Silent crash

It was a silent crash again, just like the first time. I was rocked by a computer crash a couple of decades ago. This time I could read the signs; I knew it was coming. But there’s something so radical about a computer crash that the silence is not normal. The machine ought to growl or bark as it chews up years of memory, so the yelling of the user will not be so stark.

Those of us who have been diagnosed with Multiple System Atrophy (MSA) are philosophical about this kind of thing, learning as we do that the joys and debits we save may erase themselves, every trophy a potential atrophy.

All diseases are bullies. Like the armed bullies in current headlines, they remind us that all of our plans are subject to change. A crash could even be for my own good, an intervention by a sort of angelic editor--admittedly a rare description of an editor. Such a supereditor, coming out of his or her (its?) black hole to screen the product, glancing at the million words I wrote for periodicals, books and letters, scrunches a blue pencil through every line. Words a writer inspires an editor retires.

Much of the stuff that was wiped out on my senior computer is still available on the laptop I’m using now, and I think more is stashed away in backup. I’ll check it out. MSA lets me think about one thing at a time, although I still walk and eschew puns at the same time. But it takes me two hours to watch “60 Minutes.”

About this time of the year, when Chicago gets its first snowfall of the season, I have in recent years begun my production of Christmas cards. MSA and its co-conspirator, Arthritis, ruled out handmade holiday cards even before the crash. I believe in Santa Claus as first among seasonal apps, and I wish you a Merry Christmas. Christ gives meaning to everything, even including MSA. Christ gives power to prayer.

This was not always my view. When I was 6, in the second year of the Great Depression, I was shocked to find that Santa had gone wild. His idea of Christmas presents was some new union suits, knickers, long johns with flaps, and a nightgown. I met Santa at the church Christmas celebration, and was reassured when he gave each kid an orange and the thin curlicue candy I still associate with Christmas trees. I did not recognize Santa, who was my costumed grandpa stuffed with a secret pillow.

Nobody, not even Google, knew anything about MSA in those days. Nobody knows enough about it today, but a cure is evolving from research. Pam Bower, Vera James, Philip Fortier, Larry Kellerman and others have generated support for research via The MSA Coalition. I’m one of many who value the work of the volunteers and the professionals who are going to find a cure for the disease I call MSA, or Honey I Shrunk the Brain.

There’s nothing like an incurable, progressive disease to stir thoughts about the dependency of everything that lives. Not a person, not a plant or an insect probing a plant, not even the wind or the water, has a life independent of all life. Anxious patients and generous caregivers tend to ponder, to meditate on, the purpose of the living, loving Eternal.

Catholic New World /

Dolores Madlener with Pope
John Paul II

November 15 - 28, 2015

Dolores Madlener puts down her pen and paper

By Michelle Martin

Staff Writer

The following is an updated version of a story about Dolores Madlener that originally ran on Sept. 28, 2008, on the occasion of Madlener’s 30th anniversary working for the Archdiocese of Chicago’s newspaper. Madlener, 86, retired Nov. 1.

Over the years, she profiled every parish in the archdiocese, spread “benevolent gossip” in Church Clips, introduced readers to dozens of priests and religious in “Five Minutes with Father” and “Conversations with the Consecrated” and spent decades doing the most tedious of jobs, compiling the “Around the Archdiocese” calendar listings.

Her presence in these pages will be greatly missed.

In early September of 1978, Pope John Paul I was in the midst of his 28-day papacy, Cardinal John Cody led the Archdiocese of Chicago and A.E.P. “Ed” Wall, the editor of The Chicago Catholic, as this newspaper was then known, was in need of a secretary.

Dolores Madlener, meanwhile, was working at the American Medical Association headquarters in Chicago.

Madlener, who celebrated her 30th anniversary working for the archdiocesan newspaper on Sept. 11, 2008, said she can thank Father William P. Murphy, then pastor of Queen of Martyrs Parish in Evergreen Park, for pointing her toward the job of editor’s secretary.

“We both thought I’d be a perfect fit, except Father Murphy was never wrong,” said Madlener, who put together the “Around the Archdiocese” events listings, wrote “Church Clips” and “Five Minutes with Father” in every issue.

“I was active in my parish as CCD coordinator at the time. Actually I was involved in my parish since it was founded. Father knew I had good secretarial skills and he knew I took the church seriously.”

Madlener was no stranger to the pages of the paper. She was a loyal subscriber, she said, “and I wrote letters to the editor at the time. Usually complaining.”

Wall evidently agreed with Murphy, because he hired Madlener and even had her coming in after-hours to help out after she gave notice at the AMA.

Madlener noticed the difference immediately.

“We think there’s a bureaucracy in the church, but it was nothing compared to the AMA,” she said. “The ‘hierarchy’ at AMA differed from the hierarchy I found on the fourth floor in the Pastoral Center. It’s really been the people as well as the subject matter that’s kept me here. AMA was so impersonal compared to the archdiocese.”

The waves of young journalists who have worked at the newspaper have kept her young, Madlener said, and each of the six editors — not to mention four archbishops — have made enough changes to keep things fresh.



