Monday, June 9

There's an abuse case involving a Holy Cross priest who served up here in South Bend and eventually ended up in Arizona.

The article I've linked above attempts to dissect who knew what and when did they know it, including this concerning our own bishop:

"In 1998, there was an allegation that made its way to Father Epping. It didn't come directly to him," Nussbaum said. "It came through other sources."According to Phoenix officials last week, that complaint came from a man in Arizona who said he was molested by LeBrun on a camping trip as a child.Nussbaum said Epping conducted an investigation into all the complaints. [Bishop] D'Arcy said he believes it was Epping who came to him in 1999 with the allegations against LeBrun."I asked for and received (LeBrun's) resignation as pastor," D'Arcy said.

.....After LeBrun left Little Flower, he apparently went into therapy."They (Holy Cross) gave me information of allegations that they were taking seriously and that they were sending him to therapy," D'Arcy said.The bishop said Holy Cross told him they were sending LeBrun to the Southdown Institute, which is in Canada.Epping has described Southdown as "a therapeutic facility for priests and religious men and women who deal with all sorts of issues."D'Arcy said he met with LeBrun after his time at Southdown and that LeBrun requested to return to ministry in the diocese.The bishop said he not only refused the request, he also removed LeBrun's faculties. LeBrun would not be permitted to distribute Communion, anoint the sick or administer any other sacrament.

There. Was that so hard?





From NRO:

Even Kucinich's own staff doesn't know his position on abortion.

Later in his speech on the House floor, Kucinich lashed out at the partial-birth-abortion-ban's supporters, a group that included 62 Democrats."Advocates of this bill who say they stand in defense of life would be more believable if they worked to support families with adequate child-care funding, child tax-credit relief for vulnerable families, and peace," Kucinich said. "For some, this debate is only about politics. The fact that other abortion legislation, the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, has been advanced on the publicity of the Laci Peterson tragedy shows the unfortunate politicization of this debate."

Kucinich's vitriol seems surprising in light of his not-so-distant support of the partial-birth-abortion ban.

Also surprising is that he singled out the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, which would make it a federal crime to harm a fetus during the commission of another felony. Kucinich voted for the same bill in both October 1999 and April 2001, the last time the House considered it. The legislation, recently dubbed "Laci and Connor's Law," is now pending in the House and Senate.Many Democrats and pro-choice groups oppose the bill on the grounds that by treating a fetus as a distinct human entity that has a right not to be harmed, the law is paving the way toward outlawing abortion. But Kucinich is hardly a traditional Democrat on this issue. Indeed, he has said he still believes that life begins at conception.



Finding a 33,000 pound marble altar from an about-to-be-demolished Brooklyn Heights church and taking it to CT.

Renovations like those at St. Mary's are part of a wider movement in the Catholic Church, according to the Rev. Gregoire Fluet, pastor of St. Bridget of Kildare in Moodus. A return to classical styles of architecture and decoration in the churches coincides with a renewed emphasis on the “otherworldliness and mystery” of faith, Fluet said.“There is an effort to bring a certain sense of mysticism back to Catholic worship,” Fluet said. “I think in the '60s the emphasis was more on the here and now. But people look to religion to point them to truths beyond the here and now.”The work at St. Mary is more than superficial, Fluet said. “It's a rediscovery of our roots.

And, as someone astutely pointed out in a comments box last week, the Holiday-Inn lobby/multipurpose structures of the 70's just weren't going to last - not only would we get tired of them, the carpet would wear, the plastic chairs would crack and the banners would, eventually fall apart. Bound to happen.


A story about the Rev. Robert Klein's last service as a Lutheran minister before he crosses the Tiber:

Klein will attend St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore, and after three years of formation, will be ordained in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Wilmington, encompassing Delaware and nine Eastern Shore counties of Maryland. The Roman Catholic Church accepts a few married pastors — mostly Lutherans and Episcopalians — as priest candidates if they come from a faith tradition close to Catholicism, Klein said.Carol Schlenker, staff liaison for the fellowship, said he has been an example to others for his faith and his family devotion.He will stay married to Christa, who plans to convert to the faith, along with their two grown daughters, Renate Klein and Maria Hollenbeck.


An interesting article about a Wisconsin priest with no intentions of retiring from his missionary work in Bolivia, even after 40 years.

The article contains this rather startling nugget:

Despite the poverty and the poor economy, Penchi said the people value education and are eager to see their children graduate from high school and go on to college.The parish school, which is for grades 1-12, has two sessions to accommodate the many students. The school's morning session has 902 students enrolled. The afternoon session has 1,044 students.

And from Kansas City, a Guatamalan Carmelite sister lives out the Gospel in her own country

She knew something was wrong more than 20 years ago, when she came upon a 23-year-old Mayan woman in tears because women of her race could not become nuns.Indigenous Mayan women did not have the same opportunities for education as the upper class of mixed European and indigenous blood people known as Ladino, Prado said.But she thought that this woman's calling was no less divine. It took several years, with requests that had to work their way all the way to the pope, but Prado started her own order of Carmelites that welcomed Mayan women."God insisted," she said. "God speaks with a stronger voice than people."People who have seen the work of the nuns in San Andres Itzapa return with accounts of women sheltering orphans and the elderly, providing comfort and refuge through years of war.



The One Year Later evaluations are starting to come in - a year, come June 16-18, since Dallas.

The Dallas Morning News

and

US News

What do you think? Has anything changed? Could it?

Barbara Nicolosi has some inside scoop on Mel Gibson's Passion film.

Without seeing the film, I do want to weigh in briefly on the Jewish issue. It is an important issue, have no doubt about that. The plain fact is that certain aspects of the Gospel accounts have indeed been extrapolated and taken out of context by some Christians over the past two thousand years and used as an excuse for anti-Jewish attitudes and worse. This reality shouldn't be dismissed. It is a powerful echo through too much of Christian history.

What modern readers (and viewers, I suppose) need to understand is this:

The passion narratives were shaped, in part, by the context in which the evangelists were writing: namely enormous tensions within Judaism. Note that I say within Judaism, not between Judaism and Christianity. For while relations between those who saw Jesus as Messiah and those who didn't were fluid and more and more ambiguous as time went on, (culminating in the definite separation near the end of the century, clearly reflected in John) there is no doubt that the Synoptic evangelists, at least, saw the events of the passion and related them as people coming out of a Jewish tradition speaking to other Jews. In other words, they saw themselves firmly in the prophetic tradition - the tradition of Jeremiah, for example, who spent his prophetic career excoriating Jewish leadership for infidelity. It is important to note, as well, that during this period - especially in the wake of the failed Jewish rebellion and the destruction of the Temple, there was a great deal of mutual blame-throwing going on among various divisions in Judaism. This is part of the picture we can't forget.

Secondly, the people of Judea did not condemn Jesus to death, nor did the entire population of Jerusalem. Temple leaders did this work, Temple leaders who had their own agenda (part of which was their relationship to Roman authority) and to whom theological issues were of far less importance than other factors.

All of these factors demand that our reading of the passion narratives be extremely nuanced and extremely aware of every dimension of historical context. If you want more, this document from the Pontifical Biblical Commission has much of interest to say.

It would be a terrific challenge to get this across on film, and I find the comments of the priest Barbara cites to be quite interesting on this score.

Sunday, June 8

Flynn? Wuerl?

Has Vegas weighed in on this one yet?

At the Spectator:

Responses to Tod Tamberg's response to George Neumayr. Convoluted, but fun reading nonetheless. In a mean way.

Muslim girls in CA organize a prom -

with everything except boys, of course.

Ms. Haque and her friends may have helped initiate a new American ritual: the all-girl Muslim prom. It is a spirited response to religious and cultural beliefs that forbid dating, dancing with or touching boys or appearing without a hijab, the Islamic head scarf. While Ms. Haque and her Muslim friends do most things other teenagers do — shopping for shoes at Macy's, watching "The Matrix Reloaded" at the mall or ordering Jumbo Jack burgers and curly fries at Jack in the Box — an essential ingredient of the American prom, boys, is off limits. So they decided to do something about it.

"A lot of Muslim girls don't go to prom," said Ms. Haque, 18, who removed her hijab and shawl at the prom to reveal an ethereal silvery gown. "So while the other girls are getting ready for their prom, the Muslim girls are getting ready for our prom, so we won't feel left out."

The rented room at a community center here was filled with the sounds of the rapper 50 Cent, Arabic pop music, Britney Spears and about two dozen girls, including some non-Muslim friends. But when the sun went down, the music stopped temporarily, the silken gowns disappeared beneath full-length robes, and the Muslims in the room faced toward Mecca to pray. Then it was time for spaghetti and lasagna.

The most interesting part of the piece involves the girl's decision to embrace what her mother had rejected:

Ms. Haque, who will attend the University of California at Berkeley in the fall, is one of a growing number of young Muslim women who have adopted the covering their mothers rejected. Islamic dress, worn after puberty, often accompanies a commitment not to date or to engage in activities where genders intermingle.Her parents immigrated from Pakistan, and her mother, Shazia, who has a master's degree in economics, does not wear the hijab.Ms. Haque's decision to cover herself, which she made in her freshman year, was nuanced and thoughtful. "I noticed a big difference in the way guys talked," she said. "They were afraid. I guess they had more respect. You walked down the street and you didn't feel guys staring at you. You felt a lot more confident." Her parents were surprised but said it was her decision.





