Kate Middleton: An uncommon princess

By Nicholas Köhler - Monday, November 22, 2010 at 3:20 PM - 1 Comment

Stephen Gibson/Marie Nirme/Zuma/Keystone Press; Eddie Keogh/Reuters

Catherine Elizabeth Middleton was born on Jan. 9, 1982, at the Royal Berkshire Hospital in Reading, England, a large commercial town just west of London on the River Thames. Three years earlier, Michael and Carole Middleton, her parents, had purchased a semi-detached home in the nearby village of Bradfield Southend for the middling sum of $165,000. It was here that Kate spent the early part of her rather unremarkable childhood. Yet despite these bland beginnings, she would go on, at age 28, to become the first commoner betrothed to a future British king since Anne Hyde did so in the tumultuous mid-17th century. Unlike Anne, however, Kate, with her thick brown tresses and steely good looks, would first have to endure the longest job interview in history and the sobriquet “Waity Katie.”

Hers was a decidedly middle-class family: Michael and Carole first met while working as flight attendants (he later became a pilot), and Carole’s ancestry in particular is rooted in the coal-mining clans of Hetton-le-Hole, south of Newcastle. Yet Michael’s Middleton progenitors were entrepreneurs whose lucrative wool and cloth concerns date back to 18th century Yorkshire. So it was not a surprise that, in 1987, shortly after the birth of their third child, James, Carole would launch a Middleton venture—Party Pieces, selling ready-made loot bags and other children’s party paraphernalia. It was here, in the mail-order catalogues Carole put together, that Kate received her first public exposure, in photographs modelling her parents’ merchandise.

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'It cheers everyone up'

By Leah McLaren - Friday, November 19, 2010 at 1:00 PM - 1 Comment

Paul Hackett/Reuters

After eight long years, the wait is finally over. This week, Clarence House announced that, after months of speculation and years of on-and-off dating, Prince William will marry his long-time girlfriend, Kate Middleton, in 2011. And in Britain, the reactions were, for the most part, ecstatic. Prince Charles told the press he was “thrilled, obviously,” as the couple, who are both 28, had been “practising for long enough.” Charles’s mother, the Queen, said she was “absolutely delighted” about the news. Camilla, duchess of Cornwall, leaving the Wicked Young Writers’ Award ceremony, joked that the news was “wicked!”

On the bustling streets of central London, the air was abuzz with news of the biggest—and happiest—royal event in three decades. The British media, which has been awash for months in stories of deep budget cuts and economic gloom, leapt on the story with gusto. “Engaged!” and “Will gives Kate Di’s ring” blazed tabloid headlines on the newsstands as commuters rushed to grab copies and pore over the emerging details on the tube ride home.

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The man who will be king

By Charlie Gillis - Friday, November 19, 2010 at 9:51 AM - 22 Comments

Tim Graham/Getty Images; Anwar Hussein/AP; Reuters

Exhausted and chilled, with a hard wind blowing up from the Thames, William of Wales curled tighter in his sleeping bag to fend off the -4° C cold. He wore a wool hat and grey hoodie, but this was a world away from his bedroom at Clarence House, his official residence near Buckingham Palace. Only a length of cardboard, laid amid dumpsters and ventilation grates near London’s Blackfriars Bridge, protected him from the icy sidewalk.

It was a stunt, of course. Prince William “slept rough” in an alley last December to gain an understanding of the plight of the homeless, and to raise money for Centrepoint, a charity supporting poverty stricken youth once patronized by his mother Diana. But the event spoke eloquently to the prince’s defining traits: his doggedness, his sense of civic duty, his resolve to gain enlightenment through adversity. “I cannot, after one night, even begin to imagine what it must be like to sleep on London’s streets night after night,” he said later in a statement.

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Why children are horrifically good soldiers

By macleans.ca - Monday, November 8, 2010 at 10:30 AM - 3 Comments

Tim A Hetherington/Panos Pictures

THEY FIGHT LIKE SOLDIERS, THEY DIE LIKE CHILDREN
Roméo Dallaire

The former Canadian general and head of the UN peacekeeping mission in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide, Dallaire has always been brutally open about the horrors he saw there and their effects upon him. Only “constant therapy and an unrelenting regimen of drugs” keep the memories at bay, he writes in his new book. But nothing has managed to soothe the shock Dallaire experienced when he saw preteen killers, armed to the teeth with machetes and rifles, advancing upon him.

