11/1/2025

 Saturday, November 1, 2025

1952 "Ivy Mike", the first thermonuclear weapon to utilize the H-bomb design of Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam, was detonated in the Marshall Islands, Pacific Ocean

   1954 The US Senate admonished Joseph McCarthy because of his slander campaigns

2012 Acid was poured over a 15-year-old girl by her parents after she was seen talking to a young man in an "honour killing" in Azad Kashmir, Pakistan

In bed around 9, up before 6.  Soft aches in the shoulders and hands, pain in the left ankle.  Considerable swelling in the leg last night before I went to bed, 35 days since the onset of the cellulitis.  39°, wind chill 33°, high of 47°, with some rain expected around noon.  Two years ago today I woke up to snow on the ground and a temperature of 27°. wind chill of 18°, and high temperature of 39.  

Today is All Saints Day, at least in Western Christianity.  Here are some thoughts from my journal three years ago today.

 "All Saints Day, the day as children at St. Leo's Grammar School we attended mass, a holy day of obligation, which we could never quite get into as a real 'holy day,' like Christmas and Easter  Ditto All Souls Day tomorrow.  All Souls Day made sense within the cosmology of Holy Mother Church because we prayed for 'the poor souls,' the souls suffering and languishing in Purgatory, waiting to be burned pure, punished for their sins, and eligible for entry through the Pearly Gates.  Of course, we wanted our loved ones, our ancestors, to be freed from the fires of Purgatory and prayers were presumably a ticket out, along with temporal and plenary indulgences.  So attending mass and praying for them, something pleasing to God, made a lot of sense.  But on All Saints Day, we just celebrated those who had already made it into the Celestial Kingdom, all the saints, known and unknown.  It seemed almost cruel that All Saints Day was and is a Holy Day of Obligation and All Souls Day was not.  But there you have it.  Thoughts on awakening on November 1st.  You can take the boy out of the Church, but you never take the Church out of the boy." 

Last year on this date, I wrote about a New York Times feature piece on the Pope's decision that 2025 would be a "Jubilee Year."

A Jubilee Year is a "Holy Year" signified by the ceremonial opening of the "Holy Doors" in the four Roman major basilicas: St. Peter's, St. John Lateran, St. Mary Major, and St. Paul Outside the Walls.  The Vatican issued a decree on May 13th outlining ways that Catholics can obtain a "plenary indulgence" during the 2025 Jubilee Year, including by making pilgrimages, prayerful visits to specific churches.  A plenary indulgence is a grace granted by the Catholic Church through the merits of Jesus Christ to remove the temporal punishment due to sin, i.e., time burning in Purgatory for "venial sins."  We recall that one of the complaints of Martin Luther against the Church was the selling of indulgences to raise money, but first, I note that I have visited a number of the churches in Rome whose pious visits may trigger an indulgence.  St. Peter's, Sta. Maria Maggiore, St. John in Laterano, Sta. Maria Sopra Minerva, Sta. Maria della Vittoria, and Sta. Cecilia in Trastevere.  I've also visited the catacombs beneath St. Peter's, where Peter's final resting place is reputed to be and which is also a spot that can trigger a plenary indulgence.  I've also been privileged to visit two venues outside of Rome, which may occasion an indulgence: the Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi and the Basilica of Our Lady of the Angels in Assisi.  I have good memories of all my visits to all these places, but I know I didn't receive any indulgence, plenary or temporal, because I know I didn't satisfy the conditions, the most basic of which is believing in indulgences and in the Church's divine prerogative to award them.  I remember standing next to Geri's beloved Uncle Hardy at her mother's wake as a priest arrived to lead prayers.  Uncle Hardy nodded toward the priest, said to me, "What do you think, Chuck?" and I responded, "I don't know, Uncle Hardy, what do you think?"   He waved his hand and said, "It's all a business, just a business."  

