JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israeli police said on Friday they were looking into allegations of sexual abuse against one of the country's most famous and politically influential rabbis, in a case that has triggered dramatic headlines this week.
World
Mordechai Elon -- known as "Rabbi Motti" by viewers of his popular TV show and by many young men in the West Bank settler movement -- has vehemently denied the accusations by a group of fellow rabbis who say their aim is to combat sexual harassment by authority figures.
But that has not stopped a wave of soul-searching, which has some parallels with recent turmoil in the Roman Catholic church.
(Additional reporting by Ori Lewis; editing by Andrew Roche)
Link to original....
Related Articles:
Jerusalem Post...
Rabbis coming out to denounce Motti...
Friday, February 19, 2010
Two Catholic Schools to Close in St. Paul, Minnesota
Invariably in stories like this the first commenter will invariably make the boneheaded complaint about sex abuse. The real story as some of the commenters have surmised is that enrollments are down because people aren't having children. In this case, the inner-city parish is losing its Catholic population becausee
Link to original...
In a tough environment of declining enrollment and demographic changes in local neighborhoods, two Roman Catholic schools in St. Paul said they will close at the end of the school year.
St. Bernard's High School and Holy Childhood School, which serves a pre-K-8 population, both faced dwindling enrollment and had become a burden on their parishes, said officials of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis in announcing the closings Thursday evening.
St. Bernard's closing comes less than a year after it shuttered its lower school and set plans to become the state's first Catholic high school offering an International Baccalaureate (IB) program. Currently, St. Bernard's has 198 students in grades nine through 12 at its location off Rice Street.
Link to original...
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Osservatore Romano Reporting More Innacuracies
Why is is that divisive and evil liberals are always accusing others of being divisive? Why don't they take their own advice?
Those asking for the resignation of the Archbishop and the editor of Osservator Romano should resign. It's good news that the CDF is backing Archbishop Fisichella on this one.
President of Pontifical Academy for Life should be replaced, 5 members say
Read further...
Those asking for the resignation of the Archbishop and the editor of Osservator Romano should resign. It's good news that the CDF is backing Archbishop Fisichella on this one.
President of Pontifical Academy for Life should be replaced, 5 members say
[Catholic Culture] Five members of the Pontifical Academy for Life have joined in a rare public call for the resignation of the academy's president, Archbishop Salvatore Fisichella. Their complaint traces back to the dispute that erupted last year when Archbishop Fisichella wrote an essay in L'Osservatore Romano, criticizing Brazilian Archbishop José Cardoso Sobrinho for his handling of a controversial abortion case involving a young girl.
Although the Brazilian prelate complained that the criticism in the Vatican newspaper was inaccurate, and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith eventually sided with Archbishop Cardoso, Archbishop Fisichella has never apologized or retracted his criticism. Following a plenary meeting of the Pontifical Academy for Life earlier this month, which Archbishop Fisichella had described as "serene and calm," five members of the group wrote to say that the archbishop should step down. They argued that Archbishop Fisichella has become a figure of division in the body, and added that it is damaging that the Vatican office dealing with life issues is "being led by an eccelesiastic who does not understand what absolute respect for innocent human lives entails."
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Iowa Judge tells Catholic Prosecutor to remove Ashes
We think the defense attorney who made the objection would have been too adept to object, as one commentor elsewhere observed, had the prosecutor been a Jew with a yarmulke.
Where's Bill Donahue now?
Read the laugh-riot of courtroom bullying...
Where's Bill Donahue now?
The age-old question of separation of church and state played itself out in a Marshall County courtroom Wednesday.
After a lunch recess while prosecuting a trial for attempted murder, Assistant County Attorney Paul Crawford returned from lunch with ash on his forehead. He is Catholic and celebrating Ash Wednesday is something millions of people all around the world do.
Read the laugh-riot of courtroom bullying...
Father Reese SJ Says Rome Favors Traditional Religious Orders
The things that Fr. Reese says, in addition to calling Rome paranoid, is that he indicates that they really do want to see more effective religious, engaged in the business of healing souls and serving the Church with a full heart, rather than what passes for that, and that Rome wants to see full habits and a traditional witness to religious life.
The Heretical Mind Finds a Home
By Tom Bethell
January-February 2010
Back to January-February 2010 Issue
The Heretical Mind Finds a Home
By Tom Bethell
January-February 2010
Tom Bethell, a Contributing Editor of the NOR, is the author, most recently, of Questioning Einstein: Is Relativity Necessary? (Vales Lake Publishing, 2009).
