It’s probably not demons

A while back, I wrote about how unfortunate it is that we often waste the time and energy of priests, asking them to do things that lots of other people could do. A priest once told me that this is the hardest part of his job, the non-priest stuff. It’s not that he thinks he’s too good to do office work or manual labour or show up at a BBQ; it’s just that he knows there are things that only a priest can do, and he wishes more people would ask him for those things.

Lately, I’ve been seeing a related phenomenon; people asking priests to do things that not only other people can do, but that priests really aren’t qualified to do. This happens a lot in Catholic online groups…someone will ask for advice, and several people respond, “Go to a priest.”

They frequently tell people seek marriage counselling from a priest, rather than from a marriage counsellor. Some priests may happen to be trained or especially gifted in this field, but most truly are not. It’s not a question of holiness; it’s just that counselling and therapy are specialised fields, and you can’t just show up and be holy, and expect good results, any more than you’d expect a holy priest to be able to give you good advice when your lymphatic system isn’t working well, or your vision is poor. There may very well be some overlap with spiritual matters, but that doesn’t mean a priest is the best person to go to. And a good priest will know this and say so to the person who requests this kind of help from them.

More and more often; and this coincides with an alarming rise in the fascination with “celebrity exorcists,” I see Catholics encouraging others to go to priests when someone is clearly suffering from a mental health crisis. A common example; a worried mother posts in a social media group for Catholics, saying her child has always been difficult, but there has been a recent, extreme escalation of erratic or violent behavior, and the child isn’t responding to any normal interventions, and she doesn’t know what to do.

The last time I saw this scenario, no fewer than 20 other moms told her to run to a priest and request an exorcism. Sounds like demons! Go to a priest.

Let me be clear: this is negligent parenting…Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly

image source (Creative Commons)

Untamed territory: The iconogrphy of Emanuel Burke

“Iconography is not a science, where you follow the formula and someone has an encounter with God,” said artist Emanuel Burke.

“That’s not the way it works.”

Burke ought to know. The 33-year-old artist, who works under the pseudonym Alypius, recently saw one of his icons of Jesus shared on social media.

But far from encountering God, dozens of viewers jeered at his work and called him a fake Christian who was trying to undermine the Church. He had depicted Christ with large eyes and a small head, rather than with the prominent brow that often signifies wisdom in icons.

Burke, who is a convert to and a seminarian in the Eastern Orthodox church, found it especially discouraging to face personal attacks from his fellow believers. But he tried his best to respond with humility and a kind of radical acceptance.

“We long to be right in an argument, not to be perceived a certain way. But there’s a lot to be gained from being a fool, from being slandered and misunderstood,” he said. “I don’t know how that will shake out for me and for others, but in the end, it’ll be blessed.”

An art teacher at Canongate Catholic High School in Arden, North Carolina, Burke knows some of his icons are unusual and don’t conform to every standard of the art form. Though he doesn’t have any formal training in fine art, he’s very familiar with the traditions that dictate the spiritual significance of color, shapes and gestures in Eastern iconography. But he said these traditions have developed over time and are not as inviolable as some might believe.

“They are not dogmatics, in the same way as the Trinity or the hypostatic union or something like that is,” he said.

Burke rejects the idea, popular in some circles, that “if it doesn’t look like it was painted in the 9th century, it’s not an icon.” In fact, he thinks an icon that strives primarily to look like it is ancient fails in what iconography is intended to do.

“The thing about iconography is it’s always contemporary. It’s not supposed to be stuck in the past,” he said.

Instead, it is intended to speak to, and to be received by, the people who will actually encounter it.

Contemporary — but not modern

There’s a vast divide between the modern understanding and the ancient Christian understanding of art, Burke said, and he didn’t immediately grasp that difference. As a result, his first icons were a clumsy blend of traditional imagery and modern sensibilities. He ended up sanding down his first attempt to show the face of Christ and painting over it.

“The telltale sign (of a modern understanding of art) is the overemphasis on individualism. ‘This is the way I see things or how I feel about it,’” he said.

Then each viewer brings his or her subjective interpretation to the work, and it becomes even more individualized and fragmented in meaning, he said. “Whereas with the approach of a Byzantine or Orthodox iconographer, we do this with the mind of the Church. It’s never about me or another individual in a very rigid sense,” he said.

The artist is involved by necessity because he, too, is venerating the icon even as he paints it. Burke speaks of the work of painting as a work of self-discernment.

“But I don’t see myself as the only participant,” he said.

The viewer is just as important, and in a sense, the work is incomplete until it has been beheld. The face of Christ that got Burke so much unwelcome attention online was the 21st installment in a series he undertook during Advent, which the Orthodox treat as a “Little Lent.” As a discipline, he tried — but did not quite manage — to make an image of the face of Christ every day for the 40 days leading up to Christmas.

Some of the images were painted with egg tempera; some were etchings done while he was experimenting with a cold wax technique, which uses a combination of paste and paint. He also works in ballpoint pen or even with Procreate, the digital painting app. He sees the value in making digital art that’s easy to edit and share, though he’s more drawn to the “very human” natural and tactile materials of egg tempera.

Burke admires some of the new styles of icons being produced in the Eastern Orthodox churches, especially in Ukraine. He likes their bold colors and use of geometric shapes. But he doesn’t like everything new he sees. Some innovations in modern iconography go further afield than he’s comfortable with. However, he doesn’t feel that he’s qualified to say that they’ve gone too far.

“These things get worked out over time. The openness to do something that’s a bit different helps move things away from that sort of robotic, printing-press approach to religious art,” he said.

Journey into untamed territory

Burke recently watched “Stalker,” a 1979 Soviet sci-fi film directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. It deals with a man who’s gone into “a wilderness that has been taken over with the modern innovations that were brought on by the Soviet Union.” He said that the film suggests that the experience of God is like this: It’s wild and untamed territory, and “not always a pleasant experience,” but sometimes a necessary one.