I loved Uncle Hardy. and I know he liked me.  I loved schmoozing with him, listening to stories of the Oliverio family and to stories of his own adventurous life, including his running away from home and 'riding the rails,' getting arrested by 'railroad dicks', and being sentenced to hard labor building the airport in Casper, WY (?).  Geri's brother Robert brought Uncle Hardy and Auntie Annette up to Shorewood for an afternoon's visit once when we lived in Shorewood, and we visited them in their home in Edison Park in Chicago.  It was there that Uncle Hardy cried as he told us the story of the Catholic priest refusing to let his mother, Geri's grandmother, be buried in a Catholic cemetery for some reason I can't recall now.  I think it may have been because she hadn't been a Mass-goer and hadn't had Extreme Unction before she died.  I believe it was during the Spanish Flu pandemic.  In any event, Uncle Hardy, who was in his 90s when we visited and he told us the story, never forgave that priest nor the Church  and that piece of personal history lay behind his statement to me decades later, "It's all a business, just a business."  And now, on All Saints Day, more than a century after the Spanish Flu pandemic, I remember Uncle Hardy crying about his mother.  I remember the Catholic chaplain who visited me during my hospitalization at the VA and haplessly argued with me about God.  I remember the Marine reservist Protestant minister at Willow Grove who told me most seminarians don't believe in a transcendent, personal God who answers prayers.  I think back to Monsignor Malloy ("Fill in those pews!  Don't sell to undesirables!), Father Schmidt ("Mumbo jumbo rooba dooba, chickadeeboodba, cha cha cha:", Father Devereaux, Brother Irwin, Father McEvoy at MU, the old priest in "The Sisters" in Joyce's Dubliners, found alone in the confessional, "wide-awake and laughing-like to himself. . . . So then, of course, when they saw that, that made them think that there was something gone wrong with him. . . . ”  I remember my mother, my father, and my sister and their relationships with Holy Mother Church.  I carry all these memories, and so many more, and, though you truly can't take the Church out of the boy, or at least out of this boy, I won't attend Mass on this Holy Day of Obligation, q.v., even in this Jubilee Year.

Reading between the lines.  Yesterday, Trump said that the interruption in the SNAP or food stamp program would largely hurt Democrats rather than Republicans.  I think what he is saying is that food stamps are a benefit for people with low income and little wealth, and he considers such people Democrats, because historically that has been true.  It's hardly clear anymore since the Democrats have managed to squander to the Republicans much of that part of their traditional "base," especially the White, male part of it.   Trump however has a reductivist, binary view of the world.  He divides all people into two camps: winners and losers.  He believes, along with some, but not all, Evangelicals, that wealth and prosperity are signs of God's favor.  His God, of course, is not the traditional Judeo-Christian or Islamic God, but rather Mammon. (" No servant can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other; or else he will hold to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon." Luke 16:13) .  He apparently learned the winner/loser dichotomy at his daddy's knee and he has carried it throughout his life.  It's why he is so fond of billionaires and powerful dictators, and so contemptuous of "suckers" and "losers," like soldiers killed in war.  His father's wealth and privilege let Trump avoid serving in the military during Vietnam and he looked down his nose at those who did serve, most ignominiously at John McCain, a 'loser' who committed two sins: being captured during Vietnam and losing the 2008 presidential election.  ("He was a war hero because he was captured," Trump said at the 2015 Family Leadership Summit in Ames, Iowa.  "I like people who weren't captured,")  Trump's view of being a "winner"?  On the Howard Stern show in 1997: 

Howard Stern: You've never gotten a social disease. 

Donald Trump: It is a dangerous world out there. It is scary. It's like Vietnam, sort of like, you know, the Vietnam era.

Howard Stern: It is. It is your personal Vietnam.

Donald Trump: It is my personal Vietnam.

Howard Stern: You've said that many times.

Donald Trump: I feel like a great and very brave soldier.

