News

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend Speaks on Church Reform

By Diane Dugan

On a cool October night when the Fightin’ Phils were facing down the Dodgers in the game that would clinch the National League title, members of Voice of the Faithful/Greater Philadelphia and interested members of the public gathered in the Church on the Mall in Plymouth Meeting to meet with Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, former Democratic lieutenant governor of Maryland.

Since leaving office in 2003, Kennedy Townsend has served on a number of non-profit boards and currently is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s School of Public Policy. Voice of the Faithful (VOTF), an international organization of 35,000 founded in 2002 in response to the clergy sexual abuse scandal, had invited Kennedy Townsend to discuss some of the issues in her 2007 book, “Failing America’s Faithful: How Today’s Churches Are Mixing God With Politics and Losing Their Way.”

The eldest daughter of Ethel and Robert F. Kennedy and a lifelong active Catholic, Kennedy Townsend began writing her book about seven years ago because, as she says, she had seen the relationship between church and politics change. Religion has come to be associated with the political right-wing, and by focusing so much on issues like abortion, same-sex marriage, and stem-cell research—which are “important, but not the only issues”—the Catholic Church has risked appearing “too partisan.”

She feels that the election of Barack Obama has helped the Catholic Church, explaining that the Vatican actually likes a lot of his positions (e.g., global poverty, climate change), and that he’s enormously popular in areas of the world where the Church wants to succeed. (A case in point is Africa, whose Catholic bishops just delivered a scathing denunciation of corrupt regimes in Angola and Uganda.)

“Reading the tea leaves” in her journeys around the world, Kennedy Townsend says, she perceives a shift going on in the Vatican, its recent aggressive bid for traditional Anglicans being what she calls a “desperate gasp.”

Kennedy Townsend was raised to believe in the importance of giving back, her parents often quoting St. Luke’s “To whom much has been given, much is expected.” She told of being taken to the Senate Rackets Committee hearings as a child when her father was investigating the corrupt Teamsters’ union, and the physical threats to her and her siblings as a result of his work. And she shared one of my favorite “Bobby” anecdotes: RFK speaking to a crowd of African-Americans in Indianapolis on the night of Martin Luther King’s murder, about the pain of losing a beloved brother to a violent death, and the necessity of meeting violence not with more of the same, but “with love, and wisdom, and compassion.” While many American cities erupted in riots that night, there were none in Indianapolis. These and other experiences taught her two things, she says: that doing good often comes at great personal cost; and that our God must be one of compassion and love.

Kennedy Townsend spoke movingly of the critical importance of the Church throughout her life, not just in terms of spiritual consolation but also its long, admirable record in support of human rights and social justice. She acknowledged that “the Roman Catholic Church has had problems with me” because of her stands on various issues, denying her speaking engagements at Catholic schools in her home diocese of Baltimore. Professing herself a big supporter of VOTF and their work (their mission is “Keep the Faith; Change the Church”), she feels reform-minded Catholics need to focus on positives, citing current Church involvement in issues like health care, climate change and immigration.

Internally, however, there’s much work to be done. Kennedy Townsend made a comparison between the role of Poland’s Solidarity movement, which laid the groundwork for the eventual collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, and that of the laity. The laity have a responsibility, she says, to create alternatives, such as the election of bishops and economic transparency. There are many ways to make a difference.

Two of the biggest mistakes the Church has made in recent times, Kennedy Townsend thinks, were the encyclical Humanae Vitae (banning the use of artificial contraceptives) and the clergy sexual abuse scandal. Both events had the unintended effect of making many faithful Catholics rebel. She closed by urging her audience to “write to the Pope! He’s been listening to the right wing; get him used to hearing from the left.”

October 29, 2009 by
Food & Drink

Margaret M. Johnson’s Teatime Fruitcake

This fruitcake comes from Dromoland Castle (Newmarket-on-Fergus).

Ingredients

1 cup water
1 cup (4 ounces) raisins
1 cup (4 ounces) sultanas (golden raisins)
2 ounces red glace cherries
1-1/2 Tablespoons dark rum
1-1/2 Tablespoons sherry
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, at room temperature, plus more for greasing
1/2 cup superfine sugar
2 large eggs
1 cup self-rising flour
1 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice or mixed spice (see note)

The day before baking, in a medium saucepan over medium heat, bring the water to a boil.

Stir in the raisins, sultanas and cherries, and cook for 3 minutes.

Drain the fruit and transfer to a small bowl.

Stir in the rum, sherry and vanilla.

Let cool for 30 minutes, then cover and let stand for 24 hours at room temperature.

On the day of baking, preheat the over to 300 degrees.

Line a 9- by 5- by 3-inch loaf pan with waxed paper. Butter the paper.

