ASTEROID GODDESSES

Hi again Rad,

Great to have the opportunity to continue the asteroid Goddesses thread here.

There are three of the most recent charts published I would like to mention and thank you for your reference. The first is Robina Courtin, a Buddhist nun. This is a soul who truly embodies the practical wisdom of Jupiter in Virgo and I would encourage enveryone to check her short videos on exactly this subjects, every single one is a gift of wisdom. Here is a link to her YouTube and social media (her chart is on page 40 of the thread on the MB) https://www.youtube.com/@RobinaCourtinYouTube/shorts

https://www.instagram.com/robinacourtin/

The other is Camille Herron (MB page 41), ultrarunner champion and personally a soul that makes my soul smile with joy. She is indeed an Amazon example of our times and of course she has Amazon south node conjunct her mars south node and natal Uranus in Sag.

She has a very interesting talk where she blends personal strength with her feminine nature talking about the importance of menstrual health and having run an ultramarathon on day one of her period (and finishing it!)

Here is a link for those who wish to listen

https://womensrunningstories.com/camille-herron-menstrual-health-and-running-western-states-on-day-one-of-her-period

The other is of course Mahsa Amini. What more could be a chant of Lilith if not "Women, Life, Freedom"?

This courageous woman with Pluto new phase mars, nn Lilith balsamic to Pluto, in Sag. will forever be the face of women's resistance in Iran (and with the nn Lilith pluto mars she will be again here for the cause for sure) and with her sun virgo ruling the moon's north node venus and ceres, relative to a pisces Moon/Lilith, a true martyr for the cause. I feel she has been there through this trauma for time and time again with the Uranus south node conjunction in Aquarius, Neptune in Aquarius.

May Goddess bless her soul and all the souls of women and men who keep fighting their regime repression.

Helena

Astrodata Bank lists two birthtimes for Taylor Swift:

Dec 13 1989, 5:17 am, Reading, Pa,(Rodden rating: DD)

and

Dec 13 1989, 8:36 am, Wyomissing, PA

So are first post here will be the chart of Taylor Swift. Below is her chart with a recent article about her, and a link to wikipedia that has the full documentation of her life to date.

**************

Taylor Swift becomes first musician to claim entire Top 10 on Billboard Hot 100 Singer has surpassed Drake, who had held the previous record with nine of the top songs for a week last year Associated Press Taylor Swift scored a 10 out of 10 to become the first artist in history to claim the Top 10 slots on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the US, with tracks from her latest album, Midnights. Billboard reported on Monday that Swift has surpassed Drake, who had held the previous record with nine of the Top 10 songs for a week in September 2021. "10 out of 10 of the Hot 100??? On my 10th album??? I AM IN SHAMBLES," the 32-year-old pop star tweeted. The new album came out on 21 October with both a 13-track standard release and a deluxe version with seven bonus tracks. It has had one of the biggest album launches in nearly seven years. Billboard also reported that Swift now ties with Barbra Streisand for the female artist with the most No 1 albums. The No 1 spot on the Billboard chart belongs to Anti-Hero, whose lyrics "It's me/hi/I'm the problem/It's me" have quickly become a TikTok trend. The other Top 10 songs include Lavender Haze, Maroon, Snow on the Beach, Midnight Rain, Bejeweled and Question ... ? Swift has set a number of new records with Midnights: it had the biggest first week of sales of any album this year, almost doubling the numbers of the previous title-holder, Harry's House, the third solo album by Harry Styles. Midnights also had the highest first-week streams of the year: 72.5m, again beating Styles' figures of 53.9m. On the day of its release, Midnights broke global Spotify records for the most streams of a single album in one day. Swift has also overtaken Madonna to set a new all-time UK chart record for the fastest succession of nine UK No 1 albums of any female artist – although Madonna still has the record for the most UK No 1 albums of any solo female artist, with 12 overall. Swift is now second in that list, pushing Kylie Minogue into third place. But despite her success in the UK she won't be able to replicate her domination of the Billboard Hot 100: after 16 of the 17 songs on Ed Sheeran's 2017 album, ÷, charted in the Top 20, rules were introduced that mean that only the three most popular songs of any album are now eligible for the UK's singles chart. More: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Swift ********

In the original thread we focused on the asteroids Lilith and Amazon which for her are listed below. But there are also other asteroids of course that correlate to the Goddess archetype such as Ceres for example. So please feel free to ask any questions you may have, or to comment on what you may see in any chart that we post going forwards from here. Her natal Lilith is 22 Sagittarius, N.Node 21 Sagittarius, S.Node 21 Gemini. Her natal Amazon is 5 Capricorn, N.Node 10 Taurus, and the S.Node 29 Scorpio. Goddess Bless, Rad

Here is the natal chart for Taylor which is based on her actual birth time.

Hi All,

Here is the story of the now 15yr old Palestinian girl Janna Jihad who started becoming a journalist at 11 years old in order to document the reality of the Palestinian people. I am posting an interview with her when she was 13 yrs old, but also posting links to other articles about her at different ages, and a video link as well. This a noon chart.

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Meet Janna Jihad, the 13-Year-Old Palestinian Journalist Exposing the Israeli Occupation

Web ExclusiveAugust 08, 2019

“My camera is my weapon.” Those are the words of a celebrated Palestinian journalist who has been reporting on the Israeli occupation from the West Bank for more than six years. But Janna Jihad isn’t any journalist — she’s just 13 years old. She started telling stories about her home of Nabi Saleh when she was only 7, after her cousin and uncle were killed in her village. She recently joined us in our New York studio.

“I always say that my camera is my weapon of choice, because using my camera, it’s a very peaceful and nice way to resist this occupation,” she says. “By using my camera, I can send a message, and it can be even more effective than a gun, more effective than violence, more effective than killing people.”

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. “My camera is my gun.” Those are the words of a celebrated Palestinian journalist who’s been reporting on the Israeli occupation from the West Bank for more than six years. But Janna Jihad isn’t any journalist. She’s just 13 years old. She started telling stories about her home of Nabi Saleh when she was only 7, after her cousin and her uncle were killed in the village. Since then, Janna has shared countless videos about Palestinian resistance with viewers around the world, on Twitter, on YouTube, on Facebook, garnering tens of thousands of followers. This is a clip of Janna Jihad confronting Israeli soldiers in the occupied West Bank last year, in 2018.

JANNA JIHAD: From here, as you can see, those terrorist people, humans with no humanity, are coming to our land, trying to kill children and to make children get injured. From here, we’re sending our message and saying that Palestine will be free. From Nabi Saleh, Janna Jihad, occupied Palestine.

AMY GOODMAN: You hear that sign-off: “From Nabi Saleh, this is Janna Jihad, in occupied Palestine.” Janna is the cousin of Ahed Tamimi, the teenage activist who became a heroine to Palestinians after a viral video showed her slapping an Israeli soldier near her family’s home in the occupied West Bank. It was right after she had learned her cousin had been shot in the face by an Israeli soldier.

Janna Jihad is in the United States this month to share her stories about Palestine around the country. She joins us now in our New York studio.

Janna, thanks for making this stop.

JANNA JIHAD: Thank you. Thank you for, like, letting me come here and just, like, to speak more about my issue and, like, about my message as a Palestinian child.

AMY GOODMAN: So, when did you pick up your cellphone to start videoing? And was it your cellphone?

JANNA JIHAD: So, it was my mother’s cellphone. I was only 7 years old when I started doing journalism. It was when I saw that there were not enough journalists to cover things that happened in my village, Nabi Saleh, and also in Palestine in general. Like, when my friend Mustafa was killed, my uncle Rushdie was killed, a lot of things were happening, and the world didn’t know about how we, as Palestinian children living under this Israeli military occupation, are living, how we’re suffering, how we’re — like, how our rights are getting violated, our childhood is not given to us. So I wanted to be the voice of those children and to just be the messenger of their message, which is very important, and to raise awareness about this very important international issue.

AMY GOODMAN: So, at 7 years old, you take your mom’s cellphone, and you start videoing.

JANNA JIHAD: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: And posting those videos.

JANNA JIHAD: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: You say your camera is your gun. What do you mean?

JANNA JIHAD: So, I always say that my camera is my weapon of choice, because using my camera, it’s a very peaceful and nice way to resist this occupation. And by using my camera, I can send a message, and it can be even more effective than a gun, more effective than violence, more effective than killing people.

AMY GOODMAN: How do Israeli soldiers respond to your videoing?

JANNA JIHAD: Of course, it’s pretty hard. Like, for example, last year I got — the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Thoughts made a secret report about me, saying that I’m the next threat on their country.

AMY GOODMAN: Wait, wait, wait. You have to repeat what you just said.

JANNA JIHAD: OK.

AMY GOODMAN: The Israeli Ministry of?

JANNA JIHAD: Of Strategic Thoughts.

AMY GOODMAN: How do you know about this report on you?

JANNA JIHAD: OK, I’ll explain. So, the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Thoughts made a secret report about me, saying that I’m the next threat on their state. And this report was revealed by the Israeli fourth news channel. And after that, I got a lot of threats, intimidations by the Israeli street. And after that, I got registered by the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate. And, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: So, you are the youngest press card-carrying journalist in the world. You just turned 13.

JANNA JIHAD: Thirteen, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: What does that mean? How does that protect you to have that press card?

JANNA JIHAD: So, I’m the youngest Palestinian registered press card-carrying journalist in the world. So, I got registered after this report was revealed. And it was also right after I was stopped on the border. I was only 12 years old and four days, when I was stopped while coming back from Jordan on the Israeli border, and was interrogated for three hours. And it was, of course, illegal, because, like, if a minor got interrogated, in the international law, I have to have my parent or a lawyer, and I didn’t have any of those. And it was pretty hard for me. And after that, I got registered, which would be like a bit of protection, although it’s not really protection, because all of the journalists get killed, arrested and injured in the occupied Palestine. But it helps a little bit, you know? Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to your cousin, Ahed, for a moment, Ahed Tamimi, the young Palestinian activist who served an eight-month term in Israeli prison. She became a heroine to so many Palestinians and many others around the world, when video went viral showing her slapping an Israeli soldier near the family’s home just after Ahed had learned her cousin had been gravely wounded by an Israeli soldier, who shot him in the head using a rubber-coated steel bullet. We got a chance to speak with Ahed soon after she was released from prison, and we asked her about the conditions in the jail.

AHED TAMIMI: [translated] There were women, and there were children. There was one woman who had been detained under administrative detention. Administrative detention means the detention is based on undisclosed files, so the detainee doesn’t know why they’re detained. Administrative detainees only attend administrative courts, and their sentence is always extended. At first, it might be six months, but it’ll be renewed another time for four months. They’ll tell you your administrative detention is six months, but then, after six months, they’ll tell you they’ve extended another four. After four months, they’ll tell you another six. It’s like the prisoner — may God rest his soul — Ali Jamal, who spent seven consecutive years under administrative detention.

There are over 350 children in prison, and three children who are under administrative detention. The conditions children endure in prison are very difficult. Prison isn’t for anyone. And the prison administration puts a lot of pressure on them, so it’s very difficult. I hope for the release of all prisoners, and especially children, as soon as possible.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that is Ahed Tamimi. We were speaking to her in front of her house. She was broadcasting from there to our New York studio, where I got a chance to interview her. She is 18 years old. She was jailed when she was 16, turned 17 in prison. What has Ahed’s activism meant to you? Tell us about Nabi Saleh, where you all live.

JANNA JIHAD: So, Nabi Saleh is a very small village, 500 people living there. It’s like so small. Also, we have an Israeli illegal settlement built on the land in Nabi Saleh, which is only 50 meters far from the village. And there is a checkpoint on the entrance. It’s very small. We’re all one family, which is the Tamimi family. Ahed is my cousin and my best friend. She was always. You know, I am the only child, and she has no sister, so we are always together and stuff. And yeah, Ahed is like — we’re really close. We always have been going to demonstrations and marches and like everything together. And it’s pretty nice, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: And what was it like for you when she went to jail? She went to jail for slapping an Israeli soldier. So, she had just learned that your cousin, her cousin, had just been shot in the head by a rubber-tipped steel coated bullet?