Burke himself was somewhat shaken when he first encountered the faith he now hopes to serve as a priest. He and his wife were raised Southern Baptist, although his wife, who was born in Thailand, also has early memories of practicing Buddhism. They were “freaked out” when they attended their first Divine Liturgy….Read the rest of my latest artist profile for Our Sunday Visitor

Tension and balance: The sculpture of Christopher Alles

Christopher Alles, aged 33, is the father of five kids under the age of five, including triplet girls aged 2. So you might think he was describing his home life when he said it’s “everything everywhere all at once.”

But he was actually speaking about art and how to understand it.

“You have multiple things going on at the same time, and it takes a while to get comfortable managing them: Composition, representation, abstract form, the expressiveness of the character. You have to be juggling everything at the same time,” he said.

The New York-based sculptor sometimes feels the magnitude of that “everything everywhere all at once” task on a cosmic scale, especially when he’s carving; and it’s an experience he finds immensely satisfying.

“You’re taking something that’s meaningless and incoherent, and bringing order, separating things,” he said.

He describes forming a sculpted foot, first separating it from the base of the statue, then forming the front and sides of the foot like simple walls that gradually take on definition and meaning.

“It’s like God separating the land and the water. You’re making distinctions. Gradually things come together,” he said.

But if Alles shares in God’s creative process, he’s definitely not omniscient like God, or totally in control of what he’s making.

“As you go along, things change and emerge. You feel like you’re not in charge,” he said.

There is a mysterious element to making art, and even as he proceeds along the thoughtful and laborious process from making sketches, to miniature clay figures, to full-size armatured clay sculptures, to mold, to final cast poured in resin and marble, he’s sometimes surprised at how various elements work themselves out.

He points to a recent secular commission, “Apollo and Daphne,” a startlingly explosive figurative piece that seems to fly out from a central point suspended in the air, rather than from the ground.

“The composition was just playing around. The sort of geometric form of angles and lines just sort of emerged; it was spontaneous,” he said.

It invites the viewer to feel, rather than just see, the tension between the energies of the covetous god and the hapless nymph, who becomes rooted in the earth as a tree to escape his assault.

But Alles focuses mainly on sacred art, and he recognizes that another thing that’s out of his control is what the viewer actually sees.

“It’s hard, as an artist, to see your own work in the way other people see it,” said Alles. “Other people read things into my work that I didn’t see.”

Alles recalls a statue of St. Joseph with the young Jesus…Read the rest of my latest artist profile for Our Sunday Visitor

Image: Photo courtesy of Chris Alles 

Kitchen rosary winner! And a discount code for The Woodshop At Avalon

I’m happy to announce that the winner of the Kitchen Rosary from The Woodshop at Avalon is Kim Pepper! Her name was chosen randomly from everyone who entered. Thanks to everyone who entered, and thanks to The Woodshop At Avalon for sponsoring this giveaway!

If you didn’t win, you can still order one of their beautiful abacus-style kitchen rosaries

and while you’re at it, use the 10% discount code: Enter in SMALLS24 when you check out, and you will get 10% off. The code is good until Dec. 7, 2024.

Dec. 7 is also the last day to order custom goods, so check it out! They make a variety of handcrafted goods for your Catholic home or office, for babies, and for Catechesis of the Good Shepherd atrium. A very popular item right now is the simple but clever prayer card holder, which is only $9.99. 

This size fits on most windowsills, and you can just pop in a prayer card to display the saint of the day, or keep a memorial card in it, etc. It even has storage, so the cards you’re not using won’t get lost or wrecked. You can have it engraved with “ora pro nobis” or “pray for us,” and it comes in three different finishes and two sizes. You can also order four beeswax votive candles directly from the site

Don’t forget to use your discount code! Yay, small business! 

 

 

A giveaway from The Woodshop At Avalon!

It’s Small Business Saturday, and I want to introduce you to a new-to-me store: The Woodshop At Avalon. This is a family-run business and I really like their simple, dignified goods that are designed to work with everyday Catholic living.
I have a DISCOUNT CODE and a GIVEAWAY! 

First, let’s take a look at what they make: 

 

Much better than letting them float around in the bottom of your purse indefinitely, which in my current system. These would make nice stocking stuffers, or little gifts for any Catholic. 
 

I have my eye on this lovely rustic icon shrine

made of unfinished cedar, with room for candles or a small statue inside. 

They also have a number of goods for kids and babies, like this teething rattle 

and engraved goods, like these custom etched wooden plaques, with your choice of words: 

They also make Catechesis of the Good Shepherd materials and they specialize in custom work, so if you have something special in mind, get in touch

They offer an especially custom cool service: They can use wood from objects with sentimental value and turn them into a new goods — for instance, “an old, but beloved, piano” was upcycled to craft “a gorgeous frame from a PHD certificate and an ornate shelf featuring a series of the piano keys.” 

Note: For custom orders for Christmas, please be sure to order by December 7!

One more very cool item (but there are more at the shop, so check it out!): This Tenebrae Hearse Candle Holder 

Very cool way to observe Tenebrae in Lent. It comes in walnut, cherry, or a combination. 

The discount code! Enter in SMALLS24 when you check out, and you will get 10% off. The code is good until Dec. 7, 2024.

Now for the giveaway! Yay, I love a giveaway! The Woodshop At Avalon is giving away one of their pretty handmade cherrywood kitchen abacus-style rosaries. 

 

When daily life is full of hands-on tasks, it can be hard to find the time to sit down and pray. And when we somehow manage it, an interruption often makes us lose our place and grow discouraged in the practice. This abacus-style rosary can sit on your kitchen counter or the window sill above the sink to help you keep your heart focused even as your hands are going every direction. It helps us realize the goal of making all our daily work into a prayer. Or it can hang at eye level for children who might wish to say a Hail Mary in the middle of their play, contributing to a family rosary for a shared intention. However you choose to place it in your home, we hope it is a reminder of our Blessed Mother’s ceaseless intercession on behalf of your family.

