Monday, September 23

Bishops release sexual abuse survey results
John Hearn writes to say that a site called Church Crisis is the place to go for posters to the now-discontinued VOTF discussion board.
Well, Amy Grant draws closer to her already ticked-off evangelical audience

Guilty pleasure: A hot bath with a glass of champagne and a good book. Or just staying up late and reading a good book.

I'd say it was the champagne, not the good book, that's alienating, just in case you thought I was being obnoxiousl

Western Canadian Ukrainian Catholics waiting for one more miracle so they can have a saint

Winnipeg's Ukrainian Catholics are waiting for a miracle to make the first western Canadian saint official. Bishop and martyr Vasyl Velychkovsky is one step away from sainthood, said David Gnutel, president of St. Joseph's Ukrainian Catholic Church council. To be declared a saint, Velychkovsky still must perform a miracle, or have one attributed to him, from beyond the grave. "Now we're just waiting for that miracle," Gnutel said at a ceremony in Winnipeg honouring Velychkovsky yesterday. Velychkovsky was beatified by Pope John Paul after enduring torture in Soviet labour camps in Ukraine. He refused to renounce his faith. "He was unrelenting. He wouldn't sell out," Gnutel said. "He was tortured for what he believed in by the Soviet regime but he wouldn't dissent." Velychkovsky came to Canada in 1972. He died in 1973. His remains were disinterred from his grave outside Winnipeg last Monday and sealed in a stainless steel casket.

Gay ministry group holds convention in Cincinnati; protests ensue.
A look at Eucharistic adoration in the Corpus Christi area

"In the last 10 years, doing weekly hour of adoration has become very popular for many Catholics throughout the country," said the Rev. Jim Kelleher, president of Our Lady of Corpus Christi. "A good example of its popularity is St. Louis. They have over 20 perpetual adoration chapels in that diocese." Our Lady of Corpus Christi is in the process of building a 250-seat perpetual adoration chapel on the liberal arts campus off Lantana Street. For the past year, motorists traveling along Interstate 37 have watched as construction crews piece together the structure that includes an 85-foot dome center. The chapel, which will be used by the public and students on campus, is expected to be complete and consecrated by December. "Our hope is that the entire chapel will be filled with people adoring the Lord," Kelleher said. "The vision of this adoration chapel is to have entire families sign up for adoration and strengthen relationships with God and one another."

Big news: Richard John Neuhaus, Thomas Reese, and Tom Fox all agree:

Bishops are bungling

Priests feel they are being punished while the bishops are getting off," said Reese, the Jesuit editor of America magazine and author of several books on the U.S. bishops. Neuhaus, a leading light in conservative Catholic circles, said the current crisis was caused by bishops who have failed to enforce their priests' celibacy vows for decades and have looked the other way as a "culture of homosexuality" took over the priesthood. "In Dallas, the bishops followed the advice of their PR experts and tried to get this off the front page," he said. "But business as usual has not been shaken. This is not a pedophile crisis. It's a crisis of sexual infidelity. Now the priests are being thrown to the wolves as scapegoats." Fox, publisher of the independent liberal weekly National Catholic Reporter,
was the third speaker on a weekend panel at the annual meeting of the Religion Newswriters Association, a group of journalists who cover spiritual news for the secular press. ...By failing to police their own house, Fox said the bishops have ignited a "massive implosion of trust and betrayal." "It's like Watergate without the Nixon resignation," he said. "There is no structure in the church to extricate the bishops from this crisis."


NJ parishioners support their accused priests

The frustrating thing about this story is that the diocese has not revealed what the accusations against these priests are - to anyone - so it is impossible to accurately assess the sitution.

Because only several people at each church agreed to be interviewed, the level of support for the priests among individual parishioners is difficult to gauge. But at St. Luke, more than 600 people signed a letter in support of Dowd. And at the two Morris County parishes, 70 to 100 people turned out for meetings last spring to support their priests.