JANNA JIHAD: Yeah. So, if you want, I can tell you Mohammed’s story, which is our cousin who got shot in the head, which was — he was just like literally playing. The soldiers were in the village for a couple of — for the past couple of days. And they were just shooting gas canisters randomly. There were no demonstrations, no clashes, no anything. It was just them raiding the village. And it was like right after Trump’s declaration that Jerusalem was the capital of Israel, and a lot of stuff, like, were happening in the West Bank and, you know, like a lot of demonstrations and stuff. And it was that time.

So, Mohammed was playing with his friends, soccer, on the mountain. And he was just — so, like, you know, shooting, it’s pretty normal for us, and we would play outside, because, like, you know, it’s always happening.

AMY GOODMAN: What’s always happening?

JANNA JIHAD: When, like, the Israeli occupation forces would just like start shooting gas canisters randomly. And then, suddenly, that shooting stopped. So, Mohammed thought that somebody got arrested or somebody got injured. So he was right next to that wall. It’s not a separation well, but it’s a normal wall. And he had a ladder. So he just climbed that ladder and wanted to see if something happened. And in the same moment, he climbed that ladder and just like took a look. The Israeli military soldiers were right under the wall. And one of them just shot him with a rubber-coated bullet, which came right here, right next to his nose, and was stuck in his brain. And he was in a coma for seven days. He lost a whole one-third of his skull. And he was under treatment. He had got arrested even three times while he was treated.

And after that — so, the problem about the world is that they only see the slap, but they don’t see the whole story. So, after that, the same soldiers just came right next to Ahed’s house and wanted to enter, because Ahed’s house is in a, like, pretty high area, so they can pretty much see everyone. They wanted to go to the roof of Ahed’s house and just like shoot.

AMY GOODMAN: Of Ahed.

JANNA JIHAD: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Who, at the time, was 16.

JANNA JIHAD: Yeah. They wanted to go to her house, to her properties, and start shooting more children. And Ahed was pretty much — she didn’t want them to go into her house, pretty much. And then he started pushing her, and then she slapped him. And that’s why she got arrested for eight months.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, you’re sitting here telling us this story. You’re telling us a story of when you were like, what, 10, 11 years old. Your cousin is shot in the face, is shot in the head, and now he’s lost a third of his brain or his skull in the process. How does this affect you as a child? How do you process this?

JANNA JIHAD: So, of course, a lot of difficult stuff for us as children living under this occupation happens. Like, for example, I saw a lot of people in my life getting killed in front of me. I was trying to — you know, we all — like, we get traumatized. We’re humans. You know, it’s pretty hard for us to process all of that. But we always believe that we want freedom, and wanting freedom is not easy. We have to pay the price of freedom. And the price of freedom won’t be that cheap. It’s going to be pretty expensive. A lot of people are going to get killed. A lot of people are going to get arrested. A lot of people are going to, like, get injured. But our main goal is to liberate Palestine, to live in freedom, love, peace and equality and justice, like any other human and child deserves to live.

AMY GOODMAN: You recently put out on Facebook the story of Mahmoud Salah.

JANNA JIHAD: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Who you say was shot in the leg by an Israeli sniper.

JANNA JIHAD: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Tell us what happened to him. What were the circumstances, and what has since happened?

JANNA JIHAD: So, Mahmoud Salah is a child from the village of al-Khader, next to the city of Bethlehem. So, Mahmoud Salah, he was playing after Iftar in Ramadan with his friends. He was playing soccer in the street. And his house is like basically right next to the separation wall. So, he was playing soccer, and then the soccer ball just went right next to the wall, so he went there to fetch it.

And then those Israeli soldiers in the tower shot him with a live munition, for basically no reason, in the leg. And his friends were trying to go help him, but those soldiers were faster than his friends, surrounded him. And they were shooting at his friends and didn’t allow anybody to come close to him — his family, his mom, his dad or anyone.

So they arrested his body. He fainted. He wasn’t even knowing what’s happening around him. And then, like, they didn’t inform the family about anything. After two days, they didn’t know anything about him, where was he, what happened to him. But he was at — he woke up, after two days, in an Israeli military hospital. And he had his leg cut off.

AMY GOODMAN: His leg was amputated.

JANNA JIHAD: Yeah, his leg was — like, he lost his leg, basically. And, like, none of his family was informed. And right now he’s under arrest even, for no reason, no charges. And —

AMY GOODMAN: How old is he?

JANNA JIHAD: He’s only — I think he’s only 14 years old, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: So, how do you cover these stories? Like, you don’t tweet. You’re on Facebook. What exactly do you do with your phone?

JANNA JIHAD: So, I usually try to, you know, cover whatever happens, like, for example, night raids, raids that are happening, when I’m coming back from my school on checkpoints. So, I usually even — like, usually go on live videos, because if I didn’t, if I was usually recording, they would just try to take my phone and try to break it or delete the videos off of it. So I always try to make my reports and just speak of what’s happening right in front of me, and then post it on my Facebook page. I have, like, right now about 300,000 followers. And, yeah.

Meet Janna Jihad, the 13-Year-Old Palestinian Journalist Exposing the Israeli Occupation

AMY GOODMAN: How often do you get to go to school? How often are schools closed in Nabi Saleh?

JANNA JIHAD: So, basically, our freedom of movement is violated. So, we have — me going to my school as a student is a struggle, because I face three checkpoints in my way. And those Israeli checkpoints are basically not checkpoints, but are barriers that block the street and close the whole street. And we cannot get anywhere because of those. So, usually, instead of me like reaching my school in about 25 to 30 minutes, I have to go to another way that takes me about two hours and a half to three hours to reach my school.

And it’s not only me that is getting affected. For example, my grandma started doing kidney dialysis two years ago because of how much tear gas she used to inhale, because, like, they shoot randomly at houses, at people. And, like, she has to go to the hospital three days a week, and sometimes she can’t. A lot of pregnant women gave birth to children in the car on those checkpoints. A lot of patients cannot go to the hospitals. Workers cannot go to their works. And it’s pretty hard, because we cannot go to the places we need to be at, at time. And it’s pretty — it’s a violation of our human rights.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you see as the solution for what is happening in the Occupied Territories and Israel?

JANNA JIHAD: OK, yeah. So, that’s a good question. We have the two-state solution, and we have the one-state solution. So, let’s start with the two-state solution. The two-state solution is basically dead, because, as a question, where are the borders of Israel? It was supposed to be the West Bank and Gaza for the Palestinians. But 68% of the West Bank is basically illegal settlements. And it’s pretty — it’s pretty much dead. And even like Israel doesn’t want it and is not working on it at all. Even, like, they signed on it, but it’s pretty much bad.

And then we have the one-state solution. For me, the one-state solution is the solution that would work. It can be that all of us could live together, same rights, under one government, getting exactly the same rights, me like the same as any other person. And all the refugees could come back to Palestine. All the people could live in peace, just in equality. And I have no problem with living with anybody, but a person that has — like, I would live with anybody that has a good mind, that they want peace and love and equality. And we have basically no problem. Like, welcome to our land, if you believe in peace, because it’s a land of peace, that never saw peace before. So, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you have a particular message for Israeli children?

JANNA JIHAD: So, Israeli children, I believe — we’re not the only victims, but we are freedom fighters as Palestinian children. But the Israeli children are, for me, a victim for the occupation. Because why would an 11-years-old child be holding a weapon that is even taller than him, and walking with it in the street? Why would they —

AMY GOODMAN: Have you seen that?

JANNA JIHAD: I’ve seen it. And I’ve seen children having —

AMY GOODMAN: You mean you’ve seen a settler child.

JANNA JIHAD: Uh-huh, a settler child in even like Jerusalem and anywhere we would go, like the children would be holding guns and like holding weapons. And why would a child hold that? Why would a child be raised on that mindset of killing people and on that like mindset of Zionism and really bad stuff, that we don’t want any child in this world to be raised on?

So, my message to the Israeli children is that we are all children, and we are all victims of that occupation. So, we have to stand up [to] the occupation. And, you know, the problem, I was debating that yesterday, that, like, the problem the Israeli youth are that, like, they’re going more to the right side of the government and stuff, and they’re more like a 17-years-old child would just like go and serve in the IDF. They’re supposed to go when they’re 17 years old. And it’s pretty bad, you know? And I believe that we all, children around this world, have to all unite to make this world a world of peace, love and equality and justice, because we’re the leaders of the future, and we’re the leaders of today, and we have to make a difference. We don’t have to just like repeat the mistakes of the adults right now, where they’re all separated and where, like, they’re all divided. And they just — like, we all want to live in peace. And we’re just tired of all of that, that’s happening around us.

AMY GOODMAN: Would you say that’s your message to children of the world, overall?

JANNA JIHAD: Yeah, that’s my message to all the children around the world, because we can make a difference, and we have to.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you so much for being with us. Janna Jihad just turned 13 years old. She is a Palestinian journalist, one of the youngest journalists, card-carrying journalists, in the world. She lives in Nabil Saleh in the occupied West Bank. And she is the cousin of Ahed Tamimi, who was considered a heroine to so many around the world, served time in an Israeli prison when she was 16 years old, turned 17 in person. You can go to democracynow.org to see our full interview with Ahed in Nabi Saleh. It’s been so great to have you in our studio.

JANNA JIHAD: Thank you. Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Thank you so much, Janna. This is Democracy Now! Thank you very much for joining us.

More:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janna_Jihad

https://thespectator.com/life/meet-janna-jihad-palestines-new-pin-up/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1mMgWji6r4&t=11s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TN6XwiIgop8

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Her natal Lilth is 21 Libra, n.Node 9 Capricorn, S.Node 1 Gemini. Her natal Amazon is 14 Scorpio, N.Node 13 Taurus, SNode 5 Sagittarius.

Please feel free to comment or ask questions.

Goddess Bless, Rad

HI All,

Here is the story of Charlene Richard who has been called the 'cajun saint'.

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The Miraculous Life and Afterlife of Charlene Richard

She died in 1959, at age 12. But for Catholics in her Louisiana community, that was just the beginning of her incredible story — and a decades-long fight to make her a saint.

By Nathaniel Rich

Dec. 20, 2022

NYT

It took 60 years but a postulator from the Vatican finally came to Richard, a lonesome patch of boggy farmland in southern Louisiana’s rice belt, last December. He arrived at St. Edward Roman Catholic Church, which stands at the closest thing the community has to a town center, cater-corner to Richard Elementary and opposite a pasture more than large enough for its dozen cows. He was greeted by the young parish priest, diocesan officials from Lafayette, a medical examiner, gravediggers, a pair of police officers and several siblings of the Richard family, whose sister he was there to see.

The postulator followed his hosts to the cemetery. Near the end of the first row, past plots of Thibodeaux and Babineux and LeJeunes, lies the raised tomb of Charlene Richard, who died of acute lymphocytic leukemia at age 12 in 1959. Each year as many as 10,000 people visit Charlene. They know her as the Little Cajun Saint, though the Roman Catholic Church has not yet recognized her as one. To accommodate the visitors, St. Edward sets out beside the grave, loosely arranged as if around a campfire, a pair of weather-beaten wooden prie-dieux, an iron garden bench and a tilting patio chair. Behind the tomb stands a discordant mailbox, painted over in black, on which is shakily written in chalk, donations removed daily. A long plastic container atop the tomb is the repository for handwritten prayers. Petitioners leave plastic flowers, votive candles and children’s toys: a Poppity Pop Turtle, a stuffed Elmo.

Everything was cleared for the exhumation. When the gravediggers lifted the eroded marble ledger, they found a simple wooden coffin, nearly covered by water. They hauled in an electric vacuum pump, but it wouldn’t turn on. After some tinkering, it finally hummed to life, spurting the grave water through a hose beyond the cemetery gate. Without great strain the men carried the coffin into the church. They removed the skeleton, laying it on an altar cloth for the medical examiner’s scrutiny. A rosary had been entwined around the finger bones. From the collarbones there hung a plastic sacred heart that, to the observers’ astonishment, had retained its coloration.