Beat the 1/2 cup of butter and the sugar with an electric mixer until light an fluffy.

Beat in the eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition.
With a wooden spoon, fold in the flour and spice.

Stir in the reserved fruit mixture.

Transfer the batter to the prepared pan and bake for 65 to 70 minutes, until a skewer inserted into the center comes out clean.
Remove from the oven and let cool completely in the pan on a wire rack.

Invert the cake onto the rack, peel off the waxed paper, and wrap the cake in aluminum foil.

Let sit overnight at room temperature before cutting into slices.

Serves 8 to 10.

Note: To make mixed spice, put 1 Tablespoon coriander seeds, 1 crushed cinnamon stick, 1 teaspoon whole cloves, and 1 teaspoon allspice berries in a spice or coffee grinder. Process until finely ground. Add 1 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg and 2 teaspoons ground ginger. Mix thoroughly, stirring by hand. Store in an airtight container.

Source: Tea & Crumpets, by Margaret M. Johnson (Chronicle Books, 2009). Reprinted with permission of the author.

October 29, 2009 by
Columns, How to Be Irish in Philly

How to Be Irish in Philly This Week

We could all use a few laughs and there will be more than a few when the Irish Comedy Tour rolls into town on Sunday at the Sellersville Theatre. It’s also your chance to see former Philly guy, Pat Godwin, late of the John DeBella Morning Zoo and Howard Stern radio programs.

But, before that happens, local documentary maker John Foley’s poignant and patriotic film, The Color Bearers, which features former Eagle Vince Papale, will be shown at the FirstGlance Philadelphia Film Festival at the Franklin Theater at the Franklin Institute on Saturday. The film explores the courage of those who carried the flag in the Revolutionary and Civil wars.

So, you think you can dance? Or sing? Or play a bodhran? America’s Got Talent Season 5 auditions are being held at Pennsylvania’s Convention Center on Saturday and they’re looking for Irish acts. So drag your harp or your pipes on down and show them how it’s done.

There are also a couple of fundraisers on Saturday. AOH/LAOH Div. 87 is holding a benefit to raise money to help member George Lees repair his motorized wheelchair. Paddy’s Well is at Brittingham’s Irish Pub in Lafayette Hill on Sunday afternoon to drum up support and money for Jessica Reed, daughter of Paddy’s Well bass player Frank Reed, who suffers from cystic fibrosis. Jessica recently underwent a lung transplant and her medical costs are high. Also on the bill, Oliver McElhone, The King Brothers, and Seamus McGroary.

What happened to the Celtic Tiger? That’s the focus of a panel discussion on Tuesday at the Rittenhouse Hotel, sponsored by the Irish American Business Chamber and Network. Dublin representatives from Baker Tilly, one the world’s leading accounting firms, will explore the issue of Ireland’s economy.

On Friday, don your scariest costume (yes, anything you wore back in the ‘80s will be fine) and head over to the Irish Center in Mt. Airy for the Samhain Rambling House and celebrate Halloween Irish style. We’ve heard that there have been some ghostly manifestations at the center (no, really), so you may want to bring your ouija board. Check back with us later in the week to get the whole story!

October 23, 2009 by
People

Five Questions for a Woman of a Thousand (Or So) Voices

Hollis Payer in her other job--teaching Irish fiddle.

Hollis Payer in her other job--teaching Irish fiddle.

Whether it’s a straightforward, sunny commercial for Lifetime television or a local radio ad for Philly Phlash, the next voice you hear might be that of Hollis Payer.

Hollis is a well-known voiceover artist from the Philadelphia area, lending her well-toned vocal chords to many commercial enterprises.

But you’re also just as likely to hear another signature Hollis Payer sound—that of her Irish fiddle playing. Drop around the Philadelphia Irish Center on some nights, and you might hear the strains of Hollis’ fiddle music emanating from one of the Center’s side rooms.

We chatted with Hollis about both of her amazing talents.

1. You seem to be able to interpret the spoken characteristics of a lot of character types. I imagine you’ve been doing this kind of work for a while to be as accomplished as you are. Do you hear voices?

Do I hear voices? Not since the medication kicked in! The truth is: Yes! I hear voices, I hear music, I’m tuned into and pick up on all sorts of sounds. I’ve always loved language, poetry, words. As a child, I thought I was going to be a crack journalist, like yourself, but then I went to the University of Chicago and studied linguistics. And left there to work as an actor.

