Category Archives: Ecumenical & Interfaith

Memorial Minute for Katharine “Kat” Royal

In Lumberton NC they lived near a trailer park populated by people of modest circumstances. Kat made friends with many residents there, including a woman named Lori and her daughter Christie. One day in late 2006 or 2007, Christie knocked at the door to say a dying dog had been abandoned nearby. The animal was bloody, with cuts around its neck and ears, and so weak it couldn’t stand up.

What had happened? In the area around Lumberton, dog-fighting is widely practiced, and it appeared this dog had been bred to fight, but refused to do so; hence the abuse and abandonment. We can’t keep it, the neighbor explained: the landlord won’t stand for it. But he’s so sweet: will you take him?

Kat had already purchased a young German Shepherd, hoping to train it as a service dog; and their trailer was small. But she took in the nearly comatose canine anyway.

Among their other neighbors was an Iraqi family, refugees from the wars there. They were devout Muslims, and the woman of the house was studying to become a veterinary technician. Hearing of Kat’s new dog and its desperate condition, she came by and spent many hours helping save its life and nurse it back to health, all while steadfastly refusing any payment.

Kat often told this story in her sermons, or when she heard other so-called Christians bashing Muslims: here was a Muslim practicing their faith as kindness, Kat said, and providing a more representative example of it that the violent stereotypes fed to the American public day after day.

Thus arrived in their lives the dog many of us know as Isaiah, or Zay-Zay as Kat often called him. And as Isaiah recovered, a surprising pattern developed: the German Shepherd, which Kat was working to train, paid no attention to the commands she repeated and repeated. But soon, Isaiah did start following them, unbidden, and began to take up the role the shepherd so adamantly refused. Before long the shepherd had been passed on to a new home, and Isaiah had found a new family, in which he had a vital place.

Annals of Homophobia: Don’t Cry For Kim, Rowan County

In all his public, to-the-country statements repeatedly (& honestly) trashed the right wing Catholic political agenda, and the bishops’ alliance with them. If I was scoring all this, it would go: 20 for Francis’s good stuff, 1 (so far) for bad. In sports or politics, that would be a landslide or a rout. And in Vegas, betting on the pope saying progressive things while in the USA would have been a very big, loud winner.

Compare: the Davis meeting was held in private, with no papal aides or Davis’s lawyer; it lasted only a few minutes; the pope’s reported pleasantries were boilerplate; and when asked later, he did not seem well-briefed on her case.

Further, the fact of the meeting was embargoed until the pope was safely back in Rome. And late on September 30, the Vatican was still declining to comment on it, sounding embarrassed and blindsided. Some ballyhoo.

Of course, homophobic crusaders like Davis’s “Liberty Counsel” and the “Alliance Defending Freedom” were ecstatic at the news leak, and insisted that it showed that Francis was on board with their campaigns. They can’t be stopped for grabbing this patronizing shred of recognition.