Spin Me Round

Here's where to send/drop off the archbishop's DVD, if you get one: DVD to ART.

OK, I get it now.
Like it, don't like it, Facebook works.


1. On Thursday, my BFF bink created a Facebook group DVD to ART. She wrote:

"On 9/22 the archbishop [ John C. Nienstedt, of Minneapolis and St. Paul] mailed Catholics a DVD warning that if Minnesota legalizes same-sex marriage, the sky will fall.

RESIST your temptation to return the DVD; toss it; use it as a frisbee! Give me your DVDs and I’ll recycle them into art: transforming a message of fear into hope."

2. Within 24 hours, Andy Birkey of local news site Minnesota Independent had posted "Minnesotan seeks to creatively reuse Catholic church’s anti-gay marriage DVDs", and Hart Van Denburg of City Pages posted "Archbishop John Nienstedt's anti-gay DVD becomes art fodder":

"An Artist in Residence at the Basilica of St. Mary, [bink] says she wants to take the negative message from the archbishop and transform it into something completely new, inclusive and positive. "I don't really want it to be "anti" anything," she said. "I want it to be a different message." [italics mine]

3. And on Saturday, less than 48 hours after bink first posted DVD to ART, the pastor of the Basilica of Saint Mary called bink in and "suspended" her from her role as Artist in Residence, which she'd held for fifteen years.

bink knew this would be the outcome if/when word got out about her art project, and she was willing to accept that. (It just happened really fast.) 

She blogged, "I'm both startled and humbled to find that I've join the ranks of people before me who been silenced or ousted, one by one, for disagreeing with the church.
Maybe in 500 years, I, like Galileo, will get my suspension lifted."

Galileo tattoo from Discover Magazine
Eppur si muove means "And yet it moves" in Italian. Galileo supposedly muttered this phrase in 1633 after the Inquisition forced him to recant his knowledge that Earth moves around the Sun.
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I'm stunned at the speed of it all. It's one thing to spend the summer reading about social networking, another to experience its power personally.

I'm also stunned to witness up close and personal--once again--the brutal way the Catholic Church metes out its peculiar brand of justice: 
Bam! You're outta here. No appeals, no recourse, no nothing.

I am not normally given to patriotism, but the Church makes me want to kiss the U.S. flag in gratitude for the ideals it represents: ideals like free speech, checks and balances on power, due process. 

Yeah, we Americans don't always live up to them, but by god, at least in theory we hold them dear. 
The Church does not.

I love the Church, though, as a repository of some of humanity's most amazing stories.
They are the stories that inspire bink to respond to the archbishop's DVDs with love and creativity.

In the long run, I believe, that response is made of the stuff that truly has the power to transform.
Not the speedy change of Facebook, but the low, slow work of evolution.
And if we're going to survive, we have to evolve.

"It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change."

--Charles Darwin

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Michael Bayly at The Wild Reed blog also wrote about bink's and other responses to the archbishop's DVDs:
"What To Do With the MN Bishops' DVD", and "Local Catholics Seek to "Create Some Good Out of an Unfortunate Situation"".
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TOP image: "Saint Jerome Writing" by Caravaggio
Gutenberg's Bible was the Vulgate, largely Jerome's Latin translation.