Word: philomena
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...Philomena Haas...
...will of superiors. On the saint's feast day, Feb, 21, the piazza in front of the shrine rings with the din of jukeboxes and shooting galleries and the cries of vendors selling rosaries and cold beer. Some 300,000 pilgrims yearly visit the shrine of St. Philomena in Mugnano del Cardinale, near Naples-even though Philomena was removed from the Catholic liturgical calendar...
...Losers, the second play, a middle-aged carpenter goes calling on a lady (Anna Manahan) with an outsize heart and a waist to match. Upstairs, her invalid mother sits clutching the bedclothes about her like a winding sheet, praying fanatically to St. Philomena, ringing a huge bell whenever the couple begin a furtive smooch. Marriage only makes things worse-until one day Carney spies a traumatic headline. Roaring drunk, he announces to the old crone that the Pope has quashed the cult of St. Philomena. Carney deposes a statue of the saint from its altar, insults his wife, and climbs...
...Philomena's Fall. Bollandist research has no official standing in the church, but Vatican scholars have often relied on the society's discoveries in deciding whether to eliminate a nonexistent saint from the calendar. As a rule, the church takes a tolerant attitude toward cults that have been honored by time and history; it does not forbid St. Christopher medals, for example. Yet it is quick to eliminate veneration of more recent non-saints with a growing vogue. Vatican officials two years ago sternly clamped down on devotees of the Roman "martyr"' St. Philomena, whose authenticity...
Laymen might worry about misaddressed prayers, but churchmen know that there is no such thing as a dead-letter office in heaven. For Sister Marie Helene and all those whose prayers have risen to Philomena through the years, there is some comfort in the closing words on the "saint" in the current edition (1956) of Butler's Lives of the Saints: "We do not know certainly whether she was in fact named Philomena in her earthly life, whether she was a martyr, whether her relics now rest at Mugnano or in some place unknown. And these questions are only...