2. How did you get into voiceover work?

It was a different world when I first started on this path. I’d never really heard of voice work, but a friend who worked as a producer told me I should look into it. My initial response: “They pay people to do that?” The only person doing v-o’s in Philadelphia at that time was Scott Sanders… he still is, by the way, and is legend in this business… so I called him up and asked him for advice! Get a good demo and start shopping it around was what he said. So I did. I found an entree in the pharmaceutical world, which is very media intensive and requires attention to pronunciation. With my Catholic high school Latin, I was a natural!

3. The serious authoritative voice or the dotty grandma—which one do you prefer to do?

Serious sounding authority—especially when you suspect no one’s listening to you anyway—can get a bit tedious, don’t you think? I like making up character voices. I got to “voice” (yes, it’s become a verb now) a series of animated shows where I played a smart-alecky “science boy,” and recently was heard as a “prissy dog” for an animated commercial. My most favorite job was creating voices for several characters in a DVD series of fairy tales—that were packaged along with a wrist watch and sold at Walmart.

4. How long have you been playing Irish fiddle and how’d you get into it? (I know … sneaky two questions.)

My grandfather gave me a violin when I was 8 years old and I did the standard school orchestra instruction for several years, switching to the cello in high school just because they needed someone to do that! I didn’t really pick up the fiddle to play traditional Irish music until I heard the Chieftains in 1980. Boil the Breakfast Early had just come out and I’d never heard anything like it. It was an epiphany—I had to “get” that noise. I went to Ireland for the first time a few months later, hitching around with my fiddle and hanging out at sessions, pestering people to teach me tunes. I settled back in the states in Portland, Oregon and pestered Kevin Burke to teach me more, and thus began my pestering fiddle career.

5. How do your voiceover talents and your fiddle playing go together? What is there about you that wants to do both?

Both voice work and fiddle playing have been like gifts dropped into my lap. I thought I had talent, but I never imagined it would take either of these surprising forms. Deep listening is at the heart of both. As I said in response to your first question, I’ve always been acutely aware of the sounds of this world, am profoundly moved by words and music and have the crazy need to express all of this in some way.

October 23, 2009 by
People

Sinn Fein’s Gerry Adams Meets with Local GAA Footballers

Gerry Adams, center, with the Mairead Farrell Ladies Junior Football Club in Philadelphia.

Gerry Adams, center, with the Mairead Farrell Ladies Junior Football Club in Philadelphia.

It seemed like the perfect name, says Angela Mohan. When she and Siobhan Trainor were casting about for a name for their new ladies Gaelic football club, they wanted to honor a strong Irish woman. They picked Mairead Farrell, the Belfast-born IRA fighter who spent 10 years in prison and was killed by British soldiers on Gibraltar in 1988.

The insignia associated with Farrell was a phoenix rising from the ashes. It seemed appropriate. Mohan and Trainor have both been involved with other football teams in the Philadelphia area that have folded and later been reborn as interest and the number of seasoned Irish players waxed and waned.

Their new team still relies on the Irish—often with summer visitors that Mohan recruits—but is now bucked up by Americans, many of them superb athletes on the basketball courts, but who have never played the game that started in Ireland the early 14th century.

Nevertheless, the women took home the Sean P. Cawley Cup as Philadelphia’s regional champions after a tough game against the Notre Dames last summer on the fields of Cardinal Dougherty High School.

But it was the name of their team that caught the attention of Gerry Adams, a member of Northern Ireland’s parliament and longtime head of Sinn Fein, the political party closely affiliated with the IRA.

A few months ago, he sent them a letter,commending them for commemorating the life of Mairead Farrell who, he said, “was a very special young woman whose love for her country encompassed its history and culture, including Gaelic games.”

The letter concluded, “I wish you well and hope to see you in Philadelphia in the future.” A typical sign-off. . .except that Adams meant it.

Last Friday, October 16, before Adams attended the annual banquet of the Irish Society in Philadelphia at the Penns Landing Hyatt, he spent half an hour chatting, laughing and posing for pictures with members of the team who came suited up and with a gift—a Mairead Farrell jersey. “I hope it’s extra large,” he joked.

With him was Rita O’Hare, the Sinn Fein representative to the United States, with whom Farrell had stayed in Dublin after her release from prison. “I’m glad Mairead’s name is being used and still being heard,” said O’Hare. Adams, she said was very enthusiastic about meeting the team that bears her name. “Plus he’s mad about GAA,” she laughed.

October 23, 2009 by
News

Bring Your Legal Problems—Help is Free

Have an immigration problem? A landlord dispute? Any messy legal situation you don’t know how to deal with?

The Irish Immigration Center is offering a free Legal and Immigration Clinic with the help of the Brehon Law Society and Drexel Law School every fourth Tuesday of the month, starting on October 27, from 3 to 6 PM.

Criminal and family lawyers are also available on request.