The medical examiner snipped off Charlene’s hair and handed a clump to her big brother. The postulator collected Charlene’s fingers for preparation as relics. He ordered the skeleton to be laid into a new steel coffin and returned to the vault, which was resealed with concrete.

The postulator made certain to attend to one final task. He folded the dampened altar cloth and, with great care, sealed it in a Ziploc bag. Before leaving town he would mail it to the president of the Charlene Richard Foundation, an invariably gracious, soft-spoken and patient (but not infinitely so) 68-year-old woman named Bonnie Broussard.

The emissary from Rome would never have come to Richard were it not for the ceaseless efforts of Broussard, who for more than three decades has dedicated her life to making Charlene Richard a saint. Why Broussard has pursued this laborious, expensive and thankless goal with such single-minded determination cannot be grasped from the basic biographical facts of her life. She never met Charlene, is not directly related to her and does not live in Richard. She is a devout believer, but that is unremarkable among the population of Acadiana, the French-speaking region of Louisiana that has one of the highest concentrations of Catholics in the United States.

If Broussard had to isolate a single quality that explains her intense commitment to Charlene Richard, it was her profound, lifelong desire to dedicate herself to a cause greater — nobler, grander, more permanent — than herself. What she could not have imagined, what she did not understand until just this past year, was that she was fighting for something even larger than a sainthood. She was fighting, in her dogged and self-effacing manner, for the soul of the church.

As Broussard approached 30, having yet to meet a partner, she began to suspect her calling in life was to become a nun. “I knew I could not be a single person in the world,” she says today. She was drawn to the local Carmelite monastery, a cloistered community practicing silence, fasting, manual labor and continual prayer. She had been making plans to join the order when her sister surprised her one Friday night by inviting a mechanic, the divorced father of an 11-year-old boy, to their grandmother’s house for gumbo and several rounds of the Cajun card game bourré. Within seven months they were married. “An instant family,” Broussard describes it. And the family instantly grew: They had three more children in the next five years.

During this period, she was dismissed from her job as a religious educator at the Diocese of Lafayette. Broussard had done nothing wrong. The diocese had. In 1985, it agreed to pay $4.2 million to victims of Gilbert Gauthe, a priest from Napoleonville who had admitted to molesting at least 37 children. This was the case that began the global scandal of sexual-abuse allegations against Catholic clergy, a crisis that has become the greatest threat to the church’s legitimacy since Julian the Apostate. After the Gauthe settlements, the diocese laid off much of its staff. Broussard was distraught, and furious. But she soon found a new teaching job at St. Genevieve Catholic Church in Lafayette, which was led by an exuberant, charismatic priest from Philadelphia named Joseph Brennan.

By the mid-1980s Brennan had become a celebrity in Catholic circles. He was a close friend and spiritual adviser to Mother Teresa, who opened a local chapter of her order in Lafayette and, in 1986, led a Mass at the sold-out Cajundome. (Mother Teresa made occasional incognito visits; Brennan would pick her up at the airport in New Orleans and chauffeur her into Lafayette under cover of night.) Brennan had also become a national expert during that decade’s satanic panic, leading workshops sanctioned by the diocese that advised how to detect cults, publishing a book on the subject called “The Kingdom of Darkness.” But locally Brennan was best known for having ministered to Charlene Richard on her deathbed.

Broussard had heard about Charlene since childhood. Despite the church’s reluctance to entertain the possibility of canonization, Charlene had served as Acadiana’s own guardian angel, as firmly entrenched in the cultural firmament as Meche’s King Cakes or the adventures of Bouki and Lapin. Notices regularly appeared in the classified pages expressing gratitude for prayers answered; schools chartered bus tours to her tomb; and prayer cards embossed with her sixth-grade yearbook photo were passed around on occasions of personal tragedy. But it was not until Brennan began telling Broussard about the final days of Charlene’s life that she began to grasp the force of the dead girl’s power.

Charlene Richard was born on Jan. 13, 1947, nearly seven years before Broussard and about 10 miles northwest of Lafayette, in Church Point. She was the second child of Mary Alice and Joseph Elvin Richard, two years younger than her brother John Dale. Eight siblings would follow, half of them after Charlene’s death. Mary Alice was a nurse’s aide for homebound patients; Joseph was a sharecropper and later a dragline operator for the state highway department. The Richard home had a pair of bedrooms, each of which held two large beds. The boys slept in one room, the parents and the girls in the other, the youngest child in a crib. They lacked electricity but kept the house clean and orderly. They drank from a wooden cistern and used two outhouses in the backyard. The children were forced to speak English in school, but they spoke French at home; Charlene’s father never learned English.

In Brennan’s 2009 “My Name Is Charlene,” one of a half dozen books published about the Little Cajun Saint, the priest emphasizes that her childhood was indistinguishable from that of any Cajun farm girl. The Richards attended Mass on Sunday and three other days a week. Sons were altar boys, daughters sang in the choir. The children attended Catholic school until Charlene was in second grade, when they moved three miles away to their grandparents’ property in Richard. (As is obvious to anyone in southern Louisiana, and few outside of it, “Richard” is pronounced “REE-shard.”) The community was named after Charlene’s ancestors who, with the Broussards, were among the first Acadian families to settle in Louisiana.

When the Richards were not in school, and often when they should have been in school, they worked the fields. They grew cotton, corn and sweet potatoes, raised hogs, cattle and sheep and fished for perch in the property’s cypress swamp. Joseph barbecued on a grill he jury-rigged by stretching chicken wire over the drum of a scavenged washing machine. In high summer, the children picked cotton until 2 in the afternoon, when a fluttering towel tied to the porch beam announced that it was time for prayer.

“It was a very simple life,” says Charlene’s older brother, John Dale, today. “We were at peace.”

Charlene was exuberant, loyal, generous. At 12 she stood five feet tall, not counting her bob of brown ringlets. Large dimples popped when she smiled. Girls were devoted to her and boys had crushes on her. She wrote musicals with John Dale, usually assigning him the role of “priest.” She rode horses, danced to Little Richard at sock hops and doted on babies. In fourth grade she won Richard Elementary’s Math Award; in sixth grade she was the captain of the basketball team, which lost only one game. Her mother told a reporter from The Morning Star, the diocesan newspaper, that Charlene “hated to lose.”

By 7, Charlene had memorized the rosary. She recited it nightly before an altar she assembled on her bedside table of a crucifix, an old Bible and a rose that she picked each morning. After a teacher lent her a picture book about St. Therese of Lisieux, “the Little Flower,” who died of tuberculosis at 24, Charlene declared that she wanted to be a saint. “If I pray like St. Therese,” she asked her grandmother, “will it happen?” In early 1959, when her grandmother recovered from gallbladder surgery, Charlene massaged ointment into the incision wounds. It was during the spring of that year that, while playing in the backyard, Charlene saw the lady in black.

The woman — or at least a figure “shaped like a woman,” as Charlene would tell her mother — stood before an oak tree. She was tall and wore a black bonnet that covered her face. Though her eyes were hidden, her stare burned.

“In the name of God,” Charlene screamed, “what do you want?”

The woman flew into the sky. Charlene sprinted back to the house and fell, shaking violently, into her grandmother’s arms.

Charlene had another vision the next evening. She was emptying laundry tubs in the backyard with John Dale. “I see her again,” she said, turning pale.

John Dale couldn’t see anything, but he believed his sister. “Many holy people have been visited by Satan in different forms,” he says, 60 years later. “Was it that? I have no idea.”

Around this time Charlene began to bruise easily and complain of a sore hip. The family doctor suspected growth pains. He prescribed radiation therapy. It didn’t help. Charlene bled from her rectum and suffered nosebleeds so severe that she passed out. After receiving the results of blood tests, the doctor handed Mrs. Richard a sealed envelope, addressed to a specialist at Lafayette’s Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital. “He’s going to explain what needs to be done,” the doctor assured her. John Dale remembers driving in his grandfather’s pickup truck on dirt roads to the city, Charlene on her mother’s lap.

When the specialist finished reading the letter, he called for a chaplain. The priest on duty that day was a young Joseph Brennan, who had been ordained three months earlier. Once Brennan entered, the specialist explained that Charlene’s condition was terminal. “It was pure chance that I was the priest in the room when the news was told to Charlene’s parents,” Brennan writes in his book. “The shock was as expected when her parents were told, ‘Your 12-year-old girl has two weeks to live.’”

The Richards asked Brennan to tell their daughter. “I was numb,” he writes. “We never had training like this in the seminary. What was I going to say? As the elevator reached the fourth floor, I still had no answer, even though I was praying very fervently.”

Brennan met Charlene in Room 411 of Our Lady of Lourdes. “A beautiful lady is going to come to take you home,” he told her.

“When she does,” Charlene replied, “I’ll say, ‘Blessed Mother, Father Brennan says hello.’”

Charlene spent the next 13 days in unthinkable agony. When the pain grew acute, her eyes rolled back in her head but, Brennan writes, she never complained. During their meetings, Brennan introduced her to the Catholic doctrine of redemptive suffering: the yoking of one’s pain to the suffering of Jesus to help others.

There began an informal daily catechism between them. “OK, Father,” Charlene would ask, “who am I to suffer for today?” Brennan proposed a candidate, typically another patient, such as a terminally ill woman who refused to accept her fate. Charlene beseeched God to use her pain for healings.

“Without her witness, and her devotion,” Brennan said later, “her suffering would not have served any purpose.”

On the 12th day, Charlene kissed Brennan and told him that she would be praying for him in heaven.

On the 13th day, Aug. 11, 1959, she died. But as Bonnie Broussard likes to say, that’s just the day that Charlene Richard’s story began.

It was not easy, in 1959, to make a saint. A Cause for Canonization, as a formal candidacy is called, could not even be opened until 50 years after a candidate’s death. The growth of Charlene’s cult coincided, however, with a movement within the Vatican to reform the sainthood process. An Apostolic Constitution issued by Pope John Paul II in 1983 shortened the posthumous waiting period to five years. (John Paul II himself was made a saint in 2014.) The old juridical model, in which a proponent debated a “Devil’s Advocate” on the merits of a cause, was abandoned for a process that more closely resembles the preparation of a doctoral dissertation.

The making of a saint typically begins in the candidate’s diocese. Supporters begin a promotional campaign for an audience of one: their local bishop. They must persuade the bishop that a candidate is not merely virtuous, but heroically so. If successful, the bishop declares the candidate a “Servant of God,” officially opening a Cause for Canonization.

The cause is next taken up by a postulator, a supervisory figure licensed by the Vatican. The postulator acts in the deliberate manner of an appellate lawyer preparing a case for the Supreme Court. His client is not the church but the candidate’s petitioners, who are responsible for his fee and any expenses he incurs. The National Catholic Register has estimated that the cost of preparing a cause for papal review can run more than a quarter-million dollars.

The postulator reviews evidence, witness interviews and supposed miracles. (Catholics believe that a saint in heaven can intercede with God, improving the likelihood that a prayer will elicit a divine favor.) After years or decades, he presents an account of his investigation, the positio, to nine theologians who review the case. With their approval, it advances to the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Causes of the Saints, where a body of cardinals and bishops decides whether to submit it to the pope.

Ultimately the pope makes one of four determinations. He can decline to act. He can decree the candidate a “venerable,” affirming a life of heroic virtue. Beyond venerable lies “blessed.” To earn that status, called beatification, it must be proved that the candidate has interceded in the granting of a miracle — an event, typically a healing, unexplainable by science. Beyond beatification lies sainthood.

For all the reams of evidence and historical research and liturgical debate, the saint-making process comes down to the authentication of miracles. A saint must have performed miracles. Two, to be exact.

Over the years Broussard had heard rumors of miracles credited to Charlene. Though Father Brennan did not, for decades, speak publicly about his encounters with Charlene, he did confide in a fellow novitiate, Floyd Calais. Father Calais dreamed of one day becoming a parish priest; two weeks after praying to Charlene, he received an appointment from the bishop to serve as a priest — at Charlene’s own church, St. Edward. Calais, now 96, still gets goosebumps telling the story.

