Merry Christmas and Joyeux Noël, Happy New Year and Bonne Année!

Dear Readers,

One day late, I wish you all a Merry Christmas, and I thank you, as always, for reading. Those thanks, each month, are not openly stated, but they are always present in the care and love I take writing to you.

This is our second covid Christmas. In France, we’re still wearing masks and we’re still required to show our “sanitary passport” when we enter restaurants, bars or theaters. Many restrictions remain and when I go out masked, I look at the world through the fog on my glasses. I’ve tried everything to get rid of it, but nothing works.

Seen that way, the present looks murky. Time, then, to look back to Christmas past…

Mrs. Davenport is in charge of celebrations at Jackson Street School. Miss Holahan, our teacher, herds us into a classroom where the window shades are pulled down. She instructs us to sit two to a bench at those old-fashioned desks with a hole for an inkwell on top. Shh!  Stop the whispering! Mrs. Davenport, our principal, has threaded the film into the projector. The show begins with a whir, then a crackle, then “The Spirit of Christmas” is on the portable screen mounted for the festivities.

Each Christmas, from kindergarten to fifth grade, we watch the Mabel Beaton Marionettes perform the story of the Nativity and Clement Moore’s 1823 poem “Twas the Night Before Christmas.” We never get bored, we never cry out for a remake or a sequel. Each year, we are enchanted to watch the same film and still today, watching it on my computer, I feel the wonder I felt as a child. If you’d like to watch too, here’s the AT&T version at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OB0Lf5CKDM .

On Centre Street, every store is decorated for the holidays, and Pomeroy’s Department Store, just like Wanamaker’s at City Hall in Philadelphia or Macy’s on Herald Square in New York, has its windows filled with music and animated decorations that we children love. But there are other sights to take in. One of my other personal favorites is the life-sized white horse in the window of Knapp’s Leather Goods, wearing a wreath for the season. Inside, the decorations are sober, but that store does not need much to convince me to enter. 

First of all, there’s the scent of leather. Then there are the well-stocked glass and wooden display cases. Each year I hope for a gift—a bookbag, a shoulder bag, a wallet—with initials embossed in gold. Best of all, there is Mrs. Knapp herself, who welcomes customers to her store. In fifth grade, my wish comes true. My Aunt Mildred gives me a red-leather book bag with a buckle-down flap. When I open it, I am greeted by my name in gold.

A few steps from Knapp’s, temptation looms large. I don’t dare enter Mootz’s Candies. I only have a few pennies and there’s no penny candy in there. I stand in the street like a waif, drooling in front of the display window at all those sweets. In French, window-shopping is called “lèche-vitrine,” window-licking, and that is just what I want to do. I love the barley-sugar lollipops—or clear-toy candy suckers as we call them, clear red, green and gold, in the shape of Saint Nick, a church bell or a Christmas tree. 

I also love the candy crabapples attached to a wooden stem. They are red and yellow on the outside, but become white as I suck to the core. Of course, I must not forget the peanut rolls: a creamy-white center dipped in dark chocolate and then rolled in chopped peanuts. One of my childhood dreams is to have a pound box all to myself!

I love to go Christmas shopping with my Aunt Mildred, a principal herself, of Yorkville School. She does not drive, so when we are loaded down with packages, we drop them at the office of the taxi dispatcher at Centre and Norwegian Streets, where everyone knows my aunt. Nor does she like to cook, which means our shopping expedition ends in the dining room of the Necho Allen Hotel. I order a Wimpy and have Neapolitan ice cream for dessert. 

I come from a family of working women. My mother is a teacher too and does not have much time for baking though she always makes a few batches of her specialty, Toll House chocolate-chip cookies. Each year our Aunt Nan brings us a tin of Michigan Rocks, a cookie that sets off waves of speculation in my young mind. I want to understand the origin of such a name and even see—or imagine—a blue Michigan rock stamped on each cookie. Otherwise, why call them that?