In some 30 wars across the world, he notes, hundreds of thousands of child fighters—their ranks endlessly renewed by kidnapping or by scooping up kids orphaned by AIDS, famine or violent conflicts—have become “the ultimate, cheap, expendable, yet sophisticated human weapon.” Children are, in fact, horrifically perfect for the job. They’re small enough to transport easily in large numbers, yet big enough to handle modern lightweight arms, and heavy enough also to set off land mines so adults can safely follow. They have no real sense of fear and, when indoctrinated young enough, their capacity for loyalty and for barbarism exceeds that of adults. The girls—40 per cent of child soldiers—double as sex slaves and, in long-lasting wars, as mothers of the next generation of fighters.

For Dallaire, almost as bad as the war situation he describes with such cold eloquence is the fact that the world seems to be doing little about it. The better to bring home the emotional truth of his subject, he crafted three fictional chapters on the abduction, indoctrination and killing (by a UN peacekeeper) of a child soldier. Dallaire pulls off fiction with considerable skill, but readers who are more interested in solutions will be relieved when he turns to practical suggestions. One in particular would make children far less useful to their adult controllers: a serious effort to stamp out the trade in lightweight weapons.
- BRIAN BETHUNE

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Newsmakers

By macleans.ca - Friday, October 29, 2010 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

A perfect wedding for one
Chen Wei-yih, a 30-year-old living in Taipei, waited for the right man. But he never came along, so in a triumphant gesture aimed in part at upending clichés about unmarried women, she rented a hall, bought a wedding dress and will marry herself on Nov. 6. The Facebook page for “Only&Only’s Wedding” has won her loads of new friends. And yes, there is a honeymoon: Chen will travel with her new, better half to Australia.

Still Wayne’s world
It would have been the biggest English divorce since Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. Shaken Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson told a press conference that his star attacker, Wayne Rooney, intended to move to a new professional soccer club instead of renewing his contract. Rooney had quarrelled with his boss over an ankle injury, and told Sky Sports he had concerns over “the continued ability of the club to attract the top players in the world.” The fight raised the possibility of Rooney defecting to a Man U rival—perhaps the most despised of all, Manchester City. But after two days of uncertainty, Rooney relented and signed a deal that will keep him in the famous red kit until June 2015.

He said it once. He’ll say it again.
He has no chance of becoming the next governor of New York, but this gubernatorial candidate’s stump speeches have won him Internet fame, a parody on Saturday Night Live and even a toy action figure based on his likeness. Jimmy McMillan heads a political party called The Rent is Too Damn High Party, and in appearances he hammers away at his party’s one and only platform plank: the rent is too damn high. “Our children can’t afford to live anywhere. There’s nowhere to go,” he said during one televised debate. “Once again, why? You said it, the rent is too damned high.” He even won over front-runner Andrew Cuomo, who during the debate admitted: “I’m with Jimmy: the rent is too damn high.”

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Donny Osmond is my matchmaker

By Rebecca Eckler - Thursday, October 21, 2010 at 2:00 PM - 0 Comments

GETTY IMAGES; PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY ADAM CHOLEWA

“I’m engaged!” Lorraine Connors, 51, announces gleefully, shortly after returning from Holland, where she met her fiancé, Willem, for the first time in person. “I just told Donny,” she continues. “He squealed like a fan!”

That’s Donny as in Osmond: the singer, actor, winner of the ninth season of Dancing With the Stars, and star of “Donny and Marie,” a variety show at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas, so popular it’s been extended to 2012. And Donny as in www.Donny.com, a website Osmond runs for his fans to connect and stay up to date on all things Donny, where Vancouver-based Connors first encountered her fiancé. So far, they are the only “Donny.commers,” as they call themselves, to get engaged. “It’s beyond a fairy-tale story,” sighs Connors, a long-time Donny fan, though she points out that it began as “a huge tear-jerker.”

