• About This Blog

Good News Everyday!

~ The Feel-Good-Everyday News.

Good News Everyday!

Daily Archives: March 16, 2011

French Nun cured of Parkinson’s paves way for Pope John Paul II’s Beatification

16 Wednesday Mar 2011

Posted by boochums in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Catholicism, Miracle, Religion, Vatican

Sister Marie Simon-Pierre speaks with the media during a press conference at Aix-en-Provence's archbishopric.

At Pope John Paul II’s funeral in 2005, the crowd at the Vatican chanted in unison “Santo Subito!” for one of the most beloved pontiffs in history to be made a saint immediately.

Five and half years and a thorough investigation later, Pope Benedict XVI has “signed off” after declaring that a French nun’s recovery from Parkinson’s disease was the miracle needed for John Paul to be beatified. A second miracle is needed to be canonized a saint.

Pope Benedict himself will preside at the May 1, 2011 ceremony, which falls on the feast of the Divine Mercy. The choice of the date is not accidental.  Pope John Paul II has a deep devotion to his fellow Pole Sr. Faustina Kowalska and to the Divine Mercy devotion identified with her. In August 2002, in Lagiewniki, Poland where Sr. Faustina lived and died, John Paul II entrusted the entire world  “to Divine Mercy, to the unlimited trust in God the Merciful.”

It is expected to draw hundreds of thousands of pilgrims to Rome for a precedent-setting Mass: Never before has a pope beatified by his immediate predecessor.

Although the numbers may not reach the 3 million who flocked here for John Paul’s funeral, religious tour operators in his native Poland were already preparing to bus and fly in the faithful to celebrate a man many considered a saint while he was alive.

“We have waited a long time and this is a great day for us,” said Mayor Ewa Filipiak of John Paul’s hometown of Wadowice, where the faithful lit candles Friday and prayed at a chapel in the town church dedicated to John Paul.

After four years of suffering from Parkinson’s disease, Sister Marie Simon-Pierre was completely cured some two months after the Pope passed away.

After praying to John Paul II, the nun said, she awoke one morning, to the shock of her doctor, feeling reborn and capable of performing previously difficult tasks, such as walking and writing.

“I was sick, and now I am cured,” Simon-Pierre said at a March 30, 2007, press conference in Aix-en-Provence, France. “I am cured, but it is up to the church to say whether it was a miracle or not.”

Wearing a white habit and wire-rimmed glasses, she appeared in good health and showed no signs of tremors or slurred speech, common symptoms of Parkinson’s.

“John Paul II did everything he could for life, to defend life,” she said. “He was very close to the smallest and weakest. How many times did we see him approach a handicapped person, a sick person?” Simon-Pierre said John Paul was and continues to be an inspiration to her because of his defense of the unborn and because they both suffered from Parkinson’s.

A March 2010 article in the Guardian reported that John Paul II’s sainthood had been “set back” by accounts that Simon-Pierre had again fallen ill. The Episcopal Conference of France disputed the relapse as rumor, however, stating that Simon-Pierre was fully recovered from Parkinson’s.

To qualify as a miracle, Simon-Pierre’s recovery required an intense evaluation, including psychiatric and multiple neurological screenings.

“We conducted a serious and objective investigation which led us to the conclusion that what had happened was unexplainable,” Aix-en-Provence Archbishop Claude Feidt said in March 2007.  “We cannot understand why she is the way you can see her today.”

According to the same Guardian report, a Polish daily newspaper, Rzeczpospolita, said at least one doctor assigned to evaluating Simon-Pierre’s case proposed that she may have been afflicted with another nervous disease — not Parkinson’s — that can enter sudden remission.

Simon-Pierre continues her work as a nurse at a maternity hospital run by her order, the Little Sisters of Catholic Motherhood.

Born as Karol Wojtyla in 1920, John Paul was the youngest pope in 125 years and the first non-Italian in 455 years when he was elected pontiff in 1978.

He brought a new vitality to the Vatican, and quickly became the most accessible modern pope, sitting down for meals with factory workers, skiing and wading into crowds to embrace the faithful.