There is also a distinctive flavor, one I’m not sure I like. It’s the flavor of black walnuts, a “perfumy” taste, my mother says, much stronger than that of the “normal” walnuts my mother keeps in a green glass bowl for the holidays, along with almonds, hazelnuts, pecans and Brazil nuts. Next to the bowl, we keep a silver nutcracker. Part of the fun of eating is cracking each shell to get to the nut.

On TV, we always watch a performance of Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker Suite.” This is before the creation of the Schuylkill County Ballet Theater, whose dancers put on their own “Nutcracker” each year. I love the music and the dancing and go to bed, just like the children in “Twas the Night Before Christmas,” with sugarplum fairies dancing in my head.

Today, I miss those Christmases past. I miss Pottsville and Pennsylvania and the state’s rich heritage of Christmas traditions: the Moravian star, kielbasa from Shenandoah, the Polish Wigilia, the Lithuanian Kucios, the Pennsylvania Dutch Belsnickel, even some of the nation’s first Christmas trees, a German tradition brought to North America.

So I drink a cup of kindness to auld lang syne, while wishing you many more merry Christmases and a happy New Year 2022! Think of me on New Year’s Day when you dig into your first helping of pork and sauerkraut. Bonne Année!

 

Authority, Abuse and the French Catholic Church

When I was a girl, every Sunday my mother got up and took my sisters and me to church. I’ll admit, I would have preferred to follow the example of my father, who chose to sleep in. I didn’t like going to church, didn’t like the fire and brimstone message of the pastor. Once I was old enough to attend catechism class, he taught us about predestination. I took it to mean, our whole course in life having been laid out in advance, it didn’t really matter if I was bad or good. 

My sisters and I were faithful Sunday School attenders; we were also members of the youth choir, which practiced on Wednesday evenings. Contrary to the Sunday service, this was one of the high points of our week. The choir was led by Mrs. Dorothy Loy, who filled us with a love of music and taught us song is prayer and praise. We sang religious anthems, but we also had a vast repertoire of folk songs, popular music, and tunes from Broadway shows. 

Once a year, we put on a show, complete with props and multiple costume changes. We loved it and so did our audience, who paid to attend. With that money, we went on bus trips to Washington D.C. or the 1964 New York World’s Fair. There I remember seeing Michelangelo’s Pietà, bathed in blue light, in the Vatican Pavilion. Still today, when I get together with my sisters, we burst into song, remembering lyrics we learned with Mrs. Loy. 

Except for the choir, Sunday School did not make a lasting impression. I did, however, have another religious experience that deeply marked me, one I wrote about in this column many years ago. On Mondays after school, I went to “Good News Club,” a religious service led by Mrs. Lawrence and Mrs. Nancy Hubler, who accompanied us on the piano when we sang. I loved going to those “meetings,” as I called them. I did not consider them “church,” in the sense that I was never bored and I never left a “meeting” with the heavy sense of religion as duty. 

In the 1960’s, I never came across a woman ordained as pastor, yet thinking back, I realize that women, not men, were the “pastors” of my religious education. They may not have had the authority accorded a duly ordained minister or priest, but they surely possessed the power to touch and guide children’s hearts and lives. 

Today in France, these memories resonate all the more deeply at a time when the French Catholic Church is undergoing a deep crisis directly related to authority. Last October 5th, the Sauvé report, as it is known, commissioned in 2018 by the French Conference of Bishops, was released to the public. Its subject is sexual abuse in the French Catholic Church from 1950 to the present and the revelations are devastating. 

On October 5th, Mr. Jean-Marc Sauvé, who presided the commission that prepared the report, solemnly presented it to Monseigneur Eric de Moulins-Beaufort, President of the Conference of Bishops, and to Sister Véronique Magron, President of the Religious of France. After reading the report, Véronique Magron declared, “the extent of the catastrophe is such that no one can say, that’s impossible, or we didn’t know.” 

