"holy anger"

Abbé Pierre died yesterday. If there is such a thing as a "saint", this man clearly deserved the title, but he will never be canonized by the Church. Too excessive.

He wrote that as a young priest, he had sex with a woman, and further infuriated Roman Catholic authorities by advocating gay marriage.

Even Jeanne d'Arc, who finally made saint after waiting 600 years, had never talked that kind of nonsense.

This and (almost) everything else in this remarkable NYTimes obituary of a 20th-century St. Francis almost reads like pure invention; it describes the perfect French or even universal hero of the poor, the homeless, the disenfranchised. And there's recycling in there too!

ADDENDUM: In doing a little searching I've just discovered that l'Abbé was a good friend of this dangerous man.

[image of Jacques Nadeau from Le Devoir]

untitled (vinca) 2006

This image was taken on January 6, just ten days ago, when temperatures hovered near 70 degrees and a gentle rain was falling on our roof garden outside the breakfast room window. Last night the temperature slipped below freezing with an earnestness not seen this winter until now. It finally feels like the planet may have snapped back into its proper orbit, just as we are about to obtain the second moon of a season begun last December 21.