Reiki/Catholic controversy featured in the Boston Globe

The controversy over Reiki and the Catholic Church enjoyed a new wave of headlines this past week, six months after the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued guidelines denouncing Reiki.

The latest round started in the Boston Globe on Tuesday in a feature headlined, "Reiki banned from Roman Catholic hospitals as neither science nor medicine," -- the breaking-news headline not quite appropriate for a six-month-old story. As that story was picked up by the news services (and even one Catholic news publication), so did the headlines, creating a sense in some that perhaps the Catholic Church had taken yet another action against Reiki. Not so. Meanwhile, the Globe article has drawn quite a bit of interest and discussion, with 200 comments and counting as we write this.

The blog posts soon followed, including this vehemently anti-Reiki response to the article by someone who seems essentially ignorant about Reiki and uninterested in addressing that lack of information, and a calm, reasoned reaction from Pamela Miles.

The Reiki practitioner featured prominently in the article was Debbie Griseuk of New Hampshire, who spoke to us earlier this year after her Reiki program at a local Catholic health care facility was discontinued in the wake of the bishops' guidelines. Debbie did a wonderful job speaking for Reiki, and this story reminds us that any of us might be called upon to do that at any time, whether we're addressing one person or the readership of a large newspaper.

And that makes Debbie Griseuk this week's Celeb-Reiki! You never know -- next week, it might be you.