Word: communion
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...region. Among the Pope's complaints about liberation theology is that it tends to pit Roman Catholic laity against the church hier archy. At his stop in Santo Domingo, the Pontiff warned against "considering the poor as a class in struggle, or as a church separated from communion with and obedience to its pastors...
...Aries in 1888 was a torpid provincial town, as filthy and exotic-at least to a Parisian eye as North Africa. Van Gogh's first reactions to it describe a foreign country. "The Zouaves, the brothels, the adorable little Arlésiennes going to their first Communion, the priest in his surplice, who looks like a dangerous rhinoceros, the people drinking absinthe, all seem to me creatures from another world." In fact, his stay there began the general pattern of migration southward that would be as obligatory for early modern French artists-Signac to Saint-Tropez, Matisse to Nice...
...gentle reader, what have we done! What have we done, that sex, and the sacred, awful communion should have become degraded into a thing of shame, excused only by the accident of procreation, or the perversion of spiritual union. It is no spiritual union. It is the living blood-soul in each being . . . What have we done, that men and women should have so far lost themselves, and lost one another, that marriage has become a mere affair of comradeship, 'pals,' or brother-and-sister business, or spiritual unison, or prostitution...
...guilty lovers (Ed Harris and Amy Madigan), emblematic of the dissatisfactions that dare not speak their name in all the earth's Waxahachies, betray themselves to his wife (Lindsay Grouse) by the way they handle a deck of cards in a rummy game. Best of all is the Communion service that climaxes the movie, where, with amazing grace, Benton moves almost imperceptibly from reality to fantasy in order to find for his people the kind of reconciliation with their fates that he sought for himself by making this film...
Such members follow a devotional life of daily Communion, weekly confession, daily prayers and readings, and regular extended talks with an assigned spiritual director. Numeraries also practice bodily mortification such as fasting or early rising. Periodically, there are also brief sessions of self-flagellation with long braided strings and periods of wearing a type of cilice, a barbed metal band, on the upper thigh. These, explains Father William Stetson, Opus director for four Midwestern states, "are small reminders of what our Lord endured...