Posts Tagged ‘Catholic Church’

Numberscruncher: Suffer Unto Me the Little Children

One of the priests who served at my high school and my family’s parish has been accused of abusing a student. He admitted to the incident, and was removed from office and sent to a psychiatric facility. Since then, four other people have come forward claiming that he abused them, too. It would not surprise me if the number of confirmed cases turns out to be higher than the one that Father Crum admitted to. My sister and my friends were creeped out by Father Crum. Among other things, he regularly took altar boys out for pizza and R movies, and there rumors that he bought them beer and showed them pictures of naked women, too. On top of that, pedophilia, ranging from sickos raping infants to people in authority taking advantage of people who aren’t quite of the age of consent, is more common than anyone likes to admit.

Whenever these cases break, everyone wonders why no one came forward at the time. Well, my sister and I kept saying that it was weird how Father Crum went out with the altar boys, but we were junior-high aged girls who were being snotty and disrespectful of a priest and jealous because the altar boys received special privileges. And now, the same people who dismissed us say that the men who are coming forward are pathetic folks bent on destroying a fine priest’s reputation for money. (more…)

Popdose Flashback: Madonna, “Like a Prayer”

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Love her or hate her, Madonna defined popular music – screw that, she defined popular culture – like no one else during the 1980s. Her 16 straight Top-5 singles (from “Lucky Star” to “Cherish”) are unmatched by any act in history; her clothing choices defined tween fashion for much of the decade; and her penchant for simultaneously generating controversy and commerce has served as a template for spotlight-hogging celebs ever since. And let’s not get started on her film career …

Anyway, with her last album of the decade Madonna took it all to a new level, and cemented her status as the biggest star of the ’80s. After all, how many artists can piss off Pepsi and the pope in one fell swoop?

The Material Girl actually had gone sorta quiet in 1988, leaving the pop charts to George Michael and Michael Jackson while she tried her hand at theater in David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow. Even as her not-too-badly received Broadway run continued from May through December, Madonna went into the studio in the fall with her usual compatriots, Patrick Leonard and Stephen Bray – along with a certain diminutive purple-clad figure with whom she would record one song publicly, and who would contribute to a couple others in secret.

The early buzz around the making of Like a Prayer was overshadowed during late 1988 and early ‘89 by a cultural controversy that had been brewing – make that bubbling – for a few years. The nation’s leading soft-drink companies had made pop stars an important part of their competition for market share, a development that (figuratively speaking) set many rock purists’ hair on fire. They accused artists like Michael, Whitney Houston and Jackson (whose hair had proved quite literally flammable) of selling out the music in pursuit of the almighty dollar; they howled once more when Madonna was given the then-enormous sum of $5 million to debut the “Like a Prayer” single in a commercial for Pepsi, which also bought sponsorship rights to her 1990 tour. (more…)

Political Culture: Hell Week for Catholics

When the long-awaited, religiously incendiary sequel to The Da Vinci Code arrives in theaters and the anticipated uproar is reduced to a low roar, you know it’s gotta be a rough week for the Catholic Church.

The church’s most dedicated followers of dogma have bigger post-Lenten fish to fry at the moment than the debut of a film – even if that film is Angels & Demons, an anticipated blockbuster that features a poisoned pope, kidnapped cardinals, a threat to annihilate the Vatican, and a secret Catholic sect as the presumed bad guys. No, the threat posed to the church by another Dan Brown-Tom Hanks-Richie Cunningham collaboration is nothing next to the menace of abortion-rights infidel Barack Obama receiving an honorary doctorate from Catholicism’s most prominent academic outpost this weekend.

Venerable South Bend, Indiana, had taken on a carnival-like atmosphere nearly a week before Obama addresses Notre Dame graduates on Sunday. It’s entirely likely that the number of antiabortion protesters on hand this weekend will dwarf the 2,600 graduates in attendance – and the demonstrators already include such revered figures as never-elected-to-anything Alan Keyes and Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry.

Randall Terry!!! Who exhumed that guy? Anyway, if Terry’s in the house you know the show is going to be classy – and true to form, throughout the week somebody’s been paying for a plane to be flown over South Bend, trailing a banner that depicts an aborted fetus. After all, why stop at holding up yucky posters at a rally that people can avoid, when you can put fetal remains up in the sky where everyone can see them? (more…)