It is not easy to summarize a report of over 500 pages, with an annex of 2000 pages of testimonies of victims, that it took an independent commission two and a half years to prepare. To begin, there are the figures, the result of rigorous methodology, that estimate that since 1950, 330,000 minors (a figure based on victims still alive today) were abused by priests, women religious, or lay members of the French Catholic Church. A study of Church archives estimates that between 2,900 to 3,200 pedophiles were active in those years in the Church. These figures, which remain an estimate, represent human lives, many destroyed. 

Jean-Luc Souveton, a priest who was sexually abused at age 15, reminds his fellow religious that the victims have had to work very hard to reconstruct their lives, and they continue to suffer still today because the institution that abused them does not accord them the consideration they deserve. “We need justice,” he declares for himself and all victims. 

During his closing speech at the 2021 Conference of Bishops held earlier this month in Lourdes, Monseigneur de Moulins-Beaufort quoted a verse from the Gospel of Matthew, “This people’s heart has grown callous; they hardly hear with their ears and their eyes are closed” to characterize the decades-long attitude of the French Catholic Church. In a news conference, he also recognized the systemic role of the Church: final responsibility for these crimes against children lies not with a few isolated individuals, but belongs to the institution in its entirety. All are not guilty, but all are responsible. 

The Sauvé report has become a source of indignation and debate in all of French society. Will the recognition of institutional responsibility bring about a revolution in the Catholic Church in France? Will church governance change? How should these hundreds of thousands of victims be recognized by the Church today? Is it even possible to ask for forgiveness? Some call for the resignation of all members of the Conference of Bishops, as was the case in Chile after a huge sexual-abuse scandal in 2018. Others underline the relative powerlessness of the French Church, whose decisions must be sanctioned by the Vatican. Still others would like to see Canon Law revised, so that these sexual crimes be attached to the breaking of Commandments. 

Jean-Charles Thomas, a retired French bishop, attributes a part of the problem to depriving women of authority. In an article in Ouest-France, an important regional daily, he points out that women do ¾’s of the work within the Church, yet they have no voice in major decisions. He, for one, wants this to change. Some of the testimonies of the Sauvé report point to cases of women religious abusing girls, but the lion’s share of the abuse was committed by men.

 In 2020, when a successor was needed to replace the Bishop of Lyon, who had resigned because of a sexual-abuse scandal in his diocese, Anne Soupa, a French theologian, applied in protest over the place of women in the Catholic Church. 

As for me, I’m grateful Mrs. Loy and Mrs. Lawrence were there when I was a child.

Mickaël is back, again

photo by Jean-Luc Dugast@photographyjeanluc77

Some readers may remember him, my former student, my friend, who lost both feet and much more to an attack of meningococcal purpura in 2017. If not, you can refresh your memories by reading his portrait in my article of May 2019.

Today, Mickaël Gayen is back as a cyborg, a human repaired and enhanced by mechanics and technology, strong, handsome and wonderfully articulate as he speaks via video about his life as a double below-knee amputee. He and his story are part of an exhibit that opened October 13^th at the Musée de l’Homme, a museum devoted to humanity: who we are, where we come from and where are we going. The name of the exhibit is “Aux frontières de l’humain,” at the boundaries of the human. 

 

This exhibit, which takes us to the limits of what it means to be human, explores the fusion between humans, machines and technology. It also incites us to reconsider our kinship, real and imagined, with animals. Finally, it makes us think about what kind of future we want for ourselves and our planet.

Let’s begin at the beginning, with Adam in the Garden of Eden, when God gives him dominion over all the animals, placing him above them as master, giving him the power to name. For centuries, humans were at the top of the totem pole, lording it over the animal kingdom. In the 17^th century, the French philosopher Descartes went so far as to claim that animals were no more than machines, foreign to suffering and pain.

