Archive - November, 2006

team hoyt – an amazing duo

There is not more for me to say, as the article and the videos say it all.
From Sports Illustrated, by Rick Reilly:

I try to be a good father. Give my kids mulligans. Work nights to pay for their text messaging. Take them to swimsuit shoots.
But compared with Dick Hoyt, I suck.

Eighty-five times he’s pushed his disabled son, Rick, 26.2 miles in marathons. Eight times he’s not only pushed him 26.2 miles in a wheelchair but also towed him 2.4 miles in a dinghy while swimming and pedaled him 112 miles in a seat on the handlebars — all in the same day.

Dick’s also pulled him cross-country skiing, taken him on his back mountain climbing and once hauled him across the U.S. on a bike. Makes taking your son bowling look a little lame, right?

And what has Rick done for his father? Not much — except save his life.

This love story began in Winchester, Mass., 43 years ago, when Rick was strangled by the umbilical cord during birth, leaving him brain-damaged and unable to control his limbs.

“He’ll be a vegetable the rest of his life,” Dick says doctors told him and his wife, Judy, when Rick was nine months old. “Put him in an institution.”

But the Hoyts weren’t buying it. They noticed the way Rick’s eyes followed them around the room. When Rick was 11 they took him to the engineering department at Tufts University and asked if there was anything to help the boy communicate. “No way,” Dick says he was told. “There’s nothing going on in his brain.”

“Tell him a joke,” Dick countered. They did. Rick laughed. Turns out a lot was going on in his brain.

Rigged up with a computer that allowed him to control the cursor by touching a switch with the side of his head, Rick was finally able to communicate. First words? “Go Bruins!” And after a high school classmate was paralyzed in an accident and the school organized a charity run for him, Rick pecked out, “Dad, I want to do that.”

Yeah, right. How was Dick, a self-described “porker” who never ran more than a mile at a time, going to push his son five miles? Still, he tried. “Then it was me who was handicapped,” Dick says. “I was sore for two weeks.”

That day changed Rick’s life. “Dad,” he typed, “when we were running, it felt like I wasn’t disabled anymore!”

And that sentence changed Dick’s life. He became obsessed with giving Rick that feeling as often as he could. He got into such hard-belly shape that he and Rick were ready to try the 1979 Boston Marathon.

“No way,” Dick was told by a race official. The Hoyts weren’t quite a single runner, and they weren’t quite a wheelchair competitor. For a few years Dick and Rick just joined the massive field and ran anyway, then they found a way to get into the race officially: In 1983 they ran another marathon so fast they made the qualifying time for Boston the following year.

Then somebody said, “Hey, Dick, why not a triathlon?”

How’s a guy who never learned to swim and hadn’t ridden a bike since he was six going to haul his 110-pound kid through a triathlon? Still, Dick tried.

Now they’ve done 212 triathlons, including four grueling 15-hour Ironmans in Hawaii. It must be a buzzkill to be a 25-year-old stud getting passed by an old guy towing a grown man in a dinghy, don’t you think?

Hey, Dick, why not see how you’d do on your own? “No way,” he says. Dick does it purely for “the awesome feeling” he gets seeing Rick with a cantaloupe smile as they run, swim and ride together.

This year, at ages 65 and 43, Dick and Rick finished their 24th Boston Marathon, in 5,083rd place out of more than 20,000 starters. Their best time? Two hours, 40 minutes in 1992 — only 35 minutes off the world record, which, in case you don’t keep track of these things, happens to be held by a guy who was not pushing another man in a wheelchair at the time.

“No question about it,” Rick types. “My dad is the Father of the Century.”

And Dick got something else out of all this too. Two years ago he had a mild heart attack during a race. Doctors found that one of his arteries was 95% clogged. “If you hadn’t been in such great shape,” one doctor told him, “you probably would’ve died 15 years ago.”
So, in a way, Dick and Rick saved each other’s life.

Rick, who has his own apartment (he gets home care) and works in Boston, and Dick, retired from the military and living in Holland, Mass., always find ways to be together. They give speeches around the country and compete in some backbreaking race every weekend, including this Father’s Day.

That night, Rick will buy his dad dinner, but the thing he really wants to give him is a gift he can never buy.

“The thing I’d most like,” Rick types, “is that my dad would sit in the chair and I would push him once.”

