St. Maria Goretti Parish - Articles by Fr. Peterson

You could call this piece "Incident on a Summer Evening", or maybe "Yet Another Reason Why Movie Ticket Sales are Down" (if that is not too many upper case letters.) Let me explain. It was a quiet midweek July night, and I had that rare luxury of no evening appointments in my date book. I knew that Steven Spielberg's version of "War of the Worlds" was out in theaters, and I was anxious to see what he would do with the classic story. The 1953 movie is among my favorites, even if the special effects now seem a bit hokey.
So off to the multiplex I went. I was counting on my choice of an "off" night to guarantee a quiet theater, a rarity nowadays. After I settled into my seat, still recovering from ticket price shock, all was peaceful. A few widely-scattered patrons sat making only the noise of their popcorn and whispered conversations. If only no noisemaking teens showed up, the setting would be perfect for a few hours of escapist fantasy. I could delight in some "popcorn for the brain."
Just as the previews ended, and the feature began, in marched about twenty high schoolers, and I thought to myself "there goes the neighborhood." I am long past my days as a high school teacher when I was armed with full authority to condemn any miscreants to "quasi-eternal punishment." So I just resigned myself to the fact that the onscreen war would be accompanied by adolescent males showing off for their girlfriends with well-placed heckling. Then those same girls would probably let out their patented high-pitched squeals. Having thought all that negativity about them, I had to eat some humble pie. The kids were as quiet as gas flames on a stove.
What did cause disruption was a pair of male adults. Some rows of seats from me sat a "fortysomething" male, complete with his age-inappropriate ponytail and a clinging blonde, who must have started to talk above a whisper just after Tom Cruise met his alien nemesis. Another male, with shorter hair, accompanied by his white-haired mother, reacted to this by asking ponytail, "Would you be quiet? I didn't pay almost ten bucks to hear you." That everybody in the theater heard. Ponytail didn't take the correction very well, and he suggested to the other that he perform an anatomically impossible sexual act upon himself. When patron A suggested he would now have to get the usher, patron B topped his first vulgarity by adding the verb "go" to it. Then patron A left his seat and headed for the lobby. Suddenly, Ponytail's clinging girlfriend relaxed her grip, leapt from her seat and ran down the steps of the so-called stadium seats, presumably to cool matters off. All of this while I, and the baker's dozen others in the theater were trying to watch an over-hyped movie.
The usher arrived, spoke some words of wisdom to Patron B, or Ponytail, who never seemed disturbed by any of this,. Nor did he ever offer an apology for the mess he caused, and the language he used. Fortunately, he quieted down. Patron A never returned to his original seat, as far as I could tell, and stalked out of the place sans mama. The whole incident was not only annoying, but also upsetting, as violence tends to be. The only saving feature was that this all happened early on. I will not have to rent the inevitable DVD.
As I drove home that night, my thoughts were not so much on the movie as on that incident. Mr.Spielberg did a journeyman job with his special effects, and Mr.Cruise was, well, Mr. Cruise. But forget the disappointing film. All I kept thinking about was how those teenagers, who witnessed that offscreen incident would perhaps think the offender was "cool." Worse, they might conclude that vulgarity and violence is how one adult responds to another's fraternal correction.
It was an ironic coincidence that the morning after all this came the carnage in London spilled all over the little screen. Granted, the crime in that fabled city exponentially differed from that spat in a Pennsylvania movie house. Yet violence was the common denominator. How haunting the question: "Will we ever learn Jesus' ways of peace?" I believe the bombs placed in the London underground reflect a mindset that has roots in schoolyard fights. That at least gives us a clue as to where to start the learning process. We have the tools and the power. One of our popular hymns even acts as a catalyst, if we really take in the lyric. After prompting us to sing "Let there be peace on earth", it wisely adds, "but let it begin with me." Food for thought there for parents and anyone concerned with ending the cycle of violence that turns into terror. Meanwhile, don't mind me if I rent any movies I want to see in the future.