I love the idea of people passing through and adding a Hail Mary or two to the collective family rosary. A great habit to pick up during Advent. 

This piece is priced at $45.99, but to take us up to the beginning of Advent, the folks at The Woodshop At Avalon are giving away one as a gift to one random winner. Here is how to enter the drawing: 

-Sign up for their mailing list (click here, scroll down to the bottom of the page, and enter you email address)

and/or

-Share a link to their store or one of their items on your social media

and/or

-Share this blog post on social media 

and/or

-Do something else helpful to spread the word about this business!

You can do any or all of these things to earn entries. For each thing you do, leave a comment on this post (not on Facebook or Twitter or whatever, but right here, on my site!). So if you do two things, please leave two separate comments; etc. This is using the honor system, because I know you are all honorable people and I am really fed up with Rafflecopter.

The contest will be open Saturday and Sunday, and I will use a random number selector to choose a winner on Monday morning. 

Good luck! And if you order, don’t forget to use the discount code SMALLS24. It is good until Dec. 7, 2024.

 
 
 

a Rafflecopter giveaway

50 gifts our ten kids loved: The 2024 list!

The time has come! It’s the 2024 Christmas present idea list. These are items we actually bought and enjoyed. I think this is the tenth year I’ve written this list up. I deeply wish I had also kept track of the things the kids give each other, because some of them are absolutely brilliant. But this is a start. 
 
Here is the master list compiling the first eight years of recommended gifts, organized by kind. and here is last year’s list with another 50 or so. I’m sorry, I’m lazy and haven’t consolidated everything yet. Still, hundreds of ideas. Most from Amazon, some from Etsy, some from misc. The monster list has present ideas for babies on up; the other lists are for kids age 8 or 9 or so on up. 
 

 


This year, we became fascinated by paper marbling videos, and I bought this kit on a whim so we could try it at home. Caveat: You have to prepare the ink mixture and then wait six hours before using it, so plan accordingly.  But once it was ready to go, it was fun and easy and satisfying
 
 
Just a cheapsky little fidget toy, but it has a million little articulation points and is fun to handle. Comes in several colors, and people are selling lots of different 3D printed animals and creatures. 
 

Mastermind/Codebreaker game

I myself hunted down the version with the bearded evil genius seated in a swivel chair and tenting his fingers while his glamorous companion in a futuristic white dress gazes inscrutably at the camera, but YOU can just get the normal version, which is the same in a more boring box.  This game takes about ten minutes to play. One person sets up four colored pegs behind a little shield, and the other person has to guess what they are by setting up four pegs of their own on their own side. The first person responds with up to four coded pegs: Black for “right color, right position,” and white for “right color, wrong position.” That’s it. It’s mostly logic, but a little bit of psychology, too. 

Perler beads! Still!
 

and peg boards to make your designs on. I bought these to take with us on vacation, and the teenagers used them all week long, making up all kinds of goofy designs. I think this is the only thing I’ve actually ironed in the last decade. 
 
 
Just a young feller. Decent detail for the price. Maybe you know someone who would appreciate getting a netsuke. 
 
 
 

There are, in this world, Hawaiian shirts with every possible thing printed on them. Perhaps your household has a tomato lover in it, who would enjoy this shirt. 

Fishing magnet

I actually got this for myself, because I like magnets. It comes on a lonnnnnnng cord, and gloves to help you keep your grip. I haven’t found anything in the water yet (I got a little spooked out, to be honest, dragging that thing in the dark water; but I’ll be braver next time), but there are plenty of things to be found on land. Magnets! How do they work! 

 
In all these years, I have still never sat down and watched a full episode of Teen Titans, but all my kids will gather together and watch it and laugh, so how bad could it be? 
 
 

I’m not defending this. I’m just saying, if you have a kid who would like a Sonic the Hedgehog Official Cookbook, here it is!

monster paw slippers

I like these because those silly novelty slippers always leave you with chilly bare ankles. But these make your ankles monstrous! Delightful. 

 
This is a dog toy, not a kid toy, but I’m mentioning it because our super gnawer has been super gnawing on this for a solid year, and it’s still in one piece. 
 
 
You definitely know someone who would needs this on their desk. And if you want to roll up a $20 bill and stuff it in the secret compartment, you can do that, too!
 

astronaut nebula projector

Cute little projector. Stands up and has a number of different colors and settings, and the projection covers a large area. 

and bird food

An attractive little bird feeder for a decent price. 

 

Important book for the comic artist! 
 
 
There are many, many wax stamp sealing sets in lots of styles and vibes. Kids are sending letters again, aren’t they? I don’t know. 
 
 
 
As described. Meow!
 
 

More wax sealing supplies! Somebody needs to put this stuff in order, my goodness. 

 

A classic for anyone interested in animation. 
 
 
Batman! Batmen! Batmani!
And to save your puzzle so you can store it away and work on it later: 
 
 
 
As advertised. Soft and reasonably well-made. 
 
 
Wrap yourself in the many faces of the original loverboy of Tokyo: Godzilla. 
 
 
This is fun and works well. It makes little fish-shaped waffles with a space inside, so you can fill them with whatever, Nutella or bean paste or ice cream or whatever you like. 
 
 
Enormous, comfy, soft, and durable. And yes, the cover is removable and washable if someone gets never mind what all over it. Comes in many colors. 
 
 

Another animation must-have. 

 
Floating monster eyeballs! These come in many colors and varieties. 
 

robot hand game control holder 

 
The store we got this from doesn’t seem to be open anymore, but it’s a neat idea, and there are several other styles made by various other people. It holds your game controller or remote (or whatever you want), and you can mount it on the wall or set it on your desk. 
 
A solid Miyzaki collection you can find for under $50 in many places. Nothing like a boxed set!
 
This is kinda dumb, but you can have any photo printed on a pillowcase that’s covered with those sequins that you can flip. You know what I mean. Those flippy sequins with the secret picture underneath, but it’s some silly picture that you chose! Comes in several colors. Make sure you order a pillow insert, not just the pillowcase. 
 