More on the scandal in the Philippines.

From Time magazine's European edition

A lengthy look at the state of Christianity in Europe.

It's an interesting, if scattershot look at the situation. Main points: the hot spots in the Christian landscape are among immigrants and youth:

Across the Continent, immigrant congregations are thriving. Europe's newest residents are among its most faithful, a trend not exclusive to Christianity. Many Muslim immigrants arrive with little more than a suitcase and their religious devotion, which often clashes with the mores and even the laws of their new homes. And when Christians from the Caribbean and Africa move to Europe, they "bring with them habits of the heart," says Joel Edwards, the Jamaica-born general director of Britain's Evangelical Alliance. He notes that African churches are some of the U.K.'s biggest and fastest-growing, and that so many immigrants have joined that more than half of London's practicing Christians are now nonwhite.

.....As Europe has grown less religious, you'd expect that its youth would too, and in several countries — Britain, Spain and the Netherlands — they have. But overall, "an increase in religion among youth is very clear," says French sociologist Yves Lambert. Among Danes, the number of 18-to-29-year-olds who professed belief in God leapt from 30% of youth in 1981 to 49% in 1999. In Italy, the jump was from 75% to 87%. Even in France, which has Europe's highest proportion of atheists, the figure crept from 44% to 47%.

The rise seems remarkably public. "It's an openness we haven't had for years," says Bishop Martin Lind of Linköping, Sweden. Last month, he took a five-day pilgrimage in honor of the 700th anniversary of the birth of St. Birgitta and was shocked that "500 young people walked with me." One million Catholics descended on Paris for World Youth Day 1997 celebrations. In 2000, 2 million flocked to Rome for the event's Jubilee edition. And at least 40% of those at Ecumenical Church Day in Berlin were under 30. "At home, not many young people go to church anymore," said Andrea Barbi, 17, who traveled from Neu-Ulm in Bavaria for the festivities. "But when I look around here, it's not much of a problem."

What comes through loud and clear is the crisis in authority - and not just institutional authority, but authority, period. Subjective experience has won the current battle, and if anyone here is serious about evangelization, we should understand that this is the issue at hand. Holy Writ has been historically-critically methodized out of any transcendent signifigance and religious leaders' pedestals have crashed to the ground. But the yearning for truth still remains. How do we present the Good News in this context to all people - young and old, intellectually-bent or not, rich and poor, of every culture and race?

Oh yes...happy Pentecost.

One point that this article omits, as do many discussions of this issue, is the long historical view, namely that the state of Christianity in contemporary Europe is not solely the fruit of modernity and relativism. Depending on where in Europe you live, it is the fruit of decades of brutal state-enforced atheism, centuries of government hostility toward Christianity, particularly Catholicism, and, ironically enough, the questionable effects of established religions on those supposedly practicing them.

By the way, this is also the topic of Andrew Greeley's latest book, Religion in Europe at the End of the Second Millenium: A Sociological Profile

Other articles in the same section:

Missionaries coming to Europe

Examining the Holy Lance relic.

The other day, I should have mentioned Paul Thigpen's The Rapture Trap as another excellent resource to combat LeftBehindism.

So now you have two resources (plus the Bible itself, plus the Catechism..), and none of us have any excuse for letting anyone in our circle be ignorant, right?

Saturday, June 7

Novels I'm looking forward to reading in the near future:

1.The Book Against God by the brilliant critic James Wood, reviewed here in the LA Times,

here in Slate

and here in the New Critereon

2.The Clearing by the wonderful Louisiana writer Tim Gautreaux

Mad Mel:

MEL Gibson has declared war on two of the most powerful religious groups in America over attempts to change his controversial new film about the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. The actor has threatened a lawsuit against the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Jewish-run Anti-Defamation League over a report they sent to his film company slamming the script for its depiction of Jews.



Bishop Wuerl discounts reports that he's headed east.

Bishop Donald Wuerl of the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh sloughed off published reports that he is about to be appointed to head the scandal-ridden Archdiocese of Boston, saying he was working full steam ahead on plans for Pittsburgh."This is simply speculation," Wuerl said last night of a Boston Globe story that reported he could have that post as early as Tuesday.



A report on the religious affiliations of recent US immigrants:

Nearly two-thirds of new immigrants to the United States are Christian, fueled mostly by Catholics coming from Latin America, according to research sponsored by several government agencies. Forty-two percent of immigrants are Catholic, 19% are Protestant and 4% are Eastern Orthodox, according to a study of almost 1,000 adult immigrants in 1996. Eight percent are Muslim, 4% are Buddhist, 3% are Jewish and 3% are Hindu. An additional 15% or so claimed no religion, and 1% named other religions.



The fight over the renovation of St. Charles Borromeo Church in N. Hollywood reaches the LA Times

A small but vocal group at the majestic North Hollywood church is trying to block changes that they say would transform its cathedral-like interior into a modern worship space. They fear that St. Charles' pastor, the Rev. Robert Gallagher, is bent on changing the old-fashioned church into something more akin to the new Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in downtown Los Angeles.

Gallagher has said that St. Charles does not need renovation. It needs repairs, upgrades to its acoustics, completion of its dome and other improvements. No radical changes are imminent, he said, pointing out that no funds have yet been raised.Unconvinced, the 40 active members of the St. Charles Borromeo Preservation Guild recently marched and prayed outside the church. Last year, the guild collected 1,000 signatures on an anti-renovation petition.

The article doesn't indicate whether the fears of the preservationists are based in what is actually planned for the project, or what they believe (with justification) might happen. It's either poor reporting or a deliberate omission.


Niall Ferguson on Weber and the decline of European productivity:

Why have West Europeans opted for shorter working days, weeks, months, years and lives? This is where Weber's thesis comes up trumps: the countries where the least work is done in Europe turn out to be those that were once predominantly Protestant. While the overwhelmingly Catholic French and Italians work about 15 to 20 percent fewer hours a year than Americans, the more Protestant Germans and Dutch and the wholly Protestant Norwegians work 25 to 30 percent less.

What clinches the Weber thesis is that Northern Europe's declines in working hours coincide almost exactly with steep declines in religious observance. In the Netherlands, Britain, Germany, Sweden and Denmark, less than 10 percent of the population now attend church at least once a month, a dramatic decline since the 1960's. (Only in Catholic Italy and Ireland do more than a third of the population go to church on a monthly basis.) In the recent Gallup Millennium Survey of religious attitudes, 49 percent of Danes, 52 percent of Norwegians and 55 percent of Swedes said God did not matter to them. In North America, by comparison, 82 percent of respondents said God was "very important."

So the decline of work in Northern Europe has occurred more or less simultaneously with the decline of Protestantism. Quod erat demonstrandum indeed!


More on the miracle of Blessed Maria Petkovic:

Among the 50,000 pilgrims present at the beatification Mass today in the port of Dubrovnik was Roger Cotrina Alvarado. He was the lieutenant of the submarine Pacocha, which on Aug. 26, 1988, crashed into a Japanese fishing-vessel near the Peruvian port of Callao. When the submarine began to sink, the then young officer commended himself to the intercession of Sister Maria of Jesus Crucified Petkovic, founder of the Franciscan Congregation of the Daughters of Mercy. At that moment, Cotrina Alvarado was able to close an inside door with the strength of his arms, despite the pressure of the water that was flooding the submarine. The maneuver was considered "humanly impossible" by two commissions, one military and the other Vatican. The miracle became the door that opened the way for the Croatian's beatification. Nineteen other officers trapped in the submarine were saved; six crew members died in the accident.

Philippines Bishop offers to resign

Novaliches Bishop Teodoro Bacani Jr., one of the most progressive and influential leaders of the local Catholic Church, has offered to resign amid allegations of sexual harassment by his former secretary.


Two editorials on Phoenix:

From the Dallas Morning News

and

the New York Times, by writer David Gibson, author of a new book called The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful Are Shaping a New American Catholicism

Catholic dioceses in many respects remain one of the last redoubts of absolute monarchy in the modern world, run by bishops who, in the words of the Second Vatican Council, preside "in place of God over the flock . . . as teachers for doctrine, priests for sacred worship, and ministers for governing." This three-fold mission effectively gave each bishop, who is answerable only to the Roman pontiff, the last word on everything from liturgy to finances. Until this week.

In the only other criminal admission to emerge from the scandal, Bishop John B. McCormack of Manchester, N.H., signed an accord with the state attorney general last year acknowledging that there was enough evidence to convict the diocese for child endangerment. But in that case the diocese rather than the bishop was the target, and Bishop McCormack did not have to compromise his own authority within the diocese. Likewise, the resignation of Cardinal Bernard F. Law, archbishop of Boston, did nothing to alter the authority structure of the Boston archdiocese.

With this week's plea agreement, it is a government prosecutor, not the Vatican, that is requiring a bishop to share authority in the realm of governance — the third and least sensitive charge in the prelate's brief. If the church had encouraged bishops to share such authority sooner, it might have avoided this outcome in the first place. A more collaborative diocesan administration would also better protect children by ensuring that abusive priests could not be hidden by fellow clerics.