[Update: YouTube took down the two videos I had on the Hoyt's.]

race for the cure in central texas

This week’s newsletter from the Diocese of Austin included the following note:

As a church we wholeheartedly support those who are suffering from breast cancer and other diseases. We wish we could support the “Race for a Cure,” however, it is to be noted that the Susan G. Komen Foundation in the Central Texas area financially supports Planned Parenthood and abortion.

This produces an interesting problem for Catholics. Breast cancer is something that we, of course, want eliminated, but what do we do when a foundation focused on assisting with a cancer cure supports, financially, Planned Parenthood and the killing of innocent children?

celibacy still the rule

The policy of priestly celibacy was not on the table during today’s meeting of Pope Benedict XVI and some of his cardinals. Today’s meeting focused on the impact of the estimated 100,000 priests worldwide who have left active ministry and married.
From the news I’m seeing at this point, there isn’t much to report except the status quo.

Anglican Use Jurisdiction?

There is a rumor floating around that there is a document awaiting review by the Pope that would erect an Anglican Use jurisdiction within the Roman Rite. Such a jurisdiction would be either like Opus Dei, a personal prelature, which have a worldwide jurisdiction over all those who personally belong to them. In other words, there is no geographical boundary and so any member of Opus Dei is subject to their local bishop and the prelate of Opus Dei. If an Anglican Use Personal Prelature was established, I would assume members of Anglican Use parishes would be responsible to the local bishop and the prelate.

This could also take the form of a Personal Apostolic Administration. The only current example of this form of administration is São João Maria Vianney in Brazil, erected in 2002. This is a geographical area that also has a normal diocese, but people, in this case, who wish to practice the faith using the liturgical books of 1962 are subject to the Apostolic Administrator. Like a Personal Prelature, those in São João Maria Vianney are also subject to the bishop of the “regular” Latin-rite diocese.

The Pastoral Provision, as mentioned on this site before, is the provision allowing Anglican priests to convert to Catholicism and be ordained as Catholic priests. As I am aware, these priests are the only priests of the Latin Rite who are currently both married and a priest in good standing. The Provision also allow “Anglican Use” parishes to be erected which are made up of Anglican converts who wish to still maintain elements of their former liturgy. To this end, the Book of Divine Worship, was created as a modification of the Book of Common Prayer.

The provision is directed to the United States with all of the parishes and virtually all of the priests within this country. Canada have a handful of married priest-converts. As the provision requires the approval of the local bishop for the erecting of a new parish or the ordination of a convert-priest, there have been requests rejected in other parts of the world.

With the Pope’s upcoming meeting with the Archbishop of Canterbury, I’m hesitant to give a good amount of weight to this yet. The Pastoral Provision is just that, a pastoral provision. It allows a method for converts to slowly return to the fold. There are no Anglican Use seminaries; no real way for them to maintain themselves past a generation, short of more converts. Some questions: a worldwide jurisdiction or local? How would this impact Anglican-Cathlic relations in the rest of the world? Either of the jurisdictional options above grant the right for the formation of seminaries and the incardination of clerics, opening the door to a more permanent existence of this Anglo-Catholic provision.

The report does say that nothing will come out of the pipeline until after January 31st.

If I hear anything else, I’ll pass it along.

Follow-up from January 2012: Background on Ex-Anglican Ordinariate

priestly celibacy being discussed by pope

DICASTERY HEADS TO EXAMINE QUESTION OF ARCHBISHOP MILINGO
VATICAN CITY, NOV 14, 2006 (VIS) – The Holy See Press office released the following communique late yesterday afternoon:
“The Holy Father has called a meeting of the heads of dicasteries of the Roman Curia, for Thursday, November 16, in order to examine the situation that has arisen following the disobedience of Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo, and to reflect upon requests for dispensation from the obligation of celibacy and requests for readmission to the priestly ministry, presented by married priests over the course of recent years. No other matters are scheduled on the order of the day.”

I am not expecting anything groundbreaking or different to come out of the meeting. While the Pastoral Provision (with a redesigned website) has allowed married Latin-rite priests for about 25 years now, any broad changes to priestly celibacy, I would imagine, would be discussed in much wider circles before any change.
Across the rumor mill, there were talks that this meeting would also include discussion of a wider indult for the use of the Mass according to the liturgical books of 1962, the official program says no.

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