A nicely-designed game for kids more oriented to storytelling than strategy. 

Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza

I actually love this game. It’s so stupid but lots of fun, and it’s quick and portable. It’s also a game where younger kids actually have an advantage over adults, because their reflexes are faster. 

 
 
Pretty little Greek-looking earrings. 
 

The Odd Giraffe Earrings

Laser cut wooden or acrylic earrings in bright, cute designs. I can’t share the specific earrings we bought, although we’ve bought several over the years, because she’s always turning out new designs. All our Odd Giraffe earrings always fetch lots of compliments, and the customer service goes above and beyond.  

 

Cherry skull earrings

The perfect earrings for that one kid. I definitely didn’t secretly want them for myself. 

And that’s it! If I think of more, I’ll add them to the list. Don’t forget to check out the monster list. Happy shopping! 

 
 
 
 
 

Handy kitchen substitutes, just don’t tell your grandmother

Ah, Thanksgiving, when everyone’s kitchen goes into overdrive, turning out goodies and sweets to keep the nation’s tummies merry and bright.

But sooner or later, every busy baker and clever cook is bound to hit a snag: The recipe calls for an ingredient you simply don’t have. You thought the bottle of vanilla was fresh, but it’s almost empty. You could have sworn the carton was full, but only one or two eggs remain. What to do?

You could send your husband to the convenience store to get gouged. Everyone enjoys that, especially Yogi, who is doing the gouging. (This is not racist. His name is Yogi and boy does he gouge.) Or, you could put on your thinking toque and rustle up a substitute.

A substitute! Good kitchen sense means thinking on your feet, and substitutes are the backbone of baking, unless you are, in fact, cooking a backbone, and you are out of backbone. Then you’re out of luck. 

Here are some of my most-used kitchen substitutions:

Short on eggs? Substitute 1/4 cup of unsweetened applesauce for each egg you’re missing. Or you could swap in half a mashed banana. Just don’t think too hard about why it’s okay to use banana, which is stuffed with sucrose, but the substitution guides always specify unsweetened applesauce. Baking is a science, okay? And science means you shut up. If you don’t have apples or bananas or eggs, you could always use arrowroot powder. I won’t tell you how much, because we all know you don’t have arrowroot powder. Dude, you don’t even have eggs. 

Recipe calls for buttermilk but you’re fresh out? The next best thing is a scant cup of regular milk with a tablespoon of vinegar stirred in. Let it sit for five minutes before stirring, to give the ghost of your grandmother a chance to sidle in and make that sucking noise she makes when you did something stupid; then continue cooking as normal. *kshhh*

Sour cream and yogurt are very often interchangeable, so feel free to swap them in and out. In and out! You could even use cottage cheese. In and out, up and down, side-side-side-side-side! You could even try mayonnaise, as long as there are enough other strong ingredients to mask the flavor. Few people know this, but mayonnaise is actually made of cheese. A dairy product, if you will. Yes it is. Why is it cheese-colored, then? 

Recipe calls for unsalted butter, but all you have is salted? Get over yourself. No one cares. What is this for, cookies? Your cookies are rubbery little wrinkled dough puddles with hair in them. Gray hair. People are buying them at the bake sale solely to remove them from public view. The salt ratio being marginally out of balance is not what’s going to make or break your project, bunky. 

Springform pan gone missing? Try taking a normal pan and lining it with tinfoil, then putting little pebbles from the stream all along the inside. Crimp the tinfoil along the top end and fashion little vents with a melon baller, then pour the batter over that with a wry little twisting motion of the wrist while looking in the other direction and pretending not to notice what is happening. It won’t do anything, but at least you could try. Try putting your husband’s car keys in there. Put Meow Mix, see if I care.

A little low on flour? Try this trick: Slowly tear the pages out of your most infuriating cookbook with all the precious details about a frugal but free-spirited childhood in Soho, and stuff them into the food processor. Add a little truffle oil, pulse two or three times, and boom. You’ll have an excuse to go to the Salvation Army and pick yourself out a new food processor. While you’re out, you can get some flour. 

Lost your will to live? Try eating, instead. 

Hope this helps, and happy baking! *kshhh*

Three years later, Voris is sorry, but the lawsuit isn’t over

By Damien Fisher

It took more than three years of litigation and the destruction of a right-wing Catholic news outlet, but New Hampshire’s Rev. Georges de Laire finally got Gary Michael Voris to say he’s sorry.

Voris settled the federal defamation lawsuit de Laire brought in 2021 over articles based on the reporting of nomadic canon lawyer and erstwhile Voris confidante Marc Balestrieri.

The apology Voris finally offered came this summer, after his online news outfit, Church Militant, shut down and his non-profit, Saint Michael’s Media, paid $500,000 to de Laire.

“I offer my full and genuine apology to Fr. de Laire for any hurt or emotional distress he suffered as a result of a news article titled ‘New Hampshire Vicar Changes Dogma Into Heresy’ on the St. Michael’s Media website churchmilitant.com on January 17, 2019,” Voris wrote in his apology letter.

Suzanne Elovecky, de Laire’s attorney, said Voris’ apology came with a “substantial” monetary payment to de Laire. Elovecky called the settlement a “complete victory” over Voris.

“It’s a good thing for Fr. de Laire and really shows Voris was on his heels,” Elovecky.

The lawsuit isn’t done, though, as Balestrieri’s end of the case remains unresolved. Already deemed liable for defaulting in the lawsuit, Balestrieri is currently trying to get out of paying damages to de Laire. The priest wants Balestrieri to pay at least $100,000, according to court records. 

Marc Balestrieri

Voris’ outlet published videos and articles starting in January of 2019 calling de Laire ‘emotionally unstable,’ stating de Laire is incompetent, and implying he’s corrupt, according to the lawsuit. The articles came in response to the Roman Catholic Diocese of New Hampshire disciplining the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, a fringe traditionalist group with a compound in rural Richmond, New Hampshire. At the time, de Laire was the judicial vicar for the diocese and the front man for dealing with the Slaves. 

