Universalis, your very own breviary in pixels...

Friday 6 March 2015

What, No Loretta Young? No Celeste Holmes?

Himself is an old movie buff, and the first Christmas that we were married, he introduced me to his only mandatory yuletide custom - watching Come to the Stable. (I was far more demanding, Mass, polyphony participation, and viewing the 1951 Christmas Carol- this last mentioned has grown into the annual Scroogeapalooza.)
This story is amusingly and confusingly like Stable. TV news... :
looked into a small religious order in Chicago that has been all over the news lately after some nuns received public donations for a new heating system at their West Side church.

Nuns from a French religious order .....were on Chicago TV ...describing how their heat broke down. The public has now contributed about a quarter of a million dollars to fix their boilers.
When word got out that these nuns who feed the poor were shivering through Chicago's record-cold February, they were invited onto TV and two internet funds were set up for contributions, now totaling more than $232,000. 
But then there were questions...:
...about 90-acres owned by the order behind an iron gate in Marengo.

"When they have millions of dollars in property here and now they are expanding and wanting to add a brewery and a winery and gift shop and school and all of those things and I couldn't understand why they couldn't afford to fix their church and why other people had to be responsible for that," said [a neighbor-to-be]. ...
According to public records, the order has purchased land and homes worth more than $3 million in nearby Huntley, Harvard, southern Wisconsin and New York. An unknown amount was already spent on these grounds adorned by statues and a chapel that features an ornate altar.

"It took us two years and a half to build it. Most of the equipment and material was donated," Sister Marie Valerie said. "We built with our own hands."...
A benefactor help us with down payment [see the similarities to Stable?] but every month we have to pay for our own mortgage so it's not easy," Sister Marie Valerie said.

The nuns - who say they receive no salary - insist that any new McHenry County project would be funded by donations, but not the money donated for the boilers in Chicago.

"All the money we got for the boiler, all the money we got from GoFundMe, all that money stay here to our feeding program in Chicago," Sister Marie Valerie said. 
Catch that? The nuns SAY they receive no salaries. The altar is ORNATE.
Oh no!
But the underlying reason for the pushback against the sisters' fund-raising? not in MY backyard!
Residents who opposed the order's first expansion 10 years ago say they are mobilizing again to stop the new project.
"They're very secretive. We kept asking them where they got their money from because that was an expensive piece of property, it was $2 million I think, and they just said 'investments'," Link said.
The nuns call themselves a "traditional Catholic religious order" and some donors may believe that the organization is approved by the Vatican, but it isn't. 
I think any Catholic with the slightest interest in Traditional Catholicism understands very well the fragmented nature of it, and disunity of its adherents.
And I don't know about you, but I have never dreamed of professing in, say, the Salvation Army, but I happily donate to them.

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