I've drifted far afield from Trump's view of low-income people as "Democrats" and losers, but perhaps there is a connecting thread to these thoughts, his division of humankind into 'winners' and 'losers,' into those who have wealth, power, and good fortune and those who don't, into those who accede to his self-aggrandizing power-seeking, and those who don't, into those who support his MAGA fascism, and those who don't.  I am reminded of his Republican predecessor, George W. Bush, and his infamous binary after 9/11: "Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists."  We/they, us/them, with us or against us, accomplice or enemy, MAGA/Republican/friend or Democrat/enemy.

New Life, Born Again, Great Awakening, Scales dropping from eyes.  I read a review of Amanda Knox's memoir Free: My Search for Meaning, about her experience being tried and found guilty of her roommate in Perugia, Italy, during her study-abroad year in college.  I remember the notorious case pretty vividly and read a lot about it at the time much of it occurred and thereafter.  It's a horror story, but what  caught my attention reading the book review was its description of Knox's experiences after she was finally freed from incarceration and returned home to Seattle, including  

She found relief in the landscape. Foraging for chanterelles with her Italian professor, ‘the spongy bed of pine needles on the forest floor, after years of standing on nothing but concrete, felt like it might spring me into the air. I was an astronaut bounding on the moon.’ Her senses were heightened, her curiosity ‘blazing’. When she and Madison moved into a cheap apartment, the keys ‘felt weighty and huge in my hand, like they could open the gates of a city’. She purged her wardrobe, replacing her ‘court and prison outfits’ with colourful clothes. At Arundel, her favourite second-hand bookshop, ‘I put my nose in the books, I caressed their spines, I bought as many as I could carry at a time.’ Hypervigilant, insomniac, she walked and cycled alone for hours, wandering ‘aimlessly’: ‘I was taking in the sights, both large and small, as if everything – a skyscraper, a ladybug on a rhododendron leaf – carried the same cosmic weight. I felt like a drifting ghost, unattached and insignificant.

The description brought two things to mind.  First, my experience after spending a few months living in a tent in Vietnam, wearing heavy cotton, Korean War era,  Marine 'utilities' and leather combat boots every day, and then spending a week or so at MCAS Iwakuni, Japan, wearing a much lighter-weight khaki summer service uniform and shoes instead of boots.  Walking in shoes instead of boots on concrete sidewalks instead of on Vietnamese sand seemed like walking on air.  I vividly remember the experience, even though it was 60 years ago.  Secondly, it reminds me of the experiences I have had, especially this past year, appreciating everything around me, from the clouds in the sky to the trees everywhere, to 'ordinary' homes and special-purpose buildings all over the place.  Things, buildings, parts of nature that I have ignored for all of my life seem special to me now, beautiful, interesting, unique.  I feel like Emily Webb in Thornton Wilder's Our Town, come back from the dead, imploring her mother to pay attention to everything  around her:

Emily: I can’t bear it. They’re so young and beautiful. Why did they ever have to get old? Mama, I’m here. I’m grown up. I love you all, everything. – I can’t look at everything hard enough. Oh, Mama, just look at me one minute as though you really saw me. 

Mama, fourteen years have gone by. I’m dead. You’re a grandmother, Mama. I married George Gibbs, Mama. Wally’s dead, too. Mama, his appendix burst on a camping trip to North Conway. We felt just terrible about it – don’t you remember?

But, just for a moment, now we’re all together. Mama, just for a moment, we’re happy. Let’s look at one another.

I can’t. I can’t go on. It goes so fast. We don’t have time to look at one another. I didn’t realize. All that was going on in life, and we never noticed. Take me back – up the hill – to my grave.

But first: Wait! One more look. Goodbye, Goodbye world. Goodbye, Grover’s Corners. Mama and Papa. Good-bye to clocks ticking. And Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths. And sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.

Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? – every, every minute?

Stage Manager: No. The saints and poets, maybe they do some.

Emily: I’m ready to go back. I should have listened to you. That’s all human beings are! Just blind people.

Except, unlike Emily, I'm not dead quite yet, but I'm seeing more clearly.  Thanks to Emily, Geri, Janine, and many others.