There is still time for the church to embrace openness. More transparency would not only help to restore the sagging morale of lay Catholics who are questioning whether any structural change is possible. It would also allow bishops to focus more fully on their central duties of encouraging faith and worship. Moreover, sharing power on administrative matters does not entail any reworking of Catholic theology or doctrine.

Unfortunately, the Vatican seems to view any compromise as a step toward doctrinal populism. If church leaders continue to stonewall, then prosecutors will force them, at the point of an indictment, into compromises that will in the long run do more to undermine the church's structure and spirit. If instead the Vatican loosened its grip on a few of the peripheral elements, the church's hierarchy might find that the long-term benefits would outweigh any short-term loss of power — or of a prestige that barely exists.




Friday, June 6

In the Word from Rome, John Allen tells us about a weekend discussion of the clergy sexual abuse crisis, Powell's visit to the Vatican, and lunch with scholar Robert Wilken, yet another Tiber-crosser:

When I was in graduate school working on early Christian literature, Robert Wilken’s book “The Christians as the Romans Saw Them” was important in shaping my approach. It was a privilege, then, to be able to take Wilken to lunch in Rome on June 4, as he finished up a guest course at the Gregorian University. Wilken is Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Virginia.

Wilken, who was raised a Missouri Synod Lutheran, traveled a path into the Roman Catholic Church similar to that walked by Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, well-known for his journal First Things. In fact, he and Neuhaus were classmates and were ordained together as Lutheran ministers. Both tried to uphold a vision of Lutheranism as a reform of the Catholic Church, hence they supported a “high-church” vision of liturgy, the episcopacy, and other matters.

Eventually, however, Wilken said, they became convinced that they were “living in a dream world,” that the Lutheranism they believed in didn’t really exist.

The argument that finally tipped the scales in terms of his decision to join the Ctaholic Church, Wilken said, was this. The Reformation presupposed that one could have apostolic faith through apostolic doctrine. The Catholic view, which he found persuasive, is that it is the community preserves the faith -- one needs not just doctrine, but a Church in which doctrine takes shape.


From Christianity Today, Almost everything you'd want to know about heaven..

A nice story about Brazil's "Mother Teresa" with one weird quote:

"We have hundreds of statements made about her miracles," Sister Dulce's niece, Maria Rita de Souza Pontes, told BBC World Service's Everywoman programme. "I think her sainthood will depend mainly on people making a case for her. "She was considered a saint during her life, but it is up to the Brazilian people - and of course her lawyer - to make a strong case for her."


Check out my husband's reflections on today's Papal destination, Dubrovnik

It's about freakin' time.

Catholic bishops condemn Left Behind series

The Roman Catholic bishops of Illinois are condemning the best-selling, Christian-themed Left Behind books as "anti-Catholic."They cite story lines they say are offensive--including one that involves an American cardinal who becomes the right-hand man of the Antichrist. The Illinois bishops plan to issue a statement to Catholics next week calling the series of novels by fundamentalist Christian authors Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins anti-Catholic.
They also plan to urge Catholics not to confuse the apocalyptic stories in the Left Behind books with Catholic teaching about the Second Coming of Christ.
"Our main point . . . is to make sure people who are teaching the Catholic faith are not relying on Left Behind books," said Zach Wichmann, associate director of the Catholic Conference of Illinois, which represents all 16 Roman Catholic bishops in the state.

My only problem is the inclusion of the idea of "offensiveness" in the statement. Even the slightest hint of victimhood is not only wimpy, but unnecessary. The books embody a theology that is inauthentic and a skewing of Scripture. The books' implications that Catholics aren't real Christians and LaHaye's rabid anti-Catholicism (despite his protestations) shouldn't be condemned because they're offensive. They should be condemned because they're wrong

Oh, they should just usee my article on the series

Here's a link to Carl Olson's book, Will Catholics Be Left Behind: A Critique of the Rapture and Today's Prophecy Preachers




The Alexian Brothers do a national ad campaign:

The situation called for drastic action: The Alexian Brothers, a Roman Catholic religious order that goes back to the Middle Ages, has only 37 members worldwide, with a median age of 65.

With survival of the order at stake, the congregation vowed to do whatever was necessary to attract recruits to its Elk Grove Village, Ill., headquarters - including watching a Madonna video.

For the brothers, immersion in "Material Girl," as well as clips from "Mad Max," "The Grifters" and other Hollywood fare, is not usually part of the job description. But they felt it was essential to select the right director to be the creative force behind their new national TV campaign, which observers say is the first ever for a religious order.

"It's a different era … and in an electronic age, you have to meet people where they're at," said Brother Danny McCormick, who is featured in one of the commercials, which started airing in May on cable networks ranging from MSNBC to the Golf Channel.

Ultimately, the Alexians settled on an advertising agency known for its Bud Light commercials. They liked the way the creative folks portrayed real people, said Patrick Gaughan, who handles vocations recruitment.

...Already, the blitz has elicited more than 75 responses - the usual yield for three months. Not only has the traffic been heavier, but the caliber of candidates is higher than the usual inquiries, said Gaughan.



The Pope beatified a Croatian nun, Marija "The Crucified" Petkovic today. Here's her miracle:

The Vatican has authenticated a miracle attributed to Petkovic -- the saving of a Peruvian navy submarine struck by a Japanese fishing boat in 1988 just off Peru's seacoast. A junior officer praying to the nun for help managed to prevent the sub from sinking and rescued sailors trapped deep in the hold.



From The Tablet:

Young Catholic evangelists swarm over Vienna

IN the last days of May, Vienna’s cosy, stately streets and cafés were suddenly filled with ardent young “evangelists” from all over the world attesting their Catholic faith and proclaiming the Gospel message. For 10 days, from 23 May to 1 June, the Austrian capital hosted a “city mission”, the first concerted attempt to re-evangelise an old European capital. Under the motto “Open the Doors to Christ”, some 5,500 “missionaries”, 1,500 of them from abroad, gathered in Vienna to take the Gospel message out to those in the city who have forgotten or never known about it, or who have become estranged from it yet yearn to find a deeper meaning to their lives.

The idea of re-evangelising Europe’s ancient metropolises was conceived by the French charismatic renewal movement Emmanuel, founded by the French film critic Pierre Boursat in the mid-Seventies. The Archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, brought the movement to Austria in 1987. He put the idea of the city mission to the cardinal archbishops of Malines-Brussels, Paris and Lisbon when they met in Vienna two years ago, together with bishops, priests and lay people from other large European cities. After Vienna, Paris is next in 2004, followed by Lisbon in 2005 and Brussels in 2006.

The city mission in Vienna was organised jointly by Emmanuel and the Austrian Catholic Youth Movement, which is a part of Catholic Action. It was certainly a “mega-event”: more than 1,000 conferences, workshops, concerts, lectures, discussions and “encounter sessions” took place not just in St Stephen’s Cathedral in the city centre but in parishes (110 out of Vienna’s 176 joined in), convents and monasteries throughout the city.



Thursday, June 5

George Neumayr on the Diocese of Phoenix:

Will someone at the Vatican please explain to Catholics -- who respect its authority but are sincerely puzzled by its passivity -- how telling the O'Briens of the American church not to resign protects its integrity and autonomy? Church officials didn't want to cave to undue pressure from the state? Well, that's now what they've got: the state peering into the office of bishop because church officials wouldn't let a bad one leave it.

On Tuesday's "O'Reilly Factor," a Catholic professor surmised that the Vatican wanted O'Brien to clean up his own "mess." If that's true, the reasoning is mind-bogglingly reckless. Did Ken Lay get to clean up his own mess? How could it be in the interests of the victims of a mess to let the mess-maker take a crack at cleaning it up? Having O'Brien clean up his own mess makes about as much sense as elevating Jayson Blair to ombudsman at the New York Times.

....."A diocesan Bishop who, because of illness or some other grave reason, has become unsuited for the fulfillment of his office, is earnestly requested to offer his resignation from office," say Canon Law. By not following its own law, the Catholic Church invites the intrusion of the state's.

Also from the Spectator, apparently the Voice of the LA Archdiocese has had enough of Neumayr's Mahony-Flogging:

When it comes to his misinformed and specious claims that the church is not seeking reconciliation and healing, Neumayr might as well be talking about himself. He doesn't give a hoot what happens to victims, as long as he gets to use them to pummel the church back into the 14th century, where he undoubtedly believes it should have stayed.




Will Harvard take 2.5 million from a Holocaust denier?

Despite Sheik Zayed's track record, Harvard Prof. William Graham, now dean of the Divinity School, hailed his donation. "This endowment," he told the Harvard Gazette in September 2000, "is a most welcome gift. We are delighted with this encouraging development." At the time, Mr. Graham was probably not aware of Sheik Zayed's links to hate speech and Holocaust deniers. So a group of Divinity School students, including me, went to him this March with a dossier of evidence and a request that Sheik Zayed's hate money be returned. Mr. Graham told us that he was going to have an "independent" researcher look into the matter and that he would get back to us in four to six weeks. We're still waiting. It should be noted that Mr. Graham has not been afraid to take a public stand on Harvard's ties to the Middle East--last year he signed a petition calling for the university to disinvest from Israel--but so far he has not spoken out on Sheik Zayed's gift.