Calais began traveling around Acadiana, telling Charlene’s story to solicit donations for a new church. After he raised the full amount in just two years, he began calling Charlene “my little money girl.” During his term at St. Edward, Calais claims he witnessed Charlene perform countless miracles, including for members of her family. Mary Alice, her mother, prayed to Charlene, asking for another daughter; she became pregnant with twin girls. A former schoolmate of Charlene’s named Lorita introduced Calais to a man she wanted to marry. Calais didn’t approve and prayed to Charlene. Two weeks later, the wedding was off. Six months later, Lorita was married — to John Dale, Charlene’s brother.

Thanks to Calais’s speaking tours, Charlene’s legend grew. In 1989, when Brennan and Calais organized a mass at St. Edward on the 30th anniversary of her death, an estimated 4,000 people came, surely the largest crowd ever to have gathered in Richard. Bonnie Broussard had planned to attend, but she woke up with morning sickness — she was pregnant with her third child — and gave her tickets to her mother. It was the last time she missed Charlene’s anniversary Mass.

The success of the Mass encouraged Steven Vincent, a prosperous oilman from the southern Acadian town of Gueydan, to commit himself to Charlene’s canonization. With his wife, Barbara, he founded the Friends of Charlene to publicize Charlene’s story, raise money and organize gatherings. But he needed an editor for what would become the group’s most critical function: a newsletter that published accounts of answered prayers. Over time, these collected testimonies would fill an archive that could be used to secure Charlene’s canonization — a library of miracles.

When asked by a church colleague to edit the newsletter, Broussard initially declined. She didn’t know the first thing about newsletters, and between her teaching obligations and raising three children under age 5 and a teenage stepson, she had no time. But she could not refuse a call to duty. Within a few weeks, she would conclude that it wasn’t her colleague who called her to Charlene but God.

Working from her kitchen table on a typewriter, Broussard found herself serving as a Miss Lonelyhearts for the cult of Charlene. A couple of dozen letters arrived a month — at first.

I have always had bladder trouble, developing an infection at least once a year. … In February of 1988, my husband and I traveled to Richard, La., to visit the tomb. … From that day on, I have not had any bladder infections. … I now can wear nylon pantyhose … and have a feeling of well being that I have not felt in a very long time.

A woman wrote in 1991 of traveling to Charlene’s tomb from Massachusetts after reading about her in American Airlines’ in-flight magazine; Charlene, she believed, cured her father’s prostate cancer. In the July 1992 newsletter, a correspondent credited Charlene for protecting her father from permanent lung damage after sustained asbestos exposure. In October 1992, Broussard published a letter from a Pine Bluff man who read about Charlene in the Arkansas Catholic:

My wife works at a poultry company in town and developed what the doctor called overused muscles. At that time we did not know what was wrong, because the company could not send her to a doctor and we were bound by an agreement to only use a company doctor. … I promised Charlene if she would help my wife by her prayers, I would write a letter to the Bishop … to speedily grant her sainthood. … there is only one explanation for her muscles to have healed. … Mary is still working, although we are praying for an easier job.

The accounts worked on Broussard. She began to reflect on her own past. In a 1992 editor’s note, she wrote about a health condition that sent her to the emergency room on her 38th birthday. “As I lay on the hospital bed waiting for the doctor to come and take care of me, I could not think of anyone else but MYSELF and MY PAIN. … Looking back on the event, I realized that God had given me the opportunity to experience intense physical suffering and pain just as Charlene must have felt. … Now I really know how special Charlene is and will be able to tell others about a lesson learned in humility and suffering.”

When Radio Shack transferred her sister’s husband, a store manager, to Texas that year, Broussard prayed daily to Charlene to send her sister home. On the eve of their move, Broussard’s brother-in-law was offered the chance to work in Lafayette. “That sealed the deal,” Broussard says. “Charlene was going to be my friend.”

Broussard grew convinced that sainthood was inevitable, though she didn’t know whether it would take decades or centuries. Steven Vincent, the oilman who founded Friends of Charlene, expected that they would not live to see it. Broussard was undeterred. She regularly drove to Richard, where Charlene’s immediate family, her childhood friends, Fathers Brennan and Calais and the local parishioners had become a second family to her. “If you’re an outsider in that community you know it,” Broussard says. “But over the years, I became one of them.” She had found, in the rice fields of Acadiana, her own cloistered community.

Broussard delivered every testimony she received to the diocese. A priest assured her that he would keep them in a special file, though he never failed to point out how each fell short of the church’s rigorous standards for authentication. Discouraged, Broussard stopped sharing the testimonies. But she didn’t dispose of them. She moved in with them. She stored the documents in a filing cabinet and later, when that filled up, in banker’s boxes that she stacked next to her boxes of stationery, prayer cards and prayer cloths. She installed the library of miracles inside her own bedroom, beside her bed.

The reforms of 1983 yielded an unprecedented bonanza of saint-making. During his pontificate, John Paul II recognized 1,338 beatifications and 482 canonizations, almost 15 times as many as the previous record-holder, Pius XII, who died in 1958, and more than the cumulative total of the five previous centuries combined. “We’re becoming a factory,” lamented a historical consultant to the Vatican, in “Making Saints,” Kenneth Woodward’s authoritative account of canonization in the Roman Catholic Church.

But the immoderation was the point. “In the hands of John Paul II,” Woodward writes, “the saint-making process has become a very powerful mechanism for advancing his message” — a message of a popular faith, accessible to all who believed. Saints were one of the most effective advertising tools the church had. They boosted recruitment, enabling the church to tailor its gospel to local populations and specific demographics. And the copyrighting of a saint’s name and likeness allowed the church to sell paraphernalia. Benedict maintained John Paul II’s pace, and Francis has outdone them both. In his first canonization ceremony he recognized 815 saints.

During this sainthood boom, the United States, which has the fourth-largest Catholic population of any nation, has been left out. No U.S. cause was opened before the late 19th century, and only one native-born citizen has been sainted: the Philadelphian heiress Katharine Drexel (1858-1955), canonized by Pope John Paul II in 2000. Three naturalized American citizens have been sainted, Saint Mother Teresa was an honorary citizen, and several “American” saints were born before 1776 or were foreign citizens living abroad, but this wider draw only emphasizes the scale of the underrepresentation. Canonization is, quite explicitly, a symbolic gesture, meant to draw attention to a heroic virtue, an act of martyrdom, a community. Symbolically speaking, American Catholics have been shafted.

Though there are currently more than 80 American candidates for sainthood, the Acadian community has a special claim to Roman sympathies. Its Catholic population descends from what Cajuns call “le grand dérangement”: the British Army’s expulsion of about 7,000 French Catholics from Nova Scotia in 1755 during the French and Indian War, tearing apart families and killing more than half the population. One of the largest bands of refugees arrived in Southwestern Louisiana in 1765, led by Bonnie’s ancestors, the brothers Joseph and Alexandre Broussard.

“Sainthood links the local church to the universal church,” says Kathleen Sprows Cummings, director of Notre Dame’s Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism, who wrote “A Saint of Our Own,” about the more than century-old campaign for a patron saint of the United States (leading contenders include St. Elizabeth Ann Seton and St. Kateri Tekakwitha, though each was born before the country’s founding). “The story of the Acadians is the story of how a persecuted minority was transplanted here and created a new culture. Charlene’s significance extends beyond the world of sainthood. It’s a profoundly American story.”

Since 1985, however, the Acadian story has endured a different great derangement. In May of that year Jason Berry published in The Times of Acadiana and The National Catholic Reporter his investigation into pedophilia charges against Gilbert Gauthe. Berry would later extend his reporting into a trilogy of books that tracked a series of pedophilia cases in the Diocese of Lafayette into the innermost sancta of the Vatican, revealing widespread patterns of abuse and corruption. According to data from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, more than 7,000 clerics have now been “credibly” or “not implausibly” accused of sexually abusing minors in the United States alone.

The evolution of Broussard’s relationship with the church corresponded to a broader shift that occurred in Acadiana during the 1990s, as the Gauthe case spurred dozens of other allegations within the region. Though Broussard grew disenchanted with the corruption of the clerical hierarchy, she did not consider abandoning her faith; instead she redirected her devotion to the angelic child who, she was certain, sat at the foot of God.

The diocese, during this time, showed little interest in Charlene. Even the local clergy tended to dismiss the phenomenon, despite the efforts of Brennan and Calais, who continued to ferry parishioners to Charlene’s grave, use her story in fund-raising pleas and give interviews. “In my eyes and in the eyes of many, many people, Charlene Richard is already a saint,” Brennan told The Catholic Digest. “We’re just waiting for the church to catch up.” Calais still struggles to understand his peers’ disinterest. “There were priests who thought me and Father Brennan were crazy,” he says. These included, he said, his successor at St. Edward, the Rev. Stanley Begnaud, who has been labeled a “known pedophile” in church documents and is the subject of a lawsuit filed in 2020. (Begnaud died in 1985.)

With no foreseeable path to canonization, the Friends of Charlene held meetings less often, then not at all. “Nothing had happened for 10 years, and people just wondered whether anything ever would happen,” Broussard says. “That was the hardest time, just to keep it going.” By 1999, the only remaining founding member of the organization, the oilman Steven Vincent, told Broussard that he was leaving, too. He asked her to take over as president. She accepted without hesitation. “I felt that there was something here,” she says. People traveled to the annual Mass from all over the world to testify to miracles Charlene had performed from beyond the grave. “That’s what kept me going,” Broussard says. “All these people came for a reason.”

Broussard set about professionalizing the organization. After reading “Making Saints,” she came to understand the process better than any of the local clergy members, including, it would become clear, the bishop. She learned that it was not enough to answer letters and archive testimonials. Successful causes tended to be run like political campaigns, with an administrative office, a public relations arm and a reliable funding stream. This is why most saints were clergy: the orders to which they belonged had the resources necessary to elevate a cause to the Vatican. What Broussard lacked in money and clout, she tried to make up for in effort. She transformed the Friends of Charlene into a tax-exempt organization, established a website and a bulk-mailing operation, assumed the responsibility of planning the anniversary mass and organized a weekly knitting circle, led by a pair of retirees, Louise Giroir and Lydia Babineaux, who together would produce hundreds of thousands of prayer cloths. The work was its own reward — at least that’s what Broussard told herself.

Then, suddenly, in 2002, three blessings seemed to arrive in short succession, as if ordained. Michael Mouton, a Lafayette businessman nicknamed Big Mike, had a vision of Charlene Richard while undergoing open-heart surgery. A former programmer for Apollo 11, determined to raise money for an orphanage in Thailand, opened his Bible and a Charlene Richard prayer card fell out. And a local priest, Michael Jarrell, a native of Opelousas, was named bishop.

Big Mike had developed a successful business shipping radiography machines across the Gulf South. While under sedation, he saw Charlene standing at the foot of his bed, a beatific expression on her face. When he awoke, the operation a success, he vowed to dedicate his life to advancing Charlene’s cause. He told Broussard that he would devote his offices, administrative staff and $1 million of his personal fortune to the effort. “We’ll run it like a corporation,” he told her. If most causes were managed by religious orders, Charlene’s could be headquartered out of Performance Medical Group of Lafayette.

The NASA programmer, Reggie Bollich, did not know much about Charlene and had no idea how her prayer card had gotten into his Bible. But his wife, Dottie, had heard stories from her pastor at St. Genevieve, Father Brennan. It occurred to Bollich, as it had to Father Calais, that the Little Cajun Saint might be a prolific fund-raiser — his own little money girl. Within a year Bollich raised more than $45,000, including considerable donations from Big Mike, and the orphanage, Charlene Richard House, was built in a jungle clearing near Nongkhai.

With the opening of the orphanage, and the growing international attention it drew, Bishop Jarrell seemed persuaded that Charlene was ready for canonization. In 2007, Jarrell designated Msgr. Richard Greene, who 30 years earlier edited a major series of articles about Charlene Richard for The Morning Star, to gather information for the opening of a cause. At that year’s anniversary Mass, to the thrill of the assembled, Greene announced that he was going to begin the sainthood process. Broussard was euphoric. “I thought, this is it!” she says. The unimaginable appeared inevitable.