Voris initially took credit for the article and kept secret that Balestrieri was the true author. Additionally, at the time the original article came out, Balestrieri was involved in the Slave’s canon law defense. Both Voris and Louis Villarubbia, the Slaves leader also known as Brother Andre Marie, claimed they had no knowledge of Balestrieri’s conflict of interest. 

Voris placed a large chunk of the blame for the articles on his failure to properly vet Balestrieri’s work. 

“As CEO of St. Michael’s Media and Church Militant.com, I did not ensure the proper vetting the article as I should have. Mr. Balestrieri did not substantiate, and has not substantiated in the lawsuit, his claims regarding Father de Laire by identifying sources. Prior to publication, SMM should have questioned this lack of substantiation, and should have assessed Mr. Balistieiri’s and his story’s objectivity. I did not ensure that SMM did so,” Voris wrote. 

Court records show Voris worked to keep Balestrieri’s identity secret for months after the lawsuit was filed. After Balestrieri’s connection came to light, Voris supplied him with an interest-free $65,000 loan as Balestrieri dodged process servers. Balestrieri was finally ruled in default and liable for the defamation for failing to respond to the lawsuit. 

As the case moved closer to a fall, 2023 trial, court records show de Laire’s team learned Voris and his Church Militant staff had been hiding evidence sought in discovery, including messages with Balestrieri. Balestrieri then made a surprise appearance at a June, 2023 hearing in the United States District Court in Concord seeking to get out from under the default judgement. 

Weeks before, Balestrieri denied to Villarubbia that he had written the original article. At the June hearing, Balestreiri agreed to sit for a deposition scheduled for July, 2023 during which he was likely to repeat that denial under oath. However, court records show the day of the June hearing, Voris sent Balestreiri a text message warning.

“Marc – you are committing perjury. You know you wrote that article. What you don’t know is this morning we found proof – your digital fingerprints – all totally documented – on that article. Remember the email address – TomMoore@Churchmilitant.com.? We have all the receipts. You go through with this and we will rain down on you publicly. You are a liar, and a Welch,” Voris wrote.

Balestrieri cancelled his deposition 24 hours before it was to start, and again disappeared from the scene for a time. 

From this point on, Church Militant and Voris were headed for disaster. Three defense lawyers quit the case, more evidence that had been withheld was found, Voris was fired for violating Church Militant’s “morality clause” via a gay sex scandal, and Church Militant ran out of money. In February, the outlet agreed to settle with de Laire for half a million dollars before it went dark in April.

Voris has since resurfaced with a MAGA-flavored Catholic news website called Souls and Liberty based in Houston, Texas.

Balestrieri also reappeared this month, filing a motion to dismiss the lawsuit on the legal theory he cannot be sued in New Hampshire for defamation since he never went to New Hampshire when writing the article, and the article was published by Church Militant’s Ferndale, Michigan office.

***

Image: Still from interview in which Voris argues CBS should lose its license for violating journalistic standards

The joy and pain of being a Catholic foster parent

The first time Stephen and Paige Sanchez took their boys to Mass, the children had lots of questions. The boys were 2 and 4, and this was the first they had heard of Jesus. They saw a statue and asked who it was.

Mr. Sanchez told them it was St. Joseph, the foster father of Jesus. The boys looked at each other.

“Jesus was a foster kid?” the older boy said.

Mr. Sanchez said he was, kind of.

To himself, he thought, Man, the church loves us.

The two boys are now the adopted sons of Mr. Sanchez and his wife, but at the time they were his foster children, and everyone expected them to go back to their birth parents. The Sanchezes also have an older son, who was also adopted through foster care.

Stephen and Paige first began exploring adoption after five years of struggle with infertility. Then they discovered how many children in their area needed placement through foster care. They took a class, just to learn more.

“We started thinking God was asking us [to go down this path],” Mr. Sanchez said. So they kept going.

The day after they received their fostering license, they got a call asking them to take a child.

“We decided we’d say yes, just like if we were having our own children,” Mr. Sanchez said.

That child, who came to them deeply traumatized, stayed only a few days before moving to specialized therapeutic care. But the agency immediately asked about another child, a boy whose birth parents’ parental rights were going to be terminated. Would the Sanchez family accept him, and eventually adopt him?

They talked it over for 10 minutes and agreed. The boy joined them the next day.

Two weeks later, the agency called again. This time, it was two half brothers who needed a temporary home until they could be reunified with their parents.

That was the plan, as it usually is with foster care. The reunification goal got pushed back more than once. The birth parents, who struggled with addiction, were unable to get clean and create a safe environment for their boys. Finally, after two years of limbo, the court legally severed the birth parents’ rights, and Stephen and Paige adopted the boys.

The Sanchez boy who was 2 years old in the church that day is now 15, and since that day when they first met St. Joseph and “his foster kid,” the boys have learned volumes about their faith.

But one of their first lessons was that God had a son and sent him to live with another family because God loved his son and trusted the family. It became a way for the Sanchezes to talk about Catholicism, and about the relationship the two boys might have with their new parents and their birth parents.

“St. Joseph became a clear patron,” Mr. Sanchez said—for the boys, and also for him.

Sacrifice and Stability

The Sanchez family story seems to have as close to a fairy tale ending as possible. But the foster father analogy only goes so far. And the family’s story also demonstrates some of the things that make foster care so hard: the legal and psychological limbo.

In foster care, the goal is to reunite the child and their parents, but it is not always clear how long that might take. And that goal is ultimately met less than half the time. Sometimes the timeline is changed several times, and sometimes the parents’ rights are legally terminated without another family ready to step in and offer care. The future of a child frequently hinges on the sustained efforts of people who are already in crisis, in dire poverty, suffering domestic violence or in the grip of addiction.