His Polish roots nourished a doctrinal conservatism — opposition to contraception, euthanasia, abortion and female priests — that rankled liberal Catholics in the United States and Western Europe.

But his common touch also made him a crowd-pleasing, globe-trotting superstar whose papacy carried the Catholic Church into Christianity’s third millennium and emboldened eastern Europeans to bring down the communist system.

He survived an assassination attempt in St. Peter’s Square in 1981 — and promptly forgave the Turk who had shot him.

After suffering for years from the effects of Parkinson’s, he died in his Vatican apartment on April 2, 2005. He was 84.

Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, John Paul’s most trusted friend and aide who was at his bedside that night, gave thanks Friday from Krakow, where he is archbishop.

“We are happy that this process came to an end, that what people asked for — “Santo subito” — was fulfilled,” Dziwisz said. “I express great joy on behalf of the entire diocese of Krakow — and I think I am also authorized to express this on behalf of all of Poland.”

Advertisements

‘A Merry Little Christmas composer, Hugh Martin, dies at 96.

16 Wednesday Mar 2011

Posted by boochums in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

broadway, entertainment, Music

The songwriter for popular Christmas song, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” - - popularized by singer Karen Carpenters and 500 other singers - - Hugh Martin dies of natural cause at 96.

It’s Christmas Eve, 1903, in St. Louis, and some members of the Smith family are anguished about leaving their home for Mr. Smith’s new job in New York City. The six-year-old, Tootie (Margaret O’Brien), is especially desolate about having to leave the family of snow people she has helped build in the front yard. Her teenage sister Esther (Judy Garland) has her own miseries, facing separation from the boy next door who just asked her to marry him. To cheer Tootie and comfort herself, Esther sings a seasonal ballad, whose original lyric suggested a suicide note put to music:

Have yourself a merry little Christmas.
It may be your last.
Next year we may all be living in the past…

Garland and her director, Vincente Minnelli, who were falling in love in 1944 while making Meet Me in St. Louis, asked the film’s songwriters, Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane, for a slightly less morbid lyric. Martin obliged with…

Have yourself a merry little Christmas.
Let your heart be light.
Next year all our troubles will be out of sight…

…and set the properly poignant tone for one of the loveliest, most longing of Christmas songs. In a career that spanned 70 years, Martin composed many numbers for Broadway and Hollywood musicals. As an arranger and vocal director he helped stars from Garland to Lucille Ball and Lena Horne find that special sparkle. But at his death Friday, March 11, at 96, in Encinitas, Cal., Martin’s most enduring work was a single song written 67 years ago.

Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas was later sung by Frank Sinatra, Doris Day, Ella Fitzgerald, Christina Aguilera, Coldplay, John Denver and even Ernie and Bert from Sesame Street.

It is a well-worn favourite among Christmas music repertoires and was most recently recorded by Grammy winner Lady Antebellum.

The Trolley Song, sung by Garland in the same film, was also later sung by Sinatra. Though it did not win the Oscar it was nominated for, it was ranked 26th on a list of the 100 best film songs compiled by the American Film Institute.

Hugh Martin was born Aug. 14, 1914, in Birmingham, Ala., to an architect father and his wife Ellie, who was, the San Diego Tribune reported, “an accomplished musician and a lover of all things New York.” That’s where Hugh went after studying at Birmingham Southern College, and at 23 he was performing in (and arranging the music for) the Harold Arlen-E.Y. Harburg satire Hooray for What! Also in the chorus was Blane, born Ralph Uriah Hunsecker 16 days before Martin, and fresh from Broken Arrow, Okla. The young men teamed as half of a vocal quartet, The Martins, that appeared on Fred Allen’s radio program; and soon they forged a songwriting partnership.

The pair’s first Broadway score was for the 1941 Best Food Forward, which spurred the careers of June Allyson, Nancy Walker and Stanley Donen and produced a hit song, the rah-rah “Buckle Down, Winsocki.” Martin and Blane were clearly comers. “In five years they’ll be the next Rodgers and Hart,” a friend rhapsodized to Broadway impresario Max Gordon. The producer’s reply: “Bring them back in five years.” Instead, Arthur Freed brought them to MGM, where they worked on the movie version of Best Food Forward, importing most of the original cast and adding Ball as star catnip.