Went to the zoo today. We were there last summer, once, and I swear I don't remember it being as big as it is. Did it grow or did I shrink? Undoubtedly the former.

Joseph liked most of it (last year, he was barely one and not really into it), especially the monkeys and the kangaroos, both of whom, as it happened, had babies. The Capuchin monkeys (of course he would like them, his middle name being Bernard after Venerable Solanus Casey and all...how's that for complicated?), living in the middle of an island surrounded by a moat, had a baby they carried around on their backs, one of the adults reaching back and arm to steady the baby, just like any of us would. I hate to tell you, though, that since the water in the moat also glistened with dozens of shiny pennies and nickels, Joseph, clearly not imitating his patron here, was almost as fascinated by that sight: "Money!Money!"

The kangaroos had babies, er, Joeys, er whatever - two of them carried about in pouches, which is the first time I'd ever seen that. And we saw prairie dogs and snakes and fed ducks and nasty geese (why does any zoo have geese? They are such despicable animals) and saw a very nice sea lion display with one of the happy, shiny creatures, lolling under a waterfall, head under the water, mouth open. I was jealous.

I decided to go ahead and buy a family membership, seeing as Joseph enjoyed himself, there's a playground nearby and picnic tables on the lawn outside the gate. Besides the fact that the membership gets us free admission to our own zoo, we can also get in free to various other zoos in places we frequent, like Knoxville. As for here in "Fotewayne," as Joseph as begun to say, it will be good for a couple of hours of good, hard running on sunny summer mornings. We were probably the only family there with a toddler and without a stroller. People looked at me funny. They don't understand, but they should. Nothing like a forced march through a zoo to wear a two-year old out.

We're back. Apparently, post were migrating at a slower pace than the general Blogger Continental Drift. Funny, I didn't know that posts were migratory, but you learn something new every day. The best part is that in this switch, a big chunk of my archives that has been MIA for ages has reappeared. So now all 19 months or so of Naps is available - if you find yourself battling insomnia tonight, for example.

Oh, and Mark?

HAH!

Okay, thanks Blogger.

They are going over to a new publishing screen thing, and in the process, it seems as if the whole current blog has been disappeared.

I don't know where it is. I can't find it. My apologies. I will try to add to this distressingly blank screen later, but can't do so right now....

In Hollywood, Florida, there's a battle over theChabad Lubavitch meeting in homes in a residential neighborhood...just a few doors down where a woman named Rosa Lopez has been claiming to have Marian apparitions for years.

How bishops are avoiding indictment

"Should some bishops be indicted? Probably. But I don't think they're going to get one," said Monsignor Kenneth E. Lasch, of the Church of St. Joseph in Mendham, N.J., a leading voice within the clergy for assisting victims. "There's still something about indicting a Roman Catholic bishop in this country that's distasteful and politically not the proper thing to do in many places."

Prosecutors and legal experts said, however, that there are huge legal hurdles to prosecuting a bishop who has not committed sexual abuse himself, but has not prevented abuse by others.

"The first problem is proving criminal intent," said Robert M. Bloom, a professor at Boston College Law School. Even when prosecutors can show "all kinds of inaction" by bishops in the face of sexual misconduct by priests, it is not easy to prove that "they conspired with these bad priests to allow this to continue," he said.

Since the scandal broke, many states have made it a crime not to report child abuse, but such laws cannot be imposed retroactively.In New Hampshire, prosecutors were able to turn to a state law on child endangerment that imposed a broad obligation on churches and other organizations to safeguard children in their care. In California, the child endangerment law is not as far-reaching, but prosecutors say that if they can show a single violation of the law within the current statute of limitations, they can reach back further in time to try to prove a conspiracy by church leaders to protect sexual abusers.

Prosecutors in numerous other jurisdictions have expressed frustration with their state laws and statutes of limitations. Grand juries have indicted a small number of priests, including one in Cleveland, two in St. Louis, six in Phoenix and nine in Los Angeles. But on Long Island and in Westchester, N.Y., grand juries were stymied by time limits on prosecuting sexual abuse cases and issued stinging reports calling for changes in state laws.

In Kentucky, more than 200 lawsuits have been filed against the Archdiocese of Louisville, many alleging not just abuse by priests but also a pattern of concealment by their superiors. Yet Commonwealth's Attorney David Stengel decided there was no point in calling a grand jury to investigate the diocese's leaders, said his spokesman, Jeff Derouen."The problem in Kentucky is that not reporting [sexual abuse] is a misdemeanor, and misdemeanors have a one-year statute of limitations," Derouen said.



Wednesday, June 4

Make me care about Martha Stewart. Make me care about Hillary Clinton's book.

I dare you.

A reminder....

Here's the official website for the Pope's trip to Croatia

Safe, legal, blah,blah,blah

Tell it to the dead baby killed by the doctor on the lam.

Good news:

Partial-birth abortion ban passed by House

Andrew Sullivan is glad, but some at The Corner have legal issues.

At NRO, read about about why pro-lifers do what they do, even Senators seemingly talking to no one on the Senate floor.

...because saving one life is worth it.

A UPI story on various Protestant/Anglican ministers crossing the Tiber... or the Bosporus or the Mississippi.

Whichever way the dissidents prefer to flee, though -- across the Tiber, Bosporus or Mississippi -- one thing is certain: hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions will "depart of fairer waters," as the Rev. Christopher Hershman of Allentown, Pa., phrased it, should the ELCA adopt an unbiblical approach to sexuality at its 2005 Church-wide Assembly, as many expect it will.As all mainline denominations have to deal with the same issue, expect some of them to implode or erode to the point of irrelevance. More important, though, expect help from the southern hemisphere, where orthodox Christianity -- Protestant and Catholic -- is growing robustly, and whence black, brown, and yellow missionaries fly north, thundering into the ears of their American and Western European brethren: Hold it, you have lost your way.


There's a big article today in the WSJ that is available only to subscribers, unfortunately, that's about Mark Belnick, highly successful lawyer, counsel to Tyco, International, a Fr. McCloskey convert and now under investigation:

In July 2000, Mark Belnick, then the top in-house lawyer at Tyco International Ltd., received a $2 million payment toward a $12 million bonus. For Mr. Belnick, it was the latest reward in a meteoric legal career that ran from some of the highest-profile business cases of the 1980s and 1990s to Tyco, a hugely successful conglomerate and Wall Street darling.

Today prosecutors say that payment bought Mr. Belnick's silence about the looting of Tyco by its extravagant former chief executive, L. Dennis Kozlowski. Mr. Belnick, facing criminal charges, has become one of the most celebrated casualties of the recent wave of corporate wrongdoing.

But few people know just what he did with that $2 million. Almost immediately, he gave most of it to a small Catholic college in California and to the Culture of Life Foundation, a Catholic pro-life group in Washington, according to e-mails to and from Mr. Belnick at the time and interviews with people involved with the donations.

Three months earlier, Mr. Belnick, formerly an observant Jew, had quietly converted to Catholicism and become an active supporter of Opus Dei, a conservative group within the church. While prosecutors accuse his boss, Mr. Kozlowski, of taking millions from Tyco to buy artwork and posh homes and to entertain friends in Sardinia, Mr. Belnick was using some of his allegedly unlawful Tyco haul for an entirely different purpose. In addition to his donations to the Catholic college and foundation, he gave money to a Catholic television network, two parishes and an Opus Dei bookstore and information center. It was all part of a midlife transformation that Mr. Belnick, the former president of a suburban Westchester, N.Y., synagogue, long kept secret from most of his friends and even his own family.

For Mr. Belnick, two journeys intersected at Tyco: He became embroiled in one of the messiest corporate scandals ever, and simultaneously pursued a sudden conversion and devotion to Catholic philanthropy.

It's an interesting article, although I'm really not sure what the point is beyond information, and the information is fascinating, offering, among other things, the Rest of Us glimpses into the world of Hot Shot Catholics...

I was sent the piece via email. If anyone knows how to get general access to it, let the rest of us know, please.

Here's the link. Thanks, Jim!



Praying the Rosary now available!

On controversial canonization efforts:

(namely Queen Isabella and Pius XII, in particular).

Why bother? This is what I don't get. There are plenty of Catholics, plenty of Catholics who aren't saints, plenty of Popes who aren't saints. Plenty of Catholic rulers with mixed records who aren't canonized saints, and ...that's okay. In relation to Pius XII, as one commentor pointed out, it's barely half a century since his death...what's the rush? This whole business of sorting out the historical record of the Church, and particularly the Vatican in the years leading to, during and after World War II, would be far less contentious if it weren't tied to even the hint of canonization.

Saints are always complicated people with flaws that they would be the first to tell you about, but a situation like this is different than considerations of Escriva's temper or Mother Teresa's doubts. As the Commonweal article pointed out, Pius XII made decisions that were often the best he could do in a terrible situation and some that were rooted in more parochial concerns. And there's a lot we still don't know because not all of the archives have been opened.

But why the push for canonization? Who is it coming from? Is it coming from the masses? Is there a huge cultus forming around the cause?

Not that I've heard of. It seems as if the push for Pius XII's canonization is coming from the Vatican, for whom the canonization would function as a blanket exoneration of Church failures during this period.