Sometimes, in the summer, I go to Mass at St. Ignatius Church, on the campus of the University of San Francisco. The church is large but the congregation is usually small. It's a bit like sitting amidst a busload of spectators at an empty stadium. Most of the pews are unoccupied. Almost all of the confessionals have been removed, and most of the Jesuits who once heard confessions have either died or been sent off to the Jesuit retirement home in Los Gatos.
The university itself grows ever more secular. It claims to deliver a "Jesuit education" but it would be a mistake to assume that that is a Catholic education.
One Sunday this past August, Fr. Thomas Reese, S.J., was the celebrant at the church. Until 2005 he edited the Jesuit magazine America, and when he resigned from that position rumors circulated that he had been fired by the new Pope. These days, Fr. Reese, 64, is a senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University.
Fr. Reese's claim to fame is the frequency with which he is quoted in news stories about the Catholic Church. He seems to be in every journalist's Rolodex. For reporters with newspapers like the Washington Post and The New York Times, he is the go-to guy for the adversarial quote, perhaps in nuanced disagreement with a statement by the Vatican; perhaps putting a different spin on it and always a liberal spin.
That Sunday at St. Ignatius, he preached on the famous passage from the Epistle to the Ephesians, in which St. Paul says, "Husbands love your wives; wives obey your husbands." I was immediately curious. How would America's well-known apostle of liberal Catholicism handle that?
Fr. Reese's main point was that "the historical context was different then." In the apostolic age, husbands needed to be told to love their wives because that understanding of conjugal love had not yet penetrated the Greco-Roman culture. "Radical equality" between the sexes came in with Christianity. At the time, "it was the men who would have been upset" by the Pauline injunction, "not the women." He continued in that vein, and probably there was a good deal of truth to what he said. I don't recall that he said anything about wives obeying their husbands.
"People sometimes leave the Church for the wrong reasons," Fr. Reese added. "Taking a single passage and interpreting it in a fundamentalist way can get us into trouble." Then, in what was almost a throwaway line, he referred to "the stupid passage" in St. Paul's epistle.
I wasn't sure I had heard that right — "stupid passage," did he say? I decided to check with him after Mass. Fr. Reese was already receiving visitors at the sacristy door when I got there, and I resolved to keep it non-confrontational. I said something innocuous about the best passages of Scripture being ones that challenge the conventional wisdom of the day.
That was exactly what St. Paul was doing, he replied.
I joked that in his commentaries he often seems to be reaffirming our own conventional wisdom; he's in sync with the newspapers who quote him. He demurred that his oft-expressed "concern for the poor" was not "the dominant sentiment of the culture." His was an unfashionable voice, he believed. I wanted to say that whole tribes of reporters and politicians express concern for the poor on a daily basis. Instead I asked, in a tone that tried to convey amusement rather than shock, "By the way, did you call it a 'stupid passage'?"
"Well, I probably shouldn't have said that," he replied.
We pretty much left it at that. Within the hour he would be giving a talk at nearby Fromm Hall (formerly Xavier Hall). "Catholics and Obama" was his topic. A full audience had come to hear him, and so I joined them. Coffee and doughnuts were available.
Fr. Reese's written remarks were cautious. He told us how Obama had lived with his mother in a poor neighborhood of Jakarta; how he became a community organizer in Chicago, funded by the Catholic Campaign for Human Development; how he had "fond memories" of Chicago's cardinal archbishop, Joseph Bernardin, who in turn was "strongly pro-life," so much so that he had added a raft of issues to accompany opposition to abortion. He told how Obama himself was a strong devotee of Catholic social teaching.
Occasionally Fr. Reese played it for laughs, as when he referred to the "wafer watch" following Sen. Joseph Biden's nomination for vice president. The upscale audience of San Francisco Catholics responded with a gleeful burst of laughter. Of course, for those who don't believe the Communion host is anything more than a wafer, obsessing about who consumes it really is a joke.
Fr. Reese and his liberal audience were of one mind. But his implicit message as he continued was that we have our work cut out if we are to keep on watering down the faith. The Pope is a conservative, as are many of the younger bishops. The new editor of L'Osservatore Romano, who had recently commented favorably on Obama's Notre Dame appearance, was a bright spot, but a rare one. Meanwhile, eighty U.S. bishops had lined up with South Bend's Bishop John D'Arcy in criticizing Notre Dame's president for inviting Obama to speak.