The practice of foster care is also widely misunderstood, leaving foster families isolated even among communities that could be helping the most. But experienced foster parents often say two things: Foster care reveals things that are true of every parenting relationship. And fostering is intensely, inherently pro-life work that should be much more vigorously supported and promoted by the Catholic Church.

Foster parents will also speak of a profound joy and satisfaction that keeps them doing this work over and over again, as long as they can.

Approximately 400,000 children—enough to fill Yankee Stadium eight times over—spend time in foster care every year in the United States. Each year around 60,000 children see their birth parents’ parental rights terminated, and around 50,000 children are adopted from foster care each year. About 25,000 children every year age out of the system, and 20 percent of these become instantly homeless.

Despite the great need, foster care can be a hard sell, even to families with the resources for it. Many foster parents say friends tell them they would love to offer foster care, but they are afraid of getting too attached. They are afraid they will fall too deeply in love with their foster children, only to lose them.

“In [American] culture, parenting is a little bit possessive,” Mr. Sanchez said.

Catholic culture puts great emphasis on the sacred bond between parent and child; and Americans often cultivate and cherish their identity as parents, emphasizing self-sacrifice in the name of forming lifelong attachments with their children.

None of this meshes easily with the goal of foster care, which is to relinquish children back to their birth parents. If foster care works as it is designed to, that sacrifice will lead to goodbyes.

The tension can be brutal. It’s also profoundly Christlike.

Holly Taylor Coolman, assistant professor of theology at Providence College, the author of ParentingThe Complex and Beautiful Vocation of Raising Children and the adoptive mother of five, including one by way of foster care, said foster care is the best example of the kind of love Christians are called to.

“We’re called to love people and will the good of them, even when it requires self-sacrifice. Maybe even especially when it requires self-sacrifice,” she said. “It’s a kind of hospitality that may be very difficult for the host.”

The two youngest Sanchez boys call their adoptive mother “Mommy Paige” and their birth mother “Mommy H—,” and once poignantly suggested that their birth parents could live in the backyard, so they could visit back and forth.

Mr. Sanchez reminds his sons that it’s good to love your birth parents, and such affection doesn’t hurt him and his wife. What did hurt Mr. Sanchez is seeing times when his boys’ birth parents withdrew affection and didn’t seem to care. This is where the analogy of St. Joseph as a foster father falls short, Dr. Coolman said.

Mr. Sanchez said that when his boys are mad at him, they’ll pointedly ask how their biological parents are doing. He laughs, but also feels the sting. He knows it’s normal for the boys to have conflicted feelings. Dr. Coolman said that those feelings will likely continue throughout the children’s lifetime.

“Foster kids know better than anybody else that there really is an idea of being raised by your bio mother and father. They know it in their bones,” she said. They need to know that people who have not been raised in the so-called perfect family are also beloved and precious and are not fundamentally broken; that their biological family may not be whole, but each member can be a whole person.

“Brokenness is not the ultimate description of who they are,” she said. And yet it is essential for the new parents to affirm the children’s undeniable loss.

The Ties That Bind

The possessiveness of American parenting as described by Mr. Sanchez sometimes leads to stigmas against the foster children themselves. More than half of Americans, for instance, believe that kids are in foster care because they’re juvenile delinquents, not because they were previously in unsafe homes.

Mr. Sanchez said that some Catholics he has met have absorbed unwholesome cultural ideas about heredity or destiny, and they harbor an unspoken fear that when you foster, you’re inviting a problem into your house. “Like they come from bad stock,” Mr. Sanchez said with disgust.

But while people are not their genetics, our biological connections are important. “DNA matters, which means biological ties to parents matter,” said Dr. Coolman. “I think Catholic theology should be ready to stand up and say: These relationships with the person whose DNA you share, or the person in whose body you spend the first nine months of your existence, really matter.”

This reality is an underexplored facet of St. John Paul II’s theology of the body. “You don’t just remove a baby from the body in which [he] lived and act like you’re just taking a baby from a petri dish,” Dr. Coolman said. She added that it was, in fact, at the urging of a social worker at Catholic Charities that the country began to question its practice of closed adoption. Today, approximately 95 percent of adoptions are open adoptions, a practice that works to allow children to maintain a healthy connection to their biological family of origin.

When a child is removed from their home, the smells, the tastes and their whole physical reality changes, and it is a shock to their system. And as they grow, things like their physical appearance and their genetic predispositions will continue to assert themselves. You cannot simply sever the link, and acknowledging that this is so is profoundly Catholic.

But Catholics have a long way to go until foster care is perceived as a central dimension of pro-life activity. While it is true that Christians are twice as likely to foster or adopt as the general population, it ismore often Protestant churches that sponsor foster care ministries, not Catholic parishes.

The theology is lagging, and so are the logistical supports. Catholic foster parents will tell you that while individual clergy members, schools or parishioners may be supportive, it is rare for a Catholic parish to offer robust, organized support for foster families, or even to offer information about how to get involved.

There are some Catholic communities that get it right. In South Bend, Ind., where the Sanchez family now lives, foster care has been unusually integrated into parish life.

“It’s seen as how we participate in the culture of life: Not just by being politically active, but by taking care of each other,” Mr. Sanchez said.

He also said that the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd was a helpful resource. This Montessori-based faith formation program gave the boys a space to talk freely about God and family as they played, and it became a kind of religious play-based therapy.

At one parish the family attended, the congregation had been deliberately instructed on how to behave around foster families. They knew, for example, to give children autonomy by asking, “Who is this you have with you?” rather than asking, “Is this your mom and dad?”

But in other situations, people made clueless blunders, asking in front of the children if their birth parents were on drugs, which provoked long follow-up conversations between Mr. and Mrs. Sanchez and their children.

It Takes a Village

The Sanchez family’s faith was deepened immeasurably by their experience with foster care and adoption, and they constantly relied on their faith to sustain them through the difficult parts. They say their faith has strengthened tenfold since they took that leap.

