Rick Santorum endorsed Mitt Romney late at night when no one was watching. And he got funny with Jay Leno last night when no one was watching. Jay also pinned him down on his social issues agenda in a way few other interviewers have, and Jay got a sweater vest in return. Not a bad deal.
Not surprising: By a 2-1 margin, North Carolina voters made their state the 31st state to amend its constitution to ban same-sex marriage.
Surprising: Christian singer-songwriter Jennifer Knapp came out as a lesbian and now has a comeback as a Christian singer-songwriter.
Not surprising: the Catholic bishops will focus on religious freedom when they gather in Atlanta for their annual June meeting.
Surprising: they will also talk about a proposal for possibly issuing a special message on “Catholic Reflections on Work, Poverty and a Broken Economy.” No rush.
The bishops will have a 10-year review of their response to the clergy sexual abuse crisis and listen to some recommendations for actions to take.
A gay student at a Catholic high school in Iowa won a scholarship from a foundation that honors the memory of Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old tortured and murdered in Wyoming in 1998 because he was gay. Everyone is proud of Keaton Fuller, but the Catholic diocese says the Eychaner Foundation folks cannot actually present the scholarship to Fuller at graduation because the foundation also “supports equality in marriage for any two people committed to monogamy.”
On the other hand, Worcester Bishop Robert J. McManus won’t even get to go to graduation at Anna Maria College: After McManus pressured college officials to revoke an invitation to Ted Kennedy’s widow to speak at commencement, the college asked McManus to stay away because they felt the bishop would “be a distraction.”
This priest is way more popular than his congregation: he’s Father Patrick Conroy, chaplain of the U.S. House of Representatives. “Well, I was a chaplain at San Quentin (prison, California), too — and I'm not making a comparison there,” he tells RNS.
Bill Donohue’s “vagina manger” boycott campaign against Jon Stewart and “The Daily Show” has won its first convert: Delta Airlines has pulled its advertising because of the Catholic League’s protests over a skit in which Stewart featured a picture of a manger in between a naked woman’s legs.
The underlying issue was the church’s battle against the contraception mandate, in case you could tell.
“Where the Wild Things Are,” indeed. Maurice Sendak is dead at 83. “The Holocaust has run like a river of blood through all my books,” he once said. “Anything I did had to deal with that — with my family, the ruination of my childhood, the humiliation of being a victim.”
How did he make it through? His art (above) we know. And there was literature:
“You know who my gods are, who I believe in fervently?” he said. “Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson – she’s probably the top – Mozart, Shakespeare, Keats. These are wonderful gods who have gotten me through the narrow straits of life.”
David Gibson
Photo credit: Us Weekly