Here Fr. Reese harked back nostalgically to the "good old days" when archbishops Bernardin of Chicago and John O'Connor of New York would "work out a common policy" on these issues and all the other bishops would go along with whatever they (Bernardin, mainly) decided.
In the question period Fr. Reese was asked who among the bishops seemed, well, more promising. Bishop Gerald Kicanas of Tucson, Arizona, is the leading liberal hope, and "in the Bernardin mold," Fr. Reese replied. Currently he is vice president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Reese said later that Bishop Kicanas would be "a real coup for Milwaukee," as a replacement for Archbishop Dolan, who was promoted to New York.
(Bishop Kicanas did not get the Milwaukee job, which went to Bishop Jerome Listecki of La Crosse. Bishop Kicanas was rector of Chicago's Mundelein Seminary in the 1980s when Bernardin ruled the roost and homosexuality flourished there. Kicanas has spoken with studied ambiguity about the status of homosexual priests in the Church, saying, for example, that the Vatican has adopted a "do ask, don't tell" policy.)
Fr. Reese deplored the "approaching train wreck" of the "new translations of the liturgy," which would be upon us by Advent 2010. For one example, the current response when the priest says, "The Lord be with you," is "And also with you." This will be changed to "And with your spirit."
"I don't know why we're doing this," Fr. Reese commented. He foresaw that most people would be unprepared, and priests would be telling their parishioners from their pulpits, "I can't believe we're doing this…."
"This is not going to help the bishops," Fr. Reese added, and perhaps that prospect pleased him. His argument was based on the undoubted truth that liturgical disruption of the familiar is always upsetting. But of course the liberals had no such compunction about their own huge liturgical disruptions in the late 1960s.
Someone asked Fr. Reese if it were true that Pope Benedict had fired him as editor of America.
"It would be more accurate to say that I was the last victim of Cardinal Ratzinger rather than the first victim of the new Pope," he said. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had asked him to resign in March 2005, about a month before its prefect, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, was elected Pope.
Problems arose because America is "a magazine of opinion." In 2004 Reese solicited an article from Raymond Burke, then bishop of La Crosse, about politicians receiving Holy Communion; then he published a reply by the left-wing congressman David Obey of Wisconsin, who disagreed with Bishop Burke across the board.
"The Vatican really doesn't want a journal of opinion like that," Fr. Reese concluded.
When the question period ended, Fr. Reese received an enthusiastic round of applause, and some of his admirers approached the podium for further "dialogue." Fr. Reese stayed right there and welcomed them all.
The most interesting question came from a woman who was distressed about the new Vatican inquiry into the state of women religious in the U.S.
"Why is the Vatican doing this?" she asked.
"Part of it is they [women religious] want the ordination of women," Fr. Reese said. "Well, the Vatican doesn't like that. The other thing is the Vatican would like to see the sisters in habits, with a more traditional lifestyle; that sort of thing. There is paranoia in the Vatican. The way some of them talk you'd think they have witches' covens in some of these congregations."
To be sure, he went on, "these sisters have made mistakes, but you learn from your mistakes."
He complained that the group representing some of the sisters, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, had been meeting with the Vatican Congregation for the Institutes of Consecrated Life shortly before the investigation was announced. "But they didn't even have the courtesy to say let's talk about it and explain what we're about," Fr. Reese said, by now sounding quite indignant. Unlike the "wafer watch," investigating the "sisters" was no laughing matter. "This is not the way you deal with adults. It's not respectful!"
He said the U.S. bishops were not involved in this at all. "They're going to stay away from this one. They'll run for the hills." He got that one right.
He referred back to the last time this happened. John Paul II had asked the U.S. bishops to conduct an investigation, and San Francisco's ultra-liberal Archbishop John Quinn chaired the commission.
"It turned into a love-fest!" Fr. Reese marveled. "Because Quinn liked the sisters and those on the commission were pretty favorable toward them. And when the bishops went to Rome — they have to go there every five years — the Pope asked each individual bishop, 'How do you get along with the nuns in your diocese?' Practically to a man they said, 'I get along with them pretty well.'"
But one bishop told the Pope: "'Well, you know, you've got to ask the sisters about that, how I get along with them.' The Pope didn't like that." Great cries of delight greeted this news of an unnamed bishop who knew how to parry and banter with the Pope.