Today, many boundaries between humans and animals have collapsed. Already in the 19^th century, Charles Darwin maintained that animals, even the least complex, feel pleasure and pain, happiness and unhappiness. Since the mid-20^th century, with the development of the field of ethology, the study of animal behavior, we humans have been brought down a few pegs, to the status of one primate among others. 

"Totem" copyright Marcus Coates

As far as what makes us human, it’s not language or our ability to collaborate or recognize ourselves in a mirror. We share those traits with other animals. Among primates, we are unique in having legs longer than arms, but in many areas, other primates easily surpass us. A cheetah could outrun Usain Bolt any day, and there’s no Olympic swimmer capable of moving as fast as a swordfish.

Yet, we humans are the only ones who use language to ask questions about ourselves, about the boundaries between us and other animals, and about how far we can push the limits of humanity. Because of hybridity and technology, we’re confronted, not with boundaries or walls, but with shifting borders and ever-expanding frontiers when we try to define ourselves.  

Take, for example, a surgical procedure reported earlier this month. At NYU Langone Transplant Institute, surgeons, with the consent of the patient’s family, successfully attached the kidney of a genetically altered pig to a brain-dead human. The kidney began to function almost immediately and the surgeons were quick to declare a major scientific breakthrough. This is a perfect example of the marriage of hybridity and technology, leading us to ask: If a pig keeps us alive, are we any less human? Is it ethical to use genetically modified animals to repair, prolong and enhance human life?

We humans ask a lot of questions like that, and we’ve always fantasized about hybrid versions of ourselves. In mythology and folklore, there are centaurs and mermaids; in comics, movies and Japanese mangas, superheroes and heroines like Iron Man, Edward Scissorhands or Alita Battle Angel, a pure cyborg except for her human brain. 

 

Fiction and fantasy are one thing, but what does it mean to be a living, breathing cyborg today? Here is where Mickaël comes in. In the exhibit, surrounded by an exoskeleton sculpture, by posters and photos that document “cyborg art,” a video screen projects his image as he relates the hurdles of a life intimately and intensely linked to technology.  

 

He begins by establishing an essential fact: film and fiction overlook the pain. In Mickaël’s case, this is the pain of losing both legs below the knee, the pain of several operations, of learning to walk again, of walking each day with the pressure of his legs against artificial limbs. Science fiction celebrates the technological prowess. Mickaël celebrates what his protheses have given back to him: the ability to walk, to go up and down stairs, to go out in the world, to dance and soon to drive, all achieved through technology saddled to his indomitable will.

Speaking about himself, Mickaël makes us look at ourselves, at the miracle of our toes and fingers (he lost most of his fingertips), of the legs that take us where we want to go. Soon after having been amputated, he asked himself: “Will I still be loved in this new, altered state?” Will friends, family, strangers accept him as a “cyborg,” a technically repaired and enhanced human being?

Nearly four years after his loss, Mickaël can answer those questions with a resounding “yes.” More than accepted, he has become a model for all who know him. French political parties are currently selecting their candidates for next April’s presidential elections and, as no particular candidate stands out, I’m ready to propose “Mickaël Gayen for President!”

Yet, technological prowess also has its dark side. Today researchers have the potential to create mutants through the modification of the human genome, and PGI, or preimplantation genetic diagnosis, is a step towards eugenics, allowing parents to pick and choose their child. Already in 2013, in Philadelphia, a “perfect” test-tube baby was born, thanks to in-vitro screening of embryos through genetic sequencing. 

"The Bond" copyright Patricia Piccini

In the United States, in 2016, the Human Genome Project-Write set out to create synthetic human cells that could lead to the production of embryos without parents. Today, in California, transhumanists aspire to “live forever,” or at least, to technologically extend their life span far beyond the record held by Jeanne Calment, a French woman who died in 1997 at age 122.

At a time when urgent decisions and sacrifices must be made (and most of us don’t want to make them) to save a dying Earth, while transhumanists dream of colonies on Mars and survivalists build their bunkers, this exhibit ends by reminding us that our human limits are inseparable from those of planet Earth.