OK, so the story keeps getting weirder.
Or not, who knows? Because curiously, the Reverend Edward Santana, who the Archbishop of San Juan is or is not investigating, is lying low, electronically speaking.
Which is to say that when you google “Edward Santana priest,” nothing much comes up. If you google “Edward Santana sacerdote,” you get an obscure website detailing the shenanigans about which I wrote yesterday.
There is, however, one interesting link in Google’s search results for “Edward Santana priest”: a blog called Annunciations by Michael Dubruiel. And I copy and paste the following post in its entirety.
Behind the news
The priest mentioned in this CNN story is a former classmate of mine. What they don't mention is that he is Carlos Santana's cousin:
The church is investigating whether Carlos Manuel Rodriguez, who died in 1963 after dedicating his life to the church, was responsible for curing a person of gangrene; another of diabetes, respiratory failure and heart failure; and a third of skin cancer, said priest Edward Santana, who is heading the investigations for the church.
The first two alleged miracles occurred in Rome's Plaza San Pedro immediately after Rodriguez's beatification a year ago Monday. The third, in Puerto Rico, allegedly occurred two months ago, said Santana, of the diocese in Caguas where Rodriguez was from.
OK—you might not know, but Charlie Rodríguez is the only Puerto Rican to be beatified. Actually, he’s more than that. Here’s Wikipedia:
He is the first Puerto Rican, the first Caribbean-born layperson and the first layperson in the history of the United States to be beatified.
And he’s a big deal in Puerto Rican Catholic circles, the subject of great adoration. Evidently very devout, he worked hard to restore the liturgical customs that were becoming lost. He died at age 44 of cancer in 1963, and then, as anyone could have predicted, the miracles started coming. A woman with non-Hodgkin’s malignant lymphoma asked for Charlie’s intercession, and bing! Healed!
Then, there were the miracles as stated in blog post above. At any rate, on 29 April 2001, Pope John Paul II beatified Rodríguez.
Now then—two things about the blog post above. First, the link to the CNN story doesn’t work. Nor does going directly onto CNN and searching for Carlos Manuel Rodríguez seem to do anything.
The second thing? The post says, “What they don’t mention is he is Carlos Santana’s cousin.”
Carlos Santana?
Bloggers, bloggers—consider the historical record. Dammit, I’m dead sure that Michael Dubruiel meant Carlos Rodríguez, not Santana. But guess what? Dubruiel died and the grave’s a mighty silent place, as the poet has it.
Right—so all we have is conjecture. We have no idea where Santana is, and whether he’s working in the Catholic Church and still, perhaps, molesting kids. We don’t know who is whose cousin. Lastly, we don’t know if, assuming Santana is Rodríguez’s cousin, that had anything to do with the results of his investigation.
You know, I actually feel kind of bad, now and again, about the Catholic Church. There’s got to be good priests, honest clergy, devoted nuns, lay people who contribute much and receive little.
What there is not—and it pains me to say it—is an honest, morally respectable bureaucratic structure backing up whatever good people there are in the organization.
I’m gay; I’m an atheist. But I take no pleasure in seeing an organization two millennia old screw up so completely. I don’t benefit from a church in which no reasonable person could trust; the erosion of one more institution leaves us all poorer. Yes, I prefer to see the reality and not to be deluded.
But I wish the realty were not what I’m seeing….