"So that investigation worked out fine. But this one the Vatican has decided they are going to control. There is paranoia on all sides here."
Nonetheless, Fr. Reese foresaw one more liberal victory. "I think eventually it is going to be much ado about nothing," he said. The nun in charge, a Mother Mary Clare Millea, whom Fr. Reese knew little about, "will go around talking to the sisters. Reports will be written. They will go to Rome, be put in a file cabinet. [Laughter] Typically when Rome does these things it takes five years. How many religious communities are there in the United States? The paper pile is going to be huge! So I think it's a bad idea…."
His last words were almost drowned out by his listeners' war-whoops of delight at the prospect of a Vatican once again thwarted in its search for American orthodoxy.
"So I think the Vatican would be smart to just call it all off and then invite them to come in and say, 'Let's have a conversation and talk about it,'" Fr. Reese said.
Nonetheless, with the number of women religious in the U.S. down to one-third of the mid-1960s peak, and with an average age of about 70 today, the Vatican knows perfectly well that it is addressing a serious problem.
(A side note: In a detailed article three months later, Thomas C. Fox of National Catholic Reporter said that most of the religious congregations are "not complying" with the Vatican investigation. They are filing minimal reports, sometimes including nothing more than a copy of their own constitutions.)
In a way, Fr. Reese's performance was impressive. He is smart, genial, articulate, tactful, and well informed. He knows what the Pope says to bishops in one-on-one meetings, for example. With his San Francisco audience he was skeptical and critical of the Vatican — jocular without quite crossing the line into disrespect for the Church whose doctrines he so confidently and publicly interprets. Yet he plainly also admires the pro-abortion politicians who flout the Church's teaching and scorn her doctrines while posing as practicing Catholics. Public scandal seems not to be an issue for him.
Fr. Reese illustrates the heretical mind in action. I was reminded once again that the heretic is almost always a more dangerous adversary of the Church than the outright atheist. Most atheists pay little attention to the Church. They think religion is nonsense but they don't usually mind because they know they are free to ignore it. Many of them also think that religion is harmless, although that is now changing with the coming of Islamist terror.
The heretic, in contrast, is interested in Church doctrine and wants to change it. He tampers with texts, nibbles away at doctrine, changes wording wherever he can. We have seen how successful the heretical mind has been in recent decades. The goal has been to water everything down — to "add too much water to the wine," as African cardinal Francis Arinze put it a few years ago.
The modern tendency is to reduce sin to syndrome, to attribute misbehavior to "disorder"; to reduce contrition to therapy. As far as liberals are concerned, "You're O.K.!" "And we're all O.K.!" is the mantra that might as well replace the exchange between the priest and the congregation at Mass.
In the past 50 years the Jesuits have been almost overwhelmed by such concessions to worldliness, and so great has been their influence on the Church over the centuries that Rome has seemed powerless to rein them in. In the view of his Jesuit peers, I suspect, Fr. Reese is considered to be quite the moderate, doctrinally.
The heretical mind is imbued not with a disbelief in God but with a resentment of God; and what the heretic resents is that God made the world in one particular way rather than another. The great heretical impulse today is directed toward sex and gender, most recently trying to establish the extreme proposition that men and women are basically the same, differing only in anatomical details that are superficial.
God, such revolutionaries believe, should not have made us so unalterably different, so unequally male and female. He could easily have made us the same and thereby done a better job!
The rotten fruits of this mad dream of gender and sexual equality include same-sex "marriage," women in combat, coed dorms including bathrooms, the attempted normalization of homosexuality, women priests and bishops, and many other follies. Their overall effect will be to destroy the societies that embrace them.
Notice that St. Paul's injunction in Ephesians refers to men and women asymmetrically, and that is the real reason why it so offends the modern mind. Hence also Fr. Reese's unguarded outburst against the Pauline instruction. No, he shouldn't have called it stupid, as he said, but he shouldn't have thought it either, which plainly he did. And in saying what he thought, he disclosed that, beneath the genial surface of the easygoing "we're all O.K." liberal mind, there exists a simmering cauldron of resentment and rebellion.
Back to January-February 2010 Issue
Vatican Theologian Worried that Veneration of Sacred Objects Could lead to "Superstition"
Vatican theologian and biblical scholar, Monsignor Pietro Principe, has warned that veneration of relics is running the risk of replacing authentic faith with irrational superstition.
