Catholic leaders and observers of the Vatican witnessed “a major step forward” for the Catholic Church Wednesday after Pope Francis indicated his support for civil unions for same-sex couples, breaking with the church’s long-held official teachings.
In the documentary “Francesco,” which premiered at the Rome Film Festival Wednesday, the pope called for a “civil union law” to ensure gay and lesbian couples have the same legal rights as married straight couples.
“Homosexual people have a right to be in a family,” he said in the film. “They are children of God and have a right to a family. Nobody should be thrown out or made miserable over it.”
Couples should be “legally covered” under a law allowing civil unions, Francis said, adding, “I stood up for that.”
As Archbishop of Buenos Aires, the pope supported legal protections for gay couples while opposing same-sex marriage.
While Francis did not indicate that the church would change its thinking on marriages any time soon, his statement in the film—and a scene in which he encouraged a gay couple to attend the Catholic Church with their children—was a far cry from guidance released by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 2003.
Regarding “Considerations regarding proposals to give legal recognition to unions between homosexual persons,” the church—then led by Francis’s predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI—wrote, “The Church teaches that respect for homosexual persons cannot lead in any way to approval of homosexual behavior or to legal recognition of homosexual unions.”
Jesuit priest James Martin tweeted that the pope’s appearance in the film “is a major step forward in the church’s support for LGBTQ people,” which could have positive effects on the treatment of LGBTQIA people around the world.
Pope Francis's support for same-sex civil unions is a major step forward in the church's support of LGBTQ people. It is in keeping with his pastoral approach to LGBT people, including LGBT Catholics, and sends a strong signal to countries where the church has opposed such laws.— James Martin, SJ (@JamesMartinSJ) October 21, 2020
What makes Pope Francis comments supporting same-sex civil unions today so momentous? First, he is saying them as Pope, not Archbishop of Buenos Aires. Second, he is clearly supporting, not simply tolerating, civil unions. Third, he is saying it on camera, not privately. Historic— James Martin, SJ (@JamesMartinSJ) October 21, 2020
U.S. Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), who is Catholic, applauded the pope’s remarks.
As a Catholic, I’m pleased Pope Francis is pushing the Church into the 21st Century.
A reminder of what Jesus said about homosexuals: “ “.
It was human irrationality & ignorance that led to discrimination against LGBTQ, not the Gospels, which talked about love. https://t.co/54FDbVqTRm— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) October 21, 2020
Since being elected to replace Benedict in 2013, Pope Francis has been outspoken about a number of social issues and progressive causes, indicating his desire to lead a church which defends the rights of all people and which speaks out against numerous forms of injustice.
Earlier this month, the pope condemned “the destructive effects of the empire of money” and skyrocketing inequality during the coronavirus pandemic, and he has spoken several times in recent years about the need to end fossil fuel extraction in order to save the planet.
The pope also called on the church to keep “open doors” for divorced people who remarry; held a private meeting with a Diego Neria Lejarraga, a transgender man, and reportedly embraced Lejarraga when he asked whether there was a place for him in the church; and said shortly after he was named head of the Catholic Church that he would welcome gay Catholics—in contrast with his predecessor, who referred to homosexuality as an “intrinsic moral evil.”
“If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” said Francis in July 2013.
This article first appeared on Common Dreams. You can read it here.
Lecturer of Art, Rochester Institute of Technology
Glass as a material is full of contradictions. Depending on the form and use, glass can be fragile or strong, opaque or transparent, rough or smooth. The studios my colleagues and I teach and learn in, as glass instructors, echo this abundance of physical opposites. These environments are simultaneously immersive, complex, seductive and demanding.
When the studio is in action, you might hear glass breaking, hot metal being quenched in water, glassblowing pipes rolling on the workbench rails, and some good tunes on the stereo. You might smell hot beeswax and burning newspaper. You might feel a bit of waste glass under your shoe or the intense heat from the furnaces and a breeze from a well-placed fan. Glassblowers learn to listen, to feel and to find some focus within and among the kinetic.