Greene held a series of round-table meetings with interested parties, among them Broussard, John Dale Richard, Reggie Bollich and Big Mike. Broussard recalls that Greene listened intently to their stories and took dutiful notes.

Someone asked how long it would take for the bishop to respond. Two or three weeks, Greene said. He’s a busy man.

What happens if he doesn’t approve the cause?

Then we’ll just go over his head, Big Mike interrupted.

Several petitioners gasped at the brazen display of hubris in the presence of a diocesan official.

“And that,” John Dale recalls, “was the end of that.”

They never met with Greene again. Bollich recalls that when the subject of sainthood later arose at a church ceremony, Jarrell said they could not treat it like a corporation — an obvious reference to Big Mike.

In 2012, in an interview with a local writer named Carolyn Thibodeaux for a self-published book titled “Saint Charlene Richard: Her Continuous Consecration to God,” Jarrell described the process as “kind of stalled”:

Thibodeaux: Is there anything we can do to help?

Bishop: No, I think that at this point, the ball is in my court. It’s not like you can just write a letter.

Thibodeaux: How exactly does the Canonization process work?

Bishop: I don’t know. But there are books on it.

Thibodeaux: Yes, I’ve read up on it on the internet.

Bishop: Then you probably know more about it than I do. I’m serious when I say I don’t know ... 

Thibodeaux: In writing my book, I already knew Charlene was special. I received so many healing stories. She is so deserving of the title, “Saint.”

Bishop: Well, I’m glad you judged that. If you were the Pope, it would be done.

Thibodeaux: Are you considering reviewing Msgr. Greene’s report?

Bishop: For what purpose, to help you with your book?

Thibodeaux records the bishop’s laughter.

“That was a big disappointment,” Broussard says of Jarrell’s inaction. “A major letdown for everyone. We kept waiting, thinking maybe, surely, he’ll take the next step — but he never did.”

Broussard nevertheless continued to prepare for a day when some future bishop might champion Charlene. She had learned from “Making Saints” that, as time passes, it becomes more difficult to gather the necessary evidence of a miracle: Witnesses die, memories weaken, documents are lost. It was not enough, she would explain to fellow devotees, to show that a prayer had been answered, even if a stunning reversal had occurred — a sudden recovery from a terminal illness, say, or the conversion of an unrepentant sinner. The Vatican’s bar was much higher and seemed to rise each year. The pope could not be embarrassed by modern science. As forensic technologies matured, so did the Vatican’s evidentiary standards.

Finalist miracles had to satisfy three primary criteria. They had to be rigorously documented. They had to be verified by objective experts. And they could not be explainable except by supernatural intervention. Father Brennan believed that the story of Tara Roy fulfilled all three.

Tara’s parents were parishioners at St. Genevieve. When Tara was diagnosed with Stage 3 colon cancer at age 21, in 1992, Brennan drove them to Charlene’s tomb. They returned every weekend, while Tara endured rounds of chemotherapy. Eleven months later, on the anniversary of Charlene’s death, Tara visited the tomb, emaciated and hopeless. She traced the engraving on the headstone and caressed Charlene’s portrait. “It seemed electricity ran from the tomb through her fingernails and into her entire body,” her father told the journalist Barbara Gutierrez. “She had been transformed before my eyes from a washed-out and despondent rag doll into a vibrant and energized young lady with color coursing through her cheeks.”

Three months later Tara was free of cancer. Her oncologist at Our Lady of Lourdes testified that her recovery was unexplainable by science.

Broussard was not convinced, however. “I thought it was a great story,” she says. “But I didn’t know if it could meet the standards of a miracle. She’d had surgery, after all. She’d had chemotherapy.”

The other miracle commonly asserted as proof of Charlene’s sainthood came from outside the diocese. In 1987 Jean Marcantel was diagnosed with a high-risk pregnancy, and arranged to give birth at a hospital in Lake Charles where she could be attended by a prominent obstetrician.

When the baby was born, the delivery room fell silent. “This is a mongoloid child,” the obstetrician said finally, using the jettisoned term for Down syndrome. He indicated the newborn’s prominent forehead, flat features, the ears set below the eye’s lateral canthus, the single crease across the palm of her hand.

The nurses moved the baby to a darkened isolation room. Jean was brought to the recovery room, where she was surrounded by other mothers and their healthy babies. She began to pray for the strength to raise a disabled child. She thought back to her own childhood in Richard, where she was friends with one of Charlene’s sisters. She did not believe in miracles, but after praying to the patron of lost causes and the patron of childbirth, she prayed to Charlene.

Jean awoke to the sight of her puzzled pediatrician. He told her that the baby showed no signs of Down syndrome. When her obstetrician was summoned, he burst into tears. Finally the child was brought in, her features transformed. Jean didn’t leave her daughter’s side for six weeks, fearful that her condition would reverse. Today that baby, Angelique, is a nun in Tanzania.

The Marcantels did not tell anyone what happened at the hospital except, belatedly, their priest. At his suggestion, Jean sent a confidential account to the diocese, stipulating that it should only be used if it helped Charlene’s cause. Broussard was not sure it would.

While Broussard culled her library of miracles, the cult of Charlene Richard continued to grow. Reggie Bollich, the NASA programmer, who in his retirement was ordained a deacon, helped to open Casa Charlene, a homeless shelter in the Colombian Andes, funded by Cajun parishioners. The Charlene Soup Kitchen in El Tigre, Venezuela, followed. Pilgrims, not all of them Catholic, began traveling to the St. Edward cemetery from Brazil, France, the Philippines, Australia. The canonization of Charlene Richard had become a global concern.

Still Broussard worried she wasn’t doing enough. She had kept the organization alive, preserved every testimony and mailed tens of thousands of prayer cloths, but Bishop Jarrell would not be moved. If she couldn’t convince him of Charlene’s cause, how would she convince a postulator, the Congregation for the Causes of Saints or the pope?

In 2016, after 14 years, Jarrell resigned. His successor, the Rev. J. Douglas Deshotel, was born in Basile, 20 miles west of Richard. Months after his consecration, Deshotel accepted an invitation to Charlene’s 2017 anniversary Mass — the first bishop to attend since 1989. These were promising signs, but Broussard was wary. Like so many of his predecessors, Deshotel was soon engulfed by the church’s scandals, as priests in the diocese were charged, arrested or convicted of serial sexual abuse of minors, possession of child pornography and the molestation of an altar boy. In 2019, after resisting calls from journalists for three years, Deshotel released the diocese’s list of known sex offenders (though withheld the names of accused nuns, religious-order priests and schoolteachers). Deshotel did not attend another anniversary Mass, and Broussard heard nothing from the diocese about the prospect of Charlene’s canonization. But at the 2019 Mass, Monsignor W. Curtis Mallet, the diocese’s vicar general, pulled Broussard aside in the sacristy of St. Edward, just before the ceremony began.

“I want to let you know that the bishop is considering opening Charlene’s cause,” he told Broussard. “But we have to move quickly.”

The bishop wanted to make the announcement soon, he said. If Broussard could produce a formal letter of petition, the bishop would designate Charlene a “servant of God”: The sainthood process would finally begin. Mallet warned her not to tell anybody.

Before she could respond, Broussard was called to the pulpit to give her introduction. As she gave her customary speech about Charlene’s exemplary suffering, she tried to disentangle the emotions that overwhelmed her. She realized what she felt most of all was not joy or relief. It was fear. She understood immediately that what had been, for decades, a work of private obsession, would be taken from her.

“For all this time,” she says today, “I’d been alone. I’d had the support of the community, but as far as the association, I was secretary, treasurer, president. I did everything myself, so that I could make sure that it was done right. But I knew once Charlene becomes a servant of God, she no longer belongs to the community. She becomes the property of the diocese. I would have to relinquish control. The church would be in charge, absolutely.”

At a ceremony at the diocese’s Immaculata Chapel on Nov. 17, 2021, in an unprecedented spree of canonical enterprise, Deshotel opened the causes for Charlene Richard and another candidate, August Pelafigue, an Arnaudville schoolteacher known as Nonco who embraced a life of rural poverty. (The cause of a third Cajun candidate, Ville Platte’s J. Verbis Lafleur, a World War II chaplain who gave his life to save fellow prisoners of war, was opened a few months later.) “Our culture needs a young saint,” Deshotel said. “Now more than ever.”

Broussard calls Charlene’s designation as servant of God the high point of her life, though even in the moment her elation was tempered by a profound sense of loss. “I knew it was coming to an end for me,” she says. “I had the satisfaction that I had done everything that I had been asked to do, just to keep it going. But I knew I would not be able to see it through.”

After the ceremony she turned over her entire archive. The diocese sealed it from public view. The postulator, Father Luis F. Escalante, directed Charlene’s siblings to sign over possession of their sister’s corpse to the church. In June, St. Edward’s Facebook page advised parishioners that Charlene’s tomb had come “under the protection and stewardship” of the diocese. Any item left on the tomb would be reviewed to determine whether it honored “the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church.” Broussard was not invited to attend the exhumation of the corpse, nor were any community or family members, apart from immediate siblings.

After the exhumation, St. Edward’s young pastor, the Rev. Korey LaVergne, called Broussard into his office and told her not to tell anyone what had happened. “If anyone asks you why the grave looks like it does, it’s because we’re just doing improvements,” he told her. “It’s technically not a lie, because we are going to do improvements. But you cannot tell them about exhuming the body.”

One thing was plain: After decades of apathy, discouragement and belittlement, the Diocese of Lafayette had developed a very serious interest in Charlene Richard’s successful, and expeditious, canonization.

Bishop Deshotel confirmed as much. The Diocesan Chancery, a compound of four brick buildings arranged around a simple courtyard at the eastern fringe of Lafayette, was once a seminary where he attended high school (Gilbert Gauthe was his classmate). Deshotel’s wood-paneled second-floor office was his sophomore study hall. With its potted ficuses, leather couches and broad, tidy desk, it could stand for a judge’s private chambers or a senator’s regional headquarters.

The bishop has an amiable, unprepossessing manner, with a slight stoop and a twinkly smile. He served as a priest in Dallas for nearly four decades, long enough to lose his accent but not his Cajun sympathies; his closest friends are his old high school buddies from Lafayette. Deshotel is as circumspect about miracles as are most high church officials. “There are many kinds of miracles,” he said in an interview. “It’s not all spectacular physical healings. There are also miracles of a change of heart or a conversion.” He noted the miracle of accepting the human condition: of making peace with the implacable cruelty of suffering. What is more miraculous than reconciling oneself to the certainty of death?

“A person who starts looking into Charlene’s story might ask what inspired her to be able to do that,” he said. “They might think, Maybe I should look a little bit deeper into what faith is, and what was behind her being able to accept her illness.”

St. Charlene would help the church too, Deshotel acknowledged. A Cajun saint, particularly a lay saint, would “validate the rich faith of this Acadiana community.” More important, it would serve as “a catechetical tool for me and for the priests of our diocese.” Charlene would help the church “appeal to the youth in our diocese, who are called in all kind of directions by secular society.” Charlene would serve as an excellent recruitment tool, Deshotel maintained, especially for the young people of Acadiana.

With the young people of Acadiana, the church needed all the help it could get.

Several months ago Bonnie Broussard received bad news from Rome: The postulator had rejected the top two miracles from papal consideration. Tara Roy’s cancer cure was thrown out because, as Broussard had feared, the fact of her medical treatment meant that a scientific explanation could not be eliminated. Angelique Marcantel’s miracle was disqualified by a genetic test. The Tanzanian missionary had traveled by bus 18 hours to a clinic in Dar-Es-Salaam that analyzed her DNA. To the postulator’s disappointment, no extra chromosome was detected.

This finding did not surprise the Marcantels. Of course there wasn’t an extra chromosome — why would God, in His perfection, leave it behind? But they have taken it well. The Vatican’s validation “is not necessary for me,” Jean says. “It doesn’t change my belief.”