O'Brien won't surrender power

He's delegating, not relinquishing....

On Monday, Romley had said the 14-point agreement effectively removed O'Brien from having anything to do with sexual abuse allegations in the diocese."I have attempted to take the authority over sexual abuse allegations away from Thomas O'Brien," Romley said. "He is out of the picture."

[ed. note: Let that sink in, with all of its unknown consequences...]

Romley vowed to go to court to revoke the immunity agreement if O'Brien ever again became involved in handling sexual misconduct cases.But the bishop insisted Tuesday that no civil authority could strip him of ultimate responsibility for church policies, including the monitoring of sexual misconduct accusations. "I have to know what is going on," O'Brien said. "If a priest abuses a child, I have to know that. You wouldn't want me not to know about that, would you? I would have to know because I would have to take them out of the ministry."O'Brien said he will rely on his new aides to determine the credibility of sexual abuse allegations and will act on their recommendations. That has been his policy for more than a decade, he said, and it will not change.

"That's been the case for the last 14 years," he said. "Other people made judgments about the credibility of allegations. I have not done that. But when they come to me and say, 'Bishop, there's evidence that this man has abused a child,' then I take action."


From the Weekly Standard:

The only good church is a dead church

Interior Secretary Gale Norton recently announced a grant of $317,000 to help preserve an aging edifice of historical importance to the nation. Whereupon Americans United for the Separation of Church and State objected. Why? Because the group sees a manifest violation of church and state in the new policy under which the Park Service made the grant. The edifice happens to be Boston's Old North Church, where Paul Revere got the signal that the British were advancing. And the Old North Church still is--as a horrified Barry Lynn, the executive director of Americans United, told reporters--"an active church." Were it inactive, were it one of the dead cathedrals of Europe--if its 150 members had dispersed to other churches--why, in Mr. Lynn's reckoning, the grant would be fine.



The fascinating end of Liszt

“Saint Stanislaus,” which Liszt began composing in 1874, is a thrillingly strange piece that sways between the mundane and the arcane, as the composer’s later music often does. What happened to this artist in old age is one of the enduring mysteries of musical history: the former showman of the European salons rocketed off into regions that no other nineteenth-century composer, not even Wagner, came near. The journey had much to do with Liszt’s increasing immersion in the rites of the Roman Catholic Church, in which he had taken four of the seven holy orders by 1865 (including Exorcist). He determined to revive archaic modes of plainchant and Renaissance polyphony, and imposed upon them experiments in alternative scales and unconventional harmony. The result is a sound that is unsettling even to modern ears.

....Liszt wrote some of “Saint Stanislaus” while staying with Wagner in Venice, in late 1882. Wagner had only a few months to live, but he was still in command of all his faculties, not to mention his cruelties. He told Cosima that her father’s newest music, which he probably heard floating through the walls of the Palazzo Vendramin, was a symptom of “budding insanity.” More perceptive was an earlier comment that Liszt’s dissonances seemed to display a certain self-disgust, as if the composer were compensating for his youthful excesses. There is something to this. Many observers were suspicious of the suddenness with which the debonair superstar of the Romantic piano—the epicenter of the phenomenon that Heinrich Heine dubbed “Lisztomania”—made himself over as the black-clad Abbé Liszt.

But he was no charlatan. Even in his decadent, dandyish days, he had worked at his faith, and in old age he became that rare Christian who practices to the hilt the principle of loving one’s neighbor as oneself. He was generous beyond the bounds of what seemed credible. Most of the century’s major composers profited from his enthusiasm—even those who denounced him. He gave lessons to hundreds of pianists and never charged money. He sent large amounts to total strangers who importuned him in the mail. When staying in hotels, he often let his manservant have the more luxurious room. His spirituality, in other words, took the form of concrete action. Here was the root of his difference with Wagner, who was self-absorbed on a Pharaonic scale, and whose idea of religion came dangerously close to self-deification.

All the same, “Parsifal” succeeds in becoming the spiritually radiant work that “Saint Stanislaus” and other Liszt sacred pieces only aspire to be. It is at once popular and mystical, festive and arcane. It illuminates the highest hope that religion holds forth—the hope for a healed world. Liszt probably knew this, which is why he made his peace with the inscrutable fate of dying in Bayreuth. With a martyr’s devotion, he even asked at one point to hear Wagner’s prose writings read aloud.




From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Why Gods should Matter in Social Science

If it is hard to believe that conceptions of the Gods are ignored in most recently written histories, it is harder yet to understand why Gods were long ago banished from the social-scientific study of religion. But that is precisely why I have devoted two volumes to demonstrating the crucial role of the Gods in shaping history and civilization, and to resurrecting and reformulating a sociology of Gods.

If asked what the word "religion" means, most religious people will say it's about God or the Gods. Yet, for a century, most social-scientific studies of religion have examined nearly every aspect of faith except what people believe about Gods. When and why did we get it so wrong?

Émile Durkheim and the other early functionalists, who emphasized the uses of religion, dismissed Gods as unimportant window dressing, stressing instead that rites and rituals are the fundamental stuff of religion. Seen from the perspective of "true" sociology, the concept of God "is now no more than a minor accident. It is a psychological phenomenon which has got mixed up with a whole sociological process whose importance is of quite a different order," Durkheim wrote. "Thus the sociologist will pay scant attention to the different ways in which men and peoples have conceived the unknown cause and mysterious depth of things. He will set aside all such metaphysical speculations and will see in religion only a social discipline."

Fifteen years later Durkheim had not wavered in his conviction that Gods are peripheral to religion, noting that, although the apparent purpose of rituals is "strengthening the ties between the faithful and their god," what they really do is strengthen the "ties between the individual and society ... the god being only a figurative representation of the society." Thus began a new social-science orthodoxy: Religion consists of participation in rites and rituals -- and only rites and rituals.

I have long suspected that the underlying "insight" that directed our attention away from God and toward ritual had to do with the fact that Durkheim and his circle were militantly secular Jews who, nevertheless, sometimes attended synagogue. In their personal experience, the phenomenology of religion would not have included belief in supernatural beings, but only the solidarity of group rituals. Those personal perceptions were then reinforced by their voluminous reading of anthropological accounts of the impassioned ritual life of "primitives" by observers who lacked any sympathy for the objects of those worship services.

Lengthy, interesting piece refuting these assumptions by Rodney Stark, author of a new book called For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery



Belatedly responding to a couple of requests to point out that...

Fr. Rob Johansen is having interesting discussions at his blog

and

Sean Gallagher reflects on a year in blogdom

Tuesday, June 3

Been thinking a bit about the Brideshead Revisited thing. Someone hinted at this in the comments. Although the proposed adaptation sounds deplorable, it is not so because it is a total evisceration of the work, but because it takes one thread of one aspect of one character's views and makes it the point of view of the entire work. For you see, to Charles, through much of the book, God is the villain, isn't he? As the Flytes pursue their strange, varied paths, they do so in dialogue, sometimes positive, sometimes negative, but always there, with God and their sense of what He wants and demands. But of course, that leaves out a lot. It leaves out the other characters' perspectives and sense of their own actions, and it leaves out the overarching perspective of the narrative.

A shame to take such a rich work and render it into simplistic drivel.

I want to re-recommend The Agonist to you, whether or not you ever visited there before, or if you were put off by the whole Stratfor thing. It is now a sort of group blog, totally news oriented (with opinions exchanged on the site's bulletin board), with a focus on global news. It really is the best way to keep informed on global happenings, that is, if you can take a more or less constant diet of bad news. Which the world is full of these days, from Nigeria to the Congo to the Middle East to Colombia, it seems....

Indianapolis Archdiocese cuts jobs, may sell Archbishop's residence.

The archdiocese isn't alone in facing financial concerns. Earlier this year, a shortfall in the United Way's fund-raising campaign led to a round of $2.3 million in cuts for social service agencies in central Indiana.

How a Catholic school is becoming a public charter school

(From the Dallas Morning News, Link requires registration)

For more than a decade, St. Anthony Catholic School in South Dallas scratched out an existence, surviving on donations, grants and its can-do spirit.

St. Anthony's hand-to-mouth survival took its toll. Debts mounted. The roof rotted. Twice, the Catholic Diocese of Dallas tried to shutter St. Anthony, and each time the community rallied to save the little school. Just to stay afloat, St. Anthony needed to generate about $1 million a year in gifts and grants. Now St. Anthony leaders think they've found a way to secure the financial future of their school for generations.

On July 1, St. Anthony will become a state-funded public charter school. The change will, for the first time in 15 years, give St. Anthony a reliable source of income, school leaders say.

But that security isn't cheap.

In exchange for state dollars, St. Anthony must make the ultimate sacrifice. Come July, St. Anthony Catholic School can no longer be Catholic. ....Mrs. Kratz said the decision to become a public charter school was one of the most difficult of her career. Ultimately, it came down to this: What is more important – keeping St. Anthony Catholic, or keeping St. Anthony open?

Helping make the decision was the simple fact that only four of the school's 152 students are Catholic.

"It's really our only option," Mrs. Kratz said of the conversion. "It's the kids who are important."

