First Day in Venice, July 28, 2013

Train from Mestre to Santa Lucia Station, Venice, stroll the streets, meet Leona, shopping at the Dollar store!,
taking the vaporetto to Saint Mark Square....marvelous evening!

Attending ICSA Conference in Arlington on Sat 20 April on Cult-like Methods in Teen Rehab

Because I am interested in the issue and because I support I.C.S.A. a very professional organization providing research, support and dissemination of the extent of all kinds of cult-like and High Control relationships or groups
See link


Abuses in the Troubled Teen Industry

Saturday, April 20, 2013—10:00 AM – 5:30 PM

Comfort Inn, Pentagon City, 2480 South Glebe Rd., Bldg. 2, Arlington, VA, US, 22206
Phone: (703) 682–5500 Fax: (703) 682-5505 Exit 7B (Glebe Rd.), I-395. Free parking.
International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA) and Community
Alliance for the Ethical Treatment of Youth (CAFETY) are cosponsors of
a one-day conference that will bring experts together with individuals
harmed in teen treatment programs.

Some teen treatment programs have used psychological control
techniques commonly associated with manipulative, high-demand
groups, often called “cults.” Sometimes such techniques have
contributed to the psychological, physical, or sexual abuse of teens
that the programs were supposed to help.

The conference will include the following talks, followed by discussion:
“Breaking the Chains”
By Christine Cole

 Overview of the Cultic Influences in the Troubled Teen Industry (William Goldberg)
 Clips from Surviving Straight Inc., a Documentary (Kelly Matthews)
 The Great Drug War (Arnold Trebach)
 Survivor Interviews: Surviving Straight Inc., a Documentary
 Personal Story (Sunny Linkfield and Ethel Linkfield)
 Cultic Practices in Residential Care and Applicable Human-Rights Conventions (Katherine Whitehead)
 How Do We Really Help Troubled Teens? What Science Tells Us (Steve Eichel)
 Overcoming and Healing After the Abuse (William Goldberg)
 Healing Through Advocacy (Kathy Moya)

Space is limited, so please REGISTER ASAP. The registration fee is $30, payable to ICSA.
Registration Form
Name(s):
Address:
City/State/Zip/Country:
Phone(s)/Fax:
E-mail (Important!):
Payment: [ ] Check [ ] Visa [ ] MasterCard
cc No: Exp. Date:
Register Online: http://icsahome.com/infoserv_respond/event_conferences_workshops.asp
Mail: ICSA Box 2265, Bonita Springs, FL 34133 E-mail: mail@ics

U2's Religious Music, I Still haven't found....Gospel version

This came across my desk on the Wednesday of Holy Week, "Spy Wednesday" my mother used to call it...And it had its Irish name too.

Visiting with Maciel Survivor, Arturo Jurado, in Queretaro

My wife Aura, Arturo & Chela

Tuve el gustisimo de volver a ver a Arturo y a su esposo, Chela, durante mi viaje por el Camino de la Independencia en Mexico del 16 al 25 de febrero ppdo.

It was with great pleasure that I was able to meet again with Arturo Jurado, a Maciel Survivor and an active member of the group that brought him to justice in the Vatican. Aura and I enjoyed our time with Arturo and Chela in Queretaro y later at their home in San Miguel de Allende.

Desde nuestro hotel primero en la calle 16 de Septiembre bajando hacia el Jardin Zenea...almuerzo con Arturo y Chela y accompanados de Jose Antonio Perez Olvera, otro testigo contra Maciel.

.lunch with Arturo, Chela, and we we joined by another Maciel survivor, Jose Antonio Perez Olvera....later Aura and I strolled the safe streets of Querataro and watched couple dance the "danzon" around the band stand into the night.

Off to Tipperary -No, Queretaro, Central Mexico- in the Morning!

Enjoy this beautiful web page by the Mexico Tourist Board

Native American Saint, the Lily of the Mohawks.

Those Catholics who know their history and the importance of Native Americans in America -after all, it is their country- are excited by the first canonization of a Native American woman.

Today The Native American Times proudly announced this

VATICAN CITY (AP) – Jake Finkbonner was so close to death after flesh-eating bacteria infected him through a cut on his lip that his parents had last rites performed and were discussing donating the 5-year-old's tiny organs.

Jake's 2006 cure from the infection was deemed medically inexplicable by the Vatican, the “miracle” needed to propel a 17th century Native American, Kateri Tekakwitha, on to sainthood. Kateri will be canonized on Sunday along with six other people, the first Native American from what is now the U.S. to receive the honor.

Jake is fully convinced, as is the Catholic Church, that the prayers his family and community offered to God through Kateri's intercession, including the placement of a Kateri relic on Jake's leg, were responsible for his survival.

Jake, now 12 and an avid basketball player and cross-country runner, will be present at the canonization, along with hundreds of members of his own Lummi tribe from northwest Washington state and indigenous communities across the U.S. and Canada who have converged on Rome to honor one of their own. It's a ceremony the Catholic Church hopes will encourage Native Americans to keep to their Christian faith amid continued resentment among some that Catholicism was imposed on them by colonial-era missionaries centuries ago.

“I believe everybody has a purpose on this earth,” Jake's mother Elsa Finkbonner said this week soon after the family arrived in Rome for the ceremony. “I think this Sunday Jake will define his purpose, and that's to make Kateri a saint.”