The constant stimuli of the glass studio may not seem anything like a sterile science lab, and yet glass artists need to accrue knowledge of physics and chemistry to achieve any kind of control with this dynamic material. They must choose a material with the desired properties and during the process judge factors such as heat and malleability.
Glass as a material
At Rochester Institute of Technology, where I help run the glass program, we primarily use two types of glasses. In our hot glass studio we melt “soft” glass. This glass is specifically formulated to be melted in a furnace and used by the glassblower. It’s a combination of fine mesh silica sand, soda ash and lime, with small amounts of a few additional ingredients that keep the glass beautiful when it’s at its top temperature of 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit (1,204 degrees Celsius).
In our flameworking studio, we use a borosilicate glass. You might recognize this glass as the brand Pyrex made in Corning, New York. This is a super heat-resistant glass. It melts at a higher temperature than soft glass and arrives to our students in preformed rods that they can melt and shape by torch in our flameworking studio. The differences in chemistry really change how these glasses look and behave.
Pyrex cookware is made out of a specially formulated, heat-resistant type of glass called borosilicate.Picofluidicist/Wikimedia Commons
Glass, from a material science perspective, is categorized as an amorphous solid, meaning that glass’s molecules are arranged in a near-random pattern and there is no sharp melting point. Rather, glass gradually softens over a wide temperature range.
Gathering glass
Once you’ve adjusted to the chaos of the studio, it’s time to start working.
We have two furnaces in our hot glass studio, where we work with soft glass, so anytime during the school year there is between 700 to 1,200 pounds of glass. It’s kept in the furnace at its molten state (2,200 degrees F or 1,204 degrees C), ready to be gathered and transformed.
Glass artists heat up their glass in a furnace so that it’s molten and easy to mold.AP Photo/Keith Srakocic
When we work with the material, transforming it with tools and breath and heat, it needs to be kept in a workable heat zone – probably between 1,100 and 2,000 F (593 and 1,094 C). When the glass dips below that range, we perceive it as solid, though at the molecular level it is still dynamic and acting more like a liquid.
To make anything – a sculpture, a tumbler, a celestial magical orb or a pumpkin – you start by gathering glass out of the furnace on a metal rod. Once you’ve gathered your glass, you start making decisions.
An artist works in the Glass Hot Shop at RIT. When glass is in its molten state, the artist can shape it and blow into it.Elizabeth Lamark/RIT
You might ask yourself: What tools do I need to begin to shape and transform this glass into the object I have in mind? If you wait too long and the glass begins cooling down, you’ll need to reheat it to reintroduce malleability, allowing you to continue working it without breaking it.
A big part of glasswork is moving between the reheating chamber and the bench, where the artist uses tools to move and stretch the molten glass into the desired shape. You’ll need to alternate between these two stations many times.
Glassblowing is a team activity. I have physical and intellectual support from my colleagues: breath from their lungs, protection from the heat, additional bits of glass brought from the furnace to add to my object. We almost never work alone.
So, say I want to make a very basic clear tumbler. This is a simple conceptual object – utilitarian, domestic and intimate. It is also a tricky one to make well: too heavy and it feels bad in the hand, too thick at the lip and it dribbles when you drink, too thin at the bottom and it will break before it is complete.
Maybe I want to design it so it is slightly conical: wider at the bottom than the top, so it’s less likely to tip over. Maybe I want it to have a little indent for the user’s thumb as a gentle invitation to her hand. First I make my design: I draw it. I share it with my team so they can predict the process and the object’s needs. Then we begin.
Working with physics
I gather glass out of the furnace, let it cool a bit, then introduce a bubble in the glass by blowing into the pipe, the hollow rod that attaches to the object I’m making. I reheat, sit at the bench and begin to shape the glass using both gravity and the Jills, a cooling and shaping tool. The Jills is kind of like a large pair of tongs. It hasn’t changed much in design for 2,000 years.
