Mercogliano - a maritime historian at Campbell University (@campbelledu) and former merchant mariner - discusses the situation surrounding the MV Ruby carrying 20,000 tons of ammonium nitrate and needing repairs to its hull, rudder, and propeller after grounding off Britain.
Embracing my humanity.
Aianawa (30th September 2024), Emil El Zapato (30th September 2024), Wind (30th September 2024)
Been for me a strange old mondaY Gio, thankyou from the bottom n top of me heart for this gem, havin a good cry atm, ta again.
Emil El Zapato (30th September 2024), Gio (30th September 2024)
He's back at it ...
Russia: Threats, Deterrence, and the War of Numbers
|| Peter Zeihan
Sep 30, 2024
7:20 min.
Embracing my humanity.
Emil El Zapato (30th September 2024), Octopus Garden (9th October 2024), Wind (1st October 2024)
Oozing with Reality ...
Harris and Trump Rallies Cold Open - SNL
Saturday Sept. 28
#1 on Trending
News anchor David Muir (Andrew Dismukes) checks in with Kamala Harris (Maya Rudolph), Tim Walz (Jim Gaffigan), Doug Emhoff (Andy Samberg), Donald Trump (James Austin Johnson), JD Vance (Bowen Yang) and Joe Biden (Dana Carvey) at Harris' and Trump's campaign rallies.
13:14 min.
Embracing my humanity.
Wind (1st October 2024)
#Update
Dockworkers strike at US ports may create new shortages
ABC News
1:51 seconds
Embracing my humanity.
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