....When Mr. Burrell heard the news, the teacher and administrator's heart sank. A graduate of the University of Notre Dame, he was just beginning his fifth year at the South Dallas school. He said that he knew immediately that the switch to public charter meant he'd have to find another job. "I really felt like we had turned a corner, and that I was part of it," Mr. Burrell said of his years at St. Anthony. "Spiritually and emotionally, I have a lot invested in this school. This is where I started, and I never thought that I would teach at any other Catholic school in Dallas."But in the fall, he'll join the faculty at Jesuit College Preparatory High School, where he'll teach theology. Ultimately, he said, he could not abandon his Catholic teaching. "It's what I want to do," he said.

Pete Smith, St. Anthony's social studies and religion teacher, is leaving, too. Although he does not know where he'll be working, he knows that teaching in a nonsectarian public school is not for him. "If St. Anthony can keep its identity, then yes, it's a worthy trade-off," Mr. Smith said of the decision to accept public tax dollars. "But for me, it means a lot to teach in a Catholic school."

Some parents are conflicted about the change, too. While they generally like the thought of not having to pay tuition anymore, many enrolled their children in St. Anthony for the structure and discipline that Catholic schools have traditionally taught. "I dread the thought of them not being able to pray in the morning or go to Mass," said Tracy Reed, vice president of the school's PTA. "If it were up to me, I'd rather pay the tuition" and keep the religion. "But we know this has to happen, and we've accepted it."





Milwaukee Archdiocese sells closed church to Assemblies of God

The Archdiocese of Milwaukee has sold the buildings and land of the former St. Joseph's Parish in Cudahy to an Assembly of God church, likely ending a nearly four-year fight by some former parishioners to save the parish.The group - whose appeal of the parish's merger and closing was rejected earlier this year by the Apostolic Signatura, the Vatican's highest court - said its canon lawyer in Rome was reviewing other options.

.....But Topczewski did confirm that 30% of the price was being financed by Nativity of the Lord Parish at a rate of 73/4%. The term is for up to five years or until the purchasing church sells its current building.


Proceeds from the sale will go to Nativity Parish. But the financing arrangement did not sit well with former St. Joseph's parishioners who opposed the merger, most of whom did not join the new parish."This is corruption," said Angela Scaffidi, who grew up in St. Joseph's. "How can the archdiocese take money from the parishioners and use that money to help Protestants buy a Catholic church that the St. Joe's parishioners paid for and are trying to save?"




Thanks to a commentor for pointing out the Boston's Globe not-positive reivew of the 6FU finale:

Of particular offense was:

Claire's journey to heaven with her father was particularly awkward. It offered a poignant moment, as she sees her troubled former boyfriend, Gabe, finally at peace, but it also raised a gnawing question. Claire encounters her baby in heaven, supposedly the child she gave up[my emphasis] a few weeks back in an abortion-clinic sequence that had horrific cattle-call overtones. By presenting Claire's ''choice'' as a baby, was Ball trying to make a big statement about fetuses and the morality of abortion? Or was he showing Claire resolve her own guilt, as the ghost of Lisa agreed to care for the ghost of Claire's boy? It was a distracting issue.

Fascinating. Our commenters here have been remarking on the subtle, indifferent horror of the abortion clinic scene, and the decidedly negative final impression of the whole thing that these two episodes have left, and we're accused of letting our perceptions be skewed by our pro-life views.

Maybe it's not just our prism, after all.

For those unafraid of the unborn, here's a Newsweek article on the chain of ultrasound imagery joints called Fetal Fotos.

No accompanying photos, though, of the "gorgeous" images. Surprise, surprise.


Michael and I will be signing books at the Rosary Book and Gift shop in Lansing, MI on June 14 from 1-3, I think.

Here's a link to a view of the inside of the new rosary booklet we wrote.



Catholic high school vows to stay open

Last year, Archbishop John J. Myers pledged a decreasing subsidy of $500,000 to the school over three years with the understanding that the school would find a way to become self-sufficient by the 2005-06 academic year.But a spokesman for the archdiocese said last week that the school's bills for the current academic year already exceeded the $500,000 intended for three years."There was no possibility in the endgame where the school could keep operating," said the spokesman, James Goodness. "Their actual needs far exceeded what we had set aside."

Now, a group calling itself Save Bishop Francis Essex Catholic has begun fund-raising efforts in an attempt to save the all-male school, which has been an attractive alternative to public school for many black and Hispanic students in this working-class suburb of Newark.Stung by the archdiocese's change of heart, the group has struck a defiant tone, palpable last Friday at the school's graduation ceremonies. "With the archdiocese's support or without the archdiocese's support, Bishop Francis Essex Catholic High School will live on," the dean of students, Amod Field, said in a speech to the graduates.He said that the school would reopen in September and that a local real estate developer had pledged to buy or lease the campus from the archdiocese and turn it over to the school.


More on O'Brien

In particular, O'Brien, 67, promised to delegate his authority in sexual abuse cases to two new administrators: a "moderator of the curia" -- roughly equivalent to a chief of staff -- and a "youth protection advocate." According to the agreement, they are responsible for reporting allegations to the police and enforcing the diocese's sexual misconduct policy.

Romley said that if O'Brien, or his successors as bishop, intervene in the handling of priests accused of sexually abusing minors or the priests' alleged victims, the prosecutor's office has the right to reopen the case and bring criminal charges.

"I've got the hammer over his head forever. He signed on behalf of the church," Romley said in a telephone interview.

Some Catholic lawyers, however, questioned whether O'Brien had the right to sign away the powers of the bishop's office, and whether such an arrangement would be constitutional.

"A bishop of the Roman Catholic Church does not have the power to permanently redefine the powers of a bishop. He can agree himself not to do something, but he can't bind his successors to do something that is contrary to Roman Catholic canon law," said Patrick J. Schiltz, dean of the law school at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis.

"A specific plea agreement would not necessarily raise a constitutional problem. But an agreement that carries beyond Bishop O'Brien, that applies generally to the office of bishop in that diocese . . . is starting to edge toward the constitutional line if not going beyond it," said Douglas W. Kmiec, dean of the Catholic University law school in Washington.

From the Arizona Republic:

An immunity agreement intended to bring an end to the lingering sex abuse scandal in the Phoenix Diocese turned instead into another dramatic showdown Monday between Bishop Thomas J. O'Brien and County Attorney Rick Romley.The bishop and prosecutor took sharply differing stands about the meaning of the agreement, which is believed to be the first negotiated by a senior Catholic Church leader to avoid possible criminal indictment in connection with covering up sexual abuse.

O'Brien insisted that a key 82-word statement he signed in return for immunity from prosecution fell far short of an admission that he covered up sex crimes by priests in the Phoenix Diocese and endangered children."I certainly never intentionally placed a child in harm's way," O'Brien said at a news conference Monday afternoon. "To suggest a cover-up is just plain false. I did not oversee decades of wrongdoing."

Romley reacted angrily to the bishop's remarks. "Is he revising history?" Romley said. "Did the bishop fail to understand the confession he was signing? Did he fail to understand that he needed immunity? If he continues to lie about everything, I'll have to consider whether or not that's a breach of our agreement."





Another twist in the Pius XII controversy:

Why did he help Nazis escape?

Yet there is one important Holocaust-related matter where I think Pius clearly did act at variance with traditional Catholic teaching about justice and how the ends must never justify the means. I am referring to Pius's role in assisting Fascist war criminals to escape to South America. By and large, Pius's advocates have played the ostrich when it comes to the Vatican's "ratline." Denying Pius's complicity in the church's smuggling of Nazi and Croatian Fascists out of Europe flies in the face of incontrovertible evidence. Uki Goni's The Real Odessa (Granta Books, 2002, second edition) provides the conclusive documentation. Using previously unavailable material from the Public Record Office in England and from the U.S. National Archives and Record Administration, Goni clearly demonstrates that Pius knew that ecclesiastical institutions in Rome were hiding war criminals. "The British dossiers...show that the pope secretly pleaded with Washington and London on behalf of notorious criminals and Nazi collaborators," Goni writes. Why did Pius help these murderers escape justice? Because he was convinced they would carry on the fight against communism elsewhere. It turns out that Pope Pius was one of the first cold-war warriors.

In fact, the ratline conforms to a pattern of Vatican postwar action. Pius sought clemency for Arthur Greiser, who had murdered thousands of Polish Catholics and Jews (the Poles executed him anyway); and for Otto Ohlendorf, head of one of the notorious Nazi mobile killing squads (U.S. Military Governor General Lucius Clay rejected the pope's appeal, saying that Ohlendorf was guilty of specific, heinous crimes); and for other mass murderers. After the war, the U.S. State Department complained that the Vatican was uncooperative in expelling suspected war criminals from Vatican City. The Vatican knew that Croatian Fascists brought looted gold with them from Yugoslavia after the war, but did not report this to the Tripartite Commission for the Restitution of Monetary Gold.

What do these jarring facts tell us about Pius? Why would the leader of a church that supported the state's right to use capital punishment plead for the lives of mass murderers? If Pius was so saddened about Europe's Jews—as he wrote Bishop Preysing in 1944—why did he later help their killers escape? Why have advocates for Pius's canonization failed to address the ratline issue? Wouldn't it be better for them to admit the facts and then place these failings in the full context of Eugenio Pacelli's life? Perhaps his advocates can make an argument that, because of the Communist threat, the ratline does not disqualify Pius from sainthood. That argument has yet to be made, however.