“As the years went by, I don’t think I’ve ever felt the passing of the time,” she said. “I try to live in the present moment. When I do, it doesn’t feel like 10 years, doesn’t seem like 20 years. It’s like a river, I guess.”

It’s been decades since the Catholic New World editor had a secretary. When Wall moved to Florida after Madlener had been on the job for 10 years, she continued as secretary for a time, handling correspondence and signing her name and title, “secretary to the editor.”

“But I realized with no editor, that position was going to be obsolete,” she said.

So she transferred her skills from the electric typewriter to the newsroom computer system and volunteered to take on the “most tedious job in the newsroom” — putting together “Around the Archdiocese.”

But Madlener did not find it so tedious.

“I had been active in PR in my parish for years,” she said. “I knew how important it was to A&R (Altar and Rosary Society) women to get their card parties and craft fairs in. They were like my sisters ... even though I wished they’d remember to put in the phone number or address so I wouldn’t have to check back.”

Madlener also continued doing secretarial work for successive editors. When Sister of Providence Cathy Campbell came on board, Madlener was taking minutes at an editorial advisory board meeting when the talk turned to perennial worries about circulation. Someone joked that it was too bad the paper couldn’t run a horoscope column, or better yet, a gossip column.

Inspiration struck, and Madlener went home and wrote a prototype of a “benevolent gossip” column, and “Church Clips” was born. It debuted Aug. 5, 1988.

Over the years, Madlener also took on a regular question-and-answer column similar to Chicago newsman Bob Herguth’s “Chicago Profile” column in the Sun-Times. It was similar enough that when she was asked to do “Noteworthy,” Madlener felt like she was imitating, and called Herguth to ask if it was all right to copy his format and say, “By the way, how do you do it?”

“He was very gracious, and said people copy things all the time,” Madlener said. “And he told me how he went about it.”

Later, when Madlener asked Herguth to consider doing a profile on then-assistant editor Mary Claire Gart, he turned the tables and asked to do one of her, instead.

She also profiled each parish in Chicago, in “Parish Pride,” and, in 2007, started a feature to help Catholics get to know their clergy, called “Five Minutes with Father.” This year, that has become “Conversations with the Consecrated” in honor of the Year of Consecrated Life.

“I really think ‘Five Minutes with Father’ is my favorite feature,” she said in 2008. “It’s touched me the most. I always start by asking the priest to lead us in prayer. I’m impressed by their generosity of spirit, to be so open. I hope that by getting to know them better, our readers will be moved to pray even harder for our priests.”

Madlener maintained a close relationship with those readers, many of whom feel as if they know her.

“I just feel about my readers that I know each one of them, one at a time,” she said. “In a social situation, I don’t know NASCAR from ‘Desperate Housewives.’ But if you say what parish you’re from, we can go from there. … I know people by the letters they write to me and the phone calls they make. I especially like when I put something in the column asking, ‘If you’d like a copy of the Angelus, send me a self-addressed stamped envelope.’

“Then I get all these really nice notes from people who share what’s in their hearts. And I write them a note thanking them for subscribing. Without them, where would we be? We’d be writing this in our diary, instead of in a newspaper.”

© 2015 New World Publications

835 N. Rush St., Chicago, IL 60611

(312) 534-7777

Waiting for the crash

Once again I’m the caregiver, hugging and holding on while my elderly desktop PC struggles. Sometimes it remembers what computers do, but it often forgets how to do it. It is running out of time. I will miss it because it contains my treasured PageMaker, which I bought about 15 years ago, and other programs too cranky for installation in today’s Windows 10.

Soon I’ll switch to my backup laptop. I’m not at ease using a laptop keyboard with its relatively large space in front of the keys. My first computer was an Apple, a generous gift from Our Sunday Visitor and its associated Noll Printing Company when I retired from their boards around 1983. My son David has it now.

It wasn’t easy to get this old Dell online this morning.After it connected I read in Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac that 11/12/1889 is the birthday of DeWitt Wallace. Wallace and his wife created The Readers Digest, which once sold nearly 30 million copies in 15 languages. When I was in junior high school The Reader’s Digest contained no advertising, and we kids were encouraged by our English teachers to buy a copy each month for 15 cents.

When I was 12 I was teased about my enthusiasm for this magazine. After all, it was not like being a fan of The American Scholar or Foreign Affairs. The Digest provided ideas and funny stories and shortcut books. Heinz condensed soup. The Wallaces condensed books. Someone once wisecracked that the American Catholic bishops ended an annual meeting and headed for their hotel rooms, copies of The Reader’s Digest in hand. If they’d all been carrying The American Scholar, they’d have been rapped as elitists.

I saw a current issue was when I was in my dentist’s waiting room. It was not the magazine of DeWitt Wallace’s time. I haven’t read it in more than half a century, but it was just right when I read it in the 1930s and when I worked for it for half a year in the late 1940s. First came an invitation to have lunch with DeWitt and Lila Acheson Wallace in their Pleasantville, New York, offices. Then they offered me a three-month assignment at a dazzling $500 a month, and I took it.

Everything changes. The magazine that enlivened English classes more than 75 years ago is different from the one that’s published now. My computer doesn’t go back 75 years, but computers age more like faithful dogs and so it is allowed, under the laws of political correctness, to be sentimental about them.