Jake, a poised, lanky kid who just got his braces off, seems perfectly at ease with his role in the whole thing, gracious and grateful to the doctors who performed 29 surgeries to save his life and reconstruct his face.

“It's a really special thing,” Jake told The Associated Press, flanked by his parents on a hotel terrace sofa. “We've never been to Rome, and especially meeting the pope? It'll be an experience of a lifetime.”

Besides Kateri, Pope Benedict XVI will declare another American a saint Sunday, Mother Marianne Cope, a 19th century Franciscan nun from Utica, New York – near where Kateri lived two centuries earlier – who cared for lepers exiled to Hawaii's Kalaupapa Peninsula. Another new saint is Pedro Calungsod, a Filipino teenager who was killed in 1672 along with his Jesuit missionary priest by natives resisting their conversion efforts.

The Catholic Church creates saints to hold up models for the faithful, convinced that their lives – even lived hundreds of years ago – are still relevant to today's Catholics. The complicated saint-making procedure requires that the Vatican certify a “miracle” was performed through the intercession of the candidate – a medically inexplicable cure that can be directly linked to the prayers offered by the faithful. One miracle is needed for beatification, a second for canonization.

In Jake's case, Kateri was already an important figure for Catholics in the Lummi tribe, of which his father Donny is a member. A carved wooden statue sits in the church on the Lummi reservation near Bellingham, Washington, 25 miles (40 kilometers) south of the Canadian border, where Jake's grandparents worshipped and where Donny remembers being told of Kateri's story as a child.

Known as the “Lily of the Mohawks,” Kateri was born in 1656 to a pagan Iroquois father and an Algonquin Christian mother in what is today upstate New York. Her parents and only brother died when she was 4 during a smallpox epidemic that left her badly scarred and with impaired eyesight. She went to live with her uncle, a Mohawk, and was baptized Catholic by Jesuit missionaries. But she was ostracized and persecuted by other natives for her faith, and she died in what is now Canada when she was 24.

The Rev. Tim Sauer was the Finkbonner's parish priest in Ferndale, Washington – as well as the pastor on the Lummi reservation – when Jake cut his lip while playing basketball on Saturday, Feb. 11, 2006. The necrotizing fasciitis bacteria that entered Jake's body through the cut immediately began spreading, and by the time Sauer arrived at Seattle Children's Hospital where Jake was airlifted two days later, Donny and Elsa Finkbonner were preparing to bury their son.

“At that point, we were desperate, and we were looking for anyone's help that would help our son,” Donny said, recalling how doctors had said there wasn't much else for them to do but pray, and that they had come to terms with the possibility that their oldest of three children might not survive the week.

“We wanted Jake back with us desperately,” he recalled. “But we were willing to give him up” to God.

Sauer, who performed the last rites ritual on Jake that Wednesday – four days after he cut his lip – said he immediately urged the Finkbonners and the congregation back on the reservation to pray to Kateri, thinking their shared Native American heritage and scarring diseases were relevant.

He said he did so first and foremost to save Jake, but also because he thought that Native Americans could use a “boost of faith” if one of their own were held up as a saint. Indigenous Catholics in the U.S. and Canada, he said, increasingly find themselves ostracized and criticized within their communities for embracing and retaining the Christian faith spread by imperial colonizers.

“There's been a growing sense of a return to Native American spirituality on reservations, which are good things, but at the same time along with that has been some criticism that native people should let go of Christianity because that was brought by the `white man' and should go back to their own native culture entirely,” he said.

He said Kateri represents a perfect model for indigenous Catholics today, someone who resisted the ostracization of fellow natives and kept the faith.

For the devoutly Catholic Finkbonners, prayer was all they had left after Jake's doctors tried unsuccessfully for two weeks to stop the bacteria's spread. Jake was in a drug-induced coma for most of that time and says he doesn't remember much, a few memories “here and there, not all of it.”

“Every day it would seem the news would get worse,” Donny recalled. “I remember the last day that we met with the whole group of doctors, Elsa didn't even want to hear. She just got behind me and was holding on.”

But rather than bad news, the doctors said the infection had stopped. “It was like a volcano that was erupting, and they opened him up and it was gone. It had stopped. It was a pretty amazing day,” Donny said.

It took the Finkbonners several years to realize that the turning point had come a day after a friend of the family – a nun named after Kateri – had visited them in the hospital, prayed with them and placed a relic of the soon-to-be saint on Jake's leg.

“It took years for us to look at the calendar and recall that this is the day she came, this is the day she put the relic on, this is the day the infection stopped,” Elsa said. “As the years of the investigation have gone on, little bits and pieces of puzzle seem to fall into place, and that's where it all makes sense now as to why Jake's story turned out so big.”

Jake, who bears the scars of his ordeal, seems all too happy to be the center of attention this weekend. But he seems keen to move on from his celebrity. He has basketball tryouts when he gets back home and his studies – he wants to be a plastic surgeon when he grows up. “Kateri was placed on this earth, and she has interceded on many people's behalf, she has defined her purpose,” Elsa said. “I think Jake has bigger, larger plans in store for him.”

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Follow Nicole Winfield at www.twitter.com/nwinfield

Sacre Coeur and Montrmartre, Paris

on Picaza the snaps