Mindy Goorchenko’s story went the other way…Read the rest of my cover story for America Magazine

Image: by Matthew Henry (Creative Commons)

What’s for supper? Vol. 404: Serving spoon not found

Happy Friday! Sorry this is so late. I just managed to burn my neck on a pot of spaghetti, which is something I’ve never done before. You see, you’re never too old to learn something new. 

Here’s what we ate this week: 

SATURDAY
Leftover buffet with pizza pockets

Damien and I mainly had leftover lamb curry and rice, but there were plenty of other options. 

Open photo

You can see that this week’s leftovers include taquitos, which I bought to supplement last week’s leftovers. Thank goodness it’s almost Thanksgiving, that blessed time when nobody ever has any ridiculous situations with leftovers. 

SUNDAY
Chicken thigh sandwiches, fries

Sunday I learned that, unlike many of my lady friends, my yard is absolutely bristling with iron. After Mass, I went over the driveway several times with a magnet, because we had heaped up the demolished porch materials there and I didn’t want any more flat tires this year. Apparently you can buy a long magnet on a stick designed especially for this purpose; but that didn’t occur to me, so I used my fishing magnet on a cord, and probably looked like I was dowsing for water or aligning the dirt chakras or something as I shuffled back and forth, slowly swinging my magnet and scowling at the ground. I did find a FEW nails

Open photo

and also, as I said, lots of miscellaneous bits and pieces that stuck to the magnet. So that was kind of neat. 

Then I girded my loins and tackled Corrie’s room while Elijah took her and the others to see The Wild Robot. I used this room rescue method and it took about three-and-a-half hours. I didn’t find anything especially interesting up there, which in this context is a very good thing, and she was gratifyingly grateful when she got back and could see the rug again. 

I was pretty wiped out by evening, and I just gonna heat up some chicken burgers, but I had already taken the chicken thighs out of the freezer early in the day back when I was younger, so I went ahead and made these chicken sandwiches. They’re not hard at all to make, and I was glad to be rewarded for all my hard work with this highly yummy sandwich. 

Open photo

Heavily seasoned chicken thighs (I used Tony Cachere’s) browned slowly, and then you set some cheese to melt on the chicken and quickly blister up some whole shishito peppers. Serve on soft rolls with sliced red onions and BBQ sauce. So tasty.

MONDAY
Korean beef bowl, rice, sesame broccoli 

Monday, poor Lucy had all her wisdom teeth removed. Even more excitingly, the appointment turned out to be 45 minutes earlier than I thought it was. Lucy is pretty unflappable, but I am exceedingly flappable. I’m basically an entire aviary’s worth of flappability. BUT we got there before it was too too late, and then when we got home again, I got dressed. Truly, one cannot worry about what the oral surgeon’s reception staff thinks of one. That is no way to live. 

Eventually I pulled myself together and made some rice and Korean beef bowl.

Jump to Recipe

Fresh garlic and ginger, red pepper flakes, soy sauce, and brown sugar. Can’t go wrong. 

Then it was my night to clean the kitchen. I always start with the fruit and work my way around the kitchen until I get to the dishes. I buy lots of fruit every Saturday, and the grocery put-away kid just slings bags of new fruit on top of old fruit; so on Mondays, I sort out what’s left and toss anything that’s gone bad, give everything a good wipe-down, and just do some general fruit organization. I don’t know if weekly fruit organization is a task that other people have, but it’s kind of a big deal around here.

This week, we had SO many old withered apples, I think maybe still left over from apple picking, that I couldn’t make myself throw them away or compost them; so I started some applesauce, with some vague idea of kids happily eating bowls of warm applesauce for breakfast, which is silly on a number of levels. 

I had just bought an absolutely enormous new stock pot, so I quartered the apples (and also a few peaches and plums, while I was fruit sorting)

simmering in that with a little water, and when it reduced long enough, I moved it to the crock pot and set it to cook overnight. 

TUESDAY
Roast pork ribs, applesauce, sweet potato soufflé (?)

Smelled pretty nice in the morning. 

Not nice enough to eat yet, though, because, duh, I still had to process it, and our mornings are a lot of things, but they are not generally full of free time in which one could process applesauce. Also I had been a little nervous about burning and ruining the applesauce again, so I actually put too much water in there. SO, I drained some out, ran the remaining fruit through the food mill to remove the cores, seeds, and peels, and let it continue cooking uncovered for quite a while before it reduced down to actual applesauce. I threw in some butter and cinnamon and a teeny bit of salt, but decided to leave it unsweetened. Turned out nice! Good and dusky. 

Nothing like warm, homemade applesauce. Some of the kids did have some for a snack when they got home from school, which made me happy. 

We had roast pork ribs for the main thing (just salt and pepper, roasted under a hot broiler and turned once),

and then I had these big cans of sweet potato taking up space in the cabinet.

Princella! What even is that. 

Having no other ideas, I decided to try the recipe on the side of the can.

It’s kind of a dated recipe, I guess, almost a soufflé or a custard. You drain and mash the sweet potatoes and mix them with eggs, milk, brown sugar, salt, and cinnamon, and put that in a buttered casserole dish. Then you top that with a thick batter of butter, flour, and more brown sugar. It’s also supposed to have nuts in the topping, but I didn’t have any nuts. Then you bake it. 

I halved the sugar in the potato part, because it just sounded like too much dang sugar; but I kept the top very sweet, because I like sugar. It turned out lovely and fluffy, really closer to a dessert than a vegetable side dish, even with less sugar than the recipe called for (and that’s why I decided not to sweeten the applesauce). It was honestly almost like pumpkin pie, but with the crust on top. The texture was very tender, almost like bread pudding. 

It did take almost twice as long to cook as it said on the can. I did make a double recipe, but I was still a little surprised at that. 

The rest of the family thought it was fine at best. They are so weird. They don’t like Jello, they don’t like candied sweet potatoes. Some of them don’t like marshmallows! Or pudpding! Just plain nuts. Although I have to confess, I’ve had a completely out-of-control sweet tooth lately, and I’m about three days away from swizzling a stick of butter around in a bowl of sugar and eating it like a candy bar. So who knows if this is actually good or not. (It is.)