The warning came as pilgrims began queuing to pray before the 13th-century remains of St Anthony of Padua, one of the Catholic world's most popular saints, the Times Online reported.
The skeleton of the saint, who is credited by many Catholics with miracle-working powers, went on display in a glass case at St Anthony's Basilica in Padua to mark the transfer of his remains to their final resting place in February 1350.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article7027842.ece
The warning came as pilgrims began queuing to pray before the 13th-century remains of St Anthony of Padua, one of the Catholic world's most popular saints, the Times Online reported.
The skeleton of the saint, who is credited by many Catholics with miracle-working powers, went on display in a glass case at St Anthony's Basilica in Padua to mark the transfer of his remains to their final resting place in February 1350.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article7027842.ece
Outsourcing Catholic Charity
Well, it's a sad day when a non-Catholic outsider seems to understand more about the USCCB and its attendant government and parishoner subsidized programs that promote abortion, birth-control, government overregulation, homosexuality and creeping Alinskyite socialism. It just goes to show you that you don't have to be a Catholic-in-Name-Only to tell the truth about what is going on in the American Church. Rush Limbaugh, who himself was under attack from the USCCB in October, sees things pretty clearly, he writes,
I mean holy carp, folks. Is nothing sacred? They have infiltrated the Catholic Church? Or maybe the Catholic Church has allowed itself to be infiltrated. "According to the newsletter, 'the Archdiocese of Washington's Environmental Outreach Committee has created a particularly useful new tool" and I have a compressed copy of it right there. I'm not going to zoom in here; I haven't got time. That's the calendar. "[A] calendar that lists 40 carbon-fasting measures individuals can take to reduce their carbon footprint.' The newsletter provides a link to the full calendar. The calendar contains suggestion for each of the 40 days of Lent, beginning on Ash Wednesday, Feb. 17, with 'Remove one light bulb from your home and live without the light for the next 40 days.'" What a cheap cop-out.
Perhaps we shouldn't expect truth and integrity from Jesuits or even possibly those who work for them, but we always hold out a candle of hope rather than curse the darkness; Henry Karlson who teaches at Fordham University and writes for InsideCatholic once told us that he favoured the Soviet Union over his own country, and since spending so many years at Fordham, we see that his allegiances haven't changed appreciably, as he demonstrates when he shills for the socialistic, anti-Catholic CCHD in an article he writes about the "good that the CCHD does" for Vox Nuova. Henry used to believe aliens were real, perhaps he still does, but it's far crazier and in our opinion a sign of malice, to defend the CCHD.
While he is eager to attack those who are pointing out that there is something systemically wrong with outsourcing Catholic Charity and relying on non-Catholics and anti-Catholics to do the job as using rhetoric and logical fallacies that have never before been used, he engages in some rhetoric himself and tells us, incredibly, that people would die if the CCHD disappeared tomorrow.
Actually, if the CCHD were abolished tomorrow, it would probably save lives, since the various Planned Parenthood and Pro-Abortion organizations which enjoy CCHD support wouldn't receive that support any longer.
Perhaps instead of outsourcing Catholic Charity to non-Catholic and anti-Catholic organizations, the Bishops should take that money to foster vocations to the Monastic orders who have traditionally been the charity arm of the Catholic church in the past, not a pack of United Way style professionals with murky job titles and strange agendas!
30 French Bishops take Penitential Retreat to Ars, France
As part of the celebrations during the Year for Priests, 30 French bishops, including two cardinals, participated in a pilgrimage to Ars on Sunday, February 14. These photos are from the official website for the Shrine of St. John Vianney. Among the posted photos we notice the blessing of a brand new bronze statue of the saint that was installed near his famous rectory. The pilgrimage took place amidst the annual celebrations surrounding the Cure of Ars’ entrance into the town to take up his new assignment in 1818
Link to originals and photos...
Link to originals and photos...
Bill Donahue Says Liberal Religions are Disappearing
February 17, 2010
Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on the data just released by the National Council of Churches:
The 2010 edition of the Yearbook of American & Canadian Churches is out and the results are strikingly similar to the overall pattern that has been evident for many decades: the more conservative the religion on moral issues, the more it continues to grow (or lose relatively few members); and the more liberal it is, the more it declines.