Monday, June 2

Bad - no - dreadful news for the film of Brideshead Revisited

Andrew Davies, noted for the controversy over his adaptation of Tipping The Velvet, with its lesbian themes, is writing the script about the dreaming spires of Oxford and effete upper-class Englishmen. He told Screen International that he had a "darker, more heterosexual" approach to the novel than the television series.Instead of Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte's relationship, Davies is concentrating on the doomed love affair between Charles and Julia Flyte.

His script explores how Roman Catholicism destroys their relationship and families.Davies is Britain's most prominent television costume drama writer.
His credits include Pride and Prejudice, Vanity Fair, Dr Zhivago and the screenplay for the worldwide hit Bridget Jones's Diary.He said: "I am much less enamoured of all that Oxford snobbery than some people."Of his script, the first draft of which is finished, Davies said: "It is written from the point of view of someone who does not believe in the religious themes as Waugh did. If God can be said to exist in my version, he would be the villain."



See Jesus watching you get your teeth cleaned!

Thanks to Nancy Nall for the ....inspirational link.

Three brothers celebrate a combined 100 years as priests!

A lengthy New Yorker article on a psychiatric institution called the Institute for Living and various Catholic dioceses in the Northeast

Driving from the St. Therese Shrine up to Bloomingdale last week, we saw a billboard by the side of the road. A view of the earth from space, with these words:

Peace: Because Good Planets are Hard to Find
-From the Catholic Sisters in your area.

Now, this really torqued me. Sisters in my area, please don't come to my parish crying poor for the Retired Religious Fund if you're going to be spending thousands on completely useless billboards. Sisters in my area, you might not have so much trouble lowering your average age from what...66? ....if you were associated with the very practical, concrete noble sacrificial work that built the Church in this country and brought countless poor the education and health care that no one else was able or willing to provide, rather than vague statements of good will that any country club Republican or limousine liberal woman, safe in her secure life, could sign onto without paying any kind of price at all.

And my brain hurts even more when I try to imagine the meeting - scratch that - meetings that you know without a doubt were conducted with great seriousness and purpose and self-importance and conviction of the movement of Sophia in their midst to plan this thing...

Dallas-area priest at the center of controversy resigns.

A Frisco priest accused of raping a nun 20 years ago resigned from his parish Sunday. Monsignor Ernesto C. Villaroya of St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church resigned through a letter that was read aloud during Sunday Masses, church officials said. Mr. Villaroya could not be reached for comment. "Because of the situation which has developed, he feels in conscience that he needs to remove himself from St. Francis of Assisi parish in Frisco," Bishop Charles Grahmann said in a statement that was posted Sunday on the Texas Catholic Web site, adding that he had visited with the priest. "He has asked for an extended leave of absence to think and pray about this experience," Bishop Grahmann said. "His request has been granted."



O'Brien of Phoenix admits cover-up

Bishop Thomas J. O'Brien has acknowledged that he covered up allegations of sexual abuse by priests for decades and will relinquish some of his power as head of the Phoenix Diocese to avoid possible criminal indictment, The Arizona Republic has learned.O'Brien's dramatic admission and his decision to surrender some authority came in a five-page agreement the bishop signed last month when Maricopa County Attorney Rick Romley threatened to bring him before a grand jury.

The legally binding document is one of the most candid confessions by any bishop in the country that official church policy endangered children and allowed some priests to continue molesting minors long after their sexual histories were known.O'Brien signed the agreement twice in the presence of his lawyers, acknowledging his actions both as an individual and as head of the Phoenix Diocese.

John Allen in The Word from Rome describes a brief conversation with Cardinal Arinze:

I had the pleasure of attending a reception on the terrace of a Rome hotel on Monday, May 26, hosted by Georgetown University’s President John DeGioia for alumni and friends of the university. I was especially struck by the presence of Cardinal Francis Arinze, since the Nigerian prelate’s last experience of Georgetown was a bit rocky. Arinze had been invited to speak at Georgetown’s May 17 commencement ceremony on the subject of Christian-Muslim dialogue. In the course of his remarks, Arinze spoke about threats to the family in modern culture, triggering protest.....I jokingly said to Arinze at the reception that he was brave to show up at another Georgetown event. He smiled graciously and said, in effect, that the affair was no big deal. “Had I known what effect it was going to have, I would have used another word,” he said.

Though I didn’t press him, my guess is that Arinze did not mean to attack homosexual persons. In Vatican parlance, when one mentions homosexuality in connection with the family, the reference is usually to issues such as same-sex unions and the definition of marriage. One can debate whether they amount to “mockery” of the family, but this is not hate speech.



The NYTimes on the Vatican's new Latin dictionary

The Vatican Latin Foundation (Fondatum Latinitas), which put the book together, is already working on a new edition, due out in a few years, according to Pietro Villa, an official with the foundation. "There are so many new words to add, mainly technological words or those dealing with information," Mr. Villa said.

Indeed, the dictionary gives Latin words for every aspect of life. You can order a meal in Latin. Want lasagna? Ask for "pasta segmentata." A hamburger? Grill an "isicium Hamburgense." A hot dog? "Pastillum botello fartum."

Or you can talk politics: A "conformitatis osor" (hippie) and a "communista" (communist) butt heads with a "novi Hitleriani motus assecla" (neo-Nazi).

Hitleriani? What kind of Latin is that? Call it made-up Latin, just like "iazensis musica" ("music of the jazz variety"). "Iazensis" may look Latin, but "i" is the "j" of Latin.

"This is essentially an admission of defeat," said R. J. Tarrant, a professor of Latin language and literature at Harvard. "When all else fails, stick a Latin ending on a word and move on."



Six Feet Under anyone?

Satisfying? Frustrating?

What about the role of Nathan, Sr. in each of the character's consciences?

Nate's behavior? Rico's?

Claire seeing her aborted son in her dream of the afterlife? Her facial expressions then and every point up to it when confronted with her baby niece? Her uncontrollable sobs at the wedding?

And what about that beginning? I liked it very much, because it resonates with one of the themes and fascinations of my life - the impact of the slightest decision on broader events, and the interconnectedness of those decisions..it also reinforces one of the themes of the series which is...death is always just around the corner. How do we live in the face of that fact?

We made it through all the festivities....David's graduation on Friday night - impressive because they got around 250 kids graduated in about an hour. Older folk are usually distressed in attending modern high school graduations because most of them, despite the administrations' best efforts, can be pretty noisy affairs. In the past ten years I've been a regular at three schools' graduations: a small diocesan Catholic school, a medium-sized Jesuit prep school, and a large public high school. All three were the same in that respect. Administrators sternly remind everyone to keep their traps shut and their airhorns under their seats, and it works...for a while. What happened the other night, I believe, is that the threat to throw noisemakers out of the ceremony backfired, because that particular threat was coupled with the statement (on the tickets) that no one would be allowed to leave before the ceremony was over. So...you want to leave early? Stand up and scream when your kid/friend's name is called, and be motioned out. Not that the "don't come late/leave early" thing was being stringently enforced anyway.

But it's over, and my second offspring has flown away..he's going to Virginia Tech, where his father works, and will be (already is, as of 6pm last night) living with him for at least the first year.

The other great obstacle to calm and peace this weekend was Katie's dance recital, with the added complication of a friend's birthday sleepover Friday night, which began during the 4-hour dress rehearsal, at a high school way on the other side of town....She got everywhere she needed to be, and tapped her way to glory Saturday night just fine.

Yesterday, we all went to Mass together for the last time for a while, and were treated to a visiting, retired priest who gave a fairly focused, straightforward homily - pointing out the dearth of art in our bare-bones church (he had a right to - he was stationed there 40 years ago. It's not barebones in the 1970's hotel lobby style. It's barebones in that late 1950's cool marble, moderne style - The Eucharist by Eames - the same way St. Joseph's Oratory in Montreal is), but then taking us to the conclusion that the point of the day (Ascension...sort of) is that no matter what, Christ is present. Simple, uncomplicated, unforced. Thank you, Father.

We spend much of the rest of the day ripping up the carpet from David's room (with me raging about idiots who insist on covering up perfectly good wood floors by nailing and stapling dirt-catching, dust-trapping carpets onto them) and starting the planning for Katie to move in so Joseph can then move out of Michael's study and into his very own room, with an afternoon break for Katie, Joseph and I to go see a local production of Smokey Joe's Cafe which featured Katie's piano teacher as part of the band, which is placed on stage. She liked it, and for the first act, so did Joseph, who sat there stunned by the experience without moving for a very long time (that happens when you're in the front row..)

So now we're here...Katie's last day of school is today, we have to start cleaning her room, Joseph's babysitter is on vacation this week, we're going back to Ca-go next week for the Catholic Marketing Networkshow, and somehow, somewhere in all of that, I do indeed have work to do...