Father Leonard N. Peterson

	An Article for August, 2005 You could call this piece "Incident on a Summer Evening", or maybe "Yet Another Reason Why Movie Ticket Sales are Down" (if that is not too many upper case letters.) Let me explain. It was a quiet midweek July night, and I had that rare luxury of no evening appointments in my date book. I knew that Steven Spielberg's version of "War of the Worlds" was out in theaters, and I was anxious to see what he would do with the classic story. The 1953 movie is among my favorites, even if the special effects now seem a bit hokey. So off to the multiplex I went. I was counting on my choice of an "off" night to guarantee a quiet theater, a rarity nowadays. After I settled into my seat, still recovering from ticket price shock, all was peaceful. A few widely-scattered patrons sat making only the noise of their popcorn and whispered conversations. If only no noisemaking teens showed up, the setting would be perfect for a few hours of escapist fantasy. I could delight in some "popcorn for the brain." Just as the previews ended, and the feature began, in marched about twenty high schoolers, and I thought to myself "there goes the neighborhood." I am long past my days as a high school teacher when I was armed with full authority to condemn any miscreants to "quasi-eternal punishment." So I just resigned myself to the fact that the onscreen war would be accompanied by adolescent males showing off for their girlfriends with well-placed heckling. Then those same girls would probably let out their patented high-pitched squeals. Having thought all that negativity about them, I had to eat some humble pie. The kids were as quiet as gas flames on a stove. What did cause disruption was a pair of male adults. Some rows of seats from me sat a "fortysomething" male, complete with his age-inappropriate ponytail and a clinging blonde, who must have started to talk above a whisper just after Tom Cruise met his alien nemesis. Another male, with shorter hair, accompanied by his white-haired mother, reacted to this by asking ponytail, "Would you be quiet? I didn't pay almost ten bucks to hear you." That everybody in the theater heard. Ponytail didn't take the correction very well, and he suggested to the other that he perform an anatomically impossible sexual act upon himself. When patron A suggested he would now have to get the usher, patron B topped his first vulgarity by adding the verb "go" to it. Then patron A left his seat and headed for the lobby. Suddenly, Ponytail's clinging girlfriend relaxed her grip, leapt from her seat and ran down the steps of the so-called stadium seats, presumably to cool matters off. All of this while I, and the baker's dozen others in the theater were trying to watch an over-hyped movie. The usher arrived, spoke some words of wisdom to Patron B, or Ponytail, who never seemed disturbed by any of this,. Nor did he ever offer an apology for the mess he caused, and the language he used. Fortunately, he quieted down. Patron A never returned to his original seat, as far as I could tell, and stalked out of the place sans mama. The whole incident was not only annoying, but also upsetting, as violence tends to be. The only saving feature was that this all happened early on. I will not have to rent the inevitable DVD. As I drove home that night, my thoughts were not so much on the movie as on that incident. Mr.Spielberg did a journeyman job with his special effects, and Mr.Cruise was, well, Mr. Cruise. But forget the disappointing film. All I kept thinking about was how those teenagers, who witnessed that offscreen incident would perhaps think the offender was "cool." Worse, they might conclude that vulgarity and violence is how one adult responds to another's fraternal correction. It was an ironic coincidence that the morning after all this came the carnage in London spilled all over the little screen. Granted, the crime in that fabled city exponentially differed from that spat in a Pennsylvania movie house. Yet violence was the common denominator. How haunting the question: "Will we ever learn Jesus' ways of peace?" I believe the bombs placed in the London underground reflect a mindset that has roots in schoolyard fights. That at least gives us a clue as to where to start the learning process. We have the tools and the power. One of our popular hymns even acts as a catalyst, if we really take in the lyric. After prompting us to sing "Let there be peace on earth", it wisely adds, "but let it begin with me." Food for thought there for parents and anyone concerned with ending the cycle of violence that turns into terror. Meanwhile, don't mind me if I rent any movies I want to see in the future. Father Leonard N. Peterson		An Article for September, 2005 The coverage by cable news networks of this hyperactive hurricane season has a double effect, at least in unaffected regions like our own. True, we are well-informed of storm tracks and destruction, but we are offered yet another invitation to hypertension. The networks, under obligation to fill twenty four hours with their words and pictures, have ample opportunity to do both. Earnest reporters tell us about all the mayhem happening in places where everybody except themselves has been prudently evacuated. All part of modern, high tech life. However, when those pundits come on the scene encouraging "the blame game", matters get murky. The extremes of this finger-pointing are ultimately frustrating, because no one person has all the facts. Politicizing such disasters healthy, even though free speech is part of our democracy. We have to deal with a mindset that would almost blame the weather itself, for example, on the president. All of this talk seasons many conversations over coffee. And it well might go on long after the streets of Gulf coast cities are dried out, although our societal attention span is decidedly brief. But this blaming about climatic catastrophes descends to a new level when it strikes at God. I heard on talk radio of a religious group who actually promotes the idea that Almighty God deliberately aimed Katrina's winds at New Orleans because gay people were about to hold an event there called "Southern Decadence". Amazing! Such people do religion no good when they draw such a caricature of our Creator. They invite people to imagine God sitting before His perfectly-detailed globe selecting locales and then sending this or that particular disaster upon the wicked miscreants. Admittedly, there is recorded precedent. All one has to say is "Sodom and Gomorrah." But the key component of that story is that God made the judgment, not humans. The proponents of this thinking set themselves up as judge and jury, with an implied assumption that they know God's mind. We have enough trouble as Christians confronting secular humanism and all the other "isms" of our time, without this nonsense in our way. Granted that God established the laws of nature. Wind and water do what they do. But we're the ones with the temerity to ignore them, not God, by doing such things as building cities below sea level or houses too close to the shore. We are the society that harbors racial hatred or forgets the poor. "Act of God", that unfortunate insurance company term, usually denotes something negative. That must be why the term is rarely used to describe the successful birth of a beautiful baby, or the love of newlyweds, the scent of roses or the rings of Saturn. Natural disasters usually compel people to think about what really matters in life, and that certainly excludes material things. A hurricane, while frightful, is one way to appreciate anew the fact that God gave us the gift of life and the beauty of neighborly love. When we see those rescuers and medical personnel, the police and military in action on the TV screen, the eyes of faith can see God present. All of this reflects God's goodness in His creatures even if no cable TV reporter ever says it out loud. We believers can assert the truth that events like these, though not welcome, are perhaps God's megaphone, reminding us that our usual priorities may not be right. Rather than blame God for the reminder, much less assume that He is punishing certain people, we can thank Him for the wake up call. Father Leonard Peterson