The big winners as reported in this year’s volume are the Roman Catholic Church, which is up by 1.5 percent; The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons), which grew by 1.7 percent; and the Assemblies of God, a Pentecostal group, which jumped by 1.3 percent. Catholics now stand at 68 million, literally dwarfing every other religion in the nation. The big losers, as usual, are the mainline Protestant denominations.
What are we to make of this? The more “relevant” a religion tries to be, the more irrelevant it becomes. Seems like everyone save for liberals can figure this out. That’s good news for the traditionalists, and lousy news for the religion-lite crowd. It’s not global warming they should fear, it’s their own demise.
http://www.catholicleague.org/release.php?id=1774
Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on the data just released by the National Council of Churches:
The 2010 edition of the Yearbook of American & Canadian Churches is out and the results are strikingly similar to the overall pattern that has been evident for many decades: the more conservative the religion on moral issues, the more it continues to grow (or lose relatively few members); and the more liberal it is, the more it declines.
The big winners as reported in this year’s volume are the Roman Catholic Church, which is up by 1.5 percent; The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons), which grew by 1.7 percent; and the Assemblies of God, a Pentecostal group, which jumped by 1.3 percent. Catholics now stand at 68 million, literally dwarfing every other religion in the nation. The big losers, as usual, are the mainline Protestant denominations.
What are we to make of this? The more “relevant” a religion tries to be, the more irrelevant it becomes. Seems like everyone save for liberals can figure this out. That’s good news for the traditionalists, and lousy news for the religion-lite crowd. It’s not global warming they should fear, it’s their own demise.
http://www.catholicleague.org/release.php?id=1774
February 17th, 1947: Protecting young from university, dancing and books
FROM THE ARCHIVES: In his instructions for Lent in 1947, Archbishop John Charles McQuaid of Dublin set out uncompromising views on a number of his favourite concerns, including education and “mixed” marriages.
– PARENTS, THE Archbishop says, had a most serious duty to secure a fully Catholic upbringing for their children in all that concerned the instruction of their minds, the training of their wills to virtue, their bodily welfare, and the preparation of their life as citizens. In the education of Catholics every branch of human training was subject to the guidance of the Church, and those schools alone which the Church approved were capable of providing a fully Catholic education. Therefore, the Church forbade parents to send a child to any non-Catholic school, whether primary or secondary, or continuation or university.
“Deliberately to disobey this law is a mortal sin,” added His Grace, “and they who persist in disobedience are unworthy to receive the Sacraments.”
Read this fascinating article further...
– PARENTS, THE Archbishop says, had a most serious duty to secure a fully Catholic upbringing for their children in all that concerned the instruction of their minds, the training of their wills to virtue, their bodily welfare, and the preparation of their life as citizens. In the education of Catholics every branch of human training was subject to the guidance of the Church, and those schools alone which the Church approved were capable of providing a fully Catholic education. Therefore, the Church forbade parents to send a child to any non-Catholic school, whether primary or secondary, or continuation or university.
“Deliberately to disobey this law is a mortal sin,” added His Grace, “and they who persist in disobedience are unworthy to receive the Sacraments.”
Read this fascinating article further...
New Ways Ministry Slaps Back at Cardinal George
Catholic Caveman noticed that after Cardinal George issued his condemnation of formerly CCHD funded, New Ways Ministry, that the organization simply retaliated by publishing a list of gay-friendly parishes nationwide, but he doesn't think the Local Ordinary will do much about it. Actually, the Diocese will take measures against parishes that do not follow the rules, albeit slowly and often reluctantly in the case of the Archdiocese of St. Paul in Minnesota. Ultimately, we think the Cardinal is sabre rattling. Until he begins addressing the doctrine he was meant to teach in the first place, nothing will change, you'll only see half-measures and media decoration.
In the latter example, New Ways Ministry indicates that there are three such parishes friendly to gays: St. Francis Cabrini (whose pastor will "bless" same-sex unions, but off campus, since there are so many intolerant people at the Archdiocese who object to change.), St. Joan of Arc (Recently hosted a homosexual men's choir for a "Christmas concert" and St. Stephen's which got a conservative pastor the last year and provoked a mass exodus of the elderly and aging hippies and radicals to another "community". We might amend New Ways list to include the Basilica of St Mary's and disinclude St. Stephen's which seems to now be the home of mostly Latino folks. We also think these folks should include St John's Abbey at Collegeville as well, since they have a large number of homosexuals in their community and even go to great lengths to protect them when they break the law by preying on the students at the two schools they operate.