I ask for some air from my teammate, and she blows into the pipe while I’m shaping the glass. The bubble transforms into a pill shape, slightly wider at the bottom. I constrict the area right in front of the pipe. I’m focusing on shape and heat, taking care to not let the glass get too cold. If the glass drops to about 1,000 F (538 C), it enters a danger zone. If it’s not yet finished, it needs to be warmed up in the reheating chamber; or if it is done, put away in a kiln to cool slowly.
If glass cools too quickly, the molecules freeze into a chaotic pattern, which causes stresses that result in fracture. To combat this volatility, when the glass object is done and ready to be cooled, we place the object in an annealer: a kiln set to a resting temperature of 930 F (500 C).
This temperature is like a Goldilocks zone for our glass: It’s not so hot that the glass will deform, but not so cool that the glass will stress and break. Once the kilns are full, a computer guide takes them down to room temperature over about 10 hours.
As I continue to work on my cup, I get more heat, focusing on the very end of the bubble – the part that will be the base of the cup. I then sit down and have another member of my team flatten the bottom with a wooden paddle while I tool the glass with the Jills to keep its shape. The cycle continues on and on.
The process is quick, but also there are so many little steps that it would take nearly a full-length book to describe them all. When asked how long it takes to make a tumbler, I’ll often answer, “About 10 years or 10 minutes, depending on how you think about time and material knowledge.” This is both glib and true. Glass demands attention, dedication and a willingness to make connections between physics and chemistry and your observable experiences. It is a highly challenging and equally rewarding material to work with and alongside. I count myself very lucky.
Along with the pumpkins and costumes, the candles and cobwebs, Halloween is all about storytelling. From tales of haunted houses to accounts of demonic possession, ghost stories are part of the holiday’s appeal.
As a professor at the University of Maine who specializes in ghost stories, I’ve thought a lot about what makes one unforgettable. My field research has taken me from the coast of Maine to the Amazon jungle, but some factors remain constant in an unforgettable tale.
One factor is what I call “creep value,” which includes the scare factor but also the elements of a story that might be simply unsettling or uncanny.
Take, for starters, the ghost of Catherine’s Hill along the Blacks Woods Road in Maine. The story warns that, against all intuition, even a lone driver at night must always stop and offer the phantom woman a ride. If not, as the story goes, she will appear when least expected in the back seat of the car to cause a fatal accident.
But there is more to account for than creep value in an unforgettable ghost story. These stories can keep alive the memory of a dark past. In my research I have come across tales that preserve memories of injustices that might otherwise have been forgotten.
Dark histories
One story, about a ghost ship that can be heard but never seen, preserves the little-known history of the smuggling of enslaved people.
A full moon over Seal Harbor.Marcus Librizzi
The legend goes that on foggy nights, during the full moon, those standing at the Cooksey Drive Overlook in Seal Harbor, just outside Acadia National Park, can hear the slaves in the hold of a sinking ship crying for help.
The story goes back to the Pride of the Seas, a ship that smuggled enslaved Africans into the United States after the trans-Atlantic slave trade had been abolished but slavery remained legal. The account specifies that the smugglers scuttled the ship to evade the law. In ghost stories that circulate by word of mouth on Mount Desert Island, the screams of those left behind can still be heard.
Pennsylvania coal miners offer another example of past grievances passed down in the form of ghost stories. At the sites of deadly accidents, people have reported the sound of a pickaxe or the groans of a dying man. An extensive archive contains multiple accounts of coal miners witnessing ghostly knocking, disembodied voices and apparitions of mangled men. One story involves an innocent coal miner, condemned to death in 1877, who left a handprint in his cell at the Carbon County Jail that no amount of sanding or paint has been able to erase.
Today, it is widely known that coal miners of the 19th and early 20th centuries experienced ruthless exploitation and hazardous working conditions. Years ago, their plight went unrecognized in official histories and government policies, but ghost stories helped keep these experiences in the collective memory.