WEDNESDAY
Chicken burgers, chips, veggies and dip

Wednesday I saw Millie, and she’s doing well! I truly aspire to be half as energetic as she is, and she’s ninety. I was telling her about various projects, and she said, “You’re like me; you’re a pusher.” That made me feel pretty good.  

I did go ahead and serve those chicken burgers. Poor Damien has been driving to Manchester and Concord, sometimes both, every day all week long, covering trials, so he’s exhausted and we’re missing him. 

THURSDAY
Kielbasa and red potatoes, biscuits

Bunch o’ doctor appointments, boo, plus an especially egregious run-around from the people in charge of putting medical things into computers, booooooo. All week, I had been intending to pick up cabbage or Brussels sprouts or something to cook up along with the potatoes and kielbasa, but despite going to the store 426 times, I never did. So I made the best vegetable of all: Biscuits. 

Here’s my biscuit recipe, which I have tweaked a bit since last time I posted it:

Jump to Recipe

I was pretty pleased to have two big hot trays of food coming out at the same time. 

Here’s the recipe for the potatoes and kielbasa.

Jump to Recipe

I sometimes serve all or part of the sauce as a dipping sauce, but this time I dumped it all on halfway through cooking, and it turned out nice. 

and then I fell asleep on the couch. I’m too old for this! For what, I don’t know. I’m just too old. 

FRIDAY
Spaghetti

I have another doctor story from this morning, and the short version is that I didn’t get any coffee until 10:00 because I needed a test, and it was really sad. Then, after three days of me calling to ask if I really truly needed the test, I called one more time in the hospital parking lot, and they said, oh, no, you don’t actually need the test. So then I got some coffee. That’s it, that’s the story. I never really woke up, though. Made some spaghetti mostly in my sleep, and the kids are eating it and watching Frasier, and I’m writing in my sleep, if you didn’t notice. And now my story is all told!

If you’re one of my editors, I AM working on it. It’s almost done and I’ll have it to you asap. As soon as I find the sesame seeds. 

Korean Beef Bowl

A very quick and satisfying meal with lots of flavor and only a few ingredients. Serve over rice, with sesame seeds and chopped scallions on the top if you like. You can use garlic powder and powdered ginger, but fresh is better. The proportions are flexible, and you can easily add more of any sauce ingredient at the end of cooking to adjust to your taste.

Ingredients

  • 1 cup brown sugar (or less if you're not crazy about sweetness)
  • 1 cup soy sauce
  • 1 Tbsp red pepper flakes
  • 3-4 inches fresh ginger, minced
  • 6-8 cloves garlic, minced
  • 3-4 lb2 ground beef
  • scallions, chopped, for garnish
  • sesame seeds for garnish

Instructions

  1. In a large skillet, cook ground beef, breaking it into bits, until the meat is nearly browned. Drain most of the fat and add the fresh ginger and garlic. Continue cooking until the meat is all cooked.

  2. Add the soy sauce, brown sugar, and red pepper flakes the ground beef and stir to combine. Cook a little longer until everything is hot and saucy.

  3. Serve over rice and garnish with scallions and sesame seeds. 

 

Sesame broccoli

Ingredients

  • broccoli spears
  • sesame seeds
  • sesame oil
  • soy sauce

Instructions

  1. Preheat broiler to high.

    Toss broccoli spears with sesame oil. 

    Spread in shallow pan. Drizzle with soy sauce and sprinkle with sesame seeds

    Broil for six minutes or longer, until broccoli is slightly charred. 

 

One-pan kielbasa, cabbage, and red potato dinner with mustard sauce

This meal has all the fun and salt of a wiener cookout, but it's a tiny bit fancier, and you can legit eat it in the winter. 

Ingredients

  • 3-4 lbs kielbasa
  • 3-4 lbs red potatoes
  • 1-2 medium cabbages
  • (optional) parsley for garnish
  • salt and pepper and olive oil

mustard sauce (sorry, I make this different each time):

  • mustard
  • red wine if you like
  • honey
  • a little olive oil
  • salt and pepper
  • fresh garlic, crushed

Instructions

  1. Preheat the oven to 400. 

    Whisk together the mustard dressing ingredients and set aside. Chop parsley (optional).

    Cut the kielbasa into thick coins and the potatoes into thick coins or small wedges. Mix them up with olive oil, salt, and pepper and spread them in a shallow pan. 

    Cut the cabbage into "steaks." Push the kielbasa and potatoes aside to make room to lay the cabbage down. Brush the cabbage with more olive oil and sprinkle with more salt and pepper. It should be a single layer of food, and not too crowded, so it will brown well. 

    Roast for 20 minutes, then turn the food as well as you can and roast for another 15 minutes.  

    Serve hot with dressing and parsley for a garnish. 

 

moron biscuits

Because I've been trying all my life to make nice biscuits and I was too much of a moron, until I discovered this recipe. It has egg and cream of tartar, which is weird, but they come out great every time. Flaky little crust, lovely, lofty insides, rich, buttery taste.

Ingredients

  • 6 cups flour
  • 6 Tbsp sugar
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 2 Tbsp + 2 tsp baking powder
  • 1 tsp cream of tartar
  • 1-1/2 cups (3 sticks) butter, chilled
  • 2 eggs
  • 2 cups milk

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 450.

  2. In a bowl, combine the flour, sugar, salt, baking powder, and cream of tartar.

  3. Grate the chilled butter with a box grater into the dry ingredients.

  4. Stir in the milk and egg and mix until just combined. Don't overwork it. It's fine to see little bits of butter.

  5. On a floured surface, knead the dough 10-15 times. If it's very sticky, add a little flour.

  6. With your hands, press the dough out until it's about an inch thick. Cut biscuits. Depending on the size, you can probably get 20 medium-sized biscuits with this recipe.

  7. Grease a pan and bake for 10-15 minutes or until tops are golden brown.