All in all it's a mixed bag. We think the abuses and heresy will continue because it's a social problem which has effected the Society as well, and you won't begin to address the homosexual problem until you start re-emphasizing moral theology and correct doctrine.
In the latter example, New Ways Ministry indicates that there are three such parishes friendly to gays: St. Francis Cabrini (whose pastor will "bless" same-sex unions, but off campus, since there are so many intolerant people at the Archdiocese who object to change.), St. Joan of Arc (Recently hosted a homosexual men's choir for a "Christmas concert" and St. Stephen's which got a conservative pastor the last year and provoked a mass exodus of the elderly and aging hippies and radicals to another "community". We might amend New Ways list to include the Basilica of St Mary's and disinclude St. Stephen's which seems to now be the home of mostly Latino folks. We also think these folks should include St John's Abbey at Collegeville as well, since they have a large number of homosexuals in their community and even go to great lengths to protect them when they break the law by preying on the students at the two schools they operate.
All in all it's a mixed bag. We think the abuses and heresy will continue because it's a social problem which has effected the Society as well, and you won't begin to address the homosexual problem until you start re-emphasizing moral theology and correct doctrine.
New Milwaukee Archbishop Guards Status Quo
Archbishop Listeki is carrying on in the tradition of disgraced Archbishop Weakland. He welcomed his predecessor, an unctious, unrepentant, self-justifying leftist to appear at the dedication of a bronze featuring the pandering Archbishop as a defender of children.
It's hard to believe that things will improve over what has gone on before when the same lack of integrity and accountabillity is the continuing rule.
Lying to judiciary committees, honoring celebrated and unrepentant pandering homosexual Archbishops, don't help people believe you when you want to defend your accused priests.
It might be time for +Listeki to resign to a Monastery.
+Listeki Defends Accused Priest
+Listeki Urges Victims to Report Abuse to Police
Priest Faces Sex-Abuse Charges in Wisconsin
Listeki Caught Lying to Judiciary Committee
+Listeki Would Rather Maintain the Status Quo
It's hard to believe that things will improve over what has gone on before when the same lack of integrity and accountabillity is the continuing rule.
Lying to judiciary committees, honoring celebrated and unrepentant pandering homosexual Archbishops, don't help people believe you when you want to defend your accused priests.
It might be time for +Listeki to resign to a Monastery.
+Listeki Defends Accused Priest
+Listeki Urges Victims to Report Abuse to Police
Priest Faces Sex-Abuse Charges in Wisconsin
Listeki Caught Lying to Judiciary Committee
+Listeki Would Rather Maintain the Status Quo
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Opus Dei Bans Cokie Roberts Book Signing
Staff Writer
Pewsitter.com
February 17, 2010 - The Washington Times reported today that the Catholic Information Center in Washington DC, which is run by Opus Dei, was hosting a book signing ceremony for former ABC reporter and pro-abortion Catholic, Cokie Roberts. It appears that this event has been cancelled as the following email was just received:
To the Patrons and friends of the Catholic Information Center:
The email was signed by Father Arne A. Panula, who runs the center.
Link to Pewsitter...
Pewsitter.com
February 17, 2010 - The Washington Times reported today that the Catholic Information Center in Washington DC, which is run by Opus Dei, was hosting a book signing ceremony for former ABC reporter and pro-abortion Catholic, Cokie Roberts. It appears that this event has been cancelled as the following email was just received:
To the Patrons and friends of the Catholic Information Center:
In inviting Steve and Cokie Roberts to the CIC to present their book, From this Day Forward, we were unaware that some of the positions held by Ms. Cokie Roberts are inimical to the Catholic Faith and the support of our Holy Father that we hold very dear at the Catholic Information Center. We are grateful for those of you who have taken the time to express your concern and inform us. Our apologies go out especially to all who may have been troubled by the scheduling of this event and the confusion it may have occasioned. The event has been cancelled.
The email was signed by Father Arne A. Panula, who runs the center.
Link to Pewsitter...
Fourth Christian killed in northern Iraq
By Mujahid Mohammed (AFP)
MOSUL, Iraq — A Christian student was found dead in the main northern Iraqi city of Mosul on Wednesday, the fourth in as many days, amid warnings of rising violence against the minority ahead of March 7 polls.
The bullet-riddled body of Wissam George, a 20-year-old Assyrian Christian, was recovered on a street in the south Mosul residential neighbourhood of Wadi al-Ain at around 1:00 pm (1000 GMT).
