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Date: 2007-03-22

The Church's Father Figure; a Shot of Freedom

Italy Celebrates Feast of St. Joseph

By Elizabeth Lev

ROME, MARCH 22, 2007 (Zenit.org).- On Monday morning, as the Romans were busily starting the workweek, tourists were amazed to find everything quiet over at the Vatican. The museums, archives and library were all closed in honor of St. Joseph, whose feast day falls on March 19.

As Joseph is the baptismal name of Benedict XVI, the "name day" of the Holy Father added to the festivities. Until recently in Italy, name days were often celebrated more than birthdays.

Appropriately, the day to celebrate Jesus' foster father is also Father's Day in Italy, so every child was carrying a gift, card or some colorful school project.

St. Joseph's Day also features a sweet treat. These are special deep-fried cream-filled pastries that only show up in bakery windows during the month preceding March 19. Soon afterward, they disappear.

With all the honors bestowed on St. Joseph, it comes as a surprise to discover that his devotion took a long time to get under way. The Eastern Church celebrated him as early as the fourth century, but the first church dedicated to St. Joseph in the West wasn't built until the 12th century.

In the Middle Ages, the Dominicans introduced the feast into their calendar, and by the Renaissance, the devotion to St. Joseph had blossomed. Many Renaissance paintings presented a heroic, if older, Joseph, looming protectively over the Madonna and Child.

These images of Joseph, defender of the family, who led his wife and son to Egypt and safety, were painted by the greatest of Renaissance artists; Michelangelo, Raphael and even Caravaggio immortalized St. Joseph with their brushes and colors.

At the same time, the men who commissioned them, hard workers and heads of households, were paying homage to the saint they took as their model. Mary bore Jesus, but St. Joseph protected, fed and clothed him, and taught him a trade.

In these months, Italy is raging over the endless attempts to legalize homosexual marriage. Several laws have been proposed and struck down, but the battle is nowhere near over.

The feast of St. Joseph, recognized so joyously and simply by the families of Italy, was a gentle call to what the Church means by family, and to the important, complementary input provided by mothers and fathers in the formation of children.

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Suffering in China

Last Thursday, students and professors, prelates and lay folk all crowded into a Roman pub to talk about religious freedom.

Theology on Tap, the unconventional initiative to bring theological and Church issues to young people in an informal setting, kicked off another season with a presentation on religious liberty in China.

Raphaela Schmid, assistant professor of philosophy at the Pontifical Gregorian University and director of the Rome branch of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, spoke about her experiences while filming a documentary on the underground Church in China.

Schmid opened with an insight into the open Church in China, which is government-recognized. This Church is run, to varying degrees, by the Patriotic Association, a state agency. Startled students learned that the head of the Patriotic Association, Liu Bai Nian, is a layman, who while well versed in party rhetoric, gets stumped when asked the name of his favorite saint or devotional reading.

The underground Church remains loyal to the papacy and has refused to allow any state control, especially in the appointment of bishops. As a result, they are not condoned by the state, and in some regions they are persecuted.

The joint project of the Becket Fund and Rome Reports brought Schmid to remote areas of China where people live in startling poverty. But for all the deprivations, she found the faithful joyfully following their Christian path.

"The people I interviewed always wanted to talk about how God entered their lives, they were eager to express how much it meant to them to be Christian," Schmid told the crowd. "Only afterward, when asking directly, would it come out that they had been to prison because of their faith."

"They consider the suffering for their faith secondary to their experience of faith," remarked Schmid. "They never complained or put forward that they had lost jobs or been arrested."

I couldn't help but think that these observations put into vivid perspective the difference between our lives: We might find ourselves unpopular or have difficulties at work because of our positions on questions such as abortion, but certainly we are not facing imprisonment (yet), while the members of the underground Church just want to go to Mass and listen to the teaching of the Pope.

The lay people aren't the only ones who face difficult conditions. The precious and few priests in the area demonstrate heroic virtue as they cover huge distances to tend to their flocks. One priest, recounted Schmid, when asked where he lived, announced that he had "23 rooms." She later discovered that in fact he had no house of his own. He rode his old motorbike to the 23 villages that make up his parish, staying with Catholic families in the poorest conditions.

These stories became all the more poignant because as Schmid probed what drove these people to be willing to endure hardship, she discovered that they were keen to know how Catholics live in the West.

A squirm of embarrassment went through the room as the young people considered what they are willing to give up for their faith -- an hour on Sunday ... sometimes -- or some ice cream for Lent?

The talk ended on a positive note with Schmid telling the crowd that there are examples of the underground Church emerging into the open without being forced to compromise. She mentioned the case of Bishop Lucas Li, who manages to run his Diocese of Feng Xiang without any interference from the Patriotic Association.

Sitting in the heart of downtown Rome a few short blocks from where St. Peter and St. Paul were imprisoned, and listening to these inspirational stories of men and women evangelizing against near-impossible odds, gave us a glimpse of what those first Christian communities of Rome must have been like.

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A Catholic Take on EU Anniversary

This week, the Capitoline Hill, symbol of Roman greatness since antiquity, has sprouted dozens of flags as brightly colored as any of the spring blossoms in the Eternal City. They are there to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the signing of the treaty that established what was to become the European Union, on the Capitoline Hill on March 25, 1957.

Conferences, concerts and exhibitions are all under way to celebrate this important anniversary, with special festivities for the new countries that joined the European Union only within the past few years.

The European Union has even designed a special logo for the event. It is the word "together" written with different typefaces and colors.

The interpretive text explains that this "expresses in a simple and immediate way what was originally bound by the idea of Europe: not only politics, or money, or geographic boundaries, but most of all cooperation and solidarity."

The fact that the letter "r" is the symbol for registered trademark, however, seems to indicate that the glue of the European Union is indeed economics.

The Web site also explains that "the different letters, using different typefaces, express the diversity in European history and culture and are kept 'together' by the meaning of the word itself."

Now, I don't want to be a party pooper, but what kind of togetherness is this? As the EU members struggle to explain what unites them, the answer stares at them from their flag and from the very date of their foundation.

Arsene Heitz, the Strasbourg artist who designed the flag of the European Union, gave an interview in which he stated that the idea for the stars came to him from the apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Rue du Bac in Paris and the Miraculous Medal. The 12 stars that crowned Mary of the Immaculate Conception would be placed on a blue ground which throughout the history of Western art has been the color of grace.

Furthermore, the flag was adopted on Dec. 8, the feast of the Immaculate Conception, in 1955. Although hundreds of sites have cropped up over the years to debunk this fact, given that the artists' own words confirm this story, it appears that some people just want to negate their own history and origins.

The signing date of the European treaty also seems pretty providential: March 25, the feast of the Annunciation, which until the mid-20th century was a holy day of obligation in Rome. Robert Schuman and Konrad Adenauer, two of the founders of the European Union, were devout Catholics, so the significance of the incarnation of a new union of European countries on the same day as the incarnation of God's Word would not have been lost on them.

Although the European Union has drifted far from its Christian roots, ignoring the pleas of Pope John Paul II to recognize their common bond in Christianity while drafting the constitution, there is always reason to hope.

In any case, the fact that the founders invoked the Blessed Virgin in their symbol and on the date of signing, means that she will be watching over Europe, whether it likes it or not.

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Elizabeth Lev teaches Christian art and architecture at Duquesne University's Italian campus. She can be reached at lizlev@zenit.org.