The postulator is pursuing a new tranche of miracles, among them a miraculous Covid cure and the case of Troy Hebert, a real estate broker in Lafayette whose childhood cancer was cured after he and his mother met a stranger at Charlene’s grave who they believed to be an angel. But discussions of forensic investigations only accentuate how far the ecclesiastical class had traveled from the true believers in the rice fields, who require no expert witness, no genetic test to prove Charlene is a saint. There is nothing the Vatican can do to strengthen their conviction, or weaken it.

“I’m a scientist,” says Bollich, the Apollo 11 programmer. “I’m always skeptical. I need facts. But you reach a point where factual becomes irrelevant. I believe that prayer can make a difference in whether a person lives or not. Does it happen often? No. But there are people who have been healed through prayer to Charlene. That we know. We’ve seen it.”

Father Calais found the whole process embarrassing. “The guy from Rome doesn’t know anything about Charlene Richard,” he says. “I was not impressed by him at all. I didn’t see any enthusiasm in him.”

As Jean Marcantel puts it: “It’s more important for the hierarchy of the church to have these proven miracles than for the people who experienced them. You know what they say: If you don’t believe, no proof is sufficient. If you do, no proof is necessary.” She laughed. “I wouldn’t want to be in Father Escalante’s shoes.”

Broussard herself has moved on. After turning over her life’s work to the diocese, she announced her resignation as president of the Charlene Richard Foundation. She has dedicated herself to caring for her young grandchildren. “I will always love Charlene and will do whatever I can do to help her cause,” she says. “But the fire for me has been put out.” Having spent decades battling indifference and dissuasion, waiting for the diocesan hierarchy to embrace the cause, she can’t bring herself to hang on as a junior functionary.

Besides, Broussard believes that she has already achieved her goal. Charlene won’t be forgotten. She is not yet a saint, not officially, but she has attracted a global cult that transcends not only Acadiana but Catholicism. She inspires faith, devotion and acts of healing so profound that they appear miraculous. What the Vatican wants, what the diocese desperately needs, Bonnie Broussard is powerless to give them. She gave them her papers, but she can’t give them that.

More: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlene_Richard

Her natal Lilith is 27 Capricorn, N.Node 28 Sagittarius, S.Node 0.19 Gemini. Her natal Amazon is 5 Virgo, N.Node 3 Taurus, S.Node 5 Sagittarius.

Please feel free to comment or ask questions.

Goddess Bless, Rad

HI All,

Here is a story about Maria Alyokhina of the Pussy Riot. This is a noon chart.

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Interview: ‘We have a new Hitler in Russia’: Pussy Riot’s Maria Alyokhina on Putin’s crimes and her years of resistance

The musician and activist has escaped her homeland – but its repression still torments her. She talks about being beaten and jailed, nuclear threats and the dangerous power of women

Zoe Williams

Guardian

When Pussy Riot’s Maria Alyokhina left Russia in April this year, she went to Iceland, essentially a political refugee. She had been repeatedly arrested since early 2021, on specious charges – “violation of sanitary and epidemiological rules”, social media activity, attending a demonstration in support of the imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

She is no longer in Iceland, and speaks to me, as her fellow Pussy Riot member Nadya Tolokonnikova did earlier this year, from an unnamed location. But she resists any phrases that dramatise her situation – persecution, flight, exile, escape – preferring a hard-boiled statement of the facts. “I was arrested, many times – and not just arrests. I was under a travel ban, I had a red flag on the border for two years, I had to find a way to tour. The heads of the political Moscow police were quite often trying to go to my house, speak with my mother, catch me there.” She describes the trigger event for her departure: the news that she was about to be moved from house arrest to a prison.

So she hasn’t fled; she has found a way to go on tour, living in a van, raising money any which way, through spoken word, performance art, merchandise, NFTs. “I understand there was a big noise about my so-called escape, but I don’t have any plans for emigration. I just want to help Ukraine and that’s it.” She made €10,000 selling T-shirts and sent the money to a Ukrainian children’s hospital. Alyokhina and her girlfriend, Lucy Shtein, also from Pussy Riot, have made an NFT using the ankle tags from their house arrest, melted and turned into digital art: “They’re our trophies from the fight with the Russian government. We believe those fetters will be gone.”

The proceeds from that – whether you understand NFTs or not, they can raise vast amounts of money – will be split between Ukrainian charities and Russian political prisoners. “We cannot balance the nightmare which the Russian army and Vladimir Putin have created. But I believe, as Russians, we can do something good. As a human, and especially as an artist, it’s very important to raise up our solidarity with Ukraine and our call to stop this war.”

There is something instructive and depressing about the story of Pussy Riot and the world’s reaction. When they started in 2011, they were a loose collection of female artists, writers, activists and anarchists. Alyokhina was a student at the Institute of Journalism and Creative Writing in Moscow. As well as writing protest songs, the band wore neon balaclavas and taped their mouths closed. Alyokhina’s targets are wide-ranging – the oppression of women, the savage homophobia of the Russian state, the climate crisis, Putin’s kleptocracy – but boil down to one cause: anti-authoritarianism. To the global media, they were just fun, racy rebels.

In Russian activist circles, there are jokes about the west being ‘deeply concerned’: it means they are not going to do anything

So, when three of them, including Alyokhina, were arrested for hooliganism in 2012 and sentenced to two years in jail, it didn’t leave much of a mark on Putin’s reputation, even though human rights organisations such as Amnesty International designated them political prisoners. The protest was deadly serious: it was against Orthodox Church leaders’ support for Putin and the blind eye they were turning to his corruption and creeping totalitarianism. Yet the substance of that, and the harsh consequences it had, was ignored in the service of everyone playing nice at international summits.

Alyokhina rolls her eyes, as if to say that is not the half of it: “We were released on 23 December 2013. A month after our release, we made an action [demonstrated]: ‘Putin will teach you how to love the motherland.’ That was at Sochi, the Olympic Games, and that was the first time we were beaten physically. That was the first moment that I understood: Russia was already worse than when we were imprisoned.”

Two weeks later, Putin annexed Crimea – “the first point of no way back”, she says. “Especially shocking was the very weak reaction of the west. There were slight sanctions, but nations continued to deal with Russian businesses. Germany was selling weapons to Putin’s regime, evading the weapon embargo. A lot of capital from oligarchs went to Britain, especially to London. I spoke at the European parliament, in your parliament, in the US Senate. Everyone was ‘deeply concerned’, but nothing happened. In Russian activist circles, there are a lot of jokes about the west being deeply concerned: it means they are not going to do anything.”

If there had been the sanctions there are now after Crimea and the subsequent invasion of the Donbas, Alyokhina is certain that we would not be in this mess today. “We were calling for a full embargo in 2014 and again in 2015. We were doing street actions. I was arrested 100 times. I hear a lot of discussion in the west that it’s very hard and painful to stop buying oil and gas – well, you guys had eight years. In eight years, it would have been possible. In one month, it’s hard. Maybe politicians were afraid of their voters protesting that their houses were cold. Now Ukrainians don’t have houses at all.”

She lays out in brutal terms what this combination of inertia and self-interest has created. “Money from the west is the basis of our imprisonment, of our poisoning, of political murders and, now, of the war in Ukraine. I really want people to understand this and stop it.”

You can trace Putin’s growing sense of impunity through the totalitarian acts he got away with. And it does bear reflection: how did he manage it with so little censure? The marked, even absolute, absence of women in Russian political life has tended to pass without comment, as a historical or cultural quirk. “All this Russian criminal culture, which dates from the Soviet Union, is very misogynistic,” says Alyokhina. “There is no place for women at the decision-making table. No first ladies, no role for women. Even western journalists trying to write about Russian feminism – who do they name? Alexandra Kollontai. She was living in the 1920s.” Feminist anti-war resistance is stifled within Russia and unobserved outside it. “Propaganda is working like in the Third Reich,” Alyokhina says.

Most chillingly, the persecution of LGBTQ+ people has moved at speed, from intimidatory arrests – you can be prosecuted for holding a rainbow flag – to the creation of what the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta in 2017 referred to as “concentration camps” for gay men in Chechnya. “Russia was protesting all these years – there were streets, squares, full of people, beaten, arrested, imprisoned for five, six, seven years – and nobody cared because it was within her borders,” says Alyokhina. “It has always been this way.”

Even if the west has now woken up, or rather been awakened, have we fully grasped the seriousness of the situation? There is an overwhelming consensus about Putin – that he is a warmonger and tyrant – but still, Alyokhina feels, there remains a reluctance to take his utterances seriously. “He gave interviews 10 years ago and started to talk about his role models. One is Joseph Stalin. The biggest tyrant, who repressed, raped our people, killed our culture, killed all my favourite artists, some of them personally. This is a grave warning. If you listen carefully, you can understand where it will go.”

It’s very dangerous to totalitarianism if the women rise up. That’s another revolution

Commentators desperately cling to the hope that Putin is just one wild man, that around him are people who will eventually find the spine to overthrow him. Remarks were made recently by a representative of Rosneft, Russia’s largest state oil company. “You must have heard it,” Alyokhina says, with frustration, but no, I have not. “He promoted Adolf Hitler. He said that, of all the decisions in the west, the Anglo-Saxons are the most guilty people. The first nuclear bomb must be dropped on Great Britain. This is what we have, in our so-called news. They are speaking about nuclear bombs almost every day.”

The news that does percolate from inside Russia is that the state propaganda machine is extremely effective on the older generation, who take its news as truth, and that this has created irrevocable social and family rifts. Alyokhina describes one member of her collective whose father called her a Nazi for supporting Ukraine. “There are examples of parents reporting it to the police when their twentysomething children go on demonstrations. This is very Soviet Union, teaching people to call the police or the KGB if there is a political difference of opinion. Now, it’s again rising up.”

Alyokhina’s mother, a programmer who raised her alone (she didn’t meet her father until she was 21), isn’t like that at all. “My mum is amazing. She understands that we have a new Hitler in Russia.” The central propaganda line is “to provide the message that everything is complicated” for long enough that the war slips out of the western media “and then they will attack more”. But there is another strand to the state media’s message – that Putin is fighting nazism in Ukraine. This is “very hard for old people, whose parents fought the Nazis. There is almost no family in Russia who didn’t lose their relatives in the second world war. But my mother is very clear, and very sad, about what’s happening.”

‘I’m in a panic, I’m crying every day’ … Nadya Tolokonnikova at a concert in Tennessee earlier this month. Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova: ‘You cannot play nice with Putin. He is insane. He might open fire on his own people’.. Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/mar/08/pussy-riot-nadya-tolokonnikova-interview-putin-nfts-russian

She is absolutely trenchant on one point, which she returns to often and has said on stage, in interviews, online: Putin must be tried as a war criminal. “Without an international trial for Putin, it is just unfair to pretend that Russia can exist like before. There has to be an international judgment for this. Without the understanding that Putin is a terrorist and a criminal, it will just be more blood. More dead bodies. More raped women.”

Alyokhina starts rolling a cigarette, underscoring her nervous intensity. She lights up. The image recalls the smoke-hazed faces of resistance fighters since nazism began. She has never lost faith in resistance movements within Russia, especially from Russian women – “a great power, probably the biggest power in the country”. Totalitarianism – probably all of it, not just Putin’s – thrives on “this concept of women sitting at home, feeding the children and going to church. It’s very dangerous if the women rise up. That’s another revolution.”

Nor has she ever wavered in her belief that activism counts. “I really believe that each gesture, each word, each action is important. All these small impacts are the basis for building something different.” International fellowship is powerful, even when it is expressing itself in despair. “Sometimes, there is huge hope. For example, we were performing in Hamburg and there were two Ukrainian artists singing a hymn after us. We stood on the stage, hugging each other. For several seconds, everyone was crying. I was so shocked that this fellow feeling can exist after all this tragedy.”

I wonder, then, at the immense sadness of being exiled from your country, yet feeling its acts so keenly as your responsibility; of watching brutality unfold when you have warned of it for a decade and paid for those warnings time and again with your freedom.