A South American perspective
When I collected ghost stories in South America, the same pattern held true: Some tales preserved history that would otherwise be lost.
In the Amazon jungle of northern Brazil, I traveled to a gloomy site where people, over several generations, have claimed to see the spirits of young men in the murky water. These stories keep alive injustices from the 19th century involving enslavement of Indigenous people. The location was a former sugarcane plantation notorious for cruelty, and accounts of apparitions in the water are a reminder of this history.
In Rio de Janeiro a well-known ghost story involves the apparition of a young girl in a mansion known as the Castelinho do Flamengo. All the accounts of her story agree that this young heiress, named Maria de Lourdes Fernandes, witnessed the deaths of her parents; her guardian then locked her up and drove her to suicide to get her inheritance.
Her soul is said to remain in the mansion she tried to escape. The tale is not just about an individual tragedy but one that exposes inequities involving the mistreatment of juveniles and the corrupting influence of power.
The past that isn’t past
Ghost stories don’t simply recount memories – they can revive them and bring the past back into the present.
The unsolved 1898 murder of a 52-year-old woman, Sarah Ware, in Bucksport, Maine, illustrates how ghost stories can have historical significance and flood the present with the past.
In the 1980s a woman and her daughter began having nightmares about a long-haired woman in a long dress struggling to rise from the bottom of a lake. When they realized they were having the same recurring dream, they partnered with an author, and their research led them to a conclusion that the apparition was the ghost of Ware.
Official records document that when Ware’s body was recovered it was badly decomposed and her head had completely detached. Her head remained in the courthouse until the 1990s, when it was buried in Ware’s grave. According to local lore, however, Ware’s headless body is not in that grave but instead in her original grave, now located at the bottom of Silver Lake. In the oral history of the area, workers moved only the tombstones when they flooded the paupers’ graveyard – the cemetery for the poor – to make a reservoir in the 1930s.
Ware’s ghost is believed to have appeared again in 2006. When a young woman went scuba diving in Silver Lake in Bucksport, she reported seeing a woman in a long dress struggling to rise from the bottom of the lake. When she swam over to help, the figure’s hair floated back with the movement of the water to reveal she was a faceless apparition. The sighting of the faceless ghost revived the history of the unsolved murder all over again.
Ware’s case highlights the violence and injustice and their connection to gender and social class in 19th-century Maine. Missing evidence and recanted testimonies suggest that powerful men might have interfered with the investigation to hide their own complicity in the murder. As an independent woman of the time, Ware was the subject of gossip, and the treatment of her body shows how social class affects even the honoring of the dead. As a ghost story, the history of Sarah Ware is not past but rather part of the here and now.
So when you’re out and about telling ghost stories this Halloween, remember that the unforgettable ones are all about creep value in the context of a dark history that flows back in again like the tide.
There is nothing wrong with politeness and a particular point of view, unless, of course, your interpretation of kindness is different from everyone else’s. Case in point? Boomers and every other generation.
What is it about Boomer energy that can just rub people the wrong way sometimes? It’s quite common for different age groups to have different needs and habits, and perhaps the Boomers you know may find 20% tips an absolute must, yet the concept of a service fee infuriating. Maybe they feel there is only one perfect way to load a dishwasher. Maybe job loyalty does have value. Whatever the topic, Boomers are likely to have a certain opinion about it that they feel is the best.
Finding ways to communicate and connect are important dynamics to building community and bridging the generation gap, and sometimes understanding what Boomer actions bother the other generations can help start a dialogue. VegOut Magazine described seven habits that may seem thoughtful to Boomers, but are actually emotionally taxing to younger generations.
Calling whenever they want
Boomers largely grew up in an age of landline phones that often ran unexpectedly. Instead of the horror that Millennials experience from an unsolicited phone call, Boomers find them normal and inviting. A reach out to say “Hello!” means they care and are interested in your life.
