Setting The Record Straight

You may not look like a child anymore, yet there is still a child hiding inside you. Listen with that  child to these brief and poignant Thanksgiving stories. You will find that the people in all of these stories find reasons to be grateful to God. The first few are children’s tales, the last two are for all ages.

Have you ever listened to Mozart? Not the music but what he said in his many letters. Just listen to him! “I have always had God before my eyes!”  And this. "If you thought how lucky were those who received the Eucharist, and at the communion the music spoke in quiet joy from the hearts of those kneeling there . Benedictus qui venit…”.  When he set the words of the Mass to music, he wrote,”…it comes to you and moves your soul!”

The Tango is a dance born from a Catholic sensibility, a balancing of desire against order. It was created in the La Plata region of South America. The Tango was born out of the cultural mix of the Gaucho’s European origins, the Catholic theology of the body, the artistic ferment in the societies of Buenas Aires and Montevideo, and Christendom’s creation of the romantic partnered dance.  All this arose upon the ruins of the New World’s most advanced and literate mission culture, that of the brilliant Guarani tribes that was developed under the nurturing of Jesuits before being destroyed by invasions of slavers.

Gauchito Gil is famous. Who is Gauchito Gil? Shrines to his honor and stories of his miracles are all over Argentina. Is he a saint? Well, sort of.  However just a few weeks ago Pope Francis did cannonize an Argentinian saint, a man known as The Gaucho Priest. What does the Tango have to do with all this…and with Catholicism?  Find out in Part One and Two of “The Gaucho Priest,The Pope, and The Tango”.