“I will not talk about my sadness when, even today, there have been two bomb attacks against Ukraine,” she says. “Emotions are not important. We should continue, all of us, because it’s a war.”

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Pussy Riot song protests against war in Ukraine and calls for Putin to be prosecuted

The collective said Mama, Don’t Watch TV – a reference to the words of a captured Russian conscript soldier – rails against the Russian leader’s ‘bloodthirsty puppets’ and ‘war criminals’

Laura Snapes

Sat 24 Dec 2022 09.00 GMT

Pussy Riot have released a new song protesting against the war in Ukraine, Russian censorship and the west “sponsoring” the regime through buying oil and gas from Russia. They have also called for the Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, to be tried at an international tribunal.

In a statement, they described Putin’s government as a “terrorist regime” and call him, his officials, generals and propagandists “war criminals”.

They called Мама, не смотри телевизор (Mama, Don’t Watch TV), which comes 10 months after Russia invaded Ukraine: “The music of our anger, indignation, disagreement, a reproachful desperate cry against Putin’s bloodthirsty puppets, led by a real cannibal monster, whose place is in the infinity of fierce hellish flames on the bones of the victims of this terrible war.”

The collective, in this instance represented by Maria Alyokhina, Olga Borisova, Diana Burkot and Taso Pletner, said the chorus is based on the words of a captured Russian conscript soldier who told his mother: “Mum, there are no Nazis here, don’t watch TV.”

“Russian propaganda daily poisons the hearts of people with hatred,” they wrote. “The law on foreign agents is used to silence opposition activists and journalists, to stop the activities of the last independent human rights organisations.”

Pussy Riot release song protesting against Putin’s war on Ukraine – video: https://youtu.be/W4IsdnlbOr8

They outlined the consequences for anyone who defies the regime. “Those who oppose Putin are imprisoned, poisoned with military poisons and killed,” they said, drawing attention to the “tradition of political poisoning” represented by Russia’s Lab X, a poison factory that helped silence the Soviets’ critics and that is believed to play a similar function today.

“Opposition figures of anti-government movements became victims of the ‘experiments’. Putin and the FSB are proud of this “tradition” and continue it: Alexander Litvinenko, Sergei Skripal, Vladimir Kara-Murza, Pyotr Verzilov, Alexei Navalny.”

The group said that the money the Kremlin receives from the international community conducting business with Russia is converted “into Ukrainian blood”.

They issued a three-point demand, calling for an embargo on the purchase of Russian oil and gas and the sale of weapons and police ammunition to Russia; the seizure of western bank accounts and property of Russian officials and oligarchs and personal sanctions against them; and an international tribunal to try Putin, employees of Russian state propaganda, army officers and everyone responsible for the genocide of the Ukrainian nation.

They asked the Russian people to ignore propaganda and not to participate in the war, take mobilisation notices or go to the military commissariat.

“Every action against this war is important,” they said.

Alyokhina is one of the three members of Pussy Riot who was sentenced to two years in jail for staging a performance inside Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in February 2012. She and Nadya Tolokonnikova were released in December 2013.

In July, Alyokhina told the Guardian: “We have a new Hitler in Russia.” She outlined how she had left the country in April disguised as a food courier, after repeated arrests. She went to Iceland, where she has been raising money for Ukrainian charities and Russian political prisoners, and staged an exhibition about Pussy Riot’s history, Velvet Revolution, at the Kling & Bang gallery.

She recently toured a Pussy Riot musical, Riot Days. In August, Tolokonnikova released an album as Pussy Riot called Matriarchy Now.

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Beaten, jailed, exiled and still taunting Putin: inside Pussy Riot’s filthy, furious show

‘A seven-year sentence isn’t enough – give us 18!’ …members of the collective are attacked by Cossack militia in Sochi, Russia, during the 2014 winter Olympics.

They fled Russia disguised as food couriers. Now a major exhibition is celebrating the collective’s punky protest art, from a urine-splattered portrait of Putin to the cathedral gig that landed them in prison

The first thing you see is a framed portrait of Vladimir Putin propped against a table. The Russian leader looks like a secular icon, like Lenin in his mausoleum, seemingly incapable of human expression. But this being a video installation, there is more. Standing on the table is figure in a long gown and orange balaclava, like Rasputin in women’s clothes, or a very unorthodox priest. The figure raises their skirts and a jet of urine spurts over the portrait.

Welcome to Reykjavík and to Velvet Terrorism, an exhibition tracing the decade-long history of Russian art collective Pussy Riot. “Is that you?” I ask Maria Alyokhina, AKA Masha, pointing at the masked urinator? The Pussy Riot co-founder has been showing me, over a video conferencing app, around the exhibition she and members of Icelandic art collective Kling & Bang (Dorothee Kirch, Ingibjörg Sigurjónsdóttir and Ragnar Kjartansson) are installing. Kjartansson, who earlier this year helped Alyokhina flee Russia, holds the phone and gives me a view of Alyokhina at work. “It’s not me,” says Alyokhina, thin smile below intense eyes. “It’s a new member of Pussy Riot who joined earlier this year.” By way of context, she adds: “Putin’s Russia has no women in power. Putin surrounds himself with men. The women are to stay at home and accept their role, which is to be protected. I don’t want to be protected by him. I’d rather piss on him.” Kjartansson, unseen, chips in: “It’s such a great take down of the patriarchy. We were assembling a very slick exhibition, tracing the history of Pussy Riot in the past decade. Then Masha arrived and made it very rock’n’roll.”

‘The Orthodox religion is a hardened penis’ … Pussy Riot singer Maria Alyokhina at The Junction in Cambridge this month. Photograph: Chris Radburn/Reuters

Photos are stuck to the wall with coloured electrical tape. TV monitors howl footage of the various performances and beatings the collective have undergone, such as the time in 2014 when Alyokhina and other members were whipped and pepper-sprayed by Cossacks for protesting at the Winter Olympics in Sochi. The look of the show now has a punk sensibility fitting for a collective whose first songs, 2011’s Ubey Seksista (Kill the Sexist) and Osvobodi Bruschatku (Release the Cobblestones), sampled two late 70s British punk classics: the Cockney Rejects’ I’m Not a Fool and the Angelic Upstarts’ Police Oppression.

When I first meet Alyokhina, she is scribbling text on the gallery wall with what looks like a sharpie. She is writing, in English, an explanation of video footage showing Pussy Riot’s breakthrough performance in January 2012 in Moscow’s Red Square. That day they played a song called Putin Zassal (here rendered as Putin Pissed His Pants), which included the lines: “The Orthodox religion is a hardened penis / Coercing its subjects to accept conformity.”

The next exhibit documents what happened the following month inside Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Russia was then embroiled in the so-called “snow revolution” against electoral fraud. Alyokhina and four other women smuggled a guitar and amp into the cathedral, donned balaclavas and coloured tights, and performed their Punk Prayer, with lyrics including “Virgin Mary, Mother of God, chase Putin out”, and “Virgin Mary, Mother of God, become a feminist”.

Alyokhina and other members of the collective were later jailed for inciting religious hatred after the prosecution – incredibly yet successfully – argued that feminism when proclaimed inside a church is heretical.

During Alyokhina’s 21-month incarceration in a penal colony in the Ural mountains, Putin’s ally and head of the Russian Orthodox church, Patriarch Kirill, explained what was expected of women in Putin’s Russia. “Man has his gaze turned outward – he must work, make money – and woman must be focused inwards, where her children are, where her home is. If this incredibly important function of women is destroyed then everything will be destroyed – the family and, if you wish, the motherland.” The message was clear: difficult women like Pussy Riot needed silencing to save the Russian motherland.

Alyokhina won’t be silenced, though she balks when I suggest that western artists aren’t as tough nor as political as she. This is a woman, after all, who while awaiting sentence released a single defiantly proclaiming: “Seven years isn’t enough – give us 18!” Later, while in jail, she organised impromptu uprisings and would go on to say: “This is what protest should be: desperate, sudden and joyous.”

This spring, after being arrested six times since last summer for protesting against Putin and suspecting another spell in jail was likely, Alyokhina, with girlfriend Lucy Shtein and other members of Pussy Riot, fled Russia disguised as food couriers. Shtein is now in Israel, while Alyokhina and other collective members are nomadic, and have spent much of their time since leaving Russia touring Europe to raise money to support Ukraine and sanctions on Russian oil and gas.

‘I miss my home’ … Alyokhina in Porto, Portugal, in June. Photograph: Estela Silva/EPA

Kjartansson calls me later and we speak alone. “I couldn’t say all I wanted about how great Masha is,” he says. “It’s like talking about Elvis in the presence of Elvis.” A longtime Pussy Riot fan, Kjartansson met Alyokhina last December at the grand opening of billionaire Leonid Mikhelson’s GES-2 art space in Moscow, which for a few months was hailed as a symbol of a new Russia.

Kjartansson’s recreation of the US soap Santa Barbara was the gallery’s inaugural attraction. It was a project inspired by the idea that Santa Barbara, the first US soap opera to be screened in Russia, had a powerful impact on post-Soviet culture. To that end, working with a professional film crew, he planned to stage, shoot and release about 100 episodes of the soap in Russian, on an insanely tight schedule of one episode a day performed in the gallery.

“But then the invasion of Ukraine started,” he explains, “and I didn’t want any part of what Russia was doing. So I withdrew.” He wasn’t alone. Teresa Iarocci Mavica quit as director of GES-2.

Kjartansson has since put his energies into this Pussy Riot exhibition. He wants to show the chutzpah of the collective in turning the power of the oppressors against them, making Putin’s thugs and lackeys part of their work. “Be it prison, novichok, whips, ankle tags or exile,” says the show’s publicity material, “Pussy Riot turn every violent action of the state into art material, shifting the power balance.”

I ask Alyokhina when she will go home. “A good question,” she smiles sadly. “I don’t know. I would like to be there. I miss my home. But not what Putin has done to it.”

• Velvet Terrorism runs until 15 January

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Her natal Lilith is 29 Leo, N.Node 23 Sagittarius, S.Node 19 Gemini. Her natal Amazon is 27 Virgo, N.Node 28 Taurus, S.Node 13 Scorpio.

Please feel free to comment or ask questions.

Goddess Bless, Rad

Hi All,

Here is the story of Samantha Zwicker. This is a noon chart.

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Samantha Zwicker is a Ph.D. student researching ecology and conservation at the University of Washington in the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences while pursuing separate Nonprofit Management and International Development certificates from the UW Evans School. She received her bachelor’s with honors from the UW in 2012 and her master's in June of 2015 after being awarded the College's Graduate Student of the Year.

In addition to teaching environmental studies and environmental science courses at the UW, she is President of Xi Sigma Pi Forestry Honors Society, a term member of the renowned Explorers Club, producer of Seattle's Inspiración del Perú, and co-founder and President of nonprofit Hoja Nueva. Samantha’s fieldwork is based primarily in the Amazon rainforest along the Piedras River in Peru, where she is working with remote communities to establish more sustainable farming methods while concurrently assessing the effects of land use change on cats and their prey using in-situ observation and camera trapping.

Hoja Nueva is led by novel, practical research in conservation and agroforestry. Their mission is to work with local communities to make sustainable agriculture a success in the Piedras and all remote rainforest environments like it- firstly by creating a sustainable cacao marketplace with direct, just trade values.

The urgency of conserving the earth's rainforests now goes beyond cultural and wildlife preservation. As a component of the recent Paris accord on climate change, protecting the Amazon rainforest is vital and of high potential, but more in-situ research is necessary in coupled human-environment systems in the Amazon's most biodiverse and healthy forests. Hoja Nueva consults and cooperates with local agricultural associations and other nonprofit organizations to ensure reliable food production while maintaining healthy forests, creating a future where both humans and nature can thrive.