You need an appointment for these confidential clinics. Call 610-789-6355 to make one. The Irish Immigration Center is at 7 South Cedar Lane in Upper Darby.

October 23, 2009 by
Music

Review: “Music of North Connacht” by the Innisfree Ceili Band

If you’re a dancer, you’ll love the Innisfree Céilí Band’s “Music of North Connacht.” And if you don’t dance, you’ll wish you did. Well, you can still tap your toes.

The always busy Teada fiddler Oisin Mac Diarmada is the driving force behind the Innisfree Céilí Band. (Thanks, Oisin, for providing the CD.) There are three Mac Diarmadas in the band in all, also including Cormac on fiddle and Maire on flute.

Innisfree won the 2008 All-Ireland Senior Céilí Band competition. It’s easy to see why. In its 12 tracks, “Music of North Connacht” seeks to encapsulate the musical traditions of counties Sligo, Roscommon and Leitrim. It succeeds brilliantly.

In his liner notes, MacDiarmada pays tribute to the flute and fiddle pairings North Connacht is known for and he honors the memory of those superb musicians, such as South Sligo’s Michael Coleman and James Morrison, whose early crackling and hissing 78s captured and preserved the tradition.

Innisfree’s 11 musicians—three fiddles, four flutes, two accordions, piano and drums—play with huge energy, discipline and clarity.

The CD opens with an energetic set of reels, “The Real Blackthorn Stick” and “Trim the Velvet,”and it sets a driving pace for all that follows.

I’m a big fan of the fourth track, a set of marches (“O Domhnaill Abu” and the venerable “Jamesy Gannon’s.” For whatever reason, it put me in mind of a Friday night céilí at the Philadelphia Irish Center. That, and I just like “Jamesy Gannon’s.”

Track nine, is another standout, a set of jigs featuring “Geese in the Bog” and “I Was Born for Sport.”

I have to give props to the drummer, Sligo’s Daragh Kelly. Every céilí band needs a living, breathing human metronome, and Kelly fits the bill.

I also greatly appreciated the detailed little notes on the track list. Each track provides an encapsulated history or the tunes and where they came from.

If you’d like to acquire these splendid tunes for yourself, the CD is supposed to be available at www.innisfreeceiliband.ie, but when I checked, the site wasn’t up yet. That’s how new this CD is. Indeed, the CD release party is scheduled for tomorrow, October 17, in Gurteen, County Sligo. Keep checking.

You can also visit their Facebook page.

October 13, 2009 by
Music, People

Review: “Dig With It,” a New CD from Randal Bays

By Frank Dalton

Under my window a clean rasping sound

when the spade sinks into gravelly ground:

my father, digging. I look down.

By God, the old man could handle a spade,

just like his old man.

My grandfather could cut more turf in a day

than any other man on Toner’s bog.

The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap

of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge

through living roots awaken in my head.

But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb

the squat pen rests.

I’ll dig with it.

—From Digging, by Seamus Heaney

Nobel Prize winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney knows that unlike his father and grandfather, he is no farmer. His often-quoted early work ‘Digging’ is meaningful for Randal Bays, whose own working man father “had a hard time watching his son go down the road towards the life of a musician.”

Randal is an American fiddler who has mastered the genre of Irish traditional music to a point where he now plays as well as any native. He has a number of successful recordings to his credit and has played and toured with many of the great names of the music, like fiddler Martin Hayes, button accordionist James Keane and guitarist/singer Daithi Sproule.

Randal’s amazing skill at the Irish style has been honed by more than twenty-five years of fiddling and listening, and the sharing of many a late-night session with the finest traditional musicians. Last winter Randal sat down in the studio again and recorded “Dig With It”, an impressive collection of jigs, reels, hornpipes and marches, and two beautiful slow airs.

The opening track on this thoroughly enjoyable CD, “Master’s Degree March,” is an original composition, as is the reel “Friday Harbor.” The remaining tunes are mostly traditional, or every bit as good as traditional, having been originally crafted by the likes of legendary tunesmith Ed Reavy, fiddler James Kelly, and East Galway fiddler and accordion player Tommy Coen.

“The Blue Whale” is the work of Willie Bays, who appears on that track with his proud father. The accompaniment on the CD is tasteful and unobtrusive throughout, supplied by Canadian musician Dave Marshall (guitar, tenor banjo). Randal himself displays not only his great prowess on the fiddle, but also his talent on the guitar and harp.

The Cork Examiner (Ireland) has called Randal Bays “a rare beast, a master of the fiddle”, while here in America Fiddler Magazine says he is “among the best Irish style fiddlers of his generation.” Randal has clearly earned recognition on both sides of the pond as a musician of uncommon talent.

October 13, 2009 by