Younger generations feel it’s an uninvited threat. Where’s the heads up text? Nothing triggers anxiety like an unexpected ring.
Solution: How about everyone just chill? Older people can learn to text first. Younger people can acknowledge they don’t have to answer the phone, and often don’t anyway.
The unexpected visit
Boomers grew up in an age of the unannounced visit. There was a time when neighbors just rang a doorbell and offered up some extra muffins, freshly baked. Today, people guard their homes with intensity. A doorbell ring is terrifying, especially if pizza hasn’t been ordered.
Solution: Boomers, just send a text first. It’s not that complicated. Younger generations, you can always hide in the closet and pretend you’re not home.
Comments on personal appearance
Into today’s world, unsolicited comments on someone’s appearance seem a bit risky. And yet, Boomers never seem afraid to comment on someone’s weight loss or ask questions like, “Why aren’t you smiling?” These questions and comments were once considered tools of connection. It showed interest and concern for the mental and physical health of friends and people in general.
Younger people guard all aspects of “self” and “body image.” It’s dangerous territory leading toward hurt feelings and possible backlash.
Solution: If you don’t have anything to say nice, don’t say it. Even if you do, probably don’t say it.
With age comes wisdom, yet sometimes nobody wants to hear it. Knowledge acquired over time and experience is valuable and should be passed on, but in certain contexts. Younger people often find unsolicited advice to be a rude personal attack, so be careful about offering a note no one asked for.
Solution: I had a friend who used to always ask, “Do you want to hear my opinion?” before they shared it. It was a pretty amazing quality that gave me time to prepare for what might be coming. In the end, it’s best to get permission. Simple.
Chain messages
Breaking chains. Image via Canva – Photo by Merydolla
There’s nothing quite like the inspirational chain meme your grandma found. Especially when it was making the rounds eight months ago. Like everyone else, older people benefit from feeling connected. They’re just attempting to get in the digital meta. It’s easy to point out who’s out of the loop when you’re in it.
Solution: Can we all cut one another some slack? Instead of attacks, reconnect and appreciate the meme or image you already saw months ago. Replying with, “Ha, that’s a good one” isn’t that much of a stretch, and it isn’t that much to ask when given an opportunity to share love instead of disdain. I have an aunt who gets concerned when those chain mails say, “Pass this on to 10 people…” I told her to send them my way, because I’m not afraid to dump them in the digital garbage.
Lengthy conversations for business
Boomers have worked networking and building relationships into their business model. A chat about what’s trending is a great way to ease into an important conversation. It’s a way to be polite and build-up camaraderie before the deal is done.
Younger generations don’t want to waste time. A “thumbs up” emoji can be enough to get things going.
Solution: Acumen took a look at getting generations to learn how to connect with one another. They found that “common ground” was crucial for networking. Younger people can work on patience and respecting the time offered by older generations, and Boomers can learn to fire a quick text instead of dragging every conversation into a “life lesson.”
Checking and rechecking replies
Boomers may not be totally confident in how the whole digital world works. It’s not uncommon to receive texts and emails asking, “Did you get that email…” or “Curious on your thoughts of the text I sent.” These follow-ups were designed to show interest and thoroughness. Younger people can just find them bothersome.
Solution: Boomers can learn to not treat texting and emails like a personal journal. It’s okay to be brief and to the point. A short message doesn’t mean someone is being short with you.Speak with People suggested that younger generations can give Boomers the “benefit of the doubt.”
The wrap up
Everyone is trying to fit in the best they can. It can be difficult to adapt and move with the times. Some day, younger people will be a little out of touch with the next generation.
Philosopher and theologian Martin Buber wrote, “All real living is meeting.” The more we can learn to help each other connect, the better. Learning to be curious about other people and their generation instead of dictating will build deeper and more mutual connections.
This article originally appeared 1 year ago. It has been updated.