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‘Wildcat’: A vet with PTSD finds healing with help from a baby ocelot

Nature documentary follows the stories of three trauma survivors in the Amazon jungle: An ex-soldier, a wildlife rehabilitator and an adorable wildcat

Review by Kristen Page-Kirby

Healing is a tricky business, for people and animals alike. What that looks like is the subject of “Wildcat,” a documentary about a young military veteran with PTSD, an orphaned baby ocelot that needs to learn to survive on its own, and a woman, also a trauma survivor, who wants to help them both.

The first is Harry Turner, who joined the British Army at age 18, served in combat in Afghanistan, and was given a medical discharge due to depression and PTSD. (As far as the movie shows, he wasn’t given much else in terms of support.) Harry left England and traveled to the Amazon, intending to end his life — which he didn’t want to do where his 13-year-old brother would find him. Instead, he stumbled onto a wildlife rescue-and-rehabilitation center run by American Samantha Zwicker. Harry begins working with the animals and is eventually entrusted with the care of Keanu the ocelot, a spotted wildcat about the size your house cat thinks it is. Keanu, we learn, was probably orphaned by mining or logging operations.

“I’m going to teach him how to become a killer,” Harry says.

It’s one of the clear lines that connect him to his four-footed charge: For Harry, learning to kill was the key to his survival, but it has left him damaged. Keanu also must learn to kill for food, but if he learns to do that, he’ll have to leave Harry behind. It’s a lot like parenting: The measure of Harry’s success will be how easily Keanu can live without him.

If you’re looking for lots of footage of Keanu growing and pouncing and being otherwise adorable, there’s plenty of that. And while Keanu is not a pet — which is the fate of some orphaned ocelots, popular among a certain set of rich people — any pet owner can relate to Harry’s affectionate exasperation with Keanu’s antics, especially since Let’s Bite Dad seems to be one of his favorite games. More compelling, though, are the moments when Harry steps back and lets Keanu make his own mistakes. A run-in with a spider and a later one with a caiman are nerve-racking, since “helping” Keanu now means hurting him down the road.

While Harry and Keanu’s connection is the film’s central dynamic, Harry’s relationship with Samantha is also prominent. The daughter of an alcoholic father, she admits that she’s not one to give up on people, possibly to her detriment. Harry’s mental state is not always a good one, and Samantha is sometimes at a loss to know how — or whether — to help. Any viewers who have found themselves in the role of caretaker for someone with mental health or substance abuse issues may find some of the scenes featuring Harry and Samantha scarier than those featuring large arachnids or toothy reptiles.

First-time feature directors Trevor Beck Frost and Melissa Lesh use a variety of footage to tell the story: home movies, their own camerawork, and some scenes shot by Harry and Samantha. It mostly works, with one catch. “Wildcat” doesn’t quite hang together, both visually, which is forgivable, and narratively. The film’s human subjects are a bit too removed from the camera, resulting in a loss of intimacy that makes the best documentaries so compelling.

Maybe Turner and Zwicker didn’t want to let the filmmakers in. Maybe Frost and Lesh should have pushed harder. Either way, it’s a missed opportunity, especially considering that the four pretty much lived together for months in the jungle. The film’s under-two-hour run time leaves just enough minutes to tell the stories of two subjects well — with the kind of depth and care they deserve — or the stories of three subjects at a surface level. Clearly, the filmmakers went for the latter option, which simultaneously gives the audience too much and not enough.

Still, for fans of wildlife documentaries, “Wildcat” is at least as good as, say, a rerun of “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.” (Google it). That is to say: It’s enjoyable while it lasts but fades from the mind soon after, all except for that little piece of a viewer’s heart that holds out hope that little Keanu — and the people who raised him — will one day find the lives they deserve.

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Samantha Zwicker: Where is Head of Hoja Nueva Now?

Kumari Shreya Kumari Shreya

December 30, 2022

In Amazon Prime’s ‘Wildcat,’ viewers are taken on an eye-opening journey in the Amazon rainforest. The amount of effort put in by the featured conservationists to save wildlife and biodiversity is commendable and motivates the public to focus on crucial issues surrounding us. In the documentary, we are introduced to Samantha Zwicker, who leads Hoja Nueva and plays a massive role in saving rescue animals in Peru. Her journey with wildcat conservation depicted in the film is fascinating and has made many people curious about her current whereabouts. Luckily, we are to explore the same!

Who is Samantha Zwicker?

Hailing from Washington, US, Samantha Zwicker is a well-known ecologist who graduated from Bainbridge High School in 2009. From a young age, she had been interested in working towards wildlife conservation, though it had been wolves who were her primary concern in her initial years. Samantha has gained multiple degrees from the University of Wahington to further her expertise, including a Master’s Degree in Wildlife Conservation Ecology. Additionally, she has a diploma in Nonprofit management.

In the past, Samantha has had the honor of being a Panthera Small Cat Action Fund Grantee. In addition, she has earned the titles of a Wild Felid Legacy Scholar and an NIH Global Health Fellow. Rather than conventionally going through her doctorate, Samantha decided to work with animals in their natural habitat and provide a unique perspective in her dissertation. Soon, she was deep in the Amazon rainforest and was trying to safeguard as many animals as possible.

For Samantha, rescuing and rewilding Khan, her first rescue ocelot, was a monumental task. The success of this mission would have helped her organization, Hoja Nueva, to gain much respect locally. Interestingly, she and her team members could not find any protocols surrounding how ocelots should be educated about surviving in the wild. Hence, Khan’s presence was an uncharted territory that she was eager but cautious to explore. Khan’s passing greatly impacted her and her colleague Harry Turner, yet the duo soon had a new ray of hope after Keanu’s arrival.

Where is Samantha Zwicker Now?

As of writing, Samantha Zwicker serves as the Founder, Co-Director, and Ecologist for Hoja Nueva. Since Keanu’s rescue, the organization has kept up its good work and has saved 13 wildcats, including Kleo, their first-ever female ocelot. Interestingly, Hoja Nueva is the first-ever team to reintroduce a margay to the wild. To date, they have saved 119 animals, out of which 101 were apparently rescued in 2022. In the same year, they also reintroduced 65 animals to the wild.

The ‘Wildcat’ star is quite excited about the release of the documentary featuring herself and Harry Turner. Initially, the two had decided to make a self-filmed movie documenting Khan’s reintroduction. This was mainly not to expose him to unnecessary human contact. However, during Keanu’s rewilding, the number of cameras increased, though Harry remained the primary person to have any interaction with Keanu.

Trailer for Wildcat:

https://www.youtube.comresults?search_query=trailer+for+wildcat

According to Samantha, she knows that the movie leaves a person in emotional turmoil, which she considers to be a good thing. “I just hope that people harness that emotion and put it toward a cause, maybe improving relationships in their lives,” the ecologist shared with The Seattle Times. “And, hopefully, people want to reach out and support what our cause is now and what we’ve been able to create at Hoja.”

Currently, Samantha is pursuing her doctorate in Quantitative Ecology from the University of Washington. Apart from the Amazon rainforest, she is working with the communities of Madre de Dios, Peru. Furthermore, the skilled ecologist investigates neotropical felid population dynamics and the human impact on threatened mammals; she uses camera trapping to get data. As for Samantha’s romantic life, she seems to be in a happy relationship with Dylan Joseph Singer, co-director of Hoja Nueva. The two have been together for about three years and share a love of wildlife preservation.

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Her natal Lilith is 9 Taurus, N.Node 26 Sagittarius, S.Node 17 Gemini. Her natal Amazon is 12 Taurus, N.Node 28 Taurus, and the S.Node is 27 Scorpio.

Please feel free to comment or ask questions.

Goddess Bless, Rad

She cares for 24 pigs, 20 goats, 210 cats, a skunk and 345 other rescue animals — and that's not even her day job

Laurie Zaleski, who lives with 600 rescue animals, talks about her work, her life and her new book, "Funny Farm"

By Nora Krug

WA Post

1/4/2023

MAYS LANDING, N.J. — For nearly a month, a blind lamb named Bradley has been sleeping in Laurie Zaleski's living room. Also sharing her humble two-bedroom abode: 11 dogs, 4 chickens (in diapers), 23 cats, several kittens, a baby duck and a very loud cockatoo. Yes, says Zaleski, author of the just-released memoir "Funny Farm," she is overdue for a home expansion. But she would never consider the alternative: fewer animals under her roof.

"I have a hard time saying no," Zaleski explains without needing to, as we walk around her 25-acre Mays Landing, N.J., farm one recent sunny afternoon. There were animals popping out everywhere — and no wonder. Currently on the premises are, give or take, 11 dogs, 15 horses, 131 chickens, 210 cats, two cows, 22 peacocks, four alpacas, 24 pigs, five donkeys, 20 goats, four sheep, 160 ducks, two emu, seven turkeys, two llama, several geese and one skunk. They're here to take refuge, to escape abuse, recover from injury or sickness or simply to experience being wanted. Even the skunk — whose scent glands had been removed — was once someone's pet.

The story behind Stella, the first 'talking' dog. It's not as far-fetched as it sounds.

This is the Funny Farm, double-entendre intended: "Because it's full of animals, and fit for lunatics," Zaleski jokes of the sanctuary that she built here, some 20 miles from Atlantic City, more than two decades ago.

Zaleski's love of animals was born of personal misfortune. "It was a happy accident," she writes in "Funny Farm" (St. Martin's), a chronicle of the hardscrabble childhood that sparked her devotion to all creatures great and small. Don't be fooled by the whimsical cover: This is a tale that's heartbreaking and uplifting in equal measure. (Think "Educated" meets "Dr. Dolittle.")

The story begins in the early '70s in Turnersville, about 30 miles from the Funny Farm. There Zaleski lived in a well-appointed suburban home with her parents and two siblings; they had a nanny and a beach house and cocktail parties. But Zaleski's father had violent outbursts. One day, after being threatened at knifepoint, Laurie's mother finally had enough. She drove off with the kids and settled into a new house, a ramshackle one-bedroom in the woods that, when they arrived, had no electricity or running water and was strewn with garbage. "Its few windows were broken or cracked, and one of the wooden sills hung down, as if someone had stepped on it to crawl inside. If there once had been steps out front, they were long gone — it was a straight drop, five feet from the doorsill to the ground," Zaleski writes. Soon after the family moved in, vandals tried to run them out, trashing the place and stealing valuables the family could barely afford in the first place.

Five-year-old Zaleski was terrified. But her mother, "unwavering in her cheerfulness," found a way to protect her family: a dog. Zaleski's mom got their first animal, a German shepherd named Wolf, in 1973 through one of her three jobs, cleaning cages at the local animal control. Wolf was meant to scare off the troublemakers, and for a while it worked — until Zaleski's father figured out his family's whereabouts and terrorized them.

Zaleski's mom, Annie McNulty, had a weakness for difficult men and needy animals. The former nearly got her killed; the latter saved her life. Shortly after Wolf's arrival came other animals, each with its own sad story — a baby horse with a broken leg, a runaway pig, a discarded dog. "Every time I turned around, the menagerie seemed to grow. Two by two, four by four, as if Noah had parked his ark in the woods near Turnersville, dropped the tailgate and said, 'Welcome home,'" writes Zaleski in the same matter-of-fact style in which she speaks.

Zaleski has her own biblical ship here, though sometimes she has to send some animals elsewhere — reptiles, amphibians and wildlife — where they can be cared for by specialists. "My bathtub and sometimes kitchen sink become a trauma center for animals that get hit by cars or wildlife before they get transferred to a local wildlife rescue," she says. Zaleski may be generous and patient, but even she has her limits. "It gets me so angry," she says of people who abandon pets when they move. "I think to myself, I'm glad I'm not your child. Are you going to leave them behind, too?"

The animals on the Funny Farm seem never to want to leave Zaleski behind. As we walk, a trail of critters follows, including a tall and surprisingly fast-moving emu named Connor. Zaleski, dressed in full-on cowgirl gear, flashes her long eyelashes as she greets, kisses and feeds her furry and feathered friends. For her beloved German shepherd Tucker, who has a malformed esophagus, that means propping him up in a special dog highchair so he can lick a bowl of liquefied puppy food.

Zaleski bought the farm in 2000 intending to give it to her mother. Two weeks before the