"George went missing this morning on his way to his institute, he was studying to be a teacher," said a police officer, speaking on condition of anonymity.
George is the fourth Christian since Sunday to be killed in the city, which has a Christian population of between 2,000 and 3,000.
"What can we say?" said Bishop Shlemon Warduni, the second-most-senior Chaldean bishop in Iraq.
"We are very sad. The government is looking at what is going on, it is speaking, but doing nothing," he told AFP.
On Tuesday, a gunman killed 21-year-old engineering student Zia Toma and wounded 22-year-old pharmacy student Ramsin Shmael, both Assyrian Christians.
Greengrocer Fatukhi Munir was gunned down inside his shop in a drive-by shooting late on Monday, and armed assailants killed Rayan Salem Elias, a Chaldean, outside his home on Sunday.
"We don't want elections, we don't want representatives, we don't want our rights, we just want to be alive," Baasil Abdul Noor, a priest at Mar Behnam church, said on Tuesday.
"It has become a nightmare. The security forces should not be standing by and watching. We hold them responsible, because they are supposed to be protecting us, and protecting all Iraqis."
Others have expressed concern that Christians could be targeted ahead of the elections, seen as a key test of reconciliation in Iraq, which has been wracked by sectarian violence since the US-led invasion of 2003.
"The Christian minority has become an issue in the elections, as it always is before elections," said Hazem Girgis, a deacon at a Syrian Orthodox church in the city centre.
"We are terrified... and the security forces are not able to offer us any security," said Girgis.
Attacks occur frequently in Mosul and surrounding Nineveh province.
Human Rights Watch warned in November that minorities in the north including Christians were the collateral victims of a conflict between Arabs and Kurds over who controls Iraq's disputed northern provinces.
In late 2008, a systematic campaign of killings and targeted violence killed 40 Christians and saw more than 12,000 flee Mosul.
http://www.alsumaria.tv/en/Iraq-News/1-45016-Iraq-Police-finds-dead-a-Christian-student.html
MOSUL, Iraq — A Christian student was found dead in the main northern Iraqi city of Mosul on Wednesday, the fourth in as many days, amid warnings of rising violence against the minority ahead of March 7 polls.
The bullet-riddled body of Wissam George, a 20-year-old Assyrian Christian, was recovered on a street in the south Mosul residential neighbourhood of Wadi al-Ain at around 1:00 pm (1000 GMT).
"George went missing this morning on his way to his institute, he was studying to be a teacher," said a police officer, speaking on condition of anonymity.
George is the fourth Christian since Sunday to be killed in the city, which has a Christian population of between 2,000 and 3,000.
"What can we say?" said Bishop Shlemon Warduni, the second-most-senior Chaldean bishop in Iraq.
"We are very sad. The government is looking at what is going on, it is speaking, but doing nothing," he told AFP.
On Tuesday, a gunman killed 21-year-old engineering student Zia Toma and wounded 22-year-old pharmacy student Ramsin Shmael, both Assyrian Christians.
Greengrocer Fatukhi Munir was gunned down inside his shop in a drive-by shooting late on Monday, and armed assailants killed Rayan Salem Elias, a Chaldean, outside his home on Sunday.
"We don't want elections, we don't want representatives, we don't want our rights, we just want to be alive," Baasil Abdul Noor, a priest at Mar Behnam church, said on Tuesday.
"It has become a nightmare. The security forces should not be standing by and watching. We hold them responsible, because they are supposed to be protecting us, and protecting all Iraqis."
Others have expressed concern that Christians could be targeted ahead of the elections, seen as a key test of reconciliation in Iraq, which has been wracked by sectarian violence since the US-led invasion of 2003.
"The Christian minority has become an issue in the elections, as it always is before elections," said Hazem Girgis, a deacon at a Syrian Orthodox church in the city centre.
"We are terrified... and the security forces are not able to offer us any security," said Girgis.
Attacks occur frequently in Mosul and surrounding Nineveh province.
Human Rights Watch warned in November that minorities in the north including Christians were the collateral victims of a conflict between Arabs and Kurds over who controls Iraq's disputed northern provinces.
In late 2008, a systematic campaign of killings and targeted violence killed 40 Christians and saw more than 12,000 flee Mosul.
http://www.alsumaria.tv/en/Iraq-News/1-45016-Iraq-Police-finds-dead-a-Christian-student.html
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