Catholic tastes.

EPIPHANY OF SUPER-MIKE British journalist Paul Vallely recounts a recent visit up the 3,000 steps of Mount Sinai, which, according to legend, were cut by a single Byzantine monk in the fifth century as an act of penance.

"Pilgrims and tourists jostle and push in an unholy scrum. The ancient bramble, which the monks [of the Monastery of St. Catherine] claim is the original Burning Bush, now has a fire extinguisher standing next to it, though whether to deter the overenthusiastic or as an act of irony is unclear."

The group Vallely had joined went as pilgrims, and "with each step, as tradition has it, we silently said the Orthodox prayer: `Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner.'

"It was all the more of a shock then," he recounts, that "at the top I encountered not God, but a character who called himself Super-Mike.... [This] young American ... had been told, he announced loudly, that it would take three hours for the ascent. `Three hours for an ordinary man but two hours for Super-Mike,' he bragged. But, most astonishingly, he then went on to boast of how he had stolen a bottle of water on the way up from a shack built by the Bedouin to sell drinks to visitors.

"A few feet away, behind an iron railing, stood the rock from which the devout believe God gave Moses the Ten Commandments. Super-Mike seemed to have no idea of the dissonance he embodied." (Tablet, June 5, 1999)

LET THEM EAT KREMOWKI The pope sent sales of Polish cream cakes skyrocketing when, during his most recent visit to Poland, he reminisced about how much he had enjoyed the treats as a boy. According to the Polish news agency PAP, the demand for kremowki in the pope's boyhood town of Wadowice has increased more than tenfold since the June visit. Bakery shops report that they now sell 2,500 cream cakes a day--up from about 200 before the pope's visit. (Dallas Morning News, Aug. 28, 1999)

TRULY THANKFUL "Lord God, you fed the children of Israel with manna and quails. Thank you for feeding us, your children, with a better diet than that" --Archbishop Desmond Tutu's favorite mealtime prayer (quoted in the Tablet, July 24, 1999)

A GOOD SHEPHERD "I am constantly being urged to suppress this group or that drive out of the church this lot or that I do not believe this is right I believe that as a bishop, I have to try to lead people from where they are to where they never dreamed they might go." --English Cardinal Basil Hume, shortly before his recent death, in a videotaped message to the U.S. bishops' June meeting in Tucson, Arizona (National Catholic Reporter, July 16, 1999)

"GO FOR THE GOLD," urges the Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship (TACF), which claims that its pastor John Arnott has been dispensing "miraculous touches from God on the mouth." As a result of being prayed over by Arnott, hundreds of worshipers say gold teeth have "supernaturally" appeared in their mouths or the color of their amalgam fillings has changed to gold. TACF had previously boosted attendance by staging the notorious "Toronto Blessing" revivals that were marked by "holy laughter." Now new crowds of the curious are flocking to the church, and Arnott says, "God is up to something new." The pastor also told Christianity Today (May 24, 1999) about another nice feature of the dental occurrences: "This is a miracle you don't have to be sick to get."

Among the obligatory scriptural references that have been dug up for these claims of divine dentistry are Psalm 81:10, "Open your mouth wide, and I will fill it," and Psalm 34:1, "His praise shall continually be in my mouth." Other preachers in Canada, the United States, South Africa, and South America have gotten in on the act, too. According to the Chicago Reader (Aug. 6, 1999), "Two of the claimants, Canadian TV evangelists Dick Dewert and William Thiessen, were forced to issue corrections when their dentists reminded them that their fillings had been installed the conventional way."