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Margaret Trudeau's last breakdown

By Anne Kingston - Friday, October 8, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Peter Bregg/CP/ Reuters/ Photograph by Jane Heller

Margaret Trudeau is sitting in the living room of her Montreal apartment, chatting about the Prime Minister and marijuana. No, the former flower-child chatelaine of 24 Sussex isn’t time-travelling back to her days married to prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau in the ’70s, smoking spliffs under the noses of her Mountie detail. She’s vibrantly in the here and now as conversation veers to the government’s stance on medical marijuana. “I think Mr. Harper has told us we could grow four [plants],” she says. “I’m tempted to grow four.” She’s joking—or seems to be. Trudeau’s pot-smoking days are behind her—mostly.

Now a mental-health advocate, Trudeau is more interested in the role marijuana use played in her bipolar disorder, a condition she made public in 2006. A little grass gave her focus, she says: “some light and joy and delight.” Too much triggered manic episodes. She still indulges—occasionally. “I fall off now and then, but very, very seldom,” she says. “I’m too cautious now.”

“Cautious” was never a word used to describe Margaret Trudeau, who arrived on the national stage in 1971 as the ravishing 22-year-old bride of a debonair 51-year-old PM. Their unlikely union, which produced Justin, Alexandre (known as Sacha) and Michel, ended in 1977 amidst lurid headlines that the PM’s erratic wife had bolted to photograph the Rolling Stones. Margaret filled in the details in Beyond Reason, her 1979 tell-a-lot, which revealed her “long tunnel of darkness” during her marriage and her affair with an unnamed man later identified as senator Edward Kennedy. In 1982, a second memoir, Consequences, detailed dalliances with the likes of Jack Nicholson and Ryan O’Neal as she flitted between continents seeking her own fame.

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Should you stay or should you go?

By Julia McKinnell - Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 4:00 PM - 0 Comments

Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute"Moving out": "If you always make more money than he does and you are carrying the financial burden, do you think you will respect him?"

If it feels like you’ve “outgrown” your husband, you may be wondering if you should stay or leave. Advice columnist Kimberly Ventus-Dark wants to help you with that. In a new book, she offers up various scenarios.
Women who make more money than their husband and carry the majority of responsibilities at home and are unhappy with the situation would be better off leaving, she writes in When You Have Outgrown Him: Whether to Stay or Go. And if your husband makes some money but “completely dismisses his financial responsibilities to the household,” again, you’ll be happier if you go, she writes. “Women often mention to me that when they do bring home enough income to pay the bills and support the family, some men feel that their own paycheques should be kept for their own personal pleasures or building financial worth. Unless this problem is rectified, it is nearly impossible for the couple to maintain a meaningful relationship.”

In another situation, Ventus-Darks describes the marriage of Mark, a mechanic, and Maria, a nurse. “Maria wants to pursue a master’s degree but is confused because, recently, Mark has started to accuse Maria of thinking she is better than him. Mark doesn’t understand why Maria has changed so much since their marriage. Neither one of them had a degree before the marriage, and Mark doesn’t understand why Maria seems to have become so much of a snob or why she has to get a degree.”

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Let's get married—for an hour

By Patricia Treble - Thursday, September 16, 2010 at 9:40 AM - 0 Comments

Morteza Nikoubazl/Reuters

The penalty for having sex outside of marriage in Iran is 100 lashes. So men wanting a dalliance or young unmarried couples craving a getaway turn to the legal loophole of “temporary marriages”: contracts of a specific duration—anywhere from 60 minutes to 99 years—and for a specified amount of money. These controversial marriages, traditional in the Shia form of Islam, are promoted by the ayatollahs as a way financially troubled women can make money or, as one delicately explained earlier this year, a way for a young widow to “answer her needs, because if she doesn’t, she will have psychological problems.”

Feminists decry the practice as exploitation of poor women and a form of legalized prostitution that serves only men. Recently, women’s groups fought off an attempt, the second in three years, by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to make the marriages even more male-friendly, including giving men legal cover to bypass asking permission for the relationship from their first wives. What is unmistakable is their growing popularity: up by at least 28 per cent last year in Tehran. For young couples who can’t afford to marry, the loophole is only way to be together, and avoid 100 lashes.