The plot for their next project, Meet Me in St. Louis, seemed singularly lacking in incident: a family plans to move to New York, then doesn’t. But the Martin-Blane score infused the movie with warmth and verve. It set the time and locale with a jaunty hymn to electric vehicles “The Trolley Song” (“Clang, clang, clang goes the trolley”), cued the wistful tone with Garland’s “The Boy Next Door” and served up battered optimism with their merry little holiday anthem. Like the big holiday hits of the previous two war years (“White Christmas,” “I’ll Be Home for Christmas”), this one served as consolation to women separated by an ocean from the fighting men they loved. After completing the score, Martin left Hollywood to serve in World War II. He and Blane were just 30 that year; neither knew that they had reached a peak they’d never again scale.

The team was unusual, Martin later explained, in that “Ralph and I both wrote music and we both wrote lyrics. Almost always each of us wrote songs unassisted by the other and simply pooled our work.” (Martin also said that “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” was totally his composition.) In the ’50s they collaborated on two Jane Powell musicals, Athena and The Girl Most Likely, and in 1989 wrote new songs for a Broadway version of Meet Me in St Louis. On his own, Martin wrote a 1948 show for Walker, Look, Ma, I’m Dancin’!”; the 1949 Make a Wish, with a book by Preston Sturges; and the 1964 Hugh Spirits, a musicalizing of Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit. With Alec Wilder’s assistance he wrote a symphony, New England Suite. But his main employment was as a vocal arranger and accompanist, for Horne, Debbie Reynolds and, most notably, Garland in her comeback concert series at New York’s Palace Theatre.

Martin may also have been the only pop composer of eminence who was also a Seventh Day Adventist. In latter days he served as musical arranger and accompanist for religious-music contralto Del Delker. With the help of Delker and John Fricke, he rewrote his most enduring song as “Have Yourself a Blessed Little Christmas.” In sacred or secular form, Hugh Martin’s greatest hit remains a carol for all Christmases.

Calendar of Posting

March 2011
M T W T F S S
    Apr »
 123456
78910111213
14151617181920
21222324252627
28293031  

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Top 10 Most Popular Blogs

  • The Most Expensive Food In The World
  • 51 Ways To Reward Employees Without Money
  • 23 Most Influential Toys Of All Generations
  • Travel Advisory: The Romance Of The Orient Express
  • Vietnamese Man Adopts 50 Babies; Builds Potter's Field to Bury Aborted Tots
  • Ads You'll Probably Never See Again!
  • 'A Merry Little Christmas composer, Hugh Martin, dies at 96.
  • 12 Dumbest Business Ideas Of All Time (And Made Millions)
  • Tricks of the Trade: 7 Ways Restaurant Menu Make You Spend

Good News Latest Postings

  • 5 Tech Products That Will Be Dead In 5 Years
  • 4 Holiday Card Sites That Do The Mailing For You
  • Meet The Dog That Knows 1,000 Words
  • 12 Facts That Would Shock the Masters of Sex
  • In The Land That Made Me, Me….
  • Tylenol Just Once A Month Raises A Child’s Asthma Risk 540%
  • Quantum Computing: The Next Information Revolution.
  • In Their Own Words — 16 Celebrities Who Survived Bullying
  • Why Don’t We Have A Wonder Woman Movie?
  • Bangkok is now the number One Tourists’ Destination.
  • Which Among State University Graduates Earn The Most
  • Ads You’ll Probably Never See Again!
  • Smartphone In Your Pocket: The Future In Diagnostic Technology
  • Whom To Marry (By Kids)
  • Did Apple Overestimate iPhone 5 Demand?
  • How To Use Your IPAD As Your Second Monitor
  • How To Remotely Grab Your Files Off Your Home PC?
  • Wendy’s Doubles Down On Dollar Menu
  • How To Turn Your iPhone Into A Projector
  • China Plans To Build The World’s Tallest Building In Just 90 Days

Archives

RSS LINKS

RSS Feed RSS - Posts

RSS Feed RSS - Comments

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries RSS
  • Comments RSS
  • WordPress.com
Advertisements

Blog at WordPress.com.

Cancel