"Ray of Light".

What I love about Madonna's song "Ray of Light" is how there's this very happy guitar line that goes on for a few measures and could be a lead-in to an upbeat croony acoustic folksong, but then it lingers on one measure too long, and then out of nowhere this amazing dance beat line that meshes perfectly breaks in.

Really, I think it's one of the best pop song openings I've heard, esp. the dance beat line.

That said, the song gets shapeless after the first 3rd, and really has no direction.

If it had direction, I think it would be legendary.

If only someone had caught that and worked with the song longer before recording!

Conservative Catholic Book (8 of 8): Seminary complaints.

From Michael S. Rose’s “Goodbye! Good Men: How Catholic Seminaries Turned Away Two Generations of Vocations from the Priesthood” (2002) (p. 227):

[Father John Trigilio remembers that h]is Latin breviary got him in trouble too [at St. Mark’s High School Seminary in Erie, Pennsylvania, in the late 1970s.]

“Sometimes I’d get a knock on the door of my room late at night, and one of the upperclassmen would slide a copy of ‘Playboy’ under my door.  This was the common way to circulate these magazines, but I would slide it right back out.  A few days later one of my high school teachers, a priest, asked me why I had a copy of the Latin breviary and the 1917 Code of Canon Law in Latin.  He asked me how I could read all this if I just started taking Latin this year, and followed that up by instructing me that 14-year-old boys shouldn’t be praying in Latin and reading the Code of Canon Law.  He told me that I ought to be ‘reading’ ‘Playboy’s like the other guys.

. . .

Conservative Catholic Book (7 of 8): Seminary complaints.

From Michael S. Rose’s “Goodbye! Good Men: How Catholic Seminaries Turned Away Two Generations of Vocations from the Priesthood” (2002) (pp. 209-210):

[Father William H. Hinds] related that homosexuality was looked upon kindly at [Cincinnati’s] Athenaeum.  “There was a group of seminarians,” he explained by way of example, “who would be sitting around watching the television show ‘Falcon Crest’, and every time one particular actress came on camera they would whoop and shriek and do all this kind of stuff – acting effeminate, imitating the woman.”

. . .

Hinds also recalled another incident: he complained about a fellow seminarian hanging a large poster of transvestite pop singer Boy George on the outside of the door to his dormitory room.  “Anybody who’s walking along the hallway would see this picture of Boy George with the eye shadow and painted face,” he explained, “so I brought it up one time in a meeting.  How is everyone going to know that is not the door to *my* room?  Then, to make my point I said, why don’t I take that poster and put it on the rector’s door?  Would *that* be appropriate, I asked?  I got called to the carpet for that.”

. . .

Conservative Catholic Book (6 of 8): Seminary bias.

From Michael S. Rose’s “Goodbye! Good Men: How Catholic Seminaries Turned Away Two Generations of Vocations from the Priesthood” (2002) (p. 202):

[In 1993], during his first year at Baltimore’s St. Mary’s, [a conservative seminarian who eventually transferred] was told by his formation director that he acted like “an old-fashioned monsignor who is stuck in the 1950’s.  We don’t need a---s like you in the Church.”

. . .

Conservative Catholic Book (5 of 5): Seminary horrors.

From Michael S. Rose’s “Goodbye! Good Men: How Catholic Seminaries Turned Away Two Generations of Vocations from the Priesthood” (2002) (pp. 167-168):

The final straw [at St. Paul Seminary in Minnesota] for [a priest eventually ordained for a Midwestern diocese in the mid-1990’s] was a classroom incident in which a nun instructor encouraged all of the seminarians to get on their hands and knees on the floor and pretend they were cats – rubbing their “whiskers” up against each other.  [He] was fortunately transferred to a more conservative seminary where he was able to receive a proper formation and education.

. . .

Conservative Catholic Book (4 of 5): Seminary system.

From Michael S. Rose’s “Goodbye! Good Men: How Catholic Seminaries Turned Away Two Generations of Vocations from the Priesthood” (2002) (pp. 96-97):

[A priest] said in his [1996] taped remarks [about Chicago-area St. Mary of the Lake seminary in Mundelein, Illinois], “Many of the younger students would be placed into situations in which they compromised their sexual integrity.  This would be used against them by older students for favors.  And these older students actually had faculty members who would request from time to time a friend who would come and visit them because they were lonely.  And these students would supply fresh meat.  So there were madams, pimps, and prostitutes all in a major seminary system that, from the outside, if you were to walk through, would look very holy.”

...[A] seminarian at the Chicago-area seminary during the 1998-99 school year, confirmed that [this] portrait of the sexual immorality and shenanigans remains unchanged at the dawn of the 21^st century.  “I won’t go so far as to say that some of the members of the formation team at Mundelein were literally ‘pimps,’ but one or two in particular certainly facilitated Chicago priests meeting the ‘cute’ seminarians.”

. . .

“One hall in the seminary dorm,” related [that same seminarian], “is nicknamed the ‘Catwalk,’ known as the residence of the more fashionable gays.”  ‘Catwalk,’ he explained, was a reference to the runways of fashion models, but also reflected the campy, feline-like personalities of those who lived in this certain area of the seminary...

According to [him] and several other seminarians who attended Mundelein during the 1990’s, one of the big events at the seminary was whenever a seminarian would “come out” as being a homosexually-oriented person.  The openly-gay-seminarian-to-be would do so by telling one of two of his closest friends; and sure enough the word of another “orientation proclamation,” they said, would travel quickly throughout the halls of the seminary, especially to the formation faculty members.  Oddly enough... once a seminarian would “come out,” he would soon be wined and dined – literally – by certain faculty members.  “In my opinion,” [the disgruntled seminarian] said, “it’s highly inappropriate to wine and dine any favorite students, orientation aside.”  But the special status given to openly gay seminarians, he said, is beyond the pale.

. . .

Conservative Catholic Book (3 of 5): Seminary gossip.

From Michael S. Rose’s “Goodbye! Good Men: How Catholic Seminaries Turned Away Two Generations of Vocations from the Priesthood” (2002) (p. 94):

“When my associates at the university heard that I was on the board [of a certain seminary in the upper Midwest],” [a philosophy professor at a prominent Catholic university] continued, “they began to confide in me.  A graduate student in theology, for example, told me that his mother, who was a cleaning lady at the seminary, had at first been shocked at the male pornography she saw in the students’ rooms, rooms that she assumed were those of women students.  Her shock was deepened, however, when she learned that those were the rooms of seminarians who were studying for the priesthood.”

. . .