'Couples' fake it for money

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, August 12, 2010 at 1:40 PM - 0 Comments

Getty Images

An optimist might think the uptick in marriages performed by Rev. Alex Brown of East Sussex, U.K.—who officiated at 13 ceremonies from 2001 to 2005, and a whopping 383 in the four years that followed—was a sign of love in the air. In fact, police say it was part of a massive immigration fraud. On July 29, the vicar and two other men were found guilty of organizing about 360 sham marriages from 2005 to 2009, part of a scheme that saw African nationals marrying Eastern Europeans in order to gain residency in Britain.

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How to get happily married

By Julia McKinnell - Monday, June 7, 2010 at 12:03 PM - 44 Comments

Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute

If you want a long happy marriage, “your twenties shouldn’t be spent finding a man; your twenties should be spent finding yourself.” That’s the advice in a new book for young single women called Last One Down the Aisle Wins: 10 Keys to a Fabulous Single Life Now and an Even Better Marriage Later.

The book’s co-authors are Shannon Fox, a marriage psychotherapist, and her best friend Celeste Liversidge, a divorce lawyer. They married at 29 and 30, and write that “for the past 16 years, we have been working with women in crisis, trying to save their troubled marriages. We listened to women pour their hearts out and share their stories of disappointment, regret, disillusionment and guilt. We’d often commiserate about how frustrating it was to enter our clients’ lives after the damage to their marriages was already done.”

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The men you should never marry

By By Julia Mckinnell - Monday, May 3, 2010 at 3:11 PM - 69 Comments

Getty Images

If love is blind, “marriage is like a trip to the optometrist’s office,” warns an 81-year-old priest from New Jersey in a new book for women designed to help them evaluate whether the man they’re dating is marriage material. Up front, Father Pat Connor addresses those who might question his authority to speak on the topic. “You might be thinking, ‘He’s a priest. He’s never been married,’ and in that you would be correct.” But, he goes on, “for over 50 years I have had the privilege of speaking with young women on the subject of whom not to marry. These women have opened their hearts and minds while bringing me their questions.” Questions such as: “Is money really important in a marriage?” “Yes. Yes. Yes, to that one,” he writes in Whom Not to Marry: Time-Tested Advice From a Higher Authority.

Remember, he writes, “You can be deeply in love with someone to whom you cannot be successfully married.” If you’re thinking love conquers all, “it doesn’t,” he writes. Top on his list is, “Never marry a man who cannot hold down a job.” Then there’s “never marry a man who has no friends.”

When a portion of Father Pat’s list appeared in the New York Times, a twice-married and divorced woman sent him her own version: “Never marry a man who is more affectionate in public than in private. Never marry a man who notices all of your faults but never any of his own. Never marry a man whose first wife had to sue for child support. Never marry a man whom your children don’t like.”

Father Pat advises women to take a year between the decision to marry and the wedding. “Use the engagement as a time to ask questions,” such as, “What would I be glad to know about him that’s impossible to know in the first few months of dating?”

He writes about one woman whose fiancé loved to shop for expensive clothes. “Then he wants to go to pricey restaurants to show them off,” she told Father Pat. “I prefer eating at home and wearing my comfortable clothes. How can I change him to like the simpler life?” “Change him? Forget it! He’s a bad risk for marriage. I’m afraid it’s just that simple,” Father Pat told her.

One of his must-haves is physical attraction. “There used to be, in one of the formulas used at weddings, a wonderful sentence that was said by each spouse in turn: ‘With my body, I thee worship.’ If you feel no physical attraction to him, don’t marry him!”

He urges women to ask: “Has your love grown since you became serious about one another?” “Do you see in this person the qualities you want in your children?” “Do you love each other with equal intensity and are you sure your love is not one-sided?”

Beware of the “Green-Eyed Monsters.” “Envy and jealousy are as complex as they are puzzling, and they’re both destructive.” He tells of a young woman who loved to dance but complained, “my boyfriend always declines my offers to dance with me. When I’m dancing with other boys, I can feel him staring at us. How can I help him to like dancing and to stop staring?”