Saturday, May 31

A row in Westchester, NY about a pastor's transfer

In an unusual act of defiance, a Roman Catholic pastor in Westchester County has publicly criticized Cardinal Edward M. Egan for transferring him to another parish, saying the cardinal was ignoring the wishes of parishioners and acting out of personal animosity.The pastor, the Rev. James E. Borstelmann, 61, of St. Joseph's parish in Croton Falls, said in interviews last week that he had refused the transfer to a church on Staten Island and was even thinking of moving to another diocese, under a bishop who was "more pastoral than bullying."



A brief report on Ca-go.

Well, this is how hagiography gets going.

As I told you, Joseph decided he was going to see horsies in Chicago. As we approached, he announced that he was also going to see bunnies. Not exactly what the place is known for, but whatever.

So on Thursday morning, as we're actually going into the city from Bloomingdale (where we were staying for the show in St. Charles), I hear the cry from the backseat, "Horsie!" As I turned, I saw one of those tourist horse-drawn carriages on a sidestreet, so I suppose that's what he saw. Later that day, as we were leaving the Blues Festival, walkng through Grant Park, we saw an older couple standing in front of a little round bit of landscaping. They were looking at - you guessed it - a rabbit.

As I said, this is how those stories begin:

The young saint told his parents what he foresaw in the great city: two creatures of God that would appear in the midst of the creations of men.

Of course, they would leave out the part where the young saint had to be taken out of Mass at the St. Therese Shrine because he was tearing up paper, loudly, and protesting, loudly, when it was taken away from him...

So yes, we were there a little more than twenty-four hours and we saw a lot.

We saw scads of new books, a few that were even interesting, at the Religious Booksellers’ Trade Exhibition. We saw several homeless fellows taking naps in the Cathedral, and heard their snoring echo off the ceiling, competing with the drone of a docent talking to a group of kids. We saw a woman at a restaurant eat an enormous amount of food: As we sat next to her, trying valiantly to control the young saint, she steadily worked through her meal: a huge salad, her very own inch thick stuffred pizza, a large piece of tiramisu and a couple of glasses of wine. We saw lovely white beluga whales at the Shedd Aquarium, spouting water out of their heads at us, sending Joseph into fits of giggles. My husband is absolutely certain that he saw actor Tim Robbins walking around at the Chicago Blues Festival, and I believe him.

We also saw two shrines to two very different kinds of girlhood, both in the company of an 11-year old girl.

The first, on the way up, was the National Shrine to St. Therese in Darien, Illinois, naturally, by Carmelites.

There is quite a lot there: the tiny chair upon which Therese sat, writing The Story of a Soul, a map of North American she drew when she was twelve, first class relics, and, in the chapel, a vast bas-relief wood carving of important moments in the life of Therese. It’s not the most inspiring building every constructed, as you can tell from the photos, and what's even more dissatisfying is the museum-like quality to most of the display. There's one reliquary in the chapel, under that gorgeous bas-relief, but the others relics and items of interest are in the center of an adjoining room, grouped in a roped-off circle in the middle. Not the best arrangement.


The next day, we gave Katie her reward for watching Joseph during our book signings by taking her to the famed American Girl Place in downtown Chicago, a place where, according to her “everyone” else in her class had been, some multiple times, except for her.


“American Girl” , in case you have no daughters or granddaughters, is a trademark for a line of books, dolls and other products. It started out as a book series – and a good one – for elementary age girls, each series focusing on an “American Girl” from different points in history. Molly goes through World War II with pluck, Addy deals with life as an African-American girl during Reconstruction, and so on.

The $98 dolls and hundreds of dollars worth of accessories, came next, and then a magazine, books and clothes.

Then there’s the shrine in Chicago, where you can buy American Girl products, watch a live musical production, eat in the tea-room, and even pay $10-20 to have your doll’s hair styled (in a little beauty-shop chair) while you shop.

On one hand, I have no problem with the American Girl ethos. I’ve read interviews with the editor of the magazine, and they are consciously and purposefully positioning themselves in opposition to the over-sexualized alternatives that are out there for pre-teen girls. They say they want to be there to support girls in remaining girls – not little made up, bare-midriffed, clones of Britney Spears – for as long as possible.

And, as the American Girl all grown up – Martha Stewart – likes to say, “That’s a good thing.”

But still – it’s a little spooky, watching these girls walk around the store, clutching their dolls (because, you know, you’re supposed to bring your doll with you to the American Girl store, whether her hair is getting done or not, or whether or not she has the need to check into the Doll Hospital), and sometimes even grown women doing the same thing.

For in the end, as it so often is in our culture, the American Girl ethos, as worthy as it may be at its core, in the end, turns out to be about something else. The American Girl store, right off the Magnificent Mile, near Cartier, Saks and Ralph Lauren, is not so much a shrine to innocent girlhood as it is a shrine to Stuff and the money that buys it.

An innocent and charming girlhood is there – for a price. If you fill your bedroom with enough of the dolls and their sweet little miniature schoolbooks and pets, you too can be the American Girl, an identity confirmed you can finally reach the shrine, sit in the tearoom waiting to see your doll’s new hairstyle.

It’s a scene that screams spiritual emptiness, frankly, of a culture that has deprived its daughters of the possibility of defining themselves through God’s love, leaving them only with their pricey dolls and their shrines in which to seek their identity.

Now, one of the objects on display at the St. Therese shrine is a little tiny toy china teacup. It’s probably safe to presume that she probably sipped tea out of this cup -- in the company of her dolls.

But it wasn’t an American Girl.

And neither, needless to say, was St. Therese, whose life moved beyond the care and feeding of a doll and its cups to the care of a different sort of cup: the chalices she cared for as sacristan, and the adult faith and firm identity as a soul invaluable, not because it own precious little things, but because it is precious to God.



Friday, May 30

'Sister Barbara', an actress dressed like a nun
parades in front of visitors of Germany's first Ecumenical Church Congress in Berlin on May 29, 2003

Did I not call this a few days ago? Did I not say that this Congress, as worthy an effort as it is, can't help but pulse with DieterVibes?

Yes, I believe I did.

We're back from our little Chicago jaunt. Had a lot of good feedback at the RBTE, went to the National Shrine of St. Therese, went to another national shrine - the American Girls store, - the Shedd Aquarium, spent some time at the first day of the Blues Festival, Katie went swimming twice in the hotel pool, Joseph stuck his feet in.....I think there's more, but I have quite a bit to do this morning - a column to write, David's upstairs packing up his stuff, and then the 29 hours from 4pm today to 9pm tomorrow are going to be beyond insane as we juggle graduation, recitals, parties and David's move. I might blog a bit later, but we'll see...

Wednesday, May 28

Dorothy Rabinowitz reviews what sounds like an excellent documentary airing tonight on PBS

Documentary filmmaker Charles Guggenheim's last work--airing tonight on PBS, 8 to 10:30 p.m. EDT (check local listings)--about Americans taken prisoner in the Battle of the Bulge reveals a story largely unknown to all but a few war buffs. It's also one that comes at a propitious moment, and not only because we are just past Memorial Day. For, within this bleak history stands a testament to honor and heroism all the more potent for its lack of trumpet flourishes. Even in this tale told so somberly it is impossible to miss the quintessentially American stubbornness and idealism it reflects in its down-to-earth way: as though there were nothing out of the ordinary about men who, for the sake of a principle, would defy captors holding the power of life or death.

Tuesday, May 27

Israeli Arabs tour Auschwitz

It was the largest organized visit yet by Arabs to the camp, which annually sees about 500,000 visitors, according to the Auschwitz museum. The group of Israeli Arabs included intellectuals, professionals and businessmen, most in their 40s. About 200 young Jews and Arabs from France are accompanying the group on the visit, which continues Wednesday. "We came here in order to know what happened exactly in order to express our sympathy and solidarity with the Jewish people," said Awwad Nawaf, 57, a teacher who lives in Nazareth. "We hope this will help us and the Jews to live in good neighborhood, and to understand each other. We hope it can help stop the bloodshed and the cruelty." The joint visit was the idea of Rev. Emil Shoufani, 47, an Arab Catholic priest from Nazareth, in northern Israel. He hoped the trip could help lessen the deep-rooted bitterness between Arabs and Jews, which has worsened after more than 30 months of Israeli-Palestinian conflict.



Big church congress in Germany this weekend:

A religious event set to draw up to 300,000 Christiansto Berlin over the next five days could prove a turning point in reviving the flagging fortunes of the church in Germany, according to the event's organisers.

With a heady mixture of prayers, politics and pop, the Kirchentag or church congress, is set to dwarf music festivals, sports fixtures and other popular attractions in Europe this summer, and could prove to be the biggest ever international religious event of its kind.

"The Pope draws more people when he goes on tour, but that is just for a few hours. People are coming here for five days," says Theodor Bolzenius, Kirchentag spokesman. "This is going to be historic."

The religious extravaganza, organised jointly at a cost of €18m ($21.4m, £13m) by the lay associations in the German Catholic and Protestant churches, comprises over 3,200 individual events, starting with an open-air service at Berlin's landmark Brandenburg gate, where a huge, inflatable orange halo has been erected.

Here's the website. It's in German.

The coolest thing about it is the little picture up in the upper left-hand corner - it changes with the various pages. Ordinary people with lights over their heads in halo-like fashion. Very Teutonically Hip, very Dieter, if you ask me.

"And now...we pray!"