“You’ll probably never get your boyfriend to like dancing,” Father Pat told her, “and the staring only means that jealousy is in play here. Have a chat with him about that unlovely quality. If he persists in his jealous-laden behaviour, drop him!”

If your boyfriend has cold feet, “Never put yourself in the position of trying to persuade him to marry you. No good can come of that,” he writes. “It’s important to pay attention to those actions that convey a lack of commitment on his part.”

Adhering to dating rules is another mistake, he says. “I’m uncomfortable with this rules approach to dating—rules that take into account anything from who calls whom and when, who pays for dinner, and how many dates to have before either becoming intimate or moving on. Rules can quickly morph into ultimatums, and that’s no good for anybody.”

Also, think twice about the “fun or quirky proposals,” like eloping to Vegas “on a whim.” Father Pat urges women to “think about it. The decision to get married will affect your entire life. Do you really want to enter into something so casually?”

One couple’s modest engagement rings made him happy. The groom said, “We bought these rings, one for $15, one for $20.” The couple hoped to upgrade later on. Father Pat told them, “I hope you forget in future getting more expensive rings. Put the money toward your children’s college funds!”

How to get along with the in-laws

By Julia McKinnell - Monday, November 30, 2009 at 9:35 AM - 18 Comments

“I have been married for two years. For Christmas, I received a girdle from my mother-in-law. I opened it in front of the whole family. Um, thank you, I guess,” writes an insulted daughter-in-law on a forum devoted to the worst gifts from a mother-in-law. A response comes back: “For Mother’s Day, don’t hesitate to give her really slinky, tiny, tacky lingerie as a present.” The British psychologist who moderates the forum, Dr. Terri Apter, has advice for dealing with problematic relatives in a new book, What Do You Want From Me?: Learning to Get Along With In-Laws. Many women, Apter writes, “complain about subliminal insults, such as being given a size ‘large’ sweater by a mother-in-law who explains, ‘You probably didn’t realize the ones you have are too tight.’ ”

Apter’s advice is to get your husband onside. Tell him, “It would be helpful if you could say, at least once, in your mother’s presence, ‘I think my wife looks just fine as she is.’ ” Gently solicit his help. Do not insist, “You should support me and not your mother.” Do not make a global complaint, “You never stand up for me.” Tell him, “When I feel uncomfortable with your mother, I’ll reach out my hand for you. Will you take it? That’s all you have to do to make me feel you’re supporting me.”

Apter surveyed 150 couples in the U.K. and U.S. and found that housekeeping is the No. 1 bone of contention between mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law: 80 per cent of mothers-in-law admit “the standard of cleanliness in a home was an important issue in whether they could warm to their daughter-in-law.” Many of those mothers-in-law, writes Apter, “say in all sincerity that they are keen to raise sons to be new men who are as responsive to children and as domestically responsible as their partners. Yet, on a deeper level, they may want a daughter-in-law who puts her husband first.”

Take Sammi, 34, who is thrown into self-doubt every time her mother-in-law visits. “She’s always rushing around muttering to herself as she cleans up. ‘Let me save you a job,’ she says as she picks Tim’s clothes out of the dryer and starts folding them. I tell her, ‘Marge, it’s Tim’s job to iron his own shirts, so you’re not saving me a job, you’re saving Tim a job and I hope he thanks you.’ I never know if she gets it, or if one more thing has flown out of my mouth to put her in a sulk.”

When both parties suppress the conflict, Apter calls this “the good-behaviour syndrome.” The challenge, she writes, “is to learn how to speak out, without setting off the alarms that lead straight back to silencing.” Appeal to your mother-in-law’s understanding, advises Apter. Say, “I sometimes worry that my home is not as well organized as yours. But it would mean a lot to me if you realized I did my best.” Avoid accusatory mind reading. Do not say to your mother-in-law, “You’re angry.” In turn, Apter warns mothers-in-law, “watch out for the bias toward your own son. There is nothing wrong with a parent seeing her own son’s career or comforts at twice their normal size. But if this parental bias minimizes the achievements of your daughter-in-law, it will generate conflict.”

Sometimes in-law conflicts arise between siblings-in-law. If a sister thinks her brother is “bending toward his spouse at the expense of a parent,” writes Apter, “then they may step in to shift the balance.” Apter talks about Kelly, whose husband, Jared, promised her she’d “love” his older sister Gail—they were “two peas in a pod,” he said. “You can imagine how intrigued I was to meet Gail. Who was this woman who was, in my lover’s eyes, so much like me? I tried at first,” says Kelly. “But she seems to resent every single success I have. My mother-in-law is really proud of me and I’m not sure Gail likes that!” Gail’s mother is ill. Gail believes that Kelly keeps her brother away from her mother. Gail told Apter, “Kelly’s favourite stupid line is that he needs to separate. But that doesn’t stop her from being on the phone to her mother three times a day! That selfish streak of hers is taking him away from our mother and from me.”

Discuss the situation with your spouse, advises Apter. Don’t forget there’s always hope that “over time, people learn to appreciate and respect their in-laws.” Even in-laws who “initially believe that a son or daughter could have done better and are disappointed in their choice realize, many years on, that the chosen partner has qualities that ‘lasted,’ ” she writes. “For many people, in-laws become a combination of friend and relative.”

Pierre & Maggie: The untold story

By John Geddes - Monday, October 26, 2009 at 10:56 AM - 34 Comments

There’s something dark, almost to the point of the occult, in the way Pierre Trudeau is often remembered. Scan across the shelf of books about him: titles refer to his “shadow,” the notion he remains “hidden,” and one even calls him a “magus.” The most famous biographical quote about him claims “he haunts us still.”

Perhaps it’s all this gloom that makes the story of his courtship and marriage such welcome leavening in the tale. The dancing entrance of Margaret Sinclair, quintessential flower child, brings to the story a tie-dyed splash of contrast, occasionally sheer silliness—not to mention doomed romance, rare beauty and rock-star celebrity. No wage and price controls or constitutional amendments in this chapter. Continue…

Against all odds

By Anne Kingston - Thursday, August 20, 2009 at 5:00 PM - 19 Comments

Last month, Jillian Harris packed up her bags and moved house from Vancouver to Chicago to live with her fiancé, Ed Swiderski, whom she’d known all of nine weeks before giddily agreeing to marry him; they plan to wed within the year. The couple’s warp-speed romance, one of several Harris was juggling on the last season of The Bachelorette, was served up like spray cheese on crackers to a fixated audience of millions. The 29-year-old gushed about her instant connection with the 30-year-old Swiderski on Live with Regis and Kelly in July: “We had that one date when everything came together,” she said. “I knew I could not let him go ever.”

As psychotic as that statement sounds, it’s the linga franca of the whirlwind courtship, a phenomenon far more fascinating in reality than any on faux “reality” programming. Lately there’s been a crop of them. Earlier this year, the 70-year-old writer Joyce Carol Oates married Charles Gross, a professor of psychology at Princeton less than a year after her husband of 47 years, with whom she’d had a happy marriage, died. In January, the National Post columnist Diane Francis wed John Beck, the CEO of the construction conglomerate Aecon Group, knowing him less than four months. The couple, both in their 60s, met at a dinner thrown by the conservative think tank the Fraser Institute, which, when you think about it, is the perfect forum for finding Mr. or Ms. Right: Beck, who arrived late, ended up in the only available empty chair, next to Francis. The opinionated pundit declines to comment on her personal life, but in an email response to a question from the Globe and Mail about the relationship’s rapid progression, she wrote: “When it’s right you just know it.” Continue…

Brides forced to take tests for virginity

By Katie Engelhart - Thursday, July 23, 2009 at 4:20 PM - 2 Comments

When 151 women gathered in Madhya Pradesh state in central India last month, they were preparing for a celebration; all were to be married in a state-run mass wedding in the city of Shahdol. But they weren’t expecting what came next: being shepherded into a line, and then subjected to an official “virginity test.”

The mass wedding was part of a new state-wide scheme to provide free marriages to the poor. Traditionally, women in India’s tribal regions have difficulty finding spouses, since they can’t afford costly weddings and lavish dowries. The new program not only lets them tie the knot for free, it provides them with gifts worth about 6,500 rupees ($153). Continue…

Meet the priest—and his family

By Katie Engelhart - Thursday, July 9, 2009 at 1:20 PM - 8 Comments

A Prince Edward Island man is set to become the province’s first married Catholic priest. Martin Carter, a former Anglican clergyman, will be admitted to the Catholic priesthood in August. Currently, the Roman Catholic Church does not support the ordination of married men. P.E.I. Bishop Vernon Fougere explains that Carter, who is married and has three sons, “had to petition the Holy Father—the Pope—for permission”; the whole process took almost four years. And Fougere stressed that Carter’s case was exceptional: “In the Catholic Church, we do not ordain married men. [This] does not mean that permission will be given tomorrow to every married man to be ordained.”

Still, Timothy Scott, a Catholic priest who is also president of St. Joseph’s College in Edmonton, says that the ordination of married men has been happening for 15 or 20 years—but “quietly.” And, Scott says, there’s a catch. The exception to the Church’s rule of celibacy for priests is only made for men who were priests or ministers in other Christian denominations—Anglican or Lutheran, for example—and then converted to Catholicism. A man who is born Catholic and later marries can never become a priest. “It’s a bit confusing,” he concedes. And every case needs the approval of the Vatican. Continue…

If you’re smart, you’ll marry money

By Anne Kingston - Thursday, June 18, 2009 at 10:20 AM - 53 Comments

At first glance, the new book Smart Girls Marry Money: How Women Have Been Duped into the Romantic Dream—and How They’re Paying for It by Elizabeth Ford and Daniela Drake appears to be a throwback to a paleolithic era in which women, smart or not, didn’t make their own money. (Its chick-lit hot-pink cover has Cupid’s arrow bisecting the “s” in “Girls,” lest anyone miss the avaricious point.) Indeed, its retrograde title seems calculated to repel actual “smart girls”—women who sail by the “self-help” aisle and who would kneecap anyone who called them “girls.”

But skim more deeply—through the real-life anecdotes and beyond lines like “Mr. Rich can be Mr. Right”—and it’s apparent this isn’t a 21st-century How to Marry a Millionaire. Rather, Ford, a 41-year-old Emmy-winning television producer divorced from Harrison Ford’s son, and Drake, a 44-year-old medical doctor with an M.B.A. from Stanford who has been divorced and is remarried, adopt a satiric tone to deliver a surprisingly subversive self-help manifesto: imagine, if you can, Dorothy Parker writing for Cosmo. Many of their observations have been well-aired, to wit—women have a shelf life in terms of fertility and attractiveness; taking time out to raise children reduces women’s workplace value; women have more difficulty bouncing back from divorce. And even after decades of women graduating from professional schools in greater numbers than men, men remain the power players.

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With these rings I thee wed

By Ken MacQueen - Thursday, August 7, 2008 at 10:32 AM - 0 Comments

There will be much profound speculation on the legacy of the Beijing Olympics (like maybe in a future edition of Maclean’s once your two humble correspondents get around to thinking deep thoughts) but here is an immediate impact on domestic relations. Beijing’s municipal bureau of civil affairs reports that 16,400 couples have applied to be married on Aug. 8, the day of the Olympic opening ceremonies. Eight is an auspicious number in China, and, of course, the Games officially open on 08-08-2008, at 8 p.m. It’s like hitting the jackpot, so why not get hitched?

Marriage is a pretty efficient process in China. All the love struck couples need to do Friday is drop into their local marriage bureaus and pick up their licences. Some 100 extra staff has been laid on to help with the crush. “Our goal is to provide 100 per cent satisfaction for all the couples,” bureau head Wu Shimon told the China Daily, a national English-language newspaper. Presumably the chief administrator was promising satisfaction with the act of marriage, as opposed to the honeymoon, but with the all-powerful Chinese government, you never know. At the very least, the Beijing